These days I'm no longer a gamer. I don't game. I don't really have game and I don't really eat game either, if that's of relevance. But back in the day - the day of the Amiga
- I got game. In fact I got games, plural. Usually pirated, courtesy the many hundreds of spotty Scandinavian kidlets who would be up all winter cracking new releases and writing poxy little intros bigging themselves up as the deities of all crackers (I thought the cracker deity was Southern Baptist, you learn something new every day) and the massive friendly user network of Amiga amigos who would freely exchange software and knowledge between themselves. Probably what fucked the Amiga in terms of a commercial platform in the end, but at least we didn't have to shell for games that often.
As a result, most of the early '90s (or at least my early '90s) was spent hammering the living Christ out of Sensible Soccer, Lotus Turbo Challenge (one through three), F1GP, Indy 500, Stunt Car Racer (the title of which became a Spoonerism on harder difficulty settings), Lemmings (six years of my life that ain't coming back), Cannon Fodder, Rainbow Islands (twee but addictive), Zool, Superfrog, Rick Dangerous, James Pond, Monkey Island (the original and still the best - some of the built-in pisstakes of Sierra adventure games like Hero's Quest were absolutely fucking priceless - the bogus 'Restore/Restart/Quit' screen comes to mind), Project X, SWIV, Xenon II (strong candidate for Best Theme Music of All Time), Kick Off I, II and (to a dramatically lesser extent) III, Pinball Dreams/Fantasies (Best In Game Music of All Time, in an armwrestle over the Lotus series
), Shadow of the Beast (which probably sold more Amiga systems than did any of Commodore Business Machines' crappy marketing campaigns, including sticking their logo on the Chelsea FC shirt immediately prior to going broke), It Came From The Desert, Flashback and Another World (both French, both weird, both awesome), Weird Dreams (just fucking WEIRD), Prince of Persia, Second Samurai, Ports of Call (proof that international shipping CAN be fun), Sim City, Syndicate, Pipemania, Skidmarks (a racing game as juvenile as the title would suggest, less stable than Britney Spears hence highly liable to trigger Guru Mediations but a bucket of fun), Wings, Birds of Prey (your choice of any of 40 military aircraft to stuff into the scenery), the F/A-18 Interceptor game they bundled with the starter pack (flying under the Golden Gate bridge was always fun), Turbo Out Run (got within 1.5 stages of finishing the bastard!) and of course, OF COURSE, Worms.
Most of the above get their stories told here, on Wiki or on this impossibly awesome site called LemonAmiga.com (from where the game-ad images were, um, borrowed); most of the games are shown off in action on YouTube compilations and a lot of them are downloadable for PC (possibly dodgily) so I won't blather on here with a lot of nostalgic crywanking about how games were so much better when I were a wee lad. 'Cos they weren't. I just had a lot more time and inclination to hammer the living Christ out of them, without distractions like work, or thesis writing, or exam study, or a social life, or girlfriends... we'll leave it there as down that path leads the way to madness, if not crywanking.The great strengths of the Amiga compared to its contemporary rivals - the 286-486 Wintel PCs, and other Motorola 680X0-chipped stuff like early Apple Macs and the Atari ST/Falcon (snigger) -
were always graphics and music, as well as its gameplay-friendly parallel processor architecture. Particularly compared to their contemporary PC opposition (supporters of which, such as the Captain, got large amounts of stick) they had much better graphics capabilities, even for the pros - the CGI for stuff like the Lawnmower Man and Babylon 5 was done on Amigas - and the astonishing surround sound potential of four (count 'em, FOUR) channel sound, which not only meant Amiga games had awesome music and FX but also led to the proliferation of tracker-style music programs like ProTracker upon which the likes of AJ and myself wrote some of the greatest pieces of music in the history of crap four-channel music written by spotty dateless teenagers using MIDI samples stolen from a ripped version of the Pinball Dreams theme music, particularly the Genocide-by-The-Offspring guitar sample (and no the chorus lyric is NOT 'Donkey Kong, every day, on our fellow man we prey'). Though one should note AJ's definitive reading of Axel-F remains a highlight, commissioned in honour of the school dance troupe performing a fairly racey routine to same (though not nearly as, um, provocative as their controversial version of Prince/TAFKAP/Love Symbol's 1991 ode to the beauty and sanctity of banging the arse off profoundly slutty women, Cream - exactly whose idea was it to have a half-dozen overdeveloped teenage girls gyrating against chairs nasty-stripper-styles on stage at a school performing arts concert? And do they still give out knighthoods these days?)To my knowledge neither that nor any other of the ProTracker recordings still exist - I did dodgily port them to cassette tape years ago while the last of our Amigas was still running, well after the company which made them and the community which nurtured them had faded away. But all the tapes were thrown out on some long-ago moving-house cleanout, so the world will never again have to hear my techno-punk revisitation of the James Bond theme, to mark the release of the all new Bond flick Goldeneye. (Moby totally ripped me off, the pompous little vegan fucker.)
Actually, come to think of it, Goldeneye itself spawned a seriously awesome gameplaying experience, but on the Nintendo 64, a platform whose brief-but-spectacular moment of prominence was crested many years after the Amiga performed a similar Cobain-esque rise and fall. If the Amiga was the greatest gaming platform ever produced (and it was, don't you worry about that) I'd argue Goldeneye N64 was probably the greatest game ever made.
But that's a story (and an argument) in itself.
FAIL.
18 comments:
I have downloaded some of the old games and tried playing them through emulator programs. They're just not the same. I can't believe how much time I sent on some of those things - lemmings, civilization, sonic... the list goes on. Of course I have a PS3 and an Xbox 360 now so i'm still wasting my life on games.
You know why they're not the same? Two words.
Star
Cursor
As James possibly described somewhere else - this joystick will be hanging round with the cockroaches and the McDonalds cheeseburgers long after we're all nuked by the Danish (You can't trust those crazy Danes you know :P)
Built like a brick shithouse - and then built WITH a brick shithouse around the outside - they couldn't be destroyed with a tank - but had suitably satisfying click sound to be the best joystick ever made.
And it had THREE fire buttons - all for a system that only supported one. GENIUS!
for mine - SWOS is still my favourite Amiga game - though the port of Mortal Wombat was suprisingly good - if not a little easy at times - after all - taking a game that had 5 buttons in the arcade and converting it to one had its challenges (Hello Streetfighter 2) - but it worked :P
U - I reckon AJ's onto something here - the lack of dedicated gear would make a significant difference. Have been thinking of going the emulation route but I'm very conscious of the fact you never revisit stuff that holds nostalgic memories from back in the day - computer games, movies, girls from high school - it all turns out to be a lot more crap than you remember it was. And I'm typing this on an Intel-chipped MacBook which probably wouldn't be up to the task anyway.
AJ - I was sure you could configure a two-button function on the Star Cursors - didn't they have switches underneath the things somewhere?
For the poor unfortunates who never experienced the industrial-strength hewn-from-basalt Star Cursor joystick, check this dodgy parochial-as-fuck print ad out. AJ's right, they Could Not Be Destroyed By Mortal Means. They were basically a chunk of industrial equipment carved off an arcade unit and shipped to customers. The only things that went on them were the microswitches, and I think Dick Smiths stocked them. Even throwing them at a wall didn't make them take the point that you were annoyed with their inability to convey your genius gameplaying chops into actually finishing that stage of Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 under the time limit. They were notchy as fuck though, the click could deafen passers by. Worked better after a couple of months, they freed up nicely, like running-in a new car. I remember we had one which had been split right around the casing from someone or other's temper tanty (I blame my brother) - held together with rubber bands and Selleys All Clear - and still worked fine. Strayan ingenuity at work, both in the design/construction and in the repair job. Just Googled them to find the image link above, there's still early 90s Star Cursors for sale on TradeMe (NZ equivalent of eBay).
I think that's a photo of a TAC-2 in the A500 image up top though - although they looked like a sex toy for the masochistic, they were pretty hard to kill too.
By the way mate -
"Built like a brick shithouse - and then built WITH a brick shithouse around the outside"
I fucking LOL'd like a sink backing up. That should have been their advertising tag line.
I was an Apple ][ man myself.
Not being a gamer, I can only say that 'tis all Greek to me'. Loved seeing Sir J again though!
Bangarrrrrrrr - yeah bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIs, my mother was a primary teacher and my first experiences of Personal Home Computing (i.e. wasting vast amounts of time playing games on the things) were text-based adventure games on the IIe she occasionally brought home from work on weekends. I remember one where you were hunting the Kraken which was pretty cool. The great thing about those text adventure games was the way they'd already anticipated every smart-arse thing you could type into it and had an equally smart arsed comeback. Monkey Island was the spiritual successor to those in terms of that.
Lerm - I concur re your Greek theory up to a point - we always made clear our belief that PC gamers took it up the arse.
My mates and I were Apple IIe game hackers. We used to go to the local librery, hack then copy their games. Then use Print Shop to put our HACKER names in the title screens.
We would then try and sell the games to our mates.
Funnily enough, our hacker names always started DR or Professor.
Hrm, we had Apple ][s in high school - if you got to the lab early enough you could even get on the ][e. I still have a 5 1/4" floppy - one that I'd have bought as single-sided and punched the double-sided hole in myself - with a mumble-pirated-mumble copy of the original Castle Wolfenstein on it, in a box somewhere under the house. I also have an Atari 800 kicking around somewhere, though I lost the BASIC cartridge for it back in the early 90s. But yes, I learned to program on that beast as a spotty geekling in the early 80s. Had a graphics co-processor, the thing rocked! Sure my friends with C64s looked down on this as a "games" machine, but they were more into buying software than writing it.
The perennial problem with Commodore was that while they always seemed to attract brilliant engineers, the company was such a testosterone and marketing driven one-man-show that they never really learned what it meant to be a computer company. Have you had a chance to read On the Edge?
Naut - we'd have loved to been up to that level of competency, the Amiga was a bit of a bastard for that - cracking Amiga copy protection was a serious business, and we were a bit shit. The big hacker groups like Skid Row had it sorted though. The majority of the games we ended up with had Scandinavian hacker herring-scented thumbprints all over them - they used to stick these elaborate demos on the front bigging themselves up and giving shoutouts to all their peeps (some of them quite brilliant, in terms of music and graphics - in fact the guys who made Pinball Dreams etc were ex-crackers turned legit). About all we ever managed to do was hacking games mag demo disks and compiling our own game demo collections with our own art, hacked versions of their menu structures etc.
Damien - I remember the visceral pain watching the Amiga slowly die in front of us as a going concern, knowing it was better than the rest of the guff on the market but that Commodore's inherent crapness as a company (along with the better marketing reach of Team Wintel) meant she was a goner by the mid to late '90s. I suspect it was the same for anyone who bought a Betamax VCR. Though for us it was a bit more emotive than that with the platform rivalry vs PC (we didn't know any Atari ST heads, but if we had, they would have copped much stick) - I suspect it's going to be a similar situation for all the Ford vs Holden fans if and when they and their US parent companies are forced to merge due to the collapse of the US car market.
"This joystick will be hanging round with the cockroaches and the McDonalds cheeseburgers long after we're all nuked by the Danish (You can't trust those crazy Danes you know)"
I note the Danes are now in charge of the UN Security Council. Just sayin'.
Oh come on - those wily Scandinavians have been ruling us for years. The only reason Denmark is in the security council now is because it was becoming too suspicious they HADN'T been.
It won't be long before the Finnish province of the United Scandinavian World Government activates the mind control devices in all those Nokia phones, and the Swedish province surrounds all our coastlines with stealth frigates. You know it's gonna happen.
Shouldn't be too much of a problem. The Swedish stealth frigates will either be designed in tine-homoured Volvo fashion using a set square, and will be as stealthy as a block of flats, or they'll come flat-pack and they'll have lost the key to put them together.
I for one welcome our new Finnish overlords though. They like a drink, drive fast on gravel (having won half the world rally titles awarded since the late 70s) and fine traffic offenders in proportion to their income. So that rich tosser in the BMW who's cutting people up on the M1 as we speak would be in for a five figure bill.
I had an amiga and it blew my mates PC out of the water for many years. Trouble was though that Commadore were even more ripoff merchants than Apple
True dat. OEM Commodore shit - mice, external drives, RAM etc - was ridiculously pricey. There was a decent aftermarket industry in Australia supplying bits and pieces for the Amiga/C64 which meant some things were reasonable, but it was never competitive with Wintel clone pricing.
I was thinking of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visby_class_corvette
and you'd be right about the set square :)
As for Commodor aftermarket... there used to be, till relatively recently, a fine little shop in Hawthorn called Synapse Computers, subtitles "the Amiga specialists". I bought some RAM there once, because the elderly RAM fit the sampler memory slots in an old Soundblaster card I had and thus turned it into a decent musical instrument.
BTW you should try to dig up any old 8-bit music you made, that stuff is enjoying quite a revival now.
Oh and yeah - as one who modded his Atari joystick at the first opportunity, I was heartily jealous both of the fancy analog joysticks the Apple folks had, and the friggin' indestructable monsters you Commodore fans were able to strategically deploy as tank traps.
Mind you I remember playing the early version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on a friends C64 (never had quite enough cash to spring for the ROM for the Atari), and how we'd all try to fly a 747 between the twin towers. If you got the angle of bank just right you could make it. This sort of memory makes one a little pale, of course, but there were at least 16 years between that and the, erm, event where people trying it for real failed to get the angle quite right or else emulated the dodgy kid who'd just try to crash in the most spectacular way.
Weird just remembering that stuff.
The old Tracker music has long since gone splat, unless AJ has held onto some of the files. There was actually an Amiga place in Casino which was probably the only thing going for the place, it made our list of the towns you'd drive an hour out of your way to avoid.
The biggest prob with the Star Cursor joystick was the suction cups. They worked too well, until they finally underwent catastrophic failure (usually when cranked over on full lean trying to set a pole position worthy lap on F1GP) and went flying out of your hands.
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