The hype surrounding Rise Of The Robots was absolutely incredible and relentless. I bought into it and eagerly awaited the release date. A group of us went down to the town centre computer shop after school to see it up and running in the flesh on the day. All our hearts sank, non of us bought it and that was the day i became jaded with supposed 'hype'. I carried that wary feeling throughout my life from there on out when it came to games.
I love this kind of video. You say exactly what you think and its hilarious. Too many youtubers are happy, bouncy 'Well it isn't too bad' but not you mate! Never change.
No point lying, i go on peoples streams where they never rate games less than 7/10 etc. But if you are rating crap so high where do you go when you hit a really good game. I know what i think is the best game on each system and all other games are rated from that....thats the only way to do it.
So many arcade style amiga games were just awful. partly due to the hardware not being built for them but partly because software companies did them as cheaply as possible. Console version made by fifty people? Lets get 2 guys to make our amiga one
It depends a lot on the game as to whether the hardware was there or not. Trouble was that the hardware was custom, and so the cheapest option was to just to do the ST version for both systems, like zubazub66 said, and we'd count our blessings if we at least got some Amiga audio
Correct. But with rampant piracy on the Amiga and a relatively small user base, what are you going to do? A lot of people doesn't realise that the Amiga had a relatively small market share and was relevant only in a handful of countries. It is estimated that Commodore sold about 4 to 7 millions Amigas worldwide during their less than 10 years run with the machine line (we don't have much in the way of official sales numbers from the big C= tho, only some data released during the Escom era that don't seem very accurate, hence the estimate). It seems a lot but it's negligible compared to what IBM and clone DOS PCs were doing (I don't know, hundreds of millions units sold in the 80s and 90s?). And then there is piracy. A small company could easily develop Amiga games because it didn't require a license to do so or proprietary dev kits. But as soon as they could afford deals with console manifacturers, they'd jump ship because, well, bigger money was there, a global market and no X-Copy Pro. European youtubers, bloggers and whatnot have been painting a picture for decades now in which the Amiga ruled the world just because most of their classmates had an A500. But that was never the case. It didn't even rule Europe (where DOS PCs were still the majority of computers around). And no, I don't hate the Amiga, I like it.
@@amerigocosta7452 Looking in retrospect today, it's actually amazing how many excellent games the Amiga actually got, since development for it was bordeline amateur most of the time, and the profits just weren't there. I remember Thalion leaving a message in Lionheart (a great game) saying that they wanted to prove the Amiga could handle an epic, polished, well made arcade-like game, and that the game wasn't *cheap* to produce, but if people pirated it and didn't buy it, it would be the last time Thalion would do such a thing. And indeed, it was.
Today on Game Builder Garage, I learned how to make a character punch and even have a form of health bar. Perhaps in a week or two, I could recreate that Indy game. Joy? As for After Burner, half the "fun" was being inside that moving cab with all the music, SFX, blur of enemies to shoot at and going nuts on that flight stick. No home port can do most of that. But still... lots of people think that porting that game to a home platform should be equally as fun. On another note, I had let the Arcade ROM run as I was setting up a home arcade cab. By not playing, it still got through level one. Talk about ruining the illusion that anyone ever stood a chance at that game. Only seen Moonwalker on a couple streams. Must have sounded better on paper. Cause I sure don't know it was suppose to be fun. SF II... six button game. Ported to... one button, was it? How great could the gaming experience possibly come through with that downgrade? But then... they seemingly were porting it to anything with a CPU. No matter how little it made sense to. Got to say, that Dragon's Lair level of graphics looks like a wonderful port of the laser disk original. Mind you, the original was little more than selecting tracks on a movie with precise timing. They could have gone the Nintendo route. Which was to totally make their own games. Bad games. Terrible games. Shamefully horrible games. This Amiga one looks like it aimed to be the real game on a floppy disk. Its only fault was that it had no room to flex by being so dedicated. Looks to me like Rolling Thunder is missing half the frames. Should have been half the price, as well. I mean... is there really enough going on to justify that kind of jerky screen rate??? It sure seemed like Outrun just didn't port to home consoles very well at all. The C-64 port is something this Amiga port can point at and mock, though. I'm familiar with Victory Road on the NES. Perhaps this game was just garbage to begin with??? Rise of the Ro... lost to the flood of one-on-one and should have been recycled during development. I don't think it worked on any platform.
I did not look at the title and thought 'wait, these look alright for mid-tier Commodore games'. Then it took me a minute to realize that these are not C64 games! 😱
Great list. I knew Out Run in there but initially I was concerned you weren't going to mention the execrable Days of Chunder as well. I don't know how I could have doubted you. Bravo!
True story... about 10 yrs ago, I actually found a working Amiga CD 32 and loads of games with it in my sister's loft of a house she moved into! Rise of the Robots was amongst them games! Then we sold the lot on ebay
I had Rise of the Robots. I was still in primary school at the time and got it as a Christmas present. I only managed to get it to run about 2 or 3 times so i really can't remember what it was like. My real memories of that game are admiring the screenshots on the back of the box.
Ah I was about to post saying I recognised them but couldn't work out which game! Definitely Speedball 2 now you've mentioned it! Wonder how they got away with it.
In the late 80’s/early 90’s, the Danish equivalent to Wallmart had NO idea what they were selling, when it came to computer games. There was a huge pile of C64 games - ALL priced aprox 10$ by today’s value. Didn’t matter if it was a single game or a collection! For Amiga 500 it was 10$ ish for Pocket Power games (remember those?). 22$ for the vast majority (regardless of being a collection), and later 44$ ish for bigger games like Dune and Monkey Island 2.
Dangerous Streets takes it for me as it was bundled with the CD32, and Amiga games were beginning to struggle against the SNES/Mega Drive as it was at the time.
Yeah I gotta say - many hold E-Swat in high regard.... I don't either - although the megadrive version is pretty darn good (probably as like shadow dancer, it its own version. )
I loved the arcade game to death. So much better than Data East's Robocop. Played it every chance I got. So I was left quite limp by the Genesis/Megadrive adaptation. Took awhile for a working version on MAME because the roms were encrypted. A bootleg version was floating around but had corrupted graphics and missing voice samples.
Back in the day, it was very rare that we'd afford a full price game, the thought of paying £25 back then for 1 game meant it had to be special. If it wasn't special, we threw it back. Like we'd tell them it doesn't work, if they start trying the games we'd load the disk hex editor and break it :). We tended to just get the compendiums when spending that sort of money, much better value and much less likely to end up with a turd. But sometimes it was worth holding onto something like Afterburner, Outrun, Double Dragon etc... easy to swap out for loans with people to try better games... really the playground was our review board, I'd listen to my pals about good games to try rather than go by some magazine... heck we mostly just scoured the magazines for cheats in John Menzies.
Yeah its a lot different to todays throwaway culture, there will be games on this list that although they are crap people will have fond memories of as it was a big purchase and once made you had to play it until the next big purchase came along, over that time they will have learnt to love the game and it will be attached to do much nostalgia.... now a kid would play a 60 pound ps5 game for 10 mins and never go back to it
Regarding _Akira,_ my understanding is that one of the Amiga magazines was told not to review the game unless they were going to score it 80% or more (like *that* was going to be a justifiable score(!)).
The price tags on these games are unbelievable. I did play many of them, mostly pirated, and some I got for my birthday or Christmas, like Indy 4 and Rise of the Robots. I wish I could say Rise of the Robots made me immune to hype... But at least it made me highly suspicious of it. AI that learns how you move! Music by Brian May! Incredible graphics! Well, May did contribute to the theme song or something. In my memories, that level of Beverly Hills Cop was the most fun one. It's _kinda_ cool how every level is a different kind of game. I could never beat the fourth level that's a godawful FPS.
I actually remember buying Dragon's Lair, it was excellent compared to the C64 version, which I also bought at the time. Those today prices have left me feeling quite sick though.
One of the worse games I remember trying to play on the Amiga was Heimdall. It looked good, got great reviews, but was void of any playability. The main thing I recall is tedious wandering around with your character constantly falling down traps that would appear at random beneath his feet with no way to predict or avoid, so zero skill involved.
Indeed I bought Dragons Lair.... Still remember coming out of Boots in Birmingham Town centre so excited to get home and play it.... I had a YTS at the time so was on £28 a week I think it was.... horrendous times ... no wonder I turned to X-copy 😮
I bought ROTR back in the day and I saved like crazy for it. I got home played it in my A1200 (had a hard drive) and then realised it was terrible. I kept the game on my hard drive and took it back to the shop next day and noted it was defective game (luckily you could do that back then). I got my money back and ended up getting a couple of games (I think it was xtreme racing game and a budget game) now money was well spent then!
Hey OSG. Really liked this video and your 💯 honest opinions! The calculation of how much those games would cost in today's money was a good bit of information. Interesting you put Afterburner on this list. I had it in my Amstrad CPC and really liked it. Although, in hindsight, maybe I liked it more as it reminded me of the arcade version and I agree with you that you're not really in control much of the aeroplane. BTW, if I may offer a suggestion, perhaps next time when doing a list such as this maybe consider adding some videos of the alternative games you mention that are better, maybe as a small windowed/thumbnail type one. As I said tho, just a suggestion, and I really enjoyed this video.
Yolanda was made by Chris Sorrell because he wanted to code an Amiga while he was working with Steve Bak, and was kinda frustrated Bak insisted in making ST games first and then straight ports to Amiga, not using the full Amiga potential. Steve Bak asked him to port his older game, Hercules, from the C64 to the Amiga, with just the source code at his hands and nothing else. It seems Sorrell didn't even knew what the game was like, he was just directly converting C64 code to Amiga code, heh. - One thing I find funny about Akira is that I bet most people who bought it/played it never got past the Motorbike levels, because they are a huge memorization task which isn't a lot fun to play. But the tragedy is that those are the best levels in the games, heh. - I'd add Bionic Commando somewhere in that list. Maybe remove Cool World which wasn't THAT bad (not a good game for sure, but not THAT bad).
My mate Steve bought Rise of the Robits based on the hype and the screenshot. He played it for a total of 14 minutes before it got put back on the shelf and never touched again.
Rise of the Robots could be completed by pushing one way with autofire. Also fun story from my time at Live Publishing, the publishers before Live did GameX and some other mags, I think it was a case of one company becoming another. Anyway, there were some industry veterans there and the story goes that I think the marketting guys of Rise of the Robots visited the CU Amiga team to give them an exclusive, took the reviewers out for lunch for a few bevvies, and the review was written whilst intoxicated, hence the high score of the review. One of the guys at PC Gamer was either a staffer on CU Amiga, or was a colleague in a sister title. Whilst at Live, he was a staffer on PC Gamer magazine but I don't recall his name. Martyn Carroll will probably remember more as he has a better memory than me.
I bought Rise of the Robots some time after its release for about £5 IIRC; I was aware of the terrible reviews it got so there was no way I would pay full price for it. I got a teensy bit of entertainment from it for a short while
Fortunately I was brought up on the Dragon 32 vey basic but fair games . Many years later I bought a send hand Amiga just to play Championship manager and HeroQuest. A few years after that I met a man who was a lead programmer for a large games didtributor and he told me that certain games were made to be impossible . I.E. advertise 100 levels for marketing and make level 9 impossible to complete. Who would know ? I lost all faith after that . I spent hours on Jet set Willy , I want my time back . Now I play Champ man 01/02 , and wish Id spent all those years playing Elite.
Sure those are some terrible games on the Amiga but we still get expensive garbage on the latest consoles. I do remember only ever buying final fight on the Amiga on the day of release because it wasnt cracked on day 1. God that was a waste of cash and utter garbage.
The only ones I played from this list are Out Run and Rolling Thunder. Thankfully, I got them as copies, so wasted nothing on them. See also Chase HQ and Shadow of The Beast. On the bright side, I added four disks to my pile of blanks. Some that I did buy and hated were Vigilante and The Running Man.
it would be good to see modern refresh of some of these games - some have great looking graphics, some have good ideas, just need optimising and tweaking. But some just look trash - luckily I never bought any of them, I was close to Rise of the Robots but bought a hard drive for my A500+ instead.
You are perfectly timed just got my mini never had an amiga as c64 lad, your still the best osg, since giving me assistance on my dodgy loading c64, i allways love your videos mate and i just intro one of my best mates, we love Activision Bastards 🎉 best catch phrase ever, mugs? T shirts? Massively appreciated here in Nottingham mate thanks
2:48 & their mission to do as many film conversions as humanly possible, with some they spaffed out it was like a crusade with zero quality control. To be fair there was a some good uns though but the rep doesnt really shout about them as muc as the turkers. Kinda figured RotR would be #1 on the list, didnt have it myself but if memory serves didnt it come on an amount of discs that was double figures? or am I thinking of another fighter, pretty sure if any sort of AI existed back then Xcopy would refuse to clone the discs to save people from the pain
Inflation calculators tend to be very inaccurate when comparing the cost of period computers, consoles and games and as a result we have a tendency to think 80s and 90s prices were a lot higher than they really were. For example you mentioned that Rolling Thunder was sold for £24.99 in 1987 which you put at £88 in today's money. However £24.99 was 0.01% of the average yearly disposable income in the UK in 1987 (£19221) and currently the average disposable salary is around £34000 so we can use that to extrapolate to a more realistic modern price of about £42.20. Basically an increase of 168% rather than the 350% people often use. Gaming and computers were a lot more affordable back then than some in the hobby seem to realise which is why those of us growing up in working class families were still able to afford the hobby.
Accurate list and there's plenty more that could have been on it. I didn't even sail the high seas with most of these other than rise of the robots and street fighter 2 which quickly got copied over!!
Yep Kick Off 3 caught me out. Even though it was before the internet like many I would buy a lot of magazines and read a lot in newsagents with women that worked in there ocasionally commenting are you going to buy anything or this isn't a library, my trick was to have enough money to buy one magazine at the time and read the rest until getting kicked out haha which would sometimes make the lady feel quite guilty in my imagination. Kick Off 3 somehow got past me and little did I know Dino Dini wasn't at Anco any more. As soon as I started playing it I knew I had made a huge mistake and around my area it was very hard to get a refund on a Amiga game. Lesson learned. To this day I always do my research, not just reviews as I have enjoyed plenty the mainstream reviewers haven't enjoyed or disliked many they did like over the years, but looking at gameplay and seeing if looks like something I would enjoy or a strong gut feeling about the game. Thanks for the video and the memories. I think I purchased GOAL! for the same kind of money in the same year which was by DIno Dini and I found it excellent.
So many times the greatest crime was publishers charging the highest pricepoint on Amiga versions but pay devs for Atari ST led ports so no effort was made on a specific Amiga version!😔 Would've had Amiga Ghouls'n' Ghosts which was utter cack compared to Ghosts'n'Goblins! Indiana Jones & Last Crusade Arcade Game would make Fate of Atlantis Arcade Game look good!😬
Always made me so very sad to see such epic fails when the hardware was capable of so much more. Unsurprising though, given the sheer greed and ignorance of publishers, resulting in either very few devs given time or resources to do the job right, or worse, handed off to the likes of Probe or Tiertex.
@@oldstylegaming I do think if the CPC had hardware scrolling it could have been the best 8 bit computer. I might has mis remembered something but hasn't somebody updated the CPC version so it scrolls?
Peter Beardsley's International Football was dreadful for £19.99 on the Amiga, the repetitive music you couldn't turn off, naff graphics and animation, terrible broken AI and controls, for instance often AI controlled players would just stand still like sticks as the ball went past, overall absolutely abysmal and much worse than Kick Off 3 in my opinion. Thankfully I didn't pay for it and it was only worth the disk space to laugh at lol.
Rise of The Robots....they not only got you on the Amiga but we all ate it. That pile of excrement released for the Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Snes, 3DO, PC, Amiga, and ST as well. It was universally panned across every single platform. Some ports are so broken you could beat the game spamming sweep. Addendum- Sword of Sodan for the Sega Genesis....I would rather play Outrun on the Amiga in surround sound than ever look at that box of lies again. It's definitely as bad as anything on here.
I ALMOST picked up Akira with some money I got for my birthday the year it came out as I was such a big fan of the movie - something about it set the alarm bells going though so I picked up Theme Park instead and I have to say it was probably one of the best purchasing decisions I ever made 😂
I was somewhat impressed with Beverly Hills Cop 3. If I remember right the 3rd stage used some impressive 3D first-person graphics with a reasonable frame rate. But, yeah, the gameplay was mostly crap.
I remember spending my horded birthday and christmas money on Rise of the Robots. I kept playing it in the hopes at some point the waste of precious funds would be justified. It never was. Bastards
how did ocean end up with a fate of the atlantis license? was there a movie in pre-prod and they were shopping out the movie license?? (oceans secret was to pick up the movie license very early in the movies production life so they could get them cheaper, before anyone knew if it would be a hit or not)
It was US Gold not ocean, i can only think that as they had the rights, lucas arts developed both but not sure why the title and not sure why 2 games....
This is why a lot of people just refuse to take the Amiga seriously. There was zero oversight by commodore into what was being released on their machine.
Can't really argue with any on the list, especially the number one. I did buy Outrun back in the day, at that point it was a budget title. I had never seen the arcade game, and I had just come across from my 48K Spectrum to the Amiga. At that point, I thought the game wasn't bad, and a huge step up from the Speccy and it's racing games and I personally find the intro, as stupidly over the top that it is, quite fun. It's only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can I see the obvious problems with it but I cut it some slack for myself as I got it on budget. And I know people will always compare it with Lotus but I stand by opinion that if the people who coded Lotus 2 or 3 used that engine as the foundation for an Outrun conversion, the game would ahve been superb. Not arcade perfect but it would have been considered a pretty respectable port nonetheless.
Have to add "Epic" to that list. There was a demo floating around that got me hyped , sampled classical music, cool animations, i thought i was getting Battlestar Galactica . It turned out to be a POS and even had a cheat button printed in the manual. Game took 30 mins to complete and i felt mugged off
I have to disagree with one thing. I know some people who enjoy punishment. I've known a lot over the years. I very much doubt they would willingly spend their time playing these. "You have to play these games" isn't a punishment they would enjoy
7:58 I played Rolling Thunder on the Atari ST... Not great by any means but OK! Seeing the Amiga Version here... And knowing that the Amiga was by far the more popular machine (All my friends had Amiga's... Except one!!!) - I find myself screaming WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED??? The Atari ST runs WAY SMOOTHER, Still not a great game but it makes this look like a ZX Spectrum game!!!
Back in the 90s there was a game for the Amiga that topped all these, it too, was about 24.95. Sadly, I can't remember the name of it! A review appeared in the penultimate issue of Arcane Magazine by Future Publishing (a name known to many). It was a role-playing game and the review was astonishing and was responsible for healthy sales. However, the game was complete junk, there were no redeeming features and, from memory, it was borderline unplayable. Arcane readers were frothing at the mouth claiming that the "review" was paid for by the game's publisher. In the next and final issue, the magazine's editor admitted that it was indeed a paid promotion--none of the writers at Arcane had ever plain the game. Yep, you guessed it, after that admission the zine went under. I'll keep hunting for the title.
I saved my paper route money to buy dragons lair. It was a technical marvel for sure. But the gameplay was trash, and to be fair, so was the arcade version. Lol. But the thing I hated most about omega games after 1990 was that you never knew if you were getting something designed for the amigo just a lousy port
@@oldstylegaming I was burned so many times, I stuck to developers that were consistent. ie Cinemaware, Lucasfilm, Bitmap bros, Factor 5, Graftgold, and sometimes Psygnosis. You just never knew if you were getting something good or crap
And some people dear to say modern games are unfinished compared to old ones, but people just forgot all the shitty games they used to release. For every Turrican or chaos engine we got dozens of total garbage tier games. In modern day, with patches some of these games could have been actually made atleast decent.
Final fight.... diuble dragon top my list becaize i loved the arcade games final fight again was us golded looked ok in stills till you played it found the music gone most of the moves and cheap ai so all you could do wad jump kick to survive and they did it on every uk version. I bought it twice on the speccy and amiga more fool me.
OSG I have to say that going into this video I thought that number 1 on the list was going to be a 150 quid piece of crap but there's some of them where you don't convert into today's money and a couple you dont seem to mention the price at all?
