Magistr on 21/9/2020 at 19:30

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Looking for more Amiga style games like Pocket Tanks or DX Ball. Anyone know any good ones?

henke on 22/9/2020 at 05:41

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Since the examples are DX Ball and Pocket Tanks I think it might also mean a certain aesthetic.

I recently picked up (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206770/Spa_Taxi/) Spaß Taxi and I've been enjoying it. The gameplay is very Amiga, tho the aesthetic is somewhere between Amiga 500 and "1997 PC indie shareware title".

In a similar vein, lander-game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/727020/Arcade_Moonlander/) Arcade Moonlander is another one I've been digging lately.

(https://store.steampowered.com/app/560300/Thy_Sword/) Thy Sword is a fun oldschool hack n slash.

(https://store.steampowered.com/app/1159450/Hayfever/) Hayfever is a hardcore platformer which came out earlier this year.

demagogue on 22/9/2020 at 13:14

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I remember Space Taxi from my C64 days, and for some reason, on my C64 emulator now, I always save things on a copy of a virtual Space Taxi floppy disk.

Anyway, speaking of which, nothing of course beats just getting an Amiga emulator and playing Amiga games off of it. I remember wanting an Amiga in its day after those CGI magazines started coming out. It was really the first good looking CGI made on a home computer. But it's nice to have it now on an emulator anyway.

I don't know too many games today in that C64 / Amiga style, if that's what you're looking for. Generally the place to find them would be on Itch.io under, e.g., the (https://itch.io/games/tag-retro) Retro tag, or related tags like low poly, etc.

SubJeff on 22/9/2020 at 21:27

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You never played Gods, Xenon 1 and 2, Cannon Fodder, Populous 1 and 2, Speedball 2, Monkey Island, Turrican 1 and 2, The Chaos Engine, Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Alien Breed, The Settlers, Dungeon Master, Flashback, Another World, Worms, Lemmings, Eye of The Beholder, Syndicate, Batman or Dune 2??

Shadow of the Beast?

Yeah, there's a reason that's Bitmap Brothers heavy. I think Magic Pockets was their only duff game.

demagogue on 23/9/2020 at 03:22

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The Amiga was a weird beast. It sold abysmally, and one reason (I've read) was because the marketing campaign was truly awful, the kind of awful they probably teach in marketing courses now about how you should never run a marketing campaign.

It was also very unfortunately placed in time and niche, 1985-1994, at the tail end of a field full of non-IBM clones (that weren't Apple) but already at the start of the coming "PC" hegemony with all kinds of standards we take for granted now like desktops (I mean like booting up to a desktop and not a console), photo-realistic graphics, etc. The Amiga was right in the twilight zone between those two worlds trying to hold on to a piece of both.

So the aversion or ambivalence Thirith is talking about was probably even part of that trend that a lot of people also felt. But at the same time, it also had (and still has) a bewildering kind of cult following. The graphics that started coming out of it as early as 1985, I said above they were good looking, but honestly they were jaw dropping, the kind of graphics before then you'd only see from some research institute with a supercomputer or the like. It had an indie and empowering spirit (that the C64 also had). But I think the games were also in that weird twilight zone between two eras, looking and playing too good to be part of the older world, but still with the thinking and spirit that didn't fit easily with the new world.

I never had it myself, just the C64. I always pined for it in its time, but by the time I could get my own computer, the moment had passed. So it has a strange place in my memory too, like I would have been a cultist if I could have been, but everything I know about it now is from emulating it 20 years after the fact. It's a weird kind of imagined nostalgia.