The Amiga line of computers from classic Commodore are rightly revered, but they did have their limits. Infamously, the people at id Software claimed that, despite all its custom chips, Wolf3D and Doom weren’t possible on it, and it’s true that in the time since no one has managed to make games like those on stock Amiga without some pretty major drawbacks. It’s been said that the lack of those foundational first-person shooters were really what caused PCs to be seen as gaming machines. From there, the fact that you could use one machine for both work and play arguably paved the way for the Windows hegemony of the current day.
But let’s not forget that Amigas were quite capable in other ways, and a recent technical feat has demonstrated this: the creation, by someone called reassembler, of a nearly arcade-perfect of Sega’s arcade hit Outrun (itch.io). Outrun was amazing to see in action at the time, and it’s still pretty awesome to watch today. It used Sega’s “Super Scaler” hardware to push up to 128 huge sprites per frame. The Amiga, by contrast, only has eight hardware sprites, and they’re not that different from those on Commodore’s 8-bit computers really. Where the Amiga excelled was using its blitter, a way to rapidly modify memory using custom circuitry, to simulate sprites.
Let’s not be too harsh on Probe’s port, as it was written for earlier Amigas. The new port requires the AGA graphics set and a 68030 processor, meaning the earliest machine that could run it was the Amiga 4000.
reassembler has made a video explaining the optimizations he made to get the game running so smoothly. (16½ minuites) I eat this kind of thing up. Here’s hoping it’ll be a filling meal for you too!
I’m still deep in the 8-bit computing weeds right now, and I always look to connect what I’m personally researching with what I put up on Set Side B. So lucky you, what I’ve been looking at today is The 8-Bit Guy’s videos about the history of Commodore!
It’s a series of videos (yes, on Youtube) exploring the history of that company, both lauded and hated. They released one of the best-selling computers of all time in the Commodore 64, but founder Jack Tramiel wasn’t all that great a guy. Word is the C64 was priced so low because he held a grudge against Texas Instruments, a calculator company Commodore competed against, so he moved to undercut and destroy their sales of the TI-99/4A, turning it into just another computing history footnote. He also bought rising star MOS Technologies, which had a terrific things going with the ultra low-cost 6502 processor, but then basically only used the company as Commodore’s bespoke chip fab.
But say what you will about Tramiel and other strong personality company Presidents and CEOs, when they’re successful, their ups and downs make for interesting times, to read about and hear. So “hear” you go!
The series is collected into a 13 video playlist, 8 parts of the series itself averaging about 25 minutes each, plus some extras. It’s a tale that begins with one of the first (if not the first) pre-assembled mass market personal computers, and ends with the Amiga. If the dice had only rolled differently (and maybe if Tramiel hadn’t bee forced out of the company), then instead of Apple rising to become the leading computing device maker in the world, we might be using Commodore C-Phones today.
Strictly speaking they’re not from a game, but the Amiga was regarded as a gaming computer, so you may be interested in these modern-OS compatible versions of the Amiga system font Topaz, with extra characters done in the style of the originals! They’re made by “Screwtapello” on Mastodon!
The demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.
Found from Z303’s aptly named Tumblr The Demo Scene, Batman Rises was created by the aptly-named Batman Group, who might be just a little too obsessed with Warner Bros’ multimedia megaproperty. This demo was created for the Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM in 2022. That people are still making demos for the classic Amiga platform today is pretty awesome, whether they focus on Batman, Spider-man or some other be-spandexed corporate-owned trademarked character.
Here is video of the demo in action (8 1/2 minutes):
They also made a blog post describing the narrative of the demo. You may find it interesting. It still seems pretty fluffy to me (I mean it has a scene of zooming down a technological tunnel for no reason I could discern), but I’ll admit it’s pretty awesome to see something like this running on 36-year-old hardware! If you have interest in obtaining the demo yourself, to run in physical hardware or an emulator, both it and instructions for running are here.
Bad Game Hall of Game is an interesting blog that talks about failed titles without the snark with which they were usually treated in the early days of the Web, or the rancor of The Angry Video Game Nerd. Snark and furor drive hits, of course, so I can respect the desire to give games many regard as kusoge their due, whatever that may be.
When you know it? It’s simple. When you don’t? It’s unfair.
Truthfully, there are lots of games that are perceived as bad that aren’t really so terrible, often due to the audience-chasing bile emitted by folk like Seanbaby and Something Awful. Games intended to be played for challenge, especially those from arcades and the earlier years of consoles, are kind of a pastime for masochists. When you lose, it often feels like it’s not your fault, but was it really? Was that hit telegraphed and avoidable? Was there some clever technique to be discovered, like jumping and slicing through an Ironknuckle’s helmet in Zelda II, that makes seemingly impossible enemies a simple matter to defeat? And when a game is intended to be played many times, not shattered in a single session but returned to many times, getting a bit further each time, isn’t it supposed to be a good thing that you may lose your first time out?
I took these screenshots myself for this post. See what I do for you.
There are lots of armchair game designers, maybe even more than armchair movie directors, since players spend more time with games generally before they put them down, and it’s easier, theoretically at least, to make games yourself without the capital expenditure and outside labor that movies require. (I can tell you though, it’s still plenty hard.) And yet, they are the players, and if they’re not having fun, then the game is doing it wrong. Even if it’s because of some information or training the player hasn’t, in their life, gained, you can’t blame them. Maturity can help a player enjoy games they wouldn’t otherwise. But this is also true of any art form, and the opposite could also be said to be true, there are games where, I’d say, maturity is an outright barrier to enjoyment. It’s complicated. Maybe I’ll talk about this later.
URG URG URG URG AIIEEE
In the article that Bad Game Hall Of Fame talks about that I find interesting today, the game in question is Sword of Sodan, the creation of Finnish demo coder Søren Grønbech, an infamous game with a much longer story behind it than your typical bad game, indeed extremely long. Out of curosity, I pasted BGHoF’s discussion of it into Microsoft Word, and it came up to 67 pages! It’s got two large sets of footnotes, goes back to the Amiga demo scene and gives insight into the difficulties of developing computer games, at the time, in the state of Denmark.
Almost nothing gets through these giants’ defenses, and your encounter with them puts one on either side. As a connoisseur I must say, the frustration is exquisite.
Sword of Sodan for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, as it turns out, is a port of an Amiga game. Both games are extremely hard, but the Genesis version actually has more interesting design decisions behind it, in the form of its potion mixing subgame. You can hold up to four potions, each of one of four different colors, and can choose to drink any number of them at once. Drinking different combinations of potions has different effects, most good, some useless, a couple actually bad. (Hilariously, if you drink one of each color at a time your character immediately dies, and the game flashes a message on screen: “WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS.” Gee thanks, William S. Sessions.)
Many games of the time talked the talk, but Sword of Sodan would outright kill you if you got too experimental with your potions.
67 pages is a lot to read about a game that few people might want to play, but it’s okay to skip around. I won’t tell anyone.
Tutankham Returns (itch.io link, $0) is a port/expansion of the classic Konami/Stern arcade game Tutankham. While Tutankham had only three levels, this has seven, but otherwise is much the same kind of thing. Compare the above to the original. It matches the original’s sound, graphics, and presentation exactly! The games have especially good sound design.
