Best baddest weirdest hottest Amiga games

video games
1

A while ago I found a Socrates system at a game store in stockton. This is an amiga cd32 rebranded for use in dental kiosks in the US - it‘s really just a CD32 with a mouse that I don’t own.

Anyway! There's a mod you can add to turn the thing into an Amiga 1200. This has been done, and now I can play basically any amiga game I want.

So what do I want to play? What's the hottest weirdest coolest stuff on the amiga? What would a person appreciate in the hear 2022?

Please share your recommendations, I'll make notes once I'm able to dive in later in the month. Things on my list at the moment are mostly cd32 titles like

  • chaos engine
  • whale's journey
  • black viper
  • bump n burn
  • vital light
  • super stardust

Etc! Lemme know what you got!!

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You‘ve probably played other versions of it, but Gods is at home on the Amiga.

Also, check out the Lotus games. There’s even a Trilogy collection for the CD32.

3

Any Bitmap Brothers game, really. Speedball 2, The Chaos Engine, Cadaver 1&2, Gods, even Magic Pockets while you’re at it.

Then Banshee, Premiere, Bubba´n Stix and Chuck Rock 2 (!) from Core Design. My favorite Amiga-exclusive game, which for some reason barely ever (frankly never) gets mentioned in retrospective / Top 50 videos, is their excellent RPG Darkmere.

You probably know Flashback and Prince of Persia but they are worth trying again on Amiga. Wings and Stunt Car Racer are pretty cool early 3D games. Get to Turrican and Turrican 2 early so no German demands you to play it ever again. Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Dreams are also classics. Panza Kick Boxing and Benefactor are underrated. ATR, Shufflepuck Cafe and Pushover are pretty rad.

Mr Nutz, Leander, Fury of the Furries, Ruff’n Tumble, James Pond II: Codename Robocod, Fire & Ice, Myth, Unreal, Risky Woods, Elf, Elfmania and Body Blows Ultimate are the eurojank you are looking for.

You probably remember us discussing the Italian masterpiece Fightin’ Spirit on this forum. It is on a class of its own.

Batman: The Movie, Lethal Weapon and The Addams Family are interesting euro-takes on US film properties. (So is Robocop III but you need a mouse.)

Besides Banshee, Blood Money and Project X are probably the only decent euroshmups from that era? Also you have to play and discover Katakis for yourself if you are not aware of this game. Won’t spoil it. Try to get to it blind. Will be a fun surprise.

It sucks that you don’t have a mouse as the Amiga was great for adventure games, dungeon crawlers and excellent real time mousey games like Cannon Fodder, Syndicate, Worms and Lemmings (arguably the best versions of these games in many cases).

4

By no means obscure or even tolerable by most people, but I'm a big fan of Shadow of the Beast. You already know it and you most likely already hate it.

5

@chazumaru thanks for all this! A lot of these are already on my list, but many are not! Also I don‘t currently have a mouse but I will get one! The 1200 changeover lets me use any ps/2 mouse so I just need to order one and I’ll be set.

Also, did magic pockets get the license for Betty boo doin the do or what

Amusingly I've played ports of a fair number of these on genesis (chaos engine, gods, flashback) or pc engine (shadow of the beast, Andre panza, turrican). I'm sure the originals are the ones to beat, but the consoles were more powerful in some ways, so that'll be interesting to see.

[edit] it looks like they did indeed license the song

6

@exodus I was a fan of Betty Boo at the time but even this couldn’t make Magic Pockets a good game.

I’ve been enjoying Amiga games again this year thanks to the A500 mini. Fly Harder is a ridiculously hard cave flyer, and Roadkill is a top down racing game which is mostly about combat.

Have you played much public domain games much? Or weirdo stuff like the German-only Kelloggs game?

7

There’s something awesome about the janky 3D stuff on Amiga.

[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/HOEKlLJ.png]

I could never handle the ‘advanced’ mouse control scheme in Zeewolf 2, so I probably used a third party CD32 pad instead.

Also worth checking out Hunter. It’s surprisingly open world.

8

I‘ve used this site’s Top 100 for recommendations as I've only been using the Amiga in the recent years with the MiSTer:

https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/votes_list.php

But one of my friends had one as a kid, and while he mostly played flight sims and strategy games he showed me The King of Chicago years ago when we first started hanging out. I permanently associated it with any Amiga discussions as a result. It's a simple point-and-click and easy to play for a few minutes since the game is randomly generated. Not the greatest but pretty entertaining:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17xQQ-PMPBs

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I played a lot of this shareware Snake game called Viper with my brothers. We had a lot of fun changing the sound samples. I thought it was a hidden gem which one day someone (maybe me) would remake for modern devices.

Anyway, I just looked it up and discovered not only is it a clone of a clone of a light cycle variant but there have been at least 8 other versions of it including some you can play in the browser with online multiplayer. There have even been international tournaments! The best known version which introduced the holes seems to be Achtung, die Kurve! Viper isn’t even on that page! I know nothing!

10

@copySave For Amiga kids like me, Cinemaware games were like the Naughty Dog games of their day.

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@chazumaru Wow, I played a black and white version of Shufflepuck on a Macintosh when I was very young. I haven’t thought about it at all since then. Thank you for bringing it up, was kind of weird and surreal going and looking at videos of that game!

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@Dunkr See this is the true amiga experience that I don‘t get to hear about! the shareware game you got on some “100 amazing games” disc with a magazine which actually grabbed you, without knowing it’s a clone. That's the personal computing wild (british) west right there!

13

@exodus I remember going to a few events in my small town which were just a room full of guys with X-Copy on their Amigas. Like seedy little british versions of big euro demoscene parties. Hard to find anything online about this stuff.

14

It’s time for… Klax weird and kinda problematic French games! I won’t bring up the extremely racist one.

① Silmaris’s output as a whole is worth digging through. They had a weird gentleman terrorist puzzle game with a Benny Hill vibe, Boston Bomb Club.

② Let’s stay on the topic of weird fetishizing top view puzzle games with Extase, a convoluted mix between a maze game and a hacking mini-game. Cryo / Ere Informatique is one of the weirdest developers in the History of video games, pretty much the Warp of the Eighties.

③ Their masterpiece, for better or for worse, is probably Captain Blood. Music by Jean-Michel Jarre, one among an unthinkable amount of oddities and anecdotes about this way ahead of its time and drug-fueled alien communication experience.

④ You probably know Loriciel via Amiga games ported to the PC Engine: Baby Jo!, Jim Power, Best of the Best Karate, etc. They also made what’s probably the closest thing to a French Valis? Nothing to be proud of but you’ll appreciate the curiosity that is Entity.

⑤ If you want to know what the coder of Flashback and the (teenage!) graphics artist of Another World worked on together before developing either game, look no further than Delphine Software’s Les Voyageurs du Temps a.k.a. Time Travellers a.k.a. Future Wars. Gorgeous and slightly obtuse point & click adventure.

15

Weirdo British shareware is my bread and butter. I played lots of Amiga shareware with friends, and when the CD came about it was even easier to get giant collections of stuff to try.

https://youtu.be/rhTW58BwKVQ
Drink and Drown was a pub crawl text adventure that felt incredibly edgy when I was 14.

https://youtu.be/HtLgNPYpCbw
Extreme Violence is an incredibly 2 player vs only maze shooting game. It’s incredibly tense.

There’s also Gravity Force, which is famous for incredible fast and tense vs gameplay.

16

@chazumaru OH YES!! Extase was on my list for quite some time and I forgot about it. I'll make sure to play that one (and all of these!)

17

@exodus you might enjoy how excited I was to find an Amiga copy of BC Kid (Bonk!) at a computer fair in 1993. I had spent years lusting after the PC Engine I saw in magazines, but never in shops. I played this version so much.

These computer fairs were fantastic for seeing Amiga games in their natural habitat. Booths setup entirely to Xcopy games onto disk on demand. Other booths selling blank floppies and discounted hardware. At these types of fair I also bought games for Sam Coupé, DOS, and other systems. I feel very grateful to have experienced this fleeting transitional period in gaming.

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@chazumaru wow these are some hot picks! I have to check these out.

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@docky that port was done by Factor 5! There were plans to bring over a bunch more amiga games after that but NEC was in a weird spot and it just never happened. If I recall correctly they had a finished bomberman as well.

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@exodus Wow! We did get Bomberman though, so I wonder what happened. It's super cool that the Amiga version supported five players, but one person had to use a keyboard, as demonstrated by Take That when they playerd a five player Amiga match on TV.

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