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ketra
@ketra

was watching james pond 3 yesterday and, seriously, amiga games often had more time and care spent on their fonts than their levels.


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

I was writing a blog for tumblr the other day (it's not up yet) and I was really struggling to talk about Amiga/Spectrum games overall and this is such a smart way to say it.


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in reply to @ketra's post:

I'd believe it! My impression is that the demoscene was always bigger in Europe than it was in America, and its influence definitely shines through in a lot of the title screens and cracktro screens I see for European games.

in reply to @blazehedgehog's post:

It's so baffling too, because I know people (or know of people) who will be like "yeah Fantasy World Dizzy was my childhood, I love it so much" and then you try to play Fantasy World Dizzy and it's the most player-hostile, tedious, obtuse game ever created.

Like, while writing this comment, I actually went looking up a list of Dizzy games to compare to, since my only experience is with the NES version of Treasure Island Dizzy. This video of Fantasy World Dizzy for the Amiga has the dude making one-pixel-precision jumps in the first two minutes. That's not even sickos territory anymore.

I think part of it comes from like, these games tended to be distributed on floppy disks, which gives you file-size restrictions right there, but were also expected to look 16-bit. Like, there was, if not is, an entire contingency of Amiga owners who got upset when a company only had one set of graphics for the Atari ST version of a game (half the colour depth of the Amiga) and recycled them for the Amiga version. Anyways, that's more file-size taken up. And then, of course, if the players beat the game too quickly you'd have them going "so HOW MANY pounds did I spend?" So you have to go back to Ol' Reliable - difficulty.

I'd be rather hesitant to pin the blame solely on European developers or Amiga developers - not only was this mentality in many arcade games, but also in many Japanese and American NES games. Mr. Gimmick takes less than 30 minutes to beat if you're good at it, so it "makes up" for that by being tough as nails.

Oh, absolutely. The "Amiga Game Energy" is also alive and well in a lot of DOS games from that era, too. I remember things like Skunny. And even beloved stuff like Halloween Harry feels appropriately impossible at times. Good game design was more of a mystery back then and these folks were in bedrooms and basements and garages just sort of banging rocks together and selling it in a sandwich baggie. When you're young enough, that's all you need. I mean, famously I like to tell people that my friends and I kind of liked Awesome Possum because we just didn't know any better yet.