Commodore Amiga

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Alex79
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Commodore Amiga

Post by Alex79 »

When I was a kid, as far as I was concerned, the Amiga was the Holy Grail of video gaming. Something I desperately wanted, but was just a bit beyond the means of my family. I remember pouring over adverts in games magazines, screenshots and reviews, and just thinking "man, I really want one of those".

At middle school, aged around 11, a friend of mine owned one, and in an act that was cut short by an observant teacher, we used to sneak out of the school gates at lunch time and go to his house to play on it. He only lived two minutes away, and playing stuff like Golden Axe, Shadow Of The Beast and Manchester United Europe was so worth the enormous telling off I got from my parents for those lunch time excursions.

About a year or two later, a very generous friend lent me his Amiga, and I had one glorious half term holiday just going through his impressive collection of hooky games, God it was so good. Monkey Island 2, Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, all the greats. I remember always being sorely disappointed by the Amstrad ports of games that I'd played the Amiga version of.

Still, owning an Amiga always remained out of my reach - UNTIL - aged around 23/24 I discovered online shopping and eBay. And so, eventually, I owned my own Amiga A500! God I was so excited when it arrived! I'd bought a shed load of games with it, along with a Competition Pro, the king of joysticks (get out of here with your Powerplay Cruiser, lads). I spent one incredible weekend locked in a room with nothing but memories. Memories of things I'd played, and memories of games I'd always imagined playing. It was glorious.

Of course, as with most things you buy as an adult that you were desperate for as a kid, the novelty soon wore off, and spoiled by years of consoles, and already owning a decent gaming PC for its time, I soon packed the Amiga back up and there it remains.

Still, I'll always look at the Amiga as this legendry games machine, and I've not even mentioned all the amazing music produced on it, and the demo scene that grew from it. What a computer.

EDIT: Apologies for the length. Got a little carried away there :oops:
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

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S’all good!
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CamAshworth
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by CamAshworth »

My memories of the Amiga were being amazed at the quality of the graphics on games such as Final Fight and Lotus Challenge. I came from a pretty poor family, so realistically I had to stick with my Spectrum +2 that I had bought for me some years before.

It was not until some years later I managed to get my hands on one from the Loot magazine (Remember that?)....

It came with a cardboard box of copied games on floppy disks with crudely written labels and only one legitimate boxed game - Premier Manager.

This started my love affair which is still going strong of Football management games.

I will always look back in fondness of thinking I had "Arcade Perfect" ports of Golden Axe and Final Fight when in reality this was not the case.

But to a young lad it seemed that way.
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Pixel Hunted
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by Pixel Hunted »

My very first gaming memory is on the Amiga: my Dad putting a joystick in my hand and teaching me how to play Hybris. He was (and is) always on top of new technologies and had snapped up an A500 ostensibly for work, but there were always a suspiciously large amount of games hanging around. I dimly remember him explaining the genius of Populous to me, and at one point proudly showing off how he was playing against his friend across town via the phone lines (I have no idea how this was accomplished in the early 90s). My Mum soon got into it as well, becoming dedicated to beating James Pond - I still have the title screen music seared onto my brain after all these years. There's actually a bunch of photos of myself and my siblings gathered around her playing it, our eyes glued to the screen.

Another very happy memory was spending a happy weekend with a family friend working through The Secret of Monkey Island, taking it in turns to do very silly voices for each character. There was also the joy of unwrapping Street Fighter II one Christmas Day, followed by being extremely let down by the dodgy port and the impossibility throwing a fireball on a one-button Quickshot joystick. My friends and I still played it for hours, though Dhalsim was quickly banned as spamming fierce punch made him all but invincible.

I also absolutely adored Amiga Power magazine, which I continued buying for the humour long after I'd finished regularly playing the system (their 2% review of International Rugby Challenge was and is hilarious). I still wonder whatever happened to my favourite contributor Jonathan Nash, who appears to have vanished off the face of the Earth.

Though the arrival of a Mega Drive, the first console that was mine and mine alone, meant I spent less time with the Amiga, it will always have a place in my heart as the machine that introduced me to video games.
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Woland
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by Woland »

Nostalgia counts for a lot in gaming and while my first and most formative love will always be the Speccy, it was the Amiga that fired my imagination and blew my mind in ways i could never previously conceive and that cemented for me a love of gaming that has lasted over 30 years. Weirdly, I never actually owned one and had never heard of one until my mate's dad suddenly plonked one in his dining room with a pile of games. And what games.

The following couple of years are a blur of incredible, indelible experiences that for me anyway, represent a bigger generational leap than I have experienced before or since. The text adventures of the 8 bit era evolved for me overnight into what seemed like fully cinematic adventure experiences with releases by the likes of Lucasarts and Delphine Software. The clunky, turgid trial that was Match Day 2 on the Speccy was replaced by the slick, subtle and infinitely playable Kick Off 2 and Sensi Soccer. Dazzling ports of arcade classics such as Rainbow Islands and New Zealand Story burned themselves into my cortex, never to be forgotten.

I could go on, about my first experiences of open worlds in genuinely groundbreaking games like Midwinter and Hunter, about the first glimpses of contemporary, expansive RPGs that the likes of Eye of the Beholder showed to me, about playing Powermonger for the first time and feeling like a God. I could go on for hours, but I won't, i'll leave that to you guys. I was never a console kid and the megadrive and snes largely passed me by. Nostalgia counts for a lot in gaming and for me the sweetspot will always remain those endless hours on my mate's Amiga. Anyone for Speedball?
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by seanmacgabhann »

Ah - the Amiga . So long ago but still some of my fondest memories

Raised on a spectrum, the 16 bit machines arrived and magazines were packed with jaw-dropping examples of games way beyond anything even my +3 could manage. I was working in an office, but still a teenager on a paltry salary. And so it was on a bank holiday weekend, with 10 minutes until closing time on a Friday I found myself in an indie computer shop in a backstreet in Swindon. I inquired about getting an Amiga 500 on credit ( I had no idea if I was even eligible) - he sighed and looked at me "you will be wanting this for the long weekend won't you?". Yup. So he went into a back room and I don't know if he shortened the required checks to get that extra sale - but I emerged with a 500

And for the next 5-6 years I lived and breathed Amiga. I started going to computer fairs in the big London venues - getting extra ram, disk drives. I would buy software to pimp my operating system (MagicWorkbench anyone?)
I believed in the Amiga so much, I bought word processing and desktop publishing software as well as playing so many great games. And some rubbish ones (Elvira I'm looking at you)
The games that have stayed with me over the years are a motley bunch - rather than the big names like Shadow of the Beast, it's games like Microprose Golf which I wish I could still play
Of course when the time came I upgraded to a 1200 but the writing was on the wall. AGA software wasn't really worth the extra and the PC was clearly taking over

Parallel to my Amiga years, Nintendo and Sega consoles dominated but I never had one. I pretended that my one button joystick was all I needed and consoles were always going to be a pale shadow. I was too dismissive of some of the amazing software that the consoles had even then - but then I started to read about something called the Playstation. And everything changed. But that's a story for another day
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Simonsloth
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by Simonsloth »

A few weeks after Christmas 1991 my Dad came home from work clutching a gigantic box and holding 2 large plastic bags. He told my brother, sister and I to come into the lounge to see what he had. It was an Amiga 500 plus bundle with two other packs of games, the Arcade Action and Astra packs. My Dad’s close friends were managers of Silica shop and my mum even worked there for a bit but despite this my Dad had never shown any interest in computer games.

To say this was a surprise shortly after christmas would be an understatement. To this day I still don’t why he splashed hundreds of pounds on not just an expensive computer but no less than 24 games. Aside from a bit of Bubble Bobble at a friends house and a Game and Watch parachuting handheld I had never played a game before. I think back now and realise how ludicrous it was going from nothing to more games than I could dream of.

The Cartoon Classics bundle he bought came with Captain Planet, Simpsons, Lemmings and a bonus copy of Zool. The advert was something special:



The other 20 games were a mixed bag. Some I have absolutely no recollection of whereas Rick Dangerous, Shuttlepuck Cafe and Microprose Soccer were instant favourites. I still remember cheating at Shuttlepuck and Rick Dangerous’ Waaaahs with every death.

My siblings and I were very quickly obsessed with the Amiga. My sister used to hide certain games to stop us beating her high scores, my brother and I pointlessly learnt all the answers to the bundled trivial pursuit game and my Dad was only called in to do the tricky bits then quickly dismissed.

A few months later he bought Turrican 2 which he deemed inappropriate to play with us around so waited until we were asleep to put it on. The next day rather than the bright and chirpy morning person he usually was he was grumpy and had bags under his eyes. It turns out he had stayed up until 3am playing it. Once I found out I used to creep down and watch through the crack in the door. He never did it again and hasn’t really played many games since.

Amiga action magazine swaps, shady playground pirate disc sales in exchange for sweets, Monkey Island, Flashback, Sensible soccer, Dizzy.... There are too many memories and I am aware this is already a very long trip down memory lane. To me the Amiga was my first entry into the world of video games and I remember it so very fondly.
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Worfendorf
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by Worfendorf »

Hello, Cane and Rinse team and Cane and Rinse fans!

I'm excited for this Amiga special. Usually, I'll have played the game or console up for discussion, or at the very least I'll have read about it or watched someone else play it. But since my gaming started in the early 90s with a secondhand NES, and because I didn't know anyone at that time who owned a computer, the Amiga is a blinding blind spot in my video game knowledge.

Just to say, I've listened to every Cane and Rinse (a few multiple times), and this will be one of the rare times that I get to learn about something completely foreign.

Thanks for all you do!
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga (recording June 2019)

Post by BearFishPie »

The Amiga wasn’t my first gaming experience, but it, together with the humble Game Boy, absolutely cemented my love for the hobby.

I started off in late primary school with a ZX Spectrum +2 bought with a stack of magazines and tapes, and though I did get a lot of joy from it for years I couldn’t help covet my friends’ A500s and Atari STs. Alas, I didn’t have the money to upgrade, and it was well outside the acceptable price range for a birthday or Christmas gift.

And then in what must have been 1991 I won a competition run by retail chain Dixons, which unexpectedly included a shiny new Amiga 500+ Cartoon Classics bundle. My eleven year old self was instantly wowed by the jarring leap forward in graphical and audio fidelity, watching and rewatching the (to my mind) incredible intro animation of Bart vs the Space Mutants and basking in the glorious graduated colour backdrops of so many platformers.

Having been completely absorbed by the fat stack of CRASH and Your Sinclair I’d inherited along with the Speccy, I got all the magazines I could. Where possible I sweet talked the local newsagent into handing me any discs or front coverless mags he might have stashed away. I would pick up whatever had the more appealing coverdisc for a while - Amiga Action, The One Amiga, Amiga Format or Amiga Power, but soon hero worshipped the mighty AP and stuck with it to the end.

And the games. Oh, the games! As with my Spectrum days I had no real idea about genre and was still establishing my tastes so hoovered up everything that I could afford, particularly if it reviewed well. This meant my collection spanned the gamut from sports sims to shooters to platformers to puzzlers and more esoteric fare, all of which my time-rich self would give a decent shake, even if completely incompetently. Thanks to the various magazines I also had a raft of splendid and not so splendid demos and PD games to while away the time with.

I later bought into the hype of the CD32 only to be a tad disappointed (though feel I still got my money’s worth of joy from the likes of Guardian, Roadkill and Liberation), and finally traded up to another, much flashier grey 32-bit CD based console.

The games I have the fondest memories of besides the above are a mixture of the Obvious Classics (everything Bitmaps and Sensible, Pinball Dreams / Fantasies, Hired Guns, SWIV, NZ Story, Parasol Stars, Putty, Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker, Lemmings and its sequels, disc swapping nightmare Monkey Island 2, UFO: Enemy Unknown, the groundbreaking Another World and Flashback, etc) and some slightly lesser known gems (PD games such as Gravity Force 2, Scorched Tanks, many knockoffs of arcade hits such as Pac-Man, Mr. Do, Lode Runner, Asteroids etc, and Skidmarks, Fury of the Furries, Shadow Fighter, First Samurai, Premiere, Rodland, Moonstone and the splendidly OTT wonkiness of Rasputin Software’s Base Jumpers and Jetstrike).

Wow, that was long. Sorry 😐
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga

Post by ratsoalbion »

Thank you folks, we're recording later today and the podcast will be out for patrons in the coming week or so, all being well.
:D
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Simonsloth
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga

Post by Simonsloth »

ratsoalbion wrote: June 28th, 2019, 2:35 pm Thank you folks, we're recording later today and the podcast will be out for patrons in the coming week or so, all being well.
:D

Looking forward to it.
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Re: Special No.5: Amiga

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