Fed up with being stuck in the slow lane when it comes to Amiga games? Join Steve McGill as he takes a speculative look at current Amiga games and delves into the world of expansions, upgrades and accelerators.
Ever felt you were being dealt a bum deal in the Amiga games department? Ever felt that the Amiga should still be at the forefront of video games technology like it used to be? Ever felt that the energy some PC game developers are expending on the exploitation of PC hardware should have gone into the Amiga when the A1200 first appeared? Me too. Think of how many times the Amiga's games have led the field, been copied and the cloned offspring has gone on to major success on dedicated games platforms; Lemmings, Sensi-Soccer and Super Skidmarks stand out as shining examples.
Increasingly, though, the Amiga is losing out. Not through the loss of developers - a good few of them will be back after enormous Christmas losses on their balance sheet - but through the restraint of processor power. Think about the following three games, released when the A500 was still at its zenith: Stunt Car Racer, Formula One Grand Prix and Knights of the Sky. Each one pushed the 68000 processor to its limit. That's why if you upgrade from an A500 or A600 to an A1200, the above games take on a new lease of life. They play perceptibly faster so that the motion not only feels more realistic, but enhances the immersive atmosphere of the environments the game plays in.
For more realistic AGA games, the 68020 found in the standard 1200 just doesn't cut the mustard these days. Especially in the realm of 3D, which just happens to be the area where the most exciting games are evolving; Guardian, Fears, Gloom, Gunship 2000, Zeewolf2, Coala and Alien Breed 3D to name the most important.
 A texture mapped F1 GP would be a joy to play and add incentive to gamers to upgrade and expand. Graphic detail could be traded off against speed depending on the processor used. |
 Stunt Car Racer, the serial linked racing game of champions. Linking between an A1200 and an A500/600 produces results that may be surprising to most Amiga gamers. |
To be fully effective, these games need grunt. But they also need to be made friendly and customisable enough to enable owners of underpowered Amigas to play them too.In this instance and to illustrate what we mean, we'll use the example of two games recently covered in Amiga Format: Fears and Coala. Fears requires a 68020 and the AGA chipset. In other words, a bare A1200. It will run faster if extra memory is installed - even one megabyte of Fast RAM increases the frame rate. It will run faster still if an accelerator of some kind is fitted.
Combine the two and we're talking about a game which, although lower in resolution, can run every bit as fast as Doom on the PC - subjectively speaking, of course, it depends on the spec of both computers. The beauty of Fears, though, is that it'll trade-off graphic enhancements in order to keep a decent running speed no matter what's powering the game. Therefore, if you've just bought a Falcon, a Blizzard, or Apollo accelerator card, you can afford to have the texture maps switched on the largest screen size and still expect the game to run at a silky smooth frame rate.
Close on the same speed could be achieved on a standard A1200 if you switched off the textures and reduced the screen size. Admittedly, playing this way isn't as atmospheric, but if you take the smart option and choose to upgrade, the game will upgrade with you; inbuilt longevity if you like.
On the same vein, but a different capillary, there's the helicopter battle sim Coala. This is exciting for several reasons. The main one being the potential and example it offers to games taking place in a 3D accelerated environment. It's not perfect by any means. But it has its own internal dynamics and offers a subliminal 'virtual' cockpit which helps immensely in the credibility stakes. It also offers many features that anyone in possession of a 68020 processor and above can benefit from and take advantage of. This time the 68020 doesn't necessarily mean that you have to own an A1200 either. Owners of A500+s and A600's can play Coala too; just add a 68020 accelerator card.
