~The Good Old Days

By Martin Keen


Computers are way better now than they were a few years ago, right?
Well apparently not, the recent upsurge in retrogaming suggests
otherwise. Heres what was happening in the last three Octobers; on
the Amiga in 1992, and the PC is 1993 and 1994.


~October 1992

The Amiga 600 took a 100 pound price cut down to 299 quid this month. 
However if you wanted the HD version that came with a gigantic 20Mb 
hard drive the package would still cost 499 pounds! It left industry
pundits guessing what Commodore was up to. Rumours were rife about why
Commodore were doing this - was it to introduce a new replacement to
the A2000? Commodore themselves were coming up with all sorts of 
reasons including "the new price seems more psychologically acceptable
to the customer because it seems nearer 200 pounds and more remote 
from 400 pounds". They were to give the real reason next month, the
all-new A1200 was to be released for the same price as the A600s 
making them obsolete.

The CD-ROM drive for the A500 was also released. The single speed slug
retailed for a disgraceful 350 quid, expensive for even then. Now 
Amiga owners everywhere could play games designed for the CD-TV. Yep,
both of them.

Zool and Premiere were the big name games of the month. Zool, the 
story of the ninja from the Nth dimension was a (very fast) platform 
game set out to beat Sonic on the Megadrive. It sold very well indeed
but the only fault was the shameless product placement of Chubba Chup
loppypops which kept popping up everywhere.

Premiere set new standards in platform game cartoon graphics. Based 
on a number of film sets you could go in front and behind the scenes 
in a hunt for six missing film roles which were stolen in the superb
cartoon intro. This game will always hold a special place in my heart
because I had a solution to one of Premiere's puzzles published in
Amiga Format along with my name. Fame at last!


~October 1993

Computer Manufacturer Vanilla tried to get the PC competing with the
Amiga by giving it an Amiga style price point. For just 400 pound you
could get a 386DX bundle - designed to directly compete with the
similarly priced Cartoon Classics which contained an A500. This all
sounded pretty good until Vanilla mention the PC does not come with
a hard disk. The reason for this glaring obmission is, they say, 
because Amiga HDs come as an extra so they do here too. What someone
obviously forgot to tell Vanilla is most games on the PC simply don't
work without a hard drive to install them on.

The game charts were dominated by LucasArts with their games occupying
the top three slots. Day Of The Tentacle sat on top, followed by 
X-Wing and Imperial Pursuit. Of course this was in the days before
Sim City 2000 which is now suspicously always at number one in the PC
floppy chart.

Gamewise October proved to be a very poor month. The only highlights
were Electronic Arts NHL Hockey although because it was an official
licence it couldn't include all those fights that make ice hockey 
worth watching, and Lands Of Lore (just about). Nuff said.


~October 1994

Problems started to crop up with the short lived utility DoubleSpace 
that came with MS-DOS 6. A whole host of games either crashed or 
refused to install at all - Tie Fighter being one. Microsoft were 
later to bring out an advanced version of DoubleSpace but then had to
remove it after being sued by Stac Electronics who claimed it ripped
off part of their Stacker code.

Sigma Designs did its best to revamp its MPEG player ReelMagic which 
was suffering from poor sales and even poorer software support. So
what did it do to make it more appealing to potential customers? Cut
the price in half? Add a number of top quality MPEG titles? Throw in
a few new useful features to make the card a joy to use? Nope, Sigma
took the drastic step of renaming the ReelMagic card to REALMagic!

The 10th October 1994 became 'Doomsday' which saw the release of the
disappointing Doom II which turned out to be nothing more than a few
new level designs with the difficulty level cranked up to almost
impossible.

Game highlight of the month was PGA Tour Golf 486. Sporting SVGA 
graphics that beat even Links this remains the best golf game to date.
Play against or as up to 9 real PGA professionals who have all been
digitised swinging, putting, and throwing down their clubs in anger
when they mishit a shot. Only PGA Golf '96 stands any chance of 
beating this one.


Watch out for The Good Old Days next month when (surprise, surprise) 
we take a look at past Novembers.
