Otaking's Nostlagia Gaming (Patreon)

Gather round, children, and let old man Johnson tell you a tale from my youth. A pointless slice-of-life tale, just like in your Japanese animes!

It was 1989, and I was walking down the high street in Skegness, UK, to check out the latest consoles and games. Nowadays, a triple A video game looks pretty much the same as one from a year or two ago, graphics quality-wise (for instance, Crysis was released in 2007 and it took ten years for PC graphics to get noticeably better than it), but back then it was a magical time where huge leaps forward in graphics and hardware were happening every couple of months.

Machines went from 4 bits to 8 bits to 16, CD then 32 and 64 bits, doubling in graphics power each time over only a few years. And so, if you were into games, it was worth checking all of the stores each month to see what games they were demo’ing and maybe queue up to have a go yourself. Skegness was a seaside tourist arcade town, so it was also worth checking the many arcades frequently to see what was new, and I still remember seeing a crowd gathered around a new cabinet with jaw dropping graphics.

Turns out it was Virtua Fighter 2, and we had jumped from this:
to thisin the space of one year. ONE YEAR, I tell you! Mad times.

https://youtu.be/myCRkZWxPQY
https://youtu.be/HIpfuY1n3CE
Anyway, back to 1989. I stopped into my local, now long dead Dixons computer store, with their aisles of NES’s, Master Systems and home computers (the Megadrive was still one year away, released in 1990 over here).

A grand time to be alive indeed, with Nintendo, Sega, Commodore, Spectrum and Atari all fighting to see who could destroy the others with graphics and impressive boasts! Many a schoolyard shit flinging contest was had over which machine was best.
So in I strolled, age 11, and there was a fancy new Nintendo NES on display, showing off Life Force. Consoles were mystical things to me at the time. I had a Commodore 64 and was used to playing via joystick and long tape loading times, so instant-loading cartridge games played on a “control pad” seemed exotic. I had a go on Life Force in the store and it was my first try with a joypad. I couldn’t control the ship at all and died in seconds. Nowadays I can only use a pad, and flail my hands like a lobotomised chimp with atrophied limbs and an ill-functioning mind if I touch an arcade stick.


But lo! What was this? Right next to the NES games, an Amiga home computer was on display.

This was the computer all the kids wanted but couldn’t afford. A 16-bit powerhouse of a machine made years before the Megadrive or SNES, with insane sound and music sampling abilities and 262 thousand colours on-screen from a palette of 16 million (the Megadrive, one year later in 1990, could only show 64 colours on-screen from a total palette of 1.5 thousand, and the SNES in 1992 had 256 on-screen colours from a palette of 32 thousand) Bear in mind that at the time, graphics looked like this:
The Amiga was showing off this game:
https://youtu.be/NiLDIBfpuSA?t=18
https://youtu.be/NiLDIBfpuSA?t=19I’m sure you can appreciate just how mind blowing this was.

Outside of the arcades, the best graphics really got at the time was Super Mario Brothers 2, and here was this monster with layers and layers of parallax scrolling grass and clouds.   

Unfortunately, it turned out that actually it was more of a tech demo than an actually fun game – ridiculously hard with buggy collision detection and front loaded with good looking stages to cover up some boring-looking later ones. The Amiga often had problems like this when it came to arcade ports – it was a joystick with one button so good luck playing Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Kombat.

However, because it was also an actual computer with a mouse and a keyboard, stuff like flight sims that required a keyboard full of keys were a perfect fit, along with arguably the greatest game ever made, Elite 2. Remember what they said about No Man’s Sky? Elite 2 did all that in 1993 and a lot more besides. I remember sitting in my (rich) friend’s room one evening trying to figure out how to play it! The manual was immense.

https://youtu.be/LqhP_e855C4

So, let us raise a toast to the Amiga. A machine with amazing graphics not really heard of outside of the UK. I’ll leave you with some of its’ greatest graphical feats.

Retrogaming & Computing Another World Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]
https://youtu.be/utrxk5_PeEY?t=9
YouTubeCentZloyAmiga Longplay Dune RE UP
https://youtu.be/W-9qckO5FM0?t=525
YouTubeRedSevenNineAgony | Amiga | Longplay | HD 720p 50FPS
https://youtu.be/O4RnxYPpMKI?t=298

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A great write-up by Otaking over on the Discord, and thought to share it here.

- Maki