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The ST Format Challenge

H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
So while doing the review above I was thinking of platform games and realised I hadn't seen Rick Dangerous yet but I had a sneaking suspicion I should have. It turns out that it was reviewed in Amiga Format issue 2 but not ST Format issue 2 (or any other issue for that matter). It appeared in The One in June, Games Machine in September and at some point also in CVG, so it really should have appeared in ST Format, especially when they're reviewing the likes of Verminator. True, Rick Dangerous doesn't look that pretty in stills, and it's somewhat traditional, but it has a real charm and was a wonderful (if really fucking difficult) platformer. I'll get on that.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Rick Dangerous

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ST Format Review
There isn't one. Bastards.

My Review

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For this review I'm running Steem with a 1MB STFM on TOS 1.0, using Automation disk 120.

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I'll begin the review with a little story in images, as I think that best tells the tale of this game.

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If you don't already know, Rick Dangerous is fucking hard. Like bastard hard. Dark Souls hard. I did get further than those screenshots by the way but it was funnier that way. Its flip-screen nature means that you don't always know what you're leaping into, which means that its levels become a test of memory as much as reflexes and skill. The game itself is simple enough, in that you wander around like Indiana Jones, in what appears to be an ancient tomb. Enemies tend to patrol fixed paths and you use that knowledge to kill them either with a bullet or some dynamite. The trick is not to waste too much of either, and to make sure you use the correct resource in each case.

The smaller sprite compared to Verminator allows a better connection with the flow of the level, though the sprites still manage to be nicely detailed. Rick moves at quite a decent pace through the levels, which helps to disguise the limited frames of animation. This game is not exactly a technical achievement, instead it's more a refinement of existing formulae but one that's done really well. Perhaps on that basis it was too boring to be reviewed in ST Format but it became something of a cult hit, and thankfully they rectified their mistake by giving Rick Dangerous 2 86% in issue 15, and yes I would quite like to cover that too (though it's up against stiff competition that month with Cadaver, Leisure Suit Larry 3 and Operation Stealth).

Sound consists of awful chip music mostly, crappy chip noises for jumping, that kind of thing, but there's a nice scream sample when you die. For the most part though sound doesn't matter too much in this game.

Overall this may not be the most technically exciting game, nor the most glamorous, but it does what it needs to do and does it well. It's a cracking little game and for that reason I award it the Hari Seldon Gold.

hari-Seldon-Gold.png
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
So a few posts back we were discussing Kick Off and Dino Dini buggering off to Virgin to make the brilliant Goal while Anco returned to making shit (their previous games being universally terrible including shit strip poker games). I was reading a PC Zone from 2000 this morning and the review for Player Manager 2000 mentioned that the author had spoken to someone at Anco asking why the previous version would crash when people watched the match in 3D and the chap from Anco said they didn't expect anyone to use it. Extraordinary, and I think that reflects the nature of the company. They rode their good fortune in having Dino Dini make the amazing kick off but they never really became a quality outfit, content instead to revel in shitness. Just thought I'd share that.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member

Just going back to Rick Dangerous for a moment - how shit is that box art? It's like someone drew that who had never seen the god damn game. The loading screen was far more in keeping with the game's tone.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (Action game)

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ST Format Review

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My Review
In some ways it's appropriate to go from Rick Dangerous to the man who inspired him (that the first level sees the player running from a rolling boulder is no coincidence). Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the action game of the movie, with an adventure game to follow. The adventure is of course much-loved as one of Lucasarts greats, while this action game is a little closer to the typical movie tie-ins of the era, a platformer mostly. It looks like this isn't the one I had as a kid as I remember that one having a mine-cart section among other things (click here if you want to see it in all its shite glory, where this is more or less a straight platformer. ST Format make the comparison with Navy Moves but talk themselves out of it, but in truth that's probably about right.

For this review I've used the usual STFM with TOS 1.0 and 1MB of RAM running in Steem, and I've used an Automation disk (menu 124 in this case). The menu is nicely presented, with an animated disk sliding into the ST's drive when you select your game.


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The game goes straight into a Lucasfilm logo with a sound-chip version beeping the theme tune (doing a far better job than the later adventure game which suffers from the same problems as the Zak McKracken port in that it seems to have been ported straight from the C64 in sharp contrast to Monkey Island when that came along). Eventually we get the Indy logo and he cracks his whip to switch between credits, high score and an image which might have been captured from the movie. Press fire to start.


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So we arrive at the first level and the sprite is pretty large, while the status bar takes about the bottom third of the screen, leaving nowhere near enough room to see what's going on. I'm on a ledge and it looks like I'll be taking a leap of faith. Not a great start. The framerate is actually pretty smooth, though the jumping is poor, suffering in from some similar problems to Verminator in that once in the air you don't really have much control (and yes I know that's not the most realistic thing to ask for but it does make for better gameplay and makes it easier to jump variable distances). Controls are left and right to walk, down to crouch and up to jump (which is surprisingly common in these older games where now we expect a separate button to jump) while fire takes care of punching (and later whipping).


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Indy loses energy from some quite short drops which really makes playing him quite a chore, especially when he's so bad at grabbing ropes. Then there's his whip, one of his trademark items. Even the crappy old Temple Of Doom game understood this and allowed you to make regular use of it. Here you get to use it 5 times, then you have to wait for a power up. Why restrict a fun mechanic like the whip? Admittedly it doesn't seem to offer much over the other move, the punch.


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All in all, this is a lazy cashgrab and as the developers don't seem to have put much effort into make it, I don't feel compelled to make a huge effort playing it. Instead, here's a video of someone eles playing it. In case you wondered, no I don't recommend this game.

 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Blood Money

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ST Format Review

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My Review
So, my final game for issue 2 - Blood Money. I couldn't find an Automation menu for this one so had to use a Superior cracked version instead. This is all running on my trusty Steem 1MB STE. Two other versions didn't work - it seems to be a hard game to get running.

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The game begins with some fancy sampled sounds as it flips through some screens before reacing a menu to choose music, 1/2 player, etc while playing some decent chip music.


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The game starts - and well it's a bit of a yawn. Animation is reasonably smooth though the scrolling is achingly slow, lots of things move around the screen and you do what you can to avoid them (I picked the helicopter) and shoot back at some of them - I'm picking up some Defender vibes from some of what's going on. The trouble is it's all a bit so-what, and the action doesn't feel very connected. You fire bullets and things take a few bullets to explode but it never really feels like anything is connecting, there's no feeling of kinetic energy - a product both of the lack of visual response and the lack of any audio register of a hit.


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In a way this is a game that carries some of the hallmarks of a psygnosis game in that it's well-presented but seems to lack substance. That DMA design would later go on to create Lemmings and GTA is a bit of a surprise when you see how poor this game is, but I guess everyone starts somewhere and perhaps they needed to learn their craft with something less ambitious first.

In the end, this game isn't interesting enough for me to put the effort into a full review as honestly I'd struggle to find enough interesting to say to justify it. It may well get more interesting later but I've got a lot of ST games to get through and maybe I burned myself out a bit on Issue 2!

Onwards, issue 3 awaits!
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Got Blood Money for 50p when I signed up for the Home Computer Club - remember that?

Also, where are you getting your Automation disks from? Usual Google search or some other way?

I grabbed the TOSEC collection from archive.org - it has everything.


I don’t remember home computer club but maybe it wasn’t a thing in the UK. Tbh I wasn’t terribly well connected when I was young so I’d probably not have known about it either way.

A bonus for any Amiga users here:

 
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Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
There used to be a leaflet in nearly every games mag. You chose 3 games at a dirt cheap price as long as you agreed to buy one full price game every 2 months kinda thing. No worries if you don’t remember.

Thanks for links, I’ll check them out. Oh and I’m in UK too FWIW :)
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Ah seeing the leaflet is jogging some vague memories - I think I avoided stuff like that because my income was never high enough to commit to a spend I might not be able to match. I did however pick up games cheaper via mail order as I had sussed fairly early on that they were a lot cheaper than the shops (like a £30 game would be £18 in most of the mail order ads in the mag).

Re psygnosis - yeah they were very style-over-substance. It's mad to think that DMA went from Blood Money (utter shite) to Lemmings and GTA really - Lemmings was such an un-psygnosis game in that while the art direction was exemplary it wasn't in keeping with their usual style, or was it technically that impressive. I fucking adore lemmings though, even to this day it's an absolutely amazing game that holds up brilliantly. Shame the sequels were universally shit though.
 

Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
Seeing (and hearing) Blood Money on the Amiga was what made me abandon the good ship Atari ST...

Boo hiss.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Seeing (and hearing) Blood Money on the Amiga was what made me abandon the good ship Atari ST...

Boo hiss.



Yeah I can see quite a big difference there. Tbh still a shallow game but the improvements in audio make a huge difference, it's like a different game. I will say that later ST games narrowed the gap I think, as developers figured out new techniques.
 
That DMA design would later go on to create Lemmings and GTA is a bit of a surprise when you see how poor this game is, but I guess everyone starts somewhere and perhaps they needed to learn their craft with something less ambitious first.
It's even more crazy if you have played "Menace" a year before, which was utter shite apart from the David Whittaker music and some of the colourful levels, imo.

I have to say that me as an Amiga guy really have a warm spot for the ST in my heart.

Most of the games I was interested in back then played as good or even better on the ST and the machine itself looked quite better (apart from the Amiga 1000, which was beautiful) designed.

The ST was simply not made for scrolling action games with lots of objects.
But if you code and design a game with its strengths in mind, you can have a beautiful outcome.

(I code 68K asm on the Amiga as a hobby, so I know a bit about that architecture... ;) )
 
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H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
It's even more crazy if you have played "Menace" a year before, which was utter shite apart from the David Whittaker music and some of the colourful levels, imo.

I have to say that me as an Amiga guy really have a warm spot for the ST in my heart.

Most of the games I was interested in back then played as good or even better on the ST and the machine itself looked quite better (apart from the Amiga 1000, which was beautiful) designed.

The ST was simply not made for scrolling action games with lots of objects.
But if you code and design a game with its strengths in mind, you can have a beautiful outcome.

(I code 68K asm on the Amiga as a hobby, so I know a bit about that architecture... ;) )

I have a feeling the ability to display 32 colours vs the ST's 16 made quite a difference in the case of Blood Money (and yes you could palette swap as you moved down the page but that came with a considerable performance cost). Looking at the video the colours were a lot better on the Amiga - the coins for instance looked a lot better on the Amiga than the ST The audio side could totally be done on an STFM, but at that time devs weren't really pushing that, where later releases would.

The STE obviously improved the scrolling and sprites situation a fair bit by adding hardware scrolling and a blitter. In some ways the ST was closer to the old 8-bit machines than I cared to admit, certainly outside of the CPU and shedload of RAM. Those extra chips really helped the Amiga.

I will just say that the STFM could do smooth scrolling - I was 12 and managed it with STOS - but you have to manage sprite size and count properly and have a decent tiling system for your backdrop (my first ever game in GFA basic made the platforms out of sprites which was retarded - it was so fucking slow - no idea why I remember that). I picked up an A600 in 95 I think after a RAM upgrade soldering incident killed my ST so I got to sample the latter end of the Amiga's life - it was a decent little machine, though I don't think I'd have learned as much about code had I had one.
 
I have a feeling the ability to display 32 colours vs the ST's 16 made quite a difference in the case of Blood Money (and yes you could palette swap as you moved down the page but that came with a considerable performance cost). Looking at the video the colours were a lot better on the Amiga - the coins for instance looked a lot better on the Amiga than the ST The audio side could totally be done on an STFM, but at that time devs weren't really pushing that, where later releases would.
But wasn't the STFM just an ST with a built in (fl)loppy and a TV (m)odulator?

On the colours issue with Blood Money, I think the Amiga version runs with a 4 bitplane (16 colours) setup as well. It's just, with the much higher blitter power of the Amiga, they were able to bring this 16 colours on screen, while on the ST my guess is they are blitting only 2 or 3 bitplanes, which results in those less colours for moving objects, while the background themselves have a similar graphical fidelity.

The STE obviously improved the scrolling and sprites situation a fair bit by adding hardware scrolling and a blitter. In some ways the ST was closer to the old 8-bit machines than I cared to admit, certainly outside of the CPU and shedload of RAM. Those extra chips really helped the Amiga.
Yep, the ST was for that reason very popular among the british coders who used to work on the Spectrum and to a less extend on the CPC.
Similar graphics architecture with similar solutions like preshifting.

I will just say that the STFM could do smooth scrolling - I was 12 and managed it with STOS - but you have to manage sprite size and count properly and have a decent tiling system for your backdrop (my first ever game in GFA basic made the platforms out of sprites which was retarded - it was so fucking slow - no idea why I remember that).
No idea about STOS.
I have studied the ST bitplane setup a bit, and it's very rigid compared to the Amiga. You need a lot of tricks to get a smooth horizontal scrolling going, since you cannot make the screen bigger than what is shown, so you need to mask the edges.

But anyway, there are some games showing nice horizontal and vertical scrolling, like Return to Genesis or Megablast.
 

Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
3D games were always that little bit faster on the ST than the Amiga. At least that was one thing it had over the Amiga.

But of course we all know the story - the chips in the Amiga were intended for the ST at one point - who knows how it would have played out if that happened.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Stiflers Mom Stiflers Mom so the STFM is indeed the base model, where the STE came in with a blitter, hardware scrolling, chips for sound samples (can't remember precise details) and 16 colours from a 4096 palette vs the 16 from 512 of the STFM (frankly they should have bumped this to 32/64 if they wanted to compete with the Amiga - it was far to incremental to ever get any take-up). The Amiga could do 32 colours on screen with earlier versions and 64 with later (non-AGA) ones. Obviously HAM was a thing too but that wasn't really much use in games.

I fiddled with the CPC 464 as a kid but I was 8 so wasn't doing the advanced stuff, indeed even on the ST I never pushed Assembler (I had a bit of a play with it but tbh it was a bit hardcore for me). STOS was a BASIC variant built for gaming with some really nice addons available that allowed one to get reasonably close to the metal - a lot of PD/Shareware stuff was made in STOS. Tbh I never really dug into the deep technical aspects but whatever I was doing was getting a reasonably solid scroll out of it.

Nitty_Grimes Nitty_Grimes That'll be the ST's 8MHz vs the Amiga's 7MHz for the 68000 chip - the co-processors weren't much help for the Amiga in the world of 3D.
 
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Stiflers Mom Stiflers Mom so the STFM is indeed the base model, where the STE came in with a blitter, hardware scrolling, chips for sound samples (can't remember precise details) and 16 colours from a 4096 palette vs the 16 from 512 of the STFM (frankly they should have bumped this to 32/64 if they wanted to compete with the Amiga - it was far to incremental to ever get any take-up).
The one thing that the STE has over the OCS Amiga is that it has unified RAM space, where as the Amiga has that stupid chip and fast RAM divide.

The Amiga could do 32 colours on screen with earlier versions and 64 with later (non-AGA) ones. Obviously HAM was a thing too but that wasn't really much use in games.
Only the very first Amiga 1000s were not able to do EHB mode with 64 colours. Later revisions of the Denise chip had that built in already.
That mode isn't so useful though. It's not a true 64 colours mode. Colours 32 to 64 are just darker versions of the first 32 colours.
Also, the Amiga DMA has less time for blitter access the more bitplanes/colours you use, which results in less objects.

Usually this is not a good trade off.
The Amiga DMA sequencer is balanced to be using 4 bitplanes / 16 colours to function perfectly.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
The one thing that the STE has over the OCS Amiga is that it has unified RAM space, where as the Amiga has that stupid chip and fast RAM divide.


Only the very first Amiga 1000s were not able to do EHB mode with 64 colours. Later revisions of the Denise chip had that built in already.
That mode isn't so useful though. It's not a true 64 colours mode. Colours 32 to 64 are just darker versions of the first 32 colours.
Also, the Amiga DMA has less time for blitter access the more bitplanes/colours you use, which results in less objects.

Usually this is not a good trade off.
The Amiga DMA sequencer is balanced to be using 4 bitplanes / 16 colours to function perfectly.

Interesting. I think PCs back in the day had that issue with RAM too, unless I'm mistaken. Re the EHB mode I wasn't sure of the timeline, but the 64 colours are useful. Consider that for most cases you have a certain number of basic colours you'll want, and likely some variants for shadow or gradient. The problem with 16 colours is that you either have to have a limited number of hues or a really limited number of variants - now obviously you can get around some of this with stippling but it's still a bit of a headache, and I would wager that even 32 colours would be a significant improvement, with the extra 32 offering some nice shading options - is the hit to the blitter that bad? I'm pretty sure a lot of Amiga games use the enhanced palette - Dragon's Lair for instance looks so much better on the Amiga.
 
is the hit to the blitter that bad?
This is the Amiga DMA per scanline in a nutshell:

dmaTimingZoom.png


For every bitplane you add you have less time for the blitter DMA to work.
With 6 bitplanes activated the amount of slots you get for the blitter to work with is much less than with 4 accumulated over all lines of the screen.

That's the reason why EHB was usually only used for either games with not a lot of objects, or just static game art (like the images shown in between levels in Agony).

In dual playfield mode, which uses 6 bitplanes, but split into 3/3, you usually only blit 3 bitplanes instead of 6, so the amount of stuff the blitter needs to work is halved, which makes this work a bit better.

Shadow of the Beast, Agony and Lionheart do this, for instance.
 
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H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Yep! I cut my teeth on AMOS when I learned to program, then moved onto Blitz Basic. I learned Java next, then C.

Assembler? Hell no! Scares the living daylights out of me.

I had a brief play with AMOS when I got my Amiga but tbh I think that came along at a time when I was perhaps a little too focused on other matters (girls) - AMOS was the Amiga equivalent of STOS (though they'd moved things along a bit - AMOS was quite considerably more advanced than STOS). Blitz I think I played with briefly and that was fun. Java is a good crack, it forms a large part of my day job but I never really got into C. I probably should have a poke around it at some point but I've got a lot on my dev plate these days! Assembler though.. it's an absolute beast. Not so much the language itself, in that the limited range of things you can do makes it relatively simple in some ways, but any task requires a shitload of code (all of this is from my limited understanding largely from the Bitmap Brothers assembler tutorials in ST Format). In hindsight I probably should have put more effort into it as I might have become a better coder, but it is what it is.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
ST Format Issue 3 - Download
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The World in September 1989
In the UK our ambulance crews went on strike. Meanwhile, the IRA were bombing and murdering as was their way. Nigel Lawson resigned as chancellor, paving the way for John Major to replace him (and of course he would eventually become PM). The recession gathered pace in the meantime, it was expected to be the worst in a decade.

In America George Bush (Sr) proposed to spend $7.9bn on the War On Drugs in his first televised speech - later in the month 21 tons of cocaine and $12m in cash was seized in Los Angeles. Former president Reagan had fluid removed from his brain. Hurrican Hugo hit South Carolina.

South Africa held the last election before leaving apartheid, confirming FW De Klerk's leadership. In Asia Nintendo celebrated their 100th anniversary, and Vietnam pulled its last troops from Cambodia.

On TV Peter Sissons took over as presenter of Question Time, and there were a number of really important shows that made their debuts that month. We had Challenge Anneka which would run for 6 years and become something of an institution in the UK, while Bodger and Badger would become a kids TV classic, and finally, one of the greatest comedy series in the world would have its fourth series - Blackadder Goess Forth. It finished with something you wouldn't expect of a comedy show, a proper tear-jerker, as characters we've come to know, love and despise, go over the top of the trenches to certain death.



The film charts see Lethal Weapon 2 on top, and a few decent films from the previous month remain in the charts, but there's not much fresh quality there.

The album chart features Eurythmics at #1 with their last album for 10 years. While it did get to number one, the singles didn't perform brilliantly suggesting perhaps it wasn't a classic. The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith made up the rest of the top 3 while the rest of the charts offered little. Max fucking Bygraves at 12 - that tells you something about the British public's taste.

The singles chart were led by Black Box with Ride On Time at #1, but we also had Richard Marx with the classic power ballad Right Here Waiting and Tears For Fears with the brilliant Sowing The Seeds Of Love. We also had Starlight with Numero Uno which was very much of it's time but I guarantee it would fill a dance floor now (if we were allowed to go near them anymore). House Music could also be found at #11 with The Beatmasters and Betty Boo. There are some good songs coming up through the charts with the wonderful Pump Up The Jam from Technotronic, Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode, If Only I Could by Sydney Youngblood and Cherish from Madonna (back when she was awesome), while Aerosmith were steadily climbing with Love In An Elevator (songs took a bit longer to work their way up the charts back then).





The Magazine
Issue 3's theme is violence. At the time the press was in a bit of a moral panic about violent video games, so ST format gave it a bit of coverage. The disk featured Xenon 2 in which you blew up a bunch of aliens so it's likely they didn't give any actual fucks about violence.

The news section discusses the new STs appearing at the PC show, with the STE featuring an upgraded 4096 colour palette (vs the STFM's 512 - though still only 16 on screen at once), a stereo 8-bit DMA sound chip to improve on the STFM's horrible chip warbles, horizontal and vertical hardware scrolling, a blitter chip and additional game controller ports (which would be on the side of the machine rather than under it - the underside placement meant that one had a hard time getting the plugs into and out of the ports while the idiotic decision to solder them directly to the motherboard meant they were prone to just not working after a while).

More exciting in some ways was the TT, which featured the super-powerful 68030 chip, clocked at 16MHz and packing 2MB of RAM and a 30MB hard drive. The TT had better graphics modes, able to display 256 colours at 320x480 vs the ST's 16 colours at 320x200, or 640x480 at 16 colours, plus a 1280x960 monochrome option. The STE was intended to be the Amiga-buster while the TT was aimed at business users, but the STE didn't really have fancy enough graphics modes to threaten the Amiga. The Lynx was expected to hit shops for Christmas.

Microtext offered ST users a gadget to store teletext pages on their Atari STs - surely the most retro thing I've said in this entire thread.

We have a review for GFA Raytrace - the ST had raytracing before it was fashionable, though I remember having to leave my machine on overnight to process a single 320x200 image (I recall using something that came with I think issue 8 as a freebie). We also have a review for the Hypercache accelerator board, allowing you to clock your ST to 16MHz by replacing your old 8MHz 68000 with a new fancy 16MHz one. This involves soldering. To be fair, £150 for that probably isn't bad.

The violence article amusingly predicts the FPS, musing that Operation Wolf is the perfect violent game as "you can see your enemy as you blast him.. to make this type of game better, the display would have to simulate the view taken fromt he eyes of the hero. Then as the gun was drawn level to fire, you could get a full-screen view of the victim's face. In a perfect world you'd see it crincle with pain and the eyes bulge with fear just before being treated to a liberal spurting of blood." I'd say the author has some issues.


Previews
Ocean had Untouchables and Chase HQ awaiting release, while Hewson had Onslaught, Steel and 5th gear. Of those only Chase HQ seems terribly interesting.

Reviews
Games reviewed this month:
Eye Of Horus (Weird Egyptian-themed shooter - Logotron - £24.95 - 84%)
Slayer (Shooter - Hewson - £19.95 - 54%)
Games Summer Edition (late Olympics game - US Gold - 82%)
Passing Shot (Tennis - Mirrorsoft - £19.95 - 71%)
Conflict Europe (Strategy - Mirrorsoft - £24.99 - 84%)
Strider (Sidescrolling platform shooter - US Gold - £19.99 - 92% Format Gold)
Rocket Ranger (Cinemaware weirdness - Cinemaware - £24.95 - 73%)
Xenon 2 (Bitmap Brothers Shooter - Mirrorsoft - £24.99 - 90% Format Gold)
Castle Warrior (very weird 3rd-person game - Delphine/Palace - £19.99 - 43%)
New Zealand Story (Something.. - Ocean - £19.99 - 78%)

Also-rans: Gemini Wing, California Games, Paperboy.

So Castle Warrior looks quite odd - I couldn't find an Atari ST video but there's an Amiga one...



The 3D effect is quite odd but you can see what they're going for. While it only got 43% I'd quite like to have a look at it - it's quite a weak month overall but I'll likely have a look at Summer Games and Xenon 2, possibly Passing Shot too. The good news is that while issue 4 is a bit bare, 5 and 6 see things start to heat up again.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Castle Warrior

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ST Format Review

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My Review
So for this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM. This is from Automation Menu 124, which also features issue 2's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.


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Castle Warrior opens with a well-drawn loading screen making effective use of the limited ST palette, overlaid with a fairly average chip tune. The thing that stands out to me is the copyright Delphine Software. For those who don't know, Delphine would go on to create Future Wars (their first big hit), Operation Stealth, Cruise For A Corpse, Another World and Flashback, so they have quite a pedigree, but this was their first game. In many ways it exhibits the strangeness common in French games back in those less homogenised days.


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Gameplay consists of slowly walking into the screen in a faux-3d effect which renders better than I expected, in that it's pretty similar to the Amiga version. Obviously it is flawed, but it's still cool in a strangely uncanny-valley kind of way. That said, visuals are about the only thing this game has going for it. ST Format were wise to only give it 43% as the gameplay is excerable, with it mostly consisting of moving lanes to avoid objects coming towards you and occasional encounters with large enemies where you must time the swing of your sword to bounce the balls back to kill your opponent. The poor control response makes this quite tricky.

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Overall this is more a historical curio than an interesting game, made interesting by what Delphine would go on to do rather than by anything in the game itself.
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Summer Games

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ST Format Review

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My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM. This is from Automation Menu 148 which consists of two disks (A and B). The menu has some fancy music, and a typical scrolling text which is weirdly polite and helpful.


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The game itself is somewhat delayed, having missed the Seoul Olympics by about 15 months. We begin with a selection of somewhat racially-stereotyped images of Korea (though some are more Japanese or Chinese frankly) before being treated to a vector 3D flight down to the track from an overhead shot - this took me by surprise. We then arrive at a menu with icons representing the sporting events available to us. An eclectic mix of archery, 2 gymnastics events, cycling, diving, pole vault and hurdles.


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I decided to kick off with a bit of archery. I used to be quite good as a kid, let's see if the skills transfer (they won't). I actually did OK, hitting the bullseye a couple of times. Controls are fairly standard with you choosing how much power then moving the traditional wobbly cursor to hit the target. The other events were reasonably solid, offering stronger controls than Summer Olympiad for instance. Graphics are well-drawn but the colour palette feels a bit 8-bit. That said, it's a solid little olympics game and I guess in 2020 it matters a little less that it's late (indeed it fits with how Japan is having its real olympics late).


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I notice in the review they discuss late versions of this and California Games from the same company - I wonder if perhaps they had issues working with the Atari ST. Who knows. Either way it's a solid enough game if you like this kind of thing, though for me the best olympics game is probably still Winter Olympiad. Note that I wasn't able to try everything as I had some issues with the crack.


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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Xenon 2

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ST Format Review

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My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM. This is from Automation Menu 133. The menu has some pretty decent music and a nice piece of art along with the traditional scrolly message.


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Damn this game makes an entrance. Absolute banger of a tune, not the most exciting screens but who cares when the music is that good? Before I start I just want to say that getting good screenshots was an absolute bastard of a job, because of how the emulator works. I have to use the mouse to click a screenshot button, which is quite tricky when I'm trying to avoid being fried.


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So we get to the image above and we switch back to chip music. Boooooooo! Just to get it out of the way, I had a look at the Amiga version on Youtube and the music quality is VASTLY better and carries on into the game - it seems a couple of the instruments get dropped when there's a sound effect like shooting or an explosion. Let's see how the ST handles it. Chip music and chip sound effects - but actually the sound effects are well thought-out and in a way they mesh better with the music than the Amiga version, despite being less spectacular.


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Graphically it looks a little less smooth than the Amiga, but overall it's still very very good, and the most important thing is that the controls are responsive. After Blood Money this really is an absolute pleasure to play. Enemies are inventive and well-drawn (it's that Bitmap style - yes I know The Assembly Line did the code but it's an art style that would become the Bitmaps own, with the trademark chrome look for the text and the highly-shaded greys and oranges creating a unique palette that belongs just to them). Backgrounds are beautiful with worms going into and out of tubes which pulse with their contents, and clue the player in on where the worm will re-appear. Enemies are traditional shoot-em-up fare mostly, following patterns aimed at trapping the player in an awkward spot - no AI here, just patterns. Bosses are spectacular, but you already know that.


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The game throws an impressive number of sprites around the screen, eschewing the common tactic of limiting the number of bullets the player can shoot at once and still throwing a decent number of aliens plus bullets thrown in from stationary objects on the side. It's also worth considering those worms, which as far as I can tell are made up of many small sprites (which makes them an absolute pain in the ass to take down as the collision detection with the bullets can be a bit ropey sometimes and there are so many segments to take down when even one can do significant damage on contact). At points the game rather puts you in a corner where you have no choice but to take damage, but that's 80s difficulty for you.


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Power-ups are mostly well-thought-out - the best of the early ones is the one allowing simultaneous fire to the front and rear, allowing you to deal better with enemies that swoop in a wide circle down to the bottom of the screen before coming back up to attack. Visually they're nice and clear, and it's a nice touch that you have to shoot the cannisters open to get them. There is of course the traditional item shop, a staple of 16-bit gaming. One modern irritant is that there's no indication of what each of the items in the shop actually is, or does, so you have to look at the manual (which I've linked below). That's just a product of its time though as I don't think anyone else was doing it either.


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Xenon 2 is about as good as an ST version could be at this point in the ST's life. Its importance however is in some ways not directly tied to the quality of the game, which is after all good but not particularly groundbreaking in many ways. What it did was set a standard of presentation that ST gamers would come to expect. It also made people sit up and realise that samples on the ST could be really damn good.



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In some ways it marks the transition from the old 8-bit values to a new 16-bit mindset, for better or worse. From here on we'd see fewer oddities like Virus, Sentinel, Captain Blood, Archipelagos, etc. We'd get Tower Of Babel soon but there was definitely a shift to a more professional output, in presentation at least, at a cost of some lost experimentation. Granted, we still had a wider and more varied gaming landscape by far than we have today, but we would never again see the magic of the 8-bit era. With all that said, I think this is probably the best brainless fun so far other than Kick-Off


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Finally, as is compulsory, we finish with demonstration that, at the age of 40, I am still not a grown-up.


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Resources
Manual: https://www.starehry.eu/download/action/docs/Xenon.2-Manual.pdf
 
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Havoc2049

Member
Kudos to your Xenon 2 high score page. :messenger_grinning_smiling:

I love the intro tune on Xenon 2.


Xenon 2 was good, but for some reason I never loved the majority of action game shooters and platformers from the 16-bit computer era, with a few exceptions here and there. I always preferred the computer specific genres such and simulations, strategy games, RPGs and adventure games.

The Atari Jaguar has a bunch of great Atari ST ports, with upgrades in the scrolling, frame rates and sfx/music departments. They are all fully licensed physical releases. Xenon 2 is one of them, along with Speedball 2, Defender of the Crown and others.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Kudos to your Xenon 2 high score page. :messenger_grinning_smiling:

I love the intro tune on Xenon 2.


Xenon 2 was good, but for some reason I never loved the majority of action game shooters and platformers from the 16-bit computer era, with a few exceptions here and there. I always preferred the computer specific genres such and simulations, strategy games, RPGs and adventure games.

The Atari Jaguar has a bunch of great Atari ST ports, with upgrades in the scrolling, frame rates and sfx/music departments. They are all fully licensed physical releases. Xenon 2 is one of them, along with Speedball 2, Defender of the Crown and others.

I’ll need to dig into that - though porting ST games seems a waste of all that power.

in terms of gaming tastes I think the ST didn't really do action games terribly well, which is probably what skewed me towards a similar range - my most played games were probably Sim City, Powermonger, Damocles, Midwinter 2, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Operation Stealth, etc. There were a few action games, Mad Professor Mariarti made enough of an impact to be in my avatar, for instance. I never played Xenon 2, though I had Xenon 1 in the Power Pack that came with my ST.
 
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mancs

Member
Reviews

Leathernecks


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Well, it started badly with the disk complaining about an in-memory virus, which obviously I don't have on my emulator. So, I had to hunt down a non-broken version.

So, having got a working copy.. ooooh boy. So first up it seems the game is expecting 4 players, there's only 1 of me, so my chap on the left moves while the other 4 don't, and so the screen scrolls and they die. Good start. Sampled screams but the bitrate is so low as to be horrendous (considering what the likes of Gauntlet in the early days and Mega Lo Mania later on were able to achieve). The music is the usual plinky plonky rubbish, uninspired and likely to be forgotten in about 3 seconds. Animation and movement in general is jerky, with no visibility of where your bullets are going and often no idea what just killed you, and with the player only able to shoot upwards no way to shoot enemies who produce bullets that jerk along the screen in 16-pixel intervals (and thus can't be avoided).

Gameplay is sufficiently un-fun as to leave me throwing this one in the bin after about 10 minutes. And that was me doing my absolute best. Old games were sometimes shit, and this is a perfect example of that.


Virus
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Off to a bad start with another virus message - I suddenly realised I had TOS 2.06 on an STE on instead of an older one like 1.02 on an STFM. Let's see if that helps. Problem solved, and that's probably what caused my Leathernecks woes.

A couple of false starts as I crashed into the ground, I eventually got the controls reasonably under control. Left mouse button give me lift, right button fires a bullet and the mouse tilts my spaceship with thrust coming from the underside. It's a tricky beast to control.

Graphics aren't as smooth as the more powerful (and vastly more expensive) RISC 32-bit Acorn machines from which it was ported, but that's not the game's biggest problem. The controls are awful but beyond that there's not much to do. It feels like a tech demo. It looks pretty, no doubt, with the lovely 3d landscape with palm trees and houses on a little archipelago, the particle effects from your thrusters, but it feels like there's nothing to do and shooting anything when it's so hard to damn well control the god damn thing is just an impossibility. Thankfully, I never actually managed to find anything to shoot. Instead I just found myself hurtling around an empty wasteland, awaiting my inevitable crash.


So what next?
Issue 1 is a bust, but that's because it represents the early days when games developers were either lazily porting 8-bit games to the new 16-bit devices or just not understanding the new hardware. It's an awkward phase where the games just aren't that good. There were some classics, like Dungeon Master, Sentinel, Captain Blood, Bubble Bobble among others, but they were too early to feature. I'll come back for them later though.

Onward to issue 2!
probably my favourite gaming days tbh , dungeon master , bloodwych , defender the crown , the list goes on and on and I collected loads of them mags , good memories.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
probably my favourite gaming days tbh , dungeon master , bloodwych , defender the crown , the list goes on and on and I collected loads of them mags , good memories.
Dungeon Master was huge for me - just wandering through the hall of portraits takes me right back. That little machine was honestly an insane amount of fun.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
ST Format Issue 4 - Download


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[btw - just a little something about why I post news from the previous month.. the magazine is marked as November 1989 but it comes out in October, so I talk about October].

The World in October 1989
In the UK we had our first World Wrestling Federation event. Rover launched the 200 series, and England qualified for Italia 90 by drawing with Poland. The stock market fell dramatically fuelling fears of a recession, while the party formed from the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party renamed itself to the Liberal Democrats. They were irrelevant then, had a brief spell in coalition in the 2010s but then faded back to irrelevance. The Guildford Four, wrongly convicted of terrorist activity in 1975. Labour had a 10 point lead over the Tories, but with the previous election in 1987, they would have to wait until 1992 to have a crack at the Tories, and in reality they had peaked too soon. British rail announced YET ANOTHER delay to the Channel Tunnel.

In America the Dow Jones hit a record high of 2791.41 (at time of writing it's currently 26501.60). The Galileo Probe was sent on its journey to Jupiter (I love shit like that), and the Flag Protection Act came into effect, sparking protests. It was eventually struck down.

Elsewhere, Communism was in decline, with East Germany having to close its border with Czechoslovakia to prevent emigration among other things, with Hungary declaring its Third Republic, marking the end of Communism.

On TV Jeremy Paxman made his first appearance as presenter of Newsnight where he would gain a reputation for a combative style. Michael Palin began his career in travel TV by debuting his Around The World In 80 Days. ITV added a third weekly episode of Coronation Street, contributing to the over-saturation of soaps on British TV. Birds Of A Feather first appeared on BBC1 - it was billed as comedy but it was never funny. It would last for 11 years, and then return in 2014 for fuck's sake.

The film charts see Robin Williams being fucking brilliant in Dead Poets Society at #1. At #2 was the silly but kinda fun in a cheesy way K9, with Lethal Weapon 2 at #5, and The Fly 2 at #7 (I honestly didn't know there was a sequel).

The album chart sees a new entry from Kylie Minogue, the difficult second album which saw a continuation of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman formula with some absolute bangers. Tracy Chapman's Crossroads and Tina Turner's Foreign Affair follow with Gloria Estefan next, in a female-dominated top 4.

The singles chart has Jive Bunny at #1 but there is at least some decent stuff below with Black Box, Technotronic, Sydney Youngblood and Rebel MC. The big stand-out is of course Billy Joel with We Didn't Start The fire.




The Magazine
Issue 4 has quite an interesting cover, showing the mythical 4160 STE, along with a screen showing Interphase, a game they seemed curiously obsessed with but which to me was a tech demo in search of a game, a curio no doubt but of little real interest. The news is somewhat critical of Atari's poor effort at the PC show, where the TT and Stacy (ST laptop though at 13lb it's bloody heavy) were in hiding, with the STE also ignored, as Atari tried to flog a 286 PC. Atari hid them because they didn't think they'd sell. That lack of confidence in their product shows the lack of professionalism in Atari at this time.

We have a hands-on of the new STE, including damning verdicts from a number of game developers (back when developers spoke their minds with no PR handlers). Atari would later complain about this, but the feedback is fair and perhaps explains the lack of support for the STE's featureset, given it was such a minor upgrade from the STFM, with such muddled marketing.

The disk had a demo of Interphase, though a later issue would feature the full game, prompting a ban on full games being attached to magazines. We have an interesting feature on viruses, which worked a little differently in those days. These days viruses are written by criminals looking to make money, either by stealing data from you, or locking it cryptographically (eg CryptoLocker), or using your machine in a botnet. In the old days however, STs generally weren't connected, so viruses were transferred on disks, usually doing so by writing themselves to the boot sector so that when the disk was run they would remain in memory and write themselves to any unprotected disk that was later inserted. Some would even stay in memory after a reset. They were generally done for fun by hackers, rather than for profit, and in many cases would just do something mischievous like inverting the Y-axis of your mouse.

We have a feature on laser printers, but that's not very interesting as they were still pretty niche and VERY expensive (£1-2k in 1989 money... ouch). More interesting is a section on cracking, giving advice on how it's done using a demo game for the purpose. Remarkably brave, but then this is from the days when magazines included things like addresses of hardware registers. It was a different time, more techie and more dedicated to nerds learning how the box works. I miss those days.

Previews
Elvira got her tits out for Elvira Mistress of the dark, while Ubisoft were preparing Pro Tennis Tour, and we continued to wait for Damocles from the wonderful Paul Woakes (spoiler - it's one of my all-time favourites). There were a few other games which weren't terribly notable but the remaining standout is Tower Of Babel, which I've never played but remember having a huge buzz around it when I first got my ST on Christmas 1989.

There's an adventure game preview for some reason, covering Larry 3, Space Quest 3, Colonel's Bequest and Hero's Quest.

Reviews
Games reviewed this month:
Indiana Jones - The Graphic Adventure (SCUMM adventure - US Gold - £24.95 - 77%)
Interphase (Abstract 3D shooter - Mirrorsoft - £29.99 - 93% Format Gold)
Altered Beast (Beat Em Up - Activision - £19.95 - 82%)
Continental Circus (Racer - Virgin/Mastertronic - £19.99 - 83%)
Stunt Car Racer (Racer - Microstyle - £24.99 - 74%)
Ferrari Formula One (Racer - EA - £24.99 - 62%)
TV Sports Football (American Football - Mirrorsoft - £24.99 - 68%)
Rainbow Warrior (Greenpeace Propaganda - Microstyle - £24.95 - 47%)
Battletech (RPG - Infocom - £24.99 - 72%)
Space Quest 3 (Comedy Adventure - Sierra On-line - £29.99 - 83%)

Not as exciting a selection as last week - I think Stunt Car Racer will likely be my main review, and I'll have a look to see if the SCUMM system runs a little better in Indy than it did in Zak, but otherwise I think this is an issue to move on from as quickly as possible. I'm aware that Space Quest 3 might be of some interest but I feel that's one of less value for me to review given it's still available today from gog for instance. That said, again I might poke around to see if it's any fun, and if I feel I can get anything worthwhile out of it I'll put something together.
 

mancs

Member
Great to know some heads around , with great memories of them days , loved my st ;) and st format haha, never missed.


remember the game hacked floppy disks ,with four games on ,or more , techno music of the highest order , and bouncy hackers writing in multi colours , bigging up the code breakers, on game selection screen , great great pc days.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Great to know some heads around , with great memories of them days , loved my st ;) and st format haha, never missed.


remember the game hacked floppy disks ,with four games on ,or more , techno music of the highest order , and bouncy hackers writing in multi colours , bigging up the code breakers, on game selection screen , great great pc days.

Yeah I've been trying to get screenshots of the menu disks in as they're my main source of games - little did they know but the scene guys were vital to the preservation of ST software. Tbh weirdly at the time I didn't really know much about that, I got my ST just before my 10th birthday, so my games had to be bought. They were so expensive too. Still, when I got an Amiga later on after frying the ST in a RAM upgrade soldering disaster I started to learn about that stuff. I still remember an IT class where the teacher tried to tell us about warez dudes. Very odd chap.
 

SirTerry-T

Member
But wasn't the STFM just an ST with a built in (fl)loppy and a TV (m)odulator?

On the colours issue with Blood Money, I think the Amiga version runs with a 4 bitplane (16 colours) setup as well. It's just, with the much higher blitter power of the Amiga, they were able to bring this 16 colours on screen, while on the ST my guess is they are blitting only 2 or 3 bitplanes, which results in those less colours for moving objects, while the background themselves have a similar graphical fidelity.


Yep, the ST was for that reason very popular among the british coders who used to work on the Spectrum and to a less extend on the CPC.
Similar graphics architecture with similar solutions like preshifting.


No idea about STOS.
I have studied the ST bitplane setup a bit, and it's very rigid compared to the Amiga. You need a lot of tricks to get a smooth horizontal scrolling going, since you cannot make the screen bigger than what is shown, so you need to mask the edges.

But anyway, there are some games showing nice horizontal and vertical scrolling, like Return to Genesis or Megablast.
I was never a coder outside of simple basic stuff on the Speccy so a lot of the hardware/coder talk goes right over my head...still does and I've been a professional dev for over 25 years now!
I do remember the first time a coder friend of mine asked me to do some graphics for his Amiga project though.
Up until then I was a strictly Spectrum/ST guy so I knew my way around a 16 (or less) colour limit pretty well.
I remember sitting at his desk, Amiga mouse in hand, staring at that D Paint GUI and being LOST because I had an awe inspiring 32 COLOURS to play with.
Great days, great memories.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Gave the joystick a go, decided to use the trainer for shits and giggles and took some shots in Xenon 2.. the variety of enemies is impressive and the amount of stuff it flings around the screen is extraordinary. There is some slowdown when there's a lot going on but all in all it's impressive stuff.

The joystick itself is excellent, the auto fire is very handy and it feels robust. A bit small possibly but maybe my hands are just bigger than when I last had a joystick.

One of my little oddities is that I never really got the hang of having a stick on the left (or D-pad) and buttons on the right. This caused me no end of issues with the console controllers so joysticks were always better for me. Curiously, modern controllers like the. Xbox controller and the Switch Pro Controller pose no such issues.

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mancs

Member
Turrican :) double dragon, ninja warriors and bomb jack , the list goes on and on , mastered loads of games back then as a kid , played gauntlet once all day to get to level a hundred , the to n thing carried on lol. Great great times , loved classic Atari games also , centipede master lol.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Turrican :) double dragon, ninja warriors and bomb jack , the list goes on and on , mastered loads of games back then as a kid , played gauntlet once all day to get to level a hundred , the to n thing carried on lol. Great great times , loved classic Atari games also , centipede master lol.
I'm guessing you had the Power Pack (just guessing from Double Dragon, Bomb Jack and Gauntlet). Insane value really, and some cracking games in there. I never bought Turrican though I enjoyed the demo on ST Format 20 (I think it was 20 anyway..) - I was never particularly good at run and gun games though tbh.
 

mancs

Member
I'm guessing you had the Power Pack (just guessing from Double Dragon, Bomb Jack and Gauntlet). Insane value really, and some cracking games in there. I never bought Turrican though I enjoyed the demo on ST Format 20 (I think it was 20 anyway..) - I was never particularly good at run and gun games though tbh.
no way , haha , yep , sure did. ;)
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Btw I dug out Kick Off and dear god that's a different game with a proper joystick - my performance improved dramatically. It's extraordinary how much of a difference it makes. I might revisit some of my old reviews to see if any of them need modifying to account for using a stick instead of an XBox controller.
 
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Deleted member 740922

Unconfirmed Member
Btw I dug out Kick Off and dear god that's a different game with a proper joystick - my performance improved dramatically. It's extraordinary how much of a difference it makes. I might revisit some of my old reviews to see if any of them need modifying to account for using a stick instead of an XBox controller.

Always preferred KO / KO2 to Sensible Soccer by a mile 🙂
 

Ozzie666

Member
Atari ST and it's users probably had the lowest game sold to machine tie in ratio of any platform in the history of gaming. Seriously, did anyone buy games for this thing? or did everyone have Automation, Pompey P, D-Bug compilation disks? I was always team Amiga, it was a natural and expected progression from Commodore 64. But I used to pick up all the magazines to see the latest and greatest from Europe, including the ST mags, since most games came to Amiga too.

The ST in many ways, as people have said, was more similar to 8 bit machines and stuck somewhere between those machines and an Amiga.

Keep it up, this is great and nostalgic, a trip down memory lane for sure. The STE was a nice machine, pity it wasn't used more often.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
Always preferred KO / KO2 to Sensible Soccer by a mile 🙂

Tbh both had their place - I think KO was probably the best, though Dino Dini's spiritual sequel Goal was even better IMO. I tend to oscillate back and forth though on KO vs Sensi. I should probably do a proper back-to-back sometime on them.

Atari ST and it's users probably had the lowest game sold to machine tie in ratio of any platform in the history of gaming. Seriously, did anyone buy games for this thing? or did everyone have Automation, Pompey P, D-Bug compilation disks? I was always team Amiga, it was a natural and expected progression from Commodore 64. But I used to pick up all the magazines to see the latest and greatest from Europe, including the ST mags, since most games came to Amiga too.

The ST in many ways, as people have said, was more similar to 8 bit machines and stuck somewhere between those machines and an Amiga.

Keep it up, this is great and nostalgic, a trip down memory lane for sure. The STE was a nice machine, pity it wasn't used more often.

I think there was an issue in terms of numbers of games sold, but I'd say the bigger issue was Atari being a bit over-generous with its Power Pack. I mean just look at the content:

After Burner, Black Lamp, Bomb Jack, Bombuzal, Double Dragon, Eliminator, Nebulus, Out Run, Overlander, Pac-Mania, Predator, R-Type, Space Harrier, Star Goose!, Starglider, StarRay, Super Hang-on, Super Huey, Xenon.

Of those, admittedly Super Huey was an absolute turd, Predator was shite and Black Lamp was pretty but lacking substance, but that still leaves 16 games that'll give you a decent amount of entertainment. Nobody does a bundle like that anymore.

I'm not sure how widespread piracy was - I didn't come into contact with it myself, I was a kid and didn't really have the contacts and I didn't know anyone with an ST.

The ST definitely feels closer to 8-bit when you sit down with emulators for STFM, Amiga, Snes and Mega Drive, there are probably areas the C64 could kick its arse, though for me coming from the Amstrad CPC 464 it felt like a big enough leap to be hugely impressive. The STE was never a big enough leap to catch the Amiga, nor to justify developer effort or upgrade from users. In some ways Atari repeated the trick later on with the Falcon and Jaguar.

The Falcon was a lovely bit of kit but if you look at the timeline it came out in 1992 and Pentium PCs came out in 1993 - initially running at 60MHz vs the mere 16MHz 68030 on the Falcon (bear in mind the TT was running that processor at 32MHz if I recall) - there was just no way it was ever going to compete, especially as the PC started to emerge as a proper gaming machine.

Then you have the Jaguar, competing with the Playstation and the N64 - they missed the boat badly by being miles behind on processor power (let alone the ridiculous multi-chip design where only the 68000 could properly access RAM), not enough RAM, awful lack of 3D performance, less than half the colour-count of most competitors plus shite resolution, and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_of_video_game_consoles#Home_systems has a bit more info - they really did release an in-between generations system while trying to pretend they had a more powerful machine with the 64-bit bullshit. Atari were simply behind the pace and poorly managed.

The ST was a fabulous little machine to me, but Atari were always going to fail while they were so far off the pace.
 

mancs

Member
The st had built in midi , more desirable , I imagine , for studio work at that time.
Truly the st and Amiga are classics , and 100% the only way to home game then , arcade titles in home , back them?? Very playable , colourful , awesome.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
The st had built in midi , more desirable , I imagine , for studio work at that time.
Truly the st and Amiga are classics , and 100% the only way to home game then , arcade titles in home , back them?? Very playable , colourful , awesome.

Yeah the midi was awesome. I plugged my ST into a crappy old Yamaha PSS480 and learned a tonne. Later in life I wrote and performed music that actually got on the radio - the ST was the start of that. Consider that machine gave me my music hobby and my code career I owe it one hell of a debt.
 

mancs

Member
The st had built in midi , more desirable , I imagine , for studio work at that time.
Truly the at and Amiga are classics , and 100% the only way to home game then , arcade titles in home , back them?? Very playable , colourful , awesome.
Yeah the midi was awesome. I plugged my ST into a crappy old Yamaha PSS480 and learned a tonne. Later in life I wrote and performed music that actually got on the radio - the ST was the start of that. Consider that machine gave me my music hobby and my code career I owe it one hell of a debt.
legendary piece of kit. :) ya know , this thread has popped loads of games up in my mind , outrun , james pond , chase hq , altered beast , endless :) pleasure to remind this thread of the midi , the st packed haha.
 
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hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
legendary piece of kit. :) ya know , this thread has popped loads of games up in my mind , outrun , james pond , chase hq , altered beast , endless :) pleasure to remind this thread of the midi , the st packed haha.

Tbh I think this will be my GAF legacy, the masterpiece thread! Being serious though it's a lot of fun playing all these awesome old games - some new to me, some not so much. Absolutely love it.
 
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