The Amiga was a dream come true for me when I picked one up in 1987. Blocky, minimal color 8bit graphics were out, and glorious detailed multi-color worlds were ushered in. It was a momentus shift visually and for the first time the games often resembled cutting-edge coin-ops (at least in screenshots...)
It was also a time when 3D gaming was being explored and so all those Realtime titles (Midwinter, Carrier Command, etc) as well as stuff like Hunter were pushing boundaries when it came to opening up new genres. It's quite incredible how limited and prosaic PC and consoles games are now by comparison. Because there weren't the same financial barriers to developers, the Amiga really was wide open. In fact, I think - in the Uk and Europe at least - it was the greatest and most creative time ever for home gaming.
This was mostly due to the sheer variety of genres and ideas being explored on the Amiga - everything from the most amazing hacker demos to the cutting edge German or Danish shoot 'em ups to innovative adventure, simulation and of course the best of British game design (which aside from coin-ops) was probably the best in the world at that time ... it was all there. And for many Amiga gaming was, um, free if you had the right connections. Piracy was rampant and hacker ans demo scenes were thriving as a result.
The Amiga's music represented another big step fwd (although the C64's most devoted fans fiends might disagree).
I remember hearing Tim Follin's stuff for US Gold's Abysmal ST ports of Capcom games (Bionic Commando, LED Storm and best of Ghouls' n' Ghosts) and just not believing it was game music. I recorded everything and was in heaven - incredible music that still remains untouched to this day in its compositional brilliance. And of, course, Chris Huelsbeck's Turrican stuff (and R-Type title heme) were exceptional, too.
Real imagination and creativity of this sort really put the emerging Japanese consoles to shame in my opinion. I remembering 'upgrading' to a PC Engine which I loved for R-Type and other amazing shoot 'em ups, but after a while I had to go and by an Amiga again because somehow the selection of games just seemed a little soulless by comparison. And that was an pretty amazing console, too.
Yes, that's it. The Amiga had bags of soul. And it was everything from the creators of the chipset to the programmers that burned the midnight oil to figure out ways to get just that litltle bit more power out of it.
And it didn't even matter that not all games got upgraded when being ported over form the ST (although I do rememeber fuming about many dismal coin-op conversions, the Capcom ones being a case in point - we had to suffer). Two of my favorite Amiga games were essentially ST games anyway ST - Stunt car Racer and The Sentinel.
One of my favorite memories was playing this fairly obscure top-down RPG called 'The Faery Tale Adventure' by a US company called Micro Illusions (I think). This one-disk epic (never figured out how they squeezed it all on one) had clearly been a labor of love for its creator David Joiner, and it just had so much beauty and charm, as well as nice music. With the aid of a walkthrough from my favorite Amiga mag of the time, CU Amiga, I spent a week with my brother after school (for him, Uni for me) searching this MASSIVE charming fantasy world in search of a big dragon and a distressed damsel (probably). It was later was ported to the Mega Drive but didn't carry over well at all. TFA was a work of art that most Amiga gamers passed by. Only the 8bit text adventure Twin Kingdom Valley hooked me more...
Long live the Amiga. You are sorely missed....