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[Ozzie666]

Off topic, random ST chat, can't help myself.

To me at least, the ST and Amiga is pretty much earlier version of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) in terms of comparisons. Just maybe not as close as the two consoles. I still find it amusing that early Amiga games were ports of ST games, at least until 1990 or so. Then it became the reverse situation, with Amiga getting the primary attention.

Honestly, I get just as much of a kick in this thread seeing the compilation disks and cracking screens from the old groups. For those that were around in the 80's and early 90's, who were into no good on their computers, this is pure nostalgia, an innocent and different time. Off topic, but the Atari ST gaming scene was interesting to follow in terms of the underground scene. They had a real gang type mentality and some legendary wars across Europe, which were felt in North America. But anyhow, I digress, good times.

The ST chip music is something you either love or hate. It struggled with scrolling sometimes, but those Lucasfilm and Sierra type games were pretty well done on the system. The Amiga received American game support until 1992/93, but it seems the ST died several years earlier, maybe 90/91?

The ST was surprisingly popular in Canada and the power pack was legendary. You didn't need to buy any more game. One of the last North American game companies to release any games on the ST was surprisingly, Readysoft of Dragon's Lair, Guy Spy and Wrath of the Demon fame.

 

[Kerlurk]

Gaming Discussion

Video game news, industry analysis, sales figures, deals, impressions, reviews, and discussions of everything in the medium, covering all platforms, genres, and territories.

www.neogaf.com

 

[Havoc2049]

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.

The Atari ST did have one killer app system seller game in Dungeon Master, which was released in 1987 and was exclusive to the system for about a year. I'm from the US, but Dungeon Master received a bunch of hype in the US and had some cover stories on computer gaming and ST specific magazines at the time and received a bunch of awards from the press. It's hard to get exact sales data from back then, but between the ST and Amiga, I wouldn't be surprised if the Atari ST version of Dungeon Master was one of the best selling games for those systems.
From Wikipedia:
Dungeon Master debuted on 15 December 1987 on the Atari ST, and by early 1988 was a strong seller, becoming the best-selling game for the computer of all time; Bell (lead designer and programmer of Dungeon Master) estimated that at one point more than half of all Atari ST owners had purchased the game. Because of FTL's sophisticated copy protection, many who otherwise pirated their software had to purchase Dungeon Master to play the game.

Off topic, random ST chat, can't help myself.

To me at least, the ST and Amiga is pretty much earlier version of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) in terms of comparisons. Just maybe not as close as the two consoles. I still find it amusing that early Amiga games were ports of ST games, at least until 1990 or so. Then it became the reverse situation, with Amiga getting the primary attention.

Honestly, I get just as much of a kick in this thread seeing the compilation disks and cracking screens from the old groups. For those that were around in the 80's and early 90's, who were into no good on their computers, this is pure nostalgia, an innocent and different time. Off topic, but the Atari ST gaming scene was interesting to follow in terms of the underground scene. They had a real gang type mentality and some legendary wars across Europe, which were felt in North America. But anyhow, I digress, good times.

The ST chip music is something you either love or hate. It struggled with scrolling sometimes, but those Lucasfilm and Sierra type games were pretty well done on the system. The Amiga received American game support until 1992/93, but it seems the ST died several years earlier, maybe 90/91?

The ST was surprisingly popular in Canada and the power pack was legendary. You didn't need to buy any more game. One of the last North American game companies to release any games on the ST was surprisingly, Readysoft of Dragon's Lair, Guy Spy and Wrath of the Demon fame.

Ya, the heyday for the ST in the States was from 1985 to 1989 and then support started to slowly dwindle away. In the States, the ST even outsold the Amiga from 1985 to 1987 and then the Amiga 500 came on the scene and took off. I remember going to national chains like Software Etc. and Walden Software and buying ST software and games up until about '90/'91ish. A few Atari specific computer/video game stores stayed open in the States up until the mid 90's. I was a diehard Atarian to the end I used to drive like two hours to go to one of the last Atari computer/video game stores left in the States, Toad Computers, to get my ST, Lynx and Jaguar fix. Toad Computers even sold the C-Lab Mk II Falcon computers (up to 14 MB of RAM and 811 MB hard drive) and their own hybrid hardware based PC/ST computers called the Toad Chameleon, that ran Windows 95 and TOS 2.06.

I think MicroProse was the last major US game publisher to support the ST, although they did it in a round about way, as the Atari ST versions of games like Silent Service II, F-15 Strike Eagle II, B-17 Flying Fortress (1992), Railroad Tycoon and Civilization (1991) were published by Microprose UK and imported into the US. My ST copies of Castles by Interplay and Ultima VI by Origin were the same. Although my ST copies of Secret of Monkey Island and Loom were both published in the US by Lucasfilm Games.

Speaking of MicroProse, if you were an 80's/90's computer gamer, Sid Meier just released his memoir and it's an excellent read.
Here is my Atari 1040 STE, 4MB RAM, 60 MB Supra hard drive, SC1435 monitor and Atari Powerpad.

 

[Kerlurk]

Gaming Discussion

Video game news, industry analysis, sales figures, deals, impressions, reviews, and discussions of everything in the medium, covering all platforms, genres, and territories.

www.neogaf.com

 

[hariseldon]

Stunt Car Racer

ST Format Review

My Review

For this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM. This is from Automation Menu 117. The menu has a cool picture of Garfield, but more importantly some rather excellent chip music, along with the traditional scrolly message.

I fired up the menu, enter my name and I'm in a single-player league. I could have chosen to race two Atari STs linked together with an RS232 cable, but then I'd have to find two Atari STs, an RS232 cable and someone else who likes ST games.

I decided to start with practice, and found my car being airlifted onto the track and then dropped unceremoniously to its surface. Graphics are basic, with the rather plain outer panel disguising the small 3D rendered area which chugs along at a fairly sedate pace. That said, controls remain responsive, and when I crash it's my fault. This is of course to be expected because this is the creation of the legend himself, Geoff Crammond.

For those who don't know, Geoff created the F1GP games for Microprose, and they were legendary. However, Stunt Car Racer is what he made before embarking on his F1 journey. Where his F1 games were fairly pure simulations, SCR is a bit more arcade, though it is among a fairly select few early games to use vector 3D to create a real world, things which tended to be a hallmark of simulation vs arcade racers which tended to use a sprite and rolling road (think Outrun or Super Hang-On).

Kicking off the career mode I faced my first race against Jumpin Jack. In this race I would be tasked with racing a track with a jump and a ramp, against my single AI opponent. Controls are simple enough, with the stick controlling acceleration, braking and steering and fire enabling the boost (which lasts for a limited time and sees flames come from your engine),

The race began with him hurtling off into the distance, leaving me in the dust. I did however fight back and on the 3rd and final lap it seemed I'd passed him, only for him to pass me on the final sprint to the line. As has become tradition in these reviews, I had failed.

This failure screen gives an early hint of how Microprose (MicroStyle was one of their labels) would go on to become one of the best companies for pixel art scenes - you can clearly see it's a conversion from an 8-bit image where we'll get more impressive work later more tuned to 16-bit graphics, but the techniques and the house style are starting to take shape.

Stunt Car Racer is a decent early effort at a 3D vector racing game, and one with fairly unique subject matter due to its peculiar tracks. That might itself be recommendation enough for some, as it's a solid game. For me however, I'd rather play Geoff's F1 games.

 

[kruis]

Stunt Car Racer was one of the few games that had Link Play. We used to play the game using two Amigas setups connected to each other with a null modem cable. It simply was the best two player experience on a home PC back in the day and it elevated a good racing game to god level.

See here for more info.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

Used to just play practice mode on the more difficult tracks and just jump off the higher ramps and crash deliberately all the time.

 

[hariseldon]

Just thought I’d post this - I was reading PCZone 111 and found mention of a port of Chu Chu Rocket from Dreamcast to Atari ST.

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-chu-chu-rocket_21884.html to download. I might do a review.

 

[SirTerry-T]

Picked up a useful gadget to make these a bit more authentic. Can’t wait to try it out!

Edit: The micro switches on this thing feel superb.

Best bloody joystick ever.

 

[SirTerry-T]

Off topic, random ST chat, can't help myself.

To me at least, the ST and Amiga is pretty much earlier version of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) in terms of comparisons. Just maybe not as close as the two consoles. I still find it amusing that early Amiga games were ports of ST games, at least until 1990 or so. Then it became the reverse situation, with Amiga getting the primary attention.

Honestly, I get just as much of a kick in this thread seeing the compilation disks and cracking screens from the old groups. For those that were around in the 80's and early 90's, who were into no good on their computers, this is pure nostalgia, an innocent and different time. Off topic, but the Atari ST gaming scene was interesting to follow in terms of the underground scene. They had a real gang type mentality and some legendary wars across Europe, which were felt in North America. But anyhow, I digress, good times.

The ST chip music is something you either love or hate. It struggled with scrolling sometimes, but those Lucasfilm and Sierra type games were pretty well done on the system. The Amiga received American game support until 1992/93, but it seems the ST died several years earlier, maybe 90/91?

The ST was surprisingly popular in Canada and the power pack was legendary. You didn't need to buy any more game. One of the last North American game companies to release any games on the ST was surprisingly, Readysoft of Dragon's Lair, Guy Spy and Wrath of the Demon fame.

 

[rnlval]

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.

With A500 Rev6 being in majority, trap door ram expansion(typically starting at $C0) can be access at the alternative memory address range.

From http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=417761&postcount=4
"you can have some kind of 1M chip ram even with 0.5M+0.5M configuration as long as Agnus is ECS model."

For my early primary school years, my 1989 A500 was Rev 6A variant with ECS Agnus chip.



Amiga 500's Elf Mania game acting as tech demo which has 5 bitplane game with parallax background and floor scrolling.

Amiga OCS/ECCS game in production in the year 2020, Metro Siege (a Final Fight clone with proper hardware optimizations)






-----------



I have multiple Amiga 500 games with parallax backgrounds that exceeds 16 register colors.

 

[rnlval]

Your tech demo has heavy repeated micro-tile graphics which is not comparable to the Amigia OCS/ECS's parallax layers enabled games.



Amiga ECS's Shadow Fighter game with parallax layers and per line floor scrolling.

 

[Ozzie666]

With A500 Rev6 being in majority, trap door ram expansion(typically starting at $C0) can be access at the alternative memory address range.

From http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=417761&postcount=4
"you can have some kind of 1M chip ram even with 0.5M+0.5M configuration as long as Agnus is ECS model."

For my early primary school years, my 1989 A500 was Rev 6A variant with ECS Agnus chip.



Amiga 500's Elf Mania game acting as tech demo which has 5 bitplane game with parallax background and floor scrolling.

Amiga OCS/ECCS game in production in the year 2020, Metro Siege (a Final Fight clone with proper hardware optimizations)






-----------



I have multiple Amiga 500 games with parallax backgrounds that exceeds 16 register colors.

That Metro Seige is normal Amiga 500 ocs? Okay I looked at the demo, its for Amiga 500 with 1MB.

That would have been amazing for 1991. Goes to show sprite work and art mean a lot.

The looks highly impressive and much better than the Finial Fight the Amiga received in 1991. Makes me curious how many disks it might be. Also shows the Amiga was more capable for arcade ports than what we have. I suspect a lot of Amiga Arcade ports suffered from poor communication and assistance, with assets not freely available.

 

[rnlval]

That Metro Seige is normal Amiga 500 ocs? Okay I looked at the demo, its for Amiga 500 with 1MB.

That would have been amazing for 1991. Goes to show sprite work and art mean a lot.

The looks highly impressive and much better than the Finial Fight the Amiga received in 1991. Makes me curious how many disks it might be. Also shows the Amiga was more capable for arcade ports than what we have. I suspect a lot of Amiga Arcade ports suffered from poor communication and assistance, with assets not freely available.

It's a lesson for strong 1st party game studios being owned by the game platform vendor. Microsoft's Phil Spencer has learned this important lesson for Xbox and Windows gaming platforms. e.g. buying ZeniMax Media (which owns Bethesda and ID software).

After Sony's Betamax debacle, Sony knows the strong 1st party game studio lesson prior to the release of Playstation 1 e.g. buying Amiga''s strong 3rd party game company Psygnosis.

Most of the good graphics Amiga games are European in origin. When I see US Gold + Capcom (JP), it's usually associated with crap game ports.

 

[hariseldon]

That Metro Seige is normal Amiga 500 ocs? Okay I looked at the demo, its for Amiga 500 with 1MB.

That would have been amazing for 1991. Goes to show sprite work and art mean a lot.

The looks highly impressive and much better than the Finial Fight the Amiga received in 1991. Makes me curious how many disks it might be. Also shows the Amiga was more capable for arcade ports than what we have. I suspect a lot of Amiga Arcade ports suffered from poor communication and assistance, with assets not freely available.

Having read a few Retro Gamer articles in arcade conversions, it seems it was not uncommon for the devs to have no access to any assets, just simply to have a machine running and try to copy it. Indeed some didn't even get that, instead just getting videos of the game in action (and we all know how high quality VHS was).

 

[rnlval]

Having read a few Retro Gamer articles in arcade conversions, it seems it was not uncommon for the devs to have no access to any assets, just simply to have a machine running and try to copy it. Indeed some didn't even get that, instead just getting videos of the game in action (and we all know how high quality VHS was).

A short development cycle without access to original art assets compounds the game port problem.

Joint Atari ST and Amiga port can gimp Amiga's 4096 color palette selection.

Metro Seige makes no palette consideration for Atari ST's 512 color palette limitations.

 

[hariseldon]

ST Format Issue 5 - Download

The World in November 1989
The big event was the fall of the Berlin wall. It was such a huge moment, signalling what some thought was the end of history. Following on, Bulgaria ended its communist rule and Czechoslovakia saw massive protests which would end the rule of their Communist Party and usher in elections. It was one of the most momentous times in history but at 9 I didn't really fully understand its significance. That is a source of some regret, as it now seems that I lived through the peak of Western civilisation without realising it.

In the UK we continued the loss of our own home-grown industries as Ford bought Jaguar. They have become increasingly generic. The House Of Commons was televised for the first time - given we see footage from the commons every day it seems strange now that we didn't even have highlights. Of course now with social media so much of the commons is just posturing to create that Twitter zinger.

In America the football (soccer to you guys) team qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years.

Elsewhere in the world, the end of Apartheid was drawing closer as FW De Klerk scrapped the Separate Amenities Act

On TV Blackadder Goes Forth broadcast the legendary final episode, a tearjerker if ever there was one, while Byker Grove made its debut on Childrens BBC, alongside Maid Marian And Her Merry Men.

The film charts see the brilliant Shirley Valentine at number one, in which a bored Liverpudlian housewife goes to Mykonos to get away from her husband and ends up learning that fuck is fuck, boat is boat. The rest of the chart is distressingly poor.



The album chart sees Chris Rea at number 1 with The Road To Hell. Erasure briefly hit number one but had dropped back to 5 with Wild, an album which didn't quite live up to some of their previous greats. The Beautiful South made their debut with a fantastic album, mixing caustic lyrics with uplifting melodies as Paul Heaton moved on from The Housemartins.

The singles chart has some absolute bangers with Lisa Stansfield at #1 and Phil Collins Another Day In Paradise at #2, Martika at 7 with I Feel The Earth Move, and The Mixmasters with Grand Piano at 9 for a dose of house. 808 State came in at 20 with Pacific State further showcasing the strength of dance music.





The Magazine
Issue 5's theme was video, as demonstrated by a piss-poor image ripped from VHS. The cover disk featured The Untouchables and the first ad, two whole pages in colour, was for that game, Ocean really pushing that film license (as they were prone to doing).

There were reviews for some pretty cool kit, with GST Gold Genlock being the cover feature (video cature to image), however to me the most fascinating bit of kit was the Teletext adaptor, allowing you to capture teletext pages and navigate/store them on the Atari ST. Teletext, for those who don't know, was a very early text service which was broadcast alongside the TV image allowing you to select pages (usually by typing a 3-digit number) to view news, sport, TV listings, and even play games (choose your own adventure and quiz games were popular). It was slow, but I remember as a kid switching to channel 4 so I could read Digitiser, having to wait ages for the next page to come up for each review.

You may recall that in STF issue 4 a number of developers observed that the STE wasn't worth the effort. Atari weren't happy, the news featuring a story that Atari had threatened to withdraw development machines fom the programmers involved. This would continue Atari's long history of being utterly fucking retarded.

I think we found the first SJW right here. If only we'd killed it with fire. Something tells me this was just a money-making scheme and that Sandra Vogel was just a slightly autistic teenage girl, judging by the address and subsequent disappearance of the 'organisation'. She charged money for.. well, not much. She truly blazed a trail.


Previews
This month's previews were more textual than usual - weirdly they included a sprite sheet for one game among their screenshots, Jumping Jack Son is a brilliant little game and I fully intend to review it for you guys. Theme Park Mystery was one I always wanted to take a look at and Dark Century claimed to have raytracing. This was of course absolute bollocks, as was the game. Resolution 101 got a brief mention, while we got a screenshot of Space Ace and Ghouls n Ghosts which I imagine you guys will want me to take a look at. I expect I'll die a lot.

Reviews
Games reviewed this month:
Onslaught (Platform brawler - Hewson - £24.95 - 90% Format Gold)
Red Storm Rising (Submarine Sim - Microprose - £24.95 - 89%)
Tower Of Babel (3D puzzle oddity - Microprose - £24.99 - 94% Format Gold)
The Hound Of Shadow (Text Adventure - EA - £24.99 - 90% Format Gold)
First Contact (top-down exploration sci-fi weirdness - Microprose - £24.99 - 58%)
Moonwalker (Michael Jackson - The Game - US Gold - £24.95 - 84%)
Day Of The Pharoah (No Fucking Idea - Rainbow Arts - £24.99 - 63%)
Drakkhen (RPG - Infogrames - £24.95 - 79%) - interestingly all the screenshots are in French...
Future Wars (Adventure Game - Palace/Delphine - £24.95 - 87%)
Star Command (Space Thingy - SSI - £19.99 - 37%)
Lancaster (Flight Sim - CRL - £19.95 - 81%)
Shinobi (Brawler - Virgin - £19.99 - 47%)
Double Dragon 2 (Brawler - Virgin - £19.95 - 75%)
Tintin On The Moon (Platformer/Space Shooter - Infogrames - £24.95 - 73%)
Knight Force (Shit Brawler - Titus - £24.99 - 70%)
Pro Tennis Tour (Tennis - Ubi Soft - £19.95 - 70%)
Xenophobe (Run and Gun - Microstyle - £24.99 - 55%)

That's quite a collection. For me, Tower Of Babel and Future Wars are essential, I'd quite like to have a crack at Pro Tennis Tour and I might give Drakkhen a shot. Shinobi might be worth a look and Double Dragon 2 will probably have to feature given I loved the first game (came with my ST in the Power Pack). It's a big issue, with some games I really can't wait to sink my teeth into. Tower Of Babel gives me Sentinel vibes while Future Wars is by the wonderful Delphine, creators of the brilliant Operation Stealth, Cruise For A Corpse, Another World and Flashback, it's going to be a lot of fun.

 

[lmimmfn]

The album chart sees Chris Rea at number 1 with The Road To Hell

I always consider Chris Rea's Road To Hell to be the sequel to his "Driving Home for Christmas"

 

[Havoc2049]

808 State! There 's an Atari ST in this vid.

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 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.

With clever coding, the STE could display more than 16 colors on screen, but there weren't that many games that took advantage of it.

Obsession displays like 42 colors on screen.

 

[rnlval]

808 State! There 's an Atari ST in this vid.


With clever coding, the STE could display more than 16 colors on screen, but there weren't that many games that took advantage of it.

Obsession displays like 42 colors on screen.

Atari STE has 16 color (4 bitplanes) registers. Needs TimerB method to change any of the 16 color registers ahead of the scan beam.

Amiga 500 has 32 color (5 bitplanes) registers. Needs Copper method to change any of the 32 color registers ahead of the scan beam. 64 color EHB mode recycles 32 color registers with half brightness in 6 bitplanes.

Using Paint.Net's color count plug-in

Obsession STE version has 40 colors.

--------------------

Obsession A500 version has 54 colors.

Recent Amiga 500 games in development such as Metro Siege have 60 colors with the Copper re-shading the colors on greyscale road and pavement artwork with parallax background and foreground layers workload.

Atari STe released in late 1989 which too late against the rise of PC's SVGA graphics cards.

Like Commodore, Atari was run by ex-Commdore Jack Tramiel and both companies have problems sustained and focused R&D.

Commodore has 256 colors display (8-bitplane) with 4096 color palette Commodore 65 lin late 1990 which is a waste of resource which should have focused on the Amiga platform. Amiga AGA chipset was ready in Feb 1991 and management delayed it's release to late 1992.

The entire 68K based platforms such as Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Sharp 68K, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive were killed by Motorola i.e. 68K CPU was killed by Motorola instead of following Intel Pentium evolution.

 

[rnlval]

That Metro Seige is normal Amiga 500 ocs? Okay I looked at the demo, its for Amiga 500 with 1MB.

That would have been amazing for 1991. Goes to show sprite work and art mean a lot.

The looks highly impressive and much better than the Finial Fight the Amiga received in 1991. Makes me curious how many disks it might be. Also shows the Amiga was more capable for arcade ports than what we have. I suspect a lot of Amiga Arcade ports suffered from poor communication and assistance, with assets not freely available.

Amiga 500's Double Dragon 3 and Golden Axe game ports were okay.




In general, avoid Crapcom and it's game porting contractors.

Crapcom label for Capcom is not new.

 

[Ozzie666]

It's really interesting to look back at some of these ports. It makes you wonder what arcade ports could have been, if given the needed time and resources. Also if there was more cooperation from Japanese developers sharing assets for sprites and music. It still reminded me of garage or basement development. I am guessing cost vs piracy was a consideration as well. Obviously piracy was rampant on both ST, Amiga, C64.

From the top of my head, UN Squadron wasn't terrible, Mega Twins was better than expected, Shadow Dancer etc. There is a long list of okay conversions by anyone not named Tierteix. Even some of the later Ocean arcade ports, really improved in quality like Parasol Stars, Rainbow Islands, New Zealand story, Midnight Resistance. Maybe Taito was more helpful for European companies compared to Capcom and other Japanese crews.

Easy to look back now and stick our noses up at some of these games, but those who lived during these times, didn't think things could get any better. Having an Atari ST or Amiga in 1988 was fairly uncommon, but it blew your friends away. I know there are some hardcore people who had them in 1986, but there wasn't a lot out there for these two system.

Such good times and these magazines were eagerly sought out every month.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

Upcoming Amiga 500 game "Inviyya" (kind of an R-Type clone) looks also quite nice, imo.
There is some great stuff cooking up for good old Amiga currently.

 

[SirTerry-T]

Your tech demo has heavy repeated micro-tile graphics which is not comparable to the Amigia OCS/ECS's parallax layers enabled games.



Amiga ECS's Shadow Fighter game with parallax layers and per line floor scrolling.

That's all well and good mate but I was posting that Union Demo vid in reply to a guy who was enjoying reminiscing about his Atari days...in this Atari reminiscing thread.

Also I'm 48 years old and no longer give a shit about which video game console or computer is swinging the biggest dick.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

Also I'm 48 years old and no longer give a shit about which video game console or computer is swinging the biggest dick.

Amen.
They were both great machines, and even back then I never gave a shit about which one is better.

And looking back now, I am happy I could live through those amazing times with both of these fine computers being around.

(and from a 68k asm coders point of view, I am always astounded what kind of crazy things the Atari ST scene gets out from these machines.)

 

[hariseldon]

Currently working on the Future Wars review. It’s a tricky one as it’s hard to know the right way to approach the write up. Where my reviews have so far taken a slice of life approach, doing so here risks spoilers for plot and puzzles. I also don’t think just walking through the game necessarily gives anything useful - you could read a walkthrough for that. I’ll give it some thought.

 

[NeonDelta]

completely forgot about stunt car racer. Endless evenings playing on that

 

[SirTerry-T]

My memory may be really hazy but if I remember correctly (or incorrectly), Stunt Car Racer could also be played with an ST hooked up to an Amiga via the serial port for multiplayer.
Which I guess would make it one of the first crossplay multiplayer titles before that phrase had ever been uttered?!!?

 

[SirTerry-T]

Amen.
They were both great machines, and even back then I never gave a shit about which one is better.

And looking back now, I am happy I could live through those amazing times with both of these fine computers being around.

(and from a 68k asm coders point of view, I am always astounded what kind of crazy things the Atari ST scene gets out from these machines.)

Yep, I had an Amiga 1200 after my 520 ST bit the dust and it was an excellent machine, clearly the better of the two on a technical level. However, I never had quite the same attachment to the Amiga as I did the ST though, maybe because the ST was my first BIG computer after being a 48k Speccy kid in my early teens.

 

[hariseldon]

Yep, I had an Amiga 1200 after my 520 ST bit the dust and it was an excellent machine, clearly the better of the two on a technical level. However, I never had quite the same attachment to the Amiga as I did the ST though, maybe because the ST was my first BIG computer after being a 48k Speccy kid in my early teens.

The 1200 was an awesome bit of kit - more the level of the Falcon than the ST though. I desperately wanted one as a kid. I had a 520ST then picked up a cheap A600 when it died. I’m not into the format wars stuff, and ideally I’d like to avoid that. I think this thread can serve both sets of fans as there’s a decent crossover of games. For me the ST resonates more but that’s just because that’s what I spent more time on, it’s where I learned to code, and it’s where I experienced the magical 16-bit era, an amazing era of incredible games, an industry that was definitely a bit rough around the edges but was incredibly creative and focused on gameplay. We were lucky to be there.

 

[rnlval]

That's all well and good mate but I was posting that Union Demo vid in reply to a guy who was enjoying reminiscing about his Atari days...in this Atari reminiscing thread.

Also I'm 48 years old and no longer give a shit about which video game console or computer is swinging the biggest dick.

This forum is filled with console wars.

 

[rnlval]

Upcoming Amiga 500 game "Inviyya" (kind of an R-Type clone) looks also quite nice, imo.
There is some great stuff cooking up for good old Amiga currently.

A500's Inviyya has parallax background scrolling.

 

[SirTerry-T]

The Atari ST did have one killer app system seller game in Dungeon Master, which was released in 1987 and was exclusive to the system for about a year. I'm from the US, but Dungeon Master received a bunch of hype in the US and had some cover stories on computer gaming and ST specific magazines at the time and received a bunch of awards from the press. It's hard to get exact sales data from back then, but between the ST and Amiga, I wouldn't be surprised if the Atari ST version of Dungeon Master was one of the best selling games for those systems.
From Wikipedia:
Dungeon Master debuted on 15 December 1987 on the Atari ST, and by early 1988 was a strong seller, becoming the best-selling game for the computer of all time; Bell (lead designer and programmer of Dungeon Master) estimated that at one point more than half of all Atari ST owners had purchased the game. Because of FTL's sophisticated copy protection, many who otherwise pirated their software had to purchase Dungeon Master to play the game.


Ya, the heyday for the ST in the States was from 1985 to 1989 and then support started to slowly dwindle away. In the States, the ST even outsold the Amiga from 1985 to 1987 and then the Amiga 500 came on the scene and took off. I remember going to national chains like Software Etc. and Walden Software and buying ST software and games up until about '90/'91ish. A few Atari specific computer/video game stores stayed open in the States up until the mid 90's. I was a diehard Atarian to the end I used to drive like two hours to go to one of the last Atari computer/video game stores left in the States, Toad Computers, to get my ST, Lynx and Jaguar fix. Toad Computers even sold the C-Lab Mk II Falcon computers (up to 14 MB of RAM and 811 MB hard drive) and their own hybrid hardware based PC/ST computers called the Toad Chameleon, that ran Windows 95 and TOS 2.06.

I think MicroProse was the last major US game publisher to support the ST, although they did it in a round about way, as the Atari ST versions of games like Silent Service II, F-15 Strike Eagle II, B-17 Flying Fortress (1992), Railroad Tycoon and Civilization (1991) were published by Microprose UK and imported into the US. My ST copies of Castles by Interplay and Ultima VI by Origin were the same. Although my ST copies of Secret of Monkey Island and Loom were both published in the US by Lucasfilm Games.

Speaking of MicroProse, if you were an 80's/90's computer gamer, Sid Meier just released his memoir and it's an excellent read.
Here is my Atari 1040 STE, 4MB RAM, 60 MB Supra hard drive, SC1435 monitor and Atari Powerpad.

Dungeon Master and Oids was FTL's "Double Whammy" for the ST and for a brief, brief moment the Atari machine had the games that made the other team sulk...just briefly

 

[SirTerry-T]

The 1200 was an awesome bit of kit - more the level of the Falcon than the ST though. I desperately wanted one as a kid. I had a 520ST then picked up a cheap A600 when it died. I’m not into the format wars stuff, and ideally I’d like to avoid that. I think this thread can serve both sets of fans as there’s a decent crossover of games. For me the ST resonates more but that’s just because that’s what I spent more time on, it’s where I learned to code, and it’s where I experienced the magical 16-bit era, an amazing era of incredible games, an industry that was definitely a bit rough around the edges but was incredibly creative and focused on gameplay. We were lucky to be there.

Yeah, I think those of us "of a certain vintage" got their hands properly dirty, either through coding or digital art on the 16-bit machines, after dabbling with the earlier 8-bit generation.
It really did seem like a huge shift when Atari and Commodores new hardware arrived. Think I've still got my floppies somewhere with my DPaint stuff on that got me my first gig in this filthy Industry

 

[hariseldon]

Yeah, I think those of us "of a certain vintage" got their hands properly dirty, either through coding or digital art on the 16-bit machines, after dabbling with the earlier 8-bit generation.
It really did seem like a huge shift when Atari and Commodores new hardware arrived. Think I've still got my floppies somewhere with my DPaint stuff on that got me my first gig in this filthy Industry

Honestly the jump from my trusty Amstrad CPC 464 felt huge. Absolutely enormous. And the games were great but they were definitely a gateway drug for the dark path of code. At the end of the day, yes the Amiga had better hardware for gaming, but I'm not sure the ST was ever really meant to be a games machine. I think Atari wanted the Mac's market, which is probably why they ripped off its desktop so heavily. The thing is though it felt like a great environment to do serious work in, where the Amiga for me didn't. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful games machine, and it has its musical niche with trackers vs the ST with MIDI, but the ST led me to my current comfortable lifestyle and a brief stint as a rock star* and I'll forever be grateful for that.

*idiot who wrote and performed shit music badly and somehow got on the radio despite a complete lack of talent but was thankfully never booed off stage

 

[Havoc2049]

Currently working on the Future Wars review. It’s a tricky one as it’s hard to know the right way to approach the write up. Where my reviews have so far taken a slice of life approach, doing so here risks spoilers for plot and puzzles. I also don’t think just walking through the game necessarily gives anything useful - you could read a walkthrough for that. I’ll give it some thought.

Looking forward to what you think about Future Wars, which I always wanted to play, but never got around to. Delphine was the bomb back then, with Future Wars, Another World, Operation Stealth and Flashback.

Atari STE has 16 color (4 bitplanes) registers. Needs TimerB method to change any of the 16 color registers ahead of the scan beam.

Amiga 500 has 32 color (5 bitplanes) registers. Needs Copper method to change any of the 32 color registers ahead of the scan beam. 64 color EHB mode recycles 32 color registers with half brightness in 6 bitplanes.

Using Paint.Net's color count plug-in

Obsession STE version has 40 colors.

--------------------

Obsession A500 version has 54 colors.

Recent Amiga 500 games in development such as Metro Siege have 60 colors with the Copper re-shading the colors on greyscale road and pavement artwork with parallax background and foreground layers workload.

Atari STe released in late 1989 which too late against the rise of PC's SVGA graphics cards.

Like Commodore, Atari was run by ex-Commdore Jack Tramiel and both companies have problems sustained and focused R&D.

Commodore has 256 colors display (8-bitplane) with 4096 color palette Commodore 65 lin late 1990 which is a waste of resource which should have focused on the Amiga platform. Amiga AGA chipset was ready in Feb 1991 and management delayed it's release to late 1992.

The entire 68K based platforms such as Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Sharp 68K, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive were killed by Motorola i.e. 68K CPU was killed by Motorola instead of following Intel Pentium evolution.

Ya, I'm not making the claim the ST is better than the Amiga when it comes to games, just that a few games were able to break the max 16 colors on screen with the STE. And like hariselden mentioned above, the ST was all about the Power Without the Price. Back in the day, I bought a 1040 STf, color monitor, First Word+, a printer and a couple of games, for less than the price of just the Amiga 2000 alone. The Amiga 500 wasn't exactly cheap when it first launched either. In the early days, I also preferred GEM, as it felt more Mac like, which was better for word processing and DTP, while Workbench felt clunky and slow.

I always thought the R&D was fine with Atari. It's that Atari blew their load of cash/profits they made with the ST and older 8-bit computer and console lines in '86 and '87 and dumped the majority of their cash into the ill fated PC clones and Federated electronics stores that bombed in the late 80's. After that, they were always cash strapped and it seemed like it took forever to bring products to market; like the STE, TT, Falcon and the Panther/Jaguar, with only the Lynx providing a little bit of financial relief during the 89-91 time frame. The launch of new products after 1988 was always a cluster fuck as well, with supply problems. Atari's marketing budget after 1988 was slim to none as well. For example, the Jaguar had some cool commercials, but you had to be watching cable television at like 1:00 AM to catch one.

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful games machine, and it has its musical niche with trackers vs the ST with MIDI, but the ST led me to my current comfortable lifestyle and a brief stint as a rock star* and I'll forever be grateful for that.

*idiot who wrote and performed shit music badly and somehow got on the radio despite a complete lack of talent but was thankfully never booed off stage

Whaaat??? Quien es hariselden???

 

[LarknThe4th]

Virus looks really cool, is it any good to play as a game?

 

[hariseldon]

Virus looks really cool, is it any good to play as a game?

It’s sadly terrible due to the controls. Shame as the idea was cool. We used to play it at school on the Archimedes computers and it was always style over substance.

 

[Birdo]

An ST Vs Amiga thread? How have I missed this!?

*Dives in*

 

[hariseldon]

Future Wars

ST Format Review

My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM. Automation didn't have this, nor did D-Bug, so I went with the Medway Boys for this crack. Sadly there's no intro, much to my disappointment. All you get is this lousy text after running the executable from the desktop.

Thankfully they were kind enough to crack the copy protection which seems to use images from the manual.

Before I get any further I just want to talk a little about Delphine Software. Some of you will already be familiar with them, but if not, I'll give a bit of background - those who know it can skip ahead. Delphine Software mostly specialised in adventure games. They started with a couple of action games, Castle Warrior which I reviewed a while back and Bio Challenge. Both were shit. Visually they were cool but the gameplay just wasn't there. Future Wars is where they found their feet. Future Wars set a template which they would follow in Operation Stealth (an unofficial James Bond adventure) before expanding on that system for Cruise For A Corpse. That was to be their last proper adventure, but the vector animation tech used there would be found in Another World before they went on to make Flashback which is more of a platformer. Their career after Flashback is undistinguished, but in the 16-bit era they were magnificent, for me never better than when making adventure games. They were presented in a wonderfully cinematic style with gorgeous pixel art, and at that time they were making prettier adventures (that ran a lot more smoothly) than either Sierra or Lucasarts. Operation Stealth was one of my favourites as a kid and a couple of years ago I completed Cruise For A Corpse. Both games were wonderfully polished and full of atmosphere though the plot unravelled somewhat later in the games (spoiler alert).

The Cinematique system was Delphine's SCUMM. You had objects in the room you could click on, or you could right-click to bring up an action menu (the verbs being in that action menu instead of permanently on-screen allowed more screen to be used for the environment). You could Examine an object, view your inventory, Use an object (which usually meant using it with something), Operate something (ie use it on its own) and Speak. In some cases in Operation Stealth, Examine would open up a close-up shot for more detailed interactions.

An intro sees some futuristic chaps shot by a mysterious flying saucer, while some reasonably solid chip music plays. Time to click on things and make some magic happen. I've knocked my bucket over and I'm on the side of a building, presumably I want to get off the lift somehow. My first mission is to grab anything I can. Only the bucket can be picked up - fine, maybe I'll use it as a crash helmet or something. Examinng the scaffolding I find buttons, and move up a floor. As there's a hotspot for the window the chap was yelling at me from, I assume I am expected to operate it and enter.

The game begins. I am apparently a window cleaner. My boss yells through the window so I guess I better do something. Examining everything I find a button. Taking everything I find that I now have a bucket. Finally I operate the button to take the lift up to the window and climb in.

In this shot we can see a shortcoming of the animation - our hero stops at whatever walk frame he's on, rather than resetting to stand. However, in walking around he's revealed that he can feel something under his feet. Operating the carpet reveals a key. Scanning the room for things to steal I find a bag in a bin. The bathroom looks interesting so let's investigate. There's a cupboard which means I must open it. I'll have that insecticide thank you. No clue what I'll do with it, but rule #1 of adventure games, steal anything that isn't nailed down. My other rule is if I see an opportunity to take a shit I'll take it. Disappointingly, I can open the WC door, but not take a shit. I'll take that red pixel on the ground though, which turns out to be a flag.

One definite irritant, which I have a feeling was resolved in Operation Stealth, is that you can click to operate something and it'll moan that you're not near enough. I vaguely recall that in Operation Stealth John Glames would walk to the object and do your bidding.

Back to the game for a moment, I had to read a walkthrough to figure out that I had to fill the bucket with water and place it above the boss's door to soak him so I could escape. Not really signposted unless I missed something really obvious. Anyway, with that done I head to the next room. There's cupboards so I'm going to try to open them. They're locked so I whip out a key, which miraculously works. Not sure why it was under the carpet, but I now have a typewriter to play with. Not quite sure what to do with it. May as well rifle through the drawers while I'm there, and I'll take this bit of paper.

Stuck once more I discover in a walkthrough that I must use a little flag on a map, which opens a secret passage. Overall, I'm not sure the puzzles are the most logical in the world. Nor, so far, has it presented the quality of atmosphere and world building present in Operation Stealth. In further annoyance, I got crushed because I was too slow entering a sodding code on a key input. To add insult to injury it just hangs there, no game over screen.

Loading another save, back I go. Entering the code I found in the typewriter I make it through the door and find myself in some kind of lab. Attempting to press a single-pixel red button on a machine, it keeps telling me to come closer, even when my character is literally the adjacent fucking pixel. Noting that examine machine tells me it looks a bit like a photocopier, and lacking an option to sit on the machine, I insert some paper instead.

So, eventually I get zapped by some light and I'm in a swamp. Random death from walking on the wrong bit of swamp.

So I think I'm done here. Clearly Future Wars is an important part of the journey for Delphine, but I can't help but feel that it's not quite there yet, mainly because quite a lot of it is absolute shit. Visually it's lovely, though the pixel art isn't as lush as that of Operation Stealth. The close-ups especially aren't as exciting. There's little in the way of world-building, it's really not very clear who I am or what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it, though perhaps that becomes clearer later on. The sudden deaths seem cheap for the most part, and a pain in the arse if you haven't saved recently.

I wonder if this was them building the engine that would eventually run their games and the fact that a game came with it was incidental. It feels like a practice run for Operation Stealth but maybe that's just 20/20 hindsight talking. We can see themes that run through their other work, from the Cinematique system that drives OpStealth, the close-ups starting to form, the cinematic visuals, and the sci-fi story of what I think is experiments going wrong has some parallels with Another World and Flashback. For me though, this game is a stepping stone to greater things rather than being great in itself.

Resources
Manual: https://www.starehry.eu/download/adventure/docs/Future.Wars-Manual.pdf

 

[hariseldon]

I've got Tower Of Babel, Double Dragon 2 and Pro Tennis Tour in the queue - will probably tackle Babel last so I can have a little break with some less cerebral games!

 

[rnlval]

Looking forward to what you think about Future Wars, which I always wanted to play, but never got around to. Delphine was the bomb back then, with Future Wars, Another World, Operation Stealth and Flashback.


Ya, I'm not making the claim the ST is better than the Amiga when it comes to games, just that a few games were able to break the max 16 colors on screen with the STE. And like hariselden mentioned above, the ST was all about the Power Without the Price. Back in the day, I bought a 1040 STf, color monitor, First Word+, a printer and a couple of games, for less than the price of just the Amiga 2000 alone. The Amiga 500 wasn't exactly cheap when it first launched either. In the early days, I also preferred GEM, as it felt more Mac like, which was better for word processing and DTP, while Workbench felt clunky and slow.

I always thought the R&D was fine with Atari. It's that Atari blew their load of cash/profits they made with the ST and older 8-bit computer and console lines in '86 and '87 and dumped the majority of their cash into the ill fated PC clones and Federated electronics stores that bombed in the late 80's. After that, they were always cash strapped and it seemed like it took forever to bring products to market; like the STE, TT, Falcon and the Panther/Jaguar, with only the Lynx providing a little bit of financial relief during the 89-91 time frame. The launch of new products after 1988 was always a cluster fuck as well, with supply problems. Atari's marketing budget after 1988 was slim to none as well. For example, the Jaguar had some cool commercials, but you had to be watching cable television at like 1:00 AM to catch one.

Color register changes on STe are harder to implement when compared to the Amiga's Copper based color register change.

Amiga has easier methods to reach 32 colours and beyond e.g. EHB 64 colors mode, Copper driven color register changes and HAM6 (4096 colors) mode (e.g Links golf game, Time Gal anime laser disc port).


STe's Timer B method consumes CPU time and involves resetting color register via 50/60 hz switch and attempt to continue the render.

It's a lesson for not doing "hard to program" PS3 Cell SPU design problem.

Commodore also has a money-wasting PC clone business which ended with a classic Pentium-based laptop.

Atari STe improvement with just 16 color registers with 4096 color palette + Bilter was too late for 1989 when the Amiga 500 and Sharp X68000 superior.

The Amiga can easily VM (virtualized machine) Apple Mac 68K and Atari TOS 68000.

 

[hariseldon]

Colour swaps may be harder, who knows, who cares. They work the same on the STFM btw - just from 512 colours instead of 4096. Nobody here is trying to pretend the STE was more powerful than the Amiga, and it's beginning to come off a bit console-warriorish. I'm happy to talk Amiga in here, it's all part of that same era of awesomeness but really do we have to rehash the wars of the early 90s? It's correct that the STE was too little too late, ST owners are only too aware of Atari's shortcomings, hell even ST Format, the de facto official ST magazine of the era, was sufficiently pissed off with Atari's antics as to regularly rip into them. Frankly though both companies were run by idiots, and the demise of both companies reflects that. None of that changes how utterly fucking magical these games were.

 

[hariseldon]

Double Dragon 2

ST Format Review

My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM. I used Automation disk 219, which also includes Alf: The First Adventure. Yep, a game around the TV show Alf. I might have to try it out for shits and giggles. It's an ok intro - not enormously exciting technically, but it gets the job done.

Going into the game, we have a logo screen, press fire and get some sampled music while the game loads, and then arrive at a level which I swear looks even uglier than Double Dragon 1.

With that said, the enemies come in rather more acrobatically rather than slowly shuffling across the screen, though the frame rate would drive our 60FPS obsessives round the bend. The moveset seems similar to the original, with a jump executed with fire and up/up-diagonal, a flying kick executed with fire and the direction you're facing, and a punch executed with fire. We seem to have lost the headbutt sadly, and I'm sure the first game had a throw which is also missing.

As usual you can pick weapons up by pressing fire. I tried to break a crate with a whip but this didn't work - I blame Streets Of Rage for making me think that all crates contained useful things. On a second playthrough I remembered that you could pick up barrels in the first game, and tried picking up the crate and found that worked. You're treated to sampled grunts and smacks, but otherwise sound is sparse.

Ladders remain climbable, though I would advise against it as it's easy to fall off roofs that tend not to have any guardrail (such bad health and safety because we hadn't invented that in the 1980s). As always you have the traditional giant blokes for mid and end of level bosses, and as usual doors in the background will generally open up as you pass for an enemy to emerge. This can cause problems as the point at which you push scrolling is far too close to the edge of the screen (by which I mean that scrolling doesn't happen til you're right at the edge, so you can't see what's coming, where scrolling more from the middle would give you more warning of what was coming).

Loading level two I'm dropped straight in and hit by a guy before I've had a chance to do anything (see above), and once caught in that trap it's impossible to get out as you get up, get hit again, and so on, due to lack of invincibility frames. Quite why they couldn't have this enemy walk on is anyone's guess but it's cheap to do that straight from the screen appearing. Add to that some hits simply not registering and you do often feel like the game is taking the piss.

The final straw is a combine harvester randomly moves the roller towards you without itself moving.. by that point I had simply had enough.

It's all perfectly servicable but feels a bit lacklustre, like they couldn't really be bothered, and the game never really pushes any boundaries. There are games of that time period that look far better than this.

Resources
Manual: http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/docs.php?id=499

 

[hariseldon]

Alf

So I don't think this was ever reviewed by ST Format. With the burbly chip music I'm beginning to suspect there's a reason for it. I'm sure it'll be some mediocre platform game or something.

Oh we get a nice picture of Alf - I'm pretty sure this is not using the full ST colour palette, perhaps we're dealing with a straight port from an 8-bit machine. Oh well, I'm sure it can still be fun, right?

Ok so maybe this is a game for small children. But I'm sure Alf made some somewhat grown-up jokes didn't he? That's one awful picture of Alf but it can't be that bad, can it?

Alf has nothing. You don't fucking say.

I find myself agreeing with Alf here.

I have absolutely no idea what's going on here.

I crawled through a mile of sewage for you, for your entertainment.

Let's never speak of this again.

 

[hariseldon]

So I gave up on Pro Tennis Tour aka Great Courts. I'm having considerable difficulty in returning shots and can't find a manual to figure out if I'm missing anything in the controls in terms of aiming or anything like that. So, skipping that one and going straight to Towers Of Babel.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

Manual mate...Get back to it!!

Pro Tennis Tour - Manual, Docs - Lemon Amiga

www.lemonamiga.com

 

[hariseldon]

Manual mate...Get back to it!!

Pro Tennis Tour - Manual, Docs - Lemon Amiga

www.lemonamiga.com

So.. almost everything is decided by the computer.. not much indication of how you choose direction of shot.. not a great manual! Time to have another crack but I'm not holding out much hope.

EDIT: Yeah so I played another match and in 3 sets I got two points.

 

[hariseldon]

So this was from a previous session...

The same happened just now but now it's taken me to the French Open and suddenly it's much much easier. Weird.

See if you can guess which one is me..

 

[hariseldon]

Well that went brilliantly.