It may of not been the best version but I really enjoyed the heck out of Buggy Boy.

@redking56: Heck yeah Lionheart! Love the art in that game.

Turrican II is my favourite game on the Amiga. It's a little weird at first since there's a lifebar and no hitstun, but once you get used to that it's a lot of fun. The Amiga version has the best combination of graphics, audio, and smooth scrolling.

Extase is a weird puzzle game. Watch what the AI does, it's probably easier than explaining how to play. (Basically, put the bubble over the red/orange circle when it's open to enter the wire, paint the wires purple, and create a path for all the sparks to reach the center at the same time.) There are other versions but this is the only one with the amazing dynamic soundtrack.

Lionheart is a rare Amiga game with both style and substance: it looks amazing and it plays as well as any arcade action/platformer.

Uridium 2 is a superfast shooter. Very awesome.

Apidya - a shmup on par with what you'd get out of Japan. Great music, great graphics, great level design. Ignore the "II," it's part of the developers' schtick of pretending to be making home ports of obscure arcade games.

Qwak - single-screen puzzle game similar to Bubble Bobble. Cute and fun.

Moonstone - hard to describe. A hybrid of a beat-em-up and a boardgame? Lots of fun with multiple people. There's a PC version but it isn't nearly as good.

Fire and Ice

Sidewinder (Didn't review terribly well, personally loved.)

Falcon (3.0 was my version. This is for Drew, not Jeff!)

Nthing Moonstone, but here's some others that may be of interest:

• Gods -- great platformer, also had a Genesis version,
• IK+ -- mentioned previously
• It Came From The Desert -- even if it's on other systems, they're not as good and I think the crew would have a hoot with it,
• Rainbow Islands -- again, many others tried, Amiga version is the best of them,
• Captive -- along with the previously mentioned Dungeon Master,
• Wings -- hasn't aged amazingly in the flying parts, but the scenario and shooting parts are much better,
• Midwinter -- again, not sure how it aged,
• Carrier Command
• Monty Python's Flying Circus,
• Pinball Dreams/Illusions/Fantasies
• Lotus I or I

It does have a lot of great games that were ported to everything else, but usually the definitive versions. The above are special, though.

Gods - enormously difficult for me as a ten year old, but it was awesome to see in action and the sound design was just the best.

Turrican II - Looked fantastic and the music was great. Pretty sure I never made it past level 2, nor did I even see all of level 1. The environments were gigantic.

Wings! - The flying hasn't held up (and in truth wasn't great at the time either), but the presentation and the story were captivating.

Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 - Best theme song ever. Ever!

Captive - Cyberpunk dungeon crawler. I really want to go back to this one some day.

Dunno if I would call it the best, but I remember loving Street Rod on the Amiga alot when I was younger

Turrican 1 & 2, Shadow of the Beast (that parallax scrolling), Gods and Cannon Fodder.

Just for shits 'n' giggles, consider The Hunt for Red October (the '87 version) for Dan and Drew.

BoBo. Definitely BoBo

Here's the thing about the Amiga. It didn't have a ton of exclusives, but it had a lot of the best versions of PC games in terms of graphics and sound. The question isn't what are the best Amiga games, the question is which are the best European games from that period that nobody is talking about.

I love Pushover. Remember Pushover? It was on PC and Amiga.

Same with Gobliiins, the original Dune, Speedball 2 (come on guys, nobody said Speedball 2 yet?) and anything by the Bitmap Brothers. People remember the crappy NES shoot em ups, but nobody is out here being nostalgic about Xenon, and that's a damn tragedy.

@gunstarred: Dreamweb is pretty cool, but I remember the PC version looking better? That seemed to be the case for a lot of Amiga games..

Anyway, Dreamweb was hella controversial for pixelated dong and violence!

Extreme Violence - shareware 2 player top down arena game.

Rome AD 92 (Rome Pathway to Power) - open world sandbox adventure game thing? This thing was crazy open ended for the times. Hint: steal a toga from the bathhouse.

What was the name of the game where (and I may be mis-remembering a lot of this stuff)

I think you were a cop (a bit cyberpunk), and it was from an overhead view, and it was billed as one of the first games with full voice acting and stuff. <<< was THAT Dreamweb?

edit: a quick google, and yes, that's totally the one. :)

Fire and Ice

Whether the PC or the Amiga version of a game was the better one generally depended on how high-end hardware the PC version supported. The Amiga could definitively wipe the floor with the EGA/Ad Lib PC of the late 80s, but in the 90s as (Super) VGA, Sound Blaster cards and CD-ROM drives became increasingly common the Amiga versions usually fell behind. And even in the 80s there were developers that supported certain expensive PC peripherals, like the Roland MT-32 music synthesizer for fantastic results.

I always had a soft spot for Return to Shufflepuck Cafe. And Sensible World of Soccer, obviously.

Significant but not to say all good games:

Full 3D 3rd person action adventure with multiple usable vehicle types - Hunter

Dark top down adventure with mature themes - Dreamweb

Purchased a HD for the Amiga just for the 11 disk swap fest - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Sophisticated 3D combat flight sims - F-117A Stealth Fighter and EF2000

And a special mention to Workbench OS.

The Full Experience

Get an Amiga 1200 with some hard drive space, Install Deluxe Paint, open the KingTut and Venus images in it but don't actually do much painting with it. Go through the install process for something like Fate of Atlantis. Maybe get involved in the Demoscene. Hopefully at some point during your time witness a Guru Meditation. And if there is time left play some Mods in Soundtracker and attach a microphone to a Technosound Turbo 2 and get your Dark Vader voice on.

@csl316 And now a quick Shadow of the Beast 2 death riff, yes?

Midwinter 2,awesome game.really ahead of its time.

Paradroid '90

Thunderhawk

@blacklagoon: Yeah, you said things and they are things that happened. Not sure how it relates to my post, but sure.

I mean, yeah I was there. I remember. The biggest go-to difference early on was sound. When the Amiga 500 first became popular PC gamers were normally stuck with an internal beeper. During the Amiga's lifespan PCs sort of figured out sound, with a lot of manual setup and multiple competing standards, but it worked. On video the Amiga caught the tail end of EGA being around and went from having an edge to lagging behind by the end of its run.

None of which is even tangentially related to the point I was making, which is that the Amiga was one in a set of competing home computer standards (the holy 16 bit trinity in that 87-92 period being the Amiga, the Atari ST and the "IBM PC"). Most games got ported over, and it was a mess even then to figure out what had originated where and which version was best (hint: not the Atari one). Amiga games had a... look and feel, though. Maybe it's just that there were some very specific developers with a very specific style working mainly out of the UK that led development on the Amiga, but the average gamer wasn't really aware of those technicalities as much.

So, again, when people talk about "best Amiga games" that's a bit of a misnomer if you understand "best Amiga exclusives". That wasn't a thing, it's a console-centric way of thinking about it. It's a lot more interesting to talk about best European games of the period that you probably knew from a PC port if you're American.

Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity and Valhalla: Before the War were fully voiced top down puzzle adventures. I remember them being very good and atmospheric.

I would also suggest Turrican II: The Final Fight. Of all the Amiga games I played as a kid, I still have fond memories of Turrican and still play it from time to time as an adult. Between the various platforms it released on, the Amiga version is definitely my favourite. Great soundtrack by Chris Hülsbeck, too.

If you want something for a show you should probably start with some of the impressive graphics, you've already shown Defender of the Crown (You should probably mention the correct year for that game) but there are other Cinemaware games. Some flight simulator would probably be a good idea F/A-18 Infiltrator is kind of easy to run and you can enjoy the spectacular view of your local area. Pretty much anything from Psygnosis should also work and for something more obscure The Guild of Thieves.

Other games of interest:

• Dungeon Master (I think this has been shown already also)
• Wings!
• Populous, or perhaps Populous II will look better and be a bit more intuitive.
• One of the Pinball games.
• Some shoot-em up, I like the Xenon II music but there are lot of alternatives like Battle Squadron, Katakis or R-Type.

@twolines:

Yep moonstone was awesome. especially with three friends. never got tired of chopping my brothers head off!

Oh, I have to second the mentions of The Settlers in here. My favorite in the series is still Settlers II, but the first game was really rad too.

There were a bunch of great cyberpunk adventure games too. You're already well acquainted with the Tex Murphy series, but there also was DreamWeb, Rise of the Dragon, B.A.T. and Interphase.

Oh, and Hired Guns by Psygnosis was a pretty interesting Dungeon Master style dungeon crawler set in a cyberpunk world and presented in a four-way-split-screen view. I have no idea what's up with the Giant Bomb wiki page for this game, as none of the screenshots on there are from the right game. Here's a screenshot from Mobygames though:

The main problem with getting into Amiga is that the fans are pretty loyal, almost to a fault. I'm one of them, we make some pretty radical claims sometimes...but i think that comes from seeing a pretty damn good machine with an amazing library of tiltes getting shunned by a large percentage of video game fans. You'd think people would be interested in seeing other versions of games and new titles they hadn't seen before. Anyway...

Although already mentioned, Flashback, Another World, Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder are all great titles. They are however available elsewhere, though i would say the Amiga versions are the best of the lot. I'm gonna slip in Bart vs The Space Mutants too...it sucks just as bad as the rest of them, but is probably the best version of that piece of shit.

Desert Strike on the Amiga is often overlooked and i personally think it is the better out of even the Megadrive/Genesis and SNES versions. Same goes for Populous, Civilization and Supremacy: Your Will Be Done

Speedball 2 by the Bitmap Brothers is a hell of a "Sports" game and scratches the same itch that i associate with Windjammers. By no means similar, they both ignite that intense competition. They also made Chaos Engine (also known as Soldiers of Fortune on SNES) and Cadaver too. Both excellent titles and can be pretty tough at times.

Rise of the Dragon has a lot of similarities Snatcher, and replicates a world similar Bladerunner. Along with it are a slew of great point and click adventure games, some of which many consider to be better than the PC versions.

It's a hard thing to recommend to someone that has never had any affinity for the machine. So many were focused solely on Nintendo or Sega, you could even say aggressively so, that it was really hard to recommend anything without it just being shunned or dismissed.

An Amiga Documentary has just been kickstarted i believe, from he same makers of "From Bedrooms to Billions"...both of them may be worth looking into.

You should play Stunts.

Also check out this amazing intro

Also Don Mattrick designed this game ?

Moonstone!
And i remember really liking WALKER :

oh, yes! Stunts is amazing. I've only played the PC version though, didn't even know it had been released on the Amiga.

It's pretty much the original Trackmania, and we used to share the tracks we had made in my school.

@redking56 said:

Lionheart MOTHERFUCKERS

I'm surprised no one has posted it yet.

Also Turrican. The Amiga version is actually the superioriest version. The Genesis/MegaDrive port wasn't a smooth transition and suffers from taking the controls which use UP for jump which causes many accidental jumps on a D-pad.

God Lionheart used to freak the hell out of me! Never enjoyed it as a result.

Does anyone remember Darkseed I think it was called? Point and Click game equally terrifying.

EDIT:

It is called Darkseed;

MOONSTONE!! Goddamn I loved that game, especially with other players. Super OTT gore. Watch out for the swamp monsters.

Really glad to hear Base Jumpers mentioned. That is some fantastic multiplayer fun right there especially when you start the jump handcuffed togeather. Grab 4 players and just scream at each other as you try to avoid obsticles as you decend.

Can't believe no one has mentioned Stunt Car Racer yet. Great game by its self but grab a link cable,two Amigas,two CRT's and two copies of the game. It blew our tiny minds back then.

Walker is good. Pilot a mech and blow everything to bits with keyboard and mouse controls. I found that game super hard!!

I think it,s been on other systems but the port of Midnight Resistance is fantastic!!

Would be great to see you guys mess with it on UPF or separate stream. R

These may not be the best games on the Amiga but they left a strong impression on me as a kid:

• Exile - Atmospheric open world sci-fi astronaut game. Read the manual due to complicated controls.
• Gobliiins - Solid and charming point-and-click puzzle adventure.
• Pang - Action puzzle. Especially fun with 2 players
• Wings of Fury - Side scrolling WWII flying game.
• Dyna Blaster - Bomberman. Still my favorite version of the franchise. Pretty fun single player mode.
• International Karate + - Fun controls and hilarious gameplay. Best with multiplayer.
• James Pond 2: Robocod - Platformer. Probably didn't age well.
• Mega Lo Mania
• Speedball 2
• Robocop 3 - An ambitious 3D mess, still kinda cool.
• The Spy Who Loved Me - Similar to spy hunter.

Obviously, some of these titles have C64 versions but the Amiga version is far superior. I recently went back and played a lot of these titles on the "Amiga Forever" emulator and I still really enjoyed them, that could just be nostalgia though.

Never got an Amiga. My father had the ZX Spectrum, another fine computer.

But I've always heard good things about MOONSTONE.

It's been so long since I played it, it's entirely possible I played the C64 version of the game and just don't remember. My friend had both a C64 and an Amiga and we'd spend hours going through pirated disks he'd get from the local "Commodore Club".

I do remember when he got his first hard drive. 20 freaking megabytes! No more disk swapping!!

The games I remember liking a lot on Amiga 500 were:

• Moonstone
• It Came from the Desert
• The Chaos Engine
• Turrican II: The Final Fight
• Paradroid 90

I also forgot to mention D/Generation...not mind blowing by any means but it is a hell of a lot of fun.

Faery Tale Adventure was one of my favorites as a child, but apparently there was also a Genesis/Megadrive port, I don't know how that was.

I was also a huge fan of Xenon 2.

Moonstone

Hired Guns

It Came from the Desert

I really need to get another hard drive for my A500 and get that thing fired up again.

Please take a look at Hybris! It has some of the best music..

Don't get me wrong, the Amiga version isn't bad. Way better than the PC version in every regard, but the C64 version has a loop of the original Devo song (Some Things Never Change) they use as theme music which plays during the loader in glorious 4 bit sound, and it's rad as hell.

Compare that to the Amiga version of the song:

As already mentioned in this thread, you can't really look at the Amiga as an isolated case in the the 16-bit computer landscape of the late 80s/early 90s. Between Amiga/ST/DOS, it had the best hardware for a few years and was the platform of choice for many European developers. As a result, from about 1986 to 1990, there are a lot of computer games that were either first or best on Amiga. This also includes pretty much every significant American-developed DOS game from that time. Around 1990 PCs started to pull ahead in genres that required raw CPU power and RAM, while the Amiga still had the upper hand in 2D action games for a few years.

What isn't significant: arcade/console ports or games in similar genres

This is usually the first thing people with a console background look for when approaching the Amiga. Most of the arcade/console to computer ports of that time were done with severe budget constraints and often without access to the original source code or design documents. There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part these games were better on consoles. The same is true for most original Western-developed games in these genres: they are usually inferior to the Japanese arcade/console games of that time.

Some exceptions (your mileage may vary): Lionheart, Fire & Ice, Ruff'N Tumble, Apidya, Mr. Nutz, Chaos Engine, BC Kid (best version of Bonk)

What is historically significant: unique takes on genres that didn't exist on any other platform at the time, some examples:

Typhoon Thompson: totally unique game by Dan "Choplifter" Gorlin. Accessible gameplay with a lot of depth and interesting risk-reward mechanics.

Carrier Command: action/strategy game in a 3D world. Probably requires to read a manual to understand what's going on (or just watch a video). Pretty mind-blowing in 1987.

Tower of Babel: puzzle game in a 3D world full of weird mechanical contraptions. You control 3 robots with different abilities.

Turrican II: Action-platformer with huge, non-linear levels. Heavy on exploration, which rewards you with the extra lives that you will need in order to progress.

Spindizzy Worlds: plays like an open-world version of Marble Madness with lots of puzzles.

The Sentinel: unique action/strategy hybrid in a 3D world.

Cadaver: arguably the best of the Euro-style, isometric action adventures. Puzzle-heavy, and very hard.

Paradroid 90: action/strategy game, a remake of the original Paradroid.

Spherical: the sequel that Solomon's Key never got. Adds a unique twist: you have to guide a sphere to the exit. Tons of extras, secrets, and boss fights.

KULT: very unique p&c adventure in a post-apocalyptic setting

Absolute classics that most people should already be aware of, so I will only mention them briefly. Most of them are best/first on Amiga: Populous 1+2, Dungeon Master, Elite (plus sequels), Pirates!, Lemmings (unique 2 player mode with 2 mice), F16 Falcon, Battle Isle, Settlers, Magnetic Scroll adventures, the Cinemaware games (all first on Amiga), plus all the ports of DOS-classics by Sierra, LucasArts, Origin, Microprose, EA, Interplay, Infocom, etc

I'd disagree with Sierra and LucasArts games being best on Amiga. Sierra never seemed to take much advantage of the Amiga graphically, and the music was usually just downgraded versions of the DOS MT-32 soundtracks. Given that the MT-32 is easy to emulate these days, the DOS versions are easily the better option.

Same with LucasArts really... While they usually did improve the graphics for the Amiga release, they would often release even fancier versions of their games a year or two later, whether for DOS or for more obsucre platforms like the FM-TOWNS. And whoever was doing the Amiga music for them seemed mediocre at best. In the case of Maniac Mansion for example, I'd take the fantastic PC Speaker music of the enhanced DOS version over the Amiga music any day of the week.

Everyone who mentioned MegaLoMania is my friend for life.

That was my gateway drug to strategy games. Just loved it.

@blacklagoon:

I don't disagree, but I didn't say all of these games are best on Amiga. For releases from about 1990 onward DOS-PCs started to outperform Amigas in most areas, with the exception of 2D action games that required things like smooth scrolling and lots of moving objects. MT-32 support in games didn't happen before late 1988 (King's Quest 4), and wasn't common in most DOS games before 1990. Sierra is the obvious exception here. There are actually a handful of Sierra Amiga ports with MT-32 support as well. The early Lucas games, like MM and Zak, look pretty much identical on Amiga and DOS. Neither version has particularly good music, so that is probably not something worth arguing about.

I would suggest The Killing Game Show by Psygnosis.

Moonstone, Walker & Robocop 3.

And Project X!

The Secret of Monkey Island

The Amiga had the best version of Stunt Car Racer. Had two Amigas and a null modem cable for multiplayer. There were some some good shmups like Hybris and Xenon 2. I played a bit of Dark Castle. The Psygnosis games all had the best intros, and some of the games were pretty good as well. Shadow of the Beast, Blood Money, Armour-Geddon, the Lemmings games, Baal. The bitmap brothers games were fun - Speedball, Speedball 2, GODS. I enjoyed the Cinemaware sports games, plus Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger, SDI. I played the early Bullfrog games on Amiga first - Populous, Powermonger.

One game I remember enjoying a lot was Wings. An old WWI flying game with both "sim like" stages and more arcady bombing and strafing missions. I remember it mostly because of the kind of cut-scenes it had between missions. A bit like Wing Commander, but in WWI.

I also remember playing a lot of Silent Service, but I'm not sure if it was the first one on C64 or the followup on Amiga. The Bards Tale games are similar, I remember playing them but not on which platform.

Some other games I recall playing a lot that don't seem to have been mentioned: Narco Police and Lost Patrol.

And previously mentioned games I played a lot are: Moonstone, Dungeon Master, Super Cars 2, Pinball Fantasies/Illusions, Cannon Fodder, It Came From The Desert, Rick Dangerous, Alien Breed, Defender of the Crown, Speedball 2, Lemmings, all the Lucas Arts games.

When I grew up in Sweden (born in the late 70's) you had a Commodore 64, Amiga or Atari. Only the younger generations had consoles. So there are perhaps several games that existed on multiple platforms, but that wasn't really something I cared all that much about at that point. (Until I switched to PC mid 90's.)