Amiga Schmups

[Dewt]

I mean I liked Megablast (thought Xenon 1 was ugly) and R Type had a good conversion but were there many schmups on Amiga that weren't disappointingly ploddy and second-rate?

Blood Money is considered a classic but everything moves in a straight line at the same speed and ugghgh

Researching a bit... found these:

Battle Squadron - didn't have this but it looks great

Hybris looks amazing too

Katakis- Also great

So the answer is yes, lots of great schmups but I didn't have any of them.



Did you?

[Mister Six]

Was never really a fan of these kinds of things, but Apidya and Agony had interesting "ships", at least (a wasp and an owl, respectively). Team 17's Project-X was also supposed to be stupidly hard, until they released an easier version for the CD-32.

I quite liked Uridium 2 and SWIV but they probably don't count.

[Cold Meat Platter]

Swiv and Banshee are worth a look.

Never had an amiga but always had flatmates that did around that time.

[ImmaculateClump]

I think the amiga was the domain of the euroshump, sadly.
I'm guessing the early days of PC gaming were similarly afflicted as you often see people on r/schumps going "Here, can anyone remember this game I played when I was 10? It was fucking SHHHHIT by the sounds of it!"

Apidya is the only one I remember fondly and I'm assuming nostalgia's rosy tint is doing most of the heavy lifting there.

Shooting games originated in Japan and evolved at a pace.
It's sort of like Europop where they're always ten years behind doing a naff "thumbs up" in a leather jacket.

It'd be nice if there were lots of separate backward engineering, yielding lots of unique, interesting, punky, experimental results.
But it was more like someone tasted a slice of cake on holiday and decided to make one from scratch at home without knowing any of the ingredients or even which side of the pan they were meant to fry it on, and then just shared that with all the other villagers.

Instead of lots of interesting offshoots, we just got the "euroshmup" subgenre. Analogue movement, lots of dead air, enormous hitboxes, bullet sponge enemies, health bars, typhoid.

[Dewt]

Shooting games originated in Japan and evolved at a pace.
It's sort of like Europop where they're always ten years behind doing a naff "thumbs up" in a leather jacket.

It seems like the European schmups were generated as products and you'd be lucky if they turned out as something the average player would give a shit about, whereas the Japanese ones were developed as part of a genuine culture that developed around them.

I can't think of anybody heading over to UK arcades specifically to play schmups.

[ImmaculateClump]

I was such a graphics whore back in the amiga days. I can remember wetting my knickers over that Psygnosis owl, and yeah, the team-17 stuff looked amazing too. Shame the substance wasn't there to back up the style.

I can't think of anybody heading over to UK arcades specifically to play schmups.

Japanese players voted on their ten favourite shooting games of the last decade in a recent twitter poll and the peerless "Blue Revolver" came 7th.
Yer man Danbo is from Glasgow, if you can imagine such a thing! So, you never know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IP6Qz8G-CM

Excellent trailer, but perhaps not the greatest advertisement if you're hoping to scoop up impulse buys from the shmup-curious.
It's so self harmingly geared right at it's tiny audience, I love it.
You're either "Fuuuuuck." eyes wide, watching right to the end and silently mouthing the words "Whip me, daddy" or you get 5 seconds in and you're like "streamlined digital dejection? No, you're alright ... not for me"

[fflip]

Battle Squadron is a goto game in my mind for imparting a really strong kinaesthetic sensation. The 'clink clink' of metal ships and scenery, the slow and (not sluggish, but) stately speed things move at, the amply wide play area to 'explore' with side scrolling, the garishly impactful sound effects. It all feels very chunky and solid and sure. I get a similar nice feeling from some Toaplan games (Twin Cobra... "rat-a-tat-a-tat").

I agree with the euroshmup criticism for a lot of them on the Amiga. Apidya starts strong with solid gameplay and glorious music but I repeatedly find myself losing interest somewhere in the 2nd 'world' or so, after dying and getting powered down you're suddenly getting badgered by 'bullet sponge enemies' real bad. Battle Squadron's enemies are a little spongy as well though, so why is that good and Apidya bad? I guess, thinking now, that Squadron is very well tuned in conjunction with the low speed - there's always precisely enough space and time to destroy enough enemies for some satisfaction and some safe passage, whatever weapon you have.

Hybris is by the same developer as Battle Squadron and isn't bad either. Apparently the games were predominantly written by 2 guys who were only 16-18 years old and still in school while they made it! Fantastic work.

(Actually I've made my peace with Apidya nowadays; it's not so bad if you choose the right weapons, and they do only downgrade rather than disappear when you die).