Happy (belated) 40th, for the Commodore Amiga!

I still remember owning a ZX Spectrum and seeing and hearing an Amiga running the Newtek Demo Reel in the local computer shop. What a leap. Fortunately I started my first job soon after and that's the first thing I saved up for
 
Everyone agreed that those were real problems, for example Xenon 2 was a great game but the overall framerate was unacceptable and it was a game born already in the good days of the lifecycle of Amiga. If you look very well to games like Shadow of the Beast you don't see nothing special except a good framerate and a lot of colors on screen but there's few sprites on screen and one or two big BOBs. I never loved it at all
Xenon 2 was an Atari ST port, so it didn't leverage any of the Amiga's features other than the sampled intro song (which was then replaced by a massively downgraded version for the actual game).

There were countless games like that. Jerky vertical scrolling, no horizontal scrolling, no hardware sprites, 16 colours. Even games that are well regarded, like the Bitmap Bros games and some Psygnosis stuff. I could spot them a mile off.

Having the ST around really crippled a lot of the Amiga's library, since developers targeted their game at the weaker hardware.
 
Personally the best Amiga games were ones that were designed for computers usually original & not ports of arcade or console games. It's the original stuff that made it fun to play, things that didn't come over to consoles usually although in the later years a lot of games that started off on the 8&16 bit computers ended up on consoles.

One of my faves even now is Lucasarts night shift although over the years I have played a good portion of the amigas library including a lot of the stuff that was pd shareware as my friend used to send off for bunches of disks full of original demos or games. Every weekend would go over to his place to try out the newest arrivals.

Now I just play via emulation on pc however I did grab a a500 mini which replaced me playing on pc as that offers a more than satisfactory experience it needs a bit of tinkering here and there but pretty much everything I have thrown at it so far has eventually worked.

Still remember playing life and death. At middle school age sat there with my friend trying to figure out how to do an appendicectomy, I swear that game was aimed at medical students only as the manual read like gibberish. It took a hell of a long time till we figured out how to do it without instant death as if you clicked on the wrong place it was instant failure. Long before the Internet ever existed and you could look up tutorials to make things easy. It's stuff like that which made the home computer era fantastic.
 
Yes, I remember that dicotomy - Computer are serious and console are for games or something like that
That's one of the reasons in my opinion that Sega rocked that market: they had great arcade games and there were arcades in all the world

Everybody wanted real Sega ported Arcade Games instead of bad US Gold conversions XD

Anyway fanboysm was not a thing at that time, I remember bringing my SNes at home of a friend of mine wich had Megadrive; we played both consoles all the weekend and I went at home.
A couple of week later I bought a Megadrive inspired by that weekend and I went to my frien's house to show it to him.
He was playing with his brand new Snes

In my comprehensive school, consoles were seen for little kids or people with no friends, where the only girl they kissed was MUM, There was a real stigma against consoles back then, in my neck of the woods. That didn't start to really change until Sonic on the Mega Drive, where everyone fell in love with the character and the game and where sales exploded beyond belief.

Fanboys were alive and well at my schools, even at a Jr level. Us ZX Spectrum fans made fun of the 1 C64 owner, then in my comp it was how every SNES game had slowdown and no good sports games

It was just like how us Football fans would act, even at school. Fanboys for gaming are very much like fanboys for football teams. It's all very tribal, can be at times very childish and where both throw around insults, but you can't deny their love and passion for the brand, and where the plastics, the casuals or money men in suits will never get or understand
 
I was in the demo scene in that days, mostly C64

We all bought Amiga so quickly that we were stealing it each other in the Stores

Everyone agreed that those were real problems, for example Xenon 2 was a great game but the overall framerate was unacceptable and it was a game born already in the good days of the lifecycle of Amiga. If you look very well to games like Shadow of the Beast you don't see nothing special except a good framerate and a lot of colors on screen but there's few sprites on screen and one or two big BOBs. I never loved it at all

The real Amiga's problem was the choiche of rigid hardware un-upgradable in a world were the hardware boom was ramping quiclky
Cool!
I never did any of that but enjoyed the creations. I had so many demos, loved that stuff!

I just used Demomaker and made some collections starting with some simplistic sinus text scroll with some nonsense text, then off to CLI and a simple numbered list, stuff like that.

But all of it was fun, the whole era, you could do so much by yourself, I loved that. I used to make music and pixel art and animations. Even made a whole (crappy) game in AMOS. So many great memories!

I agree on the framerate in Xenon 2. I think it was 25fps. But Shadow of the Beast ran smoothly, though as you say there were few animation frames. I still loved it though. Can still enjoy it. Gameplay 5… Graphics 10!
 
Xenon 2 was an Atari ST port, so it didn't leverage any of the Amiga's features other than the sampled intro song (which was then replaced by a massively downgraded version for the actual game).

There were countless games like that. Jerky vertical scrolling, no horizontal scrolling, no hardware sprites, 16 colours. Even games that are well regarded, like the Bitmap Bros games and some Psygnosis stuff. I could spot them a mile off.

Having the ST around really crippled a lot of the Amiga's library, since developers targeted their game at the weaker hardware.

Absolutely true. Games tailor made for the Amiga looked and sounded so much better than Atari ST ports but because of the popularity of the ST in the UK, that's what we got for the most part with unfortunately few exceptions.
 
I was in the demo scene in that days, mostly C64

We all bought Amiga so quickly that we were stealing it each other in the Stores

Everyone agreed that those were real problems, for example Xenon 2 was a great game but the overall framerate was unacceptable and it was a game born already in the good days of the lifecycle of Amiga. If you look very well to games like Shadow of the Beast you don't see nothing special except a good framerate and a lot of colors on screen but there's few sprites on screen and one or two big BOBs. I never loved it at all

The real Amiga's problem was the choiche of rigid hardware un-upgradable in a world were the hardware boom was ramping quiclky

Me and my friends were hanging around in the scene in Europe (Netherlands). We didn't really do much of importance to be honest, mostly went to parties. I created a bunch of Soundtracker songs in those days. The only thing I could find on the net was this cracktro which has my music. There's a System Z music disk out there that has 6 tracks but I can't find it anywhere.

 
A500 was the first computer of any kind that came into our house.

I loved Shadow of the Beast 2, Spiderman and the James Pond games.

But I think its biggest influence for me was that it opened the door to videogames as a whole. A year or two later my Mum allowed me to get a megadrive. Without the Amiga showing her that computers weren't a bad influence I doubt she'd have allowed it!
 
Me and my friends were hanging around in the scene in Europe (Netherlands). We didn't really do much of importance to be honest, mostly went to parties. I created a bunch of Soundtracker songs in those days. The only thing I could find on the net was this cracktro which has my music. There's a System Z music disk out there that has 6 tracks but I can't find it anywhere.



What a time to be alive
 
lmao

It was only used to backup your purchased games of course!
If you was truly upper class you'd be down the local bootsale rooting out the fat bloke with his dodgy yellow floppies and chucking him 50p.. 👀

I distinctly remember acquiring a certain French copy of Flashback and then a few mates and me bugging a French teacher what any of this crazy language meant over the proceeding week

Who says gaming has never been educational.. :unsure:

Ended up not being a ponce and bought it when it finally came out over here, then having all those mates practically live with me for two weeks :messenger_unamused:
 
If you was truly upper class you'd be down the local bootsale rooting out the fat bloke with his dodgy yellow floppies and chucking him 50p.. 👀

I distinctly remember acquiring a certain French copy of Flashback and then a few mates and me bugging a French teacher what any of this crazy language meant over the proceeding week

Who says gaming has never been educational.. :unsure:

Ended up not being a ponce and bought it when it finally came out over here, then having all those mates practically live with me for two weeks :messenger_unamused:
lol
It's been 40 years, can we finally talk about this or is the whole thing still hush-hush around here?

I grew up during the C64 era, back then few even understood that copying a cassette tape wasn't actually allowed, kids swapped cassette tapes on the school yard.
 
Don't know if anyone else did this. But I had paper round and Saturday job and persuaded my mum to buy me the Amiga from Kayes Catalogue (think that's what it was called, there were a few of them at the time). You could buy things and pay weekly for a year.

Reminiscing, I also have fond nerdy memories of Might and Magic III and Champions of Krynn.
Holy crap, Kayes!
That's the only way you'd afford anything from them (on the drip)
That or selling internal organs.
Their prices were insane iirc 🤔
 
I never had one, but boy did I yearn for one.
Sucked being poor and a kid.
You had to learn to do a lot of yearning back then.
 
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lol
It's been 40 years, can we finally talk about this or is the whole thing still hush-hush around here?
👀

I hope not, this stuffs been on abandonware for years!

But I do actually own most boxed Amiga games these days. The state of them may vary though..

I grew up during the C64 era, back then few even understood that copying a cassette tape wasn't actually allowed, kids swapped cassette tapes on the school yard.
Same here. Although weirdly the whole piracy issue was never really a factor for me with the C64, you could literally buy tapes from the local corner shop down here, and by god did I buy some crap :messenger_tears_of_joy:

It's crazy to think back to how many people stocked this stuff, literally any market or shops had rows upon rows of tapes

Although the storage has been a pain in the last few years and god knows if half of them still run.
 
Absolutely true. Games tailor made for the Amiga looked and sounded so much better than Atari ST ports but because of the popularity of the ST in the UK, that's what we got for the most part with unfortunately few exceptions.
Here's a couple I remember as being technically superior at the time. Not the greatest games, but smooth scrolling and overscan mode, so the picture went all the way to the edge of the TV with no nasty borders.

Skidz (by Core Design)



Pac-Mania (arcade conversion)



For comparison, the Atari ST version of Pac-Mania - this was basically the quality of most of the Amiga library, at least until the ST did the decent thing and died off.

 
I did work experience through secondary school, with a computer shop called Calculus.
Some great people working there,great memories.
Anyway, last day I was there, the boss got me to pack away this Amiga 1200(?) back in it's packaging.
Me being young and delusional, I had this crazy idea that he was doing this in order to present me with it for all my *ahem* hardwork during my time there.
Sort of a "Jim'll fix it" moment, but without all that pesky sexual abuse and whatnot.
I must of been high.
I did get two Snes pads and a tenner though, so that was definitely something.
Hope those guys are doing well.
 
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👀

I hope not, this stuffs been on abandonware for years!

But I do actually own most boxed Amiga games these days. The state of them may vary though..


Same here. Although weirdly the whole piracy issue was never really a factor for me with the C64, you could literally buy tapes from the local corner shop down here, and by god did I buy some crap :messenger_tears_of_joy:

It's crazy to think back to how many people stocked this stuff, literally any market or shops had rows upon rows of tapes

Although the storage has been a pain in the last few years and god knows if half of them still run.
Yeah I mean could talk about this all day long but at least in the past it was frowned upon. But maybe a certain age of the games makes it less problematic? 40 years is a long time…
Aging Matt Damon GIF


But I too bought a ton of games during the Commodore era, must have hundreds of cassettes and diskettes and a whole bunch of multi game collections too.

At this point it's a real concern how to actually make things survive... I can get load error on some games. Will the collection survive 10 more years?

On the Amiga I've ripped floppies with a Kryoflux ripper where you can get them into adf files for emulators. All my Soundtracker modules and Deluxe Paint art and the AMOS game is throughly backupped! Plus some games I just don't want to lose.

On the C64, nothing yet…

Anyhow I just think it's cool that there are people who're still interested in this era of games.

I have some of my all-time favorites on the Amiga. Turrican 1 and 2 for me are among the absolute best, not quite the level of Super Metroid but they're fantastic, and amazing music. The Digital Illusions (DICE) Pinball Dreams and Pinball Illusions are up there as well, so cool. Dungeon Master is an absolute classic too. I really liked the Bitmap Brothers games too, Gods, Cadaver. Sierra's adventures, I especially like Space Quest 3. And System 3's Ninja Remix! I'm a rabid fanboy of everything The Last Ninja, I can see where they fail but I still love them, at least C64 TLN1, LN2 and Amiga NR. Last Ninja 2 on the Amiga ported by Activision was a joke, hilarious animations. Music was still great though. (There is a Last Ninja collection coming out soon btw! Kickstarter, they're supposedly doing final touches now). Big fan of Rick Dangerous as well, one of the more brutal trial and error games from that era that I've finished.

But there are so many. I'll stop now.
 
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Yeah I mean could talk about this all day long but at least in the past it was frowned upon. But maybe a certain age of the games makes it less problematic? 40 years is a long time…
Aging Matt Damon GIF


But I too bought a ton of games during the Commodore era, must have hundreds of cassettes and diskettes and a whole bunch of multi game collections too.

At this point it's a real concern how to actually make things survive... I can get load error on some games. Will the collection survive 10 more years?

On the Amiga I've ripped floppies with a Kryoflux ripper where you can get them into adf files for emulators. All my Soundtracker modules and Deluxe Paint art and the AMOS game is throughly backupped! Plus some games I just don't want to lose.

On the C64, nothing yet…

Anyhow I just think it's cool that there are people who're still interested in this era of games.

I have some of my all-time favorites on the Amiga. Turrican 1 and 2 for me are among the absolute best, not quite the level of Super Metroid but they're fantastic, and amazing music. The Digital Illusions (DICE) Pinball Dreams and Pinball Illusions are up there as well, so cool. Dungeon Master is an absolute classic too. I really liked the Bitmap Brothers games too, Gods, Cadaver. Sierra's adventures, I especially like Space Quest 3. And System 3's Ninja Remix! I'm a rabid fanboy of everything The Last Ninja, I can see where they fail but I still love them, at least C64 TLN1, LN2 and Amiga NR. Last Ninja 2 on the Amiga ported by Activision was a joke, hilarious animations. Music was still great though. (There is a Last Ninja collection coming out soon btw! Kickstarter, they're supposedly doing final touches now). Big fan of Rick Dangerous as well, one of the more brutal trial and error games from that era that I've finished.

But there are so many. I'll stop now.
Man after my own heart! All of it! 🫡

I've played all of those! And aye, that Amiga version of last Ninja was complete trash, as was Creatures! There were quite a few C64 version I preferred over their Amiga counterpart

You've just given my brain a kick too about deluxe paint! I used to give my mate games I'd adjusted the boot block on to show page 3 models when the game first booted, just to trip him out, it took ages just for a crap joke.. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

I'll check out that kick starter though :unsure:
 
Man after my own heart! All of it! 🫡

I've played all of those! And aye, that Amiga version of last Ninja was complete trash, as was Creatures! There were quite a few C64 version I preferred over their Amiga counterpart

You've just given my brain a kick too about deluxe paint! I used to give my mate games I'd adjusted the boot block on to show page 3 models when the game first booted, just to trip him out, it took ages just for a crap joke.. :messenger_tears_of_joy:

I'll check out that kick starter though :unsure:
Heh great idea
Deluxe Paint was legit great, the perfect program to learn both pixel art and animation.

To touch on a bit of detail, I believe the Amiga had some special hardware that at the time made the mouse cursor move extremely smoothly over the screen compared to PC. Made everything using a mouse so much more pleasant.

Did you play Rock'n Roll by the way? It had you going bananas with the mouse to control a ball in a labyrinth. Great and unique game!
 
Everyone's favorite piece of Amiga software.

Come-copiare-un-file-da-pendrive-USB-a-dischetto-XCopy-X-Copy-Pro-operation-done-1992.jpg
In my country the retail shop i bought my Amiga games used that software to sell the games. They just had a folder with a huge list of games, ppl picked whatever games by name then had to wait for them to copy them and sell them pretty cheap. They also sold the software itself as well. Some years later the store was forced to close down for piracy.
 
So many great memories.

I got my kid to play some Amiga games recently (13 year old) and as he played, "Man, the graphics are not great but this is so much effin fun!"

Yup. He gets it :)
 
To touch on a bit of detail, I believe the Amiga had some special hardware that at the time made the mouse cursor move extremely smoothly over the screen compared to PC. Made everything using a mouse so much more pleasant.
Not only smoother, but the sound of the Amiga won me out over the PC. I just couldn't handle that utterly trash sound of the PC.

From Syndicate to Doom, I just couldn't do it, I was a bit of a snob when it came to sound, especially after both the C64 and Amiga had such brilliant musical ditties.. Nes, Snes, Megadrive, nothing came close

Doom just reminded of weird lift music back then on the pc, tinny and cheap



..And we had Gloom 👀



I missed out on Doom originally, It wasn't until the PS1 version that Doom sucker punched me, and that soundtrack? Perfection.

Did you play Rock'n Roll by the way? It had you going bananas with the mouse to control a ball in a labyrinth. Great and unique game!
You picked the one game I've never played!! What are the chances :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
Not my first but my first serious games machine. My first was a C64.
I was never into the consoles or computers in the C64 days, it was Football, Music going out on the drink etc, i had a few mates who had a Commodore 64's and Atari/Sega machines, they were ok but i never got hooked until one friend showed me his Atari ST and Dungeon Master game so when i decided to join in, the advice was to go Amiga, so we all join in different ways and paths in the end.
 
I was never into the consoles or computers in the C64 days, it was Football, Music going out on the drink etc, i had a few mates who had a Commodore 64's and Atari/Sega machines, they were ok but i never got hooked until one friend showed me his Atari ST and Dungeon Master game so when i decided to join in, the advice was to go Amiga, so we all join in different ways and paths in the end.
Can you remember the first Amiga game you tried?

I remember popping round this rich girls house I used to be mates with. An utterly shiny Amiga 500 sat in her room, and she loaded up Robocop, it was all over..

I went home and whinged like a maniac

I was about 9 or 10, I'd only ever seen such goodness in an Arcade.. :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
Can you remember the first Amiga game you tried?
Mate showed me Budbrain Megademo and Puggs in Space.

First game was Blood Money though.



EDIT: just realised Budbrain demo might not tick all the right boxes in this day and age so removed the link but go find it on YT at your leisure.
 
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So many great memories.

I got my kid to play some Amiga games recently (13 year old) and as he played, "Man, the graphics are not great but this is so much effin fun!"

Yup. He gets it :)
Yeah there is still hope for the younger generation, my kids play all kinds of old games. The biggest issue for them with the Commodore computers is the joystick, they grew up with console controllers.
I'm the opposite, today I can handle a controller well but when I got the SNES in the middle of the 90s I had to put in serious time to learn how to handle that tiny dpad. Felt almost impossible to do everything I did with the whole wrist with just the thumb!
 
You picked the one game I've never played!! What are the chances :messenger_tears_of_joy:
Oh it's a real gem! Music by Chris Huelbeck, you know Turrican. Go play it 👍


In case you don't have an Amiga. No idea how it's on other devices or if there is some default emulation black magic going on, but it plays extremely well on emulator on Xbox. For some unknown reason this 80s game works perfectly with the Xbox controller's analog stick, you get proper 360 degrees analog controls, and it feels superb.

But to get the proper difficulty and stress it should be played with a mouse. You'll understand when you try it!
 
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If you had an Amiga, you had to have a Zipstick. As far as I know, anyway.
Being able to use your own images like those created in Deluxe Paint as stages in Worms.
I was easily entertained in Lemmings 2 with the Super Lemming chasing my cursor around before I just ran him into a high wall.

And not saying I did this but it may have happened that someone (let's call him SastorCoze) made a copy of Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge which used the anti piracy method of being given page/line/word number for the really thick instruction manual. So ended up loading the game multiple times and failing the word each time just to record every position/word that would come up. Once it started repeating constantly I took it as there were no more words to record. It was a long list. Think after all that, I may have played the game once.

But there were some crazy anti-piracy ideas back then. the code wheels seemed the most popular. And some methods were hard to read due to being black text on black background.
 
Oh it's a real gem! Music by Chris Huelbeck, you know Turrican. Go play it 👍


In case you don't have an Amiga. No idea how it's on other devices or if there is some default emulation black magic going on, but it plays extremely well on emulator on Xbox. For some unknown reason this 80s game works perfectly with the Xbox controller's analog stick, you get proper 360 degrees analog controls, and it feels superb.

But to get the proper difficulty and stress it should be played with a mouse. You'll understand when you try it!

Love Chris Huelbeck!

I'll stick it on me Deck, infact, it might already be on it, I'll have to check :unsure:

If you ever have the chance, it's well worth checking out the Amiga emulation on the Steam Deck, I can honestly say it's been second to none. The only game I had a nightmare running was Hired Guns, after that, perfect!

I've always wanted a portable Amiga. I also bought a couple of Amiga Mini's but I've still yet to actually get stuck in and mess around with them.
 
Yeah there is still hope for the younger generation, my kids play all kinds of old games. The biggest issue for them with the Commodore computers is the joystick, they grew up with console controllers.
I'm the opposite, today I can handle a controller well but when I got the SNES in the middle of the 90s I had to put in serious time to learn how to handle that tiny dpad. Felt almost impossible to do everything I did with the whole wrist with just the thumb!
I'm not sure I could use a joystick now
 
Oh man, love the Amiga generation SO much! I started out on a C64 but weaseled my grandma into buying me a full Amiga 500 setup, complete with a Commodore 1084 monitor and later I added an external disc drive. I spent so much time working on a boot disk setup and eventually had a completely customized boot setup that required TWO FUCKING DISKS!! I was cooking with gas, my brothers!

Eventually I bought an Amiga 2000 but sadly it didn't see near as much as my 500 did because I hopped into PC gaming not too long thereafter and that was the end of that.

So many good memories, though, gaming on those systems. I still remember to this day the first time I saw Shadow of the Beast running on it. Blew me away, in a way that no game has since, really. You never truly get to recapture that first moment of awe, and for me it is with the Amiga. :messenger_heart::messenger_fire::messenger_heart:
 
Love Chris Huelbeck!

I'll stick it on me Deck, infact, it might already be on it, I'll have to check :unsure:

If you ever have the chance, it's well worth checking out the Amiga emulation on the Steam Deck, I can honestly say it's been second to none. The only game I had a nightmare running was Hired Guns, after that, perfect!

I've always wanted a portable Amiga. I also bought a couple of Amiga Mini's but I've still yet to actually get stuck in and mess around with them.
Oh wow that sounds amazing!
 
Oh wow that sounds amazing!
Honestly, it wasn't that hard to set up either.

I've spent years buying loads of crappy tablets, hand helds, anything you can think of, just to have a proper on the go hand held Amiga system.

The Deck did exactly what I wanted.

The amount of bumph I've done over the years is insane :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
Also, Amiga got a really nice port of Super Street Fighter II, after us gold' disaster port of champion edition:


That's a bit of a "stretch" to say the port was really nice, I mean lets face it, this game should have been on the CD32/A1200 from the get-go! (And the port they did do for the cd32 is god-awful, even if it looks the part) here on the A500 things look smaller, and "muddier" on top of the fact that the backgrounds aren't animated, (apart from maybe Cammy's)? Granted it runs better than the shambles US Gold did, but maybe they purposely made it bad, because they didn't care if they lost money on it....it was particularly these 2 games, Streetfighter 2, and Doom, that told you that whatever Commodore/Amiga had, it just couldn't cut it, when you look at the ports the SNES and Genesis had....and on top of that, look at what this game looked like on the "Japanese equivalent" Amiga:



As mentioned at the top of this thread about the X68000 this is the version the A1200 and CD32 should have had of the game...and had that machine launched in the West in 88/1989, then I think Commodore would have been in trouble a lot sooner..
 
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I'm not sure I could use a joystick now
It's like riding a bike, it'll feel like you've done nothing else in like 5 seconds.

Side scroller: Joystick left/right and you walk left/right, jump by flicking a stick up, crouch by pressing down, crouch+button for a low attack, up+button for jump kick or something like that, etc. Everything is absolutely natural, imo.

And for shmups it's perfection. Tac-2 joystick and mashing sturdy metal buttons.

Games like The Last Ninja with super advanced 8-way controls take some time to get used to. But for me they're natural too, can't play it using any other control method.

Biggest problem is when keys are used too. Luckily they usually aren't needed in the middle of the action. But in Turrican you have to press space for a smart bomb/wave. Unless you have a wico stick with secondary fire on the other button!
 
Can you remember the first Amiga game you tried?

I remember popping round this rich girls house I used to be mates with. An utterly shiny Amiga 500 sat in her room, and she loaded up Robocop, it was all over..

I went home and whinged like a maniac

I was about 9 or 10, I'd only ever seen such goodness in an Arcade.. :messenger_tears_of_joy:
It was Dungeon Master. but afterwards i bought Kick Off, Sensible Soccer, Silent Service, Curse of the Azure Bonds A D&D game and i used to get the Microprose flight sim games and play them quite a bit as well, i had a load of em and can't remember them all lol.
 
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