From Jonnydigital.com, the only reliable source
The following are a few Amiga games I recommend. See also my guide on how to set up WinUAE, an Amiga emulator for Windows.
Myth is an excellent platform game that takes the hero through worlds themed on various mythologies: Greek, Norse, and Egyptian. Special to this game is that it uses primarily melee weapons, unlike most platform games which use laser guns or the like, and the player can switch between weapons.
Ruff 'n' Tumble is a fun platform shooter with excellent gameplay, graphics and music. You shoot robots with a laser gun of some sort while collecting marbles. You can shoot forward, upward and diagonally. Powerups increase the maximum of your gun's power bar, which depletes quickly with time (for power-up guns you pick up) or depletes as you fire, regenerates when you stop, and penalizes your gun's rate of fire when low (for your regular gun). There's an element of strategy as you choose between extending your powerup gun duration and extending your regular gun's power when the powerup gun runs out.
Soccer Kid is a game where your weapon is a football (soccer ball). Soccer Kid can perform a fantastic array of skillful trick kicks in order to hit opponents, pick up items or catapult himself upward. His goal is to collect his missing football cards as he traverses the world to find the five pieces of the World Cup (stolen by an alien, of course), and he has to find it on time for the 1994 World Cup. A particularly nice touch is that you can choose Soccer Kid's strip colour.
Apidya is a side-scrolling shootemup where you control a wasp, battling against other insects, spiders and garden wildlife. It's one of the best shootemups on the Amiga and is produced by Team 17, who later went on to make Worms. Apidya more or less assumes you'll own an autofire joystick. Apidya has been released free to download at Dream17.
Deluxe Galaga is a top-down scrolling Galaga clone which regularly appears on top Amiga game lists even though it's a free public domain game rather than a commercial release. The author has since released a PC and Mac version named Warblade.
UFO: Enemy Unknown (in the US: X-Com: UFO Defense) is a turn-based, squad-based strategy game in which you control troops who raid UFO landing sites for technology to use against an impending alien invasion. Like Master of Orion II, UFO has both tactical combat and a significant research and resource management aspect as you reverse-engineer, produce and sell alien technology. What particularly appeals to me is that you start out with only 20th Century technology (the game begins in 1999) and research or reverse-engineer advanced technologies yourself. The DOS version is available to buy on Steam.
K240 is a real-time space colonization game in which you compete with aliens to establish mining colonies on asteroids. Your weapons include missiles and ships, both of which require certain ore to produce, and what minerals you don't use can be sold back to the empire. You can buy hi-tech blueprints for new buildings, weapons, or upgrades to existing technologies. K240 has slightly dystopian undertones (which may be unintentional): workers sometimes escape on a stolen ship, or stage a revolt, requiring security centres to be built; citizen morale is otherwise no concern of the player. K240 was re-released on the Best of Gremlin CD in 2000.
Page created: 27th September 2009. Last updated: 16th January 2010