Amiga Musings and Commodore Collections

Welcome to the setup! Retro computers may be a personal favourite of mine to collect, but the one downside is that it means I have countless keyboards and mice spread across my limited desk space. My most recent addition to the collection from just last week is a Commodore C64c, which has been on my wishlist for a long time. Haven't used it heaps yet, waiting for a replacement power supply unit before I start using it regularly. The Commodore 64 PSU is infamous and commonly referred to as "The Brick of Death" due to how prone it is to failing and overloading and frying the computer, so I'd much rather wait until I have a safer modern replacement PSU.

In the meanwhile I've been playing more on the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga model I own is an Amiga 600, a bit limited in its use and compatibility unfortunately but nonetheless does what it can do well. Eventually I would love to upgrade to an Amiga 1200, but given the prices those go for, that would be a very tall order. One day, hopefully. Something I'd also love is a method of getting pixel-perfect screenshots from Amiga games on original hardware, of the same quality I can get for Mac OS games in the Macsimum Archives reviews. I haven't found any leads on that whenever I tried searching, but I suspect that I'd probably be wanting a more powerful Amiga than the 600 for that anyway. I very much prefer playing on original hardware whenever I can when it comes to retro games, as an enthusiast of obsolete technology, emulating on a modern PC just doesn't excite me as much, but of course emulation is the best way to get high quality pixel-perfect screenshots nine times out of ten. At the moment I can't get screenshots of Amiga games up to the level of quality I'd want for main review features, but I figure I can share a bit of what I play here in an informal blog, with mediocre photos of the computer monitor I've hooked my Amiga up to via a Retrotink 2X SCART upscaler.

I played through and beat Turrican for the first time recently. I had tried it a few times in the past and despite the beloved reception the Turrican series has, I always left the game feeling negative towards it. Giving it more time however, I definitely found charm in it. I do find it to be a very janky game. The camera is wonky and doesn't let you see far enough ahead to react to a lot of stuff, the lack of any mercy invcinibility or knockback on getting hit by an enemy can result in a lot of frustration when enemies stay on top of your sprite and drain all of your health in less than a second, the jumping feels stilted and awkward, yet while those things feel like they should be deal-breakers (and they were to me in past attempts) they just didn't bother me nearly as much this time. Turrican's design is really unusual, it's aesthetically trying to bring to mind Japanese arcade and console games, but it plays absolutely nothing like them. However, I don't mean that in a "It's trying and failing" way, more of a "it's not even trying to mimic the design philosophies of the games it's inspired by and doing something completely different in every regard except for presentation". As opposed to the common Western-developed Sonic clones which attempt to copy everything that made Sonic work but fail, Turrican wears its Metroid and Psycho-Nics Oscar influences on its sleeve, its entirely unique mechanically and isn't attempting to mimic the gameplay of those games at all. The Gyroscope will bring to mind the Morph Ball of Metroid aesthetically, but its implementation and function in Turrican is completely different, for instance, being a consumable failsafe that allows you to escape from danger quickly by making you invincibile to enemy attacks while also rolling away at high speed to safety. The levels are vastly explorative like Metroid, but unlike Metroid, Turrican is divided up into levels that have a clear start point and end point while all of the branching paths and exploration are instead there to help you stock up on extra lives and temporary powerups, as opposed to the permanent upgrades of Metroid.

Basically, to succeed at Turrican, you want to go out of your way to explore as much as possible so that you can stock up on lives, which then permit you to experiment even more with exploration and finding out where you can or can not get to in later levels and learn where even more extra life stockpiles are. This felt bad to me at first since I figured this was a case of "just shower the player in a ridiculous amount of extra lives so it doesn't matter that we made the game impossibly hard since they can just brute force everything with no penalty to dying since you respawn right where you died", but as I played more and got more comfortable with the controls and Turrican's arsenal I was surprised by how few lives I was actually losing, often getting through entire levels without losing a single life or ever running out of time. It's an acquired taste of weird design choices that will feel alien to anyone most comfortable with Japanese arcade games that I wouldn't blame anyone for feeling put off by, but as I played more I came to appreciate its uniqueness, there's really nothing else that plays like Turrican which prevents it from feeling like a pale imitation of something you'd get better on Mega Drive or Super Famicom. Plus, the soundtrack absolutely slaps.

Other than that, I've been playing through Benefactor as well, though I haven't finished it yet. I'm about two thirds of the way through it, it's a very long game. Benefactor is superb, this game is criminally underrated. A wonderful puzzle platformer with an impressive amount of variety across its levels with some really creative outside-the-box thinking required in multiple occasions, topped off with a delightfully silly sense of humour. I'll likely have more to say as I finish it up, there's a chance that it may start to infuriate me the further I play, but as a fan of games like Lemmings I feel right at home here. Once again, music is great too. Amiga mod music is always such a treat.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 17th June 2023