Si Amiga

As established previously in this blog I spent much of the nineties being the proud owner of a Commodore Amga 1200. Of course, the word ‘proud’ is indeed an understatement as the mid –to-late nineties were not a kind time to the venerable company known as Commodore.  At the time, everyone had PCs and a wider, and better, selection of games. I had a lot of trouble trying to find something that would work on my machine, let alone something decent, and I was made a laughing stock in amongst my classmates at school. As is often the case with gaming, one need to pick a tribe and hope it isn’t the wrong one because if it is the wrong one you’re going to be up shit creek. And as it so happened, I picked a wrong time to be an Amiga owner – I can only wonder how my brother managed to persuade my father to shell out for an Amiga 1200.

Still I had some good times using my Amiga – I remember blowing an entire summer to complete Soccer Kid and I’ve since regretted nothing. I got into Worms via the Amiga and I even tried my hand at animation with the Amiga. I did try to keep abreast with developments via magazines but much of the time spent there was looking at games that looked ace but being forever out of reach – and settling with demos that didn’t do enough to fill the void. Still, I’ve had a soft spot for the Amiga ever since.
Now I recently received the news that Amiga Games Inc has been bought out along with the rights to over 300 games. The purchaser, the Writers Group Film Corp, now has plans to rerelease these titles to modern platforms.

Well this is good news for me on multiple fronts. It is good news as a former Amiga loyalist that interest in the Amiga is still being maintained. It is good news as an advocate for gaming preservation as the games in question are being preserved and not claimed by the march of time. But it is especially good news as someone who missed out on playing many of these games the first time around. As stated above, I never played many of the games that were available at the time and could only gawk at screenshots in magazines (of course some of the games I wanted to play from that era have now been obtained through Steam and GoG). As such I can list many games I’d like to try my hand at: Ruff N’Tumble, Chaos Engine, Bubble and Squeak, Valhalla, Final Odyssey, Alien Breed, Dragon Stone, Shadow of the Beast, Super Stardust, and Shadow Fighter among others.

Of course, it is unclear at this stage which games will be given the greenlight for release –it is entirely possible that the games released will be the crummy ones instead of the much more worthy titles mentioned above. That being said, don’t mess this up Writers Group Film Corp!