Competitive e-sports with a 25-year-old Amiga game | Hacker News Reader

Competitive e-sports with a 25-year-old Amiga game

arstechnica.com

55 pointsaltern815 comments

The Classic Amiga games only had a joystick with one button, but they were always more fun to play because of the way they were developed.

My brother and I would play Demolition Ball it was like that game in Battlestar Galactica where players armored up and tried to pass a ball into a hole in the wall and knocked each other over to try and get the ball or intercept a pass. I can't seem to find it anywhere and a friend borrowed all my Amiga disks and never returned them after moving out of state. But it was fun to play and knock over the other players with a spiked fist and get the ball in the hole in the wall before time ran out for the quarter.

If you ask me the games for the Amiga were just more fun to play than any other platform at the time. If the CD32 didn't have a patent issue that prevented it from being sold in the USA, it would have sold a lot with fun to play games.

Bard's Tale for the Amiga was fun with good music and graphics. The Bard's Tale remake wasn't as fun and sort of miss out on what made the Classic Bard's Tale so great. They even had books based on Bard's Tale that sold really well as well as other stuff.

A lot of these Amiga games it is hard to get the IP to recreate them on modern platforms, it is good to see Dino Dino make a version of their Kick Off for the PS4, I hope it is as fun as the Amiga version was.

Do you mean Speedball or Speedball 2 (http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/speedball-2-brutal-delux...) ?

Speedball 2 was so addictive, good times.

Speedball 2 was absolutely classic. It was clearly influenced by this great seventies movie, in case you need a shot of nostalgia: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073631/

Yes that's it. I got the name wrong.

Are you sure it is called Demolition Ball? Can't find anything about it.

Speed Ball apparently I remembered the name wrong.

Are you possibly thinking about the great "Brutal Sports Football"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutal_Sports_Football

No it was Speedball apparently.

There was a Mutant League series of games that had zombies and skeletons and other monsters in it, and they had Football and Hockey and they could rip the other players apart as well, so it was like Brutal Sports Football. They should make a modern version of those games, I'm sure they would sell well.

KickOff, what a sweet joystick-ruining afternoon-filling game... The first one was slightly flawed (Russia was so much faster than any other team, you could just outrun pretty much anyone), but the second was insanely good.

KO and Sensible Soccer were probably the best overhead-perspective football games ever released on any platform, a triumph of function over form. Then modern graphic cards for PCs hit the market, and Electronic Arts successfully leveraged form-over-function to build an empire.

As it mentions, the developer Dino Dini is working on a new football game for PS4. Also one of the developers behind Sensible Soccer is working on a new game. Dino has a slightly unhinged twitter feed as well.

Having met the bloke a couple of times i can confirm that Dino himself is slightly unhinged, but in a charming way :D

Kick Off is a surprising choice. I thought most people preferred Sensible Soccer over Kick Off.

Ball control in KO is harder, and overall game speed is faster than in SS. I think KO delivers more "adrenaline" than SS, but that's just me.

There is also a generational factor: the first SS was released after the KO franchise was already mature. Younger players likely went straight to SS.

Earl Weaver's Baseball (Amiga 500) would be a good competitive e-sports game for the present day. Create your own players, teams, stadiums. Compete. Multiple computers supported.

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