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I played Paradroid more than almost any other game on the Amiga. It really captured my imagination, but I can see why it's not for everyone. If I picked it up today without knowing how much enjoyment I'd get out of it, I might not even give it a second thought, but my memories of playing it are still rather vivid.

I love Worms! And the shooty triangle game!

Before watching I would say that my top three would be 3. Formula 1 Grand Prix 2. Dynablaster 1. Moonstone

Thinking back, my favorite multiplayer game was probably Pinball Fantasies. Whenever I had a group over I'd most likely put that one on. It handled up to 8 players and since none of us were particularly great at it at the time, we wouldn't have to wait too long for our turn.😊

Strong list! Gravity Force 2/Power is absolutley amazing :). I’d have also had Scorched Tanks in the list as I much preferred it to Worms (which was essentially a cartoonised copy but with less cool weapons and no shield tech).

Some nice choices here. For me, the coolest-looking Amiga character, from a design point of view, is the samurai in Second Samurai. Just beautifully drawn, coloured and animated.

Panza Kick Boxing was, in my opinion, the best fighting game on the Amiga. I never played the highly rated 4D boxing, but I think Panza had a similar appeal in being a more realistic and thoughtful approach to the genre. Even though Street Fighter 2 and Final Fight were objectively shoddy on the Amiga (especially the former), I nevertheless had fun with them. Incidentally, anyone wanting to see a really great Final Fight-style game on the Amiga should have a look on RUclips for Metro Siege, a new game for the Amiga which I think is still in the development phase. It looks superb, it has the sort of quality that one saw in Megadrive and SNES beat 'em ups in the 1990s.

Fun video. I think the best one you missed is Death Angel, it is very SWIV and Raiden inspired but also super intense and has an amazing amount of action on screen. Graphics wise I thought Ultra Violent Worlds was incredible with lots of brilliant colors and vertical parallax. Recent game SkillGrid is unique and also a shoutout to Transplant which is more rotate-y than vertical and Plutos which although kind of basic was one of my first Amiga games and quite enjoyable. Personally I also would have had Mega Typhoon and Banshee in essential.

Pretty cool stuff going on here

Loved Intact

As a Liverpool fan, I must admit that I found the John Barnes ranking to be bloody hilarious! Nice one, Brian. Man U though...tsk. And you seemed like such an erudite, intelligent chap...

Love these big rankings vids! Keep up the great work 🎉

I love these Superleagues, Brian, I nearly always discover a few games I've never heard of before. 😊👍

I played a game called whizz-kid before....it was 18+ only though

Ah ah ah nice introduction. Nice haircut.

Mix of Populous, Centurion, Feudal Lords, Civilisation and Settlers (Abd I know some of afore mentioned games apeared after Realms). As Zoidberg said, game controls are confusing, there is lot to learn and requires patience. But, these types of controls were standard on the Amiga back in the day, almost represented common knowledge of the Amiga gamers and it was much easy for seasonal Amiga gamer to get into Realms. For strategy gamers back in the Amiga heyday, these controls were somewhat intuitive!

So many truly awful football games, probably because they sold something regardless of quality, whereas really bad shoot 'em ups or platformers normally got ignored. The Kick Offs took serious time and effort to get used to, but I can see why people stuck with them, when compared to how lousy most rival games were at the time. Sensi and SWOS are what I got hooked on, but I did enjoy Goal! too. I might need to spend more time with Empire Soccer, tried it a bit and never got into it (and I normally agree with Amiga Power) - it doesn't do enough with the special moves, and as a pure football game it's got a lot wrong with it. A few I haven't really played that look quite good, such as Wembley, Sierra and Total Football.

I love your channel amazing work 👏

Great to see Switchbalde 2 getting a mention. It was my favourite Amiga game back in the day and still one I return to often, either on my original Amiga 600 or on the A500 Mini.

A good one you are missing is Scorpio, is a vertical shooter but has lot of features from R-Type

Hybris is a reinterpretation of Terra Cresta, hence the ships can split (with space bar or second button) and once you get all five you can become a phoenix for a while' plus that round flashing thing that you see bounce around can give you several powers

Hi, Do you know if there's a way to change the mapping of a Speedlink Pro joystick so that it will work whilst playing games from a USB? ( I was trying to get Sensible Soccer to work but couldn't start the game after reconfiguring the buttons - I suspect it's due to a lack of 'home' button which starts the game) Many thanks.

Hybris for me - amazing smooth "in a frame" arcade quality (a lot of the vertical scrolling shooters like Xenon etc had jerky movement and scrolling. Not Hybris!)

Iron man off road racing been looking for years for that game don't think can get it for my ps5 😭

There were so many good songs on the Amiga that having the best 10 would be a difficult pick as that is leaving out so many other classics, I could probably do a top 50 and still end up with a few classics that have been missed out on lol.

How about: First Samurai Captain Blood Pinball Dreams

A lot of these are better with more than 1 player, for me Super Skidmarks is Essential with multiple players but barely Good with one. I need to spend more time with ATR, a lot of people seem to like that but it didn't grab me. I always preferred the first Super Cars for some reason.

Yea, I knew these rankings would make pretty grim reading. Pretty much all lazy ST ports, but mostly not getting near the ST's potential either. Sadly, by the time most UK programmers were fully exploiting the Amiga, arcade conversions had pretty much died out.

Not my favourite genre in truth, only ones I had were Monkey 2, Kyrandia and Innocent, I'd probably agree with all three rankings for those.

Street Fighter II-style beat 'em ups weren't the Amiga's strength - our version of SFII was poor, Body Blows wasn't much better despite the hype, and although our Mortal Kombats were good, I don't think the actual arcade game is amazing. Shadow Fighter and Fightin' Spirit were great, but just too late for anyone to notice. IK+ is a great game, but it sadly wasn't what people wanted by 1992.

Bob's Bad Day and Pac-Mania are two of my favourites, just recently checked out Dimo's Quest too and that's really good.

My favorite vertical shooter of all time is Starforce...it's a shame they never ported it to the Amiga...I wouldn't leave the house if I had it back in days...great video by the way.

Me sitting here just waiting for all Sensi versions to simply sweep all the competition away in one fell swoop 😅

Good video , GunBee f99 is maybe one you missed? Reshoot Aproxima 3 is one I want to get for my A500mini.

There were several games here that I'd never heard, which isn't surprising as most of them were in the Poor or below category. One obscure vertical shooter I was hoping you would have on the list is Scorpio. It's kind of like a vertical R-Type wannabe. Don't get me, it's nowhere near R-Type's quality, but it's like the programmer went through R-Type and ripped off a bunch of ideas from it. The music is only a short loop and quickly gets on your nerves, although there are sound effects as well. I also find it quite difficult. I don't think I ever made it to the end of the first level, even on easy. Battle Squadron - While I liked this one, all of your weapons, even when powered up to the max, feel kind of underpowered, as everything still seems to take at least two shots to kill. Hybris - I suck at this game, but I love the music. There was a program for the Amiga that would compress executable files so they saved on disk space, but could still run just like the original. I thought it was PowerPacker, but now I'm not so sure. The program I had, had vertical equalizer-type bars to show the progress, and it played the Hybris title music. BTW, Hybris seems like it was heavily inspired by the arcade game Dangar UFO Robo. The graphics for the terrain seem quite similar, as do some of the enemy movement patterns and the idea of expanding your ship into different configurations. Major Motion - I would have liked this one, but the thing that kills it for me is the unavoidable death from the big limo that pulls up and shoots you. if there was a way to avoid being killed by it, I never figured out what it was. Star Goose - Apparently, this was/is a beloved DOS game. Personally, i never saw the appeal of it. Xenon - Never liked this one. I really didn't like using either the tank or the plane. Xenon II - This one always felt sluggish and I found the colors kind of bland.

All home vertical shooters suffer from aspect ratio, so screen is to small for incoming enemies. Only game that succesfuly worked around this problem through graphics/game design is Battle squadron, and let's face it, it is only truly excellent shooter on Amiga. Graphics, enemies, power ups, gameplay, fx/soundtrack are all excellent, and the only thing I found little lacking, are the bosses. No wonder, most of Amiga shooters are in rubish category. Another thing, apart aspect ratio, favored horizontal shooters on Amiga. Amiga can duplicate "infinite" number of sprites in horizontal scanlines, so having many objects on screen becomes more easy. Well, this horizontal duplication can work also for verictal shooters, just with clever coding. Swiv shows how you can have "million" objects on screen and has excellent presentation and interesting design of enemies and bosses, homage to Silk Worm, but power ups are big turn off for me. It has basicaly one weapon that duplicates shots and spreads more, every time you get pick up. You can shoot at it, and change it to a better pick up, but at a same time shoot and avoid enemies and be careful not to over shoot it and miss your desired pick up, which is frustrating and I hate that play mechanic. If you shoot pick up for a looong time, it will change to "best" shot which spreads in all directions (same in front, back, left and right) with no significant firepower in front, which is bad for boss fights. Anyway, with that weapon, you dont have to aim anymore and core shooter gameplay mechanic is lost?! Weapons in shooters should be colorful, powerful and satisfying when mowing down enemies, instead of bland white bullets. Also, no soundtrack! And Xennons are bad. I tried to get into into it, but as always on Amiga, simplest of genres suffer from "eurodesign vanity", a trait that made european game developers always tried to create something more "intelectual" appart "ordinary and simple" action game. And in that process, "simple things" like adequate game design and gameplay, were totaly forgoten about! They were overthinking themeselves towards total miss of the mark!

Compare these games to Japanese games of the same type that were available at the same time. Loved my Amiga but didn't use it much for games

Oh dear. The Xenons are way overrated, and Hybris with its excellent power-ups is an essential. All IMNSHO ofc.

Hybris will likely be forever my number 1 choice. It's even more amazing when you play it on a classic XBOX and assign Enter and Space to X and B. SWIV's another great one, especially when you enable the maximum firepower trainer (a great example of just how many objects OCS can have flying all over the screen).

Very nice video.

In Xenon II, the "maze" sections doesn't ask you to backtrack when you make a mistake, you are actually forced to go in dead-ends in order to get a better angle to destroy enemies and then backtrack to take the right path.

31:11 Wow.

Reshoot Proxima 3, cool.

18:16 Damn, I've checked the arcade game, someone should remake it for amiga, like for Final Fight.

Very helpful video as there are many shoot 'em ups on amiga and it's sometimes hard to know which ones are worth playing.

I love Banshee's long levels.

I didn't know the very specific genre that is "Purple Vertical Shooters."

Great video, I pretty much agree with how you rank them. One thing that is not often mentioned is frame rate. Really, shooters need to be running at 50fps - and this is partly the reason my favourite vertical shooters are Hybris and Battle Squadron. But many games on this list only run at 25 fps - or less - and that makes them look a bit clunky and impacts gameplay. Two big offenders are Xenon 2 (a game I hate. - sorry!) and SWIV. Also, in the case of SWIV, although the graphics are beautifully designed, the colour scheme is the dullest, drabbest I have ever seen in a video game - all greys and browns, and there is far too much black. Very depressing to look at! Note: The recent remake of Flying Shark really shows how lazy the original port was. The new version has nicer graphics, a better colour scheme, includes horizontal scrolling as well as vertical - and, most importantly, runs at a smooth 50fps now. That is a night-and-day improvement over the version featured in this video.

You missed out maybe the best Amiga vertical shooter, Deluxe Galaga It's an old PD game by Edgar Vidal (RIP)...loosely Galaga-esque, I think its actually based on an old VIC-20 game. It really is a superb arcade blaster that more people definitely need to know about