I love the Amiga!
I got my Amiga 500 in the late 80's, after the C64 and then the NES and Gameboy.
It was the machine that made me learn about memory expansions. Eventually I figured out what that 1mb required sticker meant on those demo disks that didn't work :P
And the joy was high when I eventually got that sweet 512 kb expansion some time later!
Ahh, the glorious Amiga mags with the prized demo disks. Cu Amiga, Amiga Format, Amiga Action, Amiga Power.
I had a friend who's dad worked at a transporting firm and he'd give me bags of mags that weren't sold. It was always exciting to find out what new demos would arrive this time :)
The Amiga sort of always tried to punch above it's weight. Often trying to be a 16 bit console like the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis but unfortunately didn't always quite reach those highs.
You had the oodles of cutsey platformers that wanted to be Sonic or Mario. (Zool, Tearaway Thomas, Kid Chaos, Robocod). You had the racers that wanted to be Mario Kart like Bump 'n' Burn. You had the fighting games that wanted to be Street Fighter 2 (Elfmania, Body Blows and Dangerous Streets) and towards the end you had the fps shooters that wanted to be Doom (Death Mask, Breathless and Fears). It was fascinating to experience.
So many great games. Some favorites were:
Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars (Brilliant conversions of colorful fun platformers even though Rainbow Islands is missing some islands)
Lethal Weapon (surprisingly good platformer based on the movies, Ocean produced some cracking good platformers back in the day)
Zak Mckraken (my copy didn't have the manual with the copy protection in it so I always got stuck in the airport :P)
Monkey Island 1 and 2, true classics. MI 2 was on 11 disks and after a couple of days I noticed that some of them was missing when I bought it! Had to wait for quite a while before I got the missing ones. And booy did that game have a lot of disk swapping. But I didn't care because that was just the way things were. It was still an incredibly good game.
Mortal Kombat (A great conversion even if we only had one button on the joystick. My brother and I played it countless times)
Cool Spot (good colorful platformer that in the EU had nothing to do with 7up :P)
North & South (great fun arcade strategy game, especially with two players)
James Pond 2: Operation Robocod (Smashing cololrful platformer with a lot of levels chock full of collectibles and secrets.
Unfortunately I don't have my Amiga hocked up anymore as it's buried in my parents attic but I still boot up Winuae from time to time and still enjoy the games as much as I did back then. Still fun to try out games I'd read about back then but never got to play.
If anybody is interested in a Amiga podcast I can highly recommend
Amigos: Everything Amiga Podcast
A great video and audio podcast series where two guys check out a Amiga game each week along with some Amiga scene news and stuff. They have great chemistry and it's very fun to hear them experience Amiga games for the first time.
