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MY MOST VIVIDLY REMEMBERED ATARI ST GAMES

5/3/2018

20 Comments

 
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I was an Atari ST owner, but I'm not deluded. I only ever played on friends' Amigas or for work, but I know full well that I tethered my fronds to the wrong horse.

I got an ST from my parents for Christmas, but it was a long time ago and I've no real idea why I asked for that and not an Amiga. It's possible - actually, it's more than likely the case - that I chose the ST because it was an Atari-branded thing, and we'd owned an Atari 2600. Plus, I'd been a Spectrum owner through my teens, and I probably couldn't quite bring myself to own a Commodore computer.

I had nothing against Commodore, but it just wasn't who I was. I mean, it's stupid now to think that this might've been my reasoning, but such is the folly of youth.

Nonetheless, with hindsight... yeah, I wish I'd had an Amiga. Obviously, I can recognise that the only real benefit the ST had over the Amiga was its MIDI capabilities. Not that I ever made use of them, or knew what they were. 

I wanted to do a list of great Atari ST exclusives today, but the truth is... most ST games also ended up on the Amiga. It is virtually impossible to think of games which "defined" the ST. Oddly, however, I've learned that a number of the bigger games that appeared on both formats were developed on the ST, before being ported over to the Amiga. When it was the other way around, Amiga games generally blew their ST counterparts out of the water. 

Still... needs must. So, here's a list of the ST games I remember most vividly... bearing in mind that, yeah, we all know they appeared on the Amiga too.

​Stop with the smug expressions, you bunch of social inadequates.
ANOTHER WORLD
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Known as Out of this World in North America, Delphine's cinematic platformer managed to lure players with a stunning opening sequence... before depositing them in - yes - Another World. Specifically, it was a world which played very much like a sci-fi version of Prince of Persia, with all the same sort of hair-pulling and frustration, and required precision. Notably, the game started life on the ST before developer Eric Chahi moved it across to the Amiga. It is what it is.

Certainly, as frustrating as it was to play, Another World has been hugely influential in proving that games can be something more than A Platformer or A Shooting Game or An Adventure. It was all of those things, and something more at the same time.

Though, let's be honest, it was an absolute pain in the cracksie to play, and the only reason anybody bought it was for those cut-scenes. 
FUTURE WARS
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Man alive... this game was a nightmare. A gorgeous point-and-click adventure, with graphics from the aforementioned Eric Chahi - I played a lot of point-and-click adventures on my ST - I was sucked in by the promise of a time travelling plot, but it buggered me from the off.

Very early on, there's a puzzle which - I later found out - required you to place a flag in a map. I mean, I had the flag, and there was a map on the wall, so I was pretty sure that's what you had to do. Unfortunately, despite moving my cursor around the screen I couldn't for the life of me place the flag. I ended up scouring magazine tips pages for the solution. It turns out that I'd been right... but hadn't banked on there being a single pixel-wide hole into which the flag had to be inserted.

I continued on from that point... but threw in the towel soon after, when I realised it was going to be full of similarly irritating puzzles that were rendered needlessly obscure by the lush visuals.
POPULOUS
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Peter Molyneux's star has fallen so far it's hard to recall a time when he was the industry's golden boy. Populous - the first game from Bullfrog - had been so heavily hyped and well-reviewed that I bought it on the day of release. I went into my local games store, and the guy behind the counter greeted me by saying "You're here to buy Populous..."

Apparently, everybody who came in the store that day had been there to buy Populous. My reaction was one of such surprise that I replied by saying "How do you know that?"

Only afterwards did I wish I'd punished his arrogant assumption by saying "No, actually... I'm here for a completely different reason - to do a cool street dance that mocks smugness".

Populous pretty much single-handedly invented the god sim, but I remember being slightly disappointed that it wasn't a smoother experience to play. Interestingly, The Daily Mail contacted Bullfrog to warn them that, because of the game's good vs evil nature, they could expect a similar fatwa to the one Salman Rushdie had been issued with.

That never happened, though it's interesting to consider how different Molyneux's career might've been if it had.
NINJA WARRIORS
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I loved this to bits, probably more than it deserved. After tolerating the Spectrum's colour clash graphics for years, Ninja Warriors felt like having a proper arcade game at home.

Yes, the visuals were squeezed into a tiny letterbox in the centre of the screen, but I was drawn in by the way the Ninjas would gradually lose their outer clothing as they took damage (oh, hell-oh!), to reveal that they were Terminator-style cyborgs. To be honest, that was probably the best thing about Ninja Warriors, but it was cool enough effect that it kept me playing beyond the point of enjoyment.
HARD DRIVIN'
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Never has there been a game with such a literal title. You see, Hard Drivin' was very hard indeed. I'd played it in the arcades, and while the ST port was reasonably well done, the frame rate was appalling, and made controlling the car a nightmare.

In particular, the bit where you had to steer it through a corkscrew loop was far more challenging than it needed to be, and thus Hard Drivin' became yet another game that was merely a good idea in theory alone.

See also: Powerdrome.  
POLICE QUEST
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Without a doubt, I bought more Atari ST games by Sierra On-Line than from any other publisher. I played all of the Space Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry point-and-click-ers, but it was the Police Quest series which I enjoyed the most.

The first three games were a pure joy - telling the story of veteran officer Sonny Bonds. After Sonny's story wrapped up they enlisted the help of real-life police fellow Daryl F. Gates, and the series became more of a serious, mature, simulation of police work.

I missed the garish, VGA graphics, and slightly simplistic world view, and gradually lost interest. I followed them, for a while, onto the PC, but when the series evolved into the SWAT franchise I'd finally had enough.

​Adding insult to injury, they even brought back Sonny Bonds as a minor character in one sequel.
DUNGEON MASTER
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Ehhh. I was really excited about Dungeon Master. It was released for the Atari ST before it came out on the Amiga (becoming the best-selling ST game of all time), and was massively well-received.

I came to it late - I had no money to buy it upon release - but confess that I was hugely disappointed. I'd expected a first-person game with the sort of smooth movement we later got in first-person shooters, but it was essentially a series of flip-screens.

I appreciate that it was a very influential game, but I found it all a bit dull and slow, and not the video game version of Dungeons & Dragons that I'd expected.

But then, most of my D&D games with mates usually broke down at some point and instead we'd play hide and seek in my mate Phil's house with the lights off and one time I glued a loofah to his bath using some sort of industrial adhesive that I'd found and he got really cross with me because his parents were going to kill him when they got home. 
LEISURE SUIT LARRY IN THE LAND OF THE LOUNGE LIZARDS
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Al Lowe's Larry games were lewd and suggestive - you had to help middle-aged virgin Larry Laffer pop his "cherry" - but had a sort of immature silliness to them.

They were funny and childish, and - as with all of Sierra's point-and-click franchises - I preferred the earlier, brightly-coloured, blockier graphics. Larry Laffer continued onto the PC where better graphics took away the innocence of the series' initial instalments, and suddenly exposed them as a bit grubby. 

Also, in the current climate, a series of games wherein you play a white male attempting to have sex with a succession of voluptuous women, would rightly be viewed as the proverbial Wrong Thing.
INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE
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At last! A point-and-click adventure which wasn't so obscure that I gave up. Managing to follow the plot of the movie, while also expanding on it significantly, The Last Crusade came with a replica of Henry Jones' Grail diary, which was required to solve many of the puzzles.

Unfortunately, I think I spilled a drink on mine, and ruined it, so I never finished the story. It's one of the few times I've ever been forced to ditch a game against my own judgement.
BUBBLE BOBBLE
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Despite hardly pushing the computer, this was the Atari ST game I played the most. A spot-on port of the arcade game, it was simple enough that it played perfectly. And that's about all there is to say about that.
CASTLE MASTER
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Castle Master gave me nightmares. Real nightmares. Powerful nightmares. I found the 3D graphics, and the emptiness of the location - barring the occasional demonic spirit - incredibly real.

It was one of the first times playing a game that I felt I was exploring an actual location. It comes back to my belief that the more primitive graphics are the more evocative they are for a player; modern visuals do all the work for you, so your imagination switches off.

​Castle Master's flat polygons somehow worked in conjunction with my brain to create a place that was far more resonant and believable than has ever been offered by decades of graphical evolution.

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20 Comments
Andrew Gillett
5/3/2018 11:12:11 am

Here's an example of a game that was better on the ST (because the other versions didn't have the proper alien speech sounds):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkpo4RBSqoU

Reply
Paul C
5/3/2018 12:48:51 pm

Came here just to mention this! Captain Blood is a classic example of the overblown ambition you can often find in early games, which put most modern stuff to shame in terms of just how high they were aiming, even if they have a habit of descending into sheer incomprehensibility along the way. I still think it's a stylish looking and sounding game even today.

Another I'd say is better on the ST is The Untouchables, one of those Ocean tie ins that was actually surprisingly varied and fun, and which for my money had better balanced gameplay than the ridiculously hard Amiga version.

It's hard to justify it beyond personal nostalgia, but I often prefer the sound on ST games. To me the more analog synthy style gels better with those old graphics than the slicker sound you got on the Amiga.

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Geebs
5/3/2018 04:54:41 pm

Blood Money had much trippier, and much better, music on the ST. Also, you didn’t have to sit through the completely pointless intro every time you played.

I got an ST because it was easier to convince my parents that it wasn’t just for games. They didn’t stay fooled for long.

Alex Walsh link
5/3/2018 11:53:06 am

I'm actually playing through Dungeon Master AGAIN at the moment :) There's a freeware PC port of it available, so I don't have to bother with Hatari or STEEM this time. Which is nice.

It's a game I come back to every few years, and it's up to the point where I tend to play it through with one character rather than a squad of four. Always preferred it to Chaos Strikes Back because of the linear nature of the dungeons.

Nothing is more rewarding than seeing the line of green text at the bottom of the screen notifying you your character has levelled up.

IIRC this game also required a meg of RAM on the Amiga, because it was a crap computer that couldn't handle games properly. Or something.

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Kelvin Green link
5/3/2018 12:30:12 pm

To be fair, Biffster, it sometimes seemed like Commodore had something against Commodore.

Some great games here; my favourite is Populous. I adored that game, but came late to the Amiga/ST version, after playing it for hours on the surprisingly decent Master System port.

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Voodoo76
5/3/2018 12:48:49 pm

Love the very authentic looking Master System 'Digitiser The Game' box, even the digi / sega logo in the corner, excellent work. For some reason I get a bit giddy whilst looking at Master System game boxes!!

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Craig Anderson link
5/3/2018 12:55:23 pm

I had access to an ST for years. Technically it was mine and my sisters joint present one Christmas, but I decided I wanted a keyboard instead so my sister got the £300 Atari ST and I got an £80 keyboard. I found out after we got both that the ST had midi ports, so plugged my keyboard into it.

Although not technically a game, I spent weeks on end using Quartet, the music writing software. I also had a sound sampler so I could record things via aux cable and incorporate them into songs. The ST and keyboard combo was superb for this.

Dungeon Master was the first ST game I ever completed. My cousin got a photocopy of the maps for every level, which helped a LOT.

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Kieren
5/3/2018 01:36:29 pm

One big advantage the ST had over the Amiga was 3D games as they played faster and smother on the ST due to the faster CPU speed and the way the ST drew the screen was quicker and more efficient too. The Amiga's custom chips had no purpose when it came to polygons so the ST shone.

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Chris
5/3/2018 04:34:11 pm

The Amiga used planar graphics which were more memory efficient and great for parallax scrolling and stuff - but utter tosh for plotting individual pixels, so (fake) 3D games it really struggled with. The CD32 had chunky-to-planar hardware (Akiko) which helped a bit, but the Amiga wasn't due to get proper chunky graphics modes until AAA, and Commodore crashed and burned before then. :(

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
5/3/2018 06:55:51 pm

It could have gone so much differently. There were various successors to the original Amiga chipset being designed even back in the mid 80s, and all of them were cancelled as a result of Commodore's penny pinching. The original designers quit as a result, and some of them ended up creating the Atari Lynx and the 3DO. Meanwhile, Commodore spent the next few years making half baked stopgap upgrades to the hardware. Even Atari and Acorn eventually leapfrogged the Amiga. The Falcon was an interesting beast indeed.

However, it is a testament to how good the original design was, that for the best part of a decade it could produce sound and visuals almost on a par with the best of what the SNES and Megadrive could offer.

Christian Dabnor link
19/4/2018 12:58:00 pm

Plus ST owners were cooler.

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Colin Dustup
5/3/2018 01:42:00 pm

My most memorable ST game/moment was Weird Dreams back in 88, my 3rd best friend at the time was a lad called Rory McGrath(no, not that one!),well he owned one(an ST) and was quite the cock of the playground as myself and my peers were still staying loyal to our speccy(s). We would watch people try and play weird dreams on a Saturday morning tv show(motor mouth?) and be green with envy at those sota(state of the art) graphics,a few weeks later Rory received said game for his birthday, a group of us were around his house for his party when he first 'fired it up', it was quite a surreal game, something startled one of the lads(Alex Darla) so he dropped a few F bombs leading Rory's sister to tell his parents,His dad went ballistic calling us all street rats before ripping the disk out and straight out the beefroom window.

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Alex Walsh link
5/3/2018 04:41:13 pm

I remember the days well. We weren't well off enough to have a separate beef room but we did have an eggstension.

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Nick the Gent link
5/3/2018 04:01:54 pm

Nice list, Brother Biffo!

Did you ever play the Novagen games, Mercenary: Escape from Targ, and Damocles? For me they had the same feeling as Castle Master - the 3D graphics were mind-blowing at the time, but it was the sense of exploration that made it real. Totally get what you're saying about the more basic graphics being more compelling.

I had Castle Master as well, and the demon / banshee things were utterly terrifying, even if they were just a couple of floating 3D blocks!

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Andrew Gillett
7/3/2018 11:09:08 am

Paul Woakes, the creator of the Mercenary series, died last year. I was blown away by Mercenary 3 on the ST. Look up "The Mercenary Site" - lots of info about those games and also an emulator that lets you play them on a PC.

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Chris
5/3/2018 04:35:48 pm

The defining ST games for me was Oil Imperium. It had clearly been written for the ST, and the interface looked like GEM/TOS. I'm not sure there even was an Amiga version.

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Chris
5/3/2018 04:47:17 pm

Lookin at YouTube it appears the computery desktop bit I remember is tailored for whatever computer you're running it on. The Amiga version has a WB1.3 interface, complete with Guru Meditation apparently. I don't know if you can make the ST interface crash like that too.

The game doesn't actually look that interesting, but I suppose it is some sort of economic management simulator of the sort that was fun in the early 90s because spreadsheets were new and exciting.

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Alan
5/3/2018 10:26:18 pm

Hard Drivin' was about the only functioning arcade machine our local swimming pool had. My heart used to sink when that corkscrew loop came up, as I could never get past it as a young 'un. Still, gave me something to distract myself with while Grandad was feeding about a tenner into the 10p shunters.

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Bingo Rose
6/3/2018 01:02:20 pm

I remember the best port of Hard Drivin' weirdly being on the... Game Boy.

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THX 1139
7/3/2018 10:20:09 am

Whither Oids?

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