For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a PC gamer. Back when I was a kid in the early 90s, while friends were plugging in and playing their Master Systems and NESes, I was firing up my Amiga A500+.
Sure, my friends’ consoles would load quickly and could even save their progress thanks to cartridges, while I had to wait for my Amiga to slowly read one (or two, if it was an ambitious game) floppy disks, and I’d need another blank floppy if I wanted to save my game, but deep down we all knew the Amiga was the better machine.
It had better sound and graphics, I could use it to type up my homework, and there was an application in the Workbench operating system that would read out whatever rude words you typed in. It also had better games. My Sega and Nintendo-owning friends might have had Sonic and Mario, but I had Zool.
OK, bad example. But I did have games like Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Xenon 2, Monkey Island and many more that offered a complexity in not just graphics and audio, but also gameplay, that consoles couldn’t compete with.
At this point regular readers are probably thinking oh great, I thought he was going to talk about a smartwatch but he’s just banging on about the Amiga again, but bear with me.
The Amiga offered a huge variety of experiences compared to consoles. Along with playing games, we could make artwork in Deluxe Paint and script our own games, leading to a thriving demo scene. It was also overly complex and sometimes a pain in the ass – with some games throwing up indecipherable error messages after you’d patiently waited for it to load. It was the perfect gateway for PC gaming.
By the time I had to juggle 12 floppy disks to play Monkey Island 2, I decided it was time to move on, and switched to a
Read more on techradar.com