The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

The Amiga. Unchanged for millions of years, yet witness to a biblical prophecy come true...

Whoops, wrong intro. The Amiga was in many ways ahead of its time, with impressive 16-bit architecture, a great multitasking operating system (AmigaOS), great graphics and genuinely incredible and lauded sound, thanks to the wonderfully-named sound chip 'Paula'.

One of the factors behind its success was the huge body of quality games released for the platform over the years, a body we've been painstakingly going through over the past few weeks to bring you our top 30.

You can find the first list here, where we run through numbers 30-21.

And the second, where we tackle 20-11, is here.

Amiga games not really your thing? Don't worry, we've already covered the top 10 ZX Spectrum games of all time too.

But now, without any further ado, we present the definitive top 10 Amiga games of all time. Enjoy!

10. Syndicate

Set in a dystopian vision of the future, Syndicate is an isometric game where the player controls a group of four cyborg agents as they undertake missions in cyberpunk-styled cities.

Released in 1993, towards the end of the Amiga's heyday, the game was succeeded by an expansion pack, called Syndicate: American Revolt, and a fantastic sequel, Syndicate Wars, which criminally, was never released on the Amiga.

In the game, the player takes on missions such as assassinating rivals, rescuing allies and kidnapping people who may be useful to the cause.

There are also various resources available for collection during missions, sometimes cash, often weapons and armour, which can be used to upgrade your own agents, making them hardier, and deadlier. The player can also research new technologies to further upgrade their cyborgs, eventually seeing them becoming (almost) unstoppable dervishes of destruction.

The mission part of the game was played out at an impressive (for the time) 640x480 resolution, with 16 colours (although the effect of a deeper colour palette was provided by dithering). The poor old 16-bit consoles of the day, including the Sega Mega Drive and SNES, couldn't handle the complexity, and were released with different level designs and graphics.

The game received a mixed reception at launch overall, with the most positive reviews appearing for the Amiga and PC versions. However it, along with its sequel, has gone on to be remembered and played by fans to this day, and still appears on various retro lists (including this one).

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

9. Cannon Fodder

Sensible Software is better known for its Sensible Soccer series (which we may hear more about later in this list...), but it's also responsible for this fun, arcade shoot ‘em up. It uses the same engine developed for Sensible Soccer, but swaps out studs, balls and corner flags for guns, grenades and more guns.

In the game the player controls a small squad of soldiers who dash through a scrolling map killing anything that moves, and lots of things that don't (including buildings, which spawn enemy soldiers).

Interestingly, the game was developed using many Agile techniques, with the programmers often splitting off into smaller teams (or working alone) for brief periods to work on new ideas and features. They'd then come together for play-testing, and either throw out the results, or keep them and iterate and improve further.

Every character in the game was given its own name, and a gravestone when it died, showing its name and rank. The designers said that this was an anti-war comment, attempting to show that people really die in combat.
Some media outlets got the reference and praised Sensible for it, while others accused the developer of both glamorising and trivialising war.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

8. Rocket Ranger

Another game from those geniuses at Cinemaware, Rocket Ranger casts the player as a US army scientist who flies around the world on his rocket pack, shooting down warplanes and punching Nazis.

The game is designed to look and feel like a 1950s sci-fi serial, with beautiful cut-scenes and stunning visuals all adding to the atmosphere. It's made up of a variety of mini-games, with fairly uneven levels of difficulty ultimately meaning that few players made it all the way through.

These mini games include dogfighting with a Luftwaffe squadron, attacking a ground base (with the one taking place in a South American jungle a particular favourite), and a fist-fight with a Nazi soldier.

Each mini game ramps up in difficulty as the player progresses through the game, with the fist-fight in particular becoming almost impossible even by the middle stages. And given the fact that there's no save or checkpoint option, it was often losing these fights that resulted ultimately in a Nazi World War II victory, and defeat for the player (lovingly rendered in game as enormous Zeppelins over the White House).

Released in 1988, Rocket Ranger received great critical acclaim, winning the ‘Best 16-bit Graphics of the Year' gong at the Golden Joystick Awards.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

7. Speedball 2

Released in 1990 as the sequel to the brilliant Speedball, Speedball 2 is that unlikeliest of things - a sequel that actually improves on the worthy original.

Set in a violent cyberpunk future, Speedball is a sport that combines handball, rugby, football and hockey, then amps up the brutality. In fact, this is spelled out in the team name of the player's club: Brutal Deluxe.

With nine players on each side, points are scored by throwing the ball in the opposition's goal, hitting various targets on the walls, or injuring opposing players. And all of these scoring systems can be multiplied by throwing the ball up one of two special ramps.

This makes for a high-stakes game, with the adrenaline really pumping in close game when your opponent suddenly gains a score multiplier. It then becomes a mad scramble to throw the ball the other way up the ramp to cancel out their multiplier, then attempt to repeat the trick to introduce a multiplier of your own.

There are also mild RPG-like elements to the game, with money earned through wins being spent either on levelling up your players' attributes, or purchasing a variety of candidates from the transfer market.

The game was hugely successful both critically and commercially, and for our money represents the peak of revered development studio Bitmap Brothers. Various remakes have been released for the PlayStation, Xbox and PC since, with the most recent, Speedball 2 HD, released on Steam in 2013. According to both press and user reviews, none has quite captured the quality and charm of the original.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

6. Lemmings

Lemmings cleverly plays into mankind's deep desire for control over a bunch of tiny, green-haired creatures as they totter around a series of platforms, mostly plunging to their doom.

It's also a puzzle-platformer from 1991, developed by DMA Design and released on the Amiga, Atari ST and PC.

The player has to save a certain number of lemmings on each level by giving some of them special skills (wall climbing, tunnelling, parachuting and more) to help them and their cohorts avoid various dangers.

It was hugely well-received, being the second highest rated game over on Amstrad Action, and sold over 15 million copies. Various emulated versions have been developed to run on today's PCs.

The inspiration for the idea behind it came from a simple but cute animation drawn in Deluxe Paint (remember that?) by Mike Dailly, DMA Design's first ever employee. The animation was originally made for Walker, another game in development at the firm, but instead inspired an all-time classic.

It scored bonus points for the cute 'Let's go!' squeaked by one of the lemmings that greeted the beginning of every level.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

5. Falcon

Want to fly your own F-16 Falcon but the local dealer won't part-exchange it for your Fiat Punto? Then this Amiga simulation from 1989 might just be the solution you've been searching for.

As well as being an incredibly accurate simulation for its day, Falcon featured a dynamic campaign, with buildings you've destroyed on previous missions remaining destroyed (at least for a time), and your side gaining the upper hand in the ongoing struggle if you perform well enough.

And the flight simulation itself was realistic to the point of insanity, with a manual the size of a lengthy novel included in the box, which was present literally to teach players the basic principles of aeronautical engineering and flight mechanics. You don't get that with your modern day Call of Duty clones.

In the game, the player could choose from a variety of missions, tool their Falcon up accordingly (bombs for bombing runs, sidewinders for air to air combat), make sure they'd got the weight and amount of fuel right, then head off into the (mostly brown) yonder.

Falcon was original in being one of the first games to offer additional features for players with an enhanced Amiga 1200 (with a mind-boggling 1Mb of RAM over the standard Amiga's 512Kb). In the standard version, planes taking off in the background while the player was stationed at the main base make a sort of weird clicking sound. But players with the beefier machines instead heard the same weird clicking sound, followed by a stranger roar. We couldn't find any other difference between the two versions than that.

So, money well spent on that 512Kb upgrade.

Falcon won a raft of awards in its day, including ‘Best 16-bit simulation of the year' at the Golden Joystick Awards in 1989.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

4. Dungeon Master

An absolute classic of early video RPGs, Dungeon Master was released in 1987 and out-sold pretty much every other title that year across multiple platforms.

Originally developed in Pascal and intended for the Apple II platform, the two-man development team joined the FTL Games studio in the midst of their work, and soon switched to the C programming language. Dungeon Master was released first on the Atari ST, then the Amiga a year later, becoming the first ever video game to use 3D sound effects.

And that's more than a gimmick too, in-game the player really can tell from which direction danger is coming thanks to the excellent audio, especially if wearing headphones. Weird squeak coming from behind, turn about, whack away with swords and spells, hurrah: Screamer slices.

Because the game's many monsters aren't the only things which will kill you - hunger and thirst are equally deadly enemies for the unprepared. Fortunately the game festoons the player with food and drink in the early levels, and with careful rationing this can easily last through to the later levels. As a mechanic, it's a good way to stop players loitering in an area with respawning monsters and endlessly grinding skills to a point when defeating enemies becomes trivial. Although, veteran players will be aware of certain rooms with nearby water sources, and respawning monsters that turn into food when killed.

Dungeon Master was innovative not just for its sound, but also its gameplay and certain mechanics. At a time when most RPGs were turn-based, Dungeon Master was real-time, with players moving around a tiled maze one step at a time, and stamina and mana dictating how frequently they can attack. Also, levelling up is achieved simply by using abilities, rather than by killing monsters and receiving experience points.

And most skills can be improved out of combat too. Get your ninja continually to throw items in the direction you're headed when you run out of inventory space, and she'll be an unstoppable death machine by the time you find the end boss. Similarly, don't just restrict your mages to casting fireballs and acid gobs when you're facing nasties, get them to do it any time their mana pool is full, and they'll soon be launching magical destruction at anything in your path.

The game inspired a large community of fans which still exists to this day. One fan, Paul R Stevens, spent six months of full-time coding to re-build it in C++, then released both it and the source code for free.

Its sequel, Chaos Strikes Back, is also great. The recent Legend of Grimrock series is a direct homage to the original Dungeon Master games, being basically enormous graphical upgrades

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

3. It Came From the Desert

"The desert. Unchanged for millions of years, yet witness to a biblical prophecy come true, that one day the meek shall inherit the Earth." If nothing else, the introduction sequence to this game should be watched by everyone, everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qTL-D3AX6H4

For 1989, this voiced cut-scene was revolutionary and awe inspiring. And also slightly inaccurate, given that the ‘meek' in this case referred to giant ants who terrorised a small US town, cutting it off from the outside world and murdering half of its inhabitants.

Developed by Cinemaware, a group which in the ‘90s could basically do no wrong (see other entries in this list), the game was inspired by ‘50s Hollywood B movies, especially the classic ‘Them!', a 1954 film featuring huge mutant ants.

The game happens more or less in real-time. Waiting, sleeping, or getting knocked unconscious (by mutant ants, of course) and waking up in hospital, all take up time, and after 15 days you lose. To win the player must locate the ant colony and kill the queen ant, in a fun, top-down minigame.

The story has multiple endings, and various ways to succeed, or at least make the final minigame simpler.

There are also two romantic opportunities (we're talking dialogue only, don't go expecting anything X-rated here), but they're mutually exclusive. Picking one upsets the other you see, much like in real life.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

2. Frontier: Elite 2

The sequel to the brilliant Elite, Fronter: Elite II is a space trading and combat game from David Braben. Released in 1993, it landed nine years after the original, with its switch to 16-bit computers bringing vastly improved graphics (no more wireframes!) and sound.

It was ground-breaking in many ways. It was the first game to feature procedurally generated star systems, putting all the recent fuss about No Man's Sky into some sort of context. Intriguingly, the game generated these systems by aggregating the total mass of material within an early star system into planets and moons, all allegedly in accordance with the laws of physics. A random element of material distribution was added in order to stop each system looking identical.

The flying model is also strictly physics-based, in this case Newtonian. So if you're flying at several thousand kilometres per second in one direction, turning the ship to point in a different direction will have no effect on your trajectory, since the ship's momentum will keep it travelling on the original course. However, there is an autopilot that takes care of most of the flying, with combat usually being the point that most players assume control themselves.

Also in keeping with reality, space is pretty big (distances and planets are all represented on a 1:1 scale). Whilst any ship worth its salt will have a hyper drive enabling quickish jumps to other systems, actually traversing a system from the point where you jump in to the planet or station you're interested in can take many hours real-time even for a fast ship.

Obviously that's not a great in-game experience, so there's a handy feature to accelerate time so that even a long trek across a huge binary star system can be dispensed with in minutes. Provided you don't run out of fuel.

Much as in Elite, in Frontier the player is left to make their own way in a vast and uncaring universe. Want to be a pirate, a trader, a mission runner, a courier, pilot a passenger ship or join the military? Or how about some blend of some or all of these? Frontier places no restrictions besides simply being able to afford to purchase, outfit and crew a ship capable of fulfilling the player's fantasies.

Braben programmed the game in 68000 assembly language. It allegedly features around 250,000 lines of code.

It had mostly favourable reviews, and went on to sell over 500,000 copies. The latest iteration, Elite: Dangerous, is still being expanded and improved by Braben's latest outfit, Frontier Developments.

The top 10 Amiga games of all time

In the final part of our rundown of the best titles ever to appear on the feted Commodore Amiga, we reach the top ten. But which paragon of software entertainment got the top slot?

1. Sensible World of Soccer

Another from the Sensible stable, Sensible World of Soccer (SWOS) was the 1994 follow-up to the 1992 hit Sensible Soccer. SWOS took the fantastic, arcade action of its predecessor and bolted on an incredibly comprehensive management game, with around 1,500 teams and over 27,000 players.

It's also the spiritual predecessor to modern classics such as World of Warcraft. Wait, hear us out! In SWOS players explore essentially a wide open world, looking for loot. Except in this case rather than running, riding or flying around Azeroth (or Outland, Draenor, the Broken Isles or wherever), they're scouring clubs from around the globe. And instead of searching for weapon and armour upgrades, they're looking for players. Still not convinced? Whatever.

Gamers would spend hours scouring obscure players from all over the world, searching for that elusive bargain who would single-handedly bring success. The lucky ones found him. Erik Hoftun. A cheap defender plying his trade for Norwegian team Molde, he was absurdly fast and capable of winning the ball at the back, sprinting past the entire opposition and scoring.

Sadly for Mr Hoftun, this ability seemed limited to his in-game version.
Incredibly, regular SWOS tournaments are still held across Europe, on both Amiga and PC. And much like real life, England never wins.

And that wraps up our entire top 30! Here are the great titles we couldn't find room for, despite their obvious quality and innovation:

What else did we miss? Let us know in the comments!