"It plays a few more late era games than the 500, and with an easily available, super simple to use bit of software – I use ‘Relokick’ – you can trick your Amiga 500+ into booting up as an Amiga 500, thus letting you play all the additional games." "I'd go for the Amiga 500+," says journalist and vintage games collector Will Freeman.
Subsequent models, including the Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200, offer more processing power and design refinements, as well as compatibility with later titles, but most of the best games will run on a 500 or the slightly improved 500+ just fine.
It's also where a lot of technically gifted European studios like Guerrilla and Housemarque originated, courtesy of the 'demo scene', where coders, artists and musicians competed to wring the absolute most out of the Amiga hardware.īuying guide: you can get a basic functional Amiga 500 for about £35 on eBay, but look for people offering bundles of the computer and games. This was the glory era of Britsoft, when idiosyncratic UK studios like Bitmap Brothers (Speedball 2, Chaos Engine), Team 17 (Worms), Bullfrog (Syndicate) and Sensible Software (Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer) were in their pomp. Okay, this isn't strictly a console, it's a home computer, but if you owned an Amiga in the late-eighties or early nineties you owned one of the best games machines on the planet.
These are all relatively reliable too so even if you buy one that looks like it has been driven over by a Ford Mondeo, it should still function.Īs ever, feel free to add your own suggestions!Ī rare sighting of a Commodore Amiga 500 doing something other than playing Cannon Fodder Photograph: public domain Commodore Amiga, 1985 They all have very large gaming libraries and again, the games are easily available. I deliberately chose machines that are easy to get hold of on eBay or at car boot sales and that won't break the bank. It's faintly fetishistic, of course, but you know, fetish is about pleasure, and old games machines certainly provide that.Īnyway, for those interested in trying old consoles first-hand, here are six classics that I'd recommend starting with. Part of the pleasure is in the ritual of the vintage hardware: plugging in a cartridge, sliding in a diskette, or hitting the button that sends a CD lid flipping up like an old ghetto blaster. Obviously, there are hundreds of online emulators that let you experience classic titles from the comfort of your PC, but that's sort of missing the point – much like listening to the MP3 of an old 78 record. They are relics of fun, nostalgic artifacts that remind us of childhoods spent waiting patiently for games to load from cassettes, or blowing the dust out of old carts. They look weird and thrilling, with their chunky plastic bodies and their gigantic cartridge ports. If modern games have one fault (they probably have more, but let's not go there), it's that they can seem intimidating to newcomers because they rely so much on age-old conventions and traditions.Īlso, old consoles are nice. They are constantly mining the past for successful ideas, merging old genres to create strange new ones, or simply borrowing the aesthetics of past generations. Games are, like most other artforms these days, obsessively self-referential.
It's all about the next big release, the next console generation, the next PC graphics card technology. People often make the mistake of thinking that video games are a relentlessly forward-looking medium.