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I wrote a couple of reviews for really obscure and typically British C64 games I could adapt for whatever the house style is here if wanted. If any admin staff want to see them on their host site I can send the links if required.

The person playing it is an expert but you can tell this is a tough game!  He loses most lives just in one of the rivet screens!

Donkey Kong is indeed a deceptively difficult game, if you don't concentrate it is very easy to lose a life even if you know how to complete every level. I think it is the finest game Nintendo ever released bar none. One of the few genuine arcade cabs I would love to own actually.

Thing is the 4 levels of the original are quite different with different skills required to complete them, I don't think the extra screens bring any new gameplay style challenge as such, then again it is just a remix so fair enough

Thanks to OP for sharing, was news to me!

Hmmm generally I would agree but Steve Snake's awesome multi Sega console emulator has really good sound on Gauntlet 4 and is really easy to use. Of course you then need to buy USB adaptors for the real official Sega Megadrive 6 button joypads (the best joypads in the world!!!!) so I can only half agree myself

The old mono Gameboy screens really needed faster respone rate more than anything (to make them more useful than a chocolate tea pot haha) but a backlight is very useful for the GBA (which apart from lack of backlight is quite a nice machine to have I think)

I play all my GB games today on a £15 chinese PSPS lookalike with a gorgeous colour TFT screen (and the mono mode goes into sepia mode greyscale haha)

People starting up these retro arcades as a business are REALLY bad news because you can't buy decent used arcade machines anywhere now. I have been looking for a few classic machines including a sit down Out Run but not even the rip-off merchants you find on google have one.

I don't like this because when all these companies go bust the machines will all be scrapped after being repossed. STOP IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The SD slot for adding roms is nice but If I was going to get one I'd probably look for one that can play the actual cartridges too.

I was interested by this comment because unlike 8 bit computer games on cassette that came with some awesome loading artwork, music and even games to play (Invade-a-load for example) while a game loaded I don't really understand how playing the games from an SD image compared to a real card would change the experience personally.

(which is why I have always had the largest possible collection of tape image files for my emulators)

Anything with a detachable keyboard looks awesome I think, I would buy one for the styling because unlike the disastrous C64 GS games console (which covered over the disk drive and cassette port and the internal keyboard connector still on the motherboard) it can still be used in the same way as an Atari 65XE.

Being honest the keyboard is quite poor being the same as on the XE computers, but I would love to modify one with a cart port on one of the sides, front or back (so you can put a monitor on top of it) and try and hack together an Atari 800XL keyboard into the external keyboard casing

To be fair if you compare Uridium on the NES with the unofficial Atari XE version called Oxygene, just depends how much time you are prepared to spend on the machine but it can be expanded nicely (I think you can still use an Atari touchpad with Technicolour Dream 256 colour paint package for example). Sadly in the EU console did very badly before the 16bit models were released and the US only had eyes for the NES at the time.

PS1 is still retro in my book, as it went head to head with Saturn/3DO/Jaguar/N64.

I know what you mean about PS1, bloody thing cost me a first in my degree, if Ridge Racer on my Japanese PS1 wasn't so damned good I wouldn't have spent all those nights playing it instead of revising for my exams! haha

I personally chose the C64 because I could afford 2 full price games a month with my pocket money (didn't have a sweet tooth anyway as a kid haha) and I think that sort of level of constant fuelling of games catalogue is what made it so special. Hell I could afford two budget games a week, more if I skimped on school lunch and gave my pound coins to Mastertronic games at the sweetshop on the way home (even more spare coins if I walked home from school!) No wonder I was so healthy in my early teens

So let's say you were stuck in a time loop and had to experience the timeline of ONE machine only over and over then what machine would it be?

For me I wish I could constantly relive my Commodore 64 years which for me were the most fun for pure gaming (as opposed to programming and arty type things I did on 520ST and Amiga 1000). And there is nothing like the wonder of those early days where colour graphics of any kind and more than simple beeps and farty noises were considered advanced features to detail on the box! haha

How about everyone else?

Lot of Amiga/ST games i saw at the time boiled down to faster 3D on ST, better sound, more colours on Amiga.

But then you had things like Midnight resistance: only 1 player on ST, push scrolling etc.

Developers like Bitmap Bros would really push boat out to ensure ST versions were as close as possible to Amiga versions though.

Apart from Chaos Engine I think you will find that is because the Amiga games are ST versions (ie same 16 color graphics in most like Xenon II) with enhanced sound and hardware scrolling implemented.

Elite (the conversion of the Acornsoft game by Firebird) famously was a 3D game that was not faster on the ST, was actually faster on the Amiga because they used the blitter to do the solid triangles in the game engine (the Amiga blitter is about 2 times the speed of the 68000 CPU at manipulating video memory and of course leaves the CPU to calculate the geometry)

I don't mind slightly slower speed of Amiga Stuntcar Racer because without the creaking sounds of the floorboards it has a lot less atmosphere and sense of peril I feel.

I prefer Gauntlet 2 on ST because the game looks, sounds and plays the same on both but there is a 1 disk crack for the ST version which makes it play like a console game (they just chopped out the long intro sample which I find annoying anyway as you can't skip it and it's just a sample not a properly made tune with sampled instruments). Both are rubbish compared to Gauntlet 1 on the ST (and the Amiga 'conversion' of that needs an Amiga 1200 with FAST RAM to run like a 1985 Atari ST anyway so AVOID that rubbish from some French guy).

I preferred The Pawn on the Amiga 1000 because it had a much nicer keyboard to type on than my 1986 520STM+SF354 computer setup, not because of the music

To be honest where it was a rubbish ST Port job on Amiga the original ST version was not good enough compared to the arcade original anyway so I didn't like either (Bionic Commandos being a prime example) or just wasn't released on the Amiga (like Road Runner or Gauntlet 1).

Games done properly on Amiga and released on both well clearly I preferred the Amiga version (like the sublime arcade perfect port of Marble Madness on Amiga).

3D games before Playstation 1 Ridge Racer came out didn't really interest me and so I rarely felt the allure 20% CPU speed advantage of the ST versions because my absolute limit is Zarch/Lander on the Archimedes (without the depth cueing forget it which is why Virus is OK on ST/Amiga but not if you had a friend with Archimedes and Zarch on tap lol)

Would like both really but after moving house I now only want to buy machines with box and polys so that will really dictate what I get first as neither are particularly common.

Interesting. Looking at World Tour Racing on Jaguar CD (the most sophisticated 3D racing game on the system which is about 15fps on average) I doubt very much those screenshots are of Jaguar Need for Speed or Road Rash because the Jaguar can not handle texture mapped 3D racing games the same way that the 3DO did IMO.

Shame despite many Amiga stock ports Lotus Turbo Challenge series was not one not thought to be given the Jaguar treatment. Imagine those racing games with the Jaguars powerful 2.5D capabilities!

Also would have been great if Afterburner or Powerdrift was done. Afterburner is a reason to own a 32x and that is less powerful than Jaguar.

The problem was the XEGS was it was just an Atari 800XL (as is the Atari 65XE) in a swanky new case format, and the Atari 800XL is not much better than the Atari 800 from 1979 (it has a few more screen modes that are of bugger all use battling the 'all 16 colours on screen' ease of the rival CPC and C64 machines but it does have 256 instead of 128 colours).

Was never going to compete with even the best programmed C64 games most of the time (be it games like Salamander or Rocket Ranger).

Having said that it did have access to some wonderful games, like Rescue on Fractalus, Star Raiders 1 and 2 and Gyrus etc. The bundled games were probably the worst possible choices they could have made. Had they bundled Rescue on Fractalus and stuck it next to an NES with the usual type of tile based 2D 3rd party games it would have made the XEGS look superior to the NES.

However games like Popeye or Donkey Kong do highlight the low sophistication of available screen modes and the Atari version of sprites.

It's a cool machine though, and with the right games it would be just as enjoyable as an NES or SMS at the time. It is a victim of its time though, by the time the XE machines and XEGS console came out EU and US software houses had long since abandoned writing high quality (technically speaking) games and moved on. The Atari 8 bits are powerful but very awkward to program to a level that matched 3rd generation C64 and CPC titles pushing those rivals to the max.

The Amiga 1000/500 technology suffered in a similar way, but to a much lesser extent, as the old Atari 400/800 series of 8 bit computers. Very very few games ever achieved anything like the full potential of the chipset in hardware design. In both cases this is down to sheer complexity. Apart from the Jaguar and Saturn I can't think of another machine as complex to get the best out of the hardware in an audio visual sense.

Now putting that aside and given the average wage (well I can only speak for the UK here) at £25 a pop for games there were enough to keep most people happy from 1986 onwards.

I plan on doing a chronological highlight of games that either brought the best arcade experience into the home of any console/computer version released (this is really rare) or excellent games that not only did what they intended to do but pushed the machine so hard it would mean the SNES or Megadrive versions of these excellent games would turn out inferior or at best almost as good as the Amiga version (at 200% of the price being cartridges were £50).

What you have to remember is that the Americans ignored the machine and so much of the software was from unprofessional UK software houses with a very low expectation of the machine's hardware and hence so many games that were released being technically underwhelming even if they played well.

Ultimately the story of Amiga is a very sad one, and nothing like the two fingers up at the surviving Apple and Wintel products around today the the Commodore 64 seems to have upheld for an extraordinarily long and successful product lifespan. It took half a decade to get 1 million Amigas into the marketplace, sad but true for the machine that invented multi-media and OS sophistication wrapped in a reliable and user friendly front end from the day of release.

Rocket Ranger on Amiga, ST and C64 (certainly not the NES release) because you would probably be put in prison if you pixeled so many Nazi symbols into a game. I don't even know how it got released in the 90s! (obviously home computer versions were not allowed in Germany...possibly amended to remove all offending symbols a la NES version prior to release).

Of course it is one of the finest examples of Cinemaware gameplay and it's not like you can choose sides but still kinda iffy.