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Happy new year! It's 2021, which by coincidence is 30 years after Amiga Power published their first of six All-Time Top 100 Games lists. Of course, the title is a little ironic - how can it be an "All-Time" list if they made six of them? - but nevertheless, they stand as a good guide to some of the best games released on the Commodore Amiga, from a catalogue of thousands.

So, what's the point of this blog? Well, I will be sampling every game that appeared in any of those six annual lists, providing my own thoughts on each one. In the next two sections, I'll explain why I embarked on this journey, and how my homemade ranking system works. The plan is to release a new update every day except Sunday, and check out all 292 games that were in the lists, plus eight Honourable Mentions to bring it to a nice round 300, and if all goes to plan, we'll see the number 1 game on New Year's Eve. Let's hope I can keep it up.

I'll kick things off on Monday with the lowest-ranked of the 292, but today, allow me to explain how things are going to work.

The Amiga Power All-Time Top 100

First, some context. Amiga Format started life in August 1989, and although the magazine reviewed plenty of games, it also covered other aspects of owning an Amiga - it was a very capable machine, after all. In May 1991, Amiga Power was created as an off-shoot of Amiga Format, focused solely on games. It began with "issue zero", which was really a 32-page extra included with that month's Amiga Format. It was here that the Amiga Power All-Time Top 100 list first appeared, with the magazine proper starting the following month.

Every year, a new Top 100 was created, reflecting the writers' changing tastes in games, and the newer games hitting the market. The 1991 list was, according to the contents page, created by a selection of journalists from various Amiga magazines, who argued for a while and did the best kind of list they could. A feature the following year explained the way it was compiled, and that it "less accurately reflected the true feelings" of the Amiga Power writers, resulting in quite a few games disappearing from the 1992 list.

As the list progressed through the years, the criteria for inclusion would change, in an attempt to feature as wide a range of games as possible. As a result, multiple games in a series would have only one featured in a particular year (in the case of the two Monkey Island games, they shared a spot in 1995 and 1996). The final list broke from tradition, being published in August 1996, one issue before the magazine closed down. Perhaps the writing was on the wall, so it was saved for the end.

My new ranking system

There are so many games on the Amiga, and I wanted a small selection of the best to put on some kind of emulation device. How to decide what's worth including? The Amiga Power lists were an obvious starting point, but if I just went by the 1996 list, I might be missing out on older games that lost the writers' interest, or previous games in a series that were excluded. So I decided to collate all six lists, which resulted in 292 unique games.

I could just end it there, but I wanted to have some fun with it. How could I rank this new list of 292 games? Sure, they're all worth playing in some way if they were picked for the list, but it would be nice to do an 'ultimate best ever' list. Here's how I decided to combine the lists.

Each game in each list gets points based on the inverse of its position - in other words, the number 1 game gets 100 points, number 100 gets 1 point, number 36 gets 65 and so on. I could just add those scores together, but that wouldn't work for several reasons: older games that feature on multiple lists would have an advantage, even if they're clearly worse games than those that came out later, and clearly the final 1996 list best reflects the final opinions of the writers. So I devised a coefficient:

1996 = x1.0
1995 = x0.8
1994 = x0.6
1993 = x0.4
1992 = x0.2
1991 = x0.1

So, now, the number 1 game in 1991 gets just 10 points, while the number 1 in 1995 gets 80. Older games that managed to maintain their popularity with the writers still get recognition for that fact, without having an unfair advantage over newer games. In the case of a tie, games featuring higher in the latest lists get priority - so a game ranked 100 in 1993 trumps a game ranked 99 in 1992. I think this is a pretty good compromise.

As well as details regarding the game's position in the rankings and the points it earned, I will include a recommended disk suggestion from the TOSEC Amiga list. No, I won't be either hosting the disk files for you to play, nor providing a link to where you can find them, but I will give you the filename of the disk(s) that I had most success with playing, so that if you would like to try the games yourself, you can use the same disk file I did with confidence that it will work. If you're using an emulator, most games run under stock Amiga 500 settings (though I always have 1MB RAM since it usually helps), but if more advanced hardware such as the Amiga 1200 is necessary, I'll mention it.

Let the list begin

There you have it, a full explanation of the point of this blog. Tune in on Monday for the first game, ranked 100 in the 1991 list, and thus having the minimum of 0.1 points. If you've looked up the lists, you'll know what it is, but if not, wait and see!

An essential link for this blog is the Amiga Magazine Rack Top 100 lists (I did find a couple of errors however, so I thoroughly checked through the actual magazine scans that can be found on the site).

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