Honourable Mention 2
Shadow of the Beast
Described by Matthew Squires for its budget re-release in 1992 as "a genuine piece of Amiga games history", "a landmark game" and "an Amiga classic", Shadow of the Beast nevertheless is not remembered as a particularly great game - Squires gave it 53%, so even then it had lost its shine. He does stress that it has to be vieweed in context: for the first few years of the Amiga's life, games were designed for the Atari ST and ported to the Amiga with little consideration for its advanced hardware. In fact, they often played more slowly due to the slower clock speed of the Amiga's CPU.
Shadow of the Beast represented the moment people realised the power the Amiga had over the ST when it was really put to good use. The game involves you running through an excessively-parallax-scrolling landscape, jumping and hitting enemies to progress. The action is straightforward, the difficulty perhaps a little unfair, but taken in its context, it's a significant technical achievement.
You really can't imagine talking about the history of the Amiga without this game, its influence being felt across that generation of gaming. Sure, it's not a lot of fun really, so leaving it out of the top 100 lists is perfectly acceptable, but if you're going to assemble the 300 most important Amiga games, this is in the top three for sure.
Recommended TOSEC disk(s):Shadow of the Beast (1989)(Psygnosis)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr PNA]
Shadow of the Beast (1989)(Psygnosis)(Disk 2 of 2)[cr PNA]
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