What country has brought the finest out of the Amstrad?

[Puresox]

Just was interested to know what the opinion is on how different countries have added to getting the most out of our machine?
When you look at the games on our machine , they all have a style  that  points to there origin. Which country do you think excels at what skill on the CPC?
U.K.
France
Spain.
Germany.
And which country has the largest Amstrad scene ?

[Bryce]

Obviously the UK is first, that's where the CPC came from. They also did some pretty good games.
France and Spain are definitely known for their excellent games. Germany was more known for hardware expansions.
And a very special mention has to go to Ireland, who gave us Tastefulmrship

Bryce.

[TFM]

Here my opinion (best ranked first):


- Germany
- France
- Spain
- UK

[dcdrac]

Here is my List

UK for the most games with some real gems
Germany/France for some amazing looking games
Spain for amazing looking games but way too hard Mr Dinamic

[Puresox]

MY personal view are.


U.K. for the best straight forward well built games.
Spain. Some fantastic looking games that maybe a touch to difficult . A lot of effort seemed to come from here.
France. From one extreme to the other, some very odd and awkward games , to some very unusual,left field  games that look good and play very intelligently.
Germany. Very few games that I know of, but the ones I do know , look great and play great .

[steve]

If we are to descend into a nationalistic slanging match then people will have to provide evidence to back up their claims.

[Puresox]

Which post do you feel was derogatory ?

[steve]

None in particular, (maybe the wording in my post was too strong), but that's the direction these sort of threads tend to go in (on other forums).

[MacDeath]

UK : thx for getting us the best  majority of the ZXspectrum48 emulated on our beloved CPC.    and for the rest of course.

Germany : thx for the gam...er... professional softwares (and perhaps a very few spielen). I guess routines designed to manage extra RAM or ROM box are considered games, there in germany. 

Spain : yeah, you are awesome, perhaps a few speccyports here and there but nice curvy chicas in comics style colourfull graphics anyway.


So yeah, France of course.

well, UK managed to also give great stuff.


Australia, Greece, rest of the world ? would be great to know.
Was Melbourne house an actual Aussie company ?


BTW, gotta remember UBIsoft's very first product was Zombi on CPC.
French games companies made a great lot of Mode1 adventure games but too few of them were actually translated I guess and they lack proper RPG mecanics IMO.


True fact : having the 8bit market literally unified by Amstrad gave French company the opportunity to have a big home market with less standards/machines, hence better profitability, Europe having frontiers at the time, French companies would also distribute games from other countries, and big home market was a nice thing to have.

And the amstrad was good because : powerfull basic, simple yet efficient video modes, "unified" Data storage sold with machine, good monitor, nice texts in Mode2, sweet keyboards... a machine that breed coders (or wankers like me).

So french videogame industry is still strong these days actually.

Happy thinking about Loriciel.



Spain : more different 8bit formats, less population, so it didn't worked that well on the long run (sadly)
Germany : playing with utilitaries ? ok...
Brits : Tapes ? speccies ? how do you produces great graphic artists with those ?


Na, kidding but some aspects are (sad but) true.

[dcdrac]

I believe Melbourne House was owned by the Mirror Group of newspapers a UK media Group which also had Mirror Soft

[Puresox]

None in particular, (maybe the wording in my post was too strong), but that's the direction these sort of threads tend to go in (on other forums).

Hopefully it won't go down that route !

[Bryce]

Here my opinion (best ranked first):


- Germany
- France
- Spain
- UK

Without stating why, your list doesn't really say anything (other than the fact that you are German)

Bryce.

[arnoldemu]

My opinion:

France
UK
Spain

I wanted to put Germany last, but only because I am not familiar with the impact of the CPC there.

I was going to put the UK first, but the French took the CPC to heart and I think they bettered the UK in their release of games and demos.

Next UK just for the amount of games, but I didn't want to exclude Spain which also released a load of cracking good games - although hard at times.

Germany was difficult for me to place - I have seen some cracking demos and utlitities from Germany, but less so for the games. I don't remember much of an impact when I was reading AA magazine - less mention of them compared to France, UK and Spain who all got good mentions.

I voted France first, but I come from the UK !

[McKlain]

The only german game company that I can remember is Magic Bytes / Micro partner.

[TMR]

I believe Melbourne House was owned by the Mirror Group of newspapers a UK media Group which also had Mirror Soft

Melbourne House started out in Australia as a traditional publisher and branched into software at the start of the 1980s under the name Beam; a UK division of Melbourne House soon followed and it was that, along with the name, which was what was sold to Mastertronic around 1987. Virgin ended up with the name when they took over Mastertronic.

[AMSDOS]

Well I don't know where Richard Wilson comes from, but he lives here in Australia, so I think robbing Australia of a mention is sad. 

[Puresox]

Is he the Executioner ?

[McKlain]

Do you mean Executioner?

[arnoldemu]

Well I don't know where Richard Wilson comes from, but he lives here in Australia, so I think robbing Australia of a mention is sad. 

Yes.

I think instead of it being "which country is better" perhaps we should put a summary on the wiki of which companies existed in each country perhaps that would give an indication of how big the machine was in each country at the time.

[Puresox]

Wasn't Turrican a German development? And Black Land?


Yes the Executioner !   sorry!

[redbox]

Although I think the 'my country is better than your country' is nonsense (hey, we all live in CPC world), I think the development of the platform across regions is of some interest.

The UK CPC coders tended to all gravitate towards financial reward.  It was all make a game, sell it, move on to the next, sell it, move on to another platform and make money from that instead.  Therefore, the UK coders all tend to follow the path of the wider evolution of the computer scene (i.e. leaving 8-bit in 1988/89 and moving onto 16-bit).

In France, the CPC (to me) seems to have had a longer life commercially.  This could explain the high technical competence of French coders because they used the platform for longer and hence were able to get more out of it.

And the Germans tended to make very good hardware additions, but as said previously, the software wasn't always that great.

As for the Spanish - I think this is an exception to all of the above as it seems to have developed at it's own speed with quite a bit of volatility inbetween with sporadic releases etc.

[TMR]

Wasn't Turrican a German development? And Black Land?

i think Turrican was designed in Germany but converted by Probe?

[TFM]

Well, the question if formulated very open... My judgement is based on quality only, with completely ignoring quantity. If I judge based on quantity, then everything turns around.


Further I guess that everybody knows most about software of the own country, because it was/(is?) the most easy to get.


Another point is all non-english software. F.e. there are a lot of great prods from Spain, France and Germany, but nearly nobody outside the county knows about it, because other just don't understand the foreign language.

[Cholo]

To answer you second question: "And which country has the largest (current?) Amstrad scene ?".

Had a quick look at my youtube statistics that says in the last month viewers origin from:
27,1% France
16,4% United Kingdom
13,6% Spain
6.1% Germany
6,1% USA
4,0% Greece
And then a bunch of smaller ones.

Must say its pretty much as id imagine. Not that it can be trusted entirely .. like what is the odd USA doing there in the list. Still, no doubt there is a really big french scene & a lot of french retro channels as well.

[Bryce]

The C64 scene is still very active in the U.S. Maybe they are watching your videos to see what games with more colours than brown look like?

Bryce.