Best Use of the Amiga's AGA Chipset

[retrosofer]

Seen as i got the Amiga perminantly set up now i have been getting back into it even more and continueing to finish the restoration and mods off that i started on the A2000/A1200. Anyway, i have been playing Jungle Strike on the system, and then heard that there was an AGA version, great i thought, as i'm not that impressed with the Amiga version, especially when Desert Strike manages to look far superior. But i found that there is no difference between the OCS version and the AGA version save the opening title screen, which in the AGA version looks better, but thats about it. I'd have seriously thought that the AGA version would look noticably better, but both versions are basicly the same.
So what game or games do other think made the absolute best use of the AGA chipset?

[Nemesis]

Banshee would be the obvious answer. Uridium 2 & Alien Breed 2 were nice as well but not hugely different to the A500 versions etc.

[TMR]

Pinball Illusions and Slamtilt both use AGA pretty well, i'm fairly sure they're 256 colour displays at 320x256 or 640x512 interlaced if in multiball (as a default, although it's possible to select which mode they run in and if it changes for mutiball if memory serves)

[pottyboy]

The AGA version of Theme Park is vastly improved over the ECS version. Not only does it look better, it has a cool intro, more stuff, and is much less buggy

[Havantgottaclue]

The AGA/CD32-only Guardian was impressive. I'm not sure what it achieves that couldn't have been achieved on a stock A500, other than more colours - and perhaps it's just the higher clock speeds that the A1200/A4000 had that made it viable, rather than the AGA chipset. But I'm still going to fling it in there and see what others think!

[paranoid marvin]

Frontier is virtually unplayable on a non-A1200 machine - same with Wing Commander

The most impressive A1200 games for me were Star Trek:25th Anniversary and Apocalypse

[SexyWayne]

Yep Guardian is pretty impressive, billed as the Amiga's Starfox back when it was released iirc, never played it properly myself but what I've seen it looks fast and throws everything about without any effort

[resident paul]

There are versions of Zool! AGA & Fire & Ice! AGA.

[SexyWayne]

Super Stardust... like Asteroids, but better

[Zagrebo]

The short answer is that games that made much use of the AGA machine's hardware were sadly few in number. It arrived quite late in the Amiga's commercial life and there was, at the time, a tradition of "upgrade" machines being unable to get much in the way of dedicated software because the older machines were still so popular and publishers didn't see the point in neglecting them (see also: 128K ZX Spectrum).

A few examples that did get made and which are worthwhile are: Chaos Engine AGA, Dreamweb AGA, Gloom and Skeleton Krew.

[killbot]

There are versions of Zool! AGA & Fire & Ice! AGA.

The AGA version of Zool is a mess. Amazingly it's slower than the OCS version with more frame-rate issues, and the snazzy new backgrounds are far too busy and easy to get lost in.

For AGA platformers, I've always had a soft spot for Marvin's Marvellous Adventure, even though (as AP pointed out at the time) it's offensively easy.

[retrosofer]

There are versions of Zool! AGA & Fire & Ice! AGA.

The AGA version of Zool is a mess. Amazingly it's slower than the OCS version with more frame-rate issues, and the snazzy new backgrounds are far too busy and easy to get lost in.

For AGA platformers, I've always had a soft spot for Marvin's Marvellous Adventure, even though (as AP pointed out at the time) it's offensively easy.

Funny you should say that about Zool, i remember playing Zool 2 AGA on my A1200 with an accelarator card with a 030 processor, fpu and with 32mb ram, and in certain parts of the game the frame-rate was so bad, couldn't understand it, game should have been running too fast lol.

Simon The Sorcerer looks pretty damn good i think, one of the most viberant colourful AGA games i have seen so far.

[clarance]

Funny one the A1200 - I only got one late in the day, second hand, after owning a 500 and accumulating a nice collection of games. Have to say, nothing really springs to mind when it comes to must have games - even things like Super Stardust had it's A500 equivalent that wasn't half bad. There were a few games that played a little better - flight sims and the like, but that didn't have anything to do with AGA, just a little more CPU grunt (and the 1200 was seriously underpowered as well, for it's time).

[resident paul]

I forgot about this one but not a game it is the AGA version of Dpaint 4 makes full use of the AGA chipset!