Midwinter, Amiga - Part 1 - Overlooked Oldies
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- This has been a long time coming, since it was pretty difficult to get into. Usually I like to play new games for the first time in the video, but I had to break with convention this time because of the complexity and obscure interface of this game. Took a while to figure out how to actually play this game.
Midwinter is a mix of strategic and action elements, where you lead a guerilla force against an invading army on the island of Midwinter. This takes place in the middle of an ice age brought on by nuclear winter. The goal is to recruit other inhabitants on the island and undermine the enemy forces by sabotaging their infrastructure.
I didn't get far, since this is a very difficult and long term game. It is impressive especially for it's time. It if weren't for the inevitable low frame rate in the action modes, which makes aiming the gun difficult, this would be a very appealing game. Remake anyone?
This is a request by Slenkar, Trusteft Fawltykog and TheUngulable.
Midwinter on Moby Games:
www.mobygames.c...
"Overlooked Oldies" is a series of let's play videos of retro games that I somehow never played back in the day. Many of them will be suggestions made by subscribers, particularly on binary milestone request videos.
Intro music is from the classic "cracktro" by SCoopex. The full version can be heard and seen here:
flashtro.com/pa...
A jewel of my AtariST years (Carrier Command, SunDog, Phantasie, Dungeon Master, Pirates!, Starfleet, and Breach comes to mind right away as well, without effort). This was one of these games you put the disk in wondering what it'll be like and after an hour or 3 you get that "this game is of a special breed" feeling... Not many of the hundred you ever play get that feeling, this one did, A LOT.
Freedom of doing absolutely anything you wanted, including fooling around trying to climb mountains with snow wolves or with an Abysmal Skier... up to meticulously planning your game from point A to B to C etc.
I was so much immersed in that one that even tho it had none, I kinda "felt" bad weather raining down on our characters sometimes "Snowstorm valley"? brings a lot of image to a young 13yo Canadian guy who experiments these 3-5 months per year.
Loved the attention to details, Stark's nurse girlfriend would join him if he asked, but if she would in turn ask that guy that loathed Stark, he would basically tell her to go drown in a river somewhere, lol.
Always played without planes and mortars because when I did, I always got pinned down somewhere badly hurt and time would pass, letting the bad guy win. General Masters, with a name like that, what an ego !
I've checked the remake from the limited stuff available, looks rather nice. I just hope it does better than the Carrier Command remake in my books.
Oh and thanks for playing this and commenting while doing it.
Thanks a whole damned lot !
This is the game I was thinking of, not Hunter. Finally found it. This always had a sinister feel to it.
It's an absolutely dream for me, that the game will become a remake.
but, if we can play it in the real speed with higher fps...
Did it get one?
@Jojo Rabbit That's a shame. Thanks tho.
FINALLY!! Someone who knows what he's doing in this game! :) Thank you so much for this video! It was really hard understanding all those little intricacies of the game...
I was looking for the name of this game for decades... It was mindblowing back in the day - although I never had any idea what I was doing.
This game was an amazing proof of concept, but horrendous to play back on 16bit. Way too choppy and low res. A remake would do the original vision justice.
I loved this game when it came out but boy do old memories differ from reality. I look forward to seeing what they can do with the remake with today's technology.
Midwinter was the first game i ever saw on the Amiga 500 with 1 megabyte in the year 1992! Awesome , good work guys !!!!
I absolutely love this game. It was very much ahead of its time in a lot of ways, and a bit too ahead of its time in some, as the hardware wasn't really able to keep up with its ambitions. I still played it to death, though.
This was such an incredibly immersive game. Even though the vector graphics were crude and the FPS low, it was still incredible at the time to be playing this on my home computer. I never really did understand the game much (didn't have a manual), but did mess around and fly hang gliders and stuff like that.
loved the midwinter and huge open space that you could explore, even believe that I managed to finish the game by placing explosive on some factory on the map
The concept of this game was brilliant and had the best game manual of all time. I never got so ramped up to play a game after reading the background on all the characters that had to work together to save the island. The game itself was really hard from what I remember, but this deserves a reboot.
This game was so hard back when it was released, i played it for ages but never got anywhere! Id also love to see a good fps remake
I played this back then but never really figured out what to do. Got a lot of hours from it but didn't ever make much progress!
The frame rate seems choppier than I remember - but the Amiga was capable of shifting solid vectors around better than this (see Elite, Carrier Command, Castle Master, Robocop 3, Epic etc)
You have the patience of a GOD. I would have run it on an emulator with the frame rate turned up.
MediaFilter thanks. I tried it with DOSbox running faster, but it sped up the game mechanics as well as the frame rate so it was even more unplayable. I'd die in a second.
Yeah.. surprised how choppy this was in such a small window (goggles). Carrier Command was waaaaaay smooth.
I got flashbacks of Midwinter while i was playing State of Decay recently, with that game's emphasis on interrelations between the survivors you recruit. Glad to see I'm not the only one who remembers!
it looks so weird seeing it today and remembering how much we all loved that game back then.. it really needs a modern re-make.
@Fawltykog you're welcome, glad you liked it :)
@HardWarUK nice one. I'll have to get hold of that front end and give it a go. Thanks :)
Hey Jim!!thank you for putting Midwinter mate here!!Appreciated highly*hugs!*hehe reminds me good old days i spent many many hours with it,it was a serious fun!I hope all is well with you mate and you are healthy!!!
Damn! I LOVED this game at the time! A few years ago I tried to find information on it, but could only find very limited stuff. I thought it had been forgotten. So good to see a gameplay video of it. Cheers!
Very cool video, I've wanted to see the gameplay for this game for a while now. Thanks, and subscribed.
We need another Midwinter. Maybe made on Frostbite.
A remake is approved by me, at least. Today, a game of this magnitude can be created by a tiny studio. But, to really get the game justice the devs must read the original script.
I played the MS-DOS version for a while a couple of years ago because this was a game I'd always been intrigued by. It's very atmospheric and the sense of freedom makes it feel quite modern. Only problem is that I felt the vehicle combat was lacking a bit.
Great game! Brings back some good memories. I remember it had a fairly hefty price tag and a really thick manual ... well worth it though! Thanks for posting.
The game world is much larger than remembered lol.
Great to see it again. I am going to watch the rest of the series. :)
"The revolution is growing! Now it's two versus ten thousand... Or something..." Love it. One of your best lines in these vids. I love the premise of this - waging a resistance campaign in Ice Age conditions. Reminds me of the Norwegian resistance against Germany in WW2. But the choppiness... Argh, I can't even tell where you are or what direction you're going in sometimes, nevermind about combat. I'd like to see a remake, with a much improved frame rate.
Midwinter is an XBox360/PS3 game trapped in the body of a 16-bit game.
I was just reading about this in Tristan Donovan's history of video games, in the context of being one of the earliest games to create environments from 3D polygons.
Looks like a cool game, too!
Yeah this could be a great game to remake for a small studio with a kickstarter project or something. It has that roguelike feel to it.
@HardWarUK thanks, that's most kind of you :)
I don't know when I'll be trying it though since I've got a lot of new games I'm looking forward to playing (retro and modern).
Thank you! Very much appreciated esp as i ain't seen this game being played since god knows when!
Keep 'em comin'!
OMG! I have totally forgotten this game. This was nice.
Indeed. However I tried using DOSbox and speeding it up, but it didn't just speed up the render speed, but also the game speed. Old games didn't usually have separate rendering and game logic cycles and their game speed was tied to processing speed. So I went with the Amiga version so I could get something like what was intended.
It worked better than most people gave it credit for. I beat it several times and think the immersion is pretty good for a game from this period. Farcry 2 could learn a thing or two from midwinter.
13:30 *Snow mobile crashes*
Homer: *D'OH!*
The remake is coming! Get your credit cards out and keep refreshing kickstarter every 30 seconds!
@HardWarUK yeah I enjoyed reading the manuals after bringing the game home. Particularly I remember the stuff that came with Elite 2. Some games still retain the tradition though. I remember the manual that came with Civilization 4 was really thick, and only in one language. The big downside of buying downloadable games is the lack of any physical manual or maps and such. Although Good Old Games try to sweeten it a little with some nice extras, which I like.
@JimPlaysGames I remember playing this and loving the concept, but being frustrated by the choppiness.. The problem was the game was too advanced for the hardware of the time. Imagine if this game were re-made on modern PC and XB360 and PS3; smooth framerate, detailed environments (now you would be able to actually see where you are lol) This game could be awesome on today's hardware.
This could be remade with arma2 or 3 i think, but they would have to retain both the graphical theme wich is awesome and the cool mechanic of each character having its own 2 hours.
Hehe, sounds very familiar. For me it was Frontier: Elite 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown that had me similarly addicted. Seems to be something about games with colons maybe.
UFO is the GOAT ;-)
I remember playing the sequel on my ST - the constant disc access killed it but it was years ahead of its time.
@kakabixlis yeah I'm good thanks mate, hope you're doing well also. Glad you enjoyed the video :)
Looked great on the back of the game box. Frame rate was so bad it was unplayable though.
Also the Atari ST and the PC versions worked much better than the Amiga version for some odd reason. I played it on the Atari ST.
@DjayAmiga yeah I do regret having to do it this way, but the recording I made the first time trying to play it without any preparation was literally just me saying "um, I don't know what I'm doing" a lot. That's why I put off doing the video for a long time. There was just no way of playing the game without reading the manual and getting used to the interface first. For Carrier Command, there was fortunately a bit of a review/tutorial online that made it easier, but little for Midwinter at all.
@Arjozof ooh Just Cause looks very cool. I'll have to have a go at it sometime.
I do prefer Hunter to Midwinter, seemed more intuitive and the game world was less sparse. I did a video about Hunter too.
Reminds me of a much older PC game called Stellar 7. Which was . . . a sort of futuristic hover tank game with outlined 3d models. Though S7 was just a pure action game of tank combat over . . 7 levels I believe?
@ligurmatic yeah a remake would definitely be a good idea, although it would be made too easy I suspect. I bet they could do some nice things with snow effects, like creating avalanches with dynamite to damage enemy positions. That would be cool (pun intended).
Play this in an Amiga with a Turbocard
Pure gem of a game. I' ve it, in Big box and another one still blistered never opened. Manual is very usefull
Is it for sale?
@DjayAmiga The first experience of a game is of course the hardest to recapture and I think watching someone have that first experience is one way to try to do that. I've seen a few let's plays that were in that style too and I find those the most entertaining, so that's what I was going for. Davidr64yt was a big inspiration for me, since he does a lot of first time playthroughs like that. His Eversion video is hilarious and brilliant for his reactions as are so many of his videos.
Yeah I'm surprised that there isn't more about it on youtube given how many people were enamoured by this game.
Oh I wish I'd known that at the time. I would have played the ST version for this video. Good to know though.
Unfortunately I couldn't find one, which is what delayed me in making this video in the first place. There is the manual though, on the Lemon Amiga site.
@Relugus indeed, it was way ahead of it's time.
@slenkar it did take a while to figure out what to do. It's certainly not intuitive. Also I preferred the Crystal Maze :)
@HardWarUK nice. I wish I'd kept it all. I don't even remember why I don't have so much of it any more. But I've never been much of a collector.
the pc version works so much better. even the atari st version, which is the first version i owned of this game back in the the day, i think worked way better than the amiga version. this is the first time i see the amiga version, but it looks like it's virtually unplayable. which seems odd to me since it came out later.
I loved this game massive world great gameplay
@HardWarUK they really put more effort into the manuals and packaging and stuff back then didn't they? You just couldn't go without reading the manual for a game like this. Although an in-game tutorial is something I do like about modern games that would be nice here.
I got this game when I was 7
had NO idea what I am doing or what I should do :-D
still have the original box and discs
Yeah that's just how it was with old Amiga games. You're thrust into them confused and even with a manual it makes no sense. Just like life.
@@JimPlaysGames well said. Amiga is life. no tutorials :-D
@HardWarUK I like most genres of games too, except for sports games.
Atari version was much much less choppy. Must be because it was designed for ST. Quality game. I had a copied version that froze each time I crashed. Still played it though. Hand Gliding was the best part.
@truelazerlight I tried playing the DOS version, but wasn't sure how fast to set the cycles. At faster cycles the 3D stuff happened too fast to make it equally unplayable. Maybe I was doing something wrong. This was pretty unplayable really. People had more tolerance for shitty frame rate back then I think.
@HardWarUK well whatever floats your rubber ducky :)
Super badass motherfucking rifle. lol
The game was really easy once you figured the best strategy. You need to recruit more and more people and fast! The more characters you have, the more actions you can do in the same clock hour. Don't waste time to fight the ennemy head to head. You need to spread on the map with your different characters and blow up factories and fuel depot. Once the ennemy will lack fuel depot and factories to refuel and rearm, their progression will come to a complete stop and it will be unable to conquer the strategic points in the north of the island. Then control the radios stations and then go to the south to blow up the ennemy HQ. Game Over!
I can see why it's overlooked... it's unplayable.
@HardWarUK I doubt I could keep it interesting for a full longplay. The game is pretty repetitive and long. It also doesn't really interest me too much. I think it would be better done by someone who really loves the game and played it back in the day for the nostalgia value.
Hi Jim, I just wanted to say this series was very helpful researching for mine, where I play the highest and lowest rated games in an old magazine to see how they've aged. Midwinter was one such high scorer. If you're interested, the video in which you're of course credited, is here -ruclips.net/video/kU3uBKv1TCE/видео.html . Thanks for making this.
this game was ground braking at the time
will an emulator pretending to be an accelerated amiga 040 etc run it any smoother or is it frame locked, ie with faster processor emulation does the game go bonkers ?
This game was the tits! Lovedit on my A600
Where can you get a tutorial on how to play this game? I keep crashing my plane or into some snow in the first couple of minutes.
@Arjozof Midwinter was made too early; the hardware of the time could not match the game's ambition.
this game gets a remake!! by the indie developer singleton
What are the games in your intro sequence ? Carrier command and..
In order: Capital Punishment, Ruff n Tumble, Chaos Engine, Gunstar Heroes, Hunter, Super Stardust, Turrican 2 and Apidya. They're all on my Overlooked Oldies playlist: ruclips.net/p/PL266DBEDBE6892C11
The graphics really shouldn't be this jerky. The Amiga wasn't great at 3D - but it was definitely better than this.