Best Atari ST Game
For the purposes of my computer game commentary I refer to the Atari ST of 1985 as a Western computer game machine. The Atari ST is also known as "The ST."
Both the Atari 520 ST and 1040 ST are powered by a Motorola 68000 clocked at 8 MHz. RAM on the ST typically ranges from 512 kbytes to 1 mbyte. The ST went head to head with the Amiga during the ST-Amiga Wars of the late 80s and early 90s.
The ST could display 16 colors from a palette range of 512 at a resolution of 320x200. Its color palette was superior to IBM EGA but inferior to the Amiga.
The best Atari ST games are Microprose's Gunship of 1986, Xanth F/X's MIDI Maze of 1987 and FTL's Oids and Dungeon Master of 1987.
Oids and MIDI Maze were not only masterpieces, they were ST-exclusives.
Dungeon Master Original Version Atari ST
Dungeon Master updates pre-drawn static screens that players "flip through" by clicking directional icons. Sprite-scaled items and actors appear in the dungeon; the actors move about and fight the player's four-person party in real-time. In addition, players can interact directly with the environment (push buttons, insert keys, stand on pressure plates, pick up objects etc.)
ST mouse/joystick ports
One of the stupidest things about the ST was how its mouse/joystick ports were located under the machine. This meant you had to lift the machine up just to access the ports. It was not a good idea to lift and move micros all the time because they were heavy and their plastic enclosures were weak. In addition, you would need to be careful when accessing the ports because if you only lifted up the front of the machine you ran the risk of putting stress on the cables and ports at the back of the machine. Thus, most people bought cable extenders that stuck out from the front, which was better but still clumsy (and ugly).
The ST had a few other problems as well; namely, lack of hardware scrolling, no bit blitter and 3-channel audio that was inferior to Commodore 64 SID and Amiga Paula [1]. The ST also only had 720K diskettes whereas the Amiga had 880K ones.
One could be forgiven for referring to the ST as a "16-bit ZX Spectrum with MIDI"; it was only its MPU, RAM, diskette-space and color that separated it from the 8-bits; it did not have any custom chips like the C64 or the Amiga; its parts were off-the-shelf. That said, it was cheap, decent and had tons of software, so it sold well.
Other Atari ST Games
You can read about the following in History of Shoot 'em ups.
There was no IBM PC or Amiga version of Xevious.
There were many good Atari ST games, but the Amiga versions were almost always superior if the coders tapped the Amiga's chipset. And since they often did not do so, the ST versions were often just as good as the Amiga ones (which were just ST ports).
In addition, the ST version of a game was often cheaper than the Amiga version, yet just as good. The ST also had clearer stock color monitors than the Amiga did.
Unless you were into DTP or MIDI (and ST MIDI was in 99% of cases NOT for games), there was no reason to choose an ST over an Amiga. ST MIDI was mostly for non-gaming: C-Lab's Notator and Steinberg's Cubase.
Note that I am only concerned with stock ST, ST-F and ST-FM models, not the ST-E, Mega ST, TT or Falcon. Reason: this is computer-game commentary, and the stock ST is the only ST that took off as a computer-game machine. The Amiga-like STE of '89 and the A1200-like Falcon of '92 never took off as computer-game machines, even though they were great micros.
[1] Doesn't mean ST games could not have good sound and music (the ST could play sampled sounds, for example).
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