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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:53 am

The folks over at Retro Gamer published a "book" in early 2015 titled, The Amiga Book. I received mine in the mail yesterday via Ebay, which I got for below cover price (list is $19.99 US) and with free shipping. Not a bad deal at all in my opinion. Since the content is basically frozen in time, I didn't want to pass this one by as it is billed as "the ultimate collector's guide to the Amiga". That's a pretty bold statement, and it's not like the book's content would feel dated by the time I got it. It's already old!

The format, to be clear, is really more like a magazine that isn't filled with ads and annoying subscription cards falling all over your floor. It also has a thick-papered cover, but it is not a hard-back. It really is like a one-off beefed up magazine with a singular focus - the games that made the Amiga memorable for many. This seems to have been off-putting for some, but overall I like it as a resource.

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The Amiga Book does a decent job of walking through the various Amiga models and games folks might want to play at each hardware level, although they spend most of their time on the 500. It also has some interesting "making of" features about a couple of popular titles. As usual, it is rather heavily focused on the European audience (PAL), which makes sense since RG is based out of the UK. This is part of the reality of the Amiga for those of us in North America one has to simply expect. I imagine it would be similar for someone in the U.S. who might be into the Neo Geo. The Neo Geo was very popular machine Japan with poor sales in the U.S. and had quite a steep entry point price-wise. But it was a fabulous piece of hardware (even if the software was overly focused on one genre) for the time.

It's also worth noting that while a lot of the very familiar Amiga titles are represented (Lemmings, Monkey Island, etc.) there are a lot of titles given very high praise that aren't typically at the top of forum lists so you may find some things you weren't expecting.

This is a book may be worthy of your coffee table if you don't own Commodore Amiga: a visual Commpendium. The content is different, but it's overall an attractive package and quite a bit cheaper, if not exactly cheap.

You can always download it digitally for much less, but personally I think you should get the print version if you get it at all.





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