Numeric Pad Amiga Games

[English Invader]

I started a thread recently about the production flaws of the A600 and suggested that the dropping of the numeric keypad wasn't as great a loss as many people made it out to be and that I had happily used an A600 for years without ever coming across software that needed one.  It was suggested that I played a very limited games library and that I didn't play anything that involved sustained use of a keyboard and mouse (for the record, I often play Lemmings and Space Harrier (which are both mouse only) and I'm also quite partial to the football management sims).

 

But my recent acquisition of a Raspberry Pi Amibian set-up has presented me with an opportunity to right this wrong.  I have a decent gaming keyboard and mouse combo with the all-important numeric keypad and now is the time to find out what I've been missing.

 

Please recommend games that utilise the numeric keypad.  I don't care what genre they are; flight sims, strategy, whatever; the only requirement is that they are either unplayable or very difficult to play without a numeric keypad.

[Daedalus2097]

Hmmmm, it will of course depend entirely on the games you play, but to say you play a very limited games library is a little bit much. There are many thousands of games on the Amiga, and nobody plays them all, all the time. If the limited selection you play uses the numpad, then it'll seem like everything needs it. Likewise if the limited selection you play doesn't need the numpad, then it'll seem like nothing needs it. Given they often seem to be similar styles of game, this effect is likely to be magnified.

 

Personally, there were a few games I played that used it, but most of the big names didn't. It is somewhat fashionable to bash certain things in the Amiga world, and the A600 is one of them, with the missing numpad being right up there. I do suspect a fair portion of people using that particular stick wouldn't even miss it for the games they play.

 

There were a couple of games that I played a lot which used the numpad. Birds of Prey was a nice flight simulator that I played to death which used it for moving the camera around. But that wasn't particularly useful, just nice for external views, flybys etc., so it was perfectly playable without it. I wouldn't have used the keypad much at all there. The more limiting factors would have been the A600's limited CPU power and the Del/Help keys, which are normally side-by-side on the Amiga but are offset on the A600. These are used for rudder control. I'm pretty sure most of the flight sims actually used the numpad for the camera. To what degree that made them unplayable without one, I don't know, but I suspect it was a similar story to Birds of Prey - a nice-to-have rather than required.

 

The other big one was Railroad Tycoon. It used the keypad for laying tracks, and while it still worked with the arrow keys, you couldn't lay diagonal tracks without the 1, 3, 7 & 9 keys on the keypad. I'd consider that essential.

 

Aside from games, there were some functions in Deluxe Paint that needed the numpad. System-friendly software like that though could be worked around with soft keyboards etc.

 

All the other big games that I can think of and that I played, didn't need the numpad. So I really do think it's a bit of an overblown problem that it's fashionable to parrot.