If you owned a Commodore Amiga, the first thing you wanted to do with it was to load those great demos and games that showed off it's awesome sound capabilities.
The Atari St just couldn't match it and what more to compound that fact but with a game like Shadow of the Beast.
Was it a good game? No. But the game wasn't about game play. It was about braving your way through the stiff controls and difficult game play so that you can show more of the incredible music and graphics to yourself and your friends.
It supplemented it's already awesomeness with a T-shirt and an awesome box that was bigger than usual. Unfortunately, it was so awesome that the price was even bigger back then.
Back then multiple layer parallel scrolling, or was it parallex? Double figure frames per second and 4096 colors onscreen, even though it was a few screen shots, were something that just seemed to wow everyone.
Now, 32 bit, 16 million colors, blah-blah frames per second, HD 720-pah to 1080i don't care, textures that are so realistic that it has now become such a norm that I can only get the wow factor by having online multiplay with foam expletive strangers and the ever increasing level of taboo breaking desensitized violence.
By the way. Games do cause violence. Try Gradius 3.
