Be Excellent To Each Other

Worst cash in of all time, Santas Xmas Capers. YS and Amstrad Action panned it and with good reason. Terrible graphics, non existant gameplay and just poor!



Not even the Pickfords can always get it right. Rasterscan was a terrible game released by Mastertronic. The Pickford that posted on World Of (Linda - Ed) explained that basically Binary Design purchased a digitiser complete with a video camera so they decided to digitise lots of things and use them in a game. That game was Rasterscan.



Sadly by their own admission they forgot about the gameplay. A shame actually as the digitised graphics looked quite good.


I loved Space Harrier. I loved the CPC conversion. Although not graphically authentic with its vector graphics it still managed to replicate the frantic action of the arcade with a cracking AY rendition of the famous music. So imagine my surprise to hear there was going to be follow-up, Space Harrier 2. Sadly the Megadrive original was already pretty dire, but take a shit game that isn't a patch on the original arcade masterpiece and squeeze it down into 8 bits:



Graphically its not bad. But its when things start to move its the problem. OK it isn't the worst game ever, not even as bad as CPC Outrun but I felt so let down by it!

Leading us on to, yep CPC Outrun:



The title screen promises much. Wow, great music, and a full crowd watching! This is gonna be great! And then the full horror dawns on you as you judder your car through silence while HAVING TO HUM THE MUSIC TO YOURSELF. What a let down!

Closing comments on the father christmas one: "It's not a bad little game, this!"



That outrun one is deeply depressing, and yet also so surreal, it's like something out of a bizarre semi-dreaming state after a weekend wired on caffeine.

Two Worlds.

Bart Vs The Space Mutants.

The first level was amazing, though.

Christ, I'd managed to block CPC Outrun from my memory until now. It's the attempt at a gradient sky that does it for me.

Yup. Then they ran out of ideas and ramped the difficulty up. I never did finish that.

Yeah. The second level in the mall was horrifically difficulty with the floating donuts, and the 'We Built This City On Rock And Roll' homage playing in the background. I think I managed to get past it maybe twice, and you ended up in an amusement park.

I remember the Nintendo Power help pages were filled with people stuck in the museum level. There was a bit where you had to stand on a certain block and cause earthquakes to make ankhs drop from the ceiling. But the bit that sticks out in my mind is the question about being unable to leap from the shore to the dinosaur skeleton floating in the tar pits. You couldn't just jump straight from the shore, you'd miss. No, you had to, unlike every other jump in the game, first hop straight up to land on a different part of the shore visible in the background, and then jump across from there.

How the FUCK were you meant to know that???

Did Amstrad Out Run not come with the tape of arcade music so you could pretend you were playing the arcade version?

Is the 'boop boop boop boop' noise on outrun supposed be tyre squeal?

Yes, I think all the home computer versions did. Certainly the Amiga version did, despite having passable conversions of the music already in the game.

It did but it was really short and on a rubbish computer quality tape. Of no use at all!

There was the audio tape that was cover mounted on C&VG that had the music from Outrun on one side and 720º on the other.

Pit fighter on SNES. Rise of the robots. Ka Ge Ki or whatever it was called on the MD. (a really stupid fighting game).

Mario Sunshine.

The actual, purchasable version of Elf Bowling.

Eh? Unpopular, yes; but amongst the worst games ever?

It was a Mario game but wasn't. You really can't get any worse or more dissapointing than that. I'd rather play Croc on the Psone and eat some bogeys.

Chase HQ on the C64 was dire, but strangely rather good on any other type of computer.

Crackdown No, I'd better not.

It's tricky to find a 'worst' game, so much harder than finding the best. Hate is such a subjective thing. I really disliked GRAW, for example.

Still got that.

Final Fantasy VII. Seriously. I'd rather play Space Ace.

I can never remember what GRAW stands for...

Ghost Recon Advanced WARFIGHTER! GRRRRRRAW!

Gah my eyes Really AWful glare

Tom Clancy: Ghost Recon Advanced Wanker.

Ikari Warriors NES, hideous version of SNK's blaster. Bionic Granny for C64, a waste of 50p, when I bought it from a boot sale.

Chinny's post made me ponder this morning about the days of Bad and/or Inaccurate Arcade Conversions and how they're one part of the 8-, 16- and 32-bit eras that's virtually vanished from existence these days due to the near-death of arcade games in general. The Inaccurateness of course was more acute back in the 8-bit (home computer) days of course*, but it seemed we got more arcade conversions generally then, or at least they had more of a fuss (i.e. hype) made about them during the later half of the '80s.

BTW, in retrospect, it's my opinion that Inaccurate Arcade Conversions helped bring about the SegaSaturn's early demise. There was little else in the way of recognisable IP for Sega to use for the Sat seeing as they were reluctant to release any proper Sonic the 'edgehog game, so by relying mostly on arcade conversions of games that mostly (Japanese) hardcore gamers would know but would find flawed probably wasn't a good move on Sega's part.

* admittedly I never really noticed at the time. I wouldn't have heard of most of those games without knowing about the Speccy conversions, being quite young and not being a frequenter of arcades. The only 'conversion envy' I suffered as a Speccy owner was looking at screenshots of C64 and AmsCPC games in magazine adverts and on game packaging and wishing that my computer could display more colours.

Tsk, that's a whole bunch of wrongness right there.

Interesting though that at the time the ST and Amiga versions got equally good reviews to the Speccy and CPC, and yet when RG reviewed all the versions a few months back they weren't that keen on the 16 bit versions.

Having played them I'd have to agree. But then as an 8 bit owner my eyes were always very wide open to the obvious 16 bit bias in mags like C+VG.

But either way the C64 version is shite.

It really, really isn't.

Although I'm surprised he's chosen this over Leisure Suit Larry : Box Office Bust. A game so bad, he can't even bring himself to max it.
I suspect if he played it for as long as he did two worlds, matters may be different, mind.

It's obviously me and Bluce against everyone else when it comes to Two Worlds.
Needless to say, everyone else is a whole bunch of wrongness.

The obvious stuff would be things like Dragon's Lair, but it get much worse than that.

If you think that you hoe system had the worst conversion of Double dragon, think again. Here's the excrable C64 version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFJHOz3TSgg

See as the tiny transparent sprites float in mid air! Wow! There's also the 2600 version, but it's not really fair to slag that given the hardwre.

Sqig on the Speccy is a famous one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfJAW8Rm_tw

I once had a compilation for the speccy called 'don't but this' (I didn't), of which I can remember this:



Fido and Fido 2 (above) are well funny. Couldn't find any videos and for some reason, and you don't seem to be able to play it on World of Spectrum. What a shame.

The most disappointing game ever is the Speccy conversion of OutRun. I was really, really looking forward to it, got it for a birthday (I think) present, rushed upstairs, waited for it to load... then was treated to horrible, horrible version of the arcade game I loved. And I had to pretend to like it, because it was a present.

Don't Buy this was terrible, I fell for it as well
I remember there was 5 games on there and the first one was an overhead racing game (like Super Sprint) with the most complicated instructions ever. The controls were basically, left makes the car turn left and right makes it turn right, but the instructions said something like "left goes left when the car goes up and right when the car goes down". This was pretty tricky for my 6 year old self to grasp.

Actually the worst video game of all time is Video Olympics on the spectrum which I couldn't even manage the first event on. I even wrote something in the inlay to remind me never to play it again (and for the benefit of future generations, I guess).
I have just noticed it's a Dinamic game, so the fact that it was near-impossible shouldn't surprise me.
I do have a vague memory of playing it recently and actually managing to qualify, but I don't remember to well. I think I'm going to have to nominate this one for the next 8-bit challenge.

I don't know about worst game ever, but the biggest disappointment I can remember is Chaos Engine 2. I eventually learned to enjoy it slightly almost out of spite, but dear god, the hollow feeling of sadness and loss I felt when I first started playing it... I'm getting quite choked up just thinking about it.

Thankfully my Amiga days were over by the time that came out. I remember I got a PC about a month after Alien Breed 3D 2 came out.

You lasted that long? I jumped October 1994 as the writing was on the wall.

I was still playing mine until about 1998, maybe 1999.

I didn't buy new games mind, aside from OnEscapee. Everything else was £5 copies of the settlers, colonisation, civ, wing commander, etc. Good times, only five years after everyone else.

Set a pretty reliable pattern, now that I think about it.

I don't really know what I'd pick as worst game of all time. Of all the games I've ever played, FA Cup Football on the Speccy is probably the one I have the most abiding hatred for, mainly because Virgin took such a fantastic licence and released a Grandstand Videprinter simulator complete with random news flashes about your star striker's Aunty Betty falling down some stairs. It was hopeless.
I'd also kill anyone who's ever been involved in the development of a Resident Evil or Tomb Raider game.

Even Resi 4?

I'd say that was the best game of the previous console generation.

I had the same experience, but it was the Amiga port instead.

I was going to let the Two Worlds nonsense slide, but not now.

I found Resi 4 both tedious and frustrating to the point where, after a few hours of play, it dawned on me I was slowly torturing myself into a towering rage, so I stopped.
I played Two Worlds for days and days and had a whale of a time from start to finish.
I fully admit I'm a loon.

My Amiga was retired in March 1996. I held on to it for another 6 months but then sold it for £250 (500+ with 2MB, extra Disc Drive, Hand Scanner, 9-pin Printer and a big pile of pirated games). I was happy with that.

Then, in 2004, I became nostalgic and bought an a1200 on ebay. I stuffed a 1GB HDD in there to live out my fantasy of having a proper amiga. I did, for a while have an accelerator board for it. It was a 040 running at 50Mhz with FPU with 32MB of RAM. It absolutely flew. It was ace. But then someone offered me twice what I'd paid for it and couldn't resist. Still got the bare a1200 though and occasionally set it up and play it.

My original 1200 is under my desk right now attached via null modem to my PC.

Really... what do you use the link for?

Last time it was heavily used was 2000/01 to transfer my game collection from the floppy drive to my PC hard drive. My Amiga drives, both HD and FD, appear as a mapped drive in my explorer. I can just drag and drop a disk to create an adf.

Can games go the other way? I have many adf, but few games. Is there any point with emulation now practically seamless?

There's less reason to do it now, no. But I'm not getting rid of my Amiga. It's precious.