The Worst Amiga Games Thread!

[Tim Janssen]

I have seen many lists of personal Amiga-favourites here at EAB. But what about crap Amiga games? The games with horrible graphics, sounds or zero playability? There are a few dubious games in my original Amiga collection which do not deserve the disc they are on:

Manhattan Dealers by Silmarils, 1988: French flick-screen beat'em up with ear-wrinching music and simple graphics. It looks almost like a C64 game;
Dragon's Lair 3: Time Warp by Readysoft, 1992: A 8-disc animation with great graphics but lack of playability;
Soldier of Light by RAD, 1988: An ancient arcadeconversion which is very difficult to play. Maybe it was a great game 13 years ago.

Any other crap games?

[CodyJarrett]

How much time do you have? :)

Well, for a start:

4th & Inches, Akira, 'Allo 'Allo, Ants, Arena (Psygnosis), Batman Returns, Borobodur, Brataccas, Crazy Cars, Crazy Cars 2, Crime Does Not Pay, Dennis, Double Dragon, Dracula, Dragon's Lair 1-3, Fusion, Gazza 2, Gazza's Super Soccer, Geisha, The Godfather, Home Alone, Huckleberry Hound, Human Killing Machine, International Rugby Challenge, Judge Dredd, Last Action Hero, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3&5, Manhunter: New York & San Francisco, Microcosm, Mike Read's Computer Pop Quiz, Moonshine Racers, Moonwalker, Ninja Rabbits, Paperboy 1&2, Pit-Fighter, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Prime Mover, Rainbow Warrior, Rambo 3, Red Heat, Robocop 1&2, Run The Gauntlet, Saint And Greavsie, Seconds Out, Skull And Crossbones, Space Ace 1&2, Street Fighter 1, STUN Runner, Super Cauldron, Super Huey, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Tetris (Spectrum Holobyte), Thai Boxing, Total Carnage, Valhalla 1-3, Whizz, WWF Wrestlemania, WWF European Rampage etc.

[Gibby]

What would you say is THE worst criminal in Amiga Computing?

Prehaps something Cody missed off his list:

RISE OF THE ROBOTS.

How excited did everyone get about this game? That is until they released a playable demo and everyone said "Wow, that is so Shit, how did you manage to make such a promising game, so crap"

[RCK]

I'm not agree with Cody for Rambo 3, which I think is a good game, (looks like "the great escape").

The gfx and gameplay are not excellent of course, but the levels are great :)

[Akira]

Cody, you missed a few:

Carlos by Loriciel
The Cartoons, by Loriciel too, emthinks
and teh dreaded DANGEROUS STREETS! ARGH!

Akira was such a travesty, I feel offended by that game :) What shocked me the most, was ICE's hypocracy with it. In the WIP I read, they were bragging about how their graphician never did anything on a computer before, and how good this was. *iirk* wrong, ICE, and you can see teh results for yourself. Thr most stupid thing they said, is that they needed approval of everything they did, because Akira was such a big license and all that. MY ARSE, I doubt anyone approved such a piece of turd.

STUN Runner was bad in all ports :) And, hey, I happened to like Prime Mover a bit. IS not like the Amiga got many good racers of that type. Road Rash is a completely different game, and No Second Prize ws 3D :)

[Khephren]

Jeez let the horrors of the Amiga out of the box...

Paperboy (terrible disk loading)
Chase HQ (promised much, delivered bugger all)
Paradroid 90 (top 64 game to over graphical Amiga mess)
Any Ocean film tie ins
Rise of the Robots (don't believe the hype)
Titus the Fox (the most irritating loaded devised)
Continental Circus (great original, shite conversion)

Thats just a few of the ones I can be arsed to remember. Sure I'll think of more.

[Akira]

I remembered another one: Cisco Heat. Oh my god, disgusting!

[Twistin'Ghost]

And while I could wax poetic for ages on bad Amiga games, I will do the possible, and list but one piece of chunder that defies belief that any game could suck so bad. Many of you have probably never played it, but here goes:

Night Walk (1988/Alternative)

This heap of shit was an Atari ST port with hints of "Ghouls 'N' Ghosts". So how bad could a rip of GnG be, anyway? It's a dreary mess, utter cack. The graphics have that washed out, dull-color look like you see in "Hammerboy", sprite control is so slow that there is no possible way to escape the living dead, and well... I guess this is not a review, but I urge anyone who loves bad games to try this stinker on for size. Never was a game so deserving of Amiga Power's "Oh Dear" treatment!

But it's so rare, I bought an original recently, despite the fact that the game is an appalling chunk of... (SNIP! - Ed)

[CodyJarrett]

Khephren - I'm really at a loss for words about how you can include Graftgold's Paradroid 90 in a list of bad games along with Rise Of The Robots. Paradroid 90 is superb!

[Khephren]

Sorry Cody, Perhaps it should be under disappoints instead of shite games.

But I was fanatical of Paradroid on the 64, it was just he dogs bollocks as far as I was concerned. Then came the conversion to the Amiga.

As far as I am concerned, it is typical of the mentality of conversions. "Oooo all those colours. What can we do to 'enhance' it?" It was dull as play and awkward to control at times.

Ok it looked pretty but that hardly makes it any good.

I was going to add Pinball Illusions to the list as well, since that was also disappointed and had the same "Let's fill it with 256 colours to wow them" mentality, yet it sucked when compared to Pinball Fantasies.

[Warlock99]

I think in my eyes the worst game I ever seen on the amiga was dick tracy (titus version) it made cliffhanger look like a masterpiece. Dick tracy must have been one of the lowest scoring amiga games of all time when it was reviewed in the english mags. I think the average was something like 8% across the whole of the mags.

Here are the main reasons:-

Animation - absolutely terrible, your character jerks along like he's got a wooden leg.

Graphics - on par with a c64 games. Thing of the worst amiga games around (i.e. cliffhanger) and you get some idea.

Music - Starts off OK and then becomes extremely annoying, see how fast you start reaching for the volume!

Sound - nothing special to say the least.

Playability - If you play past more than two of the flick screens, then you must be doing it for a bet!

Worth getting hold of just so you can have a good laugh at it.

[MethodGit]

CodyJarrett: Your first post: Wasn't that basically all the games that Amiga Power gave low scores to? Have you actually played any of those games yourself? If so, please list them with additional comments if you can.

Well, I've got a list of really crap games right here:

Warzone (Core), 1991 - No options to twiddle about with, too ridiculously hard, basically looked, felt and played like a PD game!

Akira (ICE), 1994/95 - I haven't played this game enough to give out a proper verdict, but Jonathan Davies (who reviewed the game in Amiga Power issue 48) was certainly right about the fact that hardly anyone would be able to complete the motorbike levels, like EVER, because I tried them myself! Holy cow, how can your bike explode from touching cops and waving bystanders??!! And don't even get me started on the barricades which are difficult to destroy because your grenades only explode a fixed distance away, so you have to unleash them all at once just to see if you can clear the path successfully. However, I havne't played the other levels yet (I'll use the level codes) so I'll get back to you on that game soon.

Kick Off 96 (Anco), 1996 - Amiga Power gave this their lowest score ever (to my knowledge, at least). Tried this game once some time ago (ADFs, of course, I didn't buy the real game!!! As if I ever would!! Pah!), never touched it again after that! Boring presentation, crap in-game graphics, dull gameplay, what more can I say?

The Untouchables (Ocean), 1989/90 - Dear lord, how unfunnily dull was this piece of electronic shite? Dark almost-hard-to-see-graphics, almost-impossible-to-complete first level (I didn't play this game for very long), the same droning tune over and over again, repetitive gameplay, ugh! I can't really say anymore than that!

Dragon's Lair (ReadySoft), 1988 - I know about the series and all, but I've only just played the first game today (I haven't played any of the sequels as of yet), and boy, all those people who slated it highly were right to do so!!! :haha
1. Insanely difficult levels that actually require you to have read the complete solution in a magazine or on the net beforehand to even understand what the hell you're meant to be doing exactly.
2. Good but quite mediocre animation compared to the Laserdisc original. Some things seem to happen way too quickly for you to understand though (What exactly does the potion on the second level meant to do to you? Why does Singe the Dragon just disappear almost before the magic sword even touches him at the end?)
3. The fact that on every level you have to time your joystick functions at EXACTLY the right moment to get past an obstacle (but sometimes you'll die even when you do press it at exactly the right moment! The solution? Be forced to go through the same sequences over and over until you do finally get past).
4. The constant disk-swapping that occurs, that is if you only have one or two disk drives on your real/emulated Amiga.
5. The realisation near the end that you've been cheated out of your time (and money, if you paid for the game) by the fact that there really aren't a lot of levels in the game at all! Some of the "levels" are basically the same ones as before but in reverse.
Oh well, I guess ReadySoft really wanted to port the game to as many platforms as possible! Wasn't there a C64 version though? Dear god, I wonder what THAT was like then?

Bart vs The Space Mutants (Ocean/Acclaim), 1991 - Great intro, but the game itself had shown me the following:
Disastrous presentation (A picture of the Simpsons watching TV, followed by a close-up TV screen that lacks a high-score table. Like, wow, the developers really spent a lot of time on the presentations for this game, I don't bloody think.)
Irritating music (just that one tune the whole FRICKIN' time!)
Bizarre illogical puzzles (Everyone remember the first cement pit on Level 2? Wondered what those spinning lollipops were meant to do exactly, and why you just fell thorugh them if you tried to jump on them? Well, imagine the look on your face when you read a tip in a guide that says you should jump on the second moving platform three times to get across the pit! How the twatting hell was you supposed to know that in the first place? They could've at least put in a small graphical clue somewhere!!!)
Equally irritating "Eat my shorts" quote that you'd constantly hear because of the enemies and the clinically insane obstacles on the fourth level that would kill you about 30 times or more (Even with the infinite lives cheat that I often used, I have NEVER been able to complete Level 4!)
Complete pushover bosses (they honeslty didn't take very long to complete, or design their features and IQ to be exact. I've never been able to reach the fourth boss, though. Maybe that's because of the INSANE Stone temple section, hmm?!?!)
The varied graphics (some were good, but most of them were just pure unadulterated shit, sorry. I mean the character sprites look nothing like their TV counterparts!)
Terrible, badly-written and badly-punctuated dialogue (check out the dialogue from the aliens in between the levels, for example, but also some of the dialogue during the game)
HUGELY dissapointing ending (I got to the fifth and final level using the level-skip cheat, and after completing it, what did I get? Some more dialogue from those aliens and a still-picture of a close-up ranking badge featuring Bart Simpson's face and shades on, and then several seconds afterwards, I was back at the title screen again!!! What, no high score table? No credits? No hugely-animated sequences like with the intro, but slightly more impressive? Fuck me, I've been robbed!!! :mad)
Honestly, it's as if Ocean and Acclaim had all their designer teams concentrate more on the intro than the actual game!!! I hadn't thought this about the game when I first played it back in 1991 (the first ever game I played on my (then) brand-new Amiga 500!!! :D), in fact I first thought it was a great game, but having played it recently with the additional use of the level-skip cheat, my opinions on it started to change for all the wrong reasons! This game would only be made a lot more harder if I hadn't used the infinite lives COWABUNGA cheat!!! :kill

Bart vs The World (Virgin/Acclaim), 1992/93 - Haven't played all of the levels to give this a proper review, but the fact that I simply cannot get past the first Ice level (after you complete China) would pretty much give the reason why I haven't tried playing it more! Has anyone managed to get past it? As for the part of the game I have played, well.... the graphics look like something out of a PD game, frankly. And there's not a multitude of sound effects and music, either. The gameplay's average, but the looks and sound of it are just UGH, UGH, UGH, RUBBISH, GET OFF, GET IT AWAY FROM ME etc. Sorry, I'm a very crap reviewer, I wish I was like you lot when it comes to reviewing anything in life... :(

Batman Returns (Konami/Gametek/Dentons), 1993/94 - Words seriously cannot express just how utterly retarded the presentation in this game truly is. No options, no high-score table, hell, not even a BLOODY GAME OVER SCREEN to shove into my face!!!! The first level is near-impossible to get past, the enemies just harm you from all directons at once, so what was the whole point in this game? The C64 version was in the making but got canned. Imagine what THAT version might have been like...

Batman The Movie (Ocean), 1989 - Not really a crap game, it's just that the first level is friggin' insane, it's like a maze, so I havne't been playing it a lot really!

Robocop (Ocean), 1987 - Level 1: impossible to get past the ED-209 at the end. That's it. I don't know how to avoid the friggin' robot's attacks. Burn this game for all the innocent souls out there, including us!!! (I don't mean burn us along with the game (No, please don't!!! We're sorry!!!) , I meant include us as some of those innocent souls!)

Robocop 3 (Ocean), 1991/92 - Not actually a crap game, it's just that, like the first Robocop, the first level is pretty much impossible to complete. I mean, how exactly do you stop the van on the driving level? I try to ram it from behind but a gunner starts shooting at me and my car dies before the van gets to!!!

Total Carnage (ICE), 1994 - Just playing a demo of this was enough to make me realise how shoddily programmed this truly was. Your character always walked like a camp pimp with broken dangly legs, the enemies came at you from all directions and would consume a lot of ammo before dying (and even when they were going through their blood-splash death animations, they were still deadly to the touch), it was all fucking BROWN everywhere, no impressive explosions or general effects, no MUSIC, not a lot of different sound effects, the first level takes too long to complete thanks to the ludicrous amounts of enemies in it. I haven't played the arcade original yet, though. It should be playable in MAME by now, so I guess I'll give it a try... :float

Smash TV (Ocean/Acclaim/Midway), 1991/92 - Maybe it's because I've played the arcade original and the SNES version too much, but I thought the Amiga version was just a complete catastrophe!!! I'd understand the way the C64 version was programmed because of the computer's limitations, but the Amiga version? Come on, I thought the design team could've done way better than this!!! Shoddy 15-frames per second animation, no decent "WOW!" graphics whatsoever, not even the scroll-across-arenas bit gets in (you just get the Smash TV logo for a short while and go straight to the next arena).

[MethodGit]

I actually remember once that Amiga Format (in its later days) gave the long-awaited Amiga conversion of Championship Manager 2 a lowly 12%. I think one of the reason was because of its "SLUGGISHLY DEATHLY-SLOW ALMOST HALF-AN-HOUR loading times that appeared constantly". Not that I played the game myself, I'm just quoting (roughly) from the original review. I don't know whether this has been converted to ADF as of yet, unless anyone can prove me wrong?

By the way, if you want to read almost every review a certain Stuart Campbell has ever done for any magazine, check out the following joint:

http://come.to/worldofstuart

[Warlock99]

Some of those games you mentioned were actually OK in my eyes anyway!

Warzone - Yes, it's difficult but if you work at it, it's quite a decent shoot-em-up. PD I don't think so! It had better graphics and playability than quite a few similar commercial games like the awful mercs (another awful crapcom game, too many of these to mention!). I must admit though it's one of those perverse games that you play mainly because you can't let it beat you, but it get's to be quite rewarding after a while.

Robocop - Robocop actually piss easy, I completed it over a week if I remember right. That first bit is a bit tricky but there's not that many things that you could do is there? (Try jumping in the air a few times while firing). I've played worse but it's not that great really I suppose, but it's certainly not difficult. Converted from an Atari ST games, I suppose that must explain a lot! It was a great film anyway!

Smash TV - Yes, it is unbelievably difficult and there's no doubting the game is lacking a certain something, but I still think it's quite playable. Another perverse game methinks.

[CodyJarrett]

I used the Amiga Power's low scores to remind me of the games that are shit...

[Gibby]

Robocop 3 - you stop the truck by ramming the back, when the doors open and you start getting shot you have to move to the side and start ramming it from the side. It takes a while and is a bit tough but with practice it can be fairly simple. I thought Robocop 3 was alright.

Batman the Movie - yep you're right its not a crap game and the levels are a bit big but again with some practice you can get through them. Even easier if you activate the cheat, but it is possible without the cheat. The driving levels were great fun, even the 3rd level was good.

BUT OF COURSE SOME ARE JUSTIFIED, like

Dangerous Streets - This was the worst beat'em up since Street Fighter 1. I don't know how they had the audasity to release the game, it was appauling. I also don't know how comodore had the balls to make a CD32 pack which contained that game. Imagine some non-amiga person had plumped for the CD32 cos it was the worlds first 32-bit console they open the box and play Dangerous Streets....... the CD32 goes back in the box. I must admit I did buy the game............ wait ................ only because it came on the same CD as Wing Commander which I love(d)

[Tim Janssen]

I have noticed that I have some of the crap games mentioned here in my Amiga collection. Here are my comments:

Titus the Fox: Great little platformer. There is nothing wrong with it except that it takes ages to load. But hey, this is the same with games like Last Ninja 3 and Wizkid.

Dennis the Menace: I like Dennis! The graphics are sparse, only two frames of animation, but a certain lastability. I even play it now and then.

Bart vs the World: I actually quite like this little game. I even have finished it but did not get to see the end-sequence because I collected too few Krusty-the-Clown goodies. The game is a NES port. This results in boring graphics. If the Amiga palette were used more intensively, it would be an okay game.

Carlos: Uhm, this game is just downright boring but playable. I think it is from the team who also gave us Nicky Boum 1 & 2.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day: The main reason why I still have this game in my collection is the title music. It is sooo atmospheric. The game itself is playable but the Ocean-formula of different genres (driving, beating and puzzling) is not used very well.

Super Cauldron: I agree, this game is crap but my little nephew always liked it. The most annoying thing is that the witch you control only can throw little stones by holding and releasing your fire-button. A simple enemy takes 20(!) hits before it is destroyed. This game gets my vote for most annoying game –EVER.

Smash TV: I have destroyed the disc the game came on. That says it all, does it?

[Akira]

Hey I didnt knwo about that character limit. Really it's annoying! We cannot get onto long rants as teh rined MarzAttakz tried! :)

Anyway, about Akira. I DID pass teh motorbike levels, I suppose AP reviewers were:

1) crap at games, or don't have enough patience.
2) overwhelmed by the game crappiness, and decided not to play anymore, to avoid brain damage.

I tend to choose the second, or a bit of the first, about not having patioence or perseverance. I played that fucker MANY times to get past it, and I eventually managed to pass the motorbike levels. From my personal experience, I can definitely say that the game SUCKS ARSE, majorly.

Tim, Carlos is HORRIBLE. Where did you see a Pavarotti-like guy, dressed up in red-and-yellow flowered pajamas, transforming into A BULL? WTF! HAha, if I am to give any good points to that game, it's because I laughed my ass off with it, while looking at its pathetic graphics, hearing its lame sound efefcts, and suffering its appaling control methods. Don't tell me yuo own an ORIGINAL! :)

By teh way I think Nicky Boum, and specially its sequel, are overrated games. I didn't like them one bit.

[Tim Janssen]

Akira,
I have some 'nostalgic' memories of Carlos. Not because it was any good, but it was the very last Amiga game I copied at the last Venlo Amiga Copy party ever. The game is crap, but I keep it on disc because of these nostalgic feelings.
I haven't played the game since I have installed my original Amiga a couple of months ago. Your description of the game (including the cumbersome transformation into a bull) reminds me of other 'faults' in the game like the flickering sprites and terrible drawn intermission screens. This game definitely has some cult value.;)

I have both Nicky Boum 1 & 2 in my collection because they take up only one disc each and feature some nice tunes. I have never managed to finish a level in both games because you soon get bored by wandering in the same area collecting things.

MarzAttakz,
About Dragon's Lair on the C64: Back in 1987 Dragonslair 1 & 2 already appeared on this 8-bit machine. The games were nothing like their later incarnations. The action took (mostly) place on a static screen and Dragon's Lair 2 was actually quite playable.

[Akira]

Dragon's Lair, the original and 16 bit ports, it's a JOKE. there's no game in it. press left. now press right.... now fire... BLAH, I rather go play with my TV's remote control.

Anyway, about Carlos, it seems you don't own it, so that's cool. It would be awful if you paid for it.

My collection consists of about 13 games. The copied disks are just that, copied garbage. I play them but they mean nothing to the real collection :) They have no value whatsoever. Nothing's better than their boxes and manuals!

[Unregistered]

About Dragon's lair. I quite liked it since it had quite good animation for the time. Of course the action was practically non existant which was never the idea anyway. It was supposed to be an interactive movie with a little user input.

they probably wanted to convert it to as many platforms as possible. As far as I know the original was on Laserdisks which(I would guesS) quite limited the possibilities of interaction.

But it doesn't stop with the Amiga and C64 and what other versions exist. It seems they're still active, you can now buy Dragon's lair on DVD (Which would be controlled with the remote you spoke of Akira).

[Tim Janssen]

I think Dragons Lair is some form of entertainment, just like watching the latest demos on PC, but it is not a game. The exact definition of 'game' is also beyond me but it has something to do with using joystick, mouse or keyboard intensively in combination with having a good time. IMHO this is not the case with Dragons Lair. :D

Akira,
I have a few confessions to make..
I've never bought an original game for my Amiga but...
over the past 6 years for PC I have bought 30+ original games that came with hefty manuals and huge boxes. Since I have moved to a very small appartment in the other side of The Netherlands I have thrown away the boxes. I have kept the manuals, though. :o
I am convinced that games boxes become real collector-items. Especially now more and more softwarecompanies are putting their games in these pathetic small disc-cases. You know, the ones they also put DVD's in.

By the way: Congratulations with the 4th anniversary of your (and Felix the Cat's) Shmups site. Those shmups-week articles at Classicgaming are hilarious :)

[CodyJarrett]

Believing that Dragon's Lair and Space Ace were not intended to be games is not any reason to excuse them. They were sold in games shops, next to other games. They were marketed as games. And they cost around £50!

If they are supposed to be more about the graphics, why weren't they marketed as animations? Why did they cost so much? Eric Schwartz and Tobias Richter did animations they were just as good, but they didn't sell them at a high price.

But people kept buying these games. And that is the main problem with films, games, music - people will buy any old shit.

Give me PD games like Scorched Tanks, Trick Or Treat, Gravity Force 2, Tankkk or Knockout any day, rather than these hyped up animations.

[Tim Janssen]

Somehow there is something 'magical' with these Dragons Lair/ Space Ace games. I am not quite sure for what reason.

I was "caught" by this magic back in 1989. In that time I read some Videogame magazines at the local newsagent. I saw many screenshots of blocky 8-bit games. Suddenly I saw a preview screenshot of Dragons Lair for Amiga. That game looked awesome - almost television-like! Being a foolish child I imagined how playable that game would be. I thought I could move Dirk the Daring freely around the screen. In that time I decided to save up my pocket money and buy me Amiga just to play that game.
In 1993 I played for the first time a laser-game on Amiga (Dragons Lair3: Timewarp) and found out it was a turkey. Something of the magic was lost.

Back in the late eighties Dragons Lair & Space Ace showed one thing: how far computers had come in the graphical era. It was enough to wow your uncle and aunt with.

[Akira]

But graphics do NOTHING to gameplay. I stick with Cody here, give me a PD game and I'd have more fun. Ork Attack is a good choice! Dragon's Lair was much better as a demo or something, and even that way, 50 a pop??? Screw it. People who bought it were DUMB. They were just flashed by teh graphics, just teh way people buy games today. "Flashy graphics ? I WANT IT!"

Bought 30 PC games Tim? Are there as many original PC games? Aren't they all FPS/RTS/TPS games? :)

Anyway, I don't see any magic in parting with 50 UKP to push the joystick in a direction when the computer tells me to.

Thanks for yoru comments about Shmupsweek, I am glad you liked it! Be sure to send some comments so they appear on this friday's mailbag, talk about anything shmuppy you want!

[ps: you know why I always edit my posts? Because this keyboard SUCKS!]

[Tim Janssen]

Hi Akira,
I was some days off last week. I have missed the shmups-mailbag. :(

The PC games I have bought were mostly cheapos: Fade to Black, Hell, Darkseed 2, Knights Gate, Descent 1 & 2, Eartworm Jim 1, 11th Hour (Most sucking game -EVER!), Mageslayer, Alien Odyssey, Wing Commander 3, MDK, Darklight Conflict, Shockwave Asssault, Pyrotechnica, Guts'n'Garters, Magic Carpet, Chaos Control, Streetfighter 2 Turbo, Battle Arena Toshinden, Dune 1, Quake 1, Ecstatica 2, Star Trek Borg, and a few more.
Only MDK, Fade to Black and Descent are worth the CD they came on.

B.T.W: Has anyone ever played Cliffhanger on Amiga? Now that is a crap game. -Certainly not up to the usual Psygnosis-standard. I cannot get past the 'falling rocks' level.

[RCK]

there many of the previous PC games that are not garbage for me !

Descent 1 & 2 : really cool (but must time to control the ship)
Eartworm Jim 1 : fun on Snes / Genesis
MDK : hoooo, i love the sniper mode :)
Magic Carpet : not excellent but not one crap game
Dune 1 : This game is NOT one crap game ! :scream have you read all the books ?
Quake 1 : the first real 3D FPS !, very good atmosphere

[Tim Janssen]

Since the amount of space on my PC harddisc is sparse, I install only games which offer me enough addictivity (IMHO). Maybe it is time to erase the 3450 C64 games I have collected throughout the years. They take up a whopping 300 Mb.

The games you mention are all classics in some way, but I am not 'caught' by them:
Magic Carpet was a revolution back in 1995 but I cannot get far enough in this game.
Same case with Eartworm Jim: I am stuck in the last level which is extremely difficult.
Quake 1 is also a graphical milestone but, as with most FPS-games, once find a cheat I get bored.
I have bought Dune 1 for pc a couple of weeks ago for only Fl 5,- (1,5 Pounds). I have played the Amiga game to death so had high hopes with this version. Apart from the speech and the flying section I prefer the Amiga version. I haven't read the books, though. But this will change in the near future.

[Akira]

Do NOT delete those C64 games! Common, tehy are masterpieces. Do not even consider deleting those diamonds in favour of PC garbage :)

At least, back them up.

MDK is one of the few PC games I own (Need for Speed 2 and the Reap are the others), and it is enjoyable for a while. The Sniper mode is funny indeed ;).

And Earthworm Jim really is difficult, but this makes it challenging. Though it can get REALLY frustrating a later levels

[BWT]

but including Dune!! EH?:confused ...suppose the books do help: But Dune II, although spawning modern PSX games like Command & Conquer, had so little in comparison

A few personal ones that I hate (and still remember!);

Emlyn Hughe's Football (sp?) - side scrolling footbal nonsense

and er...all my CD32 games: especially Diggers the first game that came. Ooh but I do have a soft spot for Brutal Sports Football (Vikings & Lizards on an american football pitch, rip heads, tear limbs & score goals. Sweet.)

And although it may cause people to flare up - I was never a fan of sensible soccer....

The bad games are the ones that made you feel like you'd wasted your time loading it up.

Unless you have an old Amiga Power coverdisk (issue37), which contains a deliberately bad PD game...

"ALS" - the "Advanced Lawnmower Simulator": move the mower, cut the grass. That's it.:D :D

[Tim Janssen]

Hi BWT,
Dune 1 on Amiga is an okay game. I especially like the two songs that accompany the action throughout. There is one problem with the game though: it is extremely linear. Once you have played Dune 1 you do not want to start it all over again. Following a linear pattern the characters in Dune are willing to work for you or discover new rooms in the Artreides palace.
I bought Dune 1 for PC because I was curious about the quality of it. The game has nice speech and even a great animation in the flying section. Pity the Amiga's sonics are replaced by typical god-awful MIDI songs. I did not bother to play the game on PC because of the linear pattern.

About Diggers: I have never played that game but it looked like a nice little puzzler to me. Pity it did not use the CD32's capabilities. It is more a A500 game.

Akira,
You don't have to worry about my deletion of the C64 games. I have spent too many hours searching and downloading them. I will them burn on CD in the near future :)

[Mangar]

Speaking of crap games... The biggest hyped up piece of shite I recall back in the day was EPIC. For me that was the biggest letdown I ever had on the amiga. On the PC there are too many to count.. :)

[Tim Janssen]

Yes, Epic was one of those extremely hyped games. Lucky enough I bought the magazine Amiga Format who slagged the game off with a meagre score of 27%. They also ran a special section with letters from readers who were heavily disappointed with the game.
I have never bothered to buy the game let alone to copy the cracked version.;)

Personally I think the most hyped Amiga game ever is Street Fighter 2. Back in December 1992 CU Amiga kept on hyping it with previews, solutions and so on. My friends went wild but I found the game rather tame. When I come to think of it, many beat'em ups are overhyped on Amiga. Just look at the hype Mortal Kombat and Body Blows got. But then again, I am not a beat'em up fan.

[Mangar]

Street fighter II and all other incarnations of the street fighter series were awful. I think I played Mortal combat on the amiga and liked it. Cannot really remember. Elfmania was a cool one. But with the limitations of the amiga joysticks the beat-em-up games sucked..

[Akira]

'The limitations of the Amiga joystick' is just an excuse for programmers to not do what they were supposed to ;) I kind of agree that nothing great was released on the miggy, fighting games wise (SF style, I'm not counting IK+), however the control problems were bollocks. Mortal Kombat 2 was a great conversion, and managed to cram every damned move into a one button control scheme, proving all others wrong. Mortal Kombat was cool too, but MK2 surpassed it.

Elfmania was cool looking, but the gameplay was arse. Same control method as Body Blows, which was very limited.

Shadow Fighter was quite well done, because it packed a good bunch of moves. And Super Street Fighter 2 was about the best one done. You even had the choice to use a keyboard config with all 6 buttons. Thr ECS version looked like arse but played very well, and the 1200 version was just very good. Overall, I think it was the best fighter for the miggy, maybe along with Shadow Fighter.

SF2 overhyping was atrocious. They wanted to make it sound like if it was a SNES-version beater, but it wasn't. Ok, it looked quite identical, in screenshots, but it played like arse and it had lots of frames of animation removed. Bleh, a pathetic effort which I enjoyed a bit anyway :)

[Ian]

... I just have to include this as yet unmentioned game, now I don't know why no-one has added this already, maybe it's because your minds have blocked out this hidious game ie: It's to painful for you to remember:laughing but it's a prime example of everything an Amiga game should NOT be ...... A direct Atari ST port, for god sake could the fine programmers at Elite (Tounge firmly in cheek) at least upgrade the music and SFX.

In short this game is THE worst game I've EVER played and it's called:

Thun ...... No, no it's too painful to say.

Ian's mind: Come on Ian pull yourself together man

THUNDERCATS

There I've said it, I hope your all satisfied:crying

[DPainter]

Not speaking from experience, the crappiest had to be Quasimodo (or Kwasimodo). Even after all these years I can recall copying a pile of new disks at a friends house when I asked him about one labeled "Quasimodo." He said it was complete crap, so I bypassed it and went to the next disk.

[Bombjacker]

Now that was one hell of a crap football game - almost as crap as Peter Beardsley is ugly (sorry Peter)!

The Amiga version of Bombjack was also cack. How could Elite just port this from the ST. Never forgave them after that! They were such a good Software House in the 8-bit days but went a bit bollocks with the arrival of the 16-bit machines!

Chubby Gristle was also an incredibly poor game. Its only redeeming feature was the hilarious speech! 'You can't park 'ere!'

[Bombjacker]

Now that was a crap game as well. I believe that was another crap ST port.

Although Bionic Commando wasn't a complete load of crap, why did the programmers manage to port the ST's inability to scroll over to the Amiga. Didn't they know the Amiga had decent hardware scrolling capabilities or something! They did the same with LED Storm as well. But at least they managed to show what the Amiga could do musically over the ST and its Spectrum 128 sound chip!

Also thought that Whirligig was a bit crap too - or was that because I didn't have the original and could never work out what I was doing?

[Shatterhand]

There's a shmup for Amiga called Sirius 7, that's DAMN crap
there's other one too.. I think it was called XP8, it came in 5 disks, and had incredible graphics, but the gameplay was
SOOOOO boring, it played like a bad shmup from the early 80s

People said some games here I quite like

Prime Mover is rather good IMO
and Epic is great for me, I really like that game. Ok, it may be too easy, but it's very enjoyable.

Smash T.V. is good too.. the conversion could have been better... but it could have been worse too.

Oh yeah, and everyone slags off Akira. I played it only in emulators, the 1st motorbike sections aren't that bad, just average. Then the next section freezes the emulator, so I have no idea if it's bad or not. Now, saying that motorbike section is too hard isn't fair, it didn't took me that long to beat it

About Beat'em ups on Miggy being crap, that's also unfair. Both MK games, Shadow Fighter, SSF2 and Fighting Spirite are really good, while Body Blows is ok. I just think the designers never got them right, I believe even more modern BEUS could had been ported to the A1200, like Street Fighter Alpha.

[Akira]

Akira is indeed a TRAVESTY OF A GAME. I thought the same about the bike sections, and after you pass them, you realize those were the best part of the game.

I also thought Prime Mover was quiet cool, though my favorite bike racing game is Super Cycles from Epyx, for the C64. I remember that was the first game I ever beat! (without cheating of course!)

And surely many modern BEUs could have been ported to the miggy... I'd like to see those someday on the Amiga, done byfans or something.

[Tim Janssen]

Has anyone of you ever heard of Digital Dungeon? This game got a meagre score of 1.5% in German magazine Amiga Joker way back in 1993. With this program you can create your own RPG. Looking at the screenshots it has to be the worst game ever released on Amiga.

I have also noticed that I have some of the crap games mentioned here in my Amiga collection. Here are my comments:
Prime Mover is an okay but somewhat boring game. I think it is better than Road Rash because it has smoother scrolling. Strange that Prime Mover never got the recognition it deserves.
If the ZX Spectrum would be capable to display more than 4 colours without colourclashing, a game would look something like Amiga Chubby Gristle . Unbelievable bad graphics and antiquated gameplay make it a cult-game, though.

[Peanutuk]

I thought Robocop 3 was very good. It was novel and well executed. It certainly made a change to Ocean's usual drivel.
I kind of enjoyed Cisco Heat as well. I played the AP demo a lot.
Line Of Fire was a God awful conversion (although not as bad as the appaling C64 version)


There's no doubt in my mind though that the worst game ever was the one which Commodore played with the Amiga. That really was poor!

[Burge]

Originally posted by IanCharge
... I just have to include this as yet unmentioned game, now I don't know why no-one has added this already, maybe it's because your minds have blocked out this hidious game ie: It's to painful for you to remember:laughing but it's a prime example of everything an Amiga game should NOT be ...... A direct Atari ST port, for god sake could the fine programmers at Elite (Tounge firmly in cheek) at least upgrade the music and SFX.

In short this game is THE worst game I've EVER played and it's called:

Thun ...... No, no it's too painful to say.

Ian's mind: Come on Ian pull yourself together man

THUNDERCATS

There I've said it, I hope your all satisfied:crying

Are you trying to lose all creditability by choice, Ian? :D Come on, Thundercats was never that bad. The sprites were big and well animated and come on, it was Thundercats for cyring out loud! The licence alone should save it from being labled worst ever. How 'bout you give it another go? Good.

[7-Zark-7]

I had been planning to ask a new thread on most dissapointing conversion's onto the Amiga, but this has saved doing so...

Creatures (Thalamus)-how they mucked up converting a top C64 classic I'll never understand.

Ghoul's n Ghosts-If not for the wonderful music would anyone have bothered with this?

[Amigaboy]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
Creatures (Thalamus)-how they mucked up converting a top C64 classic I'll never understand.


I second that! (as a matter of fact, I third and fourth that too :))

Disappointing indeed.

I'm glad Mayhem In Monsterland wasn't converted. That game was THE game on the C64. If they screw that one up, I may have to kick some ass

[7-Zark-7]

Hi Amigaboy-thanks for agreeing with me on Creatures!!:)
I could never forget the Game Diary written by the Rowland Brothers in Zzap in developing Creatures!

The only other mystery was why such geniuses seemed to mysteriously disappear-does anyone know what happened to them??

[Amigaboy]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
Hi Amigaboy-thanks for agreeing with me on Creatures!!:)
I could never forget the Game Diary written by the Rowland Brothers in Zzap in developing Creatures!

The only other mystery was why such geniuses seemed to mysteriously disappear-does anyone know what happened to them??

Yeah. The Zzap and Commodore Format interviews/diaries with these guys were really cool

Amazing how these guys squeezed out more than 64kb ram out of the C64 to produce Mayhem (they tapped into the SID chip)

I have no idea what happened to them either. I too would love to find out

For anyone that has no idea what the hell we're talking about, check out http://users.skynet.be/NightGem/c64_mayhem.htm :)

[Tim Janssen]

I read somewhere the Rowlands produced the Gameboy Colour version of IK+ called IK Deluxe.

Creatures on Amiga is an okay but somewhat shallow conversion of the C64 original. It is far too difficult to finish without a cheat. Rumours were WJS Design would also produce Creatures 2 on Amiga. Now that would make a great classic. Pity it never happened. :sad

[RetroMan]

There´s another crappy Amiga game called : "Renegade" which was superb on CPC and ok on C64, but the Amiga version lacks playability and grafik, it is a real mess .......

[RCK]

Originally posted by Tim Janssen
I read somewhere the Rowlands produced the Gameboy Colour version of IK+ called IK Deluxe.
wrong !
I own the "International Karate 2000" cardbridge for GBC :cool
And it was produced by Studio 3 (http://www.studio3.co.uk/html/games/game_ik1.htm).

[Steve]

What a shite game this was and still is. I played it the other day on WinUAE and it's just impossible in the graveyard section. Trying to run away from that wierd cross between a zombie monster and Ruud Gullit by smashing the 2 mouse buttons like you are Commander Data on speed. It's just impossible. There is no way to escape the freak and it renders the whole game somewhat pointless. It's got to be one of the worst games on the Amiga EVER.

[Paul]

What about Terry's Big Adventure?:D

[Akira]

IK 2000 for the GBC lacks seriously :(

[Twistin'Ghost]

I rather liked Terry's Big Adventure, despite it's unoriginality.

[CodyJarrett]

Ho ho ho! Ha ha ha! That's a good one Twistin'!

[Twistin'Ghost]

Some people just don't like platformers (unless they are slick and glossy!)

[Overdoc]

Ok, I have read all suggestions for the crappiest game on the Amiga. Some are real crap, but others are not so bad.
I even wouldn't say Space Ace I & II are crap games. Although they are more like demos instead of games, they had a big 'give it just one more try' effect on me. So I finished both, although I thaught they were complete nonsense until I tried them.

But for the all time number one shit game on the Amiga, my vote goes for a game that probably noone has mentioned, yet, because nobody knows this pile of shit:

MANI PULITE

I have uploaded it to ADF-zone so you can see what I mean.
I bet you'll all lough your ass off when you look at that grafix !
And better turn off the volume of the speaker to prevent your ears from this disaster.
And, oh, yes, don't forget about the absolutely fucked-up sprite detection.....

Really guys, trust me and download the game and see for yourselves:
You won't believe this is actually an Amigagame :(

[Akira]

I cannot resist such an offer, Overdoc :)

By the way, seems I'm getting my 1084 fixed forcheap! :D

[7-Zark-7]

I have another couple of nominee's-although I didn't personally play it, I was going over some old Zzap's & found a less than flattering review for the Dick Tracey game.

Another which I did play, was the poor excuse of a translation for Ghouls 'n'Ghost's good music,but thats about all.:(

[Tim Janssen]

A game which is not crap but bloody uncontrollable is Ocean's Hudson Hawk! Has anyone ever tried to play this game for more than 5 minutes? If so, they are really heroes. The main character in this game has an inertia effect. This means when you stop moving the joystick in a direction, the sprite has the tendency to walk a few seconds more in that direction.
The inertia effect can really get irritating in later levels when pixel-perfect movements are required.
On the other hand, Hudson Hawk has the funniest disc loading routine I have ever witnissed: while loading the game the discdrive makes some whirring noises which get repeatingly louder and longer. I always called it the 'Ping-pong load routine'.;)

[Amigaboy]

I loved Hudson Hawk. I think it's one of Ocean's finest games

It plays well (believe it or not), it looks great, and it sounds cool too

Top notch gaming there. A big thumb up from me :great

[Tim Janssen]

Amigaboy,
Are you serious about Hudson Hawk? It's only an above-average Ocean game. There are many better ones around (Batman the Movie, Midnight Resistance, Lethal Weapon). Okay, Hudson has great sounds and graphics but gameplay-wise it stinks. One can get used to the uncontrollable sprite but it is not right.

[Amigaboy]

I'm totally serious

I know there's a lot of other platformers which are way better, but I really love Hudson Hawk. I do find it very playable (only on a real Amiga. I don't think it'd be much fun using emulation)

[Akira]

And I'm totally and positively serious about seconding Amigaboy's view. Hudson Hawk is a jewel not to be missed. Just get used to the guy's inertia!

The C64 version was as sleek as the Amiga one. I love it!

[Drake1009]

I have to agree. Hudson hawk is brilliant. Lethal weapon on the other hand. Well... Let's just say, I remembered both games from seeing them at a friend (Together with Addams family).

I spent a long time searching for these games, Hudson hawk and Lethal weapon were hard to find, and so was a full version of Addams family instead of the Demo.

I like Addams family. I know it's a run of the mill platformer and everything, it's still good.

Hudson hawk though a bit hard to play until you get used to it is great.

Lethal weapon...well...I was just disappointed, I had remembered the game to be better, instead I got bored with it very very fast. Good platformer, but I'm afraid it gets drawn out too quickly. Something about Hudson hawk makes you want to come back.

[Overdoc]

Now, as I see this thread back to life, I remind another shitty Amigagame:

Last Battle by Elite

The gameplay is rather bad, also grafix aren't great, but the worst thing of it all is the difficulty !
You get a energy bar which is myabe enough to make level 1, but if you expect it to be replenished after that then you are wrong, because it seems that this game's ~20 levels have to be done just with that little shitty energy :(

I cannot believe Elite produced that crap since they did one of my favourite game on the C64, Ghosts'n Goblins !! :)

[Shatterhand]

I like Hudson Hawk a lot too... yeah, the inertia is crap (I always prefer platforms games with no inertia), but you can get the hang of it with time...

Taken from The One's review:
"Ocean gave more attention to the film than the director himself" :)


Know, what about this "demo" of Addams Familly? is that version that has only one stage, and when you beat the boss, you are locked in the boss room? I didn't know that was a demo, I always thought it was a crap beta spreaded by a stupid pirate..


Funnily enough, usually the games we hate the most are usually the harder ones too..

[Drake1009]

Shadow of the beast II was hard but still I don't hate it Shatterhand.

Well maybe it might've been a Beta as you said Shatterhand, but seeing as I haven't seen many betas of games on the Amiga I just assumed it was a demo. Especially since the version is about as bugless as the real game is.

[Akira]

Really hard games get that love-hate status that make'em an instant hit in my collection :)

Yesterday I've been dissing Gradius 2 on the MSX because I just cant pass teh stupid first level :P I hate having to play with those strange cursor keys!

Katakis on teh meega has that evilness factor that makes me want to go back at it everytime :)

[Shatterhand]

Ok ok, what I meant was that usually the games we hate are usually hard too, but that's usually because they are uncontrollabe or too unbalanced... and this leads to bad gameplay...

Really hard games with GOOD gameplay are usually welcome. :)


@Akira

bah, you suck, level 1 is very easy, and those strange cursor keys rule!...... :) (Yah know I just like to piss you off :) )

[Overdoc]

Ha, Akira, to piss you off even more:

Amiga Katakis can be finished ( without any trainers of course ) :)
I did it a long time ago, but I admit it was very hard.
But it wasn't that good compared to the excellent all time favourite C64 version, which had 12 levels instead of the Amiga version's poor 6... :(

[Tim Janssen]

Wow, never knew Ocean's Hudson Hawk was appreciated by so many. I still think this game is irritating but since I have this game still on disc I must like it in some way or another (thanks to the cheat-option). The game was slagged off in the January 1992 of Amiga Joker with a score of 45% (I think). They only devoted half a page to the game and were mainly complaining about the inertia effect.

The only version of Ocean's The Addams Family I own is probably the 1-disc demo version. It has Gomez dodging traps and enemies in a purple-coloured cellar. This game has also a very, very irritating inertia-factor. Unlike Shatterland I have never managed to make it to the endboss.

[Akira]

Arrr you braggers :)

Shatterhand: I die because I am stupid. Those shitty heads keep spitting shurikens at my back :P And I cant get used to the keys because the MissX (nice one Retroman :)) is in an uncomfortable place :( I will finish this bastard, it costed me pretty penny :)

Overdoc: Gah, excellent. I really suck at games :) I preferred the C64 version as well! I dont have time enough to master them anymore. Back then I used to spend many hours at games and finally managed to master them, but now I just cant dedicate such solid gameplay hours to any of my gaems :(

[Drake1009]

Tim : The full version is only 1 disk, but instead you start in front of the mansion instead of the purple dungeon.

[oldpx]

Most of the ocean games are utter crap. Especially the games of movies like total recall. I must add Aliens to that but I don't remember if it was ocean or not.

I'm sorry to hear people hate dragon's lair that much but I understand the reasons. It was an arcade game, and had quite different (and poor) gameplay compared to other games of that era. Being 11 disks (edit: 8 disks, my memory is poor on numbers) it was nearly unplayable on an amiga, with these factors combined, we have a totally unplayable crap. I like don bluth's work as an animator but I see I cannot defend him about that. (He's the guy who designed dragon's lair and space ace). Actually animations in these games are quite rich in detail but these games are just experimental attempts of him in the video gaming industry so they are not made by someone who is in the gaming industry for long and knows a big deal about game dynamics. being arcade games they could survive for arcade games are meant to be evil :D. But they have no attraction as amiga games especially with ECS color palette :p . Anyway his spirit as an animator is fading with every new movie he makes and these were the best works of him in aspect of animation. Dragon's Lair and Space ace.

[Drake1009]

Speaking of Don Bluth. I recently bought Titan AE on DVD. When I watched it I was for some reason constantly reminded of something slightly dragon's lair or space ace like. I don't know what it was, some of the sequences and such I think just reminded me of those games. I was indeed surprised to find Don Bluth's name in the credits.

[oldpx]

Titan AE is notorious of abusing the rotoscoping (technique of drawing over the photographs. kinda lame) I like the movie unlike anyone else that watched it :rolleyes. I think the 3D objects, and the enemies were cool in the movie. However, they have some extremely "cartoony" characters along with realistic drawings that make an absurd world.

[Drake1009]

The world is indeed absurd. Still fairly good. Just can't imagine why they'd come up with that name for the planet.

[Andrew]

I know that this will not go down very well with some. I had heard a lot of hype about Kickoff 2 so when I finally bought it and played it, i was incredibly disapointed. What were the programmers thinking when they developed the control system?

[Dizzy]

I agree about Kick off 2
The control sucks, it's nothing 2 do with real soccer.
Party game is easer to control:laugh

[oldpx]

Party Games? You know Party Games!!! I'm not the only pervert around! :bounce

[Dizzy]

no:evilgrin

[bgbennyboy]

Ian is absolutely right Thundercats is absolutely dire.
Its even worse than the abysmal Count Duckula, which for some reason they made a sequel to!
Some things just defy comprehension............:confused

[oldpx]

C64 version was thundercats was more entertaining than the Amiga one or maybe it was just me.

[Twistin'Ghost]

And I believe it was Amiga Computing that gave that game an 85 score when it came out. And AC were known for low scores on most games back then!

[Minuous]

Hmmm, how about Fireblaster? Anyone ever played it? Probably one of the most dismal shoot-em-ups of all time.

[Shatterhand]

I watched Titan A.E. 's trailer, and I just thought "Damn, mix Space Ace and Dragon's Lair heroes, and you get that guy there"


I have some reservations about Kick Off 2 too. I think the game is damn uncontrollable, the sprites are too big, the game is too fast and the goalies are too stupid.

In the other hand, I think Goal! (That was going to be KO3) is a fantastic game. Not better than SWOS, of course :) .


About KO2 resembling real soccer or not... well, I've played many, many, many soccer games in my life, and the only one that gets very close to real soccer is the Winning Eleven series on PSX. Although SWOS is my fav soccer game ever , I must be honest and admit it doesn't feel like real soccer THAT much (how many times do you cross from the side for an attacker to head into the goal, or how many times do you pass the ball back, to hold the ball and see if you attackers get a better position? not too many, I believe)

[Fred the Fop]

I know this is late, but Cody...you mentioned Moonshine Racers. How DARE you? :kill:mad
That was one of my fave arcade games, spending nearly 20 bucks one night down at the Foodtown in the TSS center in Oceanside, Long Island. Man, the authentic feeling of being a southern redneck. Why, when I used to ride my bike to get to the Foodtwon, I'd put a chicken in my basket and play Buck Owen's on my Emrson Boom box to get the feel of it. Ahhh...Moon *hic*shine ..............

[Twistin'Ghost]

Yeah, but I have actually drank the stuff, being from the deep South and all...

[Fred the Fop]

You know what? Ned Beatty did alot to tarnish the good image of moonshiners, Twist.
Off Topic ...love it :)

[Paul]

@Frederic Avatar

Are you trying impersonate me?:laugh Actually us green aliens used to eat them for breakfast:laughing

[Twistin'Ghost]

It looks like a cheesy-5:30am-children's-puppet-show-on-a-local-channel-in-Canada kind of thing...

[7-Zark-7]

Been a while since I read this thread,so I hope I didn't repeat it earlier,but those arcade Dragonlance games by US Gold were abysmal,(for those fans of the excellent novels,of which I'm one).
I put up with Heroes of the Lance for the intro portraits, but Dragons of Summer Flame needs a sledgehammer to get any "fun" out of that game!

[Pyromania]

Come on people what are the games you love to hate.

Amigaboy Says:
Thread topic edited. You know there's enough shit flying around. No need to toss in more

[Mr Softy]

I think that Mortal Kombat was very poor.
I hated Batman (from the first Burton's movie).
Street Fighter (1) was a pile of...
Captain planet is... no comment.

etc etc etc :nervous

[Tim Janssen]

I agree with you about Mortal Kombat 1, Mr Softy. The fact the game was released on Amiga was for most Amiga-mags reason enough to award it with a 90% score or higher. I'm not quite so sure about Batman the Movie. It is a bit too difficult for its own good, but playable nevertheless.

I'd like to add some more titles to this thread:
- Under Pressure: Big clumsy sprite which is difficult to control spoils an otherwise good-looking game.
- Manhattan Dealers: Look at the graphics, listen to the music and try to control the wooden sprite - MD is a badly disguised ancient 8-bit game.
- Hudson Hawk: This will probably start a flame war and I will be abandoned by other EAB-members, but I still think HH is the most uncontrolable Amiga game I have ever played. The inertia-factor of the Hudson-sprite is too big.
- Any Sierra game (except Kings Quest VI) converted to Amiga: They look either too simple or are too slow to play on a bog-standard Amiga. Pc-bleeps, people with red faces, unresponsive parser, bad American humour, long loading times: Everything I loath about a game is featured in a Sierra title.

[Dastardly]

Terminator 2
I really wanted this to be good at the time and it SO wasnt! :(
@MrSofty
Batman the Movie? Surely not one of the worst Amiga games ever!?!

[Mr Softy]

I tried body blows once. Hated the controls.

[edit: ho ho ho I see people defending Batman! Yay it was a highly subjective choice I reckon. But it got badly on my nerves! My pirate copy was quickly recycled to host something else... :p ]

[Dastardly]

I HATED Body Blows! I could never understand the attraction of this game. The characters and moves are SOOO dull!! The graphics are nicely drawn but who remembers the names of the fighters from BB?
Everyone knows all the characters from SF2 but BB nahhh.

EDIT
@MrSofty
Did you ever reach the second level of Batman? Very nice racing level.

[Mr Softy]

Originally posted by Dastardly
@MrSofty
Did you ever reach the second level of Batman? Very nice racing level.

Nope. I got past ten screens. I'm not the patient type of guy. :sleep

[blackcornflake]

Perhaps not technically one of the worst Amiga games ever, but imo a very poor, very much overrated game. http://hol.abime.net/?id=1474

I bought it after AP gave it a glowing review, but was massively disappointed. Presentation is nice, and ingame gfx are OK. But playability remotely comparable to that of Sensi? No way! Controls are a pain, AI is poor, there are only a small number of teams to choose from, there is little perceptible difference between players within a team, difficulty is set way too high and teams are all broadly comparable in strength (so even ones that are supposed to be rubbish are, in fact, tricky as hell), the keepers are too good... I could go on. Basically, the thing is seriously frustrating to play and has very low addictiveness. Practice helps a little, but the paucity of game modes and competitions means that even if you become a Total Football God, there isn't much scope to use your skills.

There is a two player mode, which is by far the best way to play, but even then it is just not possible to play the sort of quality flowing football you can in Sensi. AP, you got it wrong for once.

[Drake1009]

In my opinion the worst games on the Amiga were Sensible soccer and that stupid alien breed series (J/K)

Seriously though. I quite liked the batman game and hudson hawk too.

I don't think any game is titleable as the worst game...well except maybe Fire!, I never got the idea of that.. seriously there aren't really any games I'd say is one of the worst games, there are just games I regret ever playing.

[Akira]

Hey, I thought Mortl Kombat 1 was spot-on. I preffered the 1 button control to the 5 button one anyday.

Anyway, games that suck balls:

- Dangerous Streets
- Tube Warriors
- Last Action Hero
- Carlos
- The Cartoons

Will think of more later :D

[Antiriad]

AP always said that Bram Stokers Dracula blew chunks big time

[Kodoichi]

The Flintstones D=

[wakeupbomb]

Dangerous Streets...proof that games do produce violence

[oldpx]

Conflict Middle East *spit*

[mtb]

Count Duckula, and other games from the same software ( Alternative?? ).

[Akira]

- Suburban Commando
- Cyberpunks

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Akira
- Suburban Commando
- Cyberpunks
The WORST? You must have missed a LOT of Amiga games, then...

Very few games I have seen in this thread even come close to some of the atrocities I have seen over the years. If I had the time, I'd bang up my list, but alas I am too busy for this (sigh)

Maybe later.

[Amigaboy]

Ray Poker 100mk wasn't the worst, but it does have its bad qualities
Ray Poker 200mk was an absolute masterpiece on the other hand!

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Amigaboy
Ray Poker 100mk wasn't the worst, but it does have its bad qualities
Ray Poker 200mk was an absolute masterpiece on the other hand!
LOL! I was wondering if anyone would recognize this most brilliant pair of gaming marvels that really push the envelope on Amiga processing! When I meditate on the Amiga gaming experience, the Ray Poker games are an impenetrable institution!

http://hol.abime.net/data/screenshot/4001-4100/4028_s1.gif
http://hol.abime.net/data/screenshot/4001-4100/4029_s1.gif

[Shatterhand]

Mortal Kombat? What the hell? I think Amiga Mortal Kombat is the best home version of the game (Maybe only not as good as the Sega CD one). The 1 button control is hard at first, but it quickly becomes second nature.

Total Football? This game is pretty good IMO. It's no sensi, of course, but it plays better than Fifa. Again, the control method is a bit hard in the beggining, but after you understand how it works, the game becomes great to play. You just can't compare it to sensi.

I haven't played many REALLY bad Amiga games. Last Action Hero is bad, but not as bad as the console versions (Which, believe me, are even worse).

http://hol.abime.net/?id=1953

I think that's the worst amiga game I ever played - Sirius 7. I don't even remember much about it, but everytime I want to think about a bad amiga game, that's the 1st name that comes to mind.

[Warlock99]

Bloody Hell, I agree with shatterhand, if mortal is your worst game then you can't have seen many games on the amiga. I agree Terminator was really bad, but had some really nice graphics to partly redeem it.

I can't think what is the worst game but I seem to remember Dick Tracy by titus was one of the lowest marked games i can think of in a mag ever! I think i'll have to relook at it to experience it's direness first-hand again.

[manicx]

I agree. MK is still one of the best coin op conversions cosnidering what we deal with. If MK is bad, what can be said for SF2?

Anyway, my vote for the worst Amiga game goes to Virtual Karting 2... Nothing new comparing to one, even though hardware at the time allowed more things than that...

[Twistin'Ghost]

OK, so I was forced to dig out an old LZH file from the dark recesses of my (un)cool-ection of Amiga treasures. I'm pretty certain this hasn't been adf'd before (certainly not in TOSEC) and a game that might have vanished into obscurity had it not been (undeservingly) rescued.

Way back when SEUCK was released, it became evident pretty quickly that construction kits can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Somewhere I have a trove of SEUCK games created by folks that should have kept their noses in their copy of Amiga Word Perfect. A bunch are available at better TOSEC stores, but one (of many) that slipped past has the distinction of a catchy licence: The Simpsons. It's in the Zone. And it's a real stinker for you affecionados of all things crap.

Now, how long before web sites start adding their bootblocks, intros, texts, etc, to the adf in their hopes to have [a2]. etc. all over TOSEC dats... :rolleyes

[MethodGit]

Woah. Now THIS brings back memories of the first "worst Amiga games ever" thread from a couple of years back.... ;)

[Echo]

Probably going to cause a stir with this one, but I'm standing my ground.

ClickBOOM's Capital Punishment (1996) was a horrible game, which promised so much more. Considering the specs (6mb and hd was it?) needed to run it, it was a big letdown for me. The gameplay was also attrocious, unless I was just crap at it. Could barely beat two opponents in a row. Horribly frustrating.

It was the last Amiga game I bought too. Talk about going out on a sour note.

Pains me to think back of getting trapped in the corner and spiked half the time by that bastard creature.

[WOC_Admin]

Rise Of the Robots!

I think it was rated like 8% in one Amiga Magazine..

[the wolf]

How can you forgot AKIRA? (the one from ICE, not our lovely EAB's member!:D )
This was one of the crappiest and awful things ever made on the Amiga!

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by the wolf
How can you forgot AKIRA? (the one from ICE, not our lovely EAB's member!:D )
This was one of the crappiest and awful things ever made on the Amiga!
I urge you to the the SEUCK Simpsons game, then.

[Kodoichi]

*buuhhuuuuu*

I just played Quicksilver Pinball.

It's downright scary.

It seems as if the ball is controlled by magnets.

[the wolf]

Originally posted by Twistin'Ghost
I urge you to the the SEUCK Simpsons game, then.

Yep, I've already seen it, really bad...
But, hey, it's a SEUCK game, what do you expect?
The program is very limited and you can't made nothing special, even with a marvellous graphic...
There's plenty of awful SEUCK games... a list of these would be too long to post here...

Let's talk about games programmed from scratch, where programmers can show their "skills"!

[Akira]

Originally posted by Twistin'Ghost
I urge you to the the SEUCK Simpsons game, then.
Ah but most SEUCK games were done by Billy and his dad in a cold winter afternoon.
We're talking commercial, and I have NO CLUE how Akira did escape my list. It's the worse, and gives me a bad name :P

[Twistin'Ghost]

Alright then, Slackskin and Flint.

[MethodGit]

Let's not forget Bart Vs The Space Mutants now. :rolleyes

[Amigaboy]

Originally posted by Akira
It's the worse, and gives me a bad name :P

Nah. You did that to yourself ;)

[Pyromania]

Originally posted by Twistin'Ghost
OK, so I was forced to dig out an old LZH file from the dark recesses of my (un)cool-ection of Amiga treasures. I'm pretty certain this hasn't been adf'd before (certainly not in TOSEC) and a game that might have vanished into obscurity had it not been (undeservingly) rescued.

Way back when SEUCK was released, it became evident pretty quickly that construction kits can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Somewhere I have a trove of SEUCK games created by folks that should have kept their noses in their copy of Amiga Word Perfect. A bunch are available at better TOSEC stores, but one (of many) that slipped past has the distinction of a catchy licence: The Simpsons. It's in the Zone. And it's a real stinker for you affecionados of all things crap.

Now, how long before web sites start adding their bootblocks, intros, texts, etc, to the adf in their hopes to have [a2]. etc. all over TOSEC dats... :rolleyes

I have found SEUCK games to be some of the most compelling and exciting games on the Amiga. The graphics are always PS2 quality and the 5.1 Doulby Digital SEUCK sorround sound rules.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by MethodGit
Let's not forget Bart Vs The Space Mutants now. :rolleyes
You really believe this is one of the worst games ever on the Amiga? Clearly you've not played that many Amiga games...

[Akira]

Originally posted by Twistin'Ghost
You really believe this is one of the worst games ever on the Amiga? Clearly you've not played that many Amiga games...
It's not one of the worst, but it's pathetic NES shovelware. The original NES game wasn't that great anyway, just overly hyped because it was the first game using the Simpsons license.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Akira
It's not one of the worst, but it's pathetic NES shovelware. The original NES game wasn't that great anyway, just overly hyped because it was the first game using the Simpsons license.
Oh I agree that the game is crap at the end of the day, just not bad enough to qualify for a worst Amiga games list. NES shovelware was usually equal to or better than ST shovelware. Also, this game should have been released on a single disk...what a waste of an intro!

[Akira]

Originally posted by Twistin'Ghost
Oh I agree that the game is crap at the end of the day, just not bad enough to qualify for a worst Amiga games list.
That's for sure, with things like Allo Allo in there, Bart still looks shiny and nice! :lol

[Shatterhand]

I think Cyberpunks wasn't that bad. It was bland and its characters were as bad as they could be, but the game was mildly enjoyable, falling in the average zone.

OOHH, I remembered other crap amiga game I played: Garfield something. I can't remember the title of the game, but it has Garfield on it.

Most games by Alternative were crap as hell. I think their best games were Galactic Warrior Rats and Death Mask, and this says a lot.

[Echo]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
OOHH, I remembered other crap amiga game I played: Garfield something. I can't remember the title of the game, but it has Garfield on it.Garfield's Big Fat Hairy Deal on Speccy was a laugh, kicking Odie out of the room was the highlight for me :cheese

[Shatterhand]

Yes, that's the one.

http://hol.abime.net/?id=2697

It just came to mind that I could search for the name "Garfield" on Hol and see what would come up.

Why the double-barrel screenshot in this game actually is just one big, flat screenshot ?

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Akira
That's for sure, with things like Allo Allo in there, Bart still looks shiny and nice! :lol
LOL!!! :laughing

@Shatterhand
I liked Cyberpunks, too. Harmless fare, it. And both Garfield games were awful.

I really need to make up a list of the all-time worst Amiga games. I am a bit of a connoisseur of crap...even in my earliest Amiga gaming days, I actively sought copies of such rubbish as 4x4 Off Road Racing, P.O.W., Crazy Cars, Streetfighter, Pinball Champ (or even worse, Power Pinball), Master Ninja, Dogs of War, Belial, etc. Those old 80's compacts were treasure troves of junk with all of those cheap, cartridge-freezed ST shovelware quickies.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
Why the double-barrel screenshot in this game actually is just one big, flat screenshot ?
Technical burp there. Systems are back to normal, do not adjust your set. DBS fixed.

[CPC464]

I must agree with Mark (WOC_Admin) Rise Of the Robots!

This was a truly terrible game.

[7-Zark-7]

And another 3 to the list thanks to U.S. Gold....

Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade-the arcade game
(Not to be mistaken with the classic graphic adventure game)

Heroes of the Lance-lots of slow moving sprites that'd look bad on an ST never mind the amiga, the intro portraits were the only saving grace-a travesty of a game for fans of the great fantasy novels by Weis & Hickman.

Dragons of Flame-another Dragonlance adaptation failure.

[spiff]

STUN runner.. or anything else from domark for that matter.

[TDK]

Battletoads has to be in there surely, at 13% it's the worst game I ever worked on.

[Incomparabile]

I really enjoy racing games, so I bought in the old days Fast Lane. Really crap! :mad I want my money back now! :crazy

[7-Zark-7]

Originally posted by TDK
Battletoads has to be in there surely, at 13% it's the worst game I ever worked on.

What was your contribution to it,out of curiousity? Not that I've played the original nes version but it seemed a shoddy game to try & convert in the first place.

[Shatterhand]

Actually, Battletoads for NES (And Mega-Drive too) is a very good game, a solid progressive beat'em up with lots of originality and variety to the gameplay. I consider it to be one of the best in the genre.

I waited a lot for the Amiga conversion, and it's a shame that they managed to convert such a great game into a big mess. The Amiga could easily handle it, it's a big shame.

TDK probably worked in the music, or that's my guess, by reading his avatar description :D

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
TDK probably worked in the music, or that's my guess, by reading his avatar description :D
Or you could click on his WWW button and check out his page which lists his game music credits!

[mintsauce82]

I'd be very tempted to say Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie. It was astonishingly poor. On a more personal note, it also scarred me for life when i first played it as a wee 10-year old. Games that cast you as a schizophrenic with psychotic episodes, who wants to escape to Midian, really show the importance of having age ratings on games.

I played it again today out of curiosity, and felt those same genuine feelings of fear and discomfort. I really have issues with that game, it still REALLY frightens me, and i don't think i'm ever going to play it again. Not that i'll be missing much.

Oh, and cast another vote for Rise of the Robots. :laughing

[Djay]

I'd be very tempted to say Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie.the laughing bloke in the cell was pretty odd...

i would say...

Rise of the Robots is probably the worst Amiga game ever... it was soooo hyped and turned out to be complete pants...

although other games were very bad, the publisher realised their games were bad and didn't bother to "hype-it-up"... which is their only saving grace

[mintsauce82]

the laughing bloke in the cell was pretty odd...

Fortunately i only saw that section when i came back to it many years later, i think it was last year or the year before. I think if i had seen the laughing bloke in the cell when i was little, then i would have ended up in an asylum too. :sad

[Djay]

*Djay bangs on padded wall;)

[@licomb]

Nightbreed (both of them)
Rise of the Robots
Last Action Hero
Total Carnage (note all ICE's games were pants)
Dangerous Streets (aagggggh the bad memories)
Cliff hanger
Sleepwalker (annoying as hell)

I am also tempted to put the Dizzy games in this list as i thought the spectrum versions were better, but i will avoid.

[wakeupbomb]

Originally posted by @licomb
Nightbreed (both of them)
Rise of the Robots
Last Action Hero
Total Carnage (note all ICE's games were pants)
Dangerous Streets (aagggggh the bad memories)
Cliff hanger
Sleepwalker (annoying as hell)

I am also tempted to put the Dizzy games in this list as i thought the spectrum versions were better, but i will avoid.

Sleepwalker :hoo :hoo :hoo CLASSIC game...imo

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by wakeupbomb
Sleepwalker :hoo :hoo :hoo CLASSIC game...imo
I agree. It takes a bit of work, IIRC, but I remember liking the game and being impressed by it. Haven't touched it in years, though.

[blackcornflake]

Originally posted by @licomb
Total Carnage (note all ICE's games were pants)

I dunno, ICE did produce some games that weren't so bad. Whilst still pretty average, Mean Arenas, Deep Core, Gulp! and Abandoned Places 2 are nowhere near as awful as Akira or Total Carnage. But then I guess that would take some doing. :D

Fire Force also seems to have its admirers, but its appeal is completely lost on me.

[Shatterhand]

Mean Arenas and Deep Core are nice games, worthy ratings about 75-85%

Fire Force is great. Some people hate it, some people love it. I am one who love it.

[@licomb]

what was mean arena's about its sounds familier but forgets what it was about?

[Shatterhand]

Mean Arenas is like pacman for the 90s :D

You run with a guy in a top-down point of view, collecting dots and money in a maze, avoiding the enemies.

It's entertaining for a while.

[Twistin'Ghost]

KARATE KING (http://hol.abime.net/?id=3634) [Kingsoft/Constellation/Anco] 1987 <Beat-em-up>
TG score: *
Yeesh! The epitome of outdated, but that is no excuse since in 1987 we had far better games than this dreck! Nine levels of cheesy backgrounds, mediocre sprites, terrible control, godawful collision detection - everything that is bad. Just pass this one by!

[Dastardly]

@Shatterhand

Deep Core - Wasnt that the one with the main sprite that looked like a blatant Gods rip off? I never played it properly but the game itself looked like a dodgy sci-fi Gods rip off.

[Shatterhand]

Ya know, I had never noticed that before, but now that you've mentioned... yeah, Deep Core's main sprite is rather look-alike to the Gods one.
And their gameplay does share some stuff, but well, both are platform games with big sprites :)

[Hammy]

Mortal Kombat.

it takes ages to load, and when its loaded, its crap.

[Galahad/FLT]

- Borobodur
- Last Action Hero
- Bram Stokers Dracula
- RanX
- Phantom Fighter
- Metal Law
- Skull & Crossbones
- STUN Runner
- the list can go on and on! its certainly not exhaustive

[Twistin'Ghost]

A double bill sure to ruin any evening!

DOCTOR DOOM'S REVENGE (http://hol.abime.net/?id=377) [Paragon] 1989 <Beat-em-up>
TG score: *
Nails scraping across a blackboard has more playability than this abomination of the genre. The sprites move as if they are in a murky mire of plasma and cough medicine, controls are non-existant, gameplay is equal to passing kidney stones.

BRATACCAS (http://hol.abime.net/?id=199) [Psygnosis] 1986 <Action-Adventure>
TG score: *
Crapaccas more like. Is there honestly any game worse than this one? Even all of Psygnosis' final games stacked on top of each other to make the ultimate turd sandwich still doesn't begin to equal the utter, utter poorness of this complete disgrace to the Amiga (an ST port, no less).

[IFW]

Brataccas is actually a game that was started on the Spectrum and ended up on the Amiga. The graphic style, sound etc. is simply the result of a poorly written Spectrum game running on 68k code... :)

[manicx]

Was it Spectrum or the QL? I thought it was the QL!!!

[IFW]

Check out the excellent tzx vault for more info.

http://tzxvault.retrogames.com/time.htm

Imagine, Bandersnatch

[Steve]

There are some truly awful Amiga games around but some of the games mentioned could qualify as some of the greatest Amiga games of all time next to this little lot:

Subversion - Dreadful, dreadful game
http://hol.abime.net/?id=2168

Bravo Romeo Delta Series - Shockingly bad
http://hol.abime.net/?id=4010

The Real Ghostbusters - Had the developers heard of gameplay?
http://hol.abime.net/?id=1205

Little Shit in Dragon Land - Yawnarama!
http://hol.abime.net/?id=897

[IFW]

The Real Ghostbusters is a coin-op conversion check out mame. Fairly close to the original ;)
Codemasters games have their followers and they might not agree on Little Puff :)

[fiath]

Originally posted by blackcornflake
I dunno, ICE did produce some games that weren't so bad. Whilst still pretty average, Mean Arenas, Deep Core, Gulp! and Abandoned Places 2 are nowhere near as awful as Akira or Total Carnage. But then I guess that would take some doing. :D

Fire Force also seems to have its admirers, but its appeal is completely lost on me.

I don't think "produce" is exactly the right word for AP2, probably even the other games too.

[fiath]

Originally posted by Steve

Little Shit in Dragon Land - Yawnarama!
http://hol.abime.net/?id=897

You obviously don't appriciate the subtle variety of the game...

:p

[IFW]

Originally posted by fiath
I don't think "produce" is exactly the right word for AP2, probably even the other games too.

"Gulp" aka "A Fishy Tale" is the wet dream of Miss Deborah Isaac, also responsible for the design of "Magic Garden" aka "Gnome Alone", and "Fatal Strokes".
Nice girl, but certainly with better uses, than doing game design.
Probably it did help that she owned ICE as her father gave the money for the company... ;)

AP2 is not awful, thank you very much, and AP1 is excellent. Tens of thousands of people agree with me on this from an era where it was a very good sales figure. :cheese

As far as I remember Deep Core was done by the same lamers who did Akira, basically testers who couldn't even test AP2 properly.
I don't remember Mean Arena, maybe a different title for some crap that I otherwise know.

There were some interesting developments going on as well, I guess none saw the light of day.

One is Axxess Denied (aka Black Ice?) a 3d polygon adventure from the author who did F19 or some other famous flight sim, but by the time we met he was literally hardcore alcoholic.

Steven Curtis and David Jones the 8 bit legends worked there on pure shit "Deborah Designs". We used to have great fun destroying promotional garden gnomes that were suppsoed to be given for Magic Garden, but the game was so poor, nobody was bothered to get them. It had to be renamed to Gnome Alone and was re-issued later in a hope nobody notices it being the same old crap.

As a general rule most people were ripped off anyway or had to work on DD dream stuff, so don't blame them.

I could go on, but I'm not going to... maybe next time :D

[fiath]

Originally posted by IFW

AP2 is not awful, thank you very much, and AP1 is excellent. Tens of thousands of people agree with me on this from an era where it was a very good sales figure. :cheese


Nobody said it was! :) Somebody said all ICE games were pants - but that is a very large generalisation.

@Licomb, have you played AP2?

[IFW]

"...and Abandoned Places 2 are nowhere near as awful as..."
In my English book it reads it is awful, but not as awful as...

[fiath]

Okay, agreed. But I can see that was not actually what was meant when reading in context. Though I personally don't agree with the "pretty average" at all, I guess different people like different games.

After all you can't have "pretty average" AND "[slightly] aweful" for the same thing. ;)

[blackcornflake]

Originally posted by Fiath
After all you can't have "pretty average" AND "[slightly] aweful" for the same thing.

Point taken. I see how the sentence could read like that. Sorry for the confusion.

No, I don't think AP2 is awful. Kinda average yes, awful no. I was defending it in the first place. :)

A genuinely awful game, that makes me laugh every time I see it in action: Dalek Attack.

[7-Zark-7]

To go back on-topic.
the miggy version of Creatures. Or "how to take a great game & totally massacre the conversion in one easy lesson".

[Oscar Castillo]

Originally posted by Pyromania
Come on people what are the games you love to hate.

Amigaboy Says:
Thread topic edited. You know there's enough shit flying around. No need to toss in more

Disliked Killing Cloud.

[Twistin'Ghost]

TANK BUSTER (http://hol.abime.net/?id=1313) [Kingsoft] 1989 <Shoot-em-up>
TG score: *
Ugh! Talk about a game that you'll NEVER pull out again. Such a pity too, since the actual 'game' part seems salvagable, but let me begin the itemizing: First on the chopping block is the fact that no amount of degrading in the world could make the haphazard code load on my 030 accelerated 2.x A2000, so I had to dust off the A500 to even look at the game. Immediately upon booting, lethal thrashing of the drive heads became an almost non-stop part of the trackdisk loading routine (so far, leading me to believe the programmer is a twit!). The damaging grind was almost non-stop, bar a few short moments of gameplay.

Oh yeah - the gameplay - almost forgot that! It's a 1-2 player overhead tank blaster ala TRON Tanks, only you are given but one life to live. Screw up, and you are back to square one, which means another 30 seconds of grinding the disk drive back to the title screen and re-loading the data (which SHOULD have still been in memory) to get you back to where you already were in the first place. Completely appalling design destroyed what might have made a nice PD game.

In emulation, the game is much more forgiving, which is a shame since it was wasn't created for emulation. And there is still the single life issue.

[Overdoc]

Oh, yes, that 'loading the level again when you die' is something I really hate, too.
I have seen this in many games and it seems the programmers of these are not really intelligent guys ;)
What's the purpose of loading the same level again that I am just playing ?
But most of games which have this special 'feature' are crap games anyway, so what to expect from such a mindless programmer ?

[IFW]

Apart from the lameness factor... ;)
Reloading is quite often needed if you reuse the memory of the loaded/generated data at specific stages of gameplay.
But I guess this is not the case with the above mentioned title so it is the lameness factor then.

[Shatterhand]

I have never played the full Dalek Attack version, but I played the demo that came at "The One"

You have to agree, the guys at Alternative were really stupid. To put demos from their games in coverdisks would only harm the already low selling numbers of their games.

They also had a demo of Suburban Commando in an editiob of The One. One more crap game.

[Twistin'Ghost]

CRAZY CARS (http://hol.abime.net/?id=3113) [Titus] 1987 <Racing>
TG score: *
Perhaps the poorest racing game I have seen on the Amiga. The scary part is that some people actually enjoy this game. Truth be told, I'd be happier playing ENDURO on my Atari 2600. When the game boots, it makes you wait about a minute for the loading - some music might have helped this waiting period. And speaking of music, the great rock score is a mere looping sample. You start the race with, oddy enough, a Mercedes 560 SEC...crazy! The road looks static, the scenery looks crap and the worst part is when you collide with another car or jump a hill, the car levitates like a hovercraft, diminishing any credibility. Crazy!

Cruddy, more like.

[Twistin'Ghost]

After I posted those comments of Crazy Cars, I seemed to recall Amiga Power's wonderful Oh, dear tribute to this game. I did a search and found an online replication of that bit...

http://www.cartwright33.freeserve.co.uk/ap/ohdear.htm

I highly recommend reading this short review. No matter how many times you'd already read it, it's as funny as the first time!

[7-Zark-7]

Who enjoyed the drivel that was Crazy Cars, Twist?:shocked
Apart from the programmer's blind old granny,perhaps!:D
Btw-keep up the alternate reviews, I'd love to see you make a dedicated thread of them, the good, the bad & ugly!

I'm sure with the power of hindsight, there's probably a few games that'd get revised reviews from the immortals of the Amiga's golden age if they'd had the chance.

[Twistin'Ghost]

I was truly shocked by CRAZY CARS when I discovered it has its fans. One of the very first swap sessions I ever had back in the 80's was with some kid's dad (how I met these people, I can't even remember). They invited us to come over and see their kits and disks, then copied (and even loaned originals and cracks, both) of all sorts of games new to us. I visited their place once a week to return the old stuff and get new stuff (until I had it all, which included photocopies of their manuals!), so after CRAZY CARS turned up, I tried it out before copying it. I couldn't even like the game for its complete crapness, since at the time, this man was my only source of software; when you only have one source, you want good games!

So anyhow, I take his stuff back the next week and just had to comment of what complete garbage that game was. Surely he only kept it because he kept anything copyable, right? But no, he looked puzzled when I started my rap about how much I hated it. He already resembled Oliver Stone anyhow, so I figured he probably even liked the game PLATOON. He said he and BOTH of his sons (ages 14 and 16) always loved that game and played it as a family heavily at first and steadily now. ?!?!? To play that game with the family is probably what creates families like the Mansons!

If I want my car to jump, I'll play CARV-UP. At least it's fun (and cute, two characteristics CRAZY CARS has not!)

So I took it back with me again, certain I'd missed something blasting through a stack of games. But it was as crap as ever. I copied it anyhow this time, along with another game I also abhored (MEAN 18). Somewhere in all of that, I became a connisseur of bad games much the same way I am an affecionado of bad films. I've since gone to great lengths to obtain the very worst Amiga games ever. I should erect a Hall of Shame.

My credo: Loving great games is as easy as being a smug winner.

[Overdoc]

Hey Twist, have you ever tried 'Mani Pulite' ?
Ok, it'S an AMOS PD game, I think, but it is some kind of crap I bet you have never seen worse !!
Try it !
I am sure it is a good candidate for the hall of shame ;)

If ou want to read my comment on it then have a look in the search engine - I know I once tried to describe how shitty it is :)

[Twistin'Ghost]

Hehe...yeah, I remember your glowing praise for that game, LOL! I was intrigued back then but can't remember why I never got around to playing it. It's on my TODO list now...if it's as crap as you say, it may be some true competition for the Ray Poker games... :laughing

[stormix]

anyone play edd the duck? It was truly awful; it was a platformer and you couldn't move in the air, which was most frustrating. Also you couldn't dispose of enemies, only freeze them with snowballs.

I remember a review of Huckleberry Hound in Amiga Power, their summary of it was:


The worst pile of dog's crap inflicted on Amiga owners since Edd the Duck 2. Much much worse than it looks - and you can see how it looks.


but i never played it.

[fiath]

Oi, I own that game! :p

[Bloodwych]

I've found the worst Amiga game EVER!!!!!!!

1943 is absolutely awful. It looks even worse in motion.

I could link to the HOL, but I want you all to get a real close look at its crapness:

[Enverex]

CliffHangar. That game sucked so badly it was unreal....

[JudasEZT]

pheww.. lot of bad games.

here spanish contribution, TelemarkWarrior from DroSoft

http://hol.abime.net/?id=3753

also was very bad, ZoneWarrior form EA

http://hol.abime.net/?id=1632

[7-Zark-7]

Got to add Ghouls n' Ghosts which was so typical of the ST shovelware that U.S. Gold regularly released on the Amiga-Tim Follin's tunes were the only saving grace-the same could not be said for several tiertex/U.S. Gold capcom games, eg: Strider, Black Tiger etc.

[Fred the Fop]

Hi.
Hey.....
Zone Warrior looks bad. Like a claustrophobic Spectrum game.

[bippym]

Originally posted by stormix
anyone play edd the duck? It was truly awful; it was a platformer and you couldn't move in the air, which was most frustrating. Also you couldn't dispose of enemies, only freeze them with snowballs.


edd the duck is the poor mans rainbow islands!!

[vertigo]

Agony (psygnosis)... pure agony from the game and music..


Hey its snowing :rolleyes

[Drake1009]

Don't badmouth Edd the duck. I spent plenty of hours playing that on my C64. Edd the duck 2 though seemed very strange though.

[bippym]

Originally posted by Drake1009
Don't badmouth Edd the duck. I spent plenty of hours playing that on my C64. Edd the duck 2 though seemed very strange though.

Like i said poor mans rainbow islands :cheese

[Drake1009]

Did I mention I had rainbow islands on the C64 as well? Could've played that.

[hardmoon]

Too many to mention really... I know I always hated Xenon 2. It had lots of eyecandy back then, but the gameplay... Ack...!

[Enverex]

Originally posted by hardmoon
Too many to mention really... I know I always hated Xenon 2. It had lots of eyecandy back then, but the gameplay... Ack...!

Yeah, it was blatant'y owned by Project-X :)

[Shatterhand]

And Project X was blatant'y owned by Apidya :)

[7-Zark-7]

Which was owned by X-out, which was owned originally by a pinball machine with a family of rats living in it!! :p
Though I must ask, how do we go from talking about a vertical scroller & suddenly change to comparing it to a horizontal scroller?

[Enverex]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
Which was owned by X-out, which was owned originally by a pinball machine with a family of rats living in it!! :p
Though I must ask, how do we go from talking about a vertical scroller & suddenly change to comparing it to a horizontal scroller?

X-Out was crap! Project-X was easily the best out of all of them...

[Antiriad]

I dispute this slating of Xenon 2 and think exactly the opposite of its comparisons to Team 17s Project X.

Please elaborate your views further, and I will do likewise.

[7-Zark-7]

I still don't like necessarily comparing vertical scroller shootemups to horizontal ones generally-surely Battle Squadron or SWIV, make for better comparisons technically,at least.

X-out was a touch underrated for mine, but much better that you still had a (potentially),decent back up ship rather than a severely underpowered ship that quickly got wiped out in Project X, especially on subsequent levels. (Particularly apparent in the original pre-special ed. version.)

[Shatterhand]

Project X is too much overrated.

Well, here I go about Amiga shmups.

Xenon 2 - Dated as hell. When I got an Amiga, Xenon 2 was already rather old (92 xmas). The game has some decent graphics and excellent soundtrack, but the gameplay just suffers. The enemy patterns are completely uninspired, the weapons are kind of boring, and the level design is just stupid (Come on... there are split-ups in the level and if you get the wrong path you have to go BACKWARDS so you can get the right path.. stupid..just too much stupid). Oh, and I don't like the shop. Pause the action to buy stuff is not a clever idea in my book. It would be much better if I could just pick up the power ups in-action. (And it would be much better if the pick-up would CYCLE between the power ups.)

Project-X - First thing wrong: Inertia. There's a law in shmupland that says: NO SHOOT'EM UP IS ALLOWED TO HAVE "REALISTIC" PYSHICS or something like that. If you want a good shmup, the first thing you need is a spot-on control, and Project-X ship slides too much to give me this. Like lots of european shmups, the level design is too much uninspired. Usually there's only one kind of enemy attacking you per time, which is really boring (Couldn't they be more imaginative?) . Another irritating feature is that you have a "Time" to be attacked by a certain enemy. So, even if you kill an enemy, a copy of it will appear again, until the time runs out, and he just flies away. This is one of the most stupid ideas EVER in a shmup (And the sequel, X2, on PSX, also has this). It gives away any incentive to kill the enemies. The weapons are completely unbalanced. Most people I saw played with Guns, which is the 2nd weapon to be chosen and as good as plasma, which needed many more Ps to get. This weapon system kind of worked in Gradius (And was perfected in Gradius Gaiden) because the best power ups needed more icons to be collected. In Project X it's just crap. Not to mention the COMPLETELY unbalanced dificulty. It's not hard because Team 17 wanted you to have a real challenge. It's hard because it's badly designed. Why the hell there are just 3 power ups in level 2, while there are dozens of them in level 1? If you die, you lose all weapons, and you are history (This was corrected in the SE edition, though).

X-Out - Never played it much, so I won't comment it :D

Battle Squadron - This one was released around the same time of Xenon 2 and it's eons better. You have a good weapons array which all have your good use. You have enemies that shoot at you all the time, needing good deals of dodging stuff. You have inspired enemies (Mainly in the underground levels). There is a COOL bomb. The action flows non-stop all the time, you are always on the edge of danger. The control is nearly perfect (The way to drop the bomb isn't the best one), and while it's hard, at least you know the level design gives you a chance of winning (And you DON'T lose all your power when you die). The best vert shmup on Amiga.

Apidya - This is waaaay better than Project X. First, the weapon system here is intelligent enough. The stage design is excellent, with lots of "adlib dodging" required, and also some good memorization. It has some very cool features like underwater levels and stuff. The bosses fight are great. The action is also non-stop. It's hard, but EVERY single time I die, I can see what I did wrong, and what I should do next time. I personally consider Apidya to be one of the top 5 best shoot'em ups EVER, including there Japanase stuff like Radiant Silvergun and all time classics like R-Type. Apidya is horizontal shoot'em ups at its perfection.

I thought about mention Uridium 2, which is also excellent, but I am tired of typing :D

[JudasEZT]

Nice analisys Shatterland.

I would have desired that Factor5 guys did a game with Turrican2 shootemup stages.. (even they ar too much similar to a coinop I dont remember the name)

Other cool shootem up although toooooo difficult is Ziriax,.. man its good and very amiga style,.. but really hard

[Shatterhand]

Never heard about Ziriax..

I probably mentioned it on this thread already, but I can't remember. Sirius 7 is one of the most horrendous shmups I ever played in my life. It's probably the worst game I ever played on Amiga.

Though to be sincere, I have never been to sure if it was comercial or freeware. I got it as a commercial game, but I read somewhere that it's freeware.

[JudasEZT]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
Never heard about Ziriax..



Try it, worths a match.

;)

[andreas]

Originally posted by vertigo
Agony (psygnosis)... pure agony from the game and music..
WHAT!?

Franck Sauer is one of the best graphic artists ever...it's got furious gameplay too ... and don't forget this awesome music! A GREAT, GREAT game!

How can anyone even dare MENTION this game here!!

[JudasEZT]

Originally posted by andreas
WHAT!?

Franck Sauer is one of the best graphic artists ever...it's got furious gameplay too ... and don't forget this awesome music! A GREAT, GREAT game!

How can anyone even dare MENTION this game here!!

Well, I like this game. I got hooked.. I finished it without cheats. (I dont lost lives until last stage).

but I understand why ppl dont likes. Its bizarre, Im not referring to style, graphics, story,.. Im referring to the way it plays, the weapons, the enemy behaviours, the stage design.. its bizarre and a bit disastruous.

[andreas]

Well I'm a fan of all that H. R. Giger stuff and horror pictures in general (because of design only, mind you :cool) so I must like this game, especially with its unreal skulls and horrid phantom faces :) Well done stuff ... and nice 'n' scary atmosphere :suspiciou :)

[Shatterhand]

Agony is another shmup...

it certainly isn't a common shmup. The level design is weird, the owl is a little too big to move around enemy shots. It's unuthordox for sure. It ends being rather average in the end, IMO. It's not bad, but it's not even close to the better shmups on Amiga.

The graphics are also pretty weird. I love the graphic style, but it's true many people won't get it. The loading screens are the most beatiful ever :D

Now the music is just AWESOME.

[manicx]

I agree with Shatterhand. Besides, I always liked the japanese style shoot em ups like the ones in the PCEngine.

[Dastardly]

Id put Body Blows in with this lot. Yeah ok it wasnt technically bad, but its so lacking in character its offensive.

[Graham Humphrey]

Must be Last Action Hero surely? Any others?

[KombatSanta]

Terminator 2

[Bamiga2002]

I've said it before and i say it again: Offshore Warrior :laughing

[oldpx]

Conflict: Middle East

[T_hairy_bootson]

Crazy Cars :guru

Because I completed it.

[Akira]

Merged the new thread about this with this old one which was already 3 pages long!

[Akira]

Thanks to Freakyweakywoo now all 3 threads about this are merged, racking up for a mammoth 6 pages of crap games discussion!

Enjoy :)

[Mr Creosote]

I was going to add something to this thread, but it seems everything has already been said years ago:

- Any Sierra game [...]: Pc-bleeps, people with red faces, unresponsive parser, bad American humour, long loading times: Everything I loath about a game is featured in a Sierra title.
:p

[Marcuz]

Thanks to Freakyweakywoo now all 3 threads about this are merged, racking up for a mammoth 6 pages of crap games discussion!

Enjoy :)
bah! like i wasn't helping...
anyway: a game i cant think any reason not to add here is Team Suzuki, but this is just one i can think about now, there were so many that got so ugly for just a mayor flaw (like control in this case)...

[Joe Maroni]

i didn´t know if it is right here but found a game in HOL:

http://hol.abime.net/?id=3857

does anybody ever played this shit..???
i think this is one of the worst games ever...:)

[Marcuz]

i didn´t know if it is right here but found a game in HOL:

http://hol.abime.net/?id=3857

does anybody ever played this shit..???
i think this is one of the worst games ever...:)

naa it is a child game, not necessarily a crappy one

cute little ducks

cute

[Freakyweakywoo]

I was going to play this but I scrolled down too far on the HOL link and it spoiled the end for me ;)

But I'm inspired to sing

Everybody, after 3.
1
2
3

Thier once was an ugly duckling............ :)

[adamst85]

CRAPS...

???

Borobodur, Pit-Fighter, Smash TV, Robocop 1,2 Vahlalla, Whiz - weren't great, but weren;t craps too. Just average for me.

Amiga version of Bomb Jack was very playable for me too.

Warzone, Prime Mover - CRAPS?? Warzone - one of the best commando clones on Amiga (Great for TWO players) 8/10. Prime Mover - very good motor racing game 7,5/10.

Total craps for me are: Rise of the Robots, Last Action Hero, Cliffhanger, Skull & Crossbones, Dangeerous Streets...

Nicky Boom 2 - was average, but Nicky Boom 1 - was good - I completed it without cheats - graphics averagem but music - beautiful - and different for each world (world= 2 stages).

[Graham Humphrey]

How about Goldrunner? Very quick and all, but where was the game?

And while I'm in a bad mood (Norwich lost 3-2 at home to Everton (I'm talking about football before anyone asks)) Test Match Cricket. Words cannot adequately describe how awful this game is. Try it yourself if you're curious (and stupid :) ).

[oldpx]

naa it is a child game, not necessarily a crappy one

cute little ducks

cute
What are you going to say to this (http://hol.abime.net/?id=46) now? :D Psycho bear barney and chickens with their guts sagging from their asses!

[Hillsy_]

Goldrunner, Yeah I agree with you Humpy. ;)

Xenon 2 was a fine game...What the hell would you know about games Enverex....You only collect them, did you ever play them?? Did you play it when it first came out? Xenon 2 I played with my brother for 14 hours non-stop...just like when I played Eye of the Beholder 14 hours non-stop..just like I played Captive for 14 hours non-stop. Give Xenon 2 some credit, it was technically very good, had very good gameplay. The Bitmap brothers were one of the few who actually made good games for the Amiga. Project X....Project X give me a break....Team17 have no idea how to implement difficulty settings. Alien Breed this..Project X that...Give me Superfrog anyday - definitely their best title to date. Actual thought when into making this!!

@Antiriad - :great

@Shatterhand - Good Analysis of Project X.

X-Out was also a fine game too, including hitpoint damage to your ship.

Hmmm...I suppose you hate Xenon 1 too Enverex?

- Hillsy.

[Shatterhand]

I don't like Xenon 2 either.

And I think the 1st Xenon is better than the 2nd...

[JudasEZT]

post edited

[mcbpete]

woah, I've never seen that game before ?!! Looks like some odd Net Yaroze for the Playstation.

[Joe Maroni]

looks like it isn´t really the worst game... :shocked

it looks very well...where can i purchase it...???

[Marcuz]

What are you going to say to this (http://hol.abime.net/?id=46) now? :D Psycho bear barney and chickens with their guts sagging from their asses!
lol! it looks fine to me, just it's odd that a stuffed teddy bear tends a farm, a real one would be better choice, but anyway nice palette and the pigs look cute :cheese :laughing

[Nexjen]

Pit Fighter.

http://hol.abime.net/?id=1075

[wanderer]

Outrun. A total disappointment. Which was weird at the time, considering the awesome Super Hang-On.
http://hol.abime.net/5215

[Marcuz]

these days if a game don't get me in 5 minutes because of the interface , either of its slowness or its unadeguaticity (?) i consider crap; like Axis and Allies, Abandoned Places, Knightmare...
what's the goal in playin if those are like walls between you and the interaction?

[Matthias]

Warzone - one of the best commando clones on Amiga (Great for TWO players)
I agree! I played this over and over again together with my cousin and it used to be a lot of fun (although we never completed the game...we only reached the last level).

But to be honest: I can't really remember any really bad games... I even enjoyed playing Robocop.
This may be because I haven't played THAT many games and sticked to the Amiga-Joker and Powerplay charts back then...

[NPI]

Wizmo (http://hol.abime.net/3421) <- anyone needs a gamemap for this "game" ?

Dyter-07 (http://hol.abime.net/468) <- gross

International Truck Racing (http://hol.abime.net/2657) <- really stupid.

Top Banana (http://hol.abime.net/1457) <- I almost got a seizure when I saw that.... whatever it is

etc...

[EmuChicken]

VIZ - omg this game sucked so much balls
http://hol.abime.net/1591

Most zepellin games did aswell- I remember getting Ed the Duck on the Amstrad and kicking it, and then there was an above racer that I took back-

Thomas the Tank Engine 2 - this "sequel" uber sucked compared to the first game
http://hol.abime.net/1380

Detroit- How many of you looked at it and thought- "This looks great" ... but then realised how hard it was to actually work... I bought it later on the PC (some budget CD thing) thinking it might be alright after all,... nah ... didnt know how to work nothing
http://hol.abime.net/338

Thundercats- Erm, a platformer that really sucks!
http://hol.abime.net/1393

[Bombjacker]

Whirligig and Quadralien are two games I remember for their badness in the gameplay department. Quadalien just didn't make any sense. It was complete wrongness.

[microslave]

One of the worst games concerning graphics I remember was the german game QUIWI,
http://hol.abime.net/2271
although quiz games are generally a interesting game concept too.
But this one had very poor graphics in comparison to my other games, so me and my friends at the age of 16 had a good laugh, when looking at this.

[_ThEcRoW]

Double Dragon a crap game? It´s a arcade classic!!!!!!! Maybe the amiga version lacks the music, but have all the sfx.

[sw2001]

I really don't want to go through all the postings here to find out if the game is already included, but one of the worst games ever was M.U.D.S. (Mean Ugly Dirty Sports). It was included in a magazine and I never could find out whats the point of that game. Everything was aweful, even the music

[Mick_AKA]

Ive always been quite into battlefield simulators, worst one i ever played on the miggy was Waterloo, just an awful awful game. Compared to something like Fields of Glory its nothing.

[EmuChicken]

The Ball Game

Just wanted to add another :-)

[macce2]

Well, CodyJarrett, I don't totally agree with you about your list. Run The Gauntlet, for example, is actually quite funny game.. ;-)