The Worst platform game

[gimbal]

Regardless, I'll take boring over unplayable any day

[lordofchaos]

Anybody mention Oscar yet? Might not be the worst platformer but certainly in the running. Just remember it being a big disappointment. Messy incoherent graphics make it hard to traverse the levels, along with unresponsive controls. Never a good combination.

Oh, and I forgot the really annoying speech samples!

[Fiery Phoenix]

Cliffhanger up there too. Shocking for the year it was released

Bionic Commando too, great music but the scrolling. Nooooooo

[squirminator2k]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

Anybody mention Oscar yet? Might not be the worst platformer but certainly in the running. Just remember it being a big disappointment. Messy incoherent graphics make it hard to traverse the levels, along with unresponsive controls. Never a good combination.

Oh, and I forgot the really annoying speech samples!

BONUS LETTRRRRRRRRRRRR


Oscar and Trolls were both absolutely wretched. I ended up with like 5 copies of Oscar at one point, and I genuinely don't know how that happened.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by squirminator2k

Oscar and Trolls were both absolutely wretched. I ended up with like 5 copies of Oscar at one point, and I genuinely don't know how that happened.

Aw man. That sounds like a story worth telling around the campfire.

[jotd]

plus respawning enemies that you have to jump 3 times to kill. There should be a law against that.

Huge levels, good graphics, but annoying & boring gameplay.

THANKS EVERYBODY

[Solo Kazuki]

Not only Oscar but Trolls also (n.b. on same or very similar engine)

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by squirminator2k

BONUS LETTRRRRRRRRRRRR


Oscar and Trolls were both absolutely wretched. I ended up with like 5 copies of Oscar at one point, and I genuinely don't know how that happened.

Impression of Jeff Goldblum telling - Life finds a way...

Is it possible Oscar is alive and started multiplying, like Gremlins??

[squirminator2k]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Aw man. That sounds like a story worth telling around the campfire.

Originally Posted by Anubis

Is it possible Oscar is alive and started multiplying, like Gremlins??

It's not really that interesting. It's so uninteresting, in fact, that I can explain it via the medium of bullet-points:

• It is, I think, 1995. I'm 9 years old. It's late, and my dads hasn't come home from work yet. Nobody knows why. Eventually he shows up with an Amiga CD32 and a huge stack of games, including the Oscar + Diggers bundle. (OscarCount™: 1)
• The following year, a friend of my dad's is moving. Immigrating, I think. He ends up giving my dad all of his Amiga stuff, including a standalone CD32 release of Oscar. I am hugely disappointed when I discover this version of the game does not include the CD32 level from the compilation release, despite still owning the previous copy. (OscarCount™: 2)
• It is, I think, Christmas 2000. My mum's friend Larry surprises me by giving me what I think might have been every Amiga game he ever had. There are, inexplicably, two copies of Oscar in there - the AGA version and the OCS version. (OscarCount™: 4)
• It is early 2001. Larry is now giving me his CD32, complete with all of his games. The collection includes a second copy of the Oscar + Diggers bundle. (OscarCount™: 5)

I don't have any of these copies - I think my sister ended up with my Amiga stuff when I moved to the US - but I do still have one (1) copy of the game - when I bought an Amiga 1200 for PortsCenter almost a decade ago, it arrived in the US with a small selection of games WHDLoaded onto the hard drive. One of those games was, haha, the AGA version of Oscar. I can't get away from the bloody thing.

[Gzegzolka]

Nah, those games are not that bad

[squirminator2k]

I assure you, they are.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Gzegzolka

Nah, those games are not that bad

I think the Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed it with his CD32 episode, wasn't very impressed, not really a shock to be honest.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by squirminator2k

One of those games was, haha, the AGA version of Oscar. I can't get away from the bloody thing.

Ha ha That made me laugh. Most people are followed around by their demons, you are followed around by Oscar. Certainly a story worth telling!

[Gzegzolka]

Interesting story, but as I stated in other topic those are my guilty pleasure games. I will defend them to some small degree. Graphics and music is good in both of them, main hero got great animation, intros starts nice.
I have played and finished both cd32 and aga floppy versions. In my humble opinion, right now, after playing lot of other platform games on other systems they are just average games, nothing more, nothing less.

[rare_j]

Oscar is a wretched euro-platformer. Playing it feels like punishment.
Back in the day I had it as an A1200 pack-in. Probably got less than 15 mins playtime. Absolutely terrible.

[Havie]

Oscar is terrible and pretty unplayable as well as a feast of pain for the eyes but have to say that underneath there seems to be quite a fluid engine.

[rare_j]

Yes you're right the engine for Oscar looks nice, and in screenshots the graphics look nice, and the presentation and intros overall were really encouraging - perhaps that's what contributed to the gameplay being such a disapointment

[gimbal]

Never actually played Oscar. It looks like a typical game done in by a lack of polish. The jumping sound gets annoying real quick, enemies take too many hits which gets old really fast and the foreground and background tend to blend together which is an instant death for any platformer. If you can't properly see what's going on, precision goes out the window.

Too bad because they really went for it, that much is clear. The game has got literally everything in it. A weapon and a jump on the head mechanic, grappling mechanic, fast movement, water mechanics, goofy sounds, lots of color... And even original levels by the looks of it, no fire and ice levels for a change. Not to mention a level dedicated to the Amiga.

[Shatterhand]

Cliffhanger up there too. Shocking for the year it was released

The movie got a game for the Mega-Drive and SNES, it's a brawler and not a very good one, but not horrible wither. The 8 bits machines (NES and Game Gear) got an awful platformer game.

I don't know why the guys at Psygnosis thought the Amiga deserved the 8 bits game. The Amiga Version is a nearly pixel-perfect port of the NES version with more colors. Thing is, even for a NES game, that game is awful. It had no place being an Amiga game.

And not trying to diminish NES games here. Arc Developments made some good NES to Amiga ports, with McDonald's Land on Amiga having nothing that make it look like it was originally a NES game. And I am pretty sure a Megaman 2 or Megaman 3 (Or, hell, any Megaman game?) port on Amiga would be a killer app for the system

-

With that said, IMO it's hard to beat either Cliffhanger or Bionic Commando on this department.....

....Except if you don't consider Rolling Thunder a platformer game. Because Rolling Thunder is probably the worst Amiga game I ever played, the worst arcade Port I've ever played on any system and on of the most horrendous pieces of sotware I've ever seen.


And I am really surprised to see someone bashing Super Mario Bros here. Damn, the audacity... for a game released in 1985, Super Mario Bros was a freking revolution. Level design is so fucking spot-on and the playability if just perfect.


There's a reason why so many people tried to copy it. Usually when I think about "Excellent level design", R-Type is the first game that comes to mind (because I am a sucker for shmups), but Super Mario Bros comes exactly next. It does right what so many european developers never managed to do on their platformer games.

[squirminator2k]

Originally Posted by Havie

Oscar is terrible and pretty unplayable as well as a feast of pain for the eyes but have to say that underneath there seems to be quite a fluid engine.

There are very few games I would describe as actively unplayable - I actually damn near finished Oscar, though it took a lot of effort. Visually it's like someone ate the default DPaint color palette then threw up inside of the monitor. The CD32 version does have a couple of nifty music tracks, but other than that it's decidedly meh.


I think the fact that the title screen is so gorgeously-animated is really, for me, what makes the rest of the game a letdown. The parallax scrolling, that music, the beautifully-animated graphic of Oscar playing with his yo-yo... it's all downhill from there, alas.


Trolls is at least slightly more playable, but not by much.