Shit Game Time: Spitting Image, great show, shite game!

[ZEUSDAZ]

Anyone ever played this pile of crud or worse still was fooled into buying it?!
In this edition of "Shit Game Time" I have been requested to play Spitting Image on the C64, after this,...never again



[ Show youtube player ]

[Foebane]

Zeusdaz, you DO know Spitting Image has been revived in the last year, don't you? Why would no-one have heard of the old version?

In any case, the old show was great, but there was a reason it was cancelled: too un-PC, the snowflake woke gits of the day didn't like it. They didn't like this new version neither, I gather.

This is one of the things that baffles me about home computer games of the 1980s, especially for the UK: why studios felt the need to make ANY games at ANY quality for every single movie or TV franchise running back then, and make 99% of them substandard, is beyond me. I can only assume they were the prime source of jobs back in the 1980s, but I think the world would've been better off if they'd never bothered. But people have to do stuff, right?

[gimbal]

People like to see things they recognize so it was a logical business model to put things from TV in games.

Games sucking was just a general thing, dear Zeusdaz is building a business model on it

[Daedalus]

It was cancelled because its ratings were poor, after being tremendously popular in previous years. How did "snowflake woke gits" cause the problem when it lost its appeal to the millions who were clearly ok with the lack of political correctness? Like most series, after more than a decade on the air it went stale.

As for turning out poor games, gimbal is right - any sort of branding was seen as an easy way to sell games regardless of quality, so why spend months and hundreds of thousands of pounds on developing a game when spending weeks and tens of thousands of pounds will give you almost the same revenue?

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

As for turning out poor games, gimbal is right - any sort of branding was seen as an easy way to sell games regardless of quality, so why spend months and hundreds of thousands of pounds on developing a game when spending weeks and tens of thousands of pounds will give you almost the same revenue?

The operative word being "almost", AND at a massive drop in quality, too...!

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Zeusdaz, you DO know Spitting Image has been revived in the last year, don't you? Why would no-one have heard of the old version?

In any case, the old show was great, but there was a reason it was cancelled: too un-PC, the snowflake woke gits of the day didn't like it.

'Snowflake woke gits", like...

Spitting Image

Avalon Television executive producer Jon Thoday stated that Ronald Reagan directly contacted NBC, asking for the show to be cancelled.

Or perhaps there was another reason,

The first episode had an audience of 7.9 million, but numbers rapidly dropped, which meant economies had to be introduced since the series cost £2.6 million, which was nearly double the price of other prime time series...

The writers, Mark Burton, John O'Farrell, Pete Sinclair, Stuart Silver, and Ray Harris quit the show in 1993 and in 1995, and with viewing figures in decline, production was cancelled.

Originally Posted by Foebane

They didn't like this new version neither, I gather.

Spitting Image (2020 TV series)

The Economist was more mixed in their analysis, calling it "pretty tame" in light of the current political atmosphere and when compared to its 1984 predecessor, writing how "[i]n an era of cynicism and conspiracy theories, the radical act would be to make a show that celebrated public life."[18] Ed Power of The Telegraph was negative in his one-out-of-five star review pertaining to the two-part US election special, calling it "toothless" in its satire.

It's hard to laugh when real life has gone beyond satire and people are dying by the 100's of thousands. Perhaps releasing this new version in the middle of a pandemic - in a country run by a malevolent idiot who is adored by half the population - wasn't the best timing.

But getting back to the game - a common problem with franchises was the rights often cost so much that there wasn't enough money left to make a good game. Couple that with lack of imagination and a need to get it out fast, and you get games like this.

Mind you, as a franchise it does least does capture some of the spirit of the show, which from my memory largely consisted of ugly puppets beating each other up.

[gimbal]

It's funny to call Reagan a snowflake. He was simply from an era where TV was supposed to be 100% wholesome, I'm pretty sure people back then were already calling him out for thinking like an old geezer from a bygone era