Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Gaming => Topic started by: orb85750 on September 16, 2011, 08:56:04 PM
-
There have been plenty of 'best game' threads, but what is the absolute worst commercial game for Amiga in your opinion?
-
There have been plenty of 'best game' threads, but what is the absolute worst commercial game for Amiga in your opinion?
Gloom 3 was pretty terrible. Same great engine as the previous games but with some poorly drawn home-made graphics which made it look like a PD game knocked up in Dpaint.
http://youtu.be/WMazTlO9Vco
-
About 75% of them were technically beneath the OCS abilities IMHO.
Arcade conversions except simple games like Rainbow Islands etc were comically bad.
Powerdrift/Outrun/Outrun Turbo/Chase HQ are all only useful for scooping up dog turds.
-
About 75% of them were technically beneath the OCS abilities IMHO.
This.
Nothing ground my gears more than seeing straight EGA ports of games that the Amiga should have swallowed and had rattling around inside it.
For me the worst game I actually paid money for was Hillsfar (an allegedly AD&D based game).
-
For me, it has to be Forgotten Worlds. The graphics look great, but the game is completely unplayable due to the ludicrous controls. It's simply an atrocity.
-
Gloom 3 was pretty terrible. Same great engine as the previous games but with some poorly drawn home-made graphics which made it look like a PD game knocked up in Dpaint.
http://youtu.be/WMazTlO9Vco
Wow, I've never seen someone gunned down with a hotdog before...
-
This.
Nothing ground my gears more than seeing straight EGA ports of games that the Amiga should have swallowed and had rattling around inside it.
Or ST conversions. ;)
There's too many "bad" games to list. I agree with the 3/4 or more percentage really. This is yet another way in which the Amiga and its users were gypped. With very few excepetions, action/arcade gaming on computers back then really was a joke compared to consoles. The more Amiga games from yore I try out, the more it becomes clear to me why pirating was such a big deal back then. Majority of it simply wasn't worth the high asking price that in some cases, were as much or more than their console counterparts! Still, like to collect the buggers though. Box artwork, pretty static pictures and its marketing hype is typically more entertaining than the actual game itself. :lol:
-
Sometimes im glad nobody i knew had a console when i grew up :) we played amiga versions of strider and street fighter and thought they were pretty good.
Okay so not Strider but you get the point :)
-
There was a game I bought in Electronics Boutique shortly before they gave up selling Amiga stuff which is a likely candidate. It was some sort of turn-based submarine strategy game. I bought it on a whim one day to support the small remaining Amiga market, but it was so bad I returned it for a refund.
No manual, and took 3 attempts to boot on my standard A1200, only to be greeted by an interlaced black & white screen with impossible-to-read text, no sound, and no way of knowing what I was supposed to be doing. There were a couple of gadgets I could click which were copies of Mac OS 7 gadgets, but couldn't figure out what they did.
I can't remember what it was called, and I can't find any mention of it anywhere on the internet, but the developers should still be ashamed of themselves for that atrocity.
-
For me the worst game I actually paid money for was Hillsfar (an allegedly AD&D based game).
This was the only game I had on a crappy old Amstrad CGA (mind you, this was well into the VGA era) PC for nearly a year as a child. Those were dark times...:lol:
-
This one (http://hol.abime.net/541).
-
Hi,
It is actually easier to do the best game threads, since there was so many rotten games brought out for the Amiga.
To me Electronic Arts games where the worst, you had to look at the time they were made, so you could determine which Amiga they ran on. Due to Electronic Arts copy protection every time they came out with a new Amiga system, the old games wouldn't play on it, you had to wait for the new games to come out. So to keep up with the new games you had to buy a new system, if you played Electronic Arts games.
smerf
-
The game Top Banana is often mentioned in "worst game" type of threads, and I simply have to try it out one day :)
In my opinion there is almost a certain "quality" with being crap as well, because both the greatest and the most crap games will always be remembered, but just think about all the mediocre games that are long since forgotten.
Another thing is that everybody needs something or someone to hate :)
-
There have been plenty of 'best game' threads, but what is the absolute worst commercial game for Amiga in your opinion?
As much as I love this game: Quake. Amiga port was just a mistake. Releasing game which couldn't run propely on any Amiga at that time..
-
Honestly, Quake wasn't the first or the worst of such games. It's funny - in the PC market when a game would come out that simply wouldn't run at full speed on any computer at the time of its release was not a big deal - you just waited a while until new HW came out that could run it well (Strike Commander, Ultima VIII...). On Amiga in the second half of the 90s the 060 accelerators came out, but that was it - of course nobody knew at the time. So games that don't run that well on the 060 are basically only playable on UAE (maybe Natami or some FPGA in the future).
I personally think AB3D2 was much worse optimized than any Quake port. But that may be just my problem, because other people have apparently played it on 040 and it ran well (I've never tried patching the game). Quake on 060 with RTG is actually very playable (and a much better game than AB3D2 I might add...).
-
Hi,
It is actually easier to do the best game threads, since there was so many rotten games brought out for the Amiga.
To me Electronic Arts games where the worst, you had to look at the time they were made, so you could determine which Amiga they ran on. Due to Electronic Arts copy protection every time they came out with a new Amiga system, the old games wouldn't play on it, you had to wait for the new games to come out. So to keep up with the new games you had to buy a new system, if you played Electronic Arts games.
smerf
Your kidding right? EA were responsible for publishing a lot of great Amiga games, some of which had no copy protection at all! I know EA got a bad rep particularly in the PS2 Era, but in the Amiga days most of their stuff was pretty good. Even their console conversions like Desert Strike and Road Rash were good, when a lot of other developers/publishers did some really shoddy ports to the Amiga.
Anyway, back with the plot, Im picking the all time classic worst Amiga game - 'Rise of the Robots' - utter ****e, even the ports of Strider and Outrun weren't this bad!
-
This isn't right.. it took over a page of comments before someone mentions "Rise of the Robots"....
... and still nobody until me mentions that game "Akira".
How quickly we forget.
(and how Electronic Arts games - which includes Populous, Populous II and Powermonger - can be mentioned in a worst games thread I don't know)
-
This isn't right.. it took over a page of comments before someone mentions "Rise of the Robots"....
... and still nobody until me mentions that game "Akira".
How quickly we forget.
(and how Electronic Arts games - which includes Populous, Populous II and Powermonger - can be mentioned in a worst games thread I don't know)
Proud to say, I never even wasted a blank disk on Akira, I have never played it! (I did waste a few blanks on Rise of the Robots though... Still at least I was able to re-use them)
As for EA, most of the Amiga games I actually bought back in the day were by them, for the simple reason they actually weren't dross. Where a lot of firms early on in the Amiga's life pushed lame ST ports, EA actually took advantage of the Amiga's superior ability. Later in the Amigas life, EA tried to ensure that the Amiga versions were at least as playable and on a par with the Console/PC versions, if not better. As far as I recall they were about the only multi-platform software house to do so!
Squeezing Syndicate onto the A500, and making it almost identical to the PC version, was some achievement!
-
This.
Nothing ground my gears more than seeing straight EGA ports of games that the Amiga should have swallowed and had rattling around inside it.
For me the worst game I actually paid money for was Hillsfar (an allegedly AD&D based game).
The obvious Atari ST 68000 code + Amiga sampled sound routine made my blood boil too. Just reading the programming diary for Power Drift said it all.
-
Your kidding right? EA were responsible for publishing a lot of great Amiga games, some of which had no copy protection at all! I know EA got a bad rep particularly in the PS2 Era, but in the Amiga days most of their stuff was pretty good. Even their console conversions like Desert Strike and Road Rash were good, when a lot of other developers/publishers did some really shoddy ports to the Amiga.
Anyway, back with the plot, Im picking the all time classic worst Amiga game - 'Rise of the Robots' - utter ****e, even the ports of Strider and Outrun weren't this bad!
Rise of the Robots = crap game design so not conversion teams fault.
Outrun = crap programming for conversion (Amiga game should have looked like the Megadrive/Genesis version....Lotus II is proof)
PS Syndicate was coded for Amiga first?
-
Rise of the Robots = crap game design so not conversion teams fault.
Outrun = crap programming for conversion (Amiga game should have looked like the Megadrive/Genesis version....Lotus II is proof)
PS Syndicate was coded for Amiga first?
Erm the original topic is 'absolute worst commercial game for Amiga' - In my opinion, Rise of the Robots fits this description - even if it was a pixel perfect port from another platform - i.e.. its still s**t
Amiga Outrun, although not great is still better than Rise of the Robots, at least its reasonably playable. I'm pretty sure it also came out before the Megadrive version. Also, there are far worse Sega coin-op conversions for the Amiga than this.
Syndicate was coded on the PC first, according to the manual. Theres a quote from one of the programmers, Mark Webley "The biggest problem converting Syndicate to the Amiga was the amount of memory available"
-
Erm the original topic is 'absolute worst commercial game for Amiga' - In my opinion, Rise of the Robots fits this description - even if it was a pixel perfect port from another platform - i.e.. its still s**t
Amiga Outrun, although not great is still better than Rise of the Robots, at least its reasonably playable. I'm pretty sure it also came out before the Megadrive version. Also, there are far worse Sega coin-op conversions for the Amiga than this.
Was just giving an insight to why I think those games are the worst for me. There is no right or wrong answer at this general level of crapness :)
-
Rise of the robots certainly fits.
Bad controls
uninspiring gameplay
loads of disk
disk swap hell
at least the animations were cool but it wasnt worth the effort.
-
Any game by Sierra Online. They didn't bother to improve upon the lame PC (EGA? CGA? what gives) graphics.
They seem to have thought that porting to another system meant only utilizing the lowest common denominator of all systems the game is available on; the original PC version in their case. Since they originally made it for the PC, they deemed it unnecessary to actually figure out how to make it multiple times of magnitude better with the Amiga's capabilities.
-
Surely it's NASCAR Challenge.
I think this game (and I use that term loosely) actually qualifies for worst game of all time. Nothing is worse than this, I'm certain of it. I dare all of you to give it a try!
-
Gridstart by ANCO is another one, really horrible and the graphics look worse than my first attempts on Neochrome on the ST in 1986 :)
It's on youtube...I recorded it heh
-
Touring Car Challenge, whopping 3% from Amiga Power....
-
Can I just mention Zeppelin Games and leave it at that? Pretty much everything they did was laughable.
-
Possibly controversial but for me, anything published by Vulcan Software - some people seemed to like their stuff (they even got good reviews) but to me their games always seemed like sub-PD crap with graphics that made my eyes bleed *shudder*.
-
Great thread idea..
Yea, Rise of the Robots is a serious contender... And, I, foolishly bought the CD32 version, ack!
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Arcade: Man, this COULD have been a good port, I bet, had it not been coded by a group of comatose monkeys!
:roflmao:
Graphics have little color, and blocky enough to make a C-64 owner wince, about 3/4 size of screen, never centered, and the controls are just drek.. (I love the 'whip in random directions feature! LOL)
I LOVED this game in the arcade, why did the Amiga get such a lame version?
Some honorable mentions for just stupidity go to Sierra On-line, or course.. (They didn't even know how to use the Amiga's mouse pointer for the first King's Quest game, iirc, it was a blocky hand-drawn 'arrow')
Another to 'Boulderdash Construction Set' , it's not terrible... but the ST version has full mouse support for editing, Amiga version is joystick only... Apparently, the Amiga has no mouse....??? :laughing:
-
There was a game called Time Lords or something like that, perfectly dreadful. I've always been a fan of time travel stories and adventures and I remember pre-ordering this game and then finding that it had no plot, no real skill tests and an annoying theme playing....
-
Obvoiusly nobody remember Death Mask and Nemac IV, two masterpices of UTTER suckfest, so bad that even just leaving the disks on the table in would the drop in airpressure would pose a threat to windows and pressurized canisters.
Horrible game engines, Death Mask wasn't even proper 3D, just 2D sprites rendered in first person perspective and yet it didn't run smooth.
Nemac IV, sluggish as hell, unbelivable poor ripoff of the powerloader from Aliens, the armor looked more like a rollcage with guns.
-
I certainly agree with the comments about Sierra Online, sure the graphics sucked ass and they could have been so much better - but apart from the graphics they did have great gameplay so for that reason they aren't going in room 101!
-
Final Gate for CD32 was total joke. Also on the crap games list was town with no name, Rise of the Robots and 4x4 by epyx. I know there are a lot more junky ones but these come to mind first.
-
Super Street Fighter, shame on whoever released that abomination.
-
"Town with No Name" was a CLASSIC! It was so campy-bad it was good!
Two classic scenes are the train taking off like the Millennium Falcon and the bar girl fainting if you don't take a shower first!
Man I miss that game...
-
Possibly controversial but for me, anything published by Vulcan Software - some people seemed to like their stuff (they even got good reviews) but to me their games always seemed like sub-PD crap with graphics that made my eyes bleed *shudder*.
This. Jetpilot is quite good though, even if it needs UAE to run properly...
-
Death Mask was actually quite a clever idea and the closest you could get to Doom on an unexpanded Amiga. Nemac was uninspiring, but not a bad game at all. The Sierra adventures, I hate them too. pixel perfect EGA conversions, including sound and lousy interface. Those games could have been so much better. I agree with the comments on Rise of the Robots, the game itself got so overhyped, but is basically really bad. The game I wanted to mention was Last Action Hero, though Cliffhanger comes close, too. Many other games come close, from a certain pinball game, to that Captain Planet platformer and Pitfighter.
-
Nemac IV, sluggish as hell, unbelivable poor ripoff of the powerloader from Aliens, the armor looked more like a rollcage with guns.
NemacIV engine was not sluggish IMHO. The graphics were uninspired and I prefered gloom but NemacIV engine wasn't bad
@Aegis
I agree Vulcan games looked like bad PD-quality games. They insisted on releasing a500 floppy disk games when absolutely everyone was using hard drives, tons of fast ram, aga or rtg and accelerators. These looked like they were done with AMOS. Some of their games were released at the same time ClickBoom released Quake and Napalm!
I hate when game characters graphics include a black lines surrounding them, for a cartoonish-like game it may be ok but not in general.
For me one of the biggest deceptions was Ghouls'n'Ghosts. Having played Ghost'n'Goblins I didn't expect such a crap pd-like port.
-
I actually rather liked Vulcan Software's output :)
If you want bad commercial games, then "Trolls" needs to come near the top of that list :)
-
There are too much for example Afterburner II (it had other name but I don't remember),
Sly Spy so very slow when in the Amstrad version it was very fast, etc., etc.
-
Great thread :)
I remember those days when Electronics Boutique had a small selection of Amiga games and buying Teacksuit Manager 2 96/97.
I also had an ST, at the time games for it were less commecially available than they were for the Amiga (I brought bad luck to any system I bought) and remember buying games that, although boxed, came with a hand written disk label.
They used to have a wonderful catalogue with lists of games. How I miss this and Special Reserve.
The worst game I had for my Amiga was Championship Manager 2. So much hype, yet when I finally got it the game was unusable.
Maybe it was a great game, but it was my biggest disappointment.
-
I don't remember so much by game name (beside Baby Jo, ehehehe), but generally US Gold, before actually becoming relatively descent, was such a crappy game (usually coversions) company that I'd say pick the US Gold game of choice -_o
-
Some crappy Amiga games....
Cisco Heat - Total crappppp!!!
Street Fighter & Human Killing machine - 2 equally crap games
-
Nemac IV don´t deserves such a judge. Well it wasn´t that atmospheric but besides this great.
Don´t know if You can blame Vulcan for their other games but Genetic Species was/is awesome!
U.S. Gold really made some crap - in the beginning I liked Italy 90 but later it was seen very crappy especially compared to Sensible Soccer.
-
"Alien Fires" aka "People Standing In Hallways"
-
Okay this slightly off-topic, but nonetheless an ideal place to share it.
Yesterday I played PP Hammer for a solid hour, great game lol
What really made me laugh (heh am chucking at the very thought of it as I type), and I guarantee you'll never see it again in a modern kids game because everything is sooo damn PC these days and games have to be certificated if they want to reach the shop floor blah de blah
...I digress... if you leave the central character on the spot for more than a couple of seconds he lights on a cigarette on the spot!!!
har de har har :laughing::laughing:
-
U.S. Gold did make really crappy ports, though they did publish Another World in the US. And Another World is one of the furthest from worst game I can think of.
Worst game I can actually think of (not on the Amiga though) would have to be Top Gun on the Atari 8-bit.
Youbasically flew around and shot planes. But the kicker was, you would never run out of ammo, and you would run out of fuel, but there was no way to refuel. So basically, shoot shoot shoot, pow, you hit a plane! Oops, you just crashed 'cause you ran out of fuel and died. Game over.
Worse game ever! Maybe we should start a new thread with the worse ending in a game. My vote (well unfortunately not on the Amiga again) would be Shinobi on the Sega Master System. After beating the game you get the exact same thing as you do when you die. "Game Over." Yup, that's it.
Wanted to beat it on Mame, just to see the ending, but they don't allow you to continue after during the last section!
slaapliedje
-
Gloom 3 was pretty terrible. Same great engine as the previous games but with some poorly drawn home-made graphics which made it look like a PD game knocked up in Dpaint.
http://youtu.be/WMazTlO9Vco
Hillsfar was nothing like any of the other D&D games and I agree was not very good, but I don't think it deserves placement on the Worst Commercial Games ever list for Amiga games.
-
I would say any fighting game that had multiple buttons in the arcade but forced to use a single button sucked! Any of the Street Fighter games especially.
It was hard enough to play them with a three button Genesis controller.
Out of curiosity, did any of the games for the Amiga/CD32 actually use all the buttons from the CD32? Were the buttons just mapped to keys on the keyboard or something?
I was kind of wanting to get a CD32 gamepad, though I currently have an old Genesis one (for the type of games that play better with a game pad) and two Epyx 500XJ joysticks, and I managed to re-solder my old Amiga joystick! Yup the little red ones that Amiga made before being stolen out from under Atari! That whole thing still makes me laugh. Wish I had known that story before I had invested in the Atari Mega STe. Makes sense that the Epic Atari 8-bit and the Amiga were engineered by the most awesome Jay Miner (R.I.P.)
slaapliedje
-
Guardian on the A1200 certainly uses all of the CD32 gamepad buttons - can't recall whether any buttons were also mapped to the keyboard though - I'll have to dig it out and give it a whirl.
-
Terminator 2 arcade game was pretty damn poor. Spent good money on that - probably £30-£40 which was an absolute fortune back then!
-
F17 by Team 17, AKA, I just tapped the sodding car!!! GRRRRRAAAAHHHH!!
-
F17 by Team 17, AKA, I just tapped the sodding car!!! GRRRRRAAAAHHHH!!
you cannot honestly call that the worst commercial game. had it faults but was pretty enjoyable and good looking.
-
F1 Tornado http://hol.abime.net/472
Absolute garbage...
-
Super Street Fighter, shame on whoever released that abomination.
Can't say that it's one of the worst Amiga games released but, damn, that was an ultra ****ty, ****ed-up port! For sure one of the 5 worst ports I' ve played on our platform and if we add the "name" of the game it climbs up to number 1! Thankfully, I am not alone thinking the same :)
-
Im giving up. If you people are nominating games like that, you havent played much.
-
Terminator 2 arcade game was pretty damn poor. Spent good money on that - probably £30-£40 which was an absolute fortune back then!
I thought that this was a pretty faithful conversion, it just suffered by not having the gun from the arcade machine.(Unless you mean the action game which admittedly was ****).
-
I personally think AB3D2 was much worse optimized than any Quake port. But that may be just my problem, because other people have apparently played it on 040 and it ran well (I've never tried patching the game). Quake on 060 with RTG is actually very playable (and a much better game than AB3D2 I might add...).
I like AB3DII, and it ran fine on my 030/50. It was technically advanced -vertex lighting, hundreds of colours, proper 3D, some texture mapped polygon enemies, texture poly's for weapons. More than could be expected on my little machine that could. far more advanced than doom. Considering it gave all these abilities to a humble 030 based amiga, compared to quake needing an 060/RTG shows how well programmed it was.
It just didn't scale well above 030. If it they'd fixed that, and had a decent editor, i'm pretty sure people could have rustled up a quake clone for fast 040 and 060 machines.
-
@Paulie85 - that's it - the 'action' game.
I should have known it was going to be rubbish by virtue of the fact that the game's creator stated in a magazine (Format or CU - can't remember) that the original game had been 'stolen' sometime close to launch and that it had to recreated from 'memory' - in time for the original launch date. Couple that with sloppy controls and the fact that the terminator characters looked nothing like Arnie or Robert Patrick - due to copyright issues (?) - I should have avoided it like the plague, but I was (and still am) a big fan of the T1 & T2 films and couldn't resist.
-
Days Of Thunder was thoroughly unplayable.
I haven't tried it myself, but Legends Of Valour seemed to have nothing but brain farts and dodgy things in it. Will probably check it out some day, just for laughs :D
-
I haven't tried it myself, but Legends Of Valour seemed to have nothing but brain farts and dodgy things in it. Will probably check it out some day, just for laughs :D
That doesnt make it the worst commercial Amiga game.. ;)
In fact, its rather good. Way above average and the 3D engine worked really well back then, especially on a 030 machine. Also it was full of fun little quests and had a huge interactive, free-roaming world. Its just like Skyrim really.
-
That doesnt make it the worst commercial Amiga game.. ;)
In fact, its rather good. Way above average and the 3D engine worked really well back then, especially on a 030 machine. Also it was full of fun little quests and had a huge interactive, free-roaming world. Its just like Skyrim really.
Just like Skyrim? Hell, watch this interview with ES top developer Todd Howard:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/01/13/road-to-skyrim-the-todd-howard-interview.aspx
For the linkshy (or those who can't view the videos at work) Howard cites Legends of Valour as an influence on the entire Elder Scrolls series.
Legends of Valour had variable height floors/second story buildings and "windows" well prior to the release of DOOM. What a great old game it was!
-
There! Thanks for sharing that, I didnt know. Skyrim is one fantastic game.
-
There! Thanks for sharing that, I didnt know. Skyrim is one fantastic game.
I love it. It really puts me back in the saddle with PC gaming.
-
I agree Vulcan games looked like bad PD-quality games. They insisted on releasing a500 floppy disk games when absolutely everyone was using hard drives, tons of fast ram, aga or rtg and accelerators. These looked like they were done with AMOS.
Heheh, that's because they actually *were* done with AMOS ;-)
I see Rise of the Robots is hated, I must disagree though. It's one of the better Amiga beat-em-ups and one of the few games I actually bought, and I still play it regularly. Admittedly the disk swapping was annoying when playing from floppy, but that's pretty much unavoidable with a 880K DD floppies, and not really a fault.
In terms of bad games, maybe the Amiga port of Armalyte would perhaps qualify as one of the worst, it's absolutely awful. So is Hostages.