The best Speccy game by Ocean: discussion

[uglifruit]

Looking at this immense catalogue of classics (and not so classics), weirdly the game I play most now is Gilligan's Gold. There's something about it that just keys me coming back and coming back. It's not the best game there, but it's the one that's probably given me the most amount of hours of fun since, say, 2000.

[Turtle_Quality]

There were oceans of Ocean software that failed to impress.

The three that I actually went back to and played many times were

DT Decathalon (though it may have killed my original 48k speccy keyboard)
Chase HQ and
Match Day (once I was playing 1 player, and the computer's team suddenly started playing with their arms in the air in celebration, and scored about 10 seconds later... like they knew they were about to score...)

[StooB]

Re Street Hawk, there’s clearly some copies of the original version that got released, but it’s interesting that it was through Kay’s catalogue. I wonder if Ocean just dumped the copies of the game with Kays hoping nobody would notice, after it was rejected by Crash?

According to Gary Bracey in The History of Ocean Software:

‘Kays printed so far in advance. Of course there was no internet, so you had these huge, glossy catalogues which must have cost a fortune to print. If you didn’t have your product ready in time they would fine you a lot.’

‘It was a question of delivering to Kays, fulfilling that obligation and avoiding the fines.’

‘We had a two-tranche strategy. One was to get it out to the catalogue, and then – because it was quite a strong licence – I think we had a second shot at getting a decent game which we wanted to sell to all and sundry. So the first version was just for Kays and never went out on general release.’