toot_toot wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 9:08 am
The directors at Ocean owned a percentage of US Gold when it was setup and helped them with the early Spectrum conversions (Denton Designs were ex Imagine staff, so had a strong relationship with Ocean). Interestingly, US Gold created the Go! Label to try and prevent Ocean getting any royalties, claiming it was a completely different label to US Gold, but in the end US Gold had to pay out anyway.
Interesting, I didn't know that. I'm really not a fan of US Gold - most of their games are incredibly mediocre and one-dimensional. I used to wonder why they never made it big on the 16-bits, but looking back it's because they just weren't good enough.
One of US Gold's better games, Gauntlet, was developed by Gremlin of course, who were eventually bought by Infogrames along with Ocean. How Infogrames ended up bigger than both Ocean and Gremlin is still a mystery to me. It must've been that mega-hit Stir Crazy Featuring Bobo...
(*edit: I’m exaggerating for effect with Stir Crazy - they did have some good games, but I never saw them as being in the top division)
Beach Head is a bit of a mixed bag to me. I liked the idea of a collection of strung together minigames but the overall quality varies a lot. The air and sea battles are good, as is the tank drive up the beach, but the minefield and the fortress both let the side down. I suppose you can just skip the former entirely though.
The C64 version feels slicker overall, but the Spectrum port was OK and kept the gameplay mostly intact.
I loved Beach Head! Although it reminded me of the risk of buying games in 84/85, the reviews were always a month or two after the games were in the shops and you’d buy a game based on either the interesting looking cover, or the fact it was from the same label as a game that you really liked. Somehow, I thought that if Beach Head and Bruce Lee were good, then all games from US Gold must be good, right?
Wrong! Buck Rogers was really dire and the Spectrum version of Blue Max was nowhere near as good as the C64 one they had on demonstration in the shop!!!
But Tapper, Raid Over Moscow and Spy Hunter were brilliant, yet Flak was really poor. Just goes to show how hit and miss they were with the early conversions. I wish someone would do those games justice and make new ones!
Beach Head was one of the first games I got. It was part of They Sold a Million which had Daley Thompson's Decathlon (good), Jet Set Willy (good) and Sabre Wulf (very bad). Beach Head felt like a really average game in terms of presentation compared to those but it ended up being good fun.
Raid Over Moscow was better. I expect to see that in the top 40 somewhere.
blucey wrote: ↑Fri Nov 13, 2020 1:45 pm
Beach Head was one of the first games I got. It was part of They Sold a Million which had Daley Thompson's Decathlon (good), Jet Set Willy (good) and Sabre Wulf (very bad). Beach Head felt like a really average game in terms of presentation compared to those but it ended up being good fun.
Raid Over Moscow was better. I expect to see that in the top 40 somewhere.
Starstrike and Starglider are both great. The only thing I'd hold against them is that they've both got even more technically impressive sequels. You're probably better off playing Starglider 2 on one of the 16-bit platforms though.
Manic Miner is solid. Still playable, absolutely iconic visuals.
That level with the rays of light was a bit much though. It's not like Manic Miner needed to get harder at that point. But yeah, a really decent and tidy game. Not a personal fave but hard to dislike.
blucey wrote: ↑Tue Nov 17, 2020 2:05 pm
Manic Miner is solid. Still playable, absolutely iconic visuals.
That level with the rays of light was a bit much though. It's not like Manic Miner needed to get harder at that point. But yeah, a really decent and tidy game. Not a personal fave but hard to dislike.
To be fair, it is the second to last screen, and you'd already made it past the pixel perfect timed jumps through The Warehouse by that point. Well, unless you were using the cheat code, I suppose, as that was how I first got to see the later screens.
Anyway, I guess it's downhill from here for the list.
I tend to see Starquake as a jazzed up Underwurlde. Not being constantly bounced around by the monsters is a big plus, and the additional game mechanics mostly add to the experience, even if it wasn't the most original idea at the time.
That's as opposed to Wizard's Lair, which is a jazzed up Atic Atac, but where most of the changes to the gameplay are for the worse.
