What, in your eyes, is the worst games software house?

[PeteProdge]

Titus

[RWAC]

I'm looking for something that's the opposite of Ultimate Play The Game.

In my mind, I think I can point to The Power House and TyneSoft as notorious proprietors of dismal digital garbage.

Well this is awkward, I think Ultimate would have to be a contender for my worst games company.

I genuinely do not like any of their games.

I cannot umderstand what anyone sees in Tranz Am, Pssst, or Cookie.

Underwurlde and Lunar Jetman - Frustrating and annoying.

Sabre Wulf - Nice graphics but boring maze game.

Knightlore ushered in an era of tedious isometric games.

Atic Atac and Jetpac are ok.

Actually I didn't mind Gunfright. So that's something I suppose

[toot_toot]

[quote=PeteProdge post_id=135823 time=<a href="tel:1706441517">1706441517</a> user_id=70]
I'm looking for something that's the opposite of Ultimate Play The Game.

In my mind, I think I can point to The Power House and TyneSoft as notorious proprietors of dismal digital garbage.

Well this is awkward, I think Ultimate would have to be a contender for my worst games company.

I genuinely do not like any of their games.

I cannot umderstand what anyone sees in Tranz Am, Pssst, or Cookie.

Underwurlde and Lunar Jetman - Frustrating and annoying.

Sabre Wulf - Nice graphics but boring maze game.

Knightlore ushered in an era of tedious isometric games.

Atic Atac and Jetpac are ok.

Actually I didn't mind Gunfright. So that's something I suppose
[/quote]

I think with Ultimate’s games there has to be a bit time and situation context. The early games like Tranz Am, Pssst, Jet Pac and Cookie are very basic games, but at the time when they were originally released in 1983 and in merely 16KB of memory, it was like getting an arcade game at home. Plus they weren’t direct conversions, you could really only place them (initially) on the Spectrum. They were the killer, must have games for the system because there was nothing like it in terms of polish. But they were score attack arcade games with not much more. Cookie is similar to Robotron, Tranz Am is similar to Rally X.

With the added memory of the 48K Spectrum, Ultimate took the same approach of “arcade games at home” and really expanded on it, games like Atic Atac and Sabrewulf were games that may have arcade gameplay mechanics, they were much larger and were the sort of games that you didn’t see in the arcades. They were no longer coin munchers, but games you could spend a lot of time with and were still really polished.

Then Ultimate went in a slightly different direction with Knight Lore. They kind of dropped the arcade nature and just focused on the large gameplay that you could really only get in home computers, but with even more polish in the form of graphics that made you go “wow”!

After that, with Nightshade, Gunfrite and Cyberun, they kind of lost a bit of steam. They didn’t quite have the same wow factor and they felt like they were just reiterations without anything really new. While they were still good, they weren’t brilliant. But by this point, the Stampers were getting more interested in the Famicom.

By the end when you had Bubbler and Martianoids, those weren’t even made by the Stampers, you got to the point that they had sold Ultimate to US Gold to fund their NES/Famicom development journey and they were really like the equivalent of contract obligation albums you get in the music industry!

But I also get it why people might go “what’s so great about Tranz Am? I can play Rally X on emulation and it’s a million times better” Or “why bother with SabreWulf when I can play Legend of Zelda on the NES?” Unless you were there at the time and got caught up in the whole release of the games (and being really excited about what Ultimate were going to do next), that context gets lost and yeah, the games aren’t as good as the pinnacle of the entire 8-bit generation, but as a Spectrum owner in the early 80s, they’re an integral part of the nostalgia!

[blucey]

Power House were garbage. I only played one Tynesoft game, Superman, and it was the worst game ever created at that point.

That said, I didn't get anything out of Ultimate either apart from enjoying a bit of Tranz-am. They're far from the worst but not the example of greatness that the first post suggests.

[blucey]

Well this is awkward, I think Ultimate would have to be a contender for my worst games company.

I genuinely do not like any of their games.

I cannot umderstand what anyone sees in Tranz Am, Pssst, or Cookie.

Underwurlde and Lunar Jetman - Frustrating and annoying.

Sabre Wulf - Nice graphics but boring maze game.

Knightlore ushered in an era of tedious isometric games.

Atic Atac and Jetpac are ok.

Actually I didn't mind Gunfright. So that's something I suppose

Saw this after I just posted. I liked Tranz-Am, presumably because it was like the second game I played on the Speccy. Everything else was pure graphics over gameplay. I'll never get Atic Atac and all the 3D games were rubbish.

[PeteProdge]

I cannot umderstand what anyone sees in Tranz Am, Pssst, or Cookie.

Underwurlde and Lunar Jetman - Frustrating and annoying.

Sabre Wulf - Nice graphics but boring maze game.

Knightlore ushered in an era of tedious isometric games.

Atic Atac and Jetpac are ok.

I'm kind of with you on this a very little way, because I was a relative latecomer to the Speccy, turning up in late 1987 (exactly halfway through what I define as its commercial era). I did get to visit the Speccy's history due to a friend who had a wooden box full of the stuff from when he was a 48K owner, so got to experience the Horizons tape, yer Chuckie Eggs and yer Manic Miners and all that.

The Ultimate games, as @toot_toot rightly pointed out, do deserve the context of their time. I didn't really come across many of them until the Speccy's commercial era disappeared and early emulation cropped up in the 16-bit era. I'd heard people talk of Ultimate in hushed tones, you'd have the Speccy magazines hailing the games as all-time classics. And the games did crop up on 'PD' floppy disks and CD-ROMs.

The first times I played I played Sabre Wulf, Atic-Atac and Knight Lore were on Spectrum emulators running on my Amiga, and like @RWAC, there's this "is this IT!?" reaction because so many later games (when I turned up) copied their essence and innovations.

Having played games at random from 1982-1984, enduring masses of awful arcade knock-offs with crude flickery graphics, yeah I can see how Ultimate arriving was like Bill Haley & His Comets plugging in electric guitars and delivering something jaw-dropping.

I really don't like Atic Atac, too much 'fly swatting' for me. And yeah, now Knight Lore is like all the isometric 3D games I ever played, but hey, it was the first (um, Sandy White would like a word - Ed) and I've read recollections about it being seen as pure science fiction come to life.

Also, Ocean has a very strong reputation, but there are certainly some colossal stinkers from them.

[RWAC]

I get the argument about having to have played them when they came out. I didn't play them until much later when I bought the Ultimate Collection at a car boot sale. I kept loading up games waiting for one to grab me but none of them ever did.
On the other hand, I've enjoyed many games that i played for the first time decades after they came out including some for the Atari 2600 which is much earlier than Ultimate's efforts.

[Wizwords]

True, but they also made some very good games, like Tau Ceti, Formula One and Juggernaut. Even if you're not a firm believer in judging them at their best, that ought to drag the average up enough to take them out of contention.

Also, The Power House was a budget label of theirs, rather than a software house in its own right. If we're talking worst labels though, it's a definite contender.

The Power House did actually become independent - the label was bought off CRL by Ashley Hildebrandt in 1988 IIRC. It didn't do great in either guises

[AndyC]

I really don't like Atic Atac, too much 'fly swatting' for me. And yeah, now Knight Lore is like all the isometric 3D games I ever played, but hey, it was the first (um, Sandy White would like a word - Ed) and I've read recollections about it being seen as pure science fiction come to life.

In the early years of the Spectrum, when Thro' The Wall was actually a pretty good example of most of the games you saw, things like Atic Atac were amazing in that they felt a lot more like real arcade games.

Knightlore was something else though, absolutely jaw dropping when my mate first showed it to me. It was all we ever wanted to play for a while because it was just so different to everything we'd seen on the Spectrum. It is, however, a bit rubbish when you look at it objectively. And pales in comparison with more well designed games that followed (Head over Heels being the pinnacle) but they might never have existed without it - although there are also plenty of shonky isometric games that are just as bad (I'm looking at you Sweevos World!)

[blucey]

Knightlore was something else though, absolutely jaw dropping when my mate first showed it to me. It was all we ever wanted to play for a while because it was just so different to everything we'd seen on the Spectrum. It is, however, a bit rubbish when you look at it objectively. And pales in comparison with more well designed games that followed (Head over Heels being the pinnacle) but they might never have existed without it

Ant Attack came out first and that had the benefit of actually good gameplay so I think the genre was already up and running. Both had crap controls though!

[AndyC]

Ant Attack came out first and that had the benefit of actually good gameplay so I think the genre was already up and running. Both had crap controls though!

Sure, but Ant Attack's shaded graphics looked primitive in comparison and all the rest of the presentation was a bit BASIC-esque. I'd played (and enjoyed it) before so it wasn't like Knightlore was the first isometric experience, but it absolutely stood out for the quality of graphics and animation.

If you weren't there, it's kind of hard to understand quite how shocking it was at the time - we really just didn't believe the Spectrum was capable of anything like that. And so much of what followed, even if not isometric, was having to live up to a whole new expectation of what graphics on the Speccy could be like.

[Vampyre]

Yeah, I've regaled often enough being in the computer shop on that day in 1984 when they loaded up Knight Lore. Within seconds there was a crowd about eight-people-deep craning to get a look, with jaws on the floor. Nobody could believe that the Speccy could produce something like that - it really was a massive leap at the time.

I'd say Knight Lore stands alongside Space Harrier, Ridge Racer, Doom, Mario 64, Ocarina and Half-Life 2 as the major massive shifts in graphical prowess over the years.

[Wizwords]

I think this thread has also become an interesting comparison of which games have aged better/worse according to each poster

[StooB]

I think K-Tel was an imprint of the Prism Leisure Corporation, or even an alias. Anyway, there's some kind of connection there. Prism own Front Runner, the original publisher of ZX Spectrum Boulder Dash. Also, Prism was one of a few companies that rereleased it. It's convoluted, I know...

No, Prism don't own Front Runner. K-Tel Software and Front Runner were owned by the actual K-Tel, the giant multinational "as seen on TV" music and houseware retailer. Two of their former executives set up Beau Jolly. When the Front Runner software label wasn't successful they repurposed it for a series of VHS releases about cars and trucks:



Prism was originally another record company, Geoff's Records, and became Prism Leisure after suing US Gold over World Cup Carnival in 1986.

[PeteProdge]

Thanks @StooB! Let's not forget the later incarnation of Front Runner had competition.

[zx1]

Blue Ribbon were poor. Can't remember anything decent from them, not that they released much. Tynesoft were poor as well but they've already been mentioned already a few times. Power House was another label that never seemed to do well. Another one was Zeppelin, i can't remember playing anything half decent from them either.