The inevitable worst game ever thread

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PeteProdge
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The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by PeteProdge »

Inspired by Blucey mentioning LA SWAT, I guess it's time for the usual "what was the worst game you've ever played?" question.

The aforementioned LA SWAT was a strong contender for the absolute worst when I had a Spectrum. My brother had bought it, and it was frankly a waste of the two quid charged for it. The graphics were truly primitive, a bug had diagonal shooting going wrong and it had the gameplay of a typical Atari 2600 effort.

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But that is utter gaming heaven compared to what I discovered when I shifted online and got into emulation. As opined many times before,
Sqij has to be the worst game ever seen on the Spectrum. You could put a gun to my head and I'd have created a better game in BASIC in about 15 minutes, than this sorry sluggish nano-effort. Famously one of the sh*ttest games ever made and rightfully ridiculed.

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My controversial suggestion is Street Fighter 2. Not because the ZX Spectrum is apparently awful (I've never touched it), but because I've never liked the original for what it did to the arcade scene. It's a dismal thing to play, about ten million buttons to mash and you're just stuck in the same spot. I like my beat 'em ups to be scrolling through a world. It spawned about twenty million 'special' editions and my local arcades were full of, um, less-than-desirable people shoving their coins into the overrated thing.

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blucey
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by blucey »

The answer is always Renegade 3 but if you're temporarily insane I'll allow Superman by Tynesoft which is a game that is utterly without merit.
Wall_Axe
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Wall_Axe »

just to bring up something different,

The US Gold D&D games, dragons of flame etc.
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blucey
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by blucey »

Wall_Axe wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2017 3:28 pm just to bring up something different,

The US Gold D&D games, dragons of flame etc.
That is different. I never played them but I assume being US Gold games that they are monochrome pieces of sh*t?

Left field choice: the last two levels of Combat School. The rest of the game is pretty good (if a bit buggy) but the instructor fight is the worst example of a fighting game and the combat mission is appalling.
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

One on One. Disappointing, as I said in another thread.

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J. Erwing and Larry Bird deserved a better game!

**Edited by PJ to.update image link
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Wall_Axe »

Yeah,while playing D&D my friend's dad thought we were using a black and white telly, or that we had the colour knob turned down accidentally.
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Mike Davies
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Mike Davies »

blucey wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2017 3:10 pm The answer is always Renegade 3.
I just wonder whether this game could have come across better had it been called Joe Blade 5, or Dinokink, or something. Rather than demolishing a superb franchise. So far my track record for the game has been: HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, OK.

I'm almost determined to find some gameplay in there, something more than button mashing.
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Uto
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Uto »

I belive choosing one worst game is as difficult as choosing best game ever. O can specially remember Macronic's ET, because it's also first game I ever player on my Spectrum, but if I spend 10 minutes thinking on it I can come with another 50 samples easily :-D

Thank God we tend to remember only good games and forget about the bad ones.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Collieuk »

There are hundreds of dreadful games on the Speccy. For me, Dick Tracy is the winner. Shameful programming and atrocious gameplay but it was a licensed product with money behind it. I see this was the programmer's only Spectrum game. Good. You'd get better value with a faulty Cascade 50 tape that throws up R Tape Loading Errors with every attempt to play those crappy games. I think one mag gave this 70% or something. Proof there was a bit of corruption still going on.
Another wonderfully irrelevant and inept post no doubt.
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Mike Davies
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Mike Davies »

I just remembered Super Cycle as a terrible game. The collision detection is... well ... not there. The game disintegrates into a turn left turn right until you get bored. I struggled to off-load this title earlier this year.

Which is a great pity. I tried the Atari ST version earlier this year, and found it to be quite playable. So it's a keeper on this system.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Morkin »

Devils of the Deep.

Flippin' eck, makes Transylvanian Tower look like a world beater.

...And the "Out of left field" choice:

Pimania.

Forgetting the whole rigmarole about the prize, not sure if there was anything actually resembling a game in there.
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PeteProdge
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by PeteProdge »

Mike Davies wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 2:36 pm I just remembered Super Cycle as a terrible game. The collision detection is... well ... not there. The game disintegrates into a turn left turn right until you get bored. I struggled to off-load this title earlier this year.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Contact Sam Cruise »

I didn't think much of Friday the 13th. Dull gameplay and awful graphics. A real horror of a game.

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PeterJ
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by PeterJ »

I have to add Embassy Assault which was written by ICL. I was given this soon after I got my Spectrum. What a disappointment!

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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Contact Sam Cruise »

As a child it was easy to be sucked in by colourful and exciting artwork on the box or cassette inlay cover! For example, Survival...

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Pobulous
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Pobulous »

I think Survival gets a pass, as it's educational.

Biggest disappointment for 13 year old me was Monte Carlo on the Horizons tape, closely followed by Foxes and Rabbits!
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by AndyC »

Contact Sam Cruise wrote: Thu Oct 25, 2018 8:21 pm I didn't think much of Friday the 13th. Dull gameplay and awful graphics. A real horror of a game.

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Were it not for the ridiculous bug that you can only attack in one direction (and Jason always attacks from the other side) it might have been a reasonable game. There was the inkling of an interesting concept to it, but it's just unplayably buggy.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Ralf »

Worst game ever obejctively? Probably some totally unknown crap written in Basic by some 10 years old kid ;)

But should we really include such stuff in our discussion? I think not. You shouldn't mock kids for their first attempts.

Commercially released games are different stuff. You have right to expect them to be decent. Especially if they were great on other platforms and turned out terrible and disappointing on Spectrum.

My personal disappointment is Final Fight:
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Yes, the sprites are huge. Just as huge as the original. Seems impressive, heh?

But everything moves slow just as you walked in a swamp. It's totally unplayable.
Adn the graphics are really bad. Here on screenshot it's even okay but during most of the game you watch ugly, blurry backgrounds, automatically converted from some better platform.

It was a great beatemup on arcades but turned out too much challenge for Spectrum.

Fortuantely today we have great Mighty Final Fight which uses smaller sprites but performs splendidly :) ( https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=32221 )
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by R-Tape »

PeteProdge wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2017 2:31 pm You could put a gun to my head and I'd have created a better game in BASIC in about 15 minutes
This sounds great. It's like entering the CSS CGC, but with a gun.
Ralf wrote: Fri Oct 26, 2018 8:59 pm Worst game ever obejctively? Probably some totally unknown crap written in Basic by some 10 years old
Nope. It's still SQIJ.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Hank Scorpio »

Voyage Into The Unknown was pants, I can remember as a youngster loading it up on my uncle's speccy and probably spending about a minute trying to play it.

Macsen cocked up their conversion of the TV Quiz Countdown as well, first by making it two player only instead of the usual player vs CPU option and in the letters round it wasn't unusual to end up with trying to spell a word form something like "WXXUZNUOP" rather than having the more common letters in the English language appearing more often.
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

I remember reading a review of Mastertronic's 1985-The Day After back in the day in Microhobby magazine (IIRC) and I had never read such a bad, bad review of a game up to then.

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Even nowadays I haven't downloaded and played it yet, so I haven't my own opinion, but... anyone can confirm that game disaster?
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MatGubbins
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by MatGubbins »

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: Sun Nov 04, 2018 3:04 pm I remember reading a review of Mastertronic's 1985-The Day After back in the day in Microhobby magazine (IIRC) and I had never read such a bad, bad review of a game up to then.

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Even nowadays I haven't downloaded and played it yet, so I haven't my own opinion, but... anyone can confirm that game disaster?
I remember buy it, and trying to play it back in the day. Did I get far? Nope. Just tried again and managed to get a few character squares to the left and kept crashing. The gravity is all eff-ed up. This is a game for Pavero to make a map.
1985 makes Voyage into the Unknown a very playable and enjoyable game.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by WIWC »

1985... hateful.
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Re: The inevitable worst game ever thread

Post by AndyC »

I might have gone for Jack and the Beanstalk or SQIJ, but now you've reminded me that Voyage Into The Unknown exists and that was spectacularly awful. Here's a crappy BASIC effort and you have to guess what the controls might be. I mean, at least with SQIJ you knew the controls were broken and had the opportunity to give up right away. VittU just printed up random messages as you mashed away at the keyboard trying to figure out if it would get better if you could just get past the starting sequence. I suspect it did not, I never found out - I traded my copy in the playground for JSW2, one of the best deals I ever made.
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