Most bizarre theme for a Speccy game?

[stupidget]

I’ve been playing Kokotoni Wilf on my ps-vita over the past few days and thought ‘what an odd idea for a game’. I mean, you play as some chap with wings who travels through time collecting things. As game themes go it’s pretty random, but what is the most bizarre/surreal themes for a Speccy game?

Ninja Scooter Simulator?
Fat worm blows a sparky?
I of the mask?
Deus ex Machina?

Some of these games come across as the ideas from someone suffering a fevered cheese dream!!

What is the maddest idea for a Speccy game?

[HEXdidnt]

'Soft And Cuddly' must surely be up there on the list. To quote Wikipedia:

Soft & Cuddly is a horror arcade adventure game released for the ZX Spectrum home computer, developed by John George Jones and published by The Power House. It was released in September 1987 in the United Kingdom and in early 1988 in Spain. The player assumes the role of a man armed with a laser gun and a jet pack, whose mother, the Android Queen, has been dismembered. The player's task is to locate the scattered body parts of the Android Queen and sew her back together.

[Oloturia]

Among the others:
- Twister, Mother of Charlotte mostly because of the name: Charlotte was a replacement for "harlots" as they recognized that this kind of words wouldn't be suitable for a game which potentially could be played by kids, feat. some explicit whipping and a lot of demoniac symbolism anyway
- Travel With Trashman traveling trashmen is absurd, but to add insult to injury, it showed also respect for many religions, with duties like picking up tissues at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem or trash from people bathing in the sacred river Ganges in Benares...

but my favourite is TILER:
The Scene
"""""""""
You have been sub-contracted by Acme Construction to go and tile Rob
Rubbers roof. However this is no easy task, as Rob cannot stop bouncing
around. If he should land on you, then you'll be squashed flat.
Can you succeed, where other Tilers have failed?

[Dr beep]

How to be a complete Bas**rd

[Morkin]

Do modern and/or crap games count?

If so, there's this one.

[XTM]

I mean, you play as some chap with wings who travels through time collecting things.

Slighty off-topic as it's not Speccy-related, but in a way, this sounds like the fabled SNES game Chrono Trigger. Some chap = the protagonist Crono, wings/time travel = Epoch, the time machine in this game, is a sort of aircraft and also referred to as "Wings of Time". Collecting things, well, you receive items from defeated enemies and treasure chests

On-topic won't be so easy as you guys already mentioned everything I was thinking of.
Well, not an overly bizarre one but Sidewalk might be worth a mention. Your motorbike was stolen and disassembled, you need to talk to (and beat up) people on the street to get parts back, and also have to obtain tickets for a concert or your girlfriend will dump you. Well, that's from memory, so maybe not 100% accurate.

[stupidget]

You have been sub-contracted by Acme Construction to go and tile Rob
Rubbers roof. However this is no easy task, as Rob cannot stop bouncing

This is perfect!! I mean, A tiler who can’t stop bouncing I’m assuming he’s been sniffing some sort of tile adhesive

[Oloturia]

(in Travel with Trashman I missed a "little", it showed "little respect for many religions")

This is perfect!! I mean, A tiler who can’t stop bouncing I’m assuming he’s been sniffing some sort of tile adhesive

Well it isn't the tiler the one who bounce, but the house owner, Rob Rubber. The inlay is very descriptive.

[Lee Bee]

Gregory Loses His Clock is pretty nuts:

The first few Zeds have hardly escaped our Greg's sleeping lips when a naughty ghost intervenes, stealing Greg's timepiece. And this ghostie is really wicked - it breaks the clock into five pieces and scatters them around four weird dreamscape locations. However will our hero manage to wake up in the morning? Greg's got an important day at work ahead of him. Thanks to that bad spook, Greg will never, ever wake up to reality unless he can retrieve the parts of his clock and get them to the nice old horologist (clock mender to the likes of ordinary folk)…

[Juan F. Ramirez]

According to the instructions:

The Scenario
------------

In this game you play Mabel. She is no ordinary grandmother for she
she posesses special Ninja fighting skills. You must battle your way
through levels of increasing difficulty in your quest to become the
supreme Ninja Granny.

[stupidget]

Another fine example. At some point, someone sat down and said ‘let’s do a game where you play as a ninja granny’, and people agreed!!!!

[Lethargeek]

Wriggler - a racing game about... maggots, of all the creatures

[HEXdidnt]

Well it isn't the tiler the one who bounce, but the house owner, Rob Rubber. The inlay is very descriptive.

That's a much tamer image than I was expecting... I mean, I know it wouldn't have been an obvious inflatable gimp suit back then, considering these was "kids' games" but, yeah, Rob Rubber seems like a weird concept... Is he... living rubber?

In this game you play Mabel. She is no ordinary grandmother for she she posesses special Ninja fighting skills. You must battle your way through levels of increasing difficulty in your quest to become the supreme Ninja Granny.[/i]

You really have to wonder what was going through their minds... Not just the setting and the characters, but the mechanics of the game: any hit does only 1 pixel row of damage, so you have to get 48 hits on every enemy? But then, some opponents have moves that knock off 2 and 4 pixel rows?

[PeteProdge]

I suppose what can be bizarre is the utterly mundane. I mean, why would anyone want to simulate the incredibly dull job of pricing up canned food in a supermarket? I did that in real life for a couple of weeks many decades ago, which is slightly longer than the time I gave to this terrible game...



Of course, going back to the weird, there is always Jeff Minter's Headbangers (sic) Heaven, where a heavy metal fan WANTS hammers dropped on his head. It plays like the inverse of Space Invaders.



Finally, let's get naked...

[stupidget]

Super Trolley was the game that sprang to mind when I was thinking of bizarre games, but I couldn’t remember what it was called. Of all the things in the world to design a game on why pick the process of pricing canned goods!!!?

[Morkin]

Super Trolley was the game that sprang to mind when I was thinking of bizarre games, but I couldn’t remember what it was called. Of all the things in the world to design a game on why pick the process of pricing canned goods!!!?

It was a magazine 'win a competition to design a game' thing I think.

I wonder if it won based on being an original idea, probably a bad one as well looking at the resulting game...

[R-Tape]

They're all pretty barmy aren't they? Like Super Trolley, Kat Trap was another competition winner. Here's the blurb:

After the Solar Explosion on Earth, the few
who escaped travelled round the Universe in a
NewArk and then returned to their home
planet, but only to find that it was inhabited
by the Cat Men.

It sounds like one of the more benign solar explosions, that stop short of destroying the planet and leave the ideal environment for cats to take the next evolutionary step

[bluespikey]

Super Trolley was the game that sprang to mind when I was thinking of bizarre games, but I couldn’t remember what it was called. Of all the things in the world to design a game on why pick the process of pricing canned goods!!!?

Supertrolley was the one which went on Jim'll Fix It. Some BBC executive would have picked it thinking it was a wonderful idea, then some poor developer having to implement it for free publicity. Theres an ace Kim Justice video on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g-la83 ... KimJustice

[Morkin]

Supertrolley was the one which went on Jim'll Fix It. Some BBC executive would have picked it thinking it was a wonderful idea, then some poor developer having to implement it for free publicity. Theres an ace Kim Justice video on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g-la83 ... KimJustice

Oh gawd, Jim'll Fix It, I remember now..! Probably best I didn't though..

[stupidget]

Supertrolley was the one which went on Jim'll Fix It. Some BBC executive would have picked it thinking it was a wonderful idea, then some poor developer having to implement it for free publicity. Theres an ace Kim Justice video on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g-la83 ... KimJustice

Blimey!! Considering that that wretched monster was anywhere near the game makes me think, that in the scheme of things, maybe pricing canned goods isn’t that bad!!

[PeteProdge]

Supertrolley was the one which went on Jim'll Fix It. Some BBC executive would have picked it thinking it was a wonderful idea, then some poor developer having to implement it for free publicity. Theres an ace Kim Justice video on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g-la83 ... KimJustice

Yeah, Kim nails the 'elephant in the room' in that video very very well.

I can see why Mastertronic green-lit it, because they'd get at least ten minutes of prime time BBC1 coverage for the game and the major stakeholder in the company - a certain Mr Richard Branson - would be there to lend some celebrity kudos to it. It didn't matter that the game was utter dross and a nightmare to play, it's a purely commercial decision.

I watched the show most Saturday evenings back in the day. Filmed segments were done with the child getting their wish fulfilled and that creepy host was never present at them, only in the studio for the medal presentation. (Non-UK forum visitors, um, Google "Jimmy Savile" but be prepared for a very disturbing history.) I remember as the game was taking shape, the kid being asked what the maximum amount of people he wanted on screen, they could go up to three. "Two", he replied. I mean, aside from the original idea, that was pretty much his sole input into the game, which Mastertronic commissioned Icon Design to make.

There are one or two full episodes of Jim'll Fix It out there on YouTube (and quite a few clips), usually uploaded from off-air VHS recordings. It's a certainty that the BBC will never ever repeat them, for obvious reasons. (The theme tune's quite a pleasant earworm, mind). I can't find the Super Trolley one. From memory, it didn't really show much of the programming process, but it was nice to see the ZX Spectrum being the lead platform on yer prime time Saturday night telly.

[Lee Bee]

At some point, someone sat down and said ‘let’s do a game where you play as a ninja granny’, and people agreed!!!!

That "someone" is a member here named @deanysoft so perhaps he can confirm if that conversation ever happened? Incidentally, he also worked on the Gilbert game, which I'm sure is one of @PeteProdge's favourites!

[HEXdidnt]

Supertrolley was the one which went on Jim'll Fix It. Some BBC executive would have picked it thinking it was a wonderful idea, then some poor developer having to implement it for free publicity.

I have weirdly vivid memories of that show... Possibly because I was designing games/graphics by that point.

Couldn't help but think "You've written in to Jim'll Fix It to have your game design made real, and that's your magnum opus?"

Then again, some people say "design the games you'd want to play"... if the kid wanted to play a game about stacking shelves in a supermarket, more power to him.

Fairly sure the developer didn't seem overly enthused about the results...

[Einar Saukas]

Fairly sure the developer didn't seem overly enthused about the results...

It makes perfect sense. He was forced to implement this idea in a very short time, that had to look impressive for a couple minutes on TV but knowing that nobody would ever play it. Therefore a simple repetitive isometric 3D game was a perfect solution.

[XTM]

Wow, I've never heard of that game, awesome title! Let me (ab-)use this opportunity to add a link to one of ashens' (I have no idea where you put the apostrophe in this case!) hilarious videos in the hope some of you haven't seen it yet.

It's about the game BMX Ninja, which as you can already tell by its name is a bit bizarre of a concept, so it kinda does work for this thread. He points out how there was a time when software houses seemed to shoehorn the word Ninja into any game title whatsoever to make it sound cool. The short "meeting room" scene early on in the video always cracks me up, the rest of course is funny as hell too ... including him reading out the ridiculous scenario of the game

Disclaimer: Yes, the video shows the C64 version, sorry about that! But the game also exists for the Speccy and plays the same