Hmmm. Somebody mentioned Sport of Kings. Strangely enough I remember me and mates quite liking that! I will have to revisit it after work at which point I may agree with the worst game ever award for that! Somebody mentioned Highlander. Now that was totally crap! I had a friend who bought it as we quite liked the film. The sad thing about it was that he would spend hours playing it, trying to convince himself it was good. I wasn't convinced.
Yeah Highlander really sucked. I remember a cousin of mine gave me about 20 speccy games cause he never had time for them no more, a few I already had (Manic Miner, Match Day, Scooby Doo) a few games I never saw before and liked (Skate Wars, Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix), then there was NARC (never worked) and then came Highlander and even from the look of the loading screen I thought, man you know what I think this game is seriously gonna suck, and it did big time. Ocean were normally good at making games as well but this was a real stinker.
It was me who mentioned Highlander, as I not only think it was possibly the biggest gaming disappointment ever, but possibly the biggest waste of a license too.
Me and one of my friends forced ourselves to play it for a while to try and get some fun out of it, but in the end we conceeded it was undeniably terrible. Fortunately my friend got it on a compilation so I think he got at least one good game for his money.
Hmmm. Somebody mentioned Sport of Kings. Strangely enough I remember me and mates quite liking that! I will have to revisit it after work at which point I may agree with the worst game ever award for that! Somebody mentioned Highlander. Now that was totally crap! I had a friend who bought it as we quite liked the film. The sad thing about it was that he would spend hours playing it, trying to convince himself it was good. I wasn't convinced.
Definitely not Sport of Kings. It's a good game for what it is, and was after all a ?2.99 cheapie. I suspect that most people who didn't like it were just expecting something different.
Highlander is yet another that falls into the mediocre but overhyped category. I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than The Great Space Race or World Cup Carnival.
Surprised that nobody has mentioned Transylvanian Tower, by Richard Shepherd Software. The wait as the levels appeared... and it wasn't even a multiload, you just had to sit there for minutes at a time as the Speccy generated the maze. Helpfully there were beeps and bloops to accompany this process, plus a kind of infinite-loop progress bar, presumably to reassure you the machine was actually doing something and hadn't crashed - but handing CPU time over to producing these effects meant the maze building took even longer! Argh!
Of course, the thing about Worst Ever games is everyone will have different ones - more so perhaps than Best Ever games, which were pushed by magazines, friends of yours etc. Worst Ever experiences tend to be more personal.
Still, go play TT and you may find yourself agreeing with me :)
(may i dare to say, i'd hold manic miner to be probabaly the best example (counting myself to the later group, naturally) ?)
edit: well, but thinking abou it, i'd exaggerate to say, i hold manic miner to be a particularly bad game - i just don't understand much, why its SO popular...
If you think back to when it was first released you would understand why it blew so many people away. Yes time has been unkind to it but for Speccy owners it was one of the first great games which came out and was a step above anything else at the time. Plus for many people it was their first look at a platform game and they totally fell in love with it.
I think the games aged well, still a good basic puzzle type game working out how to get the keys to get to the exit etc. Great graphics/tune etc. Surprised you dislike it so much.
Surprised that nobody has mentioned Transylvanian Tower, by Richard Shepherd Software. The wait as the levels appeared... and it wasn't even a multiload, you just had to sit there for minutes at a time as the Speccy generated the maze. Helpfully there were beeps and bloops to accompany this process, plus a kind of infinite-loop progress bar, presumably to reassure you the machine was actually doing something and hadn't crashed - but handing CPU time over to producing these effects meant the maze building took even longer! Argh!
Of course, the thing about Worst Ever games is everyone will have different ones - more so perhaps than Best Ever games, which were pushed by magazines, friends of yours etc. Worst Ever experiences tend to be more personal.
Still, go play TT and you may find yourself agreeing with me :)
I actually quite enjoyed Transylvanian Tower when I first played it back in 1982. It's really got to be seen as a product of its time. Aside from a few exceptions, like Penetrator and Arcadia, games were mostly written in BASIC and a bit of hi-res graphics, colour and sound was more than enough to impress people who'd just upgraded from a ZX81. The game just got a bad reputation when, as an early hit, it lingered on into an era of more sophisticated programming.
There were certainly far worse games in the same genre at about the same time. Try Embassy Assault from ICL, if you dare. :)
Comments
hang on! LTK doesn't belong on this list!
every other speccy Bond game maybe but not LTK. It's a great little vert-scroller.
Me and one of my friends forced ourselves to play it for a while to try and get some fun out of it, but in the end we conceeded it was undeniably terrible. Fortunately my friend got it on a compilation so I think he got at least one good game for his money.
Definitely not Sport of Kings. It's a good game for what it is, and was after all a ?2.99 cheapie. I suspect that most people who didn't like it were just expecting something different.
Highlander is yet another that falls into the mediocre but overhyped category. I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than The Great Space Race or World Cup Carnival.
Of course, the thing about Worst Ever games is everyone will have different ones - more so perhaps than Best Ever games, which were pushed by magazines, friends of yours etc. Worst Ever experiences tend to be more personal.
Still, go play TT and you may find yourself agreeing with me :)
If you think back to when it was first released you would understand why it blew so many people away. Yes time has been unkind to it but for Speccy owners it was one of the first great games which came out and was a step above anything else at the time. Plus for many people it was their first look at a platform game and they totally fell in love with it.
I think the games aged well, still a good basic puzzle type game working out how to get the keys to get to the exit etc. Great graphics/tune etc. Surprised you dislike it so much.
In the early 80's it SOO blew people away
I actually quite enjoyed Transylvanian Tower when I first played it back in 1982. It's really got to be seen as a product of its time. Aside from a few exceptions, like Penetrator and Arcadia, games were mostly written in BASIC and a bit of hi-res graphics, colour and sound was more than enough to impress people who'd just upgraded from a ZX81. The game just got a bad reputation when, as an early hit, it lingered on into an era of more sophisticated programming.
There were certainly far worse games in the same genre at about the same time. Try Embassy Assault from ICL, if you dare. :)