Also thank you for the track and field clip. I killed myself laughing when you cleared the high jump by starting the backwards jump about four metres before you got to the bar!!
Hi Kim, Great video and thanks got the shout out, I really appreciate it. Hope you and yours stay safe and lockdown isn't driving you too barmy. I'd also mention that c64 versions of wec le mans and enduro racer don't fair too well either. Paperboy on the BBC micro is terrible, and the c16 version isn't great either. Whilst the beeb has some surprisingly decent versions of tapper and mikie amongst others, and surprisingly (although I haven't actually played it as yet) hyper sports, it also has the aforementioned paperboy and its version of commando is truly bad!! An amstrad game I'd throw in although not particularly obscure and not even particularly bad either gameplay wise is space harrier. They went with some really weird vector graphics style for the amstrad version. Staying with the amstrad and again a game that was neither too bad or particularly obscure is the original version of bubble bobble. While I always found it decent enough back in the day, it was remade in 2011 as bubble bobble 4 cpc, and is a spectacular version that, like the rtype remake, shows what the amstrad was capable of. Its much closer to the c64 version and if ever I want to play bubble bobble on the cpc, I play that version now. Again, there is also a version available for the BBC micro and its surprisingly good. For the spectrum, I always thought legend of kage was quite... Meh. I never knew the arcade game or any of the other games back in the day, but bought this and played it for maybe a day. Bosconian on the c64 ain't great either!!
Renegade on the Amstrad was one of my all time fave games in the 80s. Then i got an Amiga for christmas 1990 and was blown away. Beast 2, Giana Sisters, Kick off 2 etc. Great times. I remember going into the local video game store and seeing my old friend Renegade on the Amiga on a budget release. I didnt even know it had come out, so instantly bought it and rushed home. What i saw, was an absolute mess. Thanks for covering this as it was one of my major disappointments of my gaming childhood. The CPC version was far superior than the Amiga version! I still have fond memories of the Amiga though, my all time favourite computer for sure.
I am completely with you on this - how the ports of games could be soooo bad on the Amiga yet the native games were so darned impressive always frustrated me. I guess the ports were generally done to a timescale, whereas the native titles had a more development. Still, it stinks to be so. Although i got my Amiga with the Discovery Software port of Arkanoid - which was amazing, even next to the arcade ROM running on Mame. Impressive.
Great video, Kim! I love retrospectives of old forgotten hack job games. Some of these ports are absolutely astounding with their dismal quality. I always think I've seen the worst there is to see... then I learn of something else that tops it.
Great work, fine collection of turkeys. If you really want to get a huge collection of pathetic ports, try them on the french computers Thomson MO5 / TO7 / TO9 / etc. I tried a lot of the ones often made by James Higgins internally at Ocean, they all stink except for a few (Top Gun, Arkanoid, Slap Fight maybe ?) who are not too bad. Easily 2 or 3 videos of content if you dig that hole :)
I'm only 21 and I still managed to get stung by Tiertex. I was a big Robot Wars fan like every other 2000's kid and so I bought Robot Wars on the Gameboy. That was a mistake. It's not terrible like some of their shit but there's about 30 mins of gameplay if you're being generous and what is there is slow and boring. Needless to say, I wasn't happy with my purchase. I only got £1 per week and this was about £5. Screw Tiertex.
Thanks for the video Kim😊. Games on the C64 were either awesome or they were awful. For some reason there weren't many decent driving games on the c64 either. Whether it was down to the underpowered cpu, I'm not sure but the Amstrad and Spectrum with the z80 (which was far more powerful than the 6502) did produce driving games that were much better.
Hey, some suggestions for the next episode of this type: you might want to look at Gemini Wing on MSX. You know things are going downhill when you see joystick options that belong to another machine (yep, the MSX port of Gemini Wing was that lazy). Another curiosity is Pac-Land on the Amiga and Atari ST, if only because instead of porting from the arcade or even being lazy and just porting it from another Western computer, they seem to have taken the graphics from the Japanese NEC PC-8001 version (not the blocky parallax though as is missing in the Amiga/ST versions anyway). Evidence I have found is that Pac-man retains the red-yellow dithered gloves from that version instead of just using a solid red like every other version out there. As for the Amiga, there even was a prototype which was a much better game (based on the Commodore 64 version) than the final version (based on the Atari ST/NEC PC-8001 version).
7:30 this makes me want to play some old arcade racing games that I skipped... Bad game (and ports) reviews are super fun but you should do more best of arcade or microcomputer games too, also mentioning emulators U use if that's not on MAME.
The Amiga port of Castlevania is terrible, there's dud notes in the music as they didn't enter it right and the sprites look like they were sent in by a SEUCK user.
Pleasantly surprised to see Mamemeister in the mentions. I've been watching his videos lately and there's some great home computer coverage there. I wonder if anyone played on an Acorn Archimedes like me though; never see it mentioned.
6:21 The disappointment I felt when I booted up Karnov on the C64 for the first time. It was around the time when every developer was just crapping out half-assed games for the system. I think I got it the same day as Indy and the Last Crusade.
There's a stack of titles that really cast the capabilities of the poor old C64 into doubt. I got Karnov in an arcade bundle pack, being a fan of the original I thought "great". Nope! I still tried to play the bloody thing far more than it deserved. Funny the crap we put up with back then.
I used to rent these from the local library (bundle packs).So I never paid, if it was a bad game you switched it off and played the next one. I never lingered on a bad title, just moved on..........
The thing is, the music in the C64 port of Castlevania and Metal Gear are converted by Kris Hatlelid. Which is all the more baffling, since he also made some of the best tunes for the system, like the ones for Test Drive 2, Grand Prix Circuit, and The Cycles.
unlimmeted software was actually another name for Destinctive software, a canadian studeo who also handeled the dos port. they are also responsible for the all time dos classic stunts (aka 4d sports driving) and also co developed the engine for the original test drive, which they supposedly also reused for a dos outrun port.
I bought Karnov for the C64 because I loved the arcade game. This game turned my glorious C64 into a shabby ZX Spectrum. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
Have you tried the MSX version of Castlevania, named Vampire Killer for the European release? It was developed by Konami in tandem with the NES version and was released a month later. Since the MSX can't do scrolling that well they went for a flip screen approach and changed the levels from the linear style of the NES version to a more maze-like structure where you must find the exit of each level and a key to open it. There's even merchants that you can buy weapons from. You could almost call it a Metroidvania style game. And because it was made by Konami the graphics and audio are as close as they can to the NES version. A very interesting and pretty obscure port I think.
It wasnt a good game on any system bar the arcade. But imagine being the programmer and presenting this to your employers, stood in the room as they load and test it.....lol
Aw man. That hang-on port on C64. Once you actually notice the speed value of the bike... Then the fact that the background seems to tick past at the same 2 frames per second from 100 up to 300+ mph. Yowzer
I remember the sitdown version of thunderblade with the cockpit you swing left and right in. Just like the sitdown version of powerdrift, the movement made the game much more harder to play and concentrate on
Great video Kim, as always. How about the amazing Amiga version of Dragon Ninja? Looks fairly accurate but has one crippling flaw: you can only jump straight up. This is fine on the first level, but as soon as you get to level two and need to jump between trucks? Basically impossible.
Theres a bit where your on the top of a train in a later level thats only possible to jump between caridges by glitching the (awful) scrolling iirc. Ghastly ST port.
I considered covering the Atari ST version of Renegade for my Atari ST A to Z series last time I got to R. I booted it up, gave it a quick go and decided my time would almost certainly better be spent playing literally anything else!
If you read the manual of Amiga Thunder Blade " KEYBOARD CONTROLS F1 - Joystick Speed Control F2 - Keyboard Speed Control F9 - Pause F10 - Continue KEYBOARD SPEED CONTROL Up Arrow - Accelerate Down Arrow - Decelerate
5:10 wearing traditional Zaporizhian attire and chub, the Ukrainian cossack hairstyle in the art... yeah, that's some cultural appropriation when the developers made him "russian". Just to clarify, it's like calling a Scottish highlander in a kilt "English." Karnov looks quite a bit like legendary Ivan Poddubny except wearing style more proper for National Dance of Ukraine or something, the wide pants and red shoes and all. :3
Kasumi Rina Gaming bbbbut Soviet era? Cultural appropriation? It’s literally an eastern bloc Soviet... you know what? I’m 40. I’m not going to argue the idea of soviets appropriating a Soviet nation’s look with someone who clearly wasn’t alive. And thinks cultural appropriation is a thing to anyone but white Americans.
I actually really enjoyed cisco heat in the arcade. ... by god tho isn't that theme tune (when you put a credit in) on the push start screen an ear worm of bliss nostalgia!
I'm not sure if it's an error Kim. But if you like speccy games you must have heard of quicksilva I'm sure they did ant attack, and glider rider. Which were both good
What's worse about the C64 version of Super Hang-On is it doesn't even use the music from the arcade original. I'd of loved to of seen some high quality SID versions of those tracks. Sadly we get some ok-ish but not very suitable replacement tracks for this port. I also love how the bikers you race against get smaller as they get nearer to you. Perspective? Never heard of her...
Kim I always found Peter Pack Rat a strange conversion on the spectrum. Not a bad port but just seemed to come from nowhere and was only £1.99 as well.
There's one C64 port that's on the same level of awful as Ikari and Cisco Heat - Guerilla War by Ocean (or imagine). It's horrifically ugly and completely unplayable!
As far as Track and FIeld was concerned, I think yes - it was a contractual obligation. I seem to remember Ocean used to get arcade ports in batches, so they'd have to port 4 crap obscure titles in order to get the rights to a belter like Green Beret (for example) Edit - not that Track and Field was obscure. But by 1988, it was ancient.
12:30 - Oh god no.... I remember going to a local store in like 1992 and they still had two C64 games on the shelf, and Ikari Warriors was one (the other was some Apache helicopter game). Paid $15 for this POS game, always felt completely duped.
I first came across the DOS version of Castlevania, got up to the Grim Reaper boss, and it beat me every time. Then I played the C64 version, taking advantage of the save feature and some trainer cheats, got to the Grim Reaper, died. Now I played the NES version in emulator, used snapshots, getting up to the Grim Reaper, and it STILL KICKS MY ASS X(
Ooh I love your vids kim honest and truly! I always look forward to your videos! Uniquely enjoyable to my tastes and stuff! I was curious about the word you called Bionic commando! Srry I'm not very informative or knowledgeable insults! Hope you are doing well! Stay well ! Thanks for your work and efforts on videos for years and hope you share more for some years to come!
1499th view in 1 day, well done Kim. Some of these ports are almost as bad as the game shitty invaders that a mate and knocked I up in two lunch breaks in BBC Basic. We called it that, because, it was shit. Created a random number generator for the score because we could. Needless to say I'm not a programmer.
I can tell you what happened with these shitty micro ports. The piracy was so rampant and easy to do, the publishers could not afford to put any serious budget into these ports.
NA Bionic Commando on C64 pretty much looks like the DOS one so it was probably a license package deal. Just thinking of the why behind porting a game twice.
What I still can't understand is why Sega have never released an Arcade compilation.. Surely with emulation today we could see a comp of the classics... And obviously Thunderblade for the modern systems... How many Megadrive comps do we need?
A lot of ports (we used to term them `conversions' in the UK back then, just like the term "to shake one's bootie" means to wiggle one's butt) to the 16 bit computers (Miggy or ST) were fairly terrible next to the 8-bit ones in the late 80s. In many cases developers who had honed their skills on the C64 or Speccy suddenly had to start on the more powerful architecture and while folks had high hopes it takes a while to program either 16 bitter to a high standard, so they generally stank for a game or two. It was frustrating for us owners `cause we KNEW our machines could do better. Rolling Thunder was always a sore spot for me... the Amiga version is unplayable. Rats.
I had the Atari St version of Thunder Blade. It was awful. Most of the time I didn't even know what hit me when I died. The game had a huge advertising campaign and it looked good in screenshots, so it was quite a disappointment.
I don't really have any experience with the C64 (my family went straight from Vic-20 to the Sega Master System) but, just comparing the graphics between the two versions of Castlevania shown here, I like the detail better on the NES but prefer the colour palette on the C64 version. I suppose the counter-argument against the colours of the C64 version would be that they might be a little too bright for the atmosphere of the game and that's probably correct but I'm just going by the palette I find more appealing at a glance.
I'm totally with you on the US versions of Ikari Warriors and Bionic Commando, but I think the US version of Street Fighter was pretty OK and even had the special moves in it. Personally I thought that one was WAY better than the Euro version. While I love the C64, it definitely also had its problems with driving games, with loads of them but only a few decent ones. For the Amiga ports at the end, even though it was slow and choppy, I sort of almost liked Thunderblade on the computer even though I fully acknowledge it isn't a "good" game. As for the Renegade port, well, short of the surprisingly good port of Double Dragon II on the Amiga, I don't think the computer had any good scrolling beat 'em ups. If anyone wants to see a complete play-through comparison of NES vs C64 Castlevania you can check out one of my terrible, earliest videos here! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-biBn-rUwak0.html Don't worry, my new videos look and sound much nicer, lol.
They could code Thunderblade for Amiga in the same way that C64 version, but with better graphics. I prefer the actual Amiga version over the Megadrive version.
Wouldn't it be great if some company would remake most Amiga games and for the Amiga?. Im sure with the coding skills and knowledge that devs have today, they would push the Amiga to the limite. Just imagine that the Amiga had games like Lionheart and the freaking amazing Fighting Spirit that could run on an Amiga 500. What could a dev like that do today.
I have a video idea: late Amiga games that many misesd out on. I'm thinking of games lauded by Amiga Power in their "pamphlet with staples" phase such as Zeewolf, Banshee and Virocop.
Believe it or not, the Amiga version of Bionic Commando plays worse than the C64 US version. The US version of 720 degrees on the C64 has to be the bottom of the barrel.
