The Italian edition of Zzap! gave Catalypse a much higher and fairer score (about 90% if I remember correctly). At the time it was thought in Italy (where the game was developed) that the UK Zzap! had bashed the game because it was too similar to Armalyte (and considering that Thalamus was an offshoot of Newsfield Publications there were speculations about conflict of interest). But to be honest, I think that the UK reviewers were simply fed up after years of metallic looking horizontal shooters on the C64. In facts, most of these low scores were motivated by perceived lack of innovation for these games, that they deemed would play just like "old arcades" or reiterate the same old themes. In retrospect, expectations about the evolution of 8 bit gaming back then were much different from what we think would be feasible today.
@@briancartwright3255 I bought "Who Dares Wins 2" over "Commando" due to Zzaps review...and it's def a longer game and better value for money but I don't know if it quite deserved the love they poured on it?
You were brutal with those reviews of the reviewers...nice one!! I always liked Friday the 13th on C64, which scored low. I remember always playing it on a Friday, mum back from shopping with a Barrett Booty Bag and a can of Pepsi ready for my show down with Jason.
@OSG Please pick your favourite Zzap issue(s), review every game in it and let us re-live that issue while learning about the games that we might not have paid proper attention to at the time. I'd love to see a video like that!
Thanks for this video. Solo Flight (2nd Edition) was reviewed way back in1986 (issue 15) when it scored a respectable 85%. 39% for the KIXX release of Airborne Ranger was undoubtable down to the Cassette version - not the Disk version originally reviewed - but I agree that it was criminally overlooked.
Wow, that is crazy scores for Test Drive and Commando. We got Zapp and C&VG mags here to in Australia back in the day and yeah a lot of the reviews were all over the place. Great vid as always mate! Thank you OSG!!!
Test Drive was really awesome back in the day. I'd tell my friends at school I drove a Lamborghini today, and some would come over my house and play it too and loved it. Epyx's Championship Wrestling was gold! The finishing moves were incredible. Airborne Ranger was probably the most popular and awesome game on the system! 39%??? Hell no.
Here in Italy we had our own version of zzap, some of the reviews were simply translated from the eneglish one but most of them were made by italians, they often miscored games and there were plenty of grammatical mistakes but I loved it anyways. Catalypse was an italian game and was reviewd fair by the italian zzap and If I remember well they complained about the unfair english score. I also had the chance to tak to the guys who created that game, very nice and friendly people.
I think this is my favourite video of yours. Nice research and good choices. I had no idea that Adventure Construction Set existed or that Rogue was available on the C64. ACS would have been my dream game. Zzap!64 was the bible back in the day but on reflection I agree, the reviewers didn't give the titles enough playtime to properly critique, possibly because they had too many to look at, but that's no excuse. I'm hoping the next video will be "rubbish games that Zzap!64 overrated"? :-) Hope so.
Great video and when I saw the title, I immediately thought of all the budget games Zzap gave unfairly low scores for, Ninja being one of them. Others I can think of are: - Street Surfer, a competent racing/skating game with a novel eco-freindly theme and a great soundtrack. They gave it 29% 🤷 - Bomb Fusion, a fun arcade platformer with another cracking soundtrack, which they gave 32% - 3D Pinball, one of the best pinball sims on the system. 41% from Zzap! - Night Racer, a pretty decent driving game, which got 36% - U.F.O. - not the best shooter by any means but better than the 19% it was given. Basicially I think Zzap just didn't take budget games seriously and were somewhat to blame for the notion that all Mastertronic games were crap, when in fact around 50% of them were very playable. Looking forward to the most overrated games video as there are many that fit the bill.
I couldn’t afford to buy the magazines, I spent a lot of time reading in WH Smith while my mother was shopping. Great video as usual, brings back memories.
Excellent vid. Spot on opinions. I still play Solo flight and it's the only game even today that has you delivering mail for score. On top of that you can fly entirely in IFR conditions relying on Vor points to get you exactly where you need to touch down out of cloud. Amazing sim even now and it's nice to see it positively spoke of here. Well done on a great channel
Superb video once again, mate! I'm very glad to see that there's someone else except myself who also likes 'Ninja' and 'Soldier One'! Still play both of them regularly. 👍😉
Sounds like there was some back handers going on behind the scenes from the bigger game developers with reviews like that or the reviewer's were just numptys who didn't have a clue.. great upload!
wait till you see the next video with the games they said were good, im about half way through sorting them but there are some real turkeys that scored over 80%
It's an especially bad take because there's only passing mention (without naming it!) of Rivers of Light and the mini-adventures, which even if you don't make a single game provide considerable "value for money" and "lasting interest." Comments about the sluggishness and graphical meh-ness are tough to dispute, but in no way was that a "24%" product. It seemed that Zzap struggled to give unqualified praise to full-price, disk-only games even when they were genuinely good.
Wheee, only 25% for Ninja? Zzap64 is indeed really hard with their scoring. Also Airborne Ranger. I used to love both games, especially AR where you have to plan your mission, drop your supplies before parachuting etc.
Back in the days when we had loads of magazines on the shelves and consequently certain publishers ‘persuaded’ magazine’s to post favourable reviews in return for high value advertising
It doesn't even have to be as overt as that. There's plenty of disincentive to present budget/reissue items as the best-of-the-best (in part but not exclusively because, by their nature, budget titles generate less of the ad revenue which is the lifeblood of a print periodical!) and that's part of the reason you see scoring streamlined or sometimes simply dropped for budget/re-release games.
Such an insightful point about imagination. When I was a child my imagination could really do something with even these blocky graphics but it is not quite the same when you're older.
yeah i feel like that...mostly about newer games that have no nostalgia factor for me, but games i played or games i saw and wanted to play back then now transport me back to when i was 12 again
I recently made a comparison video on Test Drive its hard to imagine any credible magazine giving such a low rating to such a amazing game, i thought the graphics sound and even the frame rate was really impressive considering the hardware it was running on, had loads of fun playing it a great version.
@@oldstylegaming I think it was the fact that you played from inside the car and could see the steering wheel as a kid that made you think ...Wow its like driving a real car😂😂 just good times
Most of the poor scores were re-reviews to be fair and I trusted zzap from iss 1- 25 probably more than any other magazine. Mistakes however do happen. A review is an opinion mostly but we have to accept the reviewers could kill a game quickly so I did feel bad for certain games which surely were better then the reviewers were stating. I'm older now and like to make my own opinion but I do look back at the reviews fondly and remember they were capsuals in time and looking at them now is with a lot of hind sight. I.e. I cant quite remember how many side scrolling shootemup games came out in a specific year but if 50 came out I might of got tired and to be honest they mostly copied a graphic template on a winning formula :-). Great video and made me smile keep them up :-). My comments are my opinion only guys :-)
Yeah most of the time the reviews were a great source of info as we never had the internet to just go watch a video of the game etc. But as you say they are just peoples opinions and we as kids went off them for whether we bought a game or not. Im sure that some of these like airborne ranger for example there must have been something else behind the low score as that game is still brilliant to play now. As for re reviews if i was to re review something i would play they game (make my own opinion) then cross match it against the original review for inconsistencies and then flesh these out in the review. Thanks for watching mate and im sure no one will have an issue with you opinion either as we all have different ones ...but really we all here for one reason...we love the C64
Agreed that dissecting budget re-release re-reviews is less compelling than trying to take on Bad Takes in full-length, fully-produced, full-price reviews. (Which I think Zzap in particular still lends itself well to!)
I remember the Americana budget games. There were some great games released on that label such as Going For Gold and the arcade port of Karate Champ. It would be good if you could revisit that label at some time 👍
I also had Terramex on the C64. It was an awesome game, especially as it played slightly differently depending on which of the characters you chose to play as
Zzap!64 was something I looked forward to before moving on to Commodore Format later. Greats mags. I think I still own a full collection of the INPUT magazine from the 80's that taught you how to code in my mums attic.
As you said m8, Zzap64 was like a gaming bible to us C64 owners back in the day, a game could potentially fail from a bad review from it. I loved the mag and bought it religiously, the coverart by Oliver Frey was awesome! I always thought their reviews were tough but fair, so suprised to see here how many times they fecked up here! I'm familar with a few of these, can't believe the low scores. Great vid m8, loved the Catalypse rant lol :)
I was expecting you to mention Pirates!, that 68% score was ridiculous for one of the best games of all time. But I guess you were looking for even lower scores (40s and lower)...
Yeah i based my searches on sub 50% but your right that is too low for pirates! .... oh it was scored even lower on the kixx label ...only 40% ...thats ridiculous
10:45 - I have mixed feelings about Terramex. Maybe the C64 version was good but the 16-bit and Acorn 32-bt versions weren't. Much as I like Ben Daglish as a person, his music was very hit-and-miss, and the 16+-bit games Gremlin did were so much more slipshod.
Over here in the Netherlands I frequently used to grab hold of the Brittish C+VG magazine....was more into the multi-platform formula of that one....and remember drooling over the reviews and shorties on arcade games and consoles and computers that were far out of my reach back then, such as the pc-engine
I’ve played the vast majority of the games shown and agree with pretty much all the original Zzap scores. Except the budget rereleases, Airbourne Ranger is worth the 72% the original release earned for example. Ninja is in the category of “its so bad it’s good” but that doesn’t preclude the score. I got bored by Catalypse probably for the same reasons it scored low. Weird now though it’s quite rare and worth hundreds.
They scored Commando so low?? Just for the iconic music alone it deserves the high praise. And Test Drive was fun too, although I never was really a fan of driving games. And Airborn Ranger??? I never got to play it back in the day, but played it recently on my C64 Maxi an it is great, almost like an Amiga game rather then C64.
Really good idea to revisit some of these suspect scores by our beloved Zzap! Nobody's perfect after all. Sometimes it seems the whole team were really intent on tearing a game down, so NOTHING about it, apparently, was any good. It was fun to hear how worked up you still could get after all these years! Especially liked how you stuck up for Ben Daglish, he always put in an effort to come up with a suitable tune and his music is often a highlight of ANY game, so 15% is just ridiculous. Personally I would have included Fist II for my list, as this is a pretty ambitious game for its time. Even a bit of a proto Metroidvania in a way. Admittedly the game is flawed and was badly bugged at time of release but it was very atmospheric (love the music, unlike Zzap! of course) and I certainly enjoyed it quite a bit, despite its flaws. It only received 39% from Zzap! but stands at 7.7 on Lemon. There is a bug-fixed version available now anyway. Now if only someone created a version that would save your progress when praying at the shrines... (and remove the "back-kick makes you invincible" bit)
@@oldstylegaming It now can be though! 😅 If that was a known thing when Zzap! reviewed it, they may have had a point. Then they also should have given Robocop 39% or lower... 🙄
Reviews are always personal opinions and should be treated as such, but when you're a kid with limited funds, Zzap64 was our bible. I always thought "Delta" was underrated. Yes, it scored in the 70s and yes, it was a memory test in which you had to pick up the right power-ups at the right time, but so was "Nemesis" and many other shmups of the time, so it's hardly a fair criticism. It's certainly the best of the three Stavros Fasoulas games, even though both "Sanxion" and "Quedex" scored higher.
LOL, I agree with Zapp that most of the 20 are not too good. I remember buying Commando for the C64 at Adam's World in Edgeware. The music is still cool.
Just love the straightforward, bullshit-free comments and passion you show, so looking forward to that video of 'overrated' Zzap 64 games. When you think how much work these software houses put into their games, especially the small outfits, it's criminal to think that sales of decent games could be adversely affected, just because some jumped-up, little twerp took pleasure in trashing something he wasn't keen on. Nice work, OSG ;-)
I didn't agree with the 36% they gave Night Racer by Mastertronic. It's not the best driving game on the C64, but it was certainly playable and deserved a much higher score.
Great video and an interesting topic! You should do a video on the Americana budget label from US Gold/Mastertronic. They released loads of classic games (often the first time in the UK), yet most - like Moon Shuttle - got really poor reviews from Zzap64. Games like Shamus (51%), Neutral Zone (9%), Conan (32%), Scrolls of Abadon (28%), Necromancer (40%). All of the reviews seem to focus on graphics and little time on gameplay, yet it's the gameplay that brings us back to them! How many people missed out on these games because of the poor reviews?
in my country we did rely quite a bit on euro news, especially zap, for news about c64 games. having played everything on the list, none of the scores make any sense. I would have loved these games back in the day.
The reviewer said that Rogue was a Gauntlet clone? Haha. Rougue is the titular original for the entire genre of 'Roguelikes'! Now Gauntlet doesn't have procedurally generated levels, but if it did, it would be a Roguelike!
Great video again, you mention doing list of games scored far too high in ZZap 64…one that is for me top of that list is “The Eidolon”: awarded Gold Medal…and great graphics etc…but gameplay is utter tedium…
Well, you could finish it in about five minutes...so there's that. I loved what was there, but you only got a taste of the whole arcade experience, which was kinda disappointing.
Didn't see that Test Drive thing go down the way it went down.. I personally love the test drive series on C64, but don't find it has aged well. Still.. Seeing the first edition of Test Drive go down that bad... what an eye opener... Not my perspective... That shit was the best back in the day! So amazing! Why would they burn it down.. Biased to arcade racers? weird!
@old style gaming. The best thing about the British micro/games market is unlike the Americans a boy/girl could do a paper round or wash cars on a weekend and have enough money to go out and buy them for themselves filling you with a self achievement and pride, earning money and buying games that they earned and with the cheap price could amas a decent collection in a year
Test Drive had 2 big problems: 1. had to reload from tape after every stage or so. huge problem for C64 for many games of this type. 2. can't accelerate and steer at the same time. Othewise one of the best racing simulation games for the C64.
Rogue, as in Rogue-like? I get it, those games are not for everyone, but that game helped create a whole genre. Reminds me of Rolling Stone magazine dismissing Black Sabbath as a band without any merit
Love this video.....Didnt realise Commando was rated so low. I wasnt a fan of Test Drive myself but thats down to the style of the game. Catalypse just 30%???? Thats insane. Rogue is brilliant and I am happy playing it with ascii symbols. 10% suggests somebody either didnt understand the game or worse, didnt play it. How about a video of bad games that ZZap rated highly (80%+)??
Only game I'm most familiar with is Badlands and that looks like an excellent port. O_o??? Just shows negative review style has been around forever, they hear the job title as "critic" so they think they must be insanely critical. :\ I guess I sort of agree for some games with low frame rates, I'm not a fan of big HUDs but a few of those could have reduced the game window a bit to speed things up. Price is kind of hard to hinge your scores on, it's worth noting you wouldn't pay that much but you can hardly throw the whole game under the bus for that, all game titles do go on discount eventually heh. I haven't even played much Catalypse but that score was nuts "Where do they find these people?". :P I'm going to check out Terramex. :D
Great video. I still have Sabre Wulf on tape, although it wasn’t as good as the speccy one, it should have been given a better score. On the other side, Bounder was overrated for me
There was a lot of 'shenanigans' going on back in the day when it came to reviews of both software and hardware. People think it's a modern phenomenon that goes on with review sites such as IGN, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes etc, but it certainly isn't. I've seen some videos/articles about what went on, and even back then 'critics' were paid off and/or often made up reviews/scores irrespective of whether they had played the game or not.
I had Adventure Construction Set when I was younger. I got it for Christmas back in the 80s. To be honest, I didn't like it. I loved the idea of it, but the actual execution fell short in my opinion. I tried playing the example game and it was so slow that I gave up in frustration. I don't mean the story, i mean the actual speed that the game ran at. When there was more than just your character on the screen, the game slowed to a crawl. It was then that I realized that any game I made with it would be equally as slow. That alone discouraged me from even trying to make a game with it.
Excellently presented video. But most of the bad reviews come solely down to the 'horses for courses' analogy. Did people back then even spend money on games based solely on reviews? Our town video games shop would stick ANY game for you to try before you buy. Not for more than 10 minutes maybe. But you could get the gist of a game if you were worried about your hard earned 2 quid being wasted. I could name 100 games that Zzap!64 scored far too highly in my opinion, as a contrast to this video. EVERY single Jeff Minter game for starters. Rignall only liked shoot-em-ups. Penn was a grumpy arse who disliked everything it seemed by the time he finished on Zzap. (I met them both. And Minter.) The reviews were a sidebar for me in Zzap. Just there to read and do a bit of a raised eyebrow at if I'd already seen a game they reviewed. The best bits of the magazine were the letters and cheat pages in my opinion. Even the ads are a joy to look back at when I browse through my set of scans of every issue. (And I also still own the first 50 or so actual issues of the mags.)
I don't think you can judge those guys. Those games were all they had game then and we, today have the nostalgia thing. We look at pixel games and we love them all. Look at the Philips videopac. All games are squares shooting triangles and I love some of those games. Im sure if you show these games to a person that was born in the playstation era and ask them to score the games, they would score even lower. But I have to agree with you, some of those games look cool and I would play them for sure.
I remember Commando getting a rubbish review in ZZap64…and then, on a family holiday in N.Ireland, I played it on a cousin’s C64, and was blown away by how good it was!!!!… Much, much better than “Rambo” …which I’m sure ZZap gave a higher rating…
"Catalypse" has a high standard. You can compare it with "Armalyte". Okay, Armalyte has been released four years earlier. Nevertheless, i know many shooters which were really crap. "Doughboy" makes really fun for hours.
Personally, I generally agreed with the Zzap64 scores at the time but there were definitely a few that were crazy. Commando and Ninja being my personal bugbears. I think i understand their problem with Jet Set Willy 2 though, it was basically a working version of the first game with a few extra screens. Nowdays you wouldn't bat an eyelid about that 😄 They also hated games they felt were ripping off other games, Soldier one and Catalypse being the obvious examples (Beach Head and Armalyte).
Catalypse totally ripped off Armalyte but wasn't in the same league. It also ripped off the font from the title sequence of Hawkeye as well as the effect where you scroll top and bottom of the text in from opposite sides at high speed. The graphics that weren't ripped from other games were pretty iffy.
Most of these games I played in the 80's. Never bought Zzap! because it wasn't available in my town (midwest USA). I'm surprised by their rating because most of these are on my personal top 20 list as well.
I reckon the scores were low in 92 as the reviewers had probably started gaming on the 16 bit consoles and were harsher on some of the old 8 bit classics. I still give Commando an outing on occasions. Thanks for reminding me of Terramex. One I completely forgot about…
11:22 - ah, yes. The worst period of Zzap / Commodore Force. Commodore Format was a great magazine overall that sometimes had dodgy full-price reviews, but the techy part was solid, and Roger Frames had generally accurate budget reviews earlier on, but Europress's effort to turn Zzap into a bad CF ruined a great magazine. I bought both up until the end.
I agree mostly with zzap , especially about commando, test drive, wrestling, and others which I know less and I judge just from the look.Terramex and Rogue, I agree, deserved more.
When you mentioned tape long loading times, I had a PTSD flashback to Guniship from Microprose. From the time you selected the load out of your helicopter to actually starting the mission, was 46 MINUTES! Loved that game tho,
