The 20 Worst Commodore 64 Full Priced Games Ever Made! 

Great video. Back in the day when I was happy to spend £1.99 on a budget game by Mastertronic or Firebird because Zzap 64 said Rob Hubbard's music was outstanding, Thatcher's Britain was pumping out 'premium' titles from major publishers who relied upon cheap labour and often you wouldn't even get a title screen, in-game music and/or a completely broken game. I miss riding home on my bike, excited to hear Rob's latest hit - it might have cost more than a 7" single, but if the game was any good, that was a bonus (Spellbound, Soul of a Robot, Warhawk, Chimera and so many others)

The only one of these I actually bought was Double Dragon and I distinctly remember opening the box to find a slip of paper with an apology from the programmers for the state of the graphics of the characters. I should have took the hint and just put the lid back on lol

Anyone remember Cobra, the Stallone movie game from Ocean? Holy crap, was that a bad game!

System 3's Turbocharge was what the C64 Chase HQ port should have been

Listening to your Knight Rider footage, I suddenly thought “Oh, the kettle’s boiling!”

I was quite lucky when I was a kid, as i had a small independent shop near me that offered a great deal. Buy a full price game £8.99p and if you didn't like it he would exchange for another £8.99p game for an extra £1.

In fairness to Afterburner, you didn't actually do much in the arcade cabinet either

I bought Street Fighter 2 on release, thinking it was guaranteed to be incredible :(

Surprised to not see Hard Drivin' or The A Team on here - they were absolutely terrible full price games on the C64

I still cant sit down properly after Double Dragon and its been about 35 years. And now you had to go and remind me?! :D Love your content mate ;)

Absolutely can’t wait to start our stream mate, it’s gonna be a blast!! Great video as always mate

Worth watching for the immortal comment "Activision bastards!"..... Subbed.

Adding up the number of games by each company: 2:08 Mask 2 (Gremlin) 2:53 Red Heat (Ocean) 3:38 Human Killing Machine (US Gold) 4:23 Vigilante (US Gold) 5:07 Street Fighter 2 (US Gold) 5:53 Karnov (Activision) 6:36 Chase HQ (Ocean) 7:21 Double Dragon (Melbourne House) 8:06 Guerrilla War (Ocean) 8:51 Street Fighter (Go!/US Gold) 9:35 WEC Le Mans (Imagine/Ocean) 10:20 After Burner (Activision) 11:04 G-LOC (US Gold) 11:49 Big Trouble in Little China (Electric Dreams/Activision) 12:34 Crazy Cars (Titus) 13:18 Knight Rider (Ocean) 14:02 Line of Fire (US Gold) 14:47 Cisco Heat (Imageworks) 15:32 Highlander (Ocean) 16:16 Dick Tracy (Titus) And the total number of games for each company churning out this garbage: 1st equal: US Gold and Ocean (6 games each) 3rd: Activision (3 games) 4th: Titus (2 games) 5th equal: Gremlin, Melbourne House and Imageworks (1 game each) Hard Drivin' was lucky not to make this list, that's for sure! US Gold really seemed to be happy to release complete rubbish and never think of the kids buying this stuff. No wonder many people turned to piracy. Who'd want to buy a full-price game after being burnt buying anything on this list?

Gazza's Super Soccer. The back of the box listed a load of features that just didn't even exist, I assume they did in the 16-bit versions that they also showed in the box pics.

So so so many unfinished "tech demos" by coders who had just moved form basic to ASM on this list. I don't blame the coders, I blame the marketing execs for taking unfinished, unoptimized code and throwing licensed on them for quick bucks. Fantastic video as always, OSG!

With Human Killing Machine so low on the list knew we were in for a real treat. Great list and video happy I found this channel.

Love your videos OSG, keep up the good work. Looking forward to your new channel collaboration!

Looking forward to seeing you guys start up your new channel, I would have been well pissed off with some of those games bitd if I had dropped all my money into them Great video mate 👍

Thankfully the only ones I had here were Double Dragon, Cisco Heat and Street Fighter 2. Funnily enough, I had the SNES version of Street Fighter 2 before getting the C64 one… not sure what I was thinking!

I can't think for the life of me, what the back ground music is in your intro, I think Simply Austin used it too!!

I think that Street Fighter II would be difficult to reproduce even just the gameplay with just one fire button on the 🕹 joystick because how do you do a kick if the fire button is punch? Maybe press fire and point the stick down.

I had roughly half these games and I agree with you completely but, after loading up afterburner on Christmas day and seeing how terrible it was is probably what set me on the path to being such a miserable sod today!

I feel bad because I coerced my brother into buying G-LOC on the C64 because I’d played it in an arcade at Birmingham International. I felt so bad about it I gave him the money back. But he enjoyed it.

I cant believe you managed to persuade Patrick Moore to rise from the grave for this video. What a legend he was. I think street fighter was the worst game I bought on commodore but as you said, still bloody played it. Pretty sure the version i played looked very different tho! Also had double dragon but having nothing to compare it to, I didn't hate it but certainly didn't play it much

This is why two tape decks and a c120 with tape counter settings on it ruled. If it was worth it we'd buy it other than that rented from the local shop and distributed throughout school.

I still remember admiring screen captures of Shadow Warrior at the store and then being disappointed at home when game didn't look anything like it on my C64 and I thought that my game was faulty

Double Dragon actually had two ports on the C64, and both were pants

God, you've opened up some wounds with this one! Even now when me and my ZX spectrum friends banter about who's system was better. Chase HQ and Hard drivin get rubbed in my face every time!

Oi oi OSG, another great video and you got the great Gamesmaster to talk fron beyond the grave

I loved the good old days of popping into Boots and picking up a Commodore 64 game for £3.99! Had so many classics, but i never owned Street Fighter, i never knew it was on th C64 until watching this 😅 Great content as always.👍🏻

I sold my C64 in 1986 and so didn't know about many of these games. Pre 86 US Gold were a major quality label... sorry to see they went south pretty quickly...

great, funny, priceless. well done, my friend!

Great vid mate

Great stuff as always.

Noticed most of these games were dated 88/89 time, looks like the 64 port was an afterthought as evrybody was turning to the new 16bit era of computers. But i must admit i still collect these from computer fairs and on ebay just for the nostalgia.

Amazing video thanks!

Good to hear from you mate.

I have one for the ages. Magic Johnson's Basketball by Melbourne House. A utter crapfest of a basketball game where you could score by rolling the basketball under the hoop, steal the ball before the opponent could make an in-bounds pass and score again. The three point shooting percentage was way too high (I'd say around 70%). I think I paid $9.99 for that pile of garbage. I can't imagine it being released outside of the USA, so I understand why it's not here. It wasn't magic, it was tragic. Otherwise, I remember owning one or two games that made this list. Yikes. Cisco Heat looked like it was programmed as a flip book animation rather than a video game.

Ah the memories. Bought a few of these on this list, the most memorable being Knight Rider. God I was wounded....

Nice! I'm from a fairly small village in the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands. We had one store selling some C64 games at inflated prices. So pretty soon, people mysteriously found disks full of games from unknown sources. Since then, I play first, and when I like it, I buy. I only bought Rambo 2 blind (it looked cool). And despite it needing to load for 30 minutes (and sometimes fail), the game was great. But I wanted many games that then wondered by and I really didn't like. But to pay the equivalent to 40-80 euros for a game was too much for me anyway, and be disappointed like that.. Brr. I'd probably would have wanted to kill them (for real)....

The fact that Human Killing Machine was advertised as a followup to Street Fighter 1 on home computers is just insulting, as the first Street Fighter was already lame to begin with.

I had Cisco Heat😂 No idea how to stop at the stop signs

U brought back the memories of spending paper round money on x64 games i however drew a short straw and ended up with a c16

'Jailbreak', the Konami arcade game. I bought it on the C64 for £9.99. Almost 30 years later, I'm still bloody furious.

When you look at this stuff and the relative inflation, it seems that games have always been a luxury item. Its only the huge second hand market (which digital is really killing) that kept a lid on prices.

Thanks for sharing. DD did it for me: what in the heck was that transparent line along the waist of all the fighters? It screamed beta release.

Eager to watch this video. I remember some games that were $40 and I couldn't beat the first 2 of like 16 missions. Then there was Ikari Warriors which was like $45 and like 15 minutes long... I couldn't return it fast enough after beating it a second time thinking I needed to unlock more levels??

As a kid I learned pretty quick that nearly any NES game licensed from a tv / movie franchise was going to be complete garbage. Xmen is a great example....FOOL ME ONCE LJN!!!

Amusing! Enjoyed that, fortunately I didn't play any of these let alone buy them!

If by the time the Amiga is out you're not checking reviews of the c64 version before buying a game then frankly you only have yourself to blame.

I remember seeing the screenshots for SF 2 in Commodore Format at the time and I knew it was going to terrible because they just used the standard C64 char set for the text

Highlander - I had a cracked copy of this, but I couldn't play it properly, because as I recall, the cracking group cracked each level as a separate program. I forget the details because it's been close to 40 years, but I distinctly remember there being more than one part to this. Maybe the original was that way too? I have no idea. I seem to recall that there was at least one other game where they cracked it into two parts that you had to load separately.

Anyone remember the Hollywood pack? I got that for xmas around '88 or something. It had Platoon, Rambo & Miami Vice if memory serves

I didnt't even know there was a Street Fighter 2 version for C64

I'm surprised people were releasing things for the C64 in 1989 and beyond.

I had a c64 when I was a kid and it 50/50 when you bought a new game if you could even get it to load/work.

Operation Wolf 😢😮 remember buying it from WH Snith for my Birthday,wow it was bad

One of the first Atari ST games I purchased, sight unseen, here in the USA was an Import of Street Fighter. I excitedly drove back home, booted it up and never played it again. What a huge disappointment.

Brilliant list but! Where was yie At king fu 2?

Owned several of these to my shame . I rem getting Street Fighter 2 and playing Blanka and spamming electricity, then having to lie down coz my eyes hurt so much!

Only one of these i owned was SFII, which i got from a boot sale, must have been in 94 ish when i owned a SNES, but still played c64 a bit. I put a good chunk of time into it, even though it was crap.

Sadly, I had some of these :(. Fortunately I only paid for HKM (utter crap), and my copies of Chase HQ, Vigilante and Afterburner were just that - copies lol. Kudos goes to Commodore Format for their review of Cisco Heat which totally put me off buying it :)

The enemies have gone on strike 😂😂😂 im dead

There was an alternate version of street fighter 1 which was not bad at all. You had the fireball, dragon punch & spinning kick super moves. It came on the other side of the disk as the crap version in Australia. Double dragon was a massive disappointment as a kid. I think double dragon 2 was an improvement though...

Vigilante appears to be a Turkish Action Movie simulator 😂

Red Heat is absolutely the worst use of an IP ever.

thats not counting the games on Cart mate, though those only dropped if there was a sale at the shops or something like that

I feel lucky that I didn't have the bad luck to have bought the vast majority of these travesties or even played the pirated versions! I was always carefull with my hard earned dosh back then, I read multiple reviews before I parted with my cash for a new game, like you said a full price tape was a lot back then! These are all shite, it was mad how the software houses had the balls to release this kak. Hope it was as fun for you to make as it was for us to watch ;)

Smash a Rock in Red Heat? Did you never see the film you were gripping a red hot piece of coal!!

That gamesmaster AI 😅

The nostalgia. Never a major C64 gamer, always had Speccys. I and my mates were fortunate enough to have a small game store near our school, and they would have games loaded all the time, and would often load whatever you asked. They did get a fair bit of our pocket money, or paper round money as a result. But I do remember being thankful for them letting us play dogshit games so we could avoid them, and also showing us the good stuff. Chase HQ on the Speccy + was decent, Target Renegade a flipping masterpiece, but yeah the film licensees burnt a lot of kids and it's a shame because we all know these software houses were more than capable of producing great games.

Damn. Before the video I thought that Dick Tracy must be in top 3. I bought the game and after 30 years I'm still amazed how bad it was.

Does anyone know of a C64 horror themed space game where you're on a space ship fighting aliens, and on the box it advertised something like "movie style scenes" or something to that effect? I remember seeing it at Babbage's back in I think the early 1990's, but wound up buying something else instead. I went back later to find it but it was no longer in stock. I've been trying to find it ever since!

I have some nostalgic feelings for the Double Dragon C64 port! But you know a game is bad when the developers can't figure out how to make characters without a gap between sprites, and they put a lame excuse for this in the manual!

I'll own up. I bought Street Fighter 2 based on my experiences with the Coin op and fantastic SNES port. I did a 'Shut up and take my money' job before It even had a review. Talk about buyers regret.

Can't agree more, infamous games...

I never had a C64 but highlander at no 2 reminded me of Barbarian. I'm not sure about the C64 version but the latter was a decent game on the ZX

I really think Bomb Jack should have been on the list. The game was fantastic in the arcade. It was good on the Spectrum. But the C64 version ruined the gameplay completely by having bigger sprites so you couldn't fly above the enemies (see Stage 1)

How on earth did you do that patrick moore video.

RE: Chase HQ, I was so disappointed after playing it loads in the arcades all while my Speecy and Amstrad mates had it and kept saying how great it was. They soon knew how I felt after they played Buggy Boy round my house, bought it for their Spectrum and Amstrads and got a slow sluggish piece of crap, unlike the fast and fluid game I had.

Back in the day I thought that "Titus" was French for "$hite"

When the C64 version of Street Fighter 2 was first announced many people thought it wouldn't be possible...........they were right. The Big Trouble In Little China game was equally as tragic, a total tragedy. For all those affected by those terrible games - help is out there, therapists can fix us. The pain of the bad memories can be removed and replaced with happy memories.

Hmmm....what is surprising is Karnov, Guerilla War, Double Dragon and Vigilante all looked/played like pure garbage. All four games looked phenomenal and played well on the Nes/Master System. I'm also wondering if this was a budget thing? Were these games bad because the publishers went super cheap? I'm guessing that I am dead on the money, and here's why I say this... you show the prices for these games as 12.99 pounds. That's ridiculously cheap compared to what we paid for games. Budget titles started at $29.96, with full priced ones hitting between $49.96 to $69.96 American. I got my Nes and Master System in 1986, so I was definitely gaming during this time. Cool video. Addendum- Holy sh*t is that scaling on the C64 (Line of Fire)?! No way! The game might be terrible but that effect is eye-opening for the time. Wow.

I remember being furious at playing Double Dragon on my C64. Absolute tosh!

I rarely bough full price. I was a code masters or master tropic kid usually. One of the few full price Ocean games I bought was Untouchables. Didnt enjoy that. Especially at £9.99. I had Double Dragon on compilation with Dynamite Dux. Both suckeD. The PC version of Street fighter was as bad as the C64 version. I never had crazy cars on C64 but enjoyed crazy cars II on PC. That was a good driving game. Real sense of speed.

There's a couple I would disagree with, but then I guess that's me justifying the time I put into them. The interesting bit about Street Fighter is that US Gold put the UK version (developed by Tiertex) and the US version (Capcom USA) onto the same tape/disk. They took different approaches - Tiertex went for big, blocky graphics and scrolling backgrounds, whereas Capcom USA used overlaid sprites to give more detail and had narrower, smaller background strips. Both are flawed in terms of gameplay, but I marginally prefer the US version. Indeed, I have been thinking a lot about bad games recently as I have been writing a new book - C64 NIGHTMARES, for Fusion Retro Books, as a follow-up to Graeme Mason's ZX NIGHTMARES released last year. That's over 100 terrible C64 games (split into Loathsome Licenses, They Did What, Patience of a Saint, and Simply Awful chapters). Coming soon!

There is an ocean release of double.dragon. Is this one the one released be mastertronic? I guess a budget re release of the melborne house one? The ocean one wasnt great but was better than the one on here and at least has the right music.

awesome thank you

Magazine reviews were a thing you know. I got a Speccy+2 for Christmas 1986 and the first game I bought was Dragons Lair. It had pictures from the arcade game on the back and me being a young idiot didn't know any better. I learned quick though. Generally if a game was based on a license it would be crap.

Luckily I only had afterburner on this list, although I wasn`t that lucky, the game was crap from start to never reached end. No skill involved, just random joystick rotation. The box art was EXCELLENT!

I have PTSD from that Double Dragon port. I just couldn't believe it. Like yourself DD was so amazing to me andy gateway into loving arcade games. It was god awful and i realised thay day that id never be able to play the arcade game at home.... Thank goodness for Mame and Playstation store. Its helped with the childhood trauma haha😅

I’m still scarred by full price Final Fight 😢

I had hundreds of games, most of those mentioned here... But only paid for one... Nz story... The red cartridge add on was worth its weight in gold, allowed seemless easy copying and cracked all pass codes.

Karnov was an insult to the C64, they even copied the colour-clash from the spectrum 😦

I remember playing the crap out of Human Killing Machine.

I remember my friend buying Street Fighter one Saturday in Boots and me asking to borrow it some time, expecting to wait at least a week or two before he got tired of playing it. He dropped it round that same afternoon and I couldn't believe my luck... until I loaded it up. When you load a C64 game up for the first time and see that horrible generic boot-up screen Commodore font being used for the hi-score text, and it has about 10 zeros in it that never get used, you just know right away that it's going to be shit. And it was. I mean, using the same background colours as the main sprite... come on FFS!

I was disapounted with Teenage Mutant Turtles on the C64 because it was nothing like the arcade and I didnt like The Untouchables by Ocean.

Final Fight really really hurt

Part of me feels glad that I couldn't afford them at the time

Too bad Double Dragon was so bad, because the title music was BANGIN.