A little background info on the A-Team: Courbois Software was a Dutch company mostly known for their copy parties and meatballs. Once every month they rented a place where C64 users could bring their computer with them and share all the latest games and software. Doesn't sound very legal, but back then... no one cared :) They made a lot of software/games too... all with similar quality to The A-team. At those parties they would also sell their own home made meatballs... and that's what I remember them for: copy parties and meatballs.
Yes, the game was essentially an unofficial A-Team game. It was a mail order game only, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of their games were also pirated games that were made by other people first, so I wouldn't exactly call them original. Most of them were games they translated into Dutch that were originally released in other regions. German games were their biggest target.
This makes sense to me. As I never bought that A-Team was ever meant to be retail. It always seemed like someone's dare after a night of binge drinking and a half day of programming. Four sprites that some knowledgeable programming could do in BASIC and a Star Wars SID? Makes that Top Gun by Ocean look like a legit game. And that thing was pushed out the door as soon as it was certified to fly.
One of your funniest so far. Best bit was Dick Tracy, "The graphics are so bad you can't even see your bollocks". Then, sadly, I realised I'd misheard...bullets.
For those that aren't aware, the awesome Cobra music was a cover of "Skyline" that never made it into the movie. You can find it on UA-cam and it's a great song.
@@Simon0 It actually was not an officially licensed game. It was created by a Dutch piracy group and sold as mail order only, do most people who did have it either had it from them or got it through some bbs
thanks for reminding me that back in the day there really were some shocking C64 games. I can still recall the dissappointment when I spent my pocket money on bionic granny and loaded it up !
The only thing decent about Bionic Granny was the art on the cover. I've played type-ins....IN BASIC at that, that were much more polished than that piece of crap
Now, if they'd have marketed Hard Drivin' as a "Driving sim without wheels" it could have been a staggering success, because in that sense it is very realistic.
1:35 Fun fact: Beverly Hills Cop was originally meant to be more of an action movie, and Sylvester Stallone was meant to star in it, but for some reason that deal fell through. Eddie Murphy was then signed on and the movie was given a lot more comedy elements. But then a few years later a modified Beverly Hills Cop script became Cobra, starring Stallone. And you can even spot the similarities if you know to pay attention.
Bought A-team as I was a huge fan of the show. I cried for days.... worst yet I tried to return it and they refused. I was stuck with it. Funny enough, taped The Great Giana Sisters over it!!😄😄
I could add another few games to this list for sure! Black Knight (by Interdisc), was pathetic, the Melbourne House version of Double Dragon, Arnie 2, The Running Man, Red Heat, Cisco Heat, G-Loc, they were all just craptacular.
Both ports of Double Dragon would make my list. Both of them were hot garbage. The only good thing about the Ocean version was the music, so at least it had that going for it.
@@scottbreon9448 Agree, Double dragon was so hyped and I played it a lot at the arcades. I loved it. When I bougth it on day one to the C64 it was like getting punch in the stomach. Breathlessly bad.
Strike! hurts my brain. How did it ever occur to a professional programmer to create a bowling game that puts the player into the position of maneuvering his avatar looking down at him from the ceiling to his rear right side? Why did the pins have to be shown in a separate window in the upper left-hand corner of the screen? Is that a scoreboard at the bottom? How do you screw up a game based on a such a simple concept as rolling a ball in a straight line?
ok, but Chase H.q. should deserve a mention, one of the worst scams for the many fans of the original arcade game who relied on the high-sounding name of the Ocean publisher and were made fun of. Ocean should have apologized to buyers for paying for that crappy Spectrum conversion abomination
As bad a Chase H.Q. was, I actually think Cisco Heat was even worse, and that's saying a lot. At least Chase H.Q. had decent music. That's the only positive thing I could say about the game, however. Cisco Heat was on a whole other level of shit and had NO redeeming qualities at all. And don't get me started on that GOD AWFUL conversion of Super Hang-On.
I remember when my friend brought Hard Drivin' round to my house and he told me it was a fun driving game. I remember trying to play it but kept getting stuck at the very start by driving into a house. When I complained to my friend, he informed me that it wasn't a house I was driving in to, but another car. "Oh..." I recall saying. I tried occassionally to play it, but 2 or 3 fps is simply unplayable for a driving game.
The A-Team was not an officially licensed game. It was actually created by Courbois Software, a notorious Dutch piracy group that basically took other people's games without their permission and sold them as their own.
Jesus OSG some of those truly were crap, some of them looked like the games you would spend all night typing the text in from a book only to spend another day trying to debug it ! The A-Team looked like it was laden with bugs.
I absolutely love your honesty and videos! I wish we could go back in time and have you as a Zzap reviewer, I would have trusted your opinion. Please keep doing your excellent work!
Mate, you have me laughing all the way through your videos, I absolutely love your narrative, and nobody swears as good as you do, it really seems to mean something when you do it! Fantastic work my friend and very true from what I can remember.
I can't believe that ObscurPrima says that One Bite Too Deep is a misunderstood, fun game which is a lie as they sometimes have poor tastes in video games and ZZAP was right about this game for once.
OK here's a fun fact...Artura was originally planned as a tie in with the Masters of the Universe film but Gremlin lost the licence so the game was totally changed after about 25% of it was complete. They still wanted it finished in 12 weeks though...
I just noticed that three of the games from this list were all essentially made by the SAME company. Trigger Happy was made by CRL, but Robobolt and Jet Strike Mission were published by Alpha Omega Software... Alpha Omega was CRL's budget label. They always put what they deemed not good enough to make their main label onto either their Alpha Omega, or The Power House labels (another label owned by CRL). CRL were known for their terrible and mediocre games back then. Only CRL games I like is Tau Ceti (primarily the Spectrum version though), and Formula 1 on the Speccy and Amstrad. What's funny is that they deemed Trigger Happy good enough to make their main label. LOL.
Great list! Thank you. My buddy and I actually loved Karnov when we got it. In its defense, we never knew it was an arcade port so we didn't have higher hopes or expectations for it. We enjoyed it. I don't think we ever beat it.
I wasn’t surprised to see Hard Drivin’, but I was surprised to see it so high. Man there were some crap games that got released on C64. I think the biggest surprise for me is A-Team. I’ve seen it before, but I never realized it was an actual commercial release. It just looked like such garbage I assumed some hobbyist programed it and released it into the wild.
It was, but it was technically homebrew. It was made by a notorious Dutch piracy/public domain group. It was not an officially licensed game. It was mail order only. The fact that they even charged for it at all speaks volumes about their ethics, and how much they cared about their customers.
Courbois was a Dutch software company that published software for a.o. C64, Atari 8-bit, C16, Amiga and many others. They only sold their software by mail and at shows. It was not a very professional company, they used for example normal retail audio cassettes from various brands and their covers were simple photocopies. Their products are more like home made items in stead of a professional manufactured product. Many of their releases were "stolen" type in listings from international magazines, sometimes translated into Dutch, and they added their own copyright notice..... . I would not be surprised if they did not have an official license to use the name "The A-team".
Yeah, their games were early examples of homebrew games pretty much, NOT good homebrew games mind you, but homebrew nonetheless. A lot of their games were also PIRATED games from Germany and other countries as well. They basically took games originally developed in Germany and translated them into Dutch, and English without the original developer's consent.
Good video. Haha you mentioned putting tape over the holes of the cassette to tape over it. That's a blast from the past. Another attrocious game was Bosconian87. Totally broken and unplayable.
1:08: Oh god, Cobra on the C64! The other games on this list I never played, most I never even heard of, but Cobra I played way too much when I was a kid. My brothers even got it original on disk when it was released, I must've been 7 or 8. The graphical glitches and frustrating gameplay was apparent to me even then, but I still played it. I recall that the difficulty curve was uneven too, so once I struggled though the first part some of the later areas were a breeze, though I might have just gotten the hang of it then.
I think #1 could've gone to Ocean's Robocop, because to my knowledge, the C64 literally cannot be completed because it bugs out in or after Level 3? And that was intentional since the game was unfinished and shipped anyway?
To be honest, I thought the original Strider was pretty shit on the C64 too, but Strider 2 takes the cake. But then again, Strider 2 was pretty much shit on every platform IMHO. It's not even an official sequel by rights.
Oh god, Dick Tracy. I think I must have blocked out that game from my mind all these years to protect my sanity. I really couldn't remember how bad that was until confronted with it again now. The horror! I remember being in a video game store at my local shopping centre looking for a good expensive game to buy with my pocket money one Saturday in 1990. Unfortunately out of all of the great C64 games available that day, 12 year old me bought that shite! Expensive Dick Tracy was, good it most certainly was not. It came in one of those nice cardboard box type cases, the case looked great, the game was a steaming turd. Just look at those graphics!! 🤢🤢
I am shocked!!!! I genuinely can’t believe that A, I didn’t know there was ever a c64 ‘A Team’ game, and B, that it was really that atrocious. Thanks for the video and the work you out into it.
On the subject of games that should be considered for the list, I'd like to nominate the Mastertronic port of Double Dragon and both ports of Street Fighter (the Tiertex version is especially awful).
BOTH OF THEM at that. There were two conversions of Double Dragon on the C64, and they BOTH sucked. The Ocean version at least had good music, but that's the only positive thing about it
I remember most of them. However, obviously in my opinion, Cobra and Gazza were not so bad to end in the bottom of the worst games... The others.... I hated bionic granny a lot!
I must have been posh I used blutac to fill the holes as tape sometimes peeled off and got stuck in the tape machine. I must admit these sorts of games (not just C64) sort of vindicate all the software piracy I did - because if i liked the game I bought the "original" and started collect "originals".
Yes some of those brings back memories. But for me the worst C64 game was Super Hang On, I was so looking forward to that and when I finally got it, I nearly fell off my chair at how bad it was, truly disastrous.
Gazza was clearly just a forward thinking individual who wanted a game with his name on that would best represent his skills in 2022. For that the game should be celebrated as a massive success.
I appreciate the sheer commitment in doing this list, the worst C64 games are really some of the worst games EVER made on any platform (only the Atari era consoles and some other micro computers can come close), there are no modern games that can reach this level of absymal...I remember buying Dick Tracy as a kid and pretending it was decent...but it wasn't: screen after screen of tedium will end inexorably in a game over screen. It's so bad in fact, that if you don't rewind the tape to play again (why you would do that, anyway) but keep loading on, you'll reach the final screen without any way of playing it, it will be only the background, the music and no way of quitting, unless you turn off the computer. Forever.
Great video. But so very surprised and shocked that Big Trouble in Little China isn't on this list. I loved the film, so I bought the full-price game for my C64. It was dogshit. In a hat. That you put on your head.
Striker was one of the games I was most jealous of my amstrad winning friends as a kid, cos it wasn't on the speccy as far as I was aware. Unique game for the time as u play as one player instead of the whole team. Bit harsh to be on this list imo. Good watch this vid though.
It's really weird to me to see what is clearly a stepping stone between those first consoles like Atari VCS, colecovision etc. and Nintendo, sms etc. We didn't have widespread computer gaming obviously during the crash in the us. I got a c64 later but I'm ashamed to say I just played the same stuff I was playing on consoles. I remember loving Commando on c64. I wish I'd been a little more adventurous. Literally the only non-us popular game I remember on c64 was some sort of isometric view motorcycle game that I don't think had any actual point to it, you just rode around a town until you ran out of gas. I was fascinated with the idea that I was just supposed to zoom around without any overarching story or goal. I played a ton of that. I'd love to play that again if it sounds familiar to anyone!
Certainly sounds like Action Biker, but there definitely was a point to it. Drive around looking for flashing objects, these can be almost anywhere in the town, Drive over them to pick them up, some of them upgrade your bike with better brakes, higher speed etc. The idea is that once you've collected all the items, you then get to enter a race. Drive to the petrol (gas) station, stop near the pump and you'll get your bike topped up with fuel. Just about the best £2 I've ever spent.
You know your first computer is an Amstrad CPC464 when every game on this list looks good and plays well 😂, mind you, I'd have not traded my Amstrad for a C64 EVER... There's more to a computer than games. I'm in Australia, the most expensive game I ever bought on the Amstrad was WAY OF THE TIGER at $49.95 AU which was a fortune back in the day.. Budget games were $9.95, full priced were $19.95 mostly, maybe $25.00. Though I think the most expensive CPC program I ever bought was probably GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) which I never did anything with 😂 All in all, I bought over 500 games or programs and finished two of them without cheating (not including Adventure games)
Domestic Dog Simulator on Steam gives me the vibes of C64 Speccy era. What am I doing, what is this game, what are my goals, haven't got the faintest but it touches me old heart.
And I must add, I really feel for all those hopeful youngsters who bought some of these so called games back in the day.. my loord must have been sooo disappointing.. 😔😞😔
It wasn't really, I mean it was, but it's the early to late 80s, what else were you going to compare it to. I mean I bought over 500 games on my Amstrad, and I hated 80s games, I STILL hate 80s games. They're hard and unforgiving, anybody that completed Manic Miner on 3 lives deserves a bloody medal. The people that had the patience to finish Sorcery+ should have been drafted into the army. In fact the movie THE LAST STAR FIGHTER had the right idea, these games were tremendously hard... But it's all we knew. You can look back now and say wow that's a crap game and it's really hard, but compared to what.. All the other crap really hard games. Go play Ghost N' Goblins. Games nowadays are soooooo much easier, they're way more accessible thanks to checkpoints, save games etc. I bought games with the pure intention of cracking their copy protection on disc or tape, if I bought a game with no copy protection I felt robbed 😂
@@jonh404 well, I remember the good games, which there were plenty of and I always compared the really bad ones to those. I mean i still to this day love: Commando, Ikari Warriors, Platoon, Combat School, Giana Sisters, Delta, I.O, 1942, Out Run (really loved the c64 version) Rambo First Blood and of course the Last Ninja I and II and the list goes on and on... so yes I still feel sorry for those who used money on these games...
@@roartjrhom4932 definitely my outlook on these games is coloured by how hard I found them. I didn't hate them because of how they looked, it was pretty normal to not expect ground breaking graphics between genes of games on the same platform or even other platforms. The Amstrad, C64, speccy... We all had to live with the technology we got, you suddenly weren't going to get a game that looked like PS2 God of War on the C64, you sort of knew where you stood. It's definitely how difficult with the 3 lives games were , the overly difficulty levels that's coloured my viewpoint.. But I always love hearing other people's experiences. Oh and AGE is also a factor, I think the older you were, hahaha probably the worse you were at games and you might have had higher expectations and I was 17 when I got my Amstrad.
@@roartjrhom4932 Hahahahaha Outrun, go play the Amstrad version, it's an embarrassing mess, it's not even finished. But then flip the coin and play Chase HQ On the C64 and prepare to be meh'd, but be prepared to be amazed at the Amstrad version.
@@jonh404 yes that is true, sometime the Speccy got the best, other times the Amstrad version but mostly the C64 was best of course! :-P ;-) Have a nice weekend.
I'm glad I never played any of these, but Jet Strike Mission does look vaguely interesting to me simply because it has pure PETSCII graphics. Looks like it could have been easily ported to a few game-deprived Commodore computers such as the Plus/4 and PET. Okay, the game sucks, but a modern game vaguely inspired by it could be cool. PETSCII graphics were rightfully looked down upon back then, but it's a bit trendy nowadays.
all the games that you showed were utter crap , the companies should be sued for the utter crap that was allowed to be put on the shelves to be bought with the hard earned pocket money , how the hell did they get away with it ,
Cobra on the spectrum is great, it’s by a well known programmer whose name has totally slipped my mind. It seems to run at twice the speed of this c64 version
Cobra on the Spectrum was by the late, great Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith and it was a very different game from the C64 version, with parallax scrolling & lots of sprites moving at a fair old clip.
There surely was a lot of crap on c64, some games I remember u didn't mention here, mr wino, spitting images, HKM (probably the shittiest beat'em up ever), peter beardsley soccer (much worse than gazza imho). Anyway thanks for teach me about a-team I didn't know it was such a crap, I remember having it but never actually tried it.
I miss Jungle story, the bad version of Ikari Warriors, Knight Rider, After Burner, Airwolf 2, Ninja Master, Dancing Monster, Bath Time to name a few... But there are indeed so many horrendous games for the C64 so... You'd have to make a 100 list at least to cover the most important ones.
I think these all passed me by, probably I'd moved on to the Amiga by the time most of them came out. Except for Bionic Granny, which I seem to recall as being one of Mastertronic's first £1.99 games.
No it wasn't. It was only released via mail order. The Big 100 had totally different games. As shown on the boxart on mobygames. It was an early example of shareware
Awesome vid OSG. Just wondering why games were about £5 more on disk. Surely a blank disk didn't cost a fiver. Was it because you are rich enough to own a disk drive, we are going to gouge you?
@@oldstylegaming wasn't it due to the installed user base of disk drive owners, far less than cassette deck owners? 🤔 Unlike the Cart and Disk driven USA, we loved our cheap cassette games.
I think the only one I owned was Artura, which I think I actually got from a magazine cover tape. The game was pretty awful, though I must confess that I did boot it from time to time just to listen to the in-game music. 😆
I was a Spectrum kid back in the 80's, but my sister's ex did have a Commodore 64 that I got to play on a few times. One of the games he had was called "Dark Star"... which I think should have gotten a mention on this list. This was a rip-off of the Star Wars' Death Star trench run, from a top-down perspective with the action scrolling down towards your ship. You had to contend with random space craft flying down the trench at you and sentries on the side of the trench firing at you. What made it awful was that the trench wasn't a long straight - sometimes it would fork into two or three routes and sometimes a route would lead straight to a dead end, resulting in unavoidable death. And the real kicker? You only had ONE LIFE!! So once you die, it's back to the start you go to try again.
Cisco heat and super hang on,they were the worst I ever played on my c64 back then,I remember buying cisco heat as it looked good tho it had the amiga n atari st graphics on the back,when playing it I was like what is this awful piece of shit? Lol,same with super hang on with the very slow choppy graphics and awful sound effects especially when cornering lol
When you have two racing games that actually make Chase H.Q. look impressive in comparison, you know you've got issues. Seriously, as bad as Chase H.Q. was, those two games were even worse. Cisco Heat especially. At least both Chase H.Q. and Super Hang-On had decent music going for it. Cisco heat had no redeeming qualities at all.
I would have at least forgiven Robobolt if it was a type-in. It sure looked type-inish to me. But this was a commercial release, WTF were they thinking...oh yeah, more $. Greedy bastards
There were some dreadful games and I had plenty of them. I still have them all and must look out some of the really bad ones. Games crashing while loading were frustrating too but glad I was around during this gaming period.
My worst game on the spectrum was Transylvanian Tower by Richard Shepard Software. The C64 version was slightly more playable, but still not that good. It was written in BASIC. I was surprised not to see Chase HQ on your list.
The A-Team is not only crap, it's also one of the universe biggest mysteries. I mean, it has the Star Wars music and apart from the character names, what's the realtion to the TV series? Why don't you play the A-Team? Why did anyone think this was a good way to cash in on the license? It seems like a quick type in game from a magazine. I persoanlly bought Ferrari Formula One. There is a LOT in in this game, except SPEED. The driving is so slow, it's only and real challenge is just staying on the road. Racing is about getting the right lines, pushing the limits, being on the edge. FF1 has no sense of speed, you have absolutely no feeling with the car or road.
Having played A-Team totally agree with this pos and having bought Cobra back in the day it's like we were robbed, seen alot of crap games on c64 but in saying that the C64 games library is pretty massive
In a sense, "Dick Tracy" for the Commodore 64 was very realistic, even ahead of it's time. After all, in real life when you fire a gun, you can't see your bullets. 😁
I find videos like this a bit disingenuous sometimes. I think certainly in the UK most kids weren't going out weekly and spending their pocket money / paper round money on full price games. We all knew the gaming mags were full of shit too. You were more likely to come across the games in this video on a tape you'd copy from a mate with 20 or so games on it. This was also part of the reason budget games did so well, and why we have classics like the Dizzy series, affordable and fun, and you weren't breaking the bank if you bought a crappy budget game. Like a game on this list, Striker, budget game, but actually a decent game for the money certainly not even in the top 100 of worst ever games on the system, that is absolute bullshit.
@@oldstylegaming I think they were trying to create Gods before it existed, but somebody knocked a mug of coffee over the design docs, which also splashed onto the graphics artist's computer, scrambling the order of the animation frames so all the characters look like they're having seizures. It's the most reasonable conclusion I can come up with.
Not sure how true it is, but I read somewhere that the 'Highlander' game was deliberately sabotaged by the creators because they realised too late that, with the licensing deal they rushed into, that they actually stood to lose a ton of money if the game became popular - by making it so bad, the negative reviews it got would scare people away from buying it, thus preventing them from going bankrupt. If true, that has to be one of the weirdest tales in computer gaming ever 😄
Other than the music, Cobra on the C64 was complete shit. Hell, I would have been happier getting a direct conversion of the Spectrum game, at least that game was actually good.
Well, I don't think that any of the Courbois Software games were officially licensed. So, that A-Team game exists but I highly doubt it was available in stores...
Interesting list,didn’t play any of these at the time, being a console user; thank God I didn’t! I like how put the prices in the corner, gives you some idea.
Here's an honorable mention; Jesse James. The game is a black screen with a character, which I assume is Jesse, in the center who is pleasuring himself. The faster you wiggle the joystick, the faster Jesse finishes. Truly hot garbage.
A little background info on the A-Team:
Courbois Software was a Dutch company mostly known for their copy parties and meatballs. Once every month they rented a place where C64 users could bring their computer with them and share all the latest games and software. Doesn't sound very legal, but back then... no one cared :)
They made a lot of software/games too... all with similar quality to The A-team.
At those parties they would also sell their own home made meatballs... and that's what I remember them for: copy parties and meatballs.
Yes, the game was essentially an unofficial A-Team game. It was a mail order game only, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of their games were also pirated games that were made by other people first, so I wouldn't exactly call them original. Most of them were games they translated into Dutch that were originally released in other regions. German games were their biggest target.
This makes sense to me. As I never bought that A-Team was ever meant to be retail. It always seemed like someone's dare after a night of binge drinking and a half day of programming. Four sprites that some knowledgeable programming could do in BASIC and a Star Wars SID? Makes that Top Gun by Ocean look like a legit game. And that thing was pushed out the door as soon as it was certified to fly.
One of your funniest so far. Best bit was Dick Tracy, "The graphics are so bad you can't even see your bollocks". Then, sadly, I realised I'd misheard...bullets.
Lol
For those that aren't aware, the awesome Cobra music was a cover of "Skyline" that never made it into the movie. You can find it on UA-cam and it's a great song.
It's actually on the movie soundtrack on CD.
I Pity the Fool (who brought that A-team game).
That game is truly terrible 🤣
Marketing team, “Replace Space Invaders with faces of the A-team and we’re onto a winner!” 🤦🏻♂️
@@Simon0 It actually was not an officially licensed game. It was created by a Dutch piracy group and sold as mail order only, do most people who did have it either had it from them or got it through some bbs
@@scottbreon9448 thanks for the info. Luckily I avoided this game 🙂
thanks for reminding me that back in the day there really were some shocking C64 games. I can still recall the dissappointment when I spent my pocket money on bionic granny and loaded it up !
The only thing decent about Bionic Granny was the art on the cover. I've played type-ins....IN BASIC at that, that were much more polished than that piece of crap
Now, if they'd have marketed Hard Drivin' as a "Driving sim without wheels" it could have been a staggering success, because in that sense it is very realistic.
Lol
Hard Drivin'? More like, Hardly Drivin'
I remember reading a review which said "moves about as fast as Freescape", which really made me laugh.
1:35 Fun fact:
Beverly Hills Cop was originally meant to be more of an action movie, and Sylvester Stallone was meant to star in it, but for some reason that deal fell through.
Eddie Murphy was then signed on and the movie was given a lot more comedy elements. But then a few years later a modified Beverly Hills Cop script became Cobra, starring Stallone. And you can even spot the similarities if you know to pay attention.
I knew some of that but not that it became cobra.... thank god he pulled out cos bev cop is one of my favourite movies ever
I'm honestly surprised that "Attack Of The Phantom Karate Devils" was not on the list.
I think that was only released in the US
Yeah that was absolutely terrible, it's like you got electrified when hit with ninja stars lol !
Bought A-team as I was a huge fan of the show. I cried for days.... worst yet I tried to return it and they refused. I was stuck with it. Funny enough, taped The Great Giana Sisters over it!!😄😄
Can you remember the price of it?
@@oldstylegaming yes, it was 10.99$
@@remistuczynski2768 10 dollars would be like 5 pounds.
I could add another few games to this list for sure! Black Knight (by Interdisc), was pathetic, the Melbourne House version of Double Dragon, Arnie 2, The Running Man, Red Heat, Cisco Heat, G-Loc, they were all just craptacular.
arnie 2 wasn't crap
Both ports of Double Dragon would make my list. Both of them were hot garbage. The only good thing about the Ocean version was the music, so at least it had that going for it.
@@scottbreon9448 Agree, Double dragon was so hyped and I played it a lot at the arcades. I loved it. When I bougth it on day one to the C64 it was like getting punch in the stomach. Breathlessly bad.
Strike! hurts my brain. How did it ever occur to a professional programmer to create a bowling game that puts the player into the position of maneuvering his avatar looking down at him from the ceiling to his rear right side? Why did the pins have to be shown in a separate window in the upper left-hand corner of the screen? Is that a scoreboard at the bottom?
How do you screw up a game based on a such a simple concept as rolling a ball in a straight line?
Damn you beat me to the covering the tape holes and recording over idea 😆
ok, but Chase H.q. should deserve a mention, one of the worst scams for the many fans of the original arcade game who relied on the high-sounding name of the Ocean publisher and were made fun of.
Ocean should have apologized to buyers for paying for that crappy Spectrum conversion abomination
As bad a Chase H.Q. was, I actually think Cisco Heat was even worse, and that's saying a lot. At least Chase H.Q. had decent music. That's the only positive thing I could say about the game, however. Cisco Heat was on a whole other level of shit and had NO redeeming qualities at all.
And don't get me started on that GOD AWFUL conversion of Super Hang-On.
I love your blunt honesty. Straight to the point and doesn't f**k around about it. Congrats. You got a sub here
Thanks mate
I remember when my friend brought Hard Drivin' round to my house and he told me it was a fun driving game. I remember trying to play it but kept getting stuck at the very start by driving into a house. When I complained to my friend, he informed me that it wasn't a house I was driving in to, but another car. "Oh..." I recall saying. I tried occassionally to play it, but 2 or 3 fps is simply unplayable for a driving game.
The A-Team was not an officially licensed game. It was actually created by Courbois Software, a notorious Dutch piracy group that basically took other people's games without their permission and sold them as their own.
Jesus OSG some of those truly were crap, some of them looked like the games you would spend all night typing the text in from a book only to spend another day trying to debug it ! The A-Team looked like it was laden with bugs.
The sound effects of Roboball are the greatest sound design of any game ever haha!
I absolutely love your honesty and videos! I wish we could go back in time and have you as a Zzap reviewer, I would have trusted your opinion. Please keep doing your excellent work!
I think zzap has made a comeback
@@oldstylegaming It's very different nowdays unfortunately. You would have been perfect for the 80's version.
Mate, you have me laughing all the way through your videos, I absolutely love your narrative, and nobody swears as good as you do, it really seems to mean something when you do it! Fantastic work my friend and very true from what I can remember.
I can't believe that ObscurPrima says that One Bite Too Deep is a misunderstood, fun game which is a lie as they sometimes have poor tastes in video games and ZZAP was right about this game for once.
OK here's a fun fact...Artura was originally planned as a tie in with the Masters of the Universe film but Gremlin lost the licence so the game was totally changed after about 25% of it was complete. They still wanted it finished in 12 weeks though...
I just noticed that three of the games from this list were all essentially made by the SAME company. Trigger Happy was made by CRL, but Robobolt and Jet Strike Mission were published by Alpha Omega Software... Alpha Omega was CRL's budget label. They always put what they deemed not good enough to make their main label onto either their Alpha Omega, or The Power House labels (another label owned by CRL). CRL were known for their terrible and mediocre games back then. Only CRL games I like is Tau Ceti (primarily the Spectrum version though), and Formula 1 on the Speccy and Amstrad. What's funny is that they deemed Trigger Happy good enough to make their main label. LOL.
Great list! Thank you. My buddy and I actually loved Karnov when we got it. In its defense, we never knew it was an arcade port so we didn't have higher hopes or expectations for it. We enjoyed it. I don't think we ever beat it.
I wasn’t surprised to see Hard Drivin’, but I was surprised to see it so high. Man there were some crap games that got released on C64.
I think the biggest surprise for me is A-Team. I’ve seen it before, but I never realized it was an actual commercial release. It just looked like such garbage I assumed some hobbyist programed it and released it into the wild.
It was, but it was technically homebrew. It was made by a notorious Dutch piracy/public domain group. It was not an officially licensed game. It was mail order only. The fact that they even charged for it at all speaks volumes about their ethics, and how much they cared about their customers.
Courbois was a Dutch software company that published software for a.o. C64, Atari 8-bit, C16, Amiga and many others. They only sold their software by mail and at shows. It was not a very professional company, they used for example normal retail audio cassettes from various brands and their covers were simple photocopies. Their products are more like home made items in stead of a professional manufactured product. Many of their releases were "stolen" type in listings from international magazines, sometimes translated into Dutch, and they added their own copyright notice..... . I would not be surprised if they did not have an official license to use the name "The A-team".
Yeah, their games were early examples of homebrew games pretty much, NOT good homebrew games mind you, but homebrew nonetheless. A lot of their games were also PIRATED games from Germany and other countries as well. They basically took games originally developed in Germany and translated them into Dutch, and English without the original developer's consent.
Good video. Haha you mentioned putting tape over the holes of the cassette to tape over it. That's a blast from the past.
Another attrocious game was Bosconian87. Totally broken and unplayable.
1:08: Oh god, Cobra on the C64! The other games on this list I never played, most I never even heard of, but Cobra I played way too much when I was a kid. My brothers even got it original on disk when it was released, I must've been 7 or 8. The graphical glitches and frustrating gameplay was apparent to me even then, but I still played it. I recall that the difficulty curve was uneven too, so once I struggled though the first part some of the later areas were a breeze, though I might have just gotten the hang of it then.
LOL i love the commentary OSG and you are angry AF it is great stuff.
I think #1 could've gone to Ocean's Robocop, because to my knowledge, the C64 literally cannot be completed because it bugs out in or after Level 3? And that was intentional since the game was unfinished and shipped anyway?
I liked the music in the robocop game. But yeah the glitch on that level was really sh!thouse
Luckily some sceners fixed the bug a few years back
You missed out Final Fight & Strider 2, both complete shite which I remember paying full price for back in the day.
Great video as always though.
To be honest, I thought the original Strider was pretty shit on the C64 too, but Strider 2 takes the cake. But then again, Strider 2 was pretty much shit on every platform IMHO. It's not even an official sequel by rights.
Oh god, Dick Tracy. I think I must have blocked out that game from my mind all these years to protect my sanity. I really couldn't remember how bad that was until confronted with it again now. The horror! I remember being in a video game store at my local shopping centre looking for a good expensive game to buy with my pocket money one Saturday in 1990. Unfortunately out of all of the great C64 games available that day, 12 year old me bought that shite!
Expensive Dick Tracy was, good it most certainly was not. It came in one of those nice cardboard box type cases, the case looked great, the game was a steaming turd. Just look at those graphics!! 🤢🤢
Dick Tracy had a nice game (not exceptional, but ok) on Megadrive
@@fulgenzio1973 I agree, it was pretty neat on the Mega Drive. In fact it was the 2nd or third game I played on my MD, Christmas day 1991.
Karnov is spectacularly bad, amazing that there are 18 games that are worse.
Believe me i played karnov nearly last while getting footage and some games make karnov look half decent
I shudder to think how much money I wasted on games (C64 and Amiga) back in the day. As you say, plenty of blank tapes.
I am shocked!!!!
I genuinely can’t believe that A, I didn’t know there was ever a c64 ‘A Team’ game, and B, that it was really that atrocious.
Thanks for the video and the work you out into it.
it wasn't an official game, it was homebrew shareware made by a notorious Dutch cracking/piracy group
Hilarious- thanks ! 😀 The A-team does look shocking!
On the subject of games that should be considered for the list, I'd like to nominate the Mastertronic port of Double Dragon and both ports of Street Fighter (the Tiertex version is especially awful).
I'm going to use creme de la crap at work tomorrow :) 😃
Lol do it
@@oldstylegaming first team meeting of the day...
"Reports are coming in that you lot are the creme de la crap"
Hilarious episode! Thank you. Though the games are crap, the video was very entertaining. 😂🎉😉
Thanks mate
The C64 conversion of Double Dragon was awful.
BOTH OF THEM at that. There were two conversions of Double Dragon on the C64, and they BOTH sucked. The Ocean version at least had good music, but that's the only positive thing about it
I remember most of them. However, obviously in my opinion, Cobra and Gazza were not so bad to end in the bottom of the worst games... The others.... I hated bionic granny a lot!
Great channel. Been binging the content. Was afraid some C64 game I liked would be on here, but I was unfamiliar with all of them.
That _The A-Team_ game is not only utter dog-shit, but also it has the theme from _Star Wars_ on the title screen!
I must have been posh I used blutac to fill the holes as tape sometimes peeled off and got stuck in the tape machine. I must admit these sorts of games (not just C64) sort of vindicate all the software piracy I did - because if i liked the game I bought the "original" and started collect "originals".
Ive even used chewed up paper lol
Yes some of those brings back memories. But for me the worst C64 game was Super Hang On, I was so looking forward to that and when I finally got it, I nearly fell off my chair at how bad it was, truly disastrous.
To me, it's a tossup between Super Hand-On and Cisco Heat. Both of them managed to be even worse than Chase H.Q., which is saying QUITE a lot
Gazza was clearly just a forward thinking individual who wanted a game with his name on that would best represent his skills in 2022. For that the game should be celebrated as a massive success.
I appreciate the sheer commitment in doing this list, the worst C64 games are really some of the worst games EVER made on any platform (only the Atari era consoles and some other micro computers can come close), there are no modern games that can reach this level of absymal...I remember buying Dick Tracy as a kid and pretending it was decent...but it wasn't: screen after screen of tedium will end inexorably in a game over screen. It's so bad in fact, that if you don't rewind the tape to play again (why you would do that, anyway) but keep loading on, you'll reach the final screen without any way of playing it, it will be only the background, the music and no way of quitting, unless you turn off the computer. Forever.
Great video. But so very surprised and shocked that Big Trouble in Little China isn't on this list. I loved the film, so I bought the full-price game for my C64.
It was dogshit. In a hat. That you put on your head.
Karnov....my god. Absolute scutter.
5:15 Pretty sure that's a condom.
Striker was one of the games I was most jealous of my amstrad winning friends as a kid, cos it wasn't on the speccy as far as I was aware. Unique game for the time as u play as one player instead of the whole team. Bit harsh to be on this list imo. Good watch this vid though.
I would say that Sky Twice was ahead of its time, because the graphics look like those crappy flash games from the late 2000's
Worse... Reminded me more of those Tiger Hand-Held abominations, except with a tad bit more color. LMAO
Chase HQ should have been up there
It's really weird to me to see what is clearly a stepping stone between those first consoles like Atari VCS, colecovision etc. and Nintendo, sms etc.
We didn't have widespread computer gaming obviously during the crash in the us.
I got a c64 later but I'm ashamed to say I just played the same stuff I was playing on consoles. I remember loving Commando on c64. I wish I'd been a little more adventurous.
Literally the only non-us popular game I remember on c64 was some sort of isometric view motorcycle game that I don't think had any actual point to it, you just rode around a town until you ran out of gas. I was fascinated with the idea that I was just supposed to zoom around without any overarching story or goal. I played a ton of that. I'd love to play that again if it sounds familiar to anyone!
Action Biker (Clumsy Colin)?
Action Biker!
Certainly sounds like Action Biker, but there definitely was a point to it. Drive around looking for flashing objects, these can be almost anywhere in the town, Drive over them to pick them up, some of them upgrade your bike with better brakes, higher speed etc. The idea is that once you've collected all the items, you then get to enter a race. Drive to the petrol (gas) station, stop near the pump and you'll get your bike topped up with fuel. Just about the best £2 I've ever spent.
What about doing the best Commodore 64 games by year.
Great idea that mate
You know your first computer is an Amstrad CPC464 when every game on this list looks good and plays well 😂, mind you, I'd have not traded my Amstrad for a C64 EVER... There's more to a computer than games.
I'm in Australia, the most expensive game I ever bought on the Amstrad was WAY OF THE TIGER at $49.95 AU which was a fortune back in the day.. Budget games were $9.95, full priced were $19.95 mostly, maybe $25.00.
Though I think the most expensive CPC program I ever bought was probably GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) which I never did anything with 😂
All in all, I bought over 500 games or programs and finished two of them without cheating (not including Adventure games)
Domestic Dog Simulator on Steam gives me the vibes of C64 Speccy era. What am I doing, what is this game, what are my goals, haven't got the faintest but it touches me old heart.
yo OSG my man hope you are well mate 💪♥️
Yeah mate all good :-)
No not Cobra, that music is pretty awesome!
Music does not make the gameplay good
And I must add, I really feel for all those hopeful youngsters who bought some of these so called games back in the day.. my loord must have been sooo disappointing.. 😔😞😔
It wasn't really, I mean it was, but it's the early to late 80s, what else were you going to compare it to.
I mean I bought over 500 games on my Amstrad, and I hated 80s games, I STILL hate 80s games.
They're hard and unforgiving, anybody that completed Manic Miner on 3 lives deserves a bloody medal.
The people that had the patience to finish Sorcery+ should have been drafted into the army.
In fact the movie THE LAST STAR FIGHTER had the right idea, these games were tremendously hard... But it's all we knew.
You can look back now and say wow that's a crap game and it's really hard, but compared to what.. All the other crap really hard games.
Go play Ghost N' Goblins.
Games nowadays are soooooo much easier, they're way more accessible thanks to checkpoints, save games etc.
I bought games with the pure intention of cracking their copy protection on disc or tape, if I bought a game with no copy protection I felt robbed 😂
@@jonh404 well, I remember the good games, which there were plenty of and I always compared the really bad ones to those. I mean i still to this day love: Commando, Ikari Warriors, Platoon, Combat School, Giana Sisters, Delta, I.O, 1942, Out Run (really loved the c64 version) Rambo First Blood and of course the Last Ninja I and II and the list goes on and on... so yes I still feel sorry for those who used money on these games...
@@roartjrhom4932 definitely my outlook on these games is coloured by how hard I found them.
I didn't hate them because of how they looked, it was pretty normal to not expect ground breaking graphics between genes of games on the same platform or even other platforms.
The Amstrad, C64, speccy... We all had to live with the technology we got, you suddenly weren't going to get a game that looked like PS2 God of War on the C64, you sort of knew where you stood.
It's definitely how difficult with the 3 lives games were , the overly difficulty levels that's coloured my viewpoint..
But I always love hearing other people's experiences.
Oh and AGE is also a factor, I think the older you were, hahaha probably the worse you were at games and you might have had higher expectations and I was 17 when I got my Amstrad.
@@roartjrhom4932 Hahahahaha Outrun, go play the Amstrad version, it's an embarrassing mess, it's not even finished.
But then flip the coin and play Chase HQ On the C64 and prepare to be meh'd, but be prepared to be amazed at the Amstrad version.
@@jonh404 yes that is true, sometime the Speccy got the best, other times the Amstrad version but mostly the C64 was best of course! :-P ;-) Have a nice weekend.
I'm glad I never played any of these, but Jet Strike Mission does look vaguely interesting to me simply because it has pure PETSCII graphics. Looks like it could have been easily ported to a few game-deprived Commodore computers such as the Plus/4 and PET.
Okay, the game sucks, but a modern game vaguely inspired by it could be cool. PETSCII graphics were rightfully looked down upon back then, but it's a bit trendy nowadays.
Some utterly awful games on that list. Thanks for saving us the pain
all the games that you showed were utter crap , the companies should be sued for the utter crap that was allowed to be put on the shelves to be bought with the hard earned pocket money , how the hell did they get away with it ,
Cobra on the spectrum is great, it’s by a well known programmer whose name has totally slipped my mind. It seems to run at twice the speed of this c64 version
Cobra on the Spectrum was by the late, great Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith and it was a very different game from the C64 version, with parallax scrolling & lots of sprites moving at a fair old clip.
@@MaxSpender I don't think Joffa made a bad game, to be fair. Even his earliest game, Pud Pud was still a half decent shooter.
There surely was a lot of crap on c64, some games I remember u didn't mention here, mr wino, spitting images, HKM (probably the shittiest beat'em up ever), peter beardsley soccer (much worse than gazza imho).
Anyway thanks for teach me about a-team I didn't know it was such a crap, I remember having it but never actually tried it.
I miss Jungle story, the bad version of Ikari Warriors, Knight Rider, After Burner, Airwolf 2, Ninja Master, Dancing Monster, Bath Time to name a few... But there are indeed so many horrendous games for the C64 so... You'd have to make a 100 list at least to cover the most important ones.
I played my fair share of bad C64 games but luckily I dodged the bullet on these 20 stinkers 🙏
I think these all passed me by, probably I'd moved on to the Amiga by the time most of them came out. Except for Bionic Granny, which I seem to recall as being one of Mastertronic's first £1.99 games.
The A-Team game was written in BASIC, and was part of a compilation called The Big 100.
No it wasn't. It was only released via mail order. The Big 100 had totally different games. As shown on the boxart on mobygames. It was an early example of shareware
Awesome vid OSG. Just wondering why games were about £5 more on disk. Surely a blank disk didn't cost a fiver. Was it because you are rich enough to own a disk drive, we are going to gouge you?
Maybe the burning (or whatever process it was called) was more expensive
@@oldstylegaming wasn't it due to the installed user base of disk drive owners, far less than cassette deck owners? 🤔
Unlike the Cart and Disk driven USA, we loved our cheap cassette games.
Love the fact that instead of a humorous look at some old clangers, you sound genuinely outraged 🤣🤣
Great video even though it is full of tripe! Thankfully I only had one of these - Cobra and I agree it was bad.
I think the only one I owned was Artura, which I think I actually got from a magazine cover tape. The game was pretty awful, though I must confess that I did boot it from time to time just to listen to the in-game music. 😆
@@sjake8308 That's an idea for a video (if it hasn't already been done). Crap games with great music.
I was a Spectrum kid back in the 80's, but my sister's ex did have a Commodore 64 that I got to play on a few times. One of the games he had was called "Dark Star"... which I think should have gotten a mention on this list.
This was a rip-off of the Star Wars' Death Star trench run, from a top-down perspective with the action scrolling down towards your ship. You had to contend with random space craft flying down the trench at you and sentries on the side of the trench firing at you.
What made it awful was that the trench wasn't a long straight - sometimes it would fork into two or three routes and sometimes a route would lead straight to a dead end, resulting in unavoidable death. And the real kicker? You only had ONE LIFE!! So once you die, it's back to the start you go to try again.
I LOVED Striker! My brother and I played the shit outta that game.
Aww, I like Cobra. Its beatable, but lots of cheap deaths. Also, the life meter doesn't work right
Cisco heat and super hang on,they were the worst I ever played on my c64 back then,I remember buying cisco heat as it looked good tho it had the amiga n atari st graphics on the back,when playing it I was like what is this awful piece of shit? Lol,same with super hang on with the very slow choppy graphics and awful sound effects especially when cornering lol
Super hang on was shocking
Cisco heat was absolutely terrible. I had forgotten about that one.
When you have two racing games that actually make Chase H.Q. look impressive in comparison, you know you've got issues. Seriously, as bad as Chase H.Q. was, those two games were even worse. Cisco Heat especially. At least both Chase H.Q. and Super Hang-On had decent music going for it. Cisco heat had no redeeming qualities at all.
I really like some of the content you produce, please just don't swear as much - it takes away, doesn't add.
I never really swear though, i dont really say F words etc. And if i do curse its in bad games videos.
Hehehe...That's a nice list. Thank you for struggling through there for us! 😆
Street Fighter 2?
Was quite terrible and unplayable
I would have at least forgiven Robobolt if it was a type-in. It sure looked type-inish to me. But this was a commercial release, WTF were they thinking...oh yeah, more $. Greedy bastards
There were some dreadful games and I had plenty of them. I still have them all and must look out some of the really bad ones. Games crashing while loading were frustrating too but glad I was around during this gaming period.
Cobraaa, i love it XD
Is it me or does that A-Team game have the Star Wars theme
Pretty solid winner.
No complaints here.
My worst game on the spectrum was Transylvanian Tower by Richard Shepard Software. The C64 version was slightly more playable, but still not that good. It was written in BASIC.
I was surprised not to see Chase HQ on your list.
Chase HQ is awful, but to be honest, Cisco Heat was even worse
The A-Team is not only crap, it's also one of the universe biggest mysteries. I mean, it has the Star Wars music and apart from the character names, what's the realtion to the TV series? Why don't you play the A-Team? Why did anyone think this was a good way to cash in on the license? It seems like a quick type in game from a magazine.
I persoanlly bought Ferrari Formula One. There is a LOT in in this game, except SPEED. The driving is so slow, it's only and real challenge is just staying on the road. Racing is about getting the right lines, pushing the limits, being on the edge. FF1 has no sense of speed, you have absolutely no feeling with the car or road.
There was no license. It was done by a notorious Dutch piracy/"public domain" group, who had the audacity to sell it via mail order.
Having played A-Team totally agree with this pos and having bought Cobra back in the day it's like we were robbed, seen alot of crap games on c64 but in saying that the C64 games library is pretty massive
In a sense, "Dick Tracy" for the Commodore 64 was very realistic, even ahead of it's time. After all, in real life when you fire a gun, you can't see your bullets. 😁
To this day, I'm grateful I only ever came across Cobra and Highlander. Great music in both of them, though.
I find videos like this a bit disingenuous sometimes. I think certainly in the UK most kids weren't going out weekly and spending their pocket money / paper round money on full price games.
We all knew the gaming mags were full of shit too. You were more likely to come across the games in this video on a tape you'd copy from a mate with 20 or so games on it.
This was also part of the reason budget games did so well, and why we have classics like the Dizzy series, affordable and fun, and you weren't breaking the bank if you bought a crappy budget game.
Like a game on this list, Striker, budget game, but actually a decent game for the money certainly not even in the top 100 of worst ever games on the system, that is absolute bullshit.
The music for Artura is the best thing about it, but that's damning it with faint praise.
I just dont get what they were trying to do with that game its neither here nor there
@@oldstylegaming I think they were trying to create Gods before it existed, but somebody knocked a mug of coffee over the design docs, which also splashed onto the graphics artist's computer, scrambling the order of the animation frames so all the characters look like they're having seizures.
It's the most reasonable conclusion I can come up with.
@@talideon 🤣🤣🤣
Not sure how true it is, but I read somewhere that the 'Highlander' game was deliberately sabotaged by the creators because they realised too late that, with the licensing deal they rushed into, that they actually stood to lose a ton of money if the game became popular - by making it so bad, the negative reviews it got would scare people away from buying it, thus preventing them from going bankrupt.
If true, that has to be one of the weirdest tales in computer gaming ever 😄
Interesting, ill look into that
Still better than most of the efforts Amstrad got back in the day!
Lol yeah
Other than the music, Cobra on the C64 was complete shit. Hell, I would have been happier getting a direct conversion of the Spectrum game, at least that game was actually good.
It's been a while but if I recall the Spectrum version felt a little similar to Green Beret.
Well, I don't think that any of the Courbois Software games were officially licensed. So, that A-Team game exists but I highly doubt it was available in stores...
It was on compilations apparently
Gremlin really did crank out a load of shite in the late 80s didn't they?
There were some bad football games. Peter Beardsley soccer was awful and Ocean released one called Super Soccer that was truly horrendous.
Interesting list,didn’t play any of these at the time, being a console user; thank God I didn’t! I like how put the prices in the corner, gives you some idea.
Here's an honorable mention; Jesse James. The game is a black screen with a character, which I assume is Jesse, in the center who is pleasuring himself. The faster you wiggle the joystick, the faster Jesse finishes. Truly hot garbage.
Rally Driver is even worse than Hard Drivin.
Good video as always.