if u play on emulator or Easyflash cartridge there is a version around thats cartridge and bugfixed with the instant room drawing rather that painting by numbers.
Great video as always. Here's a another one: Batman: The Movie NTSC. You could not get past the first level. They redistributed the game and you could exchange your broken copy for a v1.1 version. And, of course, you had to have heard of it's existence because it was 1989 and you had no way of knowing. My brother was lamenting at the software dealer one day by chance and found out he could exchange our disk. I wasted so many hours on an impossible level. I'm not sure that the PAL version has the same problem. Anyhow, another rushed Ocean licensed title.
Don't forget Jet Set Willy. That game had a code error which cased you yo instantly die on one screen. The designers tried to excuse it by saying it was poison gas, but a player cracked the code and fixed it, publishing the fix in a magazine.
There was an inaccessible cross in "Chiller". I believe someone did a 101% for it after many years. The English version of 1987's "Livingstone, I Presume" had a one-byte bug that Robin of '8-Bit Show And Tell' has since fixed.
So after DECADES I discover I wasn't the only one who got the end of game issue on Predator. 50% of the time I had loading issues with Predator where the game screen was scrambled (real boxed copy too NOT from a "legitimate" compilation tape (TM) ) As for Robocop that was unforgivable on Ocean's part
WOW, I'm truly shocked on that Robocop situation, that a developer would knowingly ship a broken game and modify it to mask the deception. That's some next level shit right there, and did any of the other games even get play tested on retail hardware? Some of these errors should have easily been caught even if the bare minimum was being done, but I guess not.
Jet set willy was another: you jump slightly further left than right (or vice versa), and it makes some screens impossible. I think it got fixed a few years ago, but the game ending was never actually coded! My own personal no1 is Lemmings on Gameboy (pal version). Mayhem 4 is bugged such that you fall through a platform and its rendered impossible. And none of the magazine reviews of the time mentioned it! 12 year old me wasted hour upon hour trying to get it to work!
Those are some frustrating bugs. On a side note i got Future Wars on Atari St, i swear that last level with the self destruct timer on the ship was bugged so it could not be completed in time. i painstakingly drew maps of the maze, had a spreadsheet with every move and direction to go, did perfect run throughs etc for months and could never get there until i hacked the game to freeze the countdown. Good times
Rastan still burns my ass all these years later. On top of that when I finally got a cracked copy it was STILL bugged and you spawn inside a wall at level 3.
I guess Rastan was totally random: sometimes it would work, sometimes it would not. I seem to remember having managed to beat the very final boss one time, but it might be just a fake memory though.
Even with "patches" in the internet connectivity era some games are still broken and get forgotten about after a year or so of updates, fixed or not. In the PlayStation 4 and 5 timeline, things have improved, but 10 - 15 years ago it was really bad on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. I remember playing many a Need for Speed game or whatever that was usually always broken upon realease, and sometimes made worse with updates!
Chuckie Egg 2 was also broken. On the way to the egg making machine there was a room with a train track and sign saying "don't walk on the track" but as soon as you entered it you were forced to the left and unable to move right making it impossible to complete. There was talk of a patch being made by A&F software but I've never found it.
This annoyed the hell out of me when I was younger. Finally got round to disassembling it last year and worked out where the problem was. Can send you the fix if you're interested :)
I couldn’t get past the first level of C64 Robocop. Kind of satisfying to know the game was broken. It’s a shame because Ocean made great games during the 80s and early 90s.
I absolutely loved the Predator movie and was super excited about the game. But each time I tried to load it, I got the load error. I had to manually slow down the tape to load it. And when I finally loaded it, well... the game wasn't all that great :) Fortunately, behind the Iron Curtain, you could get games for free! If you could get them at all, of course.
Thanks mate, I had never seen the difference between the US/UK Predators before! Great to see Livingstone in the list, as you know, that's a real fav of mine!
Any idea why the US version would be slower? I thought the US C64's ran at a slightly faster speed (1.02mhz vs .985 mhz) and had a faster screen refresh (60hz vs 50hz).
@@JustWasted3HoursHereYes, typically NTSC games run faster than PAL so it's unusual. It could be that the game was either too fast at 60 hz, or the CPU couldn't keep up with the 60hz frame rate so it ran at 30 hz instead either by design or accident. Without digging into it (usually an hours-long process) that's my best guess.
To explain the 30 Hz thing a bit better, lots of game code syncs to a particular scanline on the screen, so the same code runs at (roughly) the same point each refresh at 50 or 60 Hz depending on the video standard. If the code misses syncing at that scanline because it's too busy/slow doing other stuff, then it will probably sync up at the same point *next* frame. So you have a situation where code is only running every 2nd frame, which is half the speed it should be. So if it's trying to run at 60 Hz and fails, it will probably run at 30 Hz. There's more to it than that, and often there will be some glitches, but that's a quick explanation.
@@8_BitMakes sense and I definitely would defer to your judgment on such matters! (Might be an interesting subject for a future video though! "Unlocking the mystery of the U.S. Predator slow-down").
Robocop was well deserved to be no1 - Saved up my hard earned pocket money for the full price big box release, and thought the game and music were great! - Until, as you say the warehouse level, i tried and tried but could never finnish it in time and was really angry at the short timer! I accidentally found that glitching short cut to finnish the level and was so happy to carry on with the game - until, the glitched mess of the next level!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I actually thought it must have been glitched because i glitched and short cutted the previous level and I continued to try and do the warehouse level legit!!!! Eventually i gave up playing the game, and I only found out the truth 20 odd years later 😡
I have the North American release of Robocop on disc and I could get to the end of the warehouse level but I didn't know you were supposed to walk up to the wall and punch it. I'm forever wondering if the US version could be completed or not.
Holy cow I wondered for years why I couldn't get past that rope in rastan! I was so mad I could never ever grab it. You cleared that up by saying it was actually broken and never fixed. What a bummer and I wasted so many hours trying to get by that part.
With the constant time pressures to get a game out by a specific time, I can understand why sometimes games have glitches. But it's a bummer that they'd rather release a glitchy or even unplayable game instead of delaying the release a month or two so the bugs could be ironed out. That's the beauty of all-original or homebrew games: They can take as much time as they want to develop and perfect the game, which is why so many of them are so good.
I loved Stratton, never was able to finish it (maybe the crack wasn't good enough?) You had to fire in diagonal, but you couldn't get diagonal without being damaged from wall collision... Kill every killable obstacles and you will meet a screen where you cannot move forward! ... the cracktro, though? Fantastic! Papillons, merci beaucoup!!!
Basically every Commodore game was broken. Quality control was close to 0. Name 10 games that do ALL of the following right: - Game has title screen that makes you understand how to start a game - Game has a second info screen explaing basic principles - Game has customisable input - Game tells which joystick port to use and explains its controls - Game has QUIT option that brings you back to BASIC without variable dirt in memory - Game has option to leave the running game to the info screen - Game has good input behaviour, for example you can't break functionality by entering wrong characters C64 software was true wild-west.
With the glitched games (especially Robocop) I thought for a while back then that I had bad loads from a poor adjustment of the Tape Head. So I would adjust, try again, adjust, try again.. etc until I realised in the end the games were bugged.
Was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bugged or was it just my copy? The levels towards the end begin to have horrible graphical glitches until it looks like the end of Robocop. Speaking of, Ocean would repeat the trick a few years later with Dennis on the Amiga. The coders were not given enough time to finish the game's last levels, so put either a brick wall or an impossible jump in which meant you would never complete the level and see the end of the game.
What about the Wall of Death from Shamus? Sometimes when you get electrocuted by bumping into the wall, your remaining life’s also get killed one after another. It happens at random.
The 3rd or 4th underwater screen on Treasure Island Dizzy caused the game to crash on a lot of tapes. Mine and my mate's were both duds. Another mate had a copy which worked fine, so we copied it. Even on the emulators today, there are still some versions which have this glitch. You go on that screen and up comes the blue screen and READY prompt.
Amaurote had a bug that appeared at random and made it impossible to continue. Tape version of Dominator had a bug (I think just before the last level, it was many years ago!) which made it impossible to complete. Tried at least two versions, eventually swapped it for Pipe Mania!
There was a bug/glitch in The Last Ninja 3, when you went to grab the rope from the tree, you could get glitched into the tree. There was the tape version of Labyrinth where the riddle from The Wise Man was unsolvable, making the game broken. And, there was a glitch in the Friday The 13th game that made it think it was a game on a C64 when it was actually in Vic 20 emulation mode, hahaha.
Interesting video! What about a video about unfinished, but released games? I read that Dick Tracy was unfinished, many things found in other versions were still missing, but Titus just released it anyways... I also have Crazy Cars from them. They really didn't like the C64, it seems...
I remember Robocop, I only passed that level with a loader and never could win the fight against ED-209. Also reached that buggy part on Rastan. And never beaten Predator or Savage. Now I know what I need to do it. Just adding to the list, Nexus, I loved playing this game but it had a bug where you couldn't get all the rumours. I only saw a video where it's probably fixed on demand, never found a fully bug free version.
Rastan - If I'm not mistaken, some cracking group fixed it so that you can get past that part. I also have a vague memory of a post on some forum saying that it WAS possible to get past it, but it involved a lot of moving back and forth to get the screen to scroll just right. Maybe I imagined it though as I can't seem to find that post now. I also recall some text adventure I had back then. There was a part where someone wanted money, but you never had enough. Then I discovered that it was written in BASIC and at that part of the program, it was hard-coded to say that however much money you had wasn't enough. As far as I could tell, there was no way to get past it. At least not without changing the program, which at the time I discovered it, was beyond my meager knowledge.
@@sirdrak I was going to test it myself, but I can't get past the three ropes in the castle on level 1! I get onto the first rope no problem, and then I managed to get onto the second rope, but it's impossible to get onto the third one. They're always swinging together at the same time so that by the time you jump, they're moving away. Of course it doesn't help that your character can only jump about 3 inches. Maybe that's the section I saw someone post about. Although when I tried going back to the left, and then doing it again, it seemed like I could no longer grab onto the ropes.
Great video! I remember my fav tape game being unfinishable - Super Robin Hood, a cracking platformer by Codemasters and super tough. Whenever I finally got to a very hot looking maid Marion (surrounded by love hearts no less) my health went down whenever I moved close to her. The game never finished! Health would reduce till death and bang game over. Devastating! Someone has put up a walkthrough which shows the game finishing which never happened in my version. Would love to know if anyone else experienced this. Ah C64 golden memories. Taking forever for a tape game to load...if it loaded. Jumping up and down for joy if it did load. Impossible to explain to kids today 😅
A lesser title, but 'Garfield: winters tale' was also broken. You could play the first 3 stages individually, but to get to the 4th stage you had to complete the 3 preceding stages sequentially. Problem was that it was impossible to complete stage 2 as an elevator was supposed to take you to the exit but it glitched and put you back at another stage of the level. Annoyed me no end.
Fist 2 The Legend Continues was bugged when shipped and would randomly keep generating an enemy after u defeated one, forever, preventing you from getting any further.
Great idea for a vid m8, only ones I was aware of was Predator and of course Robocop! Piss take releasing them like this, then again things ain't changed much, PC games especially :(
I remember Terra Cresta.Great shmup up to a certain point and then no more enemies to shoot you just travel along the map and listen to the music.proper pissed me off at the time.
I remember getting through the warehouse stage without any cheats, but like you say you eventually got to the corrupted graphics stage. I thought it was my computer which had a problem as some games wouldn't load no matter what. Those nova loaders always crashed before the games would load. So I thought it was just my computer that had a problem, apparently not.
Ironically most games have bugs and glitches in them nowadays but after a download can be fixed, would have been so frustrating bitd to put up with this Great video mate 👍
Gyroscope by Melbourne House was a Marble Madness ripoff that had a bugged course that made it impossible to complete. Predator was the one got my goat. Still gets my blood pressure up just thinking about it.
I wish I could recall all the games I had that were broken. Mostly I forgot about them on purpose. The biggest bug I can recall was Mastertronic basketball, it was 2 on 2 unless you played brown vs black then it was 3 on 1.
You could maybe excuse it from a small publisher but Activision were a big company at this time...unforgivable ....mind you they did actually give us Afterburner too so we should have known......
I also miss "Asterix and the Magic Cauldron" :) You couldn't find the last piece, later fans fixed it: POKE 18014,14: POKE 18015,152 will put the piece within the arc de triomphe.
brilliant idea for a video! The worst one I can recall was on the Amiga, 'Personal Nightmare', which I found for some reason in the $5 bin, even though it was a recent release.. I couldn't believe my luck because it was *the* very game I wanted. I did in fact end up buying around 4 or 5 copies of the game because every time I bought it, disk 3 wouldnt work on my Amiga for some reason, and I always thought it was my Amiga.. in retrospect I think they know very well the game was faulty because not only did they release an updated version, they ceased talking about the game very quickly, and almost deny its existence to this day. Even in rom sets today you'll find the faulty disk 3 version.
@@oldstylegaming oh that would be brilliant, I loved it, I didnt know Predator was broken until you just told me about it! I always thought that was me doing something wrong
if you watch this video, right near the end, Dutch actually grabs the rope for the trap and still nothing happens ...how could they not test that? its probably the most important part of the game lol
@@oldstylegaming for excuses.. perhaps the wrong file was sent to the duplication centre? thats definitely got to have happened.. then, sabotage? A disgruntled co-worker perhaps, lol.. or to get back at bosses.. i bet there has to be some good stories out there :D But likely they just rushed it out most of the time.
Not sure, if it was fault of bad copy, but Bruce Lee sometimes stopped working and screen became glitched mess when you left screen (Especially at screen with extra life)
Must have been a bad copy/version. The disk version I had as a kid was beatable, at through the first loop of the game. As a kid I could never make it through to the end on the 2nd loop.
Unfortunately the TH-cam spam filter automatically removes my link but look for '8 Bit Show and Tell Bruce Lee' and fast forward to 19 minutes. Robin talks about this buggy PAL release and manages to reproduce the glitches
Had Alcon, but the game would always crash after a certain point. Also had Grand Prix Circuit, and half the time it would cause my 1541C a nervous breakdown and do a loud rattle and quit
I think Saint Dragon was also broken. It was not possilble to pass the second level. I mean it was, but the second level always restarted. Or is there a full version of the game somewhere out there?
Unless the mandela effect is hitting me, the predator bug must've been a UK thing (I'm from the States). I remember beating the game, but i remember thinking how stupid it was that the only gun that mattered was the flame thrower. Took a lot of fun out of the replayability. I remember the goofy line of pixels the predator turned into after dropping the log on him. Fortunately, I was so bad at RoboCop that i never hit the glitch, which is good, because as a kid i thought the game was so badass.
Livingston wasn't that bad if you actually had the orginal Spanish version, problem was, when the game was converted to English, they messed it up and added a bug which they couldn't be arsed to fix. Luckily, the game was recently fixed due to some clever sceners.
Had no idea, these were huge titles of their time. However I cannot help but think that patching via internet, as much as it helps, dropped the quality check dramatically as now releasing almost-broken titles is considered normal. 2023 was one of the worst years for nearly-unplayable triple-A games. Sure, games are way more complex now, but the dev tools are also way more advanced.
I was waiting for Ghosts and Goblins which would always lock up but that may have been from it being pirated. I think I purchased about 20 C64 games but I had well over 400 lol
I thought Savage was pretty cool, 2x scale graphics and all. It had that vibe that somebody in the demo scene was involved in its development. Good thing I never made it very far..... It would have been disappointing.
any game where you spend ages trying to get to the end that cant actually be completed is very disappointing nearly as disappointing as actually getting to the end of Rambo II and seeing that ending......
Rastan...I played that to death back in the days and could never jump to the damn rope...so it's broken xaxa great video...can you do something similar with the Amiga games...I think there are some games that are broken(Alien Breed)...thanks and have a good year.
I swore back when I was 12 years old that Robocop was broken and impossible to progress.... Now 30 years later I've been proven right, thank you so much 😫
I would swear I completed the C-64 Robocop. I don't know if a finish-able version was published later, or only in the U.S., but I remember it ending with the first-person cross-hair shootout with Dick Jones with him holding the OCP president. Also, if I recall correctly, it was possible to defeat the Predator without the log trap if you had the flamethrower, but again, I have no idea if this was true in the UK version.
Im not aware of a fixed version of robocop until recent years, if you glitched through the wall in the warehouse you could actually do the glitched level still and complete it so maybe thats what happened
I remember a glitch with fighter bomber. I bought it originally (germany) and couldnt boot it for whatever reason. I had to alter the ,8,1 Stuff in code (either from ,8,1 to 8,8 or the other way around, Im not sure). Perhaps it was a faulty 1541.
Asterix & The Magic Cauldron was bolloxio'd too apparently. Of course I was a terrible gamer and never got far enough to find out first hand. And Jet Set Willy was apparently unfinishable too.
Jet Set Willy was definitely bugged. I mean the game is a bit messy anyway (it had to be coded in a very short time) but Willys jumping mechanics are terminally broken. I can't remember if it's the left jump or the right jump that's affected but he jumps a few pixels too short in length on one side. Which makes reaching the platforms in rooms like The Wine Cellar (where pixel perfect jumps are essential) impossible to do. So yeah, that one is broken. There is a fixed version online these days though. Same for the ZX Spectrum original, you can get a fixed version of that too.
I'm from the US and have an entirely different take on Predator than anyone I've seen online. I got the game shortly after seeing the movie (I was way too young but saw it on a scouting trip). I finished the game and loved it. I don't know if it was marketed as an action game but I never saw it as an action game. At the time I maybe would have said it was an adventure horror game because survival horror wasn't a thing yet. The slow movement, the unnerving sound effects, seeing your buddies go out ahead only to die, the skinned bodies in the background, limited ammo, The Predator being really the only actual threat and it stalks you the whole game... Definitely survival horror. And when they sped it up for you Brits... they did truly ruin it.
When I was kid I was sometimes very sad because I felt I am bad boy because some games were so hard. Now I think maybe those games were sometimes really that bad thing, not me. ❤❤❤ Thank to you and other game tubers that I can realize more when it wasn't my fault when I wasn't good in games.
I keep hoping someone would give rastan the arcade treatment like they did with commando and ghosts goblins. But they really did take the piss out of us with these bugged games.
Had an amstrad and an amiga, often grew up with my dad telling me I couldn't have certain games because they were buggy/a broken mess. Then we had a few generations where bugs were rather rare. And now the last 3 generations, release it broke, fix it later, or not at all. 🤣😂
ok so that wasnt my fault, TH-cam when I pasted the url in www.youtube.com/@8_Bit changed it to loads of letters and numbers after the @ sign .... i have sorted now, thanks for pointing that out
Lucky for me I RENTED Savage. :D I did make it most of the way through the Eagle (3rd) level, but never finished it. And maybe that's why!! :D I hit that Rastan bug too! Loved Livingston, but never got all that far in it anyway, so not even sure if I ever got to the broken section.
I released a 100% working version of Savage this year.
Thats great ive pinned this comment so people know, please feel free to paste a link and ill approve it
"Asterix & the magic cauldron" was the first bugged game i was aware of. One of the cauldron pieces is unreachable...
Yeah, me too. I found the following fix, that fans came up:
POKE 18014,14: POKE 18015,152 will put the piece within the arc de triomphe.
if u play on emulator or Easyflash cartridge there is a version around thats cartridge and bugfixed with the instant room drawing rather that painting by numbers.
Great video as always. Here's a another one: Batman: The Movie NTSC. You could not get past the first level. They redistributed the game and you could exchange your broken copy for a v1.1 version. And, of course, you had to have heard of it's existence because it was 1989 and you had no way of knowing. My brother was lamenting at the software dealer one day by chance and found out he could exchange our disk. I wasted so many hours on an impossible level. I'm not sure that the PAL version has the same problem. Anyhow, another rushed Ocean licensed title.
I owned Predator, Livingstone and Robocop... All bought with my allowance, still hurts remembering, even after all these years
Don't forget Jet Set Willy. That game had a code error which cased you yo instantly die on one screen.
The designers tried to excuse it by saying it was poison gas, but a player cracked the code and fixed it, publishing the fix in a magazine.
There was an inaccessible cross in "Chiller". I believe someone did a 101% for it after many years.
The English version of 1987's "Livingstone, I Presume" had a one-byte bug that Robin of '8-Bit Show And Tell' has since fixed.
I remember Fist2 had a bug where it would stop scrolling and you couldn't progress.
I might do another video, I knew about Fist 2 where it glitches at the waterfall but I could never get there
@@oldstylegaming This is probably the most famous example. I remember school kids discussing the bug in Fist 2 and how this ruined the game.
So after DECADES I discover I wasn't the only one who got the end of game issue on Predator. 50% of the time I had loading issues with Predator where the game screen was scrambled (real boxed copy too NOT from a "legitimate" compilation tape (TM) ) As for Robocop that was unforgivable on Ocean's part
yeah mate...now you can sleep easy at night knowing that it wasnt down to bad gameplay :-)
😆
WOW, I'm truly shocked on that Robocop situation, that a developer would knowingly ship a broken game and modify it to mask the deception. That's some next level shit right there, and did any of the other games even get play tested on retail hardware? Some of these errors should have easily been caught even if the bare minimum was being done, but I guess not.
Jet set willy was another: you jump slightly further left than right (or vice versa), and it makes some screens impossible. I think it got fixed a few years ago, but the game ending was never actually coded!
My own personal no1 is Lemmings on Gameboy (pal version). Mayhem 4 is bugged such that you fall through a platform and its rendered impossible. And none of the magazine reviews of the time mentioned it! 12 year old me wasted hour upon hour trying to get it to work!
Those are some frustrating bugs. On a side note i got Future Wars on Atari St, i swear that last level with the self destruct timer on the ship was bugged so it could not be completed in time. i painstakingly drew maps of the maze, had a spreadsheet with every move and direction to go, did perfect run throughs etc for months and could never get there until i hacked the game to freeze the countdown. Good times
Rastan still burns my ass all these years later. On top of that when I finally got a cracked copy it was STILL bugged and you spawn inside a wall at level 3.
its just broken
I guess Rastan was totally random: sometimes it would work, sometimes it would not. I seem to remember having managed to beat the very final boss one time, but it might be just a fake memory though.
yeah - same here - that sodding rope swing....
Even with "patches" in the internet connectivity era some games are still broken and get forgotten about after a year or so of updates, fixed or not. In the PlayStation 4 and 5 timeline, things have improved, but 10 - 15 years ago it was really bad on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. I remember playing many a Need for Speed game or whatever that was usually always broken upon realease, and sometimes made worse with updates!
5:10 - VOBOCOP!
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Chuckie Egg 2 was also broken. On the way to the egg making machine there was a room with a train track and sign saying "don't walk on the track" but as soon as you entered it you were forced to the left and unable to move right making it impossible to complete. There was talk of a patch being made by A&F software but I've never found it.
Ah yes - I loved that game (on compilation Now Games 2 I think) - but that bug ruined it
This annoyed the hell out of me when I was younger. Finally got round to disassembling it last year and worked out where the problem was. Can send you the fix if you're interested :)
Was shocking that most they never even bothered to fix in the budget release either lol
yeah some of these were released multiple times like on the hitsquad labels and they left it in lol.... wouldn't get away with that today
true that
The eagle is beautifully animated. Real fine 8 bit art!
I couldn’t get past the first level of C64 Robocop. Kind of satisfying to know the game was broken. It’s a shame because Ocean made great games during the 80s and early 90s.
Back in the days, how did we even know what a bug was? Was it a bad load or a bad copy. Nobody knew.
yeah thats the thing mate, we never knew
We had to wait for the following month's magazines to see if the letters pages were filled with angry comments from readers.
That Old Guy.
Loved this one =D That Robocop bug was really annoying! I didn't know about it and thought I was crap at that level lol
me too mate, im not lying in the video i literally got to the run out of time bit on that warehouse over 100 times
All those responsible should have been lined up and made to work on Speccy games for eternity!
hahahahaha....or worse....Amstrad
You can actually jump onto the rope in Rastan, but jumping off is the difficult bit.
I remember another issue on Rastan where if you jumped onto a moving gate you got stuck there and had to reload the whole game.
You forgot Tintin on the Moon
I absolutely loved the Predator movie and was super excited about the game. But each time I tried to load it, I got the load error. I had to manually slow down the tape to load it. And when I finally loaded it, well... the game wasn't all that great :) Fortunately, behind the Iron Curtain, you could get games for free! If you could get them at all, of course.
Not being able to buy any games is not a problem if you can't buy a computer! :)
are you from Russia?
@@oldstylegamingNo, Poland. In Russia, the game plays you!
my son is going to Poland this month...first time hes been away by himself
@@oldstylegamingLet me know if he needs any help. In any case, he won't have any problems with buying games here :)
Thanks mate, I had never seen the difference between the US/UK Predators before! Great to see Livingstone in the list, as you know, that's a real fav of mine!
Thanks for the help mate :-) Livingstone while not for everyone is a great game, proper hidden gem
Any idea why the US version would be slower? I thought the US C64's ran at a slightly faster speed (1.02mhz vs .985 mhz) and had a faster screen refresh (60hz vs 50hz).
@@JustWasted3HoursHereYes, typically NTSC games run faster than PAL so it's unusual. It could be that the game was either too fast at 60 hz, or the CPU couldn't keep up with the 60hz frame rate so it ran at 30 hz instead either by design or accident. Without digging into it (usually an hours-long process) that's my best guess.
To explain the 30 Hz thing a bit better, lots of game code syncs to a particular scanline on the screen, so the same code runs at (roughly) the same point each refresh at 50 or 60 Hz depending on the video standard. If the code misses syncing at that scanline because it's too busy/slow doing other stuff, then it will probably sync up at the same point *next* frame. So you have a situation where code is only running every 2nd frame, which is half the speed it should be. So if it's trying to run at 60 Hz and fails, it will probably run at 30 Hz. There's more to it than that, and often there will be some glitches, but that's a quick explanation.
@@8_BitMakes sense and I definitely would defer to your judgment on such matters! (Might be an interesting subject for a future video though! "Unlocking the mystery of the U.S. Predator slow-down").
There's a couple more that I know of... and you can read about them in my forthcoming book C64 Nightmares, due from Fusion Retro Books this year.
Sounds good
Robocop was well deserved to be no1 - Saved up my hard earned pocket money for the full price big box release, and thought the game and music were great! - Until, as you say the warehouse level, i tried and tried but could never finnish it in time and was really angry at the short timer!
I accidentally found that glitching short cut to finnish the level and was so happy to carry on with the game - until, the glitched mess of the next level!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I actually thought it must have been glitched because i glitched and short cutted the previous level and I continued to try and do the warehouse level legit!!!!
Eventually i gave up playing the game, and I only found out the truth 20 odd years later 😡
I have the North American release of Robocop on disc and I could get to the end of the warehouse level but I didn't know you were supposed to walk up to the wall and punch it. I'm forever wondering if the US version could be completed or not.
hmmm i never knew that the US version had enough time, Ill look into that
Holy cow I wondered for years why I couldn't get past that rope in rastan! I was so mad I could never ever grab it. You cleared that up by saying it was actually broken and never fixed. What a bummer and I wasted so many hours trying to get by that part.
Ironically enough, the NTSC version of Impossible Mission had a code bug that made it impossible to beat.
My friend told me he beat that game but I never believed him. My suspicions have finally been validated!
With the constant time pressures to get a game out by a specific time, I can understand why sometimes games have glitches. But it's a bummer that they'd rather release a glitchy or even unplayable game instead of delaying the release a month or two so the bugs could be ironed out. That's the beauty of all-original or homebrew games: They can take as much time as they want to develop and perfect the game, which is why so many of them are so good.
Always thought that Dragon's Lair on C64 was glitched, that 1st stage with that cloud blowing wind is so hard!!
I loved Stratton, never was able to finish it (maybe the crack wasn't good enough?)
You had to fire in diagonal, but you couldn't get diagonal without being damaged from wall collision...
Kill every killable obstacles and you will meet a screen where you cannot move forward!
... the cracktro, though?
Fantastic!
Papillons, merci beaucoup!!!
Basically every Commodore game was broken. Quality control was close to 0. Name 10 games that do ALL of the following right:
- Game has title screen that makes you understand how to start a game
- Game has a second info screen explaing basic principles
- Game has customisable input
- Game tells which joystick port to use and explains its controls
- Game has QUIT option that brings you back to BASIC without variable dirt in memory
- Game has option to leave the running game to the info screen
- Game has good input behaviour, for example you can't break functionality by entering wrong characters
C64 software was true wild-west.
I think Fist II had a bug as well. My friend bought it and became a master, but couldn't ever finish it due to that annoying programming error.
cool, look forward to your video of miyoo mini plus
With the glitched games (especially Robocop) I thought for a while back then that I had bad loads from a poor adjustment of the Tape Head.
So I would adjust, try again, adjust, try again.. etc until I realised in the end the games were bugged.
Was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bugged or was it just my copy? The levels towards the end begin to have horrible graphical glitches until it looks like the end of Robocop.
Speaking of, Ocean would repeat the trick a few years later with Dennis on the Amiga. The coders were not given enough time to finish the game's last levels, so put either a brick wall or an impossible jump in which meant you would never complete the level and see the end of the game.
Turtles on DOS was defo broken had a jump you couldnt make, maybe the NES too
My TMNT (the port of the first NES game) also froze and I couldn't beat it. I don't remember exactly what it looked like when it happened.
What about the Wall of Death from Shamus? Sometimes when you get electrocuted by bumping into the wall, your remaining life’s also get killed one after another. It happens at random.
The 3rd or 4th underwater screen on Treasure Island Dizzy caused the game to crash on a lot of tapes. Mine and my mate's were both duds. Another mate had a copy which worked fine, so we copied it. Even on the emulators today, there are still some versions which have this glitch. You go on that screen and up comes the blue screen and READY prompt.
Amaurote had a bug that appeared at random and made it impossible to continue. Tape version of Dominator had a bug (I think just before the last level, it was many years ago!) which made it impossible to complete. Tried at least two versions, eventually swapped it for Pipe Mania!
There was a bug/glitch in The Last Ninja 3, when you went to grab the rope from the tree, you could get glitched into the tree. There was the tape version of Labyrinth where the riddle from The Wise Man was unsolvable, making the game broken. And, there was a glitch in the Friday The 13th game that made it think it was a game on a C64 when it was actually in Vic 20 emulation mode, hahaha.
@erwindewit4073 that is totally fair, I was just trying to write something funny at the end of the comment, hahahaha.
Interesting video! What about a video about unfinished, but released games? I read that Dick Tracy was unfinished, many things found in other versions were still missing, but Titus just released it anyways... I also have Crazy Cars from them. They really didn't like the C64, it seems...
I remember Robocop, I only passed that level with a loader and never could win the fight against ED-209.
Also reached that buggy part on Rastan.
And never beaten Predator or Savage.
Now I know what I need to do it.
Just adding to the list, Nexus, I loved playing this game but it had a bug where you couldn't get all the rumours. I only saw a video where it's probably fixed on demand, never found a fully bug free version.
Glad to see you back OSG
Thanks mate, hope you have had a great xmas and newyear
Rastan - If I'm not mistaken, some cracking group fixed it so that you can get past that part. I also have a vague memory of a post on some forum saying that it WAS possible to get past it, but it involved a lot of moving back and forth to get the screen to scroll just right. Maybe I imagined it though as I can't seem to find that post now.
I also recall some text adventure I had back then. There was a part where someone wanted money, but you never had enough. Then I discovered that it was written in BASIC and at that part of the program, it was hard-coded to say that however much money you had wasn't enough. As far as I could tell, there was no way to get past it. At least not without changing the program, which at the time I discovered it, was beyond my meager knowledge.
Yes, you are mistaken... The bug in Rastan is still there, unfortunaltely
@@sirdrak I was going to test it myself, but I can't get past the three ropes in the castle on level 1! I get onto the first rope no problem, and then I managed to get onto the second rope, but it's impossible to get onto the third one. They're always swinging together at the same time so that by the time you jump, they're moving away. Of course it doesn't help that your character can only jump about 3 inches.
Maybe that's the section I saw someone post about. Although when I tried going back to the left, and then doing it again, it seemed like I could no longer grab onto the ropes.
Cracking video mate!
Many thanks!
Great video! I remember my fav tape game being unfinishable - Super Robin Hood, a cracking platformer by Codemasters and super tough. Whenever I finally got to a very hot looking maid Marion (surrounded by love hearts no less) my health went down whenever I moved close to her. The game never finished! Health would reduce till death and bang game over. Devastating! Someone has put up a walkthrough which shows the game finishing which never happened in my version. Would love to know if anyone else experienced this. Ah C64 golden memories. Taking forever for a tape game to load...if it loaded. Jumping up and down for joy if it did load. Impossible to explain to kids today 😅
So true, kids nowadays will never understand
Kid Niki. I only got past the first level, once, as a fluke. I'm still mad, 30 years on.
A lesser title, but 'Garfield: winters tale' was also broken. You could play the first 3 stages individually, but to get to the 4th stage you had to complete the 3 preceding stages sequentially. Problem was that it was impossible to complete stage 2 as an elevator was supposed to take you to the exit but it glitched and put you back at another stage of the level.
Annoyed me no end.
Fist 2 The Legend Continues was bugged when shipped and would randomly keep generating an enemy after u defeated one, forever, preventing you from getting any further.
@5:51 You can tell the QA testers were a little lax with Robocop when even the loading screen text is bugged: 'Avaliable' on Video ;)
Great idea for a vid m8, only ones I was aware of was Predator and of course Robocop! Piss take releasing them like this, then again things ain't changed much, PC games especially :(
Yeah but we expect it now and get patches like on day 2 after release
I remember Terra Cresta.Great shmup up to a certain point and then no more enemies to shoot you just travel along the map and listen to the music.proper pissed me off at the time.
in Italy the first conversion of golden axe was missing the final level
I remember getting through the warehouse stage without any cheats, but like you say you eventually got to the corrupted graphics stage. I thought it was my computer which had a problem as some games wouldn't load no matter what. Those nova loaders always crashed before the games would load. So I thought it was just my computer that had a problem, apparently not.
Ironically most games have bugs and glitches in them nowadays but after a download can be fixed, would have been so frustrating bitd to put up with this
Great video mate 👍
Gyroscope by Melbourne House was a Marble Madness ripoff that had a bugged course that made it impossible to complete. Predator was the one got my goat. Still gets my blood pressure up just thinking about it.
I wish I could recall all the games I had that were broken. Mostly I forgot about them on purpose.
The biggest bug I can recall was Mastertronic basketball, it was 2 on 2 unless you played brown vs black then it was 3 on 1.
'Tau Ceti' was another. It was impossible to collect all the cooling rods which was the whole point of the game.
Predator did me dirty, I totally agree with your Activision comment 😄
You could maybe excuse it from a small publisher but Activision were a big company at this time...unforgivable ....mind you they did actually give us Afterburner too so we should have known......
C64 Rastan was one of my first for the C64 but i was so crap at 7 years old i only got to level 2
probably for the best lol
I also miss "Asterix and the Magic Cauldron" :) You couldn't find the last piece, later fans fixed it:
POKE 18014,14: POKE 18015,152 will put the piece within the arc de triomphe.
they never pointed this out in C64 magazine!
brilliant idea for a video! The worst one I can recall was on the Amiga, 'Personal Nightmare', which I found for some reason in the $5 bin, even though it was a recent release.. I couldn't believe my luck because it was *the* very game I wanted. I did in fact end up buying around 4 or 5 copies of the game because every time I bought it, disk 3 wouldnt work on my Amiga for some reason, and I always thought it was my Amiga.. in retrospect I think they know very well the game was faulty because not only did they release an updated version, they ceased talking about the game very quickly, and almost deny its existence to this day. Even in rom sets today you'll find the faulty disk 3 version.
I might look into different systems after this, its been interesting ...i know its a short video but I hope its interesting for the viewers
@@oldstylegaming oh that would be brilliant, I loved it, I didnt know Predator was broken until you just told me about it! I always thought that was me doing something wrong
if you watch this video, right near the end, Dutch actually grabs the rope for the trap and still nothing happens ...how could they not test that? its probably the most important part of the game lol
@@oldstylegaming for excuses.. perhaps the wrong file was sent to the duplication centre? thats definitely got to have happened.. then, sabotage? A disgruntled co-worker perhaps, lol.. or to get back at bosses.. i bet there has to be some good stories out there :D But likely they just rushed it out most of the time.
defo last one I think
Not sure, if it was fault of bad copy, but Bruce Lee sometimes stopped working and screen became glitched mess when you left screen (Especially at screen with extra life)
i think it was a bad batch or something, the game was completable on some cassettes and disks ...but yeah Ive had that before
Must have been a bad copy/version. The disk version I had as a kid was beatable, at through the first loop of the game. As a kid I could never make it through to the end on the 2nd loop.
Unfortunately the TH-cam spam filter automatically removes my link but look for '8 Bit Show and Tell Bruce Lee' and fast forward to 19 minutes. Robin talks about this buggy PAL release and manages to reproduce the glitches
Ill post it here th-cam.com/video/Kiv9O-vVcTs/w-d-xo.html
Robocop had me I kept trying beat that level with the stairs, throwing my joystick and screaming it's impossible
thats cos it was impossible...imagine if Ocean opened a Robocop helpline there would have been an outcry hahahaha
I never knew that’s why I couldn’t finish Rastan. I thought I wasn’t good enough 😢
Had Alcon, but the game would always crash after a certain point.
Also had Grand Prix Circuit, and half the time it would cause my 1541C a nervous breakdown and do a loud rattle and quit
I think Saint Dragon was also broken. It was not possilble to pass the second level. I mean it was, but the second level always restarted. Or is there a full version of the game somewhere out there?
Unless the mandela effect is hitting me, the predator bug must've been a UK thing (I'm from the States). I remember beating the game, but i remember thinking how stupid it was that the only gun that mattered was the flame thrower. Took a lot of fun out of the replayability. I remember the goofy line of pixels the predator turned into after dropping the log on him. Fortunately, I was so bad at RoboCop that i never hit the glitch, which is good, because as a kid i thought the game was so badass.
Yeah, that's what he said: not in the US version.
yeah the US version was not bugged....just really, really sloooooow
Livingston wasn't that bad if you actually had the orginal Spanish version, problem was, when the game was converted to English, they messed it up and added a bug which they couldn't be arsed to fix. Luckily, the game was recently fixed due to some clever sceners.
Had no idea, these were huge titles of their time. However I cannot help but think that patching via internet, as much as it helps, dropped the quality check dramatically as now releasing almost-broken titles is considered normal. 2023 was one of the worst years for nearly-unplayable triple-A games. Sure, games are way more complex now, but the dev tools are also way more advanced.
I was waiting for Ghosts and Goblins which would always lock up but that may have been from it being pirated. I think I purchased about 20 C64 games but I had well over 400 lol
I thought Savage was pretty cool, 2x scale graphics and all. It had that vibe that somebody in the demo scene was involved in its development. Good thing I never made it very far..... It would have been disappointing.
any game where you spend ages trying to get to the end that cant actually be completed is very disappointing nearly as disappointing as actually getting to the end of Rambo II and seeing that ending......
I had a tape version of pacland and could not jump of the large lake, no matter how much I punched the jump button to keep him flying
In Kung Fu Master on level 1, if you did the gun cheat (Hold Shift and press G) and jumped, the game would crash :o
Enjoyed this video very interesting to see these
Rastan...I played that to death back in the days and could never jump to the damn rope...so it's broken xaxa great video...can you do something similar with the Amiga games...I think there are some games that are broken(Alien Breed)...thanks and have a good year.
ill definitely be doing an Amiga one :-) same to you mate
I swore back when I was 12 years old that Robocop was broken and impossible to progress.... Now 30 years later I've been proven right, thank you so much 😫
Some cassettes of Golden Axe (mine too) has not the last level
Good video man
I would swear I completed the C-64 Robocop. I don't know if a finish-able version was published later, or only in the U.S., but I remember it ending with the first-person cross-hair shootout with Dick Jones with him holding the OCP president.
Also, if I recall correctly, it was possible to defeat the Predator without the log trap if you had the flamethrower, but again, I have no idea if this was true in the UK version.
Im not aware of a fixed version of robocop until recent years, if you glitched through the wall in the warehouse you could actually do the glitched level still and complete it so maybe thats what happened
My original copy of Bad Dudes was fucked-Enemies came nonstop on a later level, until the time ran out.
Had a feeling Robocop would be number one :)
it could only be one.... I mean what game on the C64 was bigger than Robocop, the fact they sent it out broken was a complete piss take
I remember a glitch with fighter bomber. I bought it originally (germany) and couldnt boot it for whatever reason. I had to alter the ,8,1 Stuff in code (either from ,8,1 to 8,8 or the other way around, Im not sure). Perhaps it was a faulty 1541.
Most likely it was , 8 and you had to change it to , 8,1
I recall a handful of such errors but can't recall what software it would've been.
Asterix & The Magic Cauldron was bolloxio'd too apparently. Of course I was a terrible gamer and never got far enough to find out first hand. And Jet Set Willy was apparently unfinishable too.
Jet Set Willy was definitely bugged. I mean the game is a bit messy anyway (it had to be coded in a very short time) but Willys jumping mechanics are terminally broken. I can't remember if it's the left jump or the right jump that's affected but he jumps a few pixels too short in length on one side. Which makes reaching the platforms in rooms like The Wine Cellar (where pixel perfect jumps are essential) impossible to do.
So yeah, that one is broken. There is a fixed version online these days though. Same for the ZX Spectrum original, you can get a fixed version of that too.
Slow running, with a SID rendition of Chariots of Fire over the top? Hilarious!
I'm from the US and have an entirely different take on Predator than anyone I've seen online.
I got the game shortly after seeing the movie (I was way too young but saw it on a scouting trip). I finished the game and loved it. I don't know if it was marketed as an action game but I never saw it as an action game. At the time I maybe would have said it was an adventure horror game because survival horror wasn't a thing yet. The slow movement, the unnerving sound effects, seeing your buddies go out ahead only to die, the skinned bodies in the background, limited ammo, The Predator being really the only actual threat and it stalks you the whole game... Definitely survival horror. And when they sped it up for you Brits... they did truly ruin it.
When I was kid I was sometimes very sad because I felt I am bad boy because some games were so hard. Now I think maybe those games were sometimes really that bad thing, not me. ❤❤❤
Thank to you and other game tubers that I can realize more when it wasn't my fault when I wasn't good in games.
"Activision Bastards" is my favourite moment of this video.
Also why can't Ocean spell "Available"... Ocean BASTARDS!
I keep hoping someone would give rastan the arcade treatment like they did with commando and ghosts goblins. But they really did take the piss out of us with these bugged games.
Maybe they will one day, i know its getting an Amiga port
Hence doctor Livingstone in Jumanji movie or am I wrong?
Had an amstrad and an amiga, often grew up with my dad telling me I couldn't have certain games because they were buggy/a broken mess.
Then we had a few generations where bugs were rather rare.
And now the last 3 generations, release it broke, fix it later, or not at all. 🤣😂
So true
The 8-Bit Show And Tell link is broken :( is this in keeping with the theme of the video? :D
really? what about the visual link at the end of the video? i copied the link from the url bar...weird, ill take a look and sort
ok so that wasnt my fault, TH-cam when I pasted the url in www.youtube.com/@8_Bit changed it to loads of letters and numbers after the @ sign .... i have sorted now, thanks for pointing that out
RoboCop was the most famous example.
Savage has been corrected at Lemon64 forum
This is the first time I've heard the word plodge on TH-cam. You've probably guessed that I'm a fellow Northeasterner.
Lucky for me I RENTED Savage. :D I did make it most of the way through the Eagle (3rd) level, but never finished it. And maybe that's why!! :D I hit that Rastan bug too! Loved Livingston, but never got all that far in it anyway, so not even sure if I ever got to the broken section.
before the internet we knew no better, unless it was said in Zzap or something...oh how times have changed