The Ten Worst ZX Spectrum Games According To Crash Magazine
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ส.ค. 2024
- These ten games scored the lowest throughout Crash Magazines' 8 year history.
But are they really that bad....? Join me and find out as we countdown this poopfest.
00:00 Intro
01:32 Ready Steady Go
03:35 Heist 2012
05:41 Smash Out!
07:50 Howzat
09:48 Realm Of Impossibility
11:32 Voyage Into The Unknown
13:05 Piggy
15:15 Video Classics
16:33 Flight Path 737
18:50 Kosmik Pirate - เกม
I used to love Crash magazine. Bought it religiously. Those covers were absolute classics.
Crash was my favourite too. Oliver Freys artwork was good eh!!! Cheers for the comment.
We all rushed home at some point with a budget title in our pocket. So much excitement as you sat on the bus heading home. And then after waiting for it to load...
Yeah, sometimes the anticipation was the best bit!
Where's Alcatraz Harry? I remember my spoilt mate, Kevin Bird, having it bought for him and raving about it at school before a few of us went round his house after school to check it out. We pissed ourselves when it loaded, and he forever became known as Alcatraz Kev!
🤣🤣 Alcatraz Harry is a classic!!! Love that story cheers! I did a video on that game a little while ago 😁 th-cam.com/video/RFu1vgRRWZc/w-d-xo.html
Always remember Piggy from the Crash review due to the %. It appeared in the bottom 100 games on WOS. Oddly the score kept going up to take it out the bottom 100. Was going in and out. Thought the author was up scoring it.
Oh really. That's funny. Sounds like someone was trying to get it out of that bottom lot. It's crap but in its defense, it's at least kinda playable...... ish
Smash Out looks like it would be a good Breakout clone if they just slowed the ball down a bit. And I really want to see if anyone could work out Kosmic Pirate
I would love to see if anyone worked it out. Surely they tested it before putting it out??
The big issue with breakout clones was only having two directions the ball can be hit - leading to it being impossible to hit the last blocks. This was an issue in so many of the early clones. They somehow missed the vital part of it being a test of skill greater than pong is in the control of the ball, but without 5 zones on the bat for how it deflects the ball, it just becomes single player pong. (Although pong had control in how the ball is hit so it's stunning so many Devs missed this aspect when it was literally in Pong!)
Even the official 2600 Breakout failed to include ball control, so it could take a very very long time to eventually hit the last brick on every level unless you were super lucky. Playing through all the cheevos for 2600 Breakout for Retroachievements was a painful experience!
Anirog was founded in 1982 by Anil Gupta and Roger Gamon as a portmanteau of their names. Went on to become Anco, with the biggest hits being the Kick Off football games.
Oooh thanks for that. I had no idea.
The Anco renaming was after Roger Gamon passed away, so it was just Anil's company (hence Anco). This happened around 1986 if I remember.
That Video Classics review was in the first issue of Crash I ever got. That little capsule review fascinated me at the time, I didn't realize review scores could go as low as 05%, I always wanted to see it.
Once you see that game, it burns itself deep into your retinas. Cheers for the comment.
Wow, Kosmic Pirate looks exactly like something I would have programmed. Lots of confusing numbers that mean.... something... to the person who programmed it.
Realm of Impossibility - I loved this on the C64. Then again, I had a floppy drive, so the level loading wasn't much of an issue. Even though the 1541 drive is notoriously slow, I don't remember the loading times being bad at all.
I'd like to play this on a C64 actually. Feels like there could be a good game in there somewhere.
@@SebsPlaceYT It's not an especially deep game, but it's kind of fun, especially in two-player mode. You run into the dungeon, avoiding the enemies and tripping them up by dropping crosses, pick up spells that you can use to confuse or repel the enemies, grab the whatever (I forget what the item is), then get back out. I liked the way the graphics were drawn in fake 3D.
A tip: Those little alcoves along the walls are just for show, they don't lead anywhere. You generally have to progress by going to the edge of the screen so that it scrolls the next one on.
I had it too, but I don't recall if it was on disk or not. I enjoyed it, though I didn't play it very much. I got it because of the style of graphics, reminding me of Ant Attack.
Its amazing to think how fast the gaming world was moving and developing back then, shown in black and white when you compare reviews of games with their rereview a year or two later and games they love they now think are terrible.
Crazy how quickly games got better and people expected more.
14:10 "Who's afraid of a discordant noise..." 🎶😱
😂
Piggy's music put me in mind of the Vic-20 whose sound generator's frequency drifted the further away from it's intended range you go, leading to some very out-of-tune sounding music unless the coder was clued in.
Love your videos mate, kids these days don't know the torment of playing some budget titles. New subscriber!
Thank you 😊 very kind.. I'm thinking of getting my kids to play some of these games as a new punishment when they are naughty 😀
@SebsPlaceYT great idea. With mine they got up to the loading screen on an original speccy and lost patience. Would carry a epilepsy warning those loading screens today 😅
Love it
I remember reading the review for Howzat on the bus home to my friends after we went shopping.
Funny what memories stick 😍
I hope you're feeling better now! ...and, if not, that you get well soon.
Thank you! Fun video!
Super rough mate 😩 but thanks for the comment, really appreciate it 😊
@@SebsPlaceYT Sorry to read it. Bodies are rubbish. Take it easy.
Kosmik Pirate, wonder if the name was inspired by Rodney Trotter :p (I used to play Horace Goes Skiing, thats several hours of my childhood I'll never get back 😆)
Some absolute shockers here. Games like Kosmik Pirate seem to be a straight up attempt by the publisher to steal people's money...shameful. The fact that the blurb on the cassette says the game 'provides unending enjoyment' is even more insulting. Fun to watch you trawl through 'em though!😄
Yeah it's shocking what they tried to do. Glad you enjoyed it 😊
I always thought there's a game hiding in Kosmik Pirate somewhere, but one only the author knew how to play. Then someone else clearly baffled by the whole thing wrote the "instructions", and ultimately it just looks tedious anyway. It reminds me of that really old Star Trek game though, which had its fans.
There must of been. I would love to see a walk thru of the game by the author!
If that is the pacman toy with an extendable tongue, i have the exact toy on my shelf ❤😂
Ha yeah. Charity shop find.... weird, but I love it!
Excellent video. I'm always looking for more crap games to try.
Thank you, I can defo help you find crap games 😂
Great recopilación, I Will make a video trying to check this wit ur ok of course
Hi - that's fine. Just credit anything you use of mine in your description or shout me out :-)
If you want to see some really dire (yet oddly endearing in their way) games, look up the developer Barry Jones. If Spectrum Computing is to be believed he even owned his own software house!
Thank you, I will. Strangely, the name is vaguely familiar for some reason.
Fun video. You also have to factor in how long these games took to load on cassette tapes back in the day, that just added to the disappointment when you’d spent 10 mins to play the effing thing.
100%
Id definately disagree on howzat, i have a lot of good memories of playing that against my dad as a kid and we would play it for ages.
It was like a slightly better version of test match a game we also played a lot of. He was a big cricket fan and sometimes was hogging the speccy on it when i wanted to play my own games 😂
Yeah I agree. I actually enjoyed it. Great memories with your dad, love it.
Some real stinkers indeed. I remember two mates weren't seen for days in the summer holidays, busy playing Howzat together for hours on end, they loved it, I was bored after 2 minutes.
Haha... yeah even if you like cricket it doesn't offer much excitement. I kinda liked it though.
I remembered playing Howzat a lot and even though its awful graphics I did love it :)
Howzat is a bit crap but flippin awesome at the same time
Realm of Impossibility (originally called Zombies) was actually a pretty good game on the Atari 8 bit computers. On every other system it was dire, though
Nice, will have to seek it out on the Atari
Need all the music to flight path 737, I really like that.
I think it was supposed to be the theme to the Ferrero Rocher advert😂
Well that's one pile of shite right there 😅
The music if you can call it music would come in a treat should you want ear wax removal for an inner ear canal.
I get the cricket game and where you're coming from with that. I sent away for a cricket game, mail order for my Vic-20 (I must send that in to gamebase, i believe its not been archived) , it was in basic but i loved it, the same sort of quality of the game you shown on here.
Great video again mate, never seen the majority of these games which is brilliant and fresh.
👍
Music was terrible eh!! I used to have a dice game called Howzat, literally the same thing. I used to make up teams, with my Teachers names in or pop stars etc... Jason Donovan 80 not out :-) and I had a league and everything that I kept in a notebook lol. Simpler times.... Cheers as always Denny.
@@SebsPlaceYT Brilliant times mate, imagination and a picture on a cassette was all we needed 😊
There's a compilation called Don't But This: Five of the Worst Games Ever.... Two of the games on it are Fido 1, and Fido 2, where the point is for a dog to protect a garden from moles, buy walking slowly over to the molehills and flattening them with his tail. Fido 1 standalone was the first game I ever bought. Fido 1 was also the first game I ever returned for a refund, lying to the shop that the game didn't load.
Brilliant, yes I've seen that compilation. I love the fact you lied to shop, things we did eh :-) . Cheers.
See I didn't mind Piggy... I think I got it from one of those places that posted you out games to "hire" for a few days (heh, like anyone was using them for anything other than piracy!)... I played it quite a bit, as a dated but decent enough little game. Maybe I'm weird...
Haha maybe... I should give it more of a chance perhaps, but for the 20 minutes or so I played it, it sucked :-)
I remember the Crash review of the Mr Blobby game where it said it should have been called "Mr pants goes to the toilet".
Haha brilliant! Mr Blobby eh... blimey what a thing that was for awhile.....
Software house names were often purchased as is according to what ive read in retro gamer, explaining many of the odd names that are not linked to gaming. Its the quickest way to set up a company to just go off the shelf? I want to see what off the shelf names are on there now and imagine it being my software company name now 😂😎
I bought a game called The Trap at a ZX Spectrum show at Alexandra Palace in the mid '80s. I've never seen any record of it anywhere. I genuinely think I was the only person to ever have bought a copy. It was the worst bloody 'game' I've ever encountered. A sci-fi mazy thing, programmed in BASIC. Absolutely woeful. I was so naive. Won over by some packaging. At the same show I bought Zaxxon, after being convinced by a disingenuous vendor that the picture of the gameplay on the back was actually in game action. Sooooo gullible. But, even so, compared to The Trap, Zaxxon was a work of genius.
archive.org/details/games-computing/8407/page/41/mode/1up?view=theater
Is that it on page 41? Looks to be a lost game now but by the sounds of it that's no bad thing. I feel for you. So many times I was duped by the cover art. At least when magazines came out, we had a better chance of knowing if a game was crap or not. Cheers for the comment
That's it, @@SebsPlaceYT ! Nice work in tracking that down! Can't believe I was won over by that artwork and that fact it was in a bit of a posh cassette box. The game was dreadful. And at £5.95!
😂 🤣 I have no idea what you saw in that artwork, but it's a great story nonetheless. Cheers for sharing.
Voyage into the Unknown was the second ever game I bought, based on the artwork. I couldn't get pass the 3rd move. Just stuck. Lovely art though.
I liked Howzat! It was...just easy, relaxing and stress less.
Ah... Great to hear from someone who actually bought it 👏 and 100% agree with Howzat
that's hurt me. Imagine how bad can it be, if we combine the worst parts of each of them into one.
Wow, what a game that would be!
"Don't Buy This!" By Firebird actually had a couple of decent games in it by comparison to this lot.
True!
The one thing I enjoy almost as much as playing great games... is playing really shit games. Gotta love'em! It's kind of like a sickness.
Glad I found your channel. Have a like and a subscribe 😃👍🏻
😄😄 me too Neil, cheers for the sub mate. Appreciate it 👍
Voyage Into The unknown was the first Mastertronic game I bought. The cover looked good and the blurb made it sound interesting. But the game was unplayable. I used to load it up every year or so just to remind myself how crap it was. I even tried playing it a couple of years ago. Still crap.
Yeah - it's really awful 😖
Thank you for going through the pain of reviewing these turds. I’m impressed that someone coded a piece of garbage in BASIC and tried to trick gullible kids into buying it by wrapping it in some futuristic cover art. You can’t infer a game’s playability from the screenshots on the back cover so some poor sods wasted their pocket money on it.
Cheers! Yeah it was a problem. I bought a few games based on cover art and mostly regretted it 😒
Kosmik Pirate looks like a Ceefax page
Lol, yes! It does!
I liked the 3D look of Realm of Impossibility.
My friend way back yonder used to play Cricket Captain. The game was much faster than Howzat and totally playable.
Realm was a multi loader too but cannot fathom why. Cheers for the cricket recommendation
@@SebsPlaceYT I remember the players were made up of only a few pixels - those were the days :)
So Crash magazine didn't think SQIJ was even worth reviewing? Not that this surprises me, but I was expecting this to be at the bottom of the pile with a 0% rating to boot ...
WOW they are some truly awful game's.
Thanks to the good people at Crash and Zzap!64 etc. to steer us clear and not fall afowl of dazzling advertising, (as much as possible).
That Piggy game. THANK YOU I have my new ringtone 😜👍
For the last game it looked like you just put up footage of Ceefax 😂 (Where was the game so it could be called such? 😂 Oh dear).
They were rightly slated.
Another good video. Thanks Seb 👍
Haha that would be some ringtone! Cheers mate!
It was always fun that the Crash Smash badge you absolutely couldn't replicate on a real Zx Spectrum.
They all look better than the A Team on the Commodore 64.
Never played it.... is it that bad,
Haven't watched yet but I remember Thundercats being diabolical.
Thundercats is a masterpiece compared to these game mate 😂
Erm... THE Thundercats by Elite Games?? One of the greatest beat'em ups ever? Not sure if there was another Thundercats game, but the one I remember scored around 90% in all major speccy magazines and got well-deserved 10 out of 10 in Sinclair user. And I personally loved it to death.
One of the few games to get an award from all 3 big speccy magazines! I never played it back in the day, but I tried it recently for a video I did (52 games that got awards for top 3 magazines), and I enjoyed it. Didn't blow me away, but was fun.
@@lower_case_tThundercats by the Gargoyle Games team, published by Elite Systems. They developed the reworked Scooby Doo game as well.
I never bought any game as bad as these.
Which may be a sign of good taste on my part or that Crash reviewers weren't being bribed.
I never bought any of these but did buy some shockers!!! Mainly in the early days though tbf
By far the worst game I had back in the 80s was Man Trap by Century Software.
I'll have to check that out!
I worked for the company that owned Alternative Software..
Nice! What did you do? Alternative are still going, I think, which is kinda crazy.
Top stuff
They should do a remake.
Which one?
Being quite into martial arts, I bought Kung Fu Master and Uchi Mata which were both pretty good on my mate's c64.
Not so much on the Spectrum, The screenshots in magazines and even the cover for Uchi Mata showed graphics like Exploding fist, that did look like spectrum graphics, however the 'finished' product was nothing like. Grey stripey figures flickering with hideous clunky awfulness.
Kung Fu Master is probably the worst game I have ever wasted money on. Usually I would wait for Crash reviews as I do think they were generally pretty accurate and fair.
Yeah I was the same, but sometimes I took a risk without reading a review. Flintstones was probably the biggest disappointment after shelling out 8 quid for essentially a painting simulator.
just look at most of the crash smashes
Not sure what you mean?
You suffer for your art, sir!
Haha thanks Snorkers.
I can’t believe that Legend Software’s The Great Space Race wasn’t on this list! A truly awful game!
That bad boy got 44% in Crash!
Spurs supporter alert...still I enjoy your videos (go Arsenal)
😂😂 cheers mate
I got one of those 100 games on one tape. Man they were shit
Yeah they were terrible
14:31 Well, Yeah I stopped the video at this point but believe it or not, not because of teh tune... But because I have to go out! I was an Amstrad Boy myself, but my sisters had a Spectrum... And I have heard FAR, FAR WORSE! At least it qualifies as a Tune... Even if it is a bit ear piercing!
Haha 😄 OK, I'll let you off. What were your favourite amstrad games back in the day?
@@SebsPlaceYT I was hooked on arcades so Gauntlet 1 and 2 were Top Tier for me, ELITE - I mean, how can it not be... And thanks to Amstrad Action, GOD I GOT HOOKED ON DIZZY!!! Head Over Heels, Ah Yes... Many of the best games though were Ports from the Speccy! Including Dizzy, Deflektor, Cybernoid, Oh god how can I forget RANARAMA!!!
And, TARGET RENEGADE - The first Game I ever beat without Cheats ON MY OWN! :P
Still, The good old Speccy cant be outdone... Everyone's A Wally was BEAUTIFUL on the Speccy, The Amstrad had the colour but the Speccy played far better! And the Free Covertape Game HYPER ACTIVE... That was just DAMN SO WOW!!!
Great answer - thanks. ❤️ always interested in what people used to play and what games they have nostalgia for. Cheers.
Ariolasoft?
Yup
I think I'd enjoy this more if you told us why you think the games are bad rather than just telling us that they are (multiple times) and reading out old reviews from Crash magazine. F'rex, from the video alone I could see that the collision detection in Smash Out was off by the full width of a block, which is unforgivable in a game consisting only of uniformly sized rectangles - wasn't that worth a mention? Some of the other games it's very difficult to envisage what's so bad about them. Sure, the graphics - it's a ZX Spectrum, that's par for the course - but we can't tell what you're doing with the controls to elicit that response on the screen, or in many cases, what objective you're trying to accomplish.
Thanks for the feedback. It has to be fairly vague to keep the video time down. I've got less than 2 mins per game to try and keep it to around the 20 minute sweet spot, but I get what you are saying. It's sometimes hard to articulate what you are experiencing but I am improving with that. I'm still very new to this.
@@SebsPlaceYT It's cool, everyone has to start somewhere. I never got past my first game review video because I'm too much of a perfectionist and could never be happy with it.
More videos and fewer games maybe?
Ha - fair. Yeah I've done some videos on just single games, but sometimes you need a few in one go. Cheers, mate.
who's afraid of the big bad wolf?
Me!
Oh thank you! I knew it sounded familiar but I just couldn’t remember what it was!
Areola soft! Bringing you the breast-I MEAN best in video game entertainment
...Areola Soft! We're firmly the best and our best has to be quite firm...... ok ill stop.
Haha - what a name eh.... surely they knew??
@@SebsPlaceYT I want to beleive it was a genuine accident, but they used Soft with it too lol XD
Love your channel. Nostalgia overdose. Crash had those amazing art works from the porn painter Oliver fray.
Thanks Bobby! Oliver Fray was awesome 👌
No bad games list for the ZX Spectrum would be complete without SQIJ.
Unless, of course, you restrict youself to CRASH reviews. As far as I know SQIJ never defaced a CRASH page.
By the way, SQIJ 2018 is a very decent remake, so good in fact it is borderline programmer shaming.
Yeah agree about Sqij. Just wanted to look at some different games as sqij has been done by everyone. I'll look at the 2018 one, thanks for that, didn't know it existed.
You should do a reread when you stumble on reading though, it comes across really badly.
Only so many hours in the day sadly and I'm useless at reading. Most of the time I'm on take 6519 by the time I'm in the "that will have to do" camp.
How about this for the most pathetic claim to fame ever...I once won a caption competition in Crash magazine, I think my prize was a T shirt and game but in all honesty I'm not sure.
The photo was of an old man, probably about the age I am now, watching a child play a Spectrum game. My caption was something along the lines of the child saying "What do you mean this 'looks hard'...it's only a loading screen"
Sorry about wasting the last 30 seconds of your life reading this but it's too late now.
Haha brilliant! Thanks for that! So did your name appear in print?
@@SebsPlaceYT I think it did, I've changed my surname since then but it was Lewis Cohen at the time.
Hello Sebastian. Your voice sounds better like this. Always be poorly when recording a video.
Lol. You wouldn't say that if I didn't edit out all the sniffs 😀 you did make me laugh though. Thank you.
What about E.T
Was released too early for Crash probably.