Hello!I’m Stuart, aka Ashens. I make videos for YouTube, write scripts and sometimes act in things.This is my second book about atrocious old video games that are no fun whatsoever, as I’ve somehow forged a career out of pointing out substandard products and laughing at them.I live in Norwich, in a house full of tat that I pretend to need for my work. I’m planning on moving house soon so I have more space to fill, as I’ve used this series of books as an excuse to buy a large number of retro computers.My favourite soup is still crabmeat and sweetcorn.@ashensyoutube.com/ashensashens.com
Dear Reader, The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new web-site: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distrib-ute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishingrevolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type flicker5 in the promo code box when you check out.Thank you for your support,Dan, Justin and JohnFounders, Unbound
This edition first published in 2017Unbound6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GFwww.unbound.comAll rights reserved© Stuart Ashen, 2017The right of Stuart Ashen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied,reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any formor by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor beotherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that inwhich it is published and without a similar condition being imposedon the subsequent purchaser.Text Design by Friederike HuberArt Direction by Friederike HuberA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78352-413-6 (trade hbk)ISBN 978-1-78352-414-3 (ebook)ISBN 978-1-78352-415-0 (limited edition)Printed in Spain by Novoprint
Stuart Ashen
Attack of the Flickering SkeletonsFlickering
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO EVERYONE WHO BOUGHT A TERRIBLE GAME BECAUSE A MAGAZINE REVIEW LIED AND SAID IT WAS AVERAGE.
Alex BlackmonMichael BradshawAlice BroadribbGregor CameronMathew CooperLarry CordnerPhilip CornerTom CoxChloe CresswellMichael CullipherFox CutterTom DongoloJ.J. DumlaoNeil DuttonMatthew FaulknerSteven FearyCameron FrayBernie FurlongThor GaffneyFrederick GibsonMark GreenDamien Marc GreenhalghRichard ‘dragonridley’ HattonMatt HoneyballRob HutchinsonSebastian HutterNigel JohnsonRichard JohnsonMichele KalvaEuan KennedyKymo Misenica KobayashiSteven LindquistJoshua LintonNick MaceyJami MartinezLizzy MattersonConnor McKenzieScott MillerMatthew MitchellWayne MuffJohn MylanBenjamin NewmanMax NicollWill PadgettJacob PapenfussTanja ‘Tikal’ PattbergGriffin PercyJustin PuopoloLeo RatnerShawn RicciMichael SandersJoseph SaxtonAlexander SchraffStephen ShiuSilentS (JGW)Dan SilvesterJames SimonMike SleemanAlexander SmithNatalie May SnookBrad SparksMichael SpeareBenjamin SpenceEbony StarkStuart StretchThe return of the Rt Hon Sir James Rich EsqOwen TillingMark TolladayTommy Törnqvist :)God Emperor Donald J. TrumpBracken WalshAndrew WaltmanSnykier ZaerthaunJanez ZontaSUPERFRIENDSListed here are my superfriends - people who pledged a substantial amount of money to help ensure that this book became a reality.
Superfriends 7Introduction 10Auf Wiedersehen Pet 12Barravento 18Interview: ChinnyHill10 22Belial 26Butterfly 32Castle Top 38Interview: Daniel Hardcastle 44Hideous Commercial Failure Corner 48Chef 50Interview: Jim Sterling 54Cisco Heat 58Deathkick 64Interview: Daniel Ibbertson 70Domain of the Undead 74Interview: John Bain 80Commodore 64 Coin-Op Conversion Battle Royale! 84The Flintstones 96Galaxzions 102Hareraiser: Prelude and Finale 106Munchman 116Interview: Kieren Hawken 120Mystery Manor 126Mentski’s Arcade Hall Of Shame 132Interview: Laura Kate Dale 144Sqij! Update 148ProSoccer 2190 150Robobolt 156Terrible Old Game Covers That You’ve Probably Never Seen Before 162Roland on the Run 168Interview: Nostalgia Nerd 174The Worst Joystick Ever 178Top Banana 180Interview: Kim Justice 186Wec Le Mans 190Acknowledgements 196Horsenburger Appreciation Page 197Terrible Old Names You've Probably Never Heard Of 198Index 208contents
introductionHELLO! AND WELCOMEto the second volume of terrible old games you’ve probably never heard of, a further compendium of some of the worst games to ever be sold for money.Years ago, when I first started sifting through the video game industry’s bins, I thought I’d only find a handful of obscure games so atrocious that they were no fun whatsoever. I was very wrong, and this second book is a testament to the sheer amount of horrifying dross that was shovelled into our faces and called entertainment.As before, this isn’t intended as some kind of definitive guide to the very worst. It’s a showcase for games that are not only awful, but that I found interesting in some way. And they’re all obscure titles, so you won’t find the same tired games that appear in all online lists. There’s no Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing or E.T. in here.For inclusion as a main entry in this book, a game must have been: ■released some time between 1980 and 1995 inclusive ■sold commercially ■released for a home computer format, not a games console ■so utterly terrible that it would be almost impossible for a reasonable person to enjoy playing the game.
As well as games so bad they make your eyes itch, I’ve asked some interesting people what their most disappointing game purchase was. We’ve all felt the pain of spending cash on an ab-solute stinker, and these brave people have agreed to share their personal stories of pain with us. The criteria for these games are looser than those for a main entry, mostly as I discovered someone had paid money for Kris Kross: Make My Video and I couldn’t pass that opportunity up.I’ve also sprinkled some articles about other facets of gaming trash throughout the book, be-cause variety is the spice of tat as well as life.Finally, I’d like to express massive thanks to everyone who pledged for this book via Unbound. Without you this book wouldn’t exist, and the games within would remain mostly forgotten. And we should never let these games slip from history just because they’re terrible, they’re old, and you probably haven’t heard of them.Stuart Ashen Norwich, 2017
auf wiedersehen petFormat: BBC Micro / Acorn ElectronYear of Release: 1985Developer: Bob CarrPublisher: TynesoftOriginal Price: 7.95 pounds
LET’S START WITHa quick history lesson! Auf Wiedersehen, Petwas a BBC comedy-drama that initially ran for two series in the mid-eighties. It focused on some construction workers from Newcastle upon Tyne who moved to West Germany in search of work, and it was extremely popular. Home computers and tie-ins were also popular, and the appropriately Newcastle-based Tynesoft acquired the licence, dropped the comma and gave us Auf Wiedersehen Pet.How does one go about converting a TV show based around a building site to a computer game? Tynesoft decided the answer was a set of three mini-games loosely based around what the most popular character Oz might get up to on an aver-age day. Or, at least, what he might get up to on an average day if he lived in some kind of weird nightmare-world.When the game loads you’re offered some very hard to read instructions stretched across the screen, none of which actually help you too much with the gameplay. It does, however, become painfully obvious that the game is written in BASIC, which is never a good sign.The game itself begins with a painfully off-key attempt at the show’s theme tune, ‘That’s Living Alright’, and that’s the only sound in the game other than sparse beeps. Amazingly for the time, a story cutscene then plays out and we see Oz being overlooked by Eric, the German foreman, as he builds walls. It makes no real sense but it shows us that Oz is portrayed as a tiny little stick man and Eric as a giant head, and it gives us an idea of the weirdness to come.The first stage involves Oz trying to build as many walls as possible on a yellow screen covered with a blue grid. Presumably as some kind of met-aphor, multiple giant Eric heads are impaled on the grid and must be avoided as you build up-wards. There is also a rain of deadly trowels – each larger than Oz himself – dropping from One of the worst game covers in history. It doesn’t even show any of the actors from the TV series!
above, which must be avoided. Oz lays bricks as he walks and cannot stop moving at any point. He can build upwards, forming the wall, but any movement to the sides causes him to immediately fall. You basically have to pick a vertical line with-out an Eric head, then build straight upwards, hoping that no random trowels appear and cave your head in. If Oz does hit anything or fall, then the stage immediately ends and you move on to Level 2. If you succeed in building a wall, then you get some points and have to repeat the task until you do fail.There are several major problems with this first level. The first is that Oz moves extremely quick-ly, and the controls, like many BASIC games, are horrifyingly unresponsive. These two problems compound each other to the point that you will almost certainly fail, not because of poor judge-ment but because you held down the ‘up’ key and it took so long for the game to respond that you missed where you wanted to go and instead built directly into one of Eric’s lethal heads. The aver-age length of a failed attempt at the level is four seconds – that’s how fast things move.You are then treated to another bizarre cutscene showing a Düsseldorf skyline, as text explains that Oz has finished work and is off to the local Bier Keller for some liquid refreshment.The instructions form an eye test from hell.Stage 1: Oz is sadly building a wall directly into one of
Eric’s many, many heads. He is doomed.14
The Bier Keller looks like a dark basement, in-terspersed with a few tables with pints of lager on them. Oz must run around, again at high speed and unable to stop, and pick up all the lager. Why Oz always controls like he’s got a rocket wedged between his bum cheeks is never explained.Things are made slightly more difficult by the barmaids, who, in keeping with the nightmare-world vibe, appear to be green multi-tentacled alien creatures. They appear out of thin air in random places and must be avoided at all costs. If Oz collects all the lager, then points are given and the level restarts, but touching the walls, tables or monstrous barmaid creatures means it’s straight on to Stage 3. But, as with the first level, the sluggish controls are the real enemy. They’re a little better this time round but still give nowhere near an acceptable level of response.Before Stage 3 is a final weird cutscene of Oz stumbling around drunk in the middle of a road. This apparently raises the ire of the local police, who he must now avoid on his walk back to his place of lodging.And my goodness, what a walk home it is. This third stage is one of the most horribly designed Stage 2: The terrifying barmaid monsters are slowly taking over the screen.Stage 3: I hope you can memorise all the car’s positions as the whole screen will be black soon. And this is one of the easiest random car placements I’ve seen!15
sub-games I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve spent several years playing the worst games I can find.The Düsseldorf police seem very keen on catch-ing Oz, to the extent that they’ve sent out dozens of cars which they’ve parked outside his house in random places. Using his patented method of sliding around at high speed unable to stop, Oz must avoid the cars, street lamps and a security guard to get to his front door.This would be bad enough given the awful con-trols, but the street lamps slowly go out before you can move, leaving almost the entire screen totally black. You need to have memorised a route to the front door, which you take with no visual cues whatsoever. If that sounds almost im- possible to you, then congratulations – you’re correct and have worked out something that elud-ed the game designer! The slightest touch of any object and you are unceremoniously dumped straight back to the title screen without so much as a ‘Game Over’ message.Your only chance of making it through is to have failed miserably at the other levels and have a very low score. The fewer points you have, the fewer police cars appear and the fewer lights go out. If you do manage to reach the front door, then some text appears saying ‘WELL DONE KIDDA’ and it’s back to the first stage for another playthrough to get your score up. What joy.But there’s another horrifying fly in the Auf Wiedersehen Petointment. The lights take a ridic-ulously long time to go out and fill part of the screen in black, and they go out individually. It can take a full 90 seconds of lamp-watching tedi-um before you actually get to play. But when they are out, Oz starts moving upwards automatically without warning. As you have no way of knowing how many lamps will go out, chances are you’ll be bored and not notice him moving in time to stop him walking into something because that can happen within literally one second.Auf Wiedersehen Petis infuriating dross. It’s three abysmal mini-games based around you des-perately trying to control a tiny, sliding stick man who moves like a greased cheetah. The controls simply don’t work properly and there is no fun to be had at any stage. And as an adaptation, it The third cutscene. I’m surprised Oz dodging the traffic wasn’t one of the stages – perhaps that seemed too normal?16
makes little sense – it’s less Auf Wiedersehen Pet and more Oz in Purgatoryas he builds walls be-tween giant heads, runs around stealing lager from teleporting mutants then attempts a walk of faith through a black void in a hellish mockery of his daily routine. (That would make an interesting plot idea for a comeback special.)And now: the twist! I’ve been describing the Electron version the whole time. Playing on a BBC Micro is slightly faster and thus even more difficult and frustrating! Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it blasts through the bottom of the barrel and down to the Earth’s core.REVIEW SCORESElectron User called Auf Wiedersehen Pet ‘a promising game for all ages, with plenty of variety’. I imagine they also lived in a magical land full of pastel-coloured talking dinosaurs.other versionsBoth the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were cursed by Auf Wiedersehen Pet. They’re essentially the same game with the same character graphics, presumably as the BASIC code was ported across to both. In both versions the instructions are much easier to read, and the game moves slower and is easier as a result. Both have more music, which is a shame. Tragically, the Spectrum version supports the Currah MicroSpeech unit, an evil squawking box that attempts to mimic human speech. Fortunately, said noises were kept to a minimum, with just an occasional ‘you lose’ or ‘well done’.Interestingly, all three versions were written by Bob Carr. Auf Wiedersehen Pet was his last game, which is probably a blessing for everyone.and there’s moreAuf Wiedersehen, Pet was brought back to television in 2002, where it ran for a further two series. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t release a tie-in game for the PlayStation 2.play these games insteadThere are no other games similar to Auf Wiedersehen Pet, and for good reason. Just play Exile or Citadel because they’re still great.recreate this game in real lifeBecome trapped in a hell dimension that exists to mock our own, and then attempt to go about your normal day. Remember to strap banana skins to your feet and run everywhere at full speed.17
Barravento Format: Commodore AmigaYear of Release: 1993Developer: Hitek SoftworksPublisher: Hitek WorldwideOriginal Price: Unknown
CAPOEIRA IS A MARTIAL ARTfrom Brazil that combines fighting and dance. Practitioners con-stantly move back and forth in a rhythmic motion known as ginga, and wait for an opening to deliv-er a decisive blow. It’s an acrobatic art that’s very impressive to watch, so it’s a shame that a game based on it manages to be such an artless mess.When the game loads you’re presented with the game’s story while some moody synth music plays. Oddly the text is in Portuguese even if you selected English at the start, but the gist is that every 10 years all the masters of capoeira get to-gether and fight to the death, with the survivor being crowned the Barravento. And – would you believe it! – this time you’ve qualified and get to murder a load of other people while probably be-ing killed yourself. Great.Your first fight is against a bald, bearded guy wearing green trousers. It takes place in front of a badly recoloured digitised photo of what appears to be a giant bell. Both fighters start moving in a ginga and the animation is pretty good – I suspect the sprites have been rotoscoped, an animation technique where an artist draws over real-life footage. Unfortunately everything falls apart as soon as you start moving. The fighters just slide across the screen with the same ginga animation as when they stand still. Then you try and fight, and the game falls apart further into constituent atoms of incompetence.There are only a few offensive moves, and you can only do two of them with any reliability. There’s a forward kick which is very effective and usually damages your opponent. There’s a leg sweep which nearly always lands and trips the enemy up, but does no damage. And that’s it for moves you can actually trigger. There’s a different front kick, a ground-based split kick, a reverse kick and some kind of weird hand thing, and they all just kind of occasionally happen when they feel like it. At one point I seemed to be able to get the reverse kick to work one time out of three by pressing back + fire, but then it stopped working so I had to abandon that theory.It’s also possible to block by holding back, which makes you invulnerable to your opponent’s front kicks, but you have a tendency to get stuck in that position for a while. By far the best strat-egy is to shuffle forward continuously tapping the fire button, which spits out a constant stream of front kicks. In fact the collision detection is so un-predictable that it’s pretty much the only effective strategy.If you beat the bald, bearded man in green trousers, then you move on to the next fight, which takes place on a bridge. Your opponent is... a bald, bearded man wearing purple trousers! Yes indeed, there is only one enemy in Barravento. The militant wing of the Ministry of Silly Walks claims another victim.
You just have to fight the same man in front of different backgrounds. The only thing that changes is his trousers. Your health does not regenerate between levels so you really need to avoid getting hit, which due to the random colli-sion detection isn’t really something you can actively choose.So you’ve got a fighting game with totally botched controls and messed-up collision detec-tion, and no variety whatsoever. What could make it worse? How about a constantly looping five- second piece of background music that’s just a load of annoying plinky notes? Yep, that’ll do it.Barraventois the very worst commercially released fighting game on the Amiga. It somehow manages to be less fun than Dangerous Streets, which is a feat so impressive it would cause the gods of Olympus themselves to despair. Even the simultaneous two-player mode manages to be a tedious experience.Hitek never produced or published another game. I really hope their one attempt was a budget game, because the thought of anyone paying full price for Barravento is deeply upsetting.The annual crotch-grabbers convention takes place this year in front of a giant bowl containing two VHS tapes.Our hero takes a photo of his dead opponent to post on Twitter. Also: what’s wrong with the fallen man’s arms?The bald man hits the floor heavily! And loses no energy at all.20
REVIEW SCORESNone. I believe the game was only released in Brazil, which let the magazines dodge a Barravento-shaped bullet.other versionsNone. But there is a free to play online browser game called Capoeira Fighter 3 which is basically Barravento, but good! There’s also a PC game called Martial Arts: Capoeira, which is less good.What does ‘Barravento’ actually mean?It translates as ‘the turning wind’ and is the name of a classic Brazilian film from 1962.Fighting game characters that use capoeiraRichard Meyer (Fatal Fury)Bob Wilson (Fatal Fury)Elena (Street Fighter)Eddie Gordo (Tekken)Christie Monteiro (Tekken)play these games insteadShadow Fighter is a fun, Amiga-only fighting game with heaps of variety. And there’s a great version of the superb Panza Kick Boxing (known as Best of the Best: Championship Karate in the USA).recreate this game in real lifeDance around a bit wearing pyjama bottoms. That’s it really.21
FACT FACT FACTMost screenshots in this book were taken using emulation for clarity, but as a nod of respect to ChinnyHill10’s original- hardware-only rule, all the graphics in this entry were captured from his own Amstrad CPC 6128.ChinnyHill10 lives on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/chinnyhill10, where he plays and compares many retro games, recording entirely from original hardware rather than emulation. Updates can be found on Twitter via @ChinnyVision.Rik the RoadieFormat: Amstrad CPCYear of Release: 1988Developer: Alternative SoftwarePublisher: Alternative SoftwareOriginal Price: 1.99 POUNDSBY CHINNYHILL10, INTERNET ENIGMATHE MOST DISAPPOINTING GAME I EVER BOUGHT
IT MUST HAVE BEEN slim pick-ings on the Friday evening in 1989 when I purchased Rik the Roadie. These days you can get hold of any game you like in an instant, but back then the big rack of budget games in our local newsagent was only replen-ished once a month at best. So the inevitable day would come when your choice of game was some-what limited. Games you’d previously passed by would become a viable option, as walking out without a game was unthinkable.So that’s how I ended up with Rik the Roadie for my Amstrad CPC. The cover certainly didn’t appeal. It was the era of pop music producers Stock Aitken and Waterman, not middle-aged men with purple rock mullets. The instructions explain that you play the eponymous Rik, a roadie for the band Alternative Rock. They promise a three-part game involving a driving section, a section where you move equip-ment from the van into the venue, and finally a section where you set up the equipment. Everyone loves a driving game, so at least the first section sounded promising.The game loaded up on first attempt, which was a good start as Alternative Software unusually insisted on doing all their tape duplication in house. Whereas the likes of Mastertronic would proudly boast they used BASF tapes duplicated to the highest standards, Alternative copied their own tapes in the back of their warehouse in Pontefract. It wasn’t unusual to find one of their games with the label half glued, the B side missing or, in the case of one Adrian Mole game, half the game’s multi-load sections absent. The game starts with a simple screen and a jolly tune. The music is on a 10-second loop and you’ll be hearing a lot of it. Press fire, and the fun (or lack of it) begins. Big colourful graphics and a top-down view of a road. You must drive your van 200 miles to the venue within a time limit. There are no lives; all you have to do is beat the clock. Crash and you’ll lose time. There are four lanes of traffic and your van has a top speed of 127mph. The road is entirely straight and the only depiction of speed is a flash-ing red-and-white border. All the other traffic on the road travels at the same relative speed, and as long as you are doing 1mph you can overtake everything else. In fact, between 1mph and 100mph, the comparative speed of your van to the other traffic does not change. Reach 100mph and there is a one-off speed increase. Steering on your van is responsive; however, braking is not. Your van brakes at the same rate it accelerates. This, combined with the game’s strange relationship with relative speed, means that even if you are doing 1mph, you will run into the back of other road users unless you come to a complete stop, which you can’t do in time unless you are doing less than 30mph.So your only option when faced with oncoming traffic is to steer out of the way. This might not be a problem except that the game can often block the road ahead with four cars side by side, all moving at the same speed. First, you won’t be able to stop in time to avoid hitting one of the cars, and second, as the cars are all moving at the same speed, there is no way past. They’ll happily 23
travel for the full 200 miles all side by side. If you crash into them, the game might reset their posi-tions, it might not or it might spawn another group of four cars in front of you. All the time, you are running against an in-game clock that starts at six minutes. During the driving section, this clock runs at one game sec-ond to three real seconds. However, for Levels 2 and 3, the game clock actually does run in real time. Possibly a coding issue?Occasionally nothing appears to happen at all. The road is straight and the only thing to crash into is other traffic. I managed to drive for a whole minute in real time without having to touch the steering.After 200 miles and what feels like several years, Level 1 is complete. After a brief bonus screen, you are on to Level 2. You have to carry the equipment from the van into the venue. You do this by moving one foot after the other before you run out of ‘endurance’. Yes – it’s a Decathlon-style, waggle-the-joystick mini game. Left to move your left foot, right to move your right foot. You must reach the stage door before the endurance meter runs out and beat the time limit. Again, there are no lives but you lose time every occa-sion you drop the equipment due to your ‘endur-ance’ running out.The critical thing here is that it seems to be impossible to complete the section unless you start waggling the stick before the game is ready. The trick appears to be to just waggle the joystick as fast as you can and not to stop for any reason at all until the level is completed. Not exactly a masterpiece of gameplay design.High-speed action as Rik apparently drives through a ZX Spectrum loading screen.Oddly, ‘carrying heavy items’ is a gameplay mechanic missing from most modern games.24