Stuart Ashens - Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of

hello and thank you all for coming out there's lots of you most of you can't sit you're gonna get cramp that's something to look forward to later also is weird being in front of a lectern I feel like Jim sterling or something I'm gonna have to adjust this kind of regretting right now right I'm mega check and see how far and get away from the microphone while you can still hear me hello hello hello hello here is this okay ah that's good that's more comfortable I'm the direction decided so hello and welcome to this unrehearsed and previously undone presentation called terrible old games you've probably never heard of Carol it feels like the weirdest rock concert ever hello Norwich are you ready to rock anybody here from stole market anybody here swallow him off this morning I've never swallowed a mop before and I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle choice or a sort of gourmet choice really covered in dust which is now in my throat that's a really nice thing to think about before you give a presentation so this is all about gains that are terrible and they're old and you probably haven't heard of them you may have got that impression from the thing behind me there there is some audience participation evil face but it's going to be limited to trying to play a really old game while we point in love at the game not at you we go to do it unless you've got a particularly worrying hat so then this is all at the back of my lovely book I've picked up the wrong copy my lovely book this is the horrible trade paperback from Amazon boo hiss this is the lovely posh one you can buy afterwards look it's shiny and yeah so it's a very long story short I'm slightly obsessed with really old games that aren't very good you may have guessed that already I'm going to give you a quick background to where I got started in computers this is a Commodore vic-20 and what a beast it was as my uncle gave me one in 1986 and to be honest it was a bit out of date by then it wasn't the most exciting of things and but we played some games on it and there were things like radar rat race which is a total copy of an arcade game called rally-x except for some reason they thought it'd be good idea to replace cars with mice no idea of that this is Enver he which i think is some sort of pan on the french verb to invade or something so I could we'd pass between space invaders and blitz is actually quite good not that you would tell that from this image and finally cosmic cruncher is the only other one I remember which is like pac-man except pac-man as the Commodore logo and the game doesn't work properly and it was not a terrific amount of fun I've also just remember another game called Pirates Cove which was a text adventure but I've only just remembered it so I don't have a picture if you wish to imagine some text on a screen there if you've done that well done you now have a full image of Pirates Cove right but for Christmas oh my god Lee goodness I got a spectrum plus 2 which is kind of a grey spectrum with a data core door built in a data quarter being like a tape deck that doesn't quite work properly but it was the great thing ever because I could actually get new games and play them and enjoy them and it came with punchy and punchy is a ripoff of hunchback the arcade game except it doesn't quite work properly and it's ludicrously over difficult the character in the middle is supposed to be a policeman barely drawn by somebody who has no idea what a policeman is or indeed any concept of visual media at all and it had sampled speech horrifyingly low-quality sample speech every time your character died it went e hahahaha Rock a baby whilst an evil face appeared and I haven't slept since um it's not a good game another thing I've just remembered is if you fall off that magic carpet thing is on he doesn't fall into the pit he just falls over and dies in midair lazy rubbish but I still got some enjoyment out of it it's one of the few games I had now time came when I'd saved up ten mighty pounds which was enough to buy a new game and my dad went off and picked the game himself he only ever did that once because he came back with a cat-trap planet of the cat men which is part of the very popular genre of killer egg games now I was quite excited when he brought it back he got really good review in crash magazine which was the ZX spectrum magazine that I personally subscribed to why didn't realize was the reason it got to good reviews because they had effectively made it or at least funded it it was an idea from a reader who had won a competition a competition called Genesis birth of a game and the idea he came up with was this cat-trap planet the Catman thing it's actually quite a solid idea less solid was the execution because it seemed like the design studio that made it kind of lost interest I would have said 18 seconds after they cash the check so ever that with this which was quite nice to me and the little character on the left a little egg guy is called the multi-terrain exploration droid which shortens to M te d or MP ed a see what they did there and there's some evil captain and you shoot them and you run about and there's not actually much gain to it there's an idea that you have to cut different weapons for different enemies that never really plays out you can fire grenades that don't do anything and the whole thing has got to kind of not entirely had their hand in the whole idea all the way along written quite thickly across the design document I think the thing that really sticks in my mind and made this absolute a waste of money though it was far too easy apparently and so to get around this they created the orbs which are those spherical things there and the orbs don't hurt your character they don't take away power but they knock you back to the start of the level they're also virtually impossible to jump over you get stuck on them and this like loads of them together so you touch one and you can get thrown right back to the start of the level so it could take you literally 15 minutes to get across like three screens this is what we call artificial difficulty or again he couldn't really be bothered and I was not particularly impressed that I had saved up a long time for something laughs my dad has never bought a video game since as you can imagine this thing kind of reversed sat in the back of my head for some time and it's probably thinking years later when you could access to all these video games to emulation in just downloading off the internet and their tiny little files one of the worst games ever released actually were which led me to create my series terrible games you've probably never heard of that I used to do on the internet but not enough people watching it takes ages to make which is why it turned into a book that's how business works em yes and it's one of those things where thoughts are there's going to be some quite bad stuff or there will be a few I had no idea of the sort of horrifying garbage they were spewing out into shops and daring to charge people for I've just researching this one book I've probably got enough to write five books on it and my criteria are quite strict it has to have been commercially released ie somebody has you know put it on the shop and dared to take your cash for it but also it can't be kind of just a buggy mess it has to be something where there's a fundamental flaw with the design where they haven't quite you know got the whole thing together and it just doesn't work as a result which gives the bottom line of no reasonable person could have fun playing the game because of course the whole point of a game is you play it for enjoyment and if that's not really possible then they've kind of fundamentally failed at everything they were trying to do not the people cared in the early eighties when they was trying to shove a game out on the vic-20 for seven quid as we will very shortly discover and I also had a rule for the book no console games it's all just computer games released between 1980 and 1995 there's all stuff like Commodore Amiga Zed X spectrum I could now list a load of old computers that won't so there's no Nintendo no Sega no stuff along those lines because you may have noticed earlier we had there you've probably never heard of beer and stuff like Nintendo and Sega is so heavily covered on YouTube I mean everybody seen the review of Rockets et for the Atari 2600 it's Superman for the Nintendo 64 we've seen all that I wanted to find really obscure and horrible things and managed to find things so bad well let's get into it shall we this is the slide show I called end of slideshow quite pleased with it my try and get it in the tape anyway let's get rid of this and I am now going to show you something several of you will have seen because there we actually use it to test the screen earlier this is just to give you an idea of what games can be like when they're really pretty goddamn terrible this is hunter for the Atari 8-bit series bear with me I shall blow it up full screen because you really need to see it and hear it ready and are we having fun yet anybody notice a problem with the game design anybody notice any frames of animation musics nice though there we are that was 25 seconds of Hunter for the Atari 8-bit now he's the real joy that was released in 1995 that was the same year Sony released the first PlayStation some people were paying money for Ridge Racer some people were paying money for that it was only released by mail-order in Germany cuz II the Terry Abrams quite over add to favor by then by being hideously and ridiculously outdated but it still had a market and so these cheeky blighters were just bring a hunter yes it's a good game by the probably in German but it's a good game and you can buy it from us send us 15 boys marks and then the game comes back and here somebody spent money and that was somebody's Christmas unbelievable so we are now going to go through and I'm going to come up with my theory of the seven gaming sins which has seven horrifying design flaws that if you have any one it's a bit like actually in Harry Potter where they have those unforgivable curses if you do one of the evil ones you get straight to sent off to wizard prison where hello the bottom carter's bag on your wall all day imagine that but for game design if you manage to do any of these your game is going to be almost entirely unenjoyable by anybody and many of these games managed to tick several of these boxes which is quite impressive in a horrible way right we're going to start with the killer caverns for the ORAC one who had an ORAC one I really wish I'd actually brought mine just it's a cool looking thing it's got some red keys on it the ORAC one is mostly famous for having a bug in the tape loading routine which means tapes repeatedly refused to load and it's basically random if you can get a game working or not they then release an upgraded version called the ORAC Atmos that was a bit more powerful and didn't fix that bug which it still absolutely blows me away to this day right just to warn you this is very technically bad running lots of different emulators because they're all sorts of things written by hobbyists and that so this will probably go horribly wrong repeatedly so that's something to look forward to right now killer cabins here is oh well I'm going to give it a posh name and then a realistic name for the floor with it this is what we call zero control over wind stroke loss status or in layman's terms games bloody pointless because you have no actual say in whether you win or lose you may as well just toss a coin at the start and then say hey I won killer cabins or I lost killer cabins it really is that bad right let us get this thing up and running load snapshot oh here we are killer caverns by Darrell biospecimen why is this in such small window hang on I can't the window bigger that's good no make it big this is going to be fun video options full screen a look at that right so level 1 2 9 1 is easiest now this is what psychologists would call a lie because all the levels appear to be exactly the same we haven't gone through the source code but it seems to make no wallet so we're going to start off with one because it's easiest it's lied to us right so prepare for the graphic fest that is killer cabins and I shall talk very slowly because I know it takes a while for the first screen to appear and here it is that is not the logo from an accounting firm that is the main character so the story goes this gentleman wants to get the treasure the treasure is a red block I don't know maybe building some lego and got a piece missing or something but the tray is down a big hole Houck is he gonna get it is even go to B&Q and get some rope in a ladder no he's going to go into the killer caverns and try and pick up 11 parts of a ladder in the most lethal set of caverns in the world which are to the left and being as he lives in the 2d world and can't go to the right that's probably going to happen just enjoy the animation of that Andy Serkis did do the motion capture so we go left into the caverns oh my goodness I've never noticed that before he's on fire let's fight for it right so is a room full of pencils and that is deadly steam hissing from the ceiling sound effects so it's quite realistic well like the beautiful graphics now you may have noticed that the steam appears at random intervals in random places so you cannot time it you can't stand where the steam is wait for it to go and go through you see just when age is for no steam and then suddenly there's some more and every single room and puzzle in the game is like this it's totally random if you make it across or not so I'm literally just going to hold left and hope go on go on my friend I think that is a victory so next room there's a red thing that's nice oh good god I think that's king Zika France from Dark Souls so you can stand here and wait and go immediately afterwards but again it's random so you might as well hold the pole Oh when it says hard luck it means it most literally it's entirely luck based let's try that again Oh perhaps I should have waited I could have had some control over the game at least fooled myself did you know one of the major causes of human stress is thinking you have no control over your life this game is fairly stress inducing lesson I'm actually getting quite annoyed playing it now it's so good I do at the amount of time it gives you at the top though I think that's like 15 years or something right I am going to try waiting in front of him going over I know for but it does nothing but right stand here was the big blue sock puppet comes up go on go on come on give us a kiss come on yeah there is feet of some crisps and yes look at that what is the next room it's probably the steam again I reckon oh no it's this same one again that's nice so what's in the next screen please be the same again it'd be hilarious no nothing okay now I'm worried no that's that's just an empty screen maybe or maybe the random counter didn't sir trip we don't know ah the deadly red pencils notice how quickly they appear literally instantly they're usually in different places to be fair go on let's finish the game i wouldnt want to deprive an audience of seeing a full game of killer cabins go on go on go on oh yes can we find a bit of the ladder please apparently not these are slightly troubling these empty rooms what lurks within one of the rooms has a floating Scorpio well that's the end of that chapter em one of the rooms has a floating scorpion next constant flatulent noises so far to the floating scorpion it's a real hero of the game play again in a way the end button doesn't do anything you have to press Y thanks Darrell Bowers Daryl Bowers was about 15 when he wrote this game but we won't lay him off because it was being sold for money he in there being a very good programmer though he wrote several good things I believe was he one of the people by north and south on Commodore 64 I believe he was which is an excellent game but this is kind of like something he did when he was first learning I think is a very polite way to put it so there we are that is zero control over win-loss status I'm going to work out how to quit this this may take you several months quit that sounds about right ah victory achieved now that it's it number one sin number two is unclear sensory feedback also known as car bloody tell was going on love squit inter i'm going to be demonstrating this with graffiti man on the atari st which is a bit of a cheat because there are better games on these I've got a really good example on the immediate but you try emulating an immediate on laptop with HDMI out it's not going to happen so I'm gonna ask for a volunteer from the audience who would like to play graffiti man me he does go on then come up sir what's your name Nile hello now have you ever played graffiti man on the Atari ST before no I feel for you and soon we all will I've no idea how we're going to do this with a microphone I'll just kind of stand here right I'm going to get up and running oh that's nice the Parsee dll is in oh the pasty dll is still in the preliminary beta version if everybody can make a note of that there will be a quiz later George quick hasn't done anything on it since 2006 though there we are and now Windows is paranoid this is getting better it knows we're going to play graffiti man here we are we got there that's clear enough isn't right yeah let's make it a bit louder I regret right now if you wish to take the hot seat and I'm gonna have to hover over your shoulder like a weird uncle I apologize and these are the controls left/right up/down okay there we have you wish to put your right or left hand depending how you work that's it there's no shooting or anything it's nice and simple and I think to start you just press a button there we are it will go straight into the game good luck we're all counting on you the idea is to run from the left side of the screen to the right okay if you think that it load it does certainly does become a floppy disk see there we go there you are the graffiti man in black they're running along he's doing well there's a weird man coming behind him and oh you physically exploded and we start again can you tell what's going on people are running industry that is literally all you can get from this and again you've been hit from something from behind you couldn't quite work out I'm really glad you went down first most people in plant go up or to the right and they die within a second I've also just notice the old man's firing at walking gains Oh bad luck yeah over that's it did you enjoy your time with movie team an enriched your life cutting no it's too hard is exactly the lesson to learn thank you very much make do good work so as you can tell you can't tell what's going on you just start off it's a mass of the most ugly cartoon characters this side of a French novel and just well I've practiced this game and I'm now going to show you what happens when you can put on like I'm gonna try and show you what happened so now I'll had it quite right you have to go down first it's all a bit of one of those bit of a memory test more than say something you could physically enjoy down we go the idea is that this main graffiti man character wants to join a graffiti gang for reasons I haven't no understanding of and that for some reason involves running through ugly and incredibly dangerous neighborhoods so we're going to go here and now I'm going to go up and around oh no I got slightly close to the old man which causes the graffiti man to explode I don't know what ailment he has but I really hope I never catch it right up we go down again okay oh yeah I'm going to go for this there we are there's an Amiga version of this don't play that just as bad okay oh my goodness now you may notice the further you get to the right the closer you get to the edge of the screen oh no oh my goodness the problem there is sometimes enemies come from the right okay that's level one and what fun we had now you get the bonus game which you can understand what's going on but um the idea is simply to spray over somebody else's graffiti so he's supposed to be some sort of great artist and all he does is find childish graffiti and then spray what looks like fake snow over it and this goes on until all those spray cans in the bottom right run out do you know how much this game was on its release in 1987 25 using RPI to bring that up to modern amounts that's 19 trillion American games this is one of the seriously one of the most expensive games released for the Atari ST and I'm just going to stand here till the pain runs out because I kind of wish I was dead however definite the score goes up if you're covering blue not if you're covering another color the technical information through that also if you look at the life oh it's gone there I have to say look at the life meat on the bottom left it looks like the man's been boiled so level two if you thought level one was fun well you probably weren't watching well Steve Martin from rocks out there right so we're going to go along and run on the bottom as before this is much easier dump them I don't know how the old man is firing rockets out of his knees but that's something I've ever seen oh oh oh look you got near the right-hand side of the screen the horrifying racist caricature came on and I exploded and there's no way of seeing what's going on it's one of the most poorly designed games and they could have almost got away with it if it was like two pounds or something but 25 in a car cost like eight pence in those days Deary me right I'm going to attempt to quit this and I hope I'm successful let's just take a moment to enjoy life without graffiti man that's beautiful so gaining sin number three complete lack of meaningful challenge or too bloody easy for this I'm going to demonstrate this one myself actually this is alien Raiders for the Commodore vic-20 also known as alien invaders because it was written by a company called heart of old software they probably thought it wasn't good enough to release and then another company did and surreptitiously changed the name on the title screen didn't change the name in the game where it's written right across the top so well done they're really quality theft okay this is what a vic-20 looks like it's not stretched it does have that horrible font comment this bigger oh I can write this is much easier than going fullscreen or using HDMI lovely three hundred three thousand five hundred and eighty three bytes free of memory any program isn't here what could you do with that much memory weep apparently yeah okay we are going to load this this was a soul on cartridge by the way so would have been quite expensive and music buyer for the blasts there it's wonderful press return shall we press return yeah go on right if you're familiar with space invaders then you are a human that lives and yet here are the controls Chevron left four right Chevron right for right and left shift fires I can live with that you'll notice it's already calling yourself alien invaders again right so this is space invaders written by somebody who has no concept of fun now it looks pretty poor to start off with there's a reason for that it is pretty cool but you may notice that there's kind of no smooth animation of the base at the bottom it has 20 different positions it can be in in clarify one bullet at a time the aliens come down from one of these 20 positions and they kind of fur you know don't move very fast you could say that not much of a hurry you know maybe they're looking at their phone maybe they're trying to work it where they're going to buy from Morrison's later my experience Morrison's will be up stop whatever it is scores up to 18 hours finest net yeah can't see it for fun is quite relatively difficult I'm not looking at the screen straight on but still not really close to losing the game all scores nearly up to 100 that's 100 we win we have now completed the entirety of alien invaders that was what we on YouTube caller let's play walkthrough just imagine there PewDiePie in the corner they're getting all excited you beat the aliens another game yrn here's a hint doesn't begin with why so the problem with alien invaders is it's so simple you cannot fail at it unless you deliberately try and you have to just leave it for like three hours for the aliens that actually hit the bottom of the screen this has got to be some sort of kids first programming project surely but it was released on a physical cartridge and there were tape games for the big 20 so you know it's a really expensive way of doing it if you were playing mail-order in America and you spent like the equivalent of twelve pounds or something on this I imagine you're still crying to this day I'm going to say no to another game oh it immediately drops you back there we are any programs in the audience who wish to copy this game here is the entire source code that was all it really took it's so easy that I've actually run this game three times simultaneously in different emulator windows and easily beat all of them you can literally play it three times at once okay probably have had a cup of tea and written a small novel at the same time I've seen a lot of games aren't fun because they're too easy but I've never seen one that's literally no fun because it's too easy thank you hard to build software and whoever released it under the wrong name right we're now going to go in for number four impossibility of success or do bloody difficult complete opposite end of the spectrum we're going to play license to kill on the acorn electron and I must apologize because this emulator in fact none of the electron ones work properly with our save memory states which another way of saying we have to load this in as if it was a real emulate real Inc as they call it back in the day the Acorn electron if you're not familiar with the Acorn electron it is the BBC micro which is the old computer you'd have in your school of the 80s but a massively cut-down version and I'm going to be honest the BBC micro is a little at the time anyway so a cut-down version really not fun right license to kill I've now got to remember how to load and they come on get it chained I think it is let's find out oh look at that the tape doesn't physically exist we'll be fine and please don't beep at me it's very rude right so who's a fan of black screens I'm going to take this opportunity to have a drink don't dump dumb this isn't loading by the way in the Bangla it does this on a real machine we played it at the Cambridge computer museum and the chaps that are I don't the tapes worth what no this is what happens this is the pain we had to live with and before it comes up I must warn you this game was a quite a big seller it was actually ill thank you for buying this alternative software you are now licensed to kill but only in the game well unfortunately have committed quite a few murders on the back of that way right I'm going to read you the plot because it's painful it's full of incredibly bad references to the ZX spectrum how they don't like it also it's mostly rubbish because this game is quite clearly about infiltrating a Nazi base during World War two and at some point they decided to just change the plots to something about the ZX spectrum they didn't change the game at all so your character is supposed to have an electric screwdriver he uses two disabled robots and actually clearly has a knife and also it never explains why what is apparently a sinclair factory has swastikas on all the doors one for Sir Clive to answer there so the dream team of s guest and J Hamlet licensed to kill the top-secret sinclair factories have been taken over by the neo-nazi organization that explains the symbols the dreaded Sir Clive's they went on to write cracker jokes professionally your mission to recover the c7 and three quarters joke about the c5 maybe and to make your escape the recovery involves the cracking of the master spectrum David Frost was a script consultant to get the instructions and design of the c7 3/4 to do this an access code is stored in six different computers which must be individually accessed this is done by entering the access code makes sense you have a hundred and fifteen seconds in which you must find the code you'll be told of you have successfully entered the current code this changes after every attempt a cassette is required to save the part of the accessed code a disk is required to save the data from the master spectrum you can carry only six cassettes and one disk at once when attempting to enter the code you are told how many wrong you have and how many right wrong represents the ones which are in the wrong position but are still in the code and write those which are correct anybody remember Monty Python's meaning of life with the sketch about putting your clothes on a higher peg is it's getting a bit like that also required oh good to use the C similarly causes the similar starter key larger than normal keys and multicolored lovely when listen all the data has been gathered you will be able to escape I'm looking forward to that bit you're armed only with an electromagnetic screwdriver I'm stabbing the robots there teleport system is activated thus they are removed to a random position on the level which you currently occupy when it says the position which you currently occupy they can literally teleport on to the position you occupy and kill you instantly so that's always nice the reason I've read this is it's totally irrelevant they don't seem to be any keys in the game at all no doors to go in and basically no point to playing it whatsoever and here we are licensed to kill you see these scrolling of text in the middle was the random beeps go on that is the entirety of the play area it only takes up 12.5% of the screen I will require a victim from the audience person there you are in my eyeline come on down the price is horribly wrong it cost about eight quid hello there what's your name son George hello George I would well I respectfully request for you to relinquish any joy in your life and play license to kill it is controlled he says quickly looking at the notes by little blah blah blah Z and X yep move left and right and return is stabbed with the electromagnetic screwdriver and I warn you now there are other controls and get a Needham right if you want to put so it's er I forgot already is it an X left and right oh it started and return is there we go good work score 100 150 he's doing well oh no he's touched you argh he did very well it's almost impossible to actually hit them so you must have the reflexes of many Pumas Oh to cable once which is impossible to kill that's fair haven't found many multi-coloured keys so far the floor looks like it's made of knitted rope from old Christmas jumpers Oh No so your score is 400 think that's like a worldwide high school you can go up and down the ladder at the start it makes you no difference it just changes the level so you can go to level 42 and laugh about old bands and last life come on the world is in your debt if you do win oh it's hard you have been sacked by mi7 also your debt I thought that would take precedence but there we are well you didn't credit you doin Lee did incredibly well most people can't hit a single enemy this means you are now promoted to super James Bond well done please take a seat press shift to continue a key which is not used anywhere else in the game you scored 550 and the can-can plays that famous piece of music renowned the world over for espionage Jay I was a bad guy but you can't top him if you get a high score you will ruin this message notice the lowest high score is nearly double the best I've seen anybody ever play it I'm going to have to stop that because it's gonna make right no it's over it's over so yeah there's difficulty in listen then there's whatever that is it also has the cheat of having all these instructions for things which just aren't in the game we've gone through it cheating with savestates for ages you go from left to right forever it never ends there's never any doors to go in there's no way to pick up keys that are no keys it seems to be a bit of a scam in tape form and it's sold quite well you can pick it up on eBay for a couple of quid to this day to play on you're a con electron and make all your friends hate you forever and ever right let's go on to the next sin which we call singular viable gameplay strategy or bloody boring this is a game where there's one way to play it successfully and if you deviate from that single strategy at any stage you'll lose you won't win you'll lose every time and if you do anything other than the single repetitive action that's the end of it I don't know but thinking about this years ago from examples from various games and then I found a game called alien sidestep released on the Commodore 64 in the vic-20 and exists entirely in that kind of spectrum of this one thing you can do don't do that game over let's give it a shot here you ever worked in Dixon's you see that all the time I've just rose what I should have done actually oh no the other one no the other one oh no I don't know converse sixty-four keyboard layout I've ruined everything if you put a semicolon in it staggers the text little sip you never worked well in the spectrum because you had to press space to scroll right an inside step oh we're going this in title screen this one right quickly what are the keys there we are so it's like space invaders written by somebody who was very bored one afternoon and didn't want to go there grounds for tea or something so I wrote this and said so let's shoot the aliens have you worked at White's called alien sidestep yet this is the entire game you've got to stop the aliens landing the only way to do it is to fire what's moving from left to right because then they sidestep into another bullet I'm going to move to the right-hand side of the screen and then move back to the left firing all the time I'm going to move to the right-hand side of the screen and then move back to the left firing the whole time I'm going to move to do you stop the problem II if you don't do this you lose you literally have no meaningful choices as a player and if you do this you kind of never lose you can just keep doing it forever and 50 points one thoughtful Wow I think I may no be the king of this game the only other thing you can do is kind of works is to do that which involves less left and right movement but it's not quite as effective so kind of a secondary strategy that is fairly enfeebled again this was released on cartridge people paid serious money for this in the early days I forget what year it was let's have a look 1983 what a year it was the release of aliens sidestepped being the thing they always mentioned in news reports anybody here heard of quality control or play testing if you have get a time machine go back to 1983 and have a word with the people who wrote this they really would put anything out so there we are that's how you take any fun away from the game you've got to do one thing repeatedly I've been like one of those MMOs we have to grind at the start and kill a load of rats and then take a sausage to the sausage king and all that sort of really boring sir fetch quest you do at the start but distills down to one movement the movement being right to left repeatedly firing the choice right the next one is my personal favorite total concept failure also known as what were they bloody thinking I'm going to ask for somebody from the audience to come up and be really really horrified I'm going to pick I'm gonna be really lazy pick this gel because he's right near the front this is for the Amstrad CPC it's called surprise surprise it has nothing to do the Cilla black program I think they were just trying to cash in on it the cover of the game which I really wish I'd brought actually features a medieval knight shooting lightning out of his hand the game is about turning up to somebody's party late and not being able to find where it starts there are no knights in it all lightning it's the most inexplicable cover I've ever seen anyway let's get the simulator I'm running my goodness could that be any smaller I really hope we can there oh yes we can expand it there we go it was a one to eight K version I'm sure that will help right no snapshot surprise surprise they're all games running out of here we go everybody enjoying that lovely beat there we go I'm sorry workout Sorry Sorry mate I counted well we happened sure thing turn the volume down I was enjoying it so much that's where dubstep was born this game right now you will should be what's your name sir Jake right Jake the controls are mmm-hmm it says looking the things just the cursor keys again oh oh there we are that's useful ah ah I've noticed when the character stands up he turns into Eminem but when he's down he's somebody else entirely isn't that weird right so this was a start room of the game that I think is a fireplace drawn by an idiot Oh oh brother right much like in real life your life instantly ends if you go near a stranger's fireplace you have scored zero out of five nobody knows how the scoring works try again sir my goodness went up an octave they're lovely walking animation you can always tell the programmer when he's walking around town oh my goodness I forgot flappy feet he's got those flappy feet here we are Oh lemons giant lemons Oh lemon touch here game over anything but the Nicolas Cage the lemons right try again sir try different roots is the lemons were horrified oh I like the way it takes him a month to walk across the screen that really helps the game play another thing and include William aircraft see it's coming into land right oh you're making a very sensible decision of lining up exactly cuz if you touch the balls you can guess what happens and it doesn't involve their butterflies come up the game right yeah you've got to be exactly like they'll be honest I don't say apples I don't know what they are Brian knows this is a comic relief oh good work good work Beth classy oh no you're not exactly all over yet oh dear the red noses are out in force now Oh God how'd you get past that yeah don't bless your heart thank you very much Jake I'm going to load a memory snapshot from much further into the game where this house now features a weird candy-striped moving stick that crushes people that you can get from Ikea it's called a la carte and is only $14.99 I'm going to load that in again because I enjoyed it so much there is a reason oh no that's the wrong one you've seen the screen its ass goddess for life right I'm going to go to the right here's an Olympic sprinter this man oh no I can't get through that yeah yeah oh there we are right I don't know what is at the bottom of the screen graphical corruption or the rainbow row to Asgard I've got no idea now you'll notice the red I have a bottle of apple red nose useless graphic let's call it there and just drops from the screen wherever you're standing also I move much quicker in the screen and all that is and so we're going to go and try to get through the top hatch there bear in mind it takes ages to load yourself up oh wait the closer I get to the top of the screen the closer the app will appear still it appears directly on you I have never been able to get through that door I imagine beyond it lie the riches of Solomon or possibly another screen full of graphical corruption and big lemons I don't really know so what we're going through the heads of the designers as they wrote that shortly afterwards I'm sure knives and bullets were going through the heads of anybody hooked later but so I got this idea for a game you're in a house you move really weirdly and slowly everything kills you instantly and you look like Eminem when you walk upwards brilliant take my money and indeed he did I don't know what the sales were like for that I'm hoping less than zero but I actually I don't think it did so logs I've never been able to come across a copy secondhand as yet yes I collect them don't judge me right and finally we are going to come up with the most egregious fault of all this is perhaps you could argue this is more technical than design but it goes kind of beyond that into the very DNA of it this is zero existence scenario or going to bloody exist imagine you bought a game that didn't exist that's an existential crisis right there isn't it present to you squidge on the ZX spectrum at least I think it's called squidge it's s Qi ji which isn't pronounceable in English or spell about in English and it does star a pigeon so is it short for squidging which is Micah Turner I don't know that sir that's the theory of my friend Gary Larry blessing who discovered this game one day and has never been the same since welcome to squid why thank you there's two paper birds now the idea of this is in a post-apocalyptic future a mutant pigeon called squidge and needs to find some food so don't know if you know this but if pigeons don't eat they die useful facts for you there dear biology it's Elise you've learned something today and but the problem in post-apocalyptic worlds are they're full of weird monsters apparently and he needs a sustainable food source so he needs to find the magic tree of food actually they call it much better name that but I can't remember what it is this is a Commodore 64 game a very poor Commodore 64 game it was converted to the Commodore 16 and made even poorer and then there was the spectrum version by Jason Creighton never forget the name for he's kind of a war criminal in spectrum circles for this game right let's play the game I will now use the controls there are loads of controls but only actually the up-down left-right movements work you can't shoot right here we go Zed XS left and right and MB is up and down okay and I'm sorry there we up hey none none of the controls work there is no way to control squidge and the reason is this in the source code he turns on keeping the programmer not squidge he didn't sort of go tron-like into his own code he turned on the caps lock and of course the game is expecting keys without caps lock there is literally no way to play this game but wait by using break you can actually go into the program and then use a memory poke to turn off caps lock and actually play the game which I shall do now and I've got remember the balk of the poke on spec old note spectrum uses weird key words got it right I could ever invest the top of my head but to turn off the caps lock on the spectrum the memory addresses two three six five eight and we should change that to zero one being on zero being off to being a crash program there we out we've done that run squidge again thanks for that beep that really makes the whole thing for me play game here we go yay didn't turn he's going he's kind of moving there's a dirty line on him that maybe a wing that the enemies have stops with a code of not moving how do you get past the enemies to go to the next room oh that part the enemy has stuck to my face that's that's good how do we get across here it's at slower than the bloke from surprise surprise it's turned around I'm still pushing I'm pushing right the whole time let's try going up you're a pigeon you can fly come on well you look more like a bad boat from Great Yarmouth in one of these sort of tourist attractions but the current seemed to go anywhere I've got 44 on the score because the score goes up forever my energy is only at 2010 oh dear oh what a plonker you've just got yourself killed I kinda feel like I had no actual them say in the matter to Yanis mr. gray of course you could just sit at the bottom the screen and accrue infinite score over an infinite period of time but who has that long so you can't get out of the first the weird thing is the first time I ever play this I got to the exits on the left and right and left the room and I've never been able to do it since nobody's been able to repeat this feat I wish I had damn well recorded it but didn't go to the left and nothing happens you can't go through the door go to the right the game crashes because there is no game the story with squidge goes mr. Creighton was tasked with them programming some games for a company called the power house and they said oh we want to conversion the squidge game but unfortunately he had not very upset with the people who worked there on a personal level and was not going to be supplying any more stuff so we did the time-honored creatives thing of delivering a product so deliberately awful there's no way they can do anything with it and 40 the power house didn't have quality control beyond seeing if the tape loaded and released it as part of a compilation with three other games they also released it on its own for three pounds I believe so that means a game that doesn't work wasn't just released it was released twice and mr. Cravens plan failed miserably still got paid kind of hope so on some sick level yeah there's literally nothing - you can go in and check the entire source code okay as list there's no we saw that earlier there we up the source code is bizarre line one says go to - why is line one in there and of course there is no line - and it was written something called laser basic apparently which looks suspiciously like spectrum basic to me but he left the whole version of laser basic in the memory apparently so he kind of accidentally pirated a professional programming tool when he had this released I can't actually think of any other game that's been released that doesn't exist it's just you know here's a tape it's got a title screen you can't play it and if you could there is literally nothing behind it I think for that reason that may be the worst game ever released on the spectrum except maybe for crazy con by CT egg which has the problem of not really being a playable game but there we go so when anybody says our worst game ever it CT the Atari 2600 first ask them what that actually is a bit no idea where they come from and secondly just point out squidge on the Civic spectrum and run and then keep running in one direction for at least three hours so there we go those are the seven major things if you do any of those things when you're designing a game you're going to end up with something entirely unplayable particularly the one about the game not existing but that's really quite fundamental if you're going to do any sort of enterprise in life make sure it bloody exists I cannot stress that to you enough now the end of this um originally was going to be just kind nice little thing where we say isn't it good that these days you can't ask money for a game that fundamentally doesn't work who's heard of Steam greenlight if you've never heard of it well look up Jim sterling on YouTube and see his steam greenlight series where he goes through and finds things people are paying or charging money for on Steam that aren't games that don't work that adjusted game creator programs where they've just done what's known as an assets flip of buying a game creator program and releasing the tutorial as their own game you can find any tutorial at fifteen times with different names released by different people in the hope of making a quick buck so whilst the end of this was going to be a nice little thought of isn't it great that this doesn't happen anymore it's happening more than ever on devices we all have immediate access to so I think the world is probably doomed we should build a spaceship and go to Alpha Centauri which would be a long journey but not as long as crossing the screen and surprise surprise so there you have it that is terrible games you've probably never heard of if you would like or not only then it's something else's laptop spilling coke and somebody else's laptop being one of the capital offences if you would like a copy of the book where you can learn about these games and many others selling face they will be available just outside near the main entrance as you come in on the so from the orientation where we are now you would come out and go to the right and this is beginning to sound like the instructions for license to kill you will need the multicolored key and have 115 seconds in order to purchase the book anyway there all the nice posh copies there 15 pounds each they are published by unbanned look at this take with us jacket off embossed gold I thank you it's even got a ribbon so you can find your page wow it's like living in the future if the future was 1888 so there you are thank you very much for all your help with playing the games thank you very much for looking like you enjoyed it even if you didn't I always appreciate that as does anybody giving a public talk that is terrible games you've probably never heard of thank you very much

Channel: Norwich Games Festival

Views: 414,632

Rating: 4.8747225 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 6Shmi76Pax8

Length: 56min 54sec (3414 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Deson]

Neat video but I wish it could have been recorded on a different angle to where he isn't blocking the screen.

[u/mykeuk]

Just spotted this this morning and loved it!

[u/omnomnominator1]

I was sat right below the camera, I think I can see my hair at one point.

[u/davedubya]

"My uncle gave me one, in 1986".

Ooo err, missus.

[u/Oscarman97]

I wish I was that kid who went to the stage!