You Hated This Game | Nostalgia Nerd

let me tell you about a game that was never even really supposed to see the light of day a game that was made entirely with taking the piss in mind a game crafted by a teenager with a demanding Publishing Company breathing down his neck while he was busy trying to deal with other important things such as exams and you know being a child a game birthed from sheer Spite and bristling hormonal anger a Game Notorious in a retro Computing scene as being one of the worst if not the worst games ever put to Market that game is squitch for the ZX Spectrum in the 1980s and in the Heyday of computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum the still young gaming scene had a heck of a lot to offer anyone wanting to rack up scores at home rather than at the arcades new titles seem to be churing out all the time cassette tapes with promise of a challenge or at least a great way to spend your time after school and if you were so inclined perhaps you'd make your own game and show off your coding skills to your friends and at some point publishing companies realized there was a great opportunity here to capitalize off literal child labor and said companies weren't always that bothered about simple things such as quality control at the time it's not like players of something crap could review bomit on the internet no they'd have to rely on Gaming magazine reviews before spending their pocket money on chubby gristle or Jet Set Willie because these publishing companies opened themselves up to allowing kids who had mastered or even semi- mastered Rec coding language to send Rec Creations to said publisher who would chuck a bit of cash by away and then publish the game and I do mean kids the writer of the original squid game was just 13 years old the company responsible for getting squid to Market was the PowerHouse they eagerly offered bedroom coders marketing and artwork for their game in exchange for all the rights and they Chuck in a couple of quid too sometimes a little sometimes a lot I hate to be cynical here but I have a feeling that such companies knew they could take advantage of non-financially literate kids and low balled the bobbins out of them send 50 Quid with 13y old and he'd think it was literally the most money anyone had ever seen even if a Powerhouse knew the game was going to net thousands for the company that's business I suppose and to be fair £50 will buy you a lot of w bars flumps and opal fruits maybe Louise Smith and the year above will see you cutting about in 20 candy necklaces and those watches made of colored sugar pellets and let you hold her hand at break time if you were lucky Squid didn't start on the zedex Spectrum it was originally made for the Commodore 64 and would be published on home computer system in 1986 and it was made by one Jason Kendall a 13-year-old school boy whose voice had probably barely dropped impressively Jason had spent about a year teaching himself how to use basic after starting on his school's computer then sweet talking his mom and dad to buy a Vic 20 on the latter he eventually compiled his first ever computer game being a Jeff Minter fan and who isn't he enjoyed bizarre psychedelic gobbins in games and thus decided the hero of his game would be a weird mutant bird thing and why not make the other characters in it a bit weird too or a plot for that matter sources online seem to agree Jason was paid a massive 300 lbs at the time for squid which is an insane amount of space Raiders and tangy Toms I hope he made his bedroom into a swimming pool with them because that's what I would do the cover art depicts what one would assume is the main character a bird by the name of squidge a terrifying Al Dragon hybrid zooming through the air at top speed as far as cover art goes this does seem to promise that it's all about to UT L kick off it's scary exciting and who doesn't love controlling a horrendous monstrosity flying through the air it's for closest gameplay experience you're going to get to lobbing a Frey bentos pie across a Motorway Bridge which is pretty fun a what in the absolute you can gleam some information from the cassette inlay and it's also quite insane squidge was once a happy bird in the decadent days before the population Holocaust Holocaust that is is a strong word with strong connotations our boy Jason was not mucking around okay so now I'm even more terrified to play this game although I am a bit worried it's going to be massively insensitive then the food ran out in Block capitals oh no the second sentence of a blur and I'm absolutely being tumbled onto a roller coaster of emotions Panic fear concern this is a journey you control this mutant creature who will stop at nothing to satisfy its only driving force insatiable ferocious violent hunger mhm at this point I have many questions what kind of horror filled world does squid live in is he or she or they okay have they become a cannibal after a nuclear apocalypse exactly how did this so-called Holocaust happen and what are those decadent days mentioned in the blur is this going to be a moral about taking day-to-day life for granted there's a rich and dark backstory here that we are not being privy to and that is just a travesty on another page of inlay it offers a little more context you must guide squidge through the underground labyrinth in search of the pieces of the enner tree what is the enner tree why does squid have to do this if it's been a population Holocaust and the food has run out maybe it's best to call it a day and shoot yourself in the head before the zombies come at this point I'd like to thank sponsor displate for sending me these absolutely spectacular works of art all packaged up to keep them absolutely safe in transport look at those I'm taking these and I'm putting them up for everyone to see in my arcade bar Barcadia all displates are passion printed on metal within the EU they come in various sizes and you get an easy and safe magnet mounting system which allows you to make sure they're exactly in the right place with ease it's so fast as well now I'm not even being funny but they look fantastic punters are going to love looking at those with a beer in hand you can get retro arcade art like I have here which works well with what I've got check out their official designs they'll delve into various artists on display including some of my favorites heyun and yadan honestly it's a great alternative to Canvas OR paper prints they look stylish they're durable and by using the discount available through my affiliate link they're pretty darn cheap free time is also just four to five business days with delivery to 56 countries so go on click the link and take a look today the game's title screen is well it's busy busy in the way only a 13-year-old boy's brain can be busy Sands the over sexualization of mamory glands rather adorably it contains scrolling text which thanks the author's friends and family for helping with the game or simply says hi to them he also takes the opportunity to boast about how good he is of the game's Rubik's magic and tell a few jokes it's honestly very endearing I'm going to feel like a total bastard when I rip this game a new one so the point of the game is to pick up little pieces of a tree and assemble them in the middle of the underground caves which the title screen calls the great underground cabins of Poa P Pula It also says that rebuilding the tree will give squid everlasting life but that would mean he's going to stay alive in this desolate post-apocalyptic world forever I'm not seeing his motivation here again I would very much enjoy some more context but I'm on the verge of being rude about the output of a literal child and I feel bad here we go the starting screen here's squid himself looking very different from how he looked on the cover art he's not terrifying at all he's actually an adorable little green lad with Flappy Wings he can shoot with what the auor calls his splunger not sure what this is but it can be used to defend yourself against various thingies again the author's words UNT fortunately he can only shoot said splunger horizontally and that is very much a problem in a game where enemies come at to you from all angles every time an enemy touches squid his health bar goes down you need to pick up these big fruit things in order to get passes you'll need to use in the Maze to navigate The Maze you will need to draw a map or something because a lot of the screens look the same it's not hard to get lost if the enemies spawn at an insane rate kill one and another just wanders in like it damn well owns the place you will often have four of them going for you at once and in the small spaces it's too hard to get to their level and shoot them with that horizontal only laser beam thing plus it's not unusual for an enemy to just burst out of the exit you're heading for with no warning it's almost impossible not to take damage you can replenish Health but only by picking up pieces of the enry each piece of which is a massive trick to get through the endless caves of bloodthirsty nasties oh and yes touching the walls takes Health off too because screw you that's why all in all it's a stressful gameplay experience and just not fun it's a kind of game that is difficult to the point of being unfair and doesn't offer anything satisfying enough to justify dragging yourself through screen after screen of blue cave while frantically avoiding various bizarre looking creatures which can turn our hero into a pile of Ash sure with a bit of work it could have been half decent but the PowerHouse wasn't about wasting time making a game actually good they were about getting that on the shelves turning a profit ASAP so on it went and a plan to release it on other platforms was devised namely the then popular in UK computer for ZX Spectrum the problem was Jason Kendall didn't have a ZX Spectrum or indeed any particular interest in learning how to code with one he was happy to stick with the Commodore side of things which is fair enough so while he likely went off to withdraw his £300 payment in1 notes so he could throw them on his bed and roll on them with his mates the PowerHouse got in touch with some other poor bastard who had been sending them games 15-year-old Jason Creon this Jason was on the powerhouses books because he had already sent a couple of his own games to the parent company crl even though the company did not deem those games good enough for publishing they clearly saw a chance to take advantage of sorry I mean give a great opportunity to the bud encoder probably Keen to get a foot on the door of the industry Jason Creon accepted the PowerHouse then proceeded to put him on a timed contract and then take the utter piss first off Jason wasn't even given a copy of the original game according to a Euro gamer article I will link in the description he had seen the game at crl's office and the company apparently thought that was enough information to you know convert the entire game Faithfully after asking repeatedly for this basic request apparently even going to the offices to ask personally and being talked down to crl eventually sent him the game on a floppy disc he did not have a disc drive and so the only use it had to him was as a beer coaster beer that he couldn't even legally drink yet because and I really do want to press this home this company was demanding a fully converted game from a literal child while also being rude bastards to him as the contracted deadline Drew near Jason had all but given up on making the game at all he' originally planned to make it with effort and in fast running machine code but after crl Shenanigans and pestering he was rightfully keen on having the Publishers get in the absolute sea however a month before the deadline was up crl sent him a copy of Squid's map and proceeded to Pest of the bobbins out of him for the conversion I think the lad was too plight to explicitly tell the company to kick rocks but with his exams on the way it seems that he did at least ignore them or try to but crl didn't like getting ignored and they kept going at him for the game so much so that Jason decided to make it just to get them to leave him alone but he wasn't going to bother using machine code for it he instead opted for for the poorly reviewed laser basic by ocean software a programming extender package and its compiler aimed at video game developer hopefuls Jason proceeded to knuckle down and put his head into making a purposely crap game let's have a look at it now famously this game it doesn't even work this would appear to be because there's a line of code which means the game will only listen to caps lock keystrokes but then the code for moving the big bird in the middle there asks for lowercase keys but because the loader forces them all into caps lock there's no input red and you can't do a soding thing Jason has since denied putting that code in there on purpose saying that when he sent it to crl it was at least playable in the loosest sense of the word exactly how that little snippet of functionality destroying code got in there then remains a mystery so in order to play this we're going to have to muck around with the code I'm going to do it so we can have a look at what those who bought this game at the time were missing changing the Ram value at 23658 effectively turns off caps lock you can't do it by simply pressing caps lock because the game outright refuses to accept any key inputs unless it's already off it's crazy the beauty of the spectrum was you could break into most games and just muck around with the code and then run it again and hey Presto this is actually how most cheats work too or pokes as they were known back then by the way whilst we're here the game code is excellent for example level is written at the bottom of the screen but the code makes no attempt to actually put anything next to that there's no variable nothing just for text level you can see how incredibly lazy everything else is too there are lines of code that could be for Loops for for example but they're not there are go-to commands which send the code racing to line 706 which literally doesn't exist so the game jumps to 73 which sends you back to 105 which is literally back to where we started unoptimized doesn't even sum it up and then there's utter nonsense like this dude what were you even thinking good Lord this is not how you program and this is coming from someone who used to program exactly like this for a commercial business and they never knew so first off the mutant bird in this version is absolutely massive he's also incredibly Badly Drawn you can actually tell this was intentionally drawn so bad this is an excellent visual representation of stuff it I can't be asked there are enemies here neither of which look anything like the enemies in the original version and unlike the original version they don't care about squidge they would just move back and forth having a nice time it only hurt squid if you go out of your way to smash the Bird's massive body into them the Splurge event which if you remember was the name the original developer Jason Kendall gave to Squid's weapon needs to be used A Few Good Hits to wipe out any of the enemies it will take you a while because the hit boxes on these things apparently didn't get the memo to you know be functional squid himself moves incredibly slowly perhaps because he's so bastard and huge he can barely fit into the corridors that he very slowly squeezes himself into he also leaves little artifacts of himself behind like shed skin while his deformed Wing flaps him despondently along also when squid moves the enemies stop moving that's how much the game is struggling just to function at all every time you finally get to another screen squid inexplicably appears slap back in the middle of the new one getting to another screen is a mission in itself too sometimes the game will just give up on life and crash if you haven't positioned squid in the very precise part of the exit so as not to confuse the game the game experience is an absolutely mindless SLO from screen to screen with the slowest moving playable character ever made I can't imagine playing it all the way through picking up all the pieces of a tree and the fruit because it would probably be quicker to drive to the Moon ah what in the absolute sh and because of another glitch squid can't actually pick up the items needed to complete the game we can see what the game end screen says by looking at the game code which is linked with an excellent article on the badame Hall of fame.com which I will link in the description I'll also link for line byline explanation of the game code AS compiled by Mark green which does an excellent job of untangling the mess Jason creeton rather spectacularly made if a functional version had been released players of switch who had successfully dragged themselves through the gaming version of pulling yourself through trial or an afternoon long team building meeting were rewarded with this message well doneal Bean you've done it but for me it means another 2 months in a dark dank bedroom which badly needs decorating writing a followup oh well never mind bye for now Stella in an Artful you Jason didn't even bother compiling the game that means he delivered the code uncompressed and unoptimized like an absolute Legend also because it was uncompiled it essentially had an entire copy of laser basic right there in the code but could easily be stolen by anyone not looking to buy it outright that was massively illegal but that wasn't Jason's problem you would have hoped that someone at the PowerHouse might have checked for something like that but of course they didn't in fact even after releasing the game on playable the PowerHouse went ahead and chucked it still on playable onto a compilation cassette this suggests that not a single person at Powerhouse or crl gave any manner of a which you know fair enough and in a delightful stroke of absolute miserly bastard they never even paid Jason Creon apparently he was due £25 commission from the solded copies but they conveniently forgot to send the check by the way the PowerHouse wanted a version made for the commodor 16 also and I do want to cover it quickly because the gameplay transcends absolutely Insanity again Jason Kendall didn't have the equipment or KN how to do the conversion and of course why would he so who did they employ to do that well it was a kid again one Mark mccubbin apparently child labor laws didn't extend to nerds at the time I think he was a child any anyway in this picture he does look about 5 years old but as a man in my 40s so does anyone under the age of 25 the c16 version of squid is graphically massively downgraded to accommodate for the restrictions of a Commodore 16 squid himself now looks like a gangrenous opaopa there are only four parts of a tree to collect rather than six and the enemies all look the same little squares with sad faces in them honestly whose idea was it to convert this to so many platforms what what is going on but about the en enemies they are absolutely balls to the wall insane let's take a look at how they actually behave in the game look at this what is going on how is squid meant to deal with these utter scenes those enemies are kicking off to such an extent it's overwhelming this is what a panic attack looks like it's the same on each screen too the enem is moving at 500 mph in a circle or figure of eight patterns but trap squidge with no choice but to Barrel through them and take a hit and then there's another problem the restrictions of the Commodore 16 and apparently also included needing to remove the ability for squidges splunger flanger whatever it was called to have any soding effect on the enemies at all they are moving so fast anyway is not surprising bullets seem to just pass by them every time you think you've got a hit one of the bastards just respawns anyway and the manic dance continues what you end up with is another panic inducing gameplay experience but one in which you find yourself just accepting your fate beating this one is impossible you need to literally slow down time to be able to to finish the game according to the inlay of this version of squid Mark was also working on another conversion one for The Equalizer it doesn't seem like this ever got released so one would hope the lad realized the PowerHouse were taking the piss and told them to get shafted pathway through development that game by the way is a mediocre Wonder Boy ripoff so it's not like Commodore 16 owners were missing out on a huge amount so that's the story of one of the most reviled games on the zedx Spectrum reviewed a game hated by players and the poor lad who made it until next time I've been Nostalgia nerd to [Applause] Lou [Music]

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 89,536

Keywords: sqij, worst games ever, worst game

Id: PWy_3kMOuMA

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023