The most broken game

[Harrison]

What would you say were the most broken games released for the Amiga?

I'm not talking about just bad graphics or not enjoyable to play. I mean games that were released in an unfinished, bug ridden way, or that just didn't deliver on any of their promises and contained limited gameplay or were impossible to play.

For me I would like to nominate Teho's favourite game, Rise of the Robots. That game promised so much in its previews, but on release the pre-rendered graphics looked good, but the game had no gameplay. Each playable character with one move, and that was about it. Completely broken.

Another is Microcosm. Looked great, but where was the game? I remember receiving my new CD32 on release and unpacking it looking forward to play this hyped game. It booted the intro movie and I was amazed by the quality of the video and the production values of the video sequence. But then it got to the game and I couldn't believe how bad it was. A tunnel shoot 'em up! With no real feel of interaction or progress. Horrible. I'm so glad the CD32 also came with Diggers, as that was a brilliant game I was hooked on for weeks. :)

[Tiago]

the only one i remember is, once again... Rise of The Robots, i happend to me to, i look at soe photos in a local magazine, and i thought it would be a great game, but it was the oposite. sorry Teho :-)

[Shoonay]

Legion.
It's both my favorite Polish game for the Amiga, and the game I consider most buggy.
And written in everybody's favorite - AMOS. :D
Sometimes you can play it for hours without a hang, and sometimes it "exits" itself at the copy protection check screen or at some city... it's all random!
After a while I kinda figured what triggers the hangs, like getting too many quests at the same time and not finishing a single one, etc., but I usually just loved to play the strategic elements (building a perfect city) then leveluping my team, and finally getting on with the quests. And I usually spent so much time fooling around the final boss killed me, but whatever, great game :)

PS: The PC remake is available here: http://www.legionpc.yoyo.pl/
Many bugs are fixed, you can change the game's language to English, and even turn that shitty blur effect off.

[Harrison]

I will have to take a look at that.

Another I've through of for bugs is the first Shadow of the Beast. It was technically amazing at the time, with parallax scrolling and graphics that surpassed anything else, and a music score that was brilliant. Sadly for me, the game seemed very unstable and crashed a lot. And if you died it refused to let you start again unless you rebooted the whole game, which was frustrating. I don't know if I had an early version and these issues were fixed in a later release. Anyone else experience similar with this game? The first 2 SotB games were also a bit style of substance too, with not that much gameplay under the visuals. More like an interactive demo than a game, to show off just what the Amiga could do. Still, it is a series of games that pioneered much on the Amiga and so are still remembered fondly.

[Teho]

Of course you had to bring up Rise of The Robots again. The nightmare just never ends.

Broken games, I think Days of Thunder is one. Not buggy, just terrible. Looked ugly, ran unbelievably slow. Amazingly, two of my most favourite games are also two of the buggiest on the Amiga: Moonstone and Frontier. You could complete a game of Moonstone without it hanging, but it would often freeze. And in Frontier just travelling to a planet in a different system meant saving the game three times to at least two different files, just in case; pre-jump, post-jump and pre-docking.

[Tiago]

Of course you had to bring up Rise of The Robots again. The nightmare just never ends.
he he he, you will have nighmares for ever Teho.....
:jason:
1, 2 freddy's came for you ...
3, 4 better lock your door...
5, 6 grab a crucifix...
7, 8 better stay up late ...

[Demon Cleaner]

9,10 he's back again ;)

[Teho]

11, 12 You're all going to hell. ;)

[Tiago]

he he he
rise of the robots - live in hell !! :freddy5hi:

i wounder if you going to tell your grand children about Rise of the Robots...

:Rockingchair: - oh, my young boys, when i was your age, i use to play a game called "Rise of the Robots", but those idiots from classicamiga.com they where always making fun of me...

:gathering:- what grandfather? rise of what ? classic what?

[Teho]

Pff, don't have to wait that long. My nephew gave me funny looks not long ago when I showed him my Dingoo and all the cool old games we used to play. He wasn't very impressed. :lol:

[Harrison]

Kids today have zero attention spans... I feel sorry for them. Blame it on the "throw away/I want it now" culture of today..

[burns flipper]

I encountered some bugs in The Settlers, which I put down to it being a very complex game in terms of what the computer had to keep track of.

Sometimes it would crash when I was saving the game - usually if I had a big map and had up to 50 hours play-time on it. Crash is understandable!

One time, when I cretaed new buildings it would not create the path between the flag directly outside the building and the building door - so when the worker woud arrive, he could not enter the house.

Another time I had a network of roads, some of which went over a lake so had a boatman manning it...and when I sent the knights back to the Castle to refresh them, they all walked on water! They walked along the paths built on the lake. I was curious to see what would happen if I removed the path - would the knights start actually walking on water? - so i removed the road whilst about 10 of the highest-level Knights were walking home...and they all just disappeared... :mad:

And one time I had a guard hut by an enemy border, and he had one too, and I managed to connect one of my roads to his flag. I can't remember what happened next, it would be cool if I started stealing his resources for my buildings!

[Harrison]

I also encountered a few similar "bugs" in The Settlers, but none of them were really game breaking.

Issues with paths was the biggest one I had. Sometimes no one would travel along a path and it needed to be removed and remade. Or resources would illogically be moved in the wrong direction, when the building to process them was right next door along the route. This sometimes led to a mass of resources building up on a junction and builders or processing buildings sat waiting with nothing to do.

For a game of its time it was an amazingly complex thing for the Amiga to process. As you say, if you had been playing for a long time on a map there would be a lot happening on that map to keep track of and update.

[Sharingan]

Gonna second Moonstone here. Loved the game to bits, but the frequent and seemingly random crashes were game-breaking.

I kind of have the feeling that they (the developers) knew about the bug, but couldn't be bothered to fix it.

[Harrison]

I read in a few different places that the Moonstone problem was more that most people were using a pre-release pirated copy with some bugs, as buying a real copy was hard as the game was rare to find in stores.

I never managed to complete Moonstone. my copy always crashed right near to the end. :(

[J Stanley]

Insanity Fight, actually that was the first game I ever booted up on my A500. The sound was awesome and blew me away but it kept crashing for no good reason.

[slicer1000]

Theme Park was also a buggy game on an A500 version the grass was not green and if you made your park to big the game would become unstable. That was the retail version as well. Just to point out that a lot of bugs in amiga games only appeared in pirate versions of the games

[Vangar]

I've always had trouble booting Bubble Bobble, and when I did the game's physics and speed seemed to be flaky compared to the Master system or Arcade versions.

[Harrison]

I've always had trouble booting Bubble Bobble, and when I did the game's physics and speed seemed to be flaky compared to the Master system or Arcade versions.

Bubble Bobble is quite an early Amiga game and was released for the first A500's with Kickstart 1.2 and 512KB of chip ram. If running on an A500 or A600 it runs at the correct speed, but it hates having fast ram present. On a newer setup it is very unstable and doesn't load very well. On an A500+ or A600 it sometimes loaded fine with relokick, but not always. It doesn't need to like newer chipsets. Sometimes it would crash during loading. And on an A1200 I don't think I ever got it to run from disk, but it does using WHDLoad.

These issues were true for many early 1986-1988 games on the Amiga and not really bugs as such. Rather the programs not complying with coding standards and hitting the hardware directly.

When running correctly it is a great version. Although you can't beat the game running on MAME. :)

[Harrison]

Just to point out that a lot of bugs in amiga games only appeared in pirate versions of the games

Yeah, most pirated copies of games that appeared were cracked versions of pre-released versions of the games. Often the versions of a game sent to journalists for review. Most were still not quite complete for retail as the reviewers needed to review the games months in advance to make sure the magazine review was in the issue that coincided with the game release.

I'm surprised the publishers and developers didn't realise where the sources of the pirated copies were coming from. A lot of pirated versions often appeared even before the official release dates. And in fact that still happens for new games.

[Teho]

Oh, they knew. I know one reviewer who mentioned that with an early Id Software game - I think maybe it was Quake - all review copies were unique and had the actual name of the reviewer hidden somewhere in the code. So if a review copy got spread to the pirates they could find out who it originated from. I never learned if this was actually true or if this was a bluff to discourage reviewers to spread their copy though.

[Phantom]

If Rise of the Robots is really crap, then what about Dangerous Streets? :p

Even Renegade series on Amstrad CPC 6128 is far better than this crap from Flair Software. :lolup:

[Harrison]

At least Dangerous Streets had more than one move per character :lol: ... but yeah, I got it free in the CD32 retail bundle and remember how bad it was. There are much worse beat 'um 'ups on the Amiga though. What about PitFighter. Now that was a dire game on any platform!

[Phantom]

No, you've to believe me. Pit Fighter is slightly better than Dangerous Streets. :lol:

[happydevas]

The most broken game:-
1.Call Of Duty 3
2. Heavy Rain
3. Gears Of War
4.The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
5.Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

[Phantom]

The most broken game:-
1.Call Of Duty 3
2. Heavy Rain
3. Gears Of War
4.The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
5.Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Are these Amiga games? :p

[Harrison]

We always get one who doesn't read the topic don't we! :lol:

[slicer1000]

yep most new games are leaked at the distribution stage when the masters are sent to be printed as retail copies.

Toki was another pretty broken game as a large number of copies had faults with them

[Yanni Oblivion]

The version of Silly Putty bundled as part of the Wild Weird and Wicked pack for the A600 was full of bugs, but this was later attributed to the fact that the version that was bundled in that pack was for all intents and purposes a beta! Minor fail, but still a great game.