10 Weird and (Not Always) Bad Arcade Games | Kim Justice

foreign games don't usually get talked about a whole lot certainly not in the same way that's more high profile failures on consoles and computers get mentioned there's a few reasons for that perhaps arcade games tend to be simpler and don't exactly have a high cost of Entry so a bad arcade game is likely just going to be played once and then forgotten about indeed a lot of the arcades most would perceive as bad ones are likely to be ones that have been dredged up through May more elsewhere rather than actually played on the floor that and a lot of the bigger companies have an option to just not to release a game fully if it doesn't do well on the floor if you had the luxury of being able to do location testing you could send a prototype out to an arcade and if it didn't do well the decision might be made just Binet Lin and Lair rather than start producing it in any quantity something like atari's marble man the long lost sequel to Marble Madness would be an example of this happening there are certainly a couple of arcade games that get a bit of a knock of course most would agree that Spy Hunter 2 and Double Dragon 3 for example are largely awful sequels that completely miss the mark when it comes to what made the original titles any good some other titles might not necessarily be too bad mechanically but are somewhat cringe-worthy in their presentation Revolution X isn't a particularly bad example of a rail shooter at all but the concept of saving Aerosmith from a new world order type organization is quite a hilarious one something like this would probably also apply to a lot of old LaserDisc games and then you do have whole Legions of games that simply tried to rip off whatever title was popular at the time a whole load of poorly made clones of the likes of Donkey Kong Frogger or Space Invaders that aren't awfully notable Beyond being poorly made clones for this vid I've ended up with a mix of titles that fit into these various categories as well as the odd one that goes a bit deeper some of them are pretty high profile While others are completely obscure and there's a couple that I've even got a bit of a soft spot for as opposed to the ones that are just completely hideous I've got around 10 or so and we should probably start with a title that tries to give fans of one of the late 70s and early 80s biggest bands a Sonic and visual experience like no other and it fails but it does so in a very amusing fashion hello I always love it when I get the chance to play Journey on a stream the questions just seem to fly in from all angles most of them simply been why on Earth is there an arcade game based on journey I suppose you could also ask the same question of games like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Revolution X but something about there being a game based on Journey really ends up being a head scratcher for some people I mean what the guys who wrote Don't Stop Believing and any way you want it those guys really but in any case it exists largely it exists because Steve Perry Neil Sean and Company were all big video game fans and were well up for getting involved this arcade game isn't even the first title based on the band Sienna's Journey Escape on the Atari 2600 predates it by a year but this title is much more famous or inFAMOUS I suppose a March 1983 arcade released by Bally Midway that takes a similar form to Chuan they're highly successful arcade based on the movie and was designed by Marvin glass and Associates the old toy company who made a few games for Midway including Tapper and Timber the most notable thing about journey is of course those big old Heads This was the first game to feature digitized faces and their implementation was surely quite impressive back in the day even if they do look quite ridiculous now the technology behind these digitized faces was created by no lesser figure than Ralph Bayer yes the same man who made the original Magnavox Odyssey initially Bayer's technology was going to be used in a game that was known as clone the title would have a special camera in the cabinet that would take your headshot so that you could be in the game unfortunately the result of this was kind of predictable during testing some immature sod naturally decided to use this newfangled tick to make a dick pic clone was scrapped as a result but the tech would be used in this game with Bayer taking pictures of the band backstage at a concert funnily enough fans probably relatedly Frontiers the journey album that this game was released to help promote has artwork that's very much based on the box for the Odyssey too and said artwork also makes up a big part of the game's title screen so as mentioned this game is a lot like midway's earlier Tron although it's nowhere near as good the band must fly less Scarab spaceship to five planets in order to recover their instruments meaning that Steve Perry's got to get a mic whilst Valley needs to grab his base and so on the mini games themselves are pretty simple and come in two parts the first is usually some sort of obstacle course and isn't too hard with Valerie jumping on columns or Jonathan Kane doing a rather simple with a Donkey Kong type Affair etc etc the second part is usually a bit harder it's more of a Shoot Em Up seen as your instrument can shoot naturally and suddenly there'll be something like flashing sticks or records being chucked in your direction in any case you have to reach the line to get back to the Scarab instrument intact the most frustrating part about the game is how big the band members heads are it's quite easy to misjudge them and graze them on obstacle meaning that you get to see Steve Perry or Steve Smith falling down and having a bit of a tantrum all of these stages feature fairly simple but not awfully terrible versions of Journey songs fans will surely be able to spot the likes of Don't Stop Believing Stone In Love and Wheel in the Sky on the soundtrack foreign if you do manage to retrieve all five instruments you go to a special sixth stage the Bando in concert and you play as Herbie The Bouncer stopping Journeys squeezing fans from over one in the stage for as long as you can during this part the bands play their latest hit and let's face it greatest song separate ways worlds apart and it's the real deal this time a cassette that would actually play inside of the cabinet meaning that you'll need the appropriate sample in order to experience this in Mame and then naturally it all Loops over on a higher difficulty ah this game it is undeniably very silly even by Arcade standards and I've seen it featured on Plenty of worst arcades ever lists but I cannot say I hate it I'm partial to a bit of Journey after all and this game achieves a certain level of corniness that fits the band very well latent I've played plenty worse arcade games than this one believe me it certainly wasn't a successful game at all but bearing in mind that this came out in the spin of 1983 right at the time when the bottom was about ready to fall out of the arcade business in North America there is perhaps bigger factors in play when you consider the game's lackluster commercial performance mind you it is an arcade game based on freaking journey of all Finns and it probably wouldn't have done all that much even if it had been released a couple of years previously still I get a kick out of it [Music] while we are on the subject of arcade licensed games let's go to a much more traditional subject of such Affairs a certain Caped Crusader Batman games are usually big deals especially when it comes to the various titles that were based off of the 1989 movie nearly all of which were very successful and well remembered whether it's Ocean's computer game that helped solely Amiga 500 or sunsoft's beautifully made Ness and Mega Drive Platformers even the PC engine game is cool if also rather weird however there's one platform where the big black bat didn't make much of an impact and that's on the arcade floor hell I didn't even know that there was a Batman arcade game until a few years ago more than that it was a game made by Atari naturally I was curious fired it up in Mame and quickly discovered the likely reason why I didn't know anything about this Batman arcade game because it's pretty bloody dull the arcade Batman didn't come out until April of 1991 and it didn't have that big a release it only ever came out as a conversion kit and only 600 or so were ever made in another world an arcade game based on Batman may have been made by an entirely different company a recent time extension interview with former Konami artist masaki kokino revealed that the company did try to obtain the arcade whites for Batman but were unable to presumably because Atari had got there first this would have been during the time when Konami were rightly going nuts for licenses to arcade games with spectacularly profitable results they could have probably been trusted to do a pretty good Batman arcade with the excellent Batman Returns beat em up that they eventually released on the SNES a couple of years later maybe being a decent indicator of what a Konami arcade Batman would have looked like the Atari game by and large is a generic side scroller think of the sunsoft Mega Drive game only far more simplistic most of your time is going to be spent punching and kick in various thugs although you do get pickups in the shape of batarans gas grenades and the grappling hook and the various stages all based on the movie's major locations are woken up by a quick journey in either the Batmobile or batwin will you try to blow up the Joker's vehicles in a style that's kind of like Road blasters keeping a multiplier going for accurate shots and not missing anyone the driving parts are probably the best bits because the side scrolling it just feels dull full of time and the animation is lacking it's not utterly incompetent as far as side scrollers go but they don't exactly Dance with the Devil in the pale Moonlight yeah awkwardly shoehorned in references aside the game does have the good sense to include lots of speech samples from the movie so you can expect plenty of I'm Batman and so on but that doesn't do too much to make the game feel any more an old hat however it still surprising that the arcade game isn't better known it is a Batman title after all and this is a time when people would have happily bought jars of guano if it had a bat logo on it there seems to have been a bit of a delay it's got a 1990 copyright but again it didn't come out until April of 91.

Did Atari not have the time or budget to give it anything more than a conversion Kit's release or were they just not confident enough in the game's quality to give it any more hey ho the Atari Batman never got any kind of Home Port although I would say that the Atari Links Batman Returns one of about 20 000 separate games released for that movie is a definite successor as it does have similar cookie cutters side-scrolling gameplay [Music] thank you [Music] I'm glad you did Castlevania May well be a first ballot Hall of Famer when it comes to series of Platformers but it doesn't always hit the mark every time out there's certainly odd few games that at the very least divide people whether it's Simon's Quest or the various 3D vanias that were on the N64 and PS2 games that do certainly have their fans and monster detractors and of course there's a few obscure ports kicking around that block the copy book a bit even if they were probably done by a solitary person who had three weeks and an LSD freaks hazy Recollections of the original to go on and even with all these Finns considered the very worst game in the Castlevania series is still unquestionably konami's own haunted castle if anyone ever asks the question whether Castlevania would be a good fit for the arcade floor this game answers it with a thoroughly resounding no a game that's right down there as one of the worst Konami have ever put out certainly from their more classic periods some folks will even try to pretend that haunted castle isn't a part of the series at all I mean it's got a different name and everything it's just you know a lot like Castlevania alas that's not the case in Japan where it is called accla major Dracula mind you it didn't start out Life as a Castlevania game once again masaki kokino has revealed some details about the project over the years kokino and some others were working on an entirely unrelated Konami arcade called hot Chase when the company's boss presumably kazazuki himself ordered them to go on a Mission of Mercy and help out an original horror platformer of unknown identity that was by all accounts a complete mess the decision to switch the game to a Castlevania title was made very late on with the whole thing having its Graphics changed accordingly and being beaten into shape over the course of a single month scarcely anytime at all in other words the final result is quite the ugly Affair everything's certainly bigger because it's the arcades but the graphics lack any charm whatsoever and the conanified muscle-bound Simon Belmont is not a pretty sight you can kind of tell how rushed and botched together the whole thing is I'm afraid in mind it's rather annoying that a lot of konami's marketing including classically corny Western flies with real people as was their want tried to position the game as a remake of the original when there's nothing in common Beyond Simon Dracula and a few recognizable enemies still that's not the worst thing that would be the stupidly unfair difficulty of it all now naturally you would expect a Castlevania Game to be rock hard but the game does do some evil things in particular it only allows you up to three continues which is ludicrously cool now it's not uncommon for arcade games to stop continuing in the final level titles like Shinobi do that for example but this it limits you the whole way through free continues and only one life in each of them it's not that this is a golden age type game where continuing would be kind of pointless it's a multi-stage platformer that's got a bit more length to it but the chance of most people actually making it till the end is pretty minimal unless they're willing to Chuck coin after coining in order to get good enough to get through the six levels absolutely evil if you really want to get through the title if you're some kind of Castlevania completionist there are some things you can do to redress the balance firstly don't play the American version the North American release is way harder than the Japanese one although the Japanese one does also have limited continues even at all you can fuss around a bit with dip switches to stop every attack taking out half your bloody energy bar you can also use coins to increase your energy bar although again you can only do this a couple of times but if you would rather just play with one big energy bar then go ahead I do believe that some versions actually do allow you to give the bar a boost through each of the three credits too which again may help there are some odd fins the game does that changes the usual Vania formula Simon can actually upgrade to different weapons like a morning star and a sword and bosses are generally easy seen as you usually get the ideal sub weapon for them just before the fight I suppose this is also the first Castlevania Game to reuse famous tracks with bloody tears making a deserved second appearance generally speaking kanichi matsabawa's music is of the Vania standard and is worth checking out even if honestly nothing else about the title is even worth a slight look haunted castle stayed exclusive to the arcade until 2006 when it got to budget Japan only release on PS2 little Mall in an emulator the woman and a few extras but it can also be found in konami's arcade Classics Anniversary Collection [Music] [Music] I'm afraid that taito's now going to come in for a bit of a kick in I've mentioned this one a few times before but I can't not include nastar Warrior or rastan Saga 2 in this selection the original is such a marvelous game the best Conan title has ever been even if taito weren't able to get the actual license for it so with that in mind just what on Earth happened here how did they manage to make such a pig's ear out of the sequel It's not as if it's even that different to the original it's still the same mix of slashing and platforming but everything about this game from the graphics to how it controls is so much worse I've always found this game to be somewhat baffling ever since I originally played the mega Drive Port and found it to be shockingly terrible I seeked out the arcade original thinking that it might just have been a bad Port but no it's actually quite accurate as soon as the arcade is also a complete misery that's Star Warrior or simply nastar if you're European actually takes place before the events of the original game being the story of how the Barbarian Warrior got his name by saving the kingdom of rastania from a wicked group of demons it appears as though a fair few people who worked on the original rastan did also work on this title although that number doesn't include yoshinoi Kobayashi the Conan loving driving force behind the first game and I think that might have been important on the surface it's a bigger and better sequel where everything from the man himself to all the enemies have had a significant increase in Sprite size but when you compare this game to The Originals Graphics it's not even close this game may be bigger but the graphics has so much Plano and less detailed while the original Hadley's really defined outdoor levels with dramatic skies and enemies that really look to the part everything about nastar feels lifeless and amateurish by comparison again a crucial member is missing toshiyuki nishimura was the lead artist on the original game and responsible for just how striking rastan still looks to this day and he didn't work on this sequel the poor Graphics however are nothing compared to the botched controls our hero moves around so sluggishly is as if he can barely carry the weight of his overblown pectorals and then to top it all off the jumping comes with an inexplicable second of delay that makes any platform sequence so much harder to time and gives the impression of a game that's not even finished and again we are comparing this to an original game where the controls were title and the nuns you know what West End may have the same abilities he can switch from a sword and shield to claws or a bigger blade and he can also augment his abilities with potions and Magic but it's just not the same and the much less memorable levels that mostly consist of mindlessly Smashing blocks and stultifyingly over long boss battles don't exactly help every single thing about nastar Warrior is so much worse than the original making it the exact opposite of what a sequel should be the third game multi-screen hack and slasher Warrior blade may be somewhat derivative of golden ax but Frank Heavens that it was a return to form for the Barbarian kin that could at least partially wash the taste of this Abomination out of arcadegoers mouse foreign [Music] [Music] subject now arcade games and the UK as far as original Creations go Les not exactly a whole lot of famous ones the high majority of Studios over here was content to just create computer games there are a couple of exceptions mind you one of them being Sentry Electronics from the early 80s most Century games were cheap and cheerful fitting into the not very good clone of a better game category and were also sold at a low cost thanks to their CVS system that allowed operators to switch games in and out of a cabinet pretty easily still they are responsible for Hunchback which is one of the few arcade games from the UK to receive any recognition at all both in Europe and in the states where it was actually quite successful I have seen people here and there take lumps out of Hunchback in the past particularly Americans but personally I think it's a fun enough Pitfall type game even if it is somewhat behind the times even by 1983 standards but I'm not really here to talk about the original Hunchback instead I'm going to look at centuries 2 attempts at following it up because they're much much worse the first Hunchback sequel from early in 1984 was called hero this stands for Hunchback Esmeralda rescue operation and it's nothing like the old Activision game of the same name instead it's a maze action title where you have to pick up Trinkets and avoid obstacles from Fireballs to the more usual arrows fired from off screen basically it's a much more simplistic and way slower version of konami's tutankham and I really do mean slower I don't know what's happened to Old Quasimodo but you will forgive me for saying that he's had a few too many Vats of beef burger before taking on this adventure which is to say that he moves like a friggin escargot the original Hunchback played a lot quicker which was part of the appeal and even if this still has latam using gobbled death cry it smacks of a very hastily knocked together game that tried to capitalize on the original success but failed totally [Music] thank you [Music] and it wasn't the only one oh quasi might have been a bit embarrassed by his sluggishness in the last title so he's got himself trained up and fighting fit good thing too because he's taken part in the Olympics yes he has Hunchback Olympics and as you might expect it's a track and field clone now you might wonder just how you could further simplify a game like track and field where you just hit buttons a lot but Sentry actually do manage it here so credit for that I guess it doesn't seem too bad when you just do the 100 meters but as soon as you get to the long jump you see that the angle meter doesn't even go up normally instead moving in increments of 10.

The discus is here too but even that simplified it plays exactly like the javelin and shot put and you only need to find the correct angle it's better than the previous title if only because it's a bit of a giggle to have Quasimodo do in athletics but still not much to speak of funnily enough this one did end up getting a port to microcomputers as Hunchback at the Olympics while hero never left the arcade floor needless to say Neve of these games helped Sentry make a last in business out of Quasimodo games they failed and Sentry itself went bankrupt only a little over a year after the original Hunchback came out wrecked both by the lack of a successful follow-up and the depressed state of the arcade scene [Music] I have a few others that won't a bit of a mention but I'm gonna run through them a bit more briskly first up here's something from the golden age that most people tend to bag on San ritsu's dream Shopper from 1982 a pretty simple game that runs on namco's Pac-Man Hardware as straightforward as some of these games can be dream Shoppers seems to miss the mark for people probably because it's just so repetitive it's a game where you simply press the button to reveal tile after tile in order to achieve a Target score trying to avoid holes bombs and other near-do Wells and occasionally going for a maze that appears to be made entirely out of the letter c it's a maze game without much of a maze to speak of and it's not exactly something that's going to stick in the memory for a long time it is the classic example of a very old and not very good arcade that probably wouldn't be known at all nowadays if it hadn't been found in the annals of Mame that said it did apparently get a home Port 2 of all computers The Sword and five foreign how about a couple of fighting games won the tapes Mortal Kombat and another that goes for Street Fighter Sammy's Survivor Lut seems to be one that makes a few lists of bad arcades even more so than other Mortal Kombat clones although playing it I'm not totally sure what makes this a particularly terrible one compared to the likes of I don't know time Killers it certainly has big Sprites and a bit of production value about it although the game can be rather cheap and annoying I don't know it just felt rather boring as opposed to being especially hideous but I thought I would at least give it a mention on the much lower end of the budget Spectrum best of best is a street fighter clone that comes from the almighty Sunday the finest arcade Studio to ever come out of South Korea this is a ropey game to say the very least but it's got quite a lot of plain old wacky charm maybe that's to do with the silly characters all the special moves being called the Arts of shore killing but it is at least a pretty easy Street Fighter clone to grasp it's not good but it's certainly enough to produce a good few laughs I should also mention kaniko's Blood Warrior here too this is something of a mixture again with digitized spikes but Street fighter-centric controls and naturally a lot of blood kind of Japanese Samurai movie Style filled with rival amuse in characters based on Japanese history and mythology and doesn't actually move too badly I'd say it's one of the better kaniko arcades and certainly better than their more famous titles based on Jackie Chan I had a jolly good laugh playing this recently with the folks from One Credit reviews and that's a video that you'll surely be able to see soon over on their Channel [Music] finally and sort of sticking with kaniko let's have a little venture to the darker corner of the arcade the one that's filled with the million and one clones of kaniko's Gauss Panic you know the game that's a lot like kicks only you're slowly revealing a picture of a naked model there's tons of leaves but new Fantasia is always the one that I get the biggest kick out of I mean where else are you going to be able to have a match between yasa Arafat and Robin Williams from toys or have RoboCop go against the Terminator in the only true contest between them where else can you play as Uncle Fester or Saddam Hussein and get punished for being too cowardly with your pointer by having the picture of your model turned into freaking Pinhead naturally there's a lot of the gameplay area that I am having to cover up here but I don't know this game is so spectacularly stupid that I can't help but have a bit of a laugh whenever I think of it it is certainly better than Loverboy which is the worst arcade game that I have ever played and a game that I literally cannot show anything of beyond the title screen that is a horror that you'll have to seek out on your own although I do not recommend doing so anywho that's a selection of some rather strange weird and bad arcade games there's certainly plenty more out there and this is a subject that could easily be Revisited but there's a lot of surreal fun to be found here Beyond some of the arcades that most would agree to be pretty lousy or Double Dragon freeze and Guardians of the hood and so on but any others that you would potentially like to see looked at in the future don't hesitate to mention them but as ever it's time for me to say bye for now [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign