Seeing as we have a few threads along these lines at present, I would like to debate the worst Amiga bundle. I am not going to have a poll though, I am more interested in the qualitative analysis.
For me, the worst bundle by quite some way is Screen Gems. You get four games that are completely and utterly unplayable.
Back to the Future II unplayable due to being incredibly boring.
Nightbreed is unplayable due to it being a scattershot smerge of simplistic styles of games that were never fun in the first place. This is like an olympic games style game masquerading as an adventure game. Lots of joystick waggling, space bar thumping and pot luck to get nowhere and not care about it anyway.
Days of Thunder is the worst driving game I have ever seen. It makes no attempt to be playable or attractive or anything. The cars crawl around like Tom Cruise is out the back pushing.
Shadow of the Beast II is a game with extremely good graphics and music. It is the game that actually convinced my Dad to get our A500. However, it is extremely unplayable because it is ridiculously difficult. Without the cheat I did not even get to see the first puzzle, let alone try to complete it. It was a daft game to include in a bundle for people that may have never had much experience of playing computer games before. Even with the cheat and the full solution it took several weekends to complete. Every time you lose you have to wait 5 minutes to go through the end game screen, and the guitar music, and then go back to the main screen and have it reload everything it has just dumped from memory to start from scratch again, with your no extra lives or opportunities to save your position. So while being the only game with any production qualities worthy of praise, it was also the game that probably got played the very least out if this terrible bundle.
Of course, Shadow of the Beast II was a very late in the day replacement for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, which the pack was originally meant to be based around. That game was terrible too, but it was a hit on other platforms. The Turtles deal would have most likely secured the Amiga a bumper set of sales and market position, and as a result a much brighter future. It certainly served that purpose for Nintendo in the UK. I suspect that the budget for the Turtles deal was mostly spent on Shadow of the Beast II as it was a high budget production with unusually high shelf price, and the label would probably have demanded a better deal.
Maybe I would have gone for Deluxe Paint III over Deluxe Paint II, but perhaps the 512k ram restrictions prevented that. However this package badly missed a proper word processor. It could also have done with a programming language with a compiler to meet the expectations of those upgrading from 8 bit machines.
I think they needed a broader package that showed the strengths of the machine and appealed to kids and parents and their concerns for kids alike. Just a random selection that comes off the top of my head for an alternate bundle:
Rainbow Islands
Batman
Battle Chess (picked deliberately as this was a well known game on the PC which was in a lot of offices and looked a lot poorer than the Amiga version)
North and South
Fantasy World Dizzy
Some form of Deluxe Paint
Scribble!
EDIT: I forgot to say. I would include AMOS as well.
---------- Post added at 13:09 ---------- Previous post was at 12:59 ----------
By the way, I thought Desktop Dynamite stunk as well, as the games were abysmal, and the version of Wordworth was out of date before it hit the shelves. That package should have been along these lines:
Lemmings, maybe with new levels.
Formula one Grand prix, patched to take advantage of the increased speed of the A1200
Pinball Dreams
Zool
Octamed
Dpaint IV AGA
The latest version of one of the leading word processors.
AMOS
None of the games are AGA, but I'd rather have had something that was playable than something that is AGA but stinks, which is what we ended up with. Maybe even offer a mail in for AGA versions of the bundled software when they are available? You have do these kind of things when you are launching a new machine and technology.
For me, the worst bundle by quite some way is Screen Gems. You get four games that are completely and utterly unplayable.
Back to the Future II unplayable due to being incredibly boring.
Nightbreed is unplayable due to it being a scattershot smerge of simplistic styles of games that were never fun in the first place. This is like an olympic games style game masquerading as an adventure game. Lots of joystick waggling, space bar thumping and pot luck to get nowhere and not care about it anyway.
Days of Thunder is the worst driving game I have ever seen. It makes no attempt to be playable or attractive or anything. The cars crawl around like Tom Cruise is out the back pushing.
Shadow of the Beast II is a game with extremely good graphics and music. It is the game that actually convinced my Dad to get our A500. However, it is extremely unplayable because it is ridiculously difficult. Without the cheat I did not even get to see the first puzzle, let alone try to complete it. It was a daft game to include in a bundle for people that may have never had much experience of playing computer games before. Even with the cheat and the full solution it took several weekends to complete. Every time you lose you have to wait 5 minutes to go through the end game screen, and the guitar music, and then go back to the main screen and have it reload everything it has just dumped from memory to start from scratch again, with your no extra lives or opportunities to save your position. So while being the only game with any production qualities worthy of praise, it was also the game that probably got played the very least out if this terrible bundle.
Of course, Shadow of the Beast II was a very late in the day replacement for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, which the pack was originally meant to be based around. That game was terrible too, but it was a hit on other platforms. The Turtles deal would have most likely secured the Amiga a bumper set of sales and market position, and as a result a much brighter future. It certainly served that purpose for Nintendo in the UK. I suspect that the budget for the Turtles deal was mostly spent on Shadow of the Beast II as it was a high budget production with unusually high shelf price, and the label would probably have demanded a better deal.
Maybe I would have gone for Deluxe Paint III over Deluxe Paint II, but perhaps the 512k ram restrictions prevented that. However this package badly missed a proper word processor. It could also have done with a programming language with a compiler to meet the expectations of those upgrading from 8 bit machines.
I think they needed a broader package that showed the strengths of the machine and appealed to kids and parents and their concerns for kids alike. Just a random selection that comes off the top of my head for an alternate bundle:
Rainbow Islands
Batman
Battle Chess (picked deliberately as this was a well known game on the PC which was in a lot of offices and looked a lot poorer than the Amiga version)
North and South
Fantasy World Dizzy
Some form of Deluxe Paint
Scribble!
EDIT: I forgot to say. I would include AMOS as well.
---------- Post added at 13:09 ---------- Previous post was at 12:59 ----------
By the way, I thought Desktop Dynamite stunk as well, as the games were abysmal, and the version of Wordworth was out of date before it hit the shelves. That package should have been along these lines:
Lemmings, maybe with new levels.
Formula one Grand prix, patched to take advantage of the increased speed of the A1200
Pinball Dreams
Zool
Octamed
Dpaint IV AGA
The latest version of one of the leading word processors.
AMOS
None of the games are AGA, but I'd rather have had something that was playable than something that is AGA but stinks, which is what we ended up with. Maybe even offer a mail in for AGA versions of the bundled software when they are available? You have do these kind of things when you are launching a new machine and technology.
