Be Excellent To Each Other

Roger Frames Chinny recommends 8 bit budget games.

90% + games

Super Robin Hood - CPC - The Olivers first game for Codemasters and before they realised it was quicker to use the CPC's 4 colour mode so it was easier to port their games to the Spectrum.

Dizzy 1 and 4 - CPC/Spectrum - Dizzy 1 is special. It's not the most polished but has the most atmosphere. 4 (Magicland Dizzy) is the first by Big Red Software and combines polish with great gameplay. After Magicland you are better off with the Amiga versions.

180 - CPC/Spectrum - Pickford action! Even GTA 5 doesn't get darts right. 180 does and it's great. Like all Pickford games, avoid the Commodore version.

Zub - CPC/Spectrum + an ok C64 port - More Pickford action. The "I Sent My Monkey To The Moon" prototype in Magnetic Billiards has part of the Zub jumping up mechanic. ISMMTTM is brilliant. Zub is brilliant. The least disappointing of all the games they had ported to the C64 as well

CJ's Elephant Antics - C64 - A platformer that is equal to anything on the NES at 8 times the price. It's really good. CJ in the USA is excellent as well. There is a Spectrum version but some of the graphics are horrifically unclear and the scrolling is terrible. That said still great, but the C64 version is king without shadow of a doubt.

Colony - CPC/C64/Spectrum/Atari - Protect your Colony, shoot the baddies, grow mushrooms, sell them for cash, buy stuff you need, repeat. Sounds dull but it's addictive and frantic. As far as I know you can't win, you just play until you die as the game gets harder and harder. Great stuff.

Seymour Goes To Hollywood - Spectrum - It's Dizzy but it isn't.

Kwik Snax (Dizzy) - CPC/Spectrum - Forget the Dizzy connection. This is a bloody brilliant arcade game. C64 version is a totally different game and pants!

Werewolves Of London - CPC - Developed as a full price game and then abandoned before release (or all the bugs being ironed out) Mastertronic snapped ut ip and put it out at just £1.99. Speccy and C64 versions are OK but the CPC version stands head and shoulders above the other 2 formats. Despite suffering some horrific slowdown when there are a lot of sprites on screen it's a great game that even my C64 owning chum would defer to the CPC version for (he also had it on his 64). And the CPC and Speccy version came on the same tape to boot!

Invaiderload - C64 - Play space invaders while your game loads. Often more fun than the game you were loading so you'd just press stop on the tape and play Invaiderload instead!

Kane - CPC, Spectrum, C64 - It's Kane! Speccy version looks a tad rough but if you can get over that it plays just as well as the other 2 versions. Shoot birdies, ride to Kane, shoot baddies and then stop the train! Then do it again! Not forgetting 3, ('three, THREE' - Ed) levels of selectable ('selectable, SELECTABLE' - Ed) difficulty. And for just a penny short of £2? Laugh? I nearly burped!

Notable games

Milk Race - CPC, Spectrum, MSX - A racing bike simulator that is officially licensed from the 1987 Milk Race! Spectrum version is fast but has no funky music, MSX version is slightly slower but identical to the Speccy and has funky music. CPC version is slow but has colourful graphics and funky music. There's also C64 and Atari versions. Have played the C64 and it's naff, not played the Atari but it looks rough.

SAS Combat Simulator - CPC, C64 - It's Ikari Warrors, it's Green Beret, it's a total rip off of two popular games for just £1.99! And it does it quite well! Not seen the Speccy version. ('Hello, I'm a lawyer from the makers of Green Beret and Ikari Warriors' - Ed).

Ninja Massacre- Spectrum, CPC - A Tesco Value Gauntlet with a kicking tune. It should be shit, but I keep on playing as hundreds of badly animated baddies attack me. Written by Amstrad Actions technical Ed, Adam Waring.

Action Biker - C64 - Fun if limited action with an 80's crisp icon and his bike.

Lost Caves and the Tomb Of Doom - Spectrum, CPC - Came to most peoples attention by being put on an Amstrad Action covertape, Another Adam Waring game, this is Boulderdash meets Repton and for £1.99. For the price you couldn't complain!

Chiller - C64 - An early Mastertronic effort, badly ported to the Speccy and CPC (the Speccy version is especially hilarious). But good fun on the 64.

The thing about 16 bit budget games is they never had the penetration ('oooerrr ' - Ed) that the 8 bit tapes had. Chances were you'd have to buy 16 bit budgets from a dedicated software shop. 8 bit games would be in the newsagents.

Its strange - I've just went through the adverts and reviews from December 88 till April 89 and found the first review for a budget Amiga game where they call it out as being rubbish and saying if this is what budget games are like they can stuff them



£9.99 and April 89 so ties in with what Chinny posted earlier and its about a year before your Codemasters advert at the start

43% would seem generous:



But it's better on the Amiga, right?



You appear to chase a ship through some triangles that hurtle towards you at speed.

Frankly if you had Starglider 2 which came out late '88, you'd think it was more like a 10% game. In fact Starglider 2 on the Speccy would still make Chase look like a 10% game!

I forgot this from my list!



CPC or ST/Amiga versions for me.

The C64 version has screwed up AI, According to the Pickfords when the rival wizard is off screen the game code stops tracking him as it should and he just randomly reappears. All the other versions properly track him across the map even when you can't see him which is vital to the gameplay as you may be trying to beat him to an ingredient needed for a spell.

Spidertronic was my favourite Amiga budget game.

Caves Of Doom was a 1985 effort by Mr Chip Software and released by Mastertronic that was totally sadistic. I loved the exploring and the colourful simplistic graphics. I didn't like the constant death or the terrifying stick man baddie that could walk through walls and always killed you (see 2:10 onward)



It even came with a level editor which you could alter the screens to an extent. Although the same baddies always appeared in the same places as usual I recall.

And here's the Spectrum version. The jetpack noise isn't annoying at all!



Speccy version doesn't seem to have the same level of insta-death as the CPC.

The programmers got hold of some low quality samples and by god he's going to use them!

Yuck - sounded so much better on the Amiga.

While I'm posting videos, I just want to again highlight how CJ's Elephant Antics still stands up as a quality platform game even today:



Nice graphics, great sound, big end of level baddies. Better than many full price games. If it hadn't been so cutesy and had robots and guns like Turrican I don't think it would be so overlooked.

And the Speccy version which has the horrible scrolling and some colour clash issues. Shame as some of the sprites are better drawn than the C64 version:

Bubble Dizzy had the makings of a good iPhone game:



But not the CPC version which was truly shit:



And if you watch the Amiga version to the end you get to see Dizzy giving Daisy a pearl necklace.

Zeppelin try to get down with the kids by forgoing modern fads like Ninja Turtles and skateboards, instead opting for "Norman The Navy". Yes send £7.99 and get 2 shit 8 bit games or 1 shit 16 bit game at a discount of fuck all and get an exclusive "Gold Credit Card Style Membership Card".



+ Hang on, hadn't Deathchase been out at £1.99 + pretty sure Pro Go Kart Simulator (a truly shit game) was £2.99.

Yes that £7.99 is a real bargain!

Bubble Dizzy was spin-off of a subgame in NES and Mega Drive game Fantastic Dizzy, trufax.

I remember from late 1989, Codemasters really started to milk the Dizzy 'franchise' to death. Not just the sequels, but Fast Food and all the rest of the arcadey games.. Thing is, I don't think Dizzy would be so negatively regarded if they'd left the series at Fantasy World Dizzy, which was probably about as far as the main series could go without overstaying its welcome.

First game I might've spent my own pocket money on was the Amiga version of Treasure Island Dizzy, I'm almost sure of. Wasn't many options for cheap games for my family's new 16-bit computer at that time, and my parents had pretty much exclusively bought budget games, compilations and magazines with covertapes to keep us supplied with Spectrum games, so I was used to gaming on the cheap.. (I'm pretty sure at one point they'd buy a new £2.99 Hit Squad or Codemasters budget release every week when shopping, come to think of it!)

I've put Bubble Dizzy on my GP2X Wiz to play at lunch time today. I had completely forgot about the game until Chinny mentioned it on Twitter. Good work Chinny. I'm looking forward to that.

The Bubble Dizzy pafrt of teh NES game was what made me gave up trying to collect all 250 stars, as it was hard.

The NES game was in itself born out of a section of Treasure Island Dizzy where you go underwater and have to jump on bubbles to get back to the surface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oSxBT0WfqJc#t=709

Treasure Island Dizzy was ridiculously hard. Instadeath and you couldn't see what was coming on the next screen. I found Fantasy World a bit more forgiving.

Unless you typed EGGSONLEGS for invincibility, or ICANFLY to go up through the top screens and access random caverns and stuff.

I know this isn't exactly budget talk, but I've been looking for an adf of a PD game released by 17-bit called Go Getter for years. I used to play it with my Mum when I was small (fnar). You basically played as a sphere and you had to traverse a board guessing Higher or Lower for each move you made. I would love it if I could find it again. I've searched everywhere I can think of.

I just happen to have the 30GB Tosec collection on my desktop right now. I'll do a quick search of it.

Are you sure of the name ? - i'm pretty sure i have the complete Amiga TOSEC on DVDs somewhere so could check to see if its on there

Weird though - googling it gives

http://forum.classicamiga.com/forum/arc ... -2831.html

Which is another forum pointing to this forum :-)

It's not in the tosec zip that I have. Sorry.

Thanks chaps. I know it exists, just doesn't look like anyone has made a disk image of it. I guess it's lost in the sands of time...

I Ball 2, which many rated highly but I hated:

Bubble Dizzy crashed on level 3. Pah.

It's probably for the best though as I'm sure I'd seen all the game had to offer up until that point.

Chronos:



Just for the title music. The 1 bit beeper sings!

I remembering liking Saboteur a lot on my spaccy. And playing it on my friend's Amstrad as well. Was that budget? Even if it wasn't then, I bet it is now, so the point stands.

Cor, what a lovely bunch of chaps.

I assume J T posts/lurks here?

Budget re-release, almost certainly on Encore.

Original release



Budget Re-release on Encore



I think I preferred the cover for II

Original



Budget Re-release on Encore

That wizard from Duel looks bloody furious. Gritted teeth, clenched fists - he's about to go flipping nuts.

I used to play Saboteur on my commodore +4. Awesome game, that

I wish I understood what I need to do in One Man And His Droid.

So I was looking at this pic to see those I remember from Encore but does anyone recall Aliens on the C64? Sheeeet, I don't, but this video pricked up my interest. I can't remember this at all. Also, it looks awesome but also dreadful in equal measures.

Maybe it was US-only release.

You need to guide the sheep into the pen / transporter thing in the right order

What exactly were all the budget labels again? From memory...

Ocean = Hit Squad
US Gold = Klassix, later Kixx
Mirrorsoft / Image Works = Mirror Image
Domark = Respray
Virgin Games = Mastertronic 16-Blitz (later renamed Tronix)
Elite = Encore

Hit Squad also did Imagine games.

Indeed, although those were the games published by Imagine when Imagine was an imprint of Ocean used solely for arcade conversions. The original Imagine 8-bit games were reissued by Mastertronic.

I'm not sure if Ocean owned Hit Squad or Hit Squad just licensed Ocean's games, as later on HS reissued games by Virgin, Activision, Electronics Arts and quite a few others.

Hit Squad were just an Ocean label. In fact they pre-existed the budget range as the They Sold A Million Range was put out as Hit Squad.

Mastertronic had a number of labels of their own including:

MAD (Mastertronic Added Dimension) - For £2.99 games
Ricochet - For re-releases
Bulldog (Best Of British) - They put out Feud and Colony on this short lived label intended for export.
Rack-It - Hewson Games
Americana - US Gold games prior to them launching Kixx

I had the CPC version, which was similar.

I'm pretty sure there were 2 versions , a US one with crappy graphics and on disk only + a UK release which was basically the same as the Speccy / Amstrad ones and that you could get on disk or tape

This one is the one I remember and here is a nice page on all the versions from Peoww

http://www.peoww.co.uk/bughunting-part-one/

Yeah, me too. I never understood how the how to play it, though.

There was of course also the earlier Alien:





Which was a strategy game and caused much confusion about which version people had.

That looks a lot like FTL.

Just spotted the re-release is on a Durell blue cassette presumably with their custom leader tape as well. Perhaps when Elite bought the rights to the games they also bought up all of Durell's tape stock?

Grand Theft Auto: Greendale

Activision's Transformers game is funny from an '80s Transformers' fan perspective, as it treats Hot Rod and Rodimus Prime as entirely separate characters, and featuring blue Huffer clone Pipes in the latter's only appearance of note ever. I recall some terrible screen in the game where a dinosaur stomps on a space shuttle launcher, or something. Whatever happened, it was dire. Like all other licensed Transformers games ever.

Just remembered another old budget label, incidentally: Gremlin had GBH (GBH presumably an acronym for Gremlin Budget Hits. I hope).