Imagine making a game whose backgrounds are composed entirely of the default PETSCII character set, and actually trying to sell it. It's like the exact polar opposite of a "game that pushed the limits".

"It's your Grandmother's Dinner Service: The Game"!

Willow Pattern Adventure I got on a dual disc with a another game I since forgot from Firebird. And I liked it. I played it like crazy.

Yes Willow Pattern is a re-skin of Treasure Island for the C16 Plus/4 and I remember that being good :(

I remember buying Willow Pattern as a kid for my C64. It was clearance at Electronics Boutique for 19 cents. Seriously, 19 cents. I still feel like I overpaid for it.

This is actually quite inspiring: a game based on porcelain paintings or chimney sweeping, how DO you turn that into a good game? Is there even to this day an attempt, successful or not, at these concepts?

That was the great thing about the home computer market of 80's. Bedroom programmers, bizarre ideas and box art that puts to shame modern releases. No one green lit games other than a Nigel with a dream and and a compiler. You'd never get a Jet Set Willy these days!

Saying "Ninja (insert skill here)", such as 'Ninja Chef', denotes master level skills.

Though Hard Drivin' is dire, you really need to look at the C64 conversion of Cisco Heat, which came out a year later. The cars look like they are moving backwards and some of the police car sprites are on grey blocks - almost like a VIC 20 game. Other clunkers to consider: Domark's Friday The 13th and CRL's Robobolt (which got the lowest ever score in Zzap! 64).

Love your channel Sharopolis. Please never stop!

I must say Willow Pattern is one of my favourite games. I regularly return to it to enjoy its ambience. It nicely transfers the blue-white ceramic style to colour. The tune fits perfectly and can be both soothing and rousing at the same time. It is a mistake to categorize this game as an arcade, it is more of a maze/puzzle adventure. You can admire the scenery as much as you want while you navigate the maze at your own pace. You can, but does not have to try to maximize your score, which requires some planning (the puzzle element supported by all the time you may want) and also some skill in more tight "fights". The unique "fighting" mechanic is ingenious. It does not rush you, you can engage or evade whenever you want. It requires you to take some risk and give the enemy one try to throw the sword at you. Conventional sword swinging might be more realistic, but since when does realism produce great game mechanics? The change of pace of the music when you pick up a sword is also an excellent design choice. It induces restlessness and makes you rush and make mistakes. To sum it up I think The Willow Pattern Adventure is an underappreciated gem.

I love the C64 to death, but calling it a "plastic cow pat" was pretty damned hilarious. 😅

Karnov on the C64 is particularly bad, they just ported over the Spectrum version, which in itself was already terrible, but now its even worse.

If I hadn't have seen this, and played that karate game on an emulator, I'd have thought it had gone wrong with him being invisible.

Thanks to everybody in the comments section. I didn't know there were so many awful games. I'll not be bored today checking them all out!

"...Riding a distracted arthritic rattlesnake that is trying to make a call to a tin can of angering bees and struggling to get a signal." - Sharpopolis I found that quote in an old text document on my PC and somehow found the video it's from again

I owned (and played) all of these games yet have forgotten them completely; it was pretty surreal to get reintroduced to them now four decades later

You did forget Double Dragon lol

Thank you for pointing out "Phantom Karate Devils"! I actually played it back in the day and a year or so back I remembered it but not the name so I couldn't look it up.

"the finest PETSCI character graphics the C=64 could summon" 😂😂😂

Maybe you want to try Bionic Granny on the C64. I think it beats everything when it comes to suckage.

Amazing analogy packed bundle of smiles and laughs - thank you

Great overview. Didn´t know any of those except for hard driving. I guess I had a lot of games that I thought to be unplayable - but it turns out young me just didn´t know how to play them ;-)

I kind of like Ninja Sooter Sim. Sorry to admit that.

On the face of it, Trashman's premise seems odd, but it was a great game. So maybe a chimney-sweeping game could have worked?

Missed out on a classic ......escape MCP ! Really go check it out

Tears in my eyes. Good work, sir!

I don't know what's more depressing: a game where you play as a chimney sweep, or that one game on the ZX Spectrum where you play a grocery store shelf stocker.

Great videos. Subscribed

even the arcade version of hard driving was brutal -

Wow, I totally forgot about that Karate Devils game. It was a weird one for sure.

Holy cow, I've been playing "Willow Pattern Adventure" for a long time and though it was great :O I haven't thought of this in decades ... and don't recall the name at all. It reminds of Shogun.

some of the weirdest games were totally enjoyable on the 64..I loved a game called Space taxi and of course Leaderboard Golf

Still see no-one mention the amazingly bad 'ARRRGGGH CONDOR'. That game was the epitome if crap.

Suggestions for part 2: The Last V8 - The only good part about it is that Mastertronic let Rob Hubbard compose whatever he wanted. Bozo's night out - Only for those who are interested in what could possibly be the first game that simulates being drunk. Miami Vice - Although created with good intentions, its too hard to control the car, but Martin Galway pulled through with a great cover version of the theme song based upon the show the game was created for.

THE ATTACK OF THE PHANTOM KARATE DEVILS!!!!! I have been trying to remember the name of this game for DECADES! THANK YOU! Thank you thank you THANK YOU!

I dunno, I was pretty excited to find a almost full set of blue flow dinnerware from 1920, among the free pile of stuff my neighbor gave away as she was moving from her apartment next door.

Hard driving is a playability vacuum but it almost looks like the arcade game. It somewhat plays like the arcade game, which was a bit pants itself.

My personal worst C64 game is, and always will be Miami Vice. The mental scars still run deep

Ninja Scooter looks like the driving sections of the NES Ghostbusters 2... not exactly a game that makes me want to seek out similar titles.

I'd definitely put "Miami Vice" on the list! In it, you got to drive a car, but the controls were so bad that you mostly ended up running into walls. You could also go into buildings, although I'm not sure why - I never figured out what the heck you were actually supposed to do in this game. It was published by Ocean, who at the time acquired licenses for well-known movies and TV series and then made crappy games out of them. There are plenty of crappy games for the C64 but I consider this one of the worst because it was made by a well-known company who *should* have had the resources to make a good game - if they'd only bothered. Another stinker worth checking out is "Gerry the Germ Goes Body Poppin'". It is exactly as horrible as it sounds like.

Willow pattern looks so much like an early pitch for the last ninja.

"A game constructed entirely out of glitches". LOL!! xD

There's roughly a year between Sabre Wulf on the Spectrum (1984) and Willow Pattern Adventure on the C64 (1985), me thinks the decision to even release it was because it visually resembled Sabre Wulf and they probably thought potential buyers would confuse the two or just look for something like it if they weren't Speccy owners.

Phantom Karate Devils looks like a port of a Tiger Electronics game. Damn...

Sweep - Looks like the same coder also released a C64 stinker called Crazy Paving, which has the same screen layout (and the same navigation issues) but is less brown. Most games cast the player as a spy, ninja, adventurer, astronaut, etc. but he knew that sweeping chimneys and laying paving slabs were what gamers really dreamed of.

Anything using the Freescape engine and variants looked just like a technical demo to me. Like, great, you got it rendering 3D on this CPU, but, what's the point? I tried Driller once, and while it might be a good idea, the unbelievable slowness of it, just killed it. Kinda like those graphical adventures where you saw it building the scene, but at least there you got to see it drawing for entertainment.

Somebody get in touch with Cinemasscare, it is time for the Nerd to review some C64 games.

Wasn't "The Willow Pattern" released on the Spectrum as "Treasure Island"? It looks identical to one of +2's launch titles that came with it.

I had a Ninja Scooter in the 80s, they were a real thing. No idea why they were called 'Ninja' Scooters right enough.

Ever play Amazon Parrot? That game makes everything on this list look fantastic.

Did it matter how good they were? Everyone was pirating them anyway. :P

I would like to mention that hard drivin' on the c64 was drivable if you never went more than one pixel from centre on the steering wheel but stayed active with the throttle. That doesn't mean it wasn't as boring a f*ck. Domark knew it, and only released it as a side to one of their crap 'best of' compilations.

Came here for the hyperbole, was not disappointed!

Just to defend Mastertronic a little: at least it was a budget company so their terrible games were cheap. Some of them were even pretty good once in a while.

I was half expecting to see Auf Wiedersehen Pet...But in it's defense...that game sucked on every system. LMAO

Hard Driving looks like a worse game than Big Rigs! And that's saying something!

The "ordure ordinateur" @ 13:52ish - did you think the Commodore 64 was a shit computer? haha. I loved mine.

Saber Wolf? That's clearly Treasure Island on the Plus/4 ported very badly for the C64.

Ninja Master from Firebird - it got 0 from Commodore User

the karate devils look like that Wojack meme

The worst pile of crap I ever purchased was this 50 games on one cassette compilation.... I think they released it for all the 8 bits ... the games were worse than anything shown here.

I can think of the following shite games: Booty, Pedro, Ninja, Bazooka Bill, Judge Dredd, Cobra, Friday the 13th, Cyborg, Double Dragon, V, Ship Of the Line, Jump Jet, Karate Champ, Cisco Heat, Streetfighter 2. The last two bring a tear to my eye as they were developed by a fellow Scotsman. Fuck me, you could put any old shite on a cassette back then with a license and people would buy it .

Ninja scooter simulator sounds like a game that would have tried to get on Steam Greenlight when that was a thing.

The C64 conversion of Xevious was a real turd, even more embarrassing is that 2 years before, Thorn EMI did a really competent knock off called Black Hawk

What!?! I used to LOVE Willow Pattern.

I loved to know what inspired Mastertronic to to make sweep. If you are reading Mastertronic, let me know.

the china one had some nice asethetics imo. it could had easily been a nice sort of Zelda clone if that's possible on that particular system.

Got THROTTLE? 'Hard Drivin' plays so much better if you're not redlining the engine at 8,000 rpm all the time.

Strange the A-team wasn't in this list..;-)

BMX Ninja is what happens when publishers combine two worlds they thing children like to make the game sound "cool" just think they they thought that no one notice the whole lack of Ninjas.

Phantom Karate Devils was Charakter Arte only, right?

I remember playing hard driver in the arcade version. They had in Metrotown in Burnaby. It was f-ing hard. You couldn’t keep it in the loop if you tried. It sucked, but I spent so much money on it because I didn’t want some shit game to get the best of me. Lol They got my money so I guess they won.

I love the idea of a Brit bad mouthing the graphics in these C64 games given the popularity of the Speccy ZX in the UK.

What's scary-slash-amusing is that all of this crap is stuff I'd have been overjoyed to have on the Apple IIe, it being one of the only platforms I had to work with until I finally got my hands on a NES. It's a permanent crying shame that I never got to experience the C64 in its heyday. Seriously, all of the games in this video would have been legends on the Apple II.

I would suggest that Mastertronic Games were generally very good value for money. OI doubt they made as many stinkers as some companies charging top price for their garbage. Blaby Computer Games comes to mind.

Methinks Ninja Scooter Simulator was probably the only game with Simulator in the title that Codemasters didn’t publish

you suffered and the you made us all suffer. thank you

Are you keeping up with Commodore? These games: No, not really.

"It probably sold?" Well, I don't know about you, but maybe the reason I was OK with many of these terrible games back in the day was that, um, I didn't exactly pay for them.

These aren't the worst. They aren't so bad they're horrible levels of bad.

WTF? A game based on dinnerware?

The girl figure is the best that BMX Nija has to offer... why not stick to making it larger and more detailed? North Star actually looks rather good, but... 1988, seriously? Playability might have been something to hone a little bit... taking your runup and timing your jump for certain gaps is like attempting to fart when having diarrhea. Too much or too little, and once you get the jump right and don't fall in a gap... mostly you could just as well have. You can't control your trajectory at all once you initiate the jump. You don't see much of your enemies until too late. You have four lives, and instant death at a mere touch of an enemy... instead of, or in addition to, having to mind collecting oxygen, why not make an energy bar that depletes from contacts, and could be replenished by collecting the blue bubbles left behind by enemies... and then, the main weapon, robotic arm, that actully becomes slower to operate by the frst bonus... in the later levels you spend more time dying than advancing. Without cheating, I don't know anyone getting much ahead of level 4.

Brown's my favourite colour! Chimney game's are my least favourite game genre though oaw... *Edit - when this video was uploaded I was on holiday visiting a mate oop north. I want normality back!!! Aghr!!!

Mastertronic games pretty much sucked across the board, but damn did they always have the kick-ass soundtracks.

Try The Human Race sometime. Graphics and sound are fine. I dare you to make it past the first screen.

Sweep and Willow Pattern weren't terrible. Add: Chase HQ, Freddy Hardest/Guardian Angel, World Cup Carnival, Gauntlet II, Renegade, and the 64 port of Jet Set Willy

That Greg guy is the best game reviewer I have ever seen! I sure wish we had his expertise here in the states. I would love to see his take on Action 52. That set of "games" would have likely blown his mind.

After that intro I was expecting hilarious broken trash but all it was was a list of games you don't happen to like.

As an 8 year old kid I thought treasure island was quite a nice game ;)...found it on one of the nearly 60 copied tapes that came with my 1st c64

Hungry Horace is missing!

Wait a minute...so you think making a game based on chimney sweeping is a bad idea?! I think Microsoft and Sony need to do a complete overhaul of this game in 4K@60fps HDR10 w/Ray Tracing! I have you know that chimney sweeping is the in thing right now. It's the new extreme sport played by 8 year olds...see, the package sells itself. Hopefully we can get EA in on this so the game can have tons of DLC and Loot Box content! This is going to be GOTTY right here. Halo Infinite and God of War have met their match! ;)

what about Knight Rider - that was pretty bad too!

I loved Willow Pattern!

that willow thing is a direct rip off of treasure island on the c16.......

I vaguely remember Inspector Gadget being the worst game I ever played on the C64. Anyone else?

C64, or should I say home computer consoles in general Atari 800, Texas Instruments Home Computer, were so awesome it was not uncommon for even the bad games to be enjoyable. Some of those games though poorly designed were very original and were saved by only the fun factor. That's my experience and what I am seeing with these games on this video. The games here look cool and fun. But you can see the flaws. No matter. Fun is why I even play video games. If it's not fun I regret buying it no matter how good the graphics are. That's why I spend most the time playing old games.

i had the hardriving game on my 286 laptop

What about the Temple of Apshai?

You should have tried Ninja Hamster from CRL LMAO