I used to love Crash magazine. Bought it religiously. Those covers were absolute classics.

We all rushed home at some point with a budget title in our pocket. So much excitement as you sat on the bus heading home. And then after waiting for it to load...

Where's Alcatraz Harry? I remember my spoilt mate, Kevin Bird, having it bought for him and raving about it at school before a few of us went round his house after school to check it out. We pissed ourselves when it loaded, and he forever became known as Alcatraz Kev!

Always remember Piggy from the Crash review due to the %. It appeared in the bottom 100 games on WOS. Oddly the score kept going up to take it out the bottom 100. Was going in and out. Thought the author was up scoring it.

Anirog was founded in 1982 by Anil Gupta and Roger Gamon as a portmanteau of their names. Went on to become Anco, with the biggest hits being the Kick Off football games.

Smash Out looks like it would be a good Breakout clone if they just slowed the ball down a bit. And I really want to see if anyone could work out Kosmic Pirate

That Video Classics review was in the first issue of Crash I ever got. That little capsule review fascinated me at the time, I didn't realize review scores could go as low as 05%, I always wanted to see it.

Realm of Impossibility - I loved this on the C64. Then again, I had a floppy drive, so the level loading wasn't much of an issue. Even though the 1541 drive is notoriously slow, I don't remember the loading times being bad at all.

Its amazing to think how fast the gaming world was moving and developing back then, shown in black and white when you compare reviews of games with their rereview a year or two later and games they love they now think are terrible.

14:10 "Who's afraid of a discordant noise..." 🎶😱

Piggy's music put me in mind of the Vic-20 whose sound generator's frequency drifted the further away from it's intended range you go, leading to some very out-of-tune sounding music unless the coder was clued in.

Love your videos mate, kids these days don't know the torment of playing some budget titles. New subscriber!

I remember reading the review for Howzat on the bus home to my friends after we went shopping.

I always thought there's a game hiding in Kosmik Pirate somewhere, but one only the author knew how to play. Then someone else clearly baffled by the whole thing wrote the "instructions", and ultimately it just looks tedious anyway. It reminds me of that really old Star Trek game though, which had its fans.

Kosmik Pirate, wonder if the name was inspired by Rodney Trotter :p (I used to play Horace Goes Skiing, thats several hours of my childhood I'll never get back 😆)

I hope you're feeling better now! ...and, if not, that you get well soon. Thank you! Fun video!

I bought a game called The Trap at a ZX Spectrum show at Alexandra Palace in the mid '80s. I've never seen any record of it anywhere. I genuinely think I was the only person to ever have bought a copy. It was the worst bloody 'game' I've ever encountered. A sci-fi mazy thing, programmed in BASIC. Absolutely woeful. I was so naive. Won over by some packaging. At the same show I bought Zaxxon, after being convinced by a disingenuous vendor that the picture of the gameplay on the back was actually in game action. Sooooo gullible. But, even so, compared to The Trap, Zaxxon was a work of genius.

So Crash magazine didn't think SQIJ was even worth reviewing? Not that this surprises me, but I was expecting this to be at the bottom of the pile with a 0% rating to boot ...

If you want to see some really dire (yet oddly endearing in their way) games, look up the developer Barry Jones. If Spectrum Computing is to be believed he even owned his own software house!

Realm of Impossibility (originally called Zombies) was actually a pretty good game on the Atari 8 bit computers. On every other system it was dire, though

If that is the pacman toy with an extendable tongue, i have the exact toy on my shelf ❤😂

Id definately disagree on howzat, i have a lot of good memories of playing that against my dad as a kid and we would play it for ages. It was like a slightly better version of test match a game we also played a lot of. He was a big cricket fan and sometimes was hogging the speccy on it when i wanted to play my own games 😂

There's a compilation called Don't But This: Five of the Worst Games Ever.... Two of the games on it are Fido 1, and Fido 2, where the point is for a dog to protect a garden from moles, buy walking slowly over to the molehills and flattening them with his tail. Fido 1 standalone was the first game I ever bought. Fido 1 was also the first game I ever returned for a refund, lying to the shop that the game didn't load.

Fun video. You also have to factor in how long these games took to load on cassette tapes back in the day, that just added to the disappointment when you’d spent 10 mins to play the effing thing.

Some real stinkers indeed. I remember two mates weren't seen for days in the summer holidays, busy playing Howzat together for hours on end, they loved it, I was bored after 2 minutes.

that's hurt me. Imagine how bad can it be, if we combine the worst parts of each of them into one.

"Don't Buy This!" By Firebird actually had a couple of decent games in it by comparison to this lot.

Voyage Into The unknown was the first Mastertronic game I bought. The cover looked good and the blurb made it sound interesting. But the game was unplayable. I used to load it up every year or so just to remind myself how crap it was. I even tried playing it a couple of years ago. Still crap.

I never bought any game as bad as these. Which may be a sign of good taste on my part or that Crash reviewers weren't being bribed.

Excellent video. I'm always looking for more crap games to try.

See I didn't mind Piggy... I think I got it from one of those places that posted you out games to "hire" for a few days (heh, like anyone was using them for anything other than piracy!)... I played it quite a bit, as a dated but decent enough little game. Maybe I'm weird...

Great recopilación, I Will make a video trying to check this wit ur ok of course

Thank you for going through the pain of reviewing these turds. I’m impressed that someone coded a piece of garbage in BASIC and tried to trick gullible kids into buying it by wrapping it in some futuristic cover art. You can’t infer a game’s playability from the screenshots on the back cover so some poor sods wasted their pocket money on it.

Voyage into the Unknown was the second ever game I bought, based on the artwork. I couldn't get pass the 3rd move. Just stuck. Lovely art though. I liked Howzat! It was...just easy, relaxing and stress less.

I remember the Crash review of the Mr Blobby game where it said it should have been called "Mr pants goes to the toilet".

Being quite into martial arts, I bought Kung Fu Master and Uchi Mata which were both pretty good on my mate's c64. Not so much on the Spectrum, The screenshots in magazines and even the cover for Uchi Mata showed graphics like Exploding fist, that did look like spectrum graphics, however the 'finished' product was nothing like. Grey stripey figures flickering with hideous clunky awfulness. Kung Fu Master is probably the worst game I have ever wasted money on. Usually I would wait for Crash reviews as I do think they were generally pretty accurate and fair.

Need all the music to flight path 737, I really like that.

I remembered playing Howzat a lot and even though its awful graphics I did love it :)

Software house names were often purchased as is according to what ive read in retro gamer, explaining many of the odd names that are not linked to gaming. Its the quickest way to set up a company to just go off the shelf? I want to see what off the shelf names are on there now and imagine it being my software company name now 😂😎

Well that's one pile of shite right there 😅 The music if you can call it music would come in a treat should you want ear wax removal for an inner ear canal. I get the cricket game and where you're coming from with that. I sent away for a cricket game, mail order for my Vic-20 (I must send that in to gamebase, i believe its not been archived) , it was in basic but i loved it, the same sort of quality of the game you shown on here. Great video again mate, never seen the majority of these games which is brilliant and fresh. 👍

The one thing I enjoy almost as much as playing great games... is playing really shit games. Gotta love'em! It's kind of like a sickness. Glad I found your channel. Have a like and a subscribe 😃👍🏻

They all look better than the A Team on the Commodore 64.

Kosmik Pirate looks like a Ceefax page

By far the worst game I had back in the 80s was Man Trap by Century Software.

I worked for the company that owned Alternative Software..

I liked the 3D look of Realm of Impossibility. My friend way back yonder used to play Cricket Captain. The game was much faster than Howzat and totally playable.

It was always fun that the Crash Smash badge you absolutely couldn't replicate on a real Zx Spectrum.

I can’t believe that Legend Software’s The Great Space Race wasn’t on this list! A truly awful game!

They should do a remake.

WOW they are some truly awful game's. Thanks to the good people at Crash and Zzap!64 etc. to steer us clear and not fall afowl of dazzling advertising, (as much as possible). That Piggy game. THANK YOU I have my new ringtone 😜👍 For the last game it looked like you just put up footage of Ceefax 😂 (Where was the game so it could be called such? 😂 Oh dear). They were rightly slated. Another good video. Thanks Seb 👍

Top stuff

Haven't watched yet but I remember Thundercats being diabolical.

just look at most of the crash smashes

14:31 Well, Yeah I stopped the video at this point but believe it or not, not because of teh tune... But because I have to go out! I was an Amstrad Boy myself, but my sisters had a Spectrum... And I have heard FAR, FAR WORSE! At least it qualifies as a Tune... Even if it is a bit ear piercing!

I got one of those 100 games on one tape. Man they were shit

I think I'd enjoy this more if you told us why you think the games are bad rather than just telling us that they are (multiple times) and reading out old reviews from Crash magazine. F'rex, from the video alone I could see that the collision detection in Smash Out was off by the full width of a block, which is unforgivable in a game consisting only of uniformly sized rectangles - wasn't that worth a mention? Some of the other games it's very difficult to envisage what's so bad about them. Sure, the graphics - it's a ZX Spectrum, that's par for the course - but we can't tell what you're doing with the controls to elicit that response on the screen, or in many cases, what objective you're trying to accomplish.

You suffer for your art, sir!

Spurs supporter alert...still I enjoy your videos (go Arsenal)

Love your channel. Nostalgia overdose. Crash had those amazing art works from the porn painter Oliver fray.

who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

Areola soft! Bringing you the breast-I MEAN best in video game entertainment ...Areola Soft! We're firmly the best and our best has to be quite firm...... ok ill stop.

Ariolasoft?

You should do a reread when you stumble on reading though, it comes across really badly.

How about this for the most pathetic claim to fame ever...I once won a caption competition in Crash magazine, I think my prize was a T shirt and game but in all honesty I'm not sure. The photo was of an old man, probably about the age I am now, watching a child play a Spectrum game. My caption was something along the lines of the child saying "What do you mean this 'looks hard'...it's only a loading screen" Sorry about wasting the last 30 seconds of your life reading this but it's too late now.

Hello Sebastian. Your voice sounds better like this. Always be poorly when recording a video.

What about E.T