Technically Bad Games.

[Sly Reflex]

I posted this over at games™, but I thought I'd put it in here as well due to how fucking shit it was. I kinda enjoyed it to start with, but damn I grew to hate it. One of the worst games I have ever played. Ever.

Right, here we go.

This game I had on the Amiga 1200. It was realised in 1994 At the time it pushed boundaries as far as management games went with it's easy to understand but deep gameplay that excelled by having a clear and easy to navigate UI that meant nothing was overly complex and could be learnt in minutes. It had a few bugs, one of which included people getting stuck behind specific rides which could be avoided by putting fences up and saving you hassle. It also had a really annoying advisor, but no worries, he could be turned off. Now onto this...

I picked this game up quite a while ago now, I think it was about Christmas 2007 when I acquired this game. Only in the last week have I been able to dedicate the time you need to really benefit from a Theme Park game. Now, on the cover this game looks like it is just a straight port of the game we know and love. Except it isn't, otherwise this would be in a different thread.

It all starts off in the usual remake way, you put your name in, and choose an advisor. Not satisfied with having one annoying c*nt from the previous game they decide to add 3 more. Yes, now you can choose who to be nagged to death by. You either pick the old jovial dude that is a rip off of Mr Monopoly, a kid girl, an annoying c*nt of a man that you'd cross the street just to punch his mouth in and a MILF that looks like Alaska favourite turkey killer and all round winker Sarah Palin. I choose Palin, as the others were just to much to bear. Now this advisor resides on the top screen and comes up with useful hints and tips on how to run the park. No problem you think, I'll just turn her off. You look for the option, but no matter how hard you look it isn't there. She spams the same info at you over and over. "Raise the price of your ice cream to X amount" she will say over and over, which you do just to shut her up, only for all the little people to boycott the ice cream stall because it's priced too high. The prices the game tells you to sell stuff seems random and it wouldn't be the 1st time the game told me to sell stock at a loss. Well done there whoever decided to program that algorithm. "People are needing more sign posts because they can't find the exit..." they will say, "Put up more signposts!". So you check the feedback people are giving on the park and it turns out that 0.01% actually want more sign posts, despite your advisor putting it across that these people are in more peril than someone who just ate an asbestos pie.

The problems don't end there with the advisor, because also on the top screen is a mini map of your park. Or there would be if you could actually see the whole thing because the advisor takes up 1/4 of the screen every time it tells you to do something. Which it will be doing. Constantly.

Enough of the advisor though, that's one of the many problems that this version of Theme Park has. One that plagued the original game was people getting stuck. It could always be prevented by making sure that the people couldn't get near these parts of the game by fencing them off, and even in the worst case scenario you could delete the offending article that the people were stuck on to prevent them from getting lodged in areas they shouldn't be. However, in this game they get stuck on everything. And I mean everything.I've had them stuck on the paths, the rides, on the park walls. They have even just randomly decided to walk on the grass and get stuck there. Sometimes you can fix this problem by deleting whatever they are stuck on. Pretty much all the time they are stuck there for good though, prompting "You need to rescue a visitor who is stuck somewhere in your park" chants from your advisor. You try to use the mini-map to find said victims, but you can't see everywhere because that blabbering c*nthole is covering the right hand section of it by telling you someone is trapped. Over and over.

So, onto the actual rides and shops. Like the old Theme Park, you have to spend money researching. This works pretty well in this version of the game. However, there is only 24 unlocks for each section. So, a load of stuff has been omitted. When I say a load of stuff has been omitted, I really mean it. Basically you get the 1st 24 things that normally unlock are the only things you'll get. You want loop the loops and cork screws for your roller coaster? Well you're sh*t out of luck. Want the nice ornamental features and the super toilets? Unlucky. You want the arcade? That's absent as well. When I played Theme Park on the Amiga, it had about 70 different ride, 50 different shops and a f*ck tonne of trees and other things to make your park look nice. Now you can't even put a white picket fence down, because the c*nts that converted this game dropped it. Another gripe is that the rides break after 1 or 2 sets of people have been on them, and after a tiny bit of game time the lovely advisor starts ordering you to replace said ride because it's shagged, despite you putting it in about 1 year ago in game time. If you don't replace the ride, you get the advisor on your back until it is replaced.

Onto the staff. The staff cope quite well at the beginning of the game, but soon devolve into the idiocy that will make you both smile and make you want to break the DS in half. The cleaners work as they should. This is good. The mechanics? To say they were broken to f*ck would be an understatement. They have fixed rides magically by not even touching them, they have sat next to a ride as it has blown up and not give a monkeys, they have glitched into rides, walls, onto water, into the road. Some have even vanished, yet still gone about their daily task of fixing rides. One of the mechanics chased the bus of the screen and basically fired himself. Another ran round and round the entrance of the park. Another one ran around and around a roller coaster that was about to blow up. Broken to f*ck. Something that did amuse me where the work unions. In the old game you were called upon these meeting every so often where you would negotiate with a rep and wages would change accordingly. Well now these screens allow you to cut the wages of your staff by between 15% and 10% every time you get called into the office. This is a lot, you can tell because the mechanic was only getting paid $50 instead of his $250 normal rate. The same goes for the supplies too I beat them down so that I was buying everything for $1 a unit. However, there was a bug that happens a fair bit into the game that made it so I had no chance but to pay all the staff a 35% increase on their wages, which resulted in them eventually getting $12,000 a month by6 the time I had completed the game.

"It can't get any more worse can it?" I hear you cry. Yes. Yes it can. The game will tell you you have to close your park through bankruptcy for no reason at all. It did it once when the park was worth $1 million and I had $7 million available in free cash. How is this even possible? I don't get how the game works this out, but yet it does and it's f*cking stupid.

Now in the above I just mentioned the major things, but there were a myriad of other graphical and sound bugs that made this game fit for gaming room 101. Seriously guy, I wouldn't even consider pirating this sh*t, it's just terrible. The worse game I have played in a long long time, and hopefully the last.

In short I hated it and it isn't fit to share the Theme Park name with the original game. AIDS come in a box, and that box is labelled Theme Park DS.

[Craymen Edge]

I think you're exaggerating a little bit.

I played this back when it came out, and don't remember the advisor being too much of a problem. Looking at screenshots now, they don't take up all that much room. The biggest issue with the map screen being a side effect of the DS's small screens and fairly low resolution.

I didn't have a lot of problems with stuck visitors that I remember (no more than the old version), but did find placement of certain things fiddly. e.g. Entrance and exits, queues for rides. The biggest problem with Theme Park DS is that it's a 1994 PC game that hasn't aged all that well, and has had very little done to update it.

[Hendo]

I wouldn't know a good Theme Park from a shit one - I tried the original years ago and just couldn't get on with it.

[Sly Reflex]

When things were simple, it ran OK, but as soon as things started to get busy there was no end of problems. There were bugs I didn't mention stuff like the research sticking and deducting cash even after you had researched everything and not being able to reset it yourself because the option becomes greyed out. Just terrible man, it's obvious they never play tested the thing.

[HandsomeDead]

I played it on the Megadrive, dunno how that one stands against the other versions, don't remember any advisor. I remember the cleaners would skive around the park a made and leave all the rubbish in the busy areas lying there, tossers.

[Sly Reflex]

Did you create paths for them to patrol? You need to designate paths for them to follow, they normally do good, it was actually one of the bits they managed to improve in the DS version.

[HandsomeDead]

God knows, probably not. It was someone elses and I didn't play it a great deal.

[Sly Reflex]

Take a seat Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, you belong here in the special class.

More later when I can be arsed to do a long long post.

[Jimboxy]

the box art is made of WIN and KITTENS

[Craymen Edge]

It performs so badly in places that it's pretty much compulsory to install the thing to the hard drive. It's clearly a PC game at heart, and a low budget one a that, yet I find it strangely enjoyable.

[Sly Reflex]

I think I may have been a bit hasty to give this a kicking, I've played it a bit more and it's kind of compulsive, but I don't know why. The graphics are shit, the quests are a bit shit, the fighting is mega shit and the voice acting is just WTFBBQTELETHONDELAROFFLES shit with added batshit crazy random stuff said both randomly and in quest missions.

When you buy a game you get the euphoria stage. A bit where you think its great. Then you get the realisation stage, it comes quite quick with this game, about 10 minutes in. Then the regret sets in and you wish you had left it on the shelf. But then through forcing yourself to play you get to like it. No idea why, because there is a load of RPG's on the current crop of consoles to take up the slack before I could recommend this to anyone, but I am sure once you go past the stages I have been through you would end up liking it in some sadistic sort of way.

One good thing about this is how big it is, when you initially look at the map it just looks like one small area walled in by impassible mountain ranges, but you eventually break through them into areas that are basically 10 or 15 times the size of the area you fuck about in at the start.

[Sly Reflex]

Um... It's actually pretty good.

I've got the hang of most of it now and I'm having fun, something that I thought would never ever happen when I started playing.

[Sly Reflex]

It just over took GTA: Episodes to take the 6th place in my most played games since joining raptr. How far up will it actually get?

[Sly Reflex]

Well, I'm nearing the end of this game now and there is no way it deserved the mediocre reception it got. Sure, it might be a bit clichéd, but I am sure that every game set in a world full of dragons and magic is the same. I know Oblivion trod the path pretty heavily, as well as Dragon Age and Demon Souls do (although I have yet to play the latter two games) and Sacred 2 is no exception. However, Sacred 2 really need to be played in a group to get the best out of it, similar to the way Borderlands plays way better when you have 3 friends playing each of the other classes. Playing alone is passable, but the bosses you will come across feel really cheap in the way only RPG's can muster, you can tell by some of the design where they are situated that there are areas when certain classes are meant to attack or support from. Quite a bit into the game you will run into some hard common enemies which seems a bit unbalanced in the fact that they take a hell of a lot of punishment to slay, as well as retaliating enough to fuck up everything you worked for so far.

When you initially start this game, it puts you in the same boat as Borderlands puts you in. All the stuff you have is shit, but unlike Borderlands which softly nudges you in the right direction on how to play, this game just expects you to get on with it. Back in the 90's this game would have come with a 100+ page instruction book explaining on how everything works, where as here nothing at all is explained, and if it is it's so vague that it will leave you scratching your head in confusion to what it just told you. It has menus within menus that can be hard to find when you are looking for something specific and even after 30 hours of playing I still struggle to find out how I carried out getting points to modify magic, or combat arts as they are known in this game. You can tell it was a PC game before, although the most important stuff such as adding level up points and new skills is mapped to the controller pretty well.

Combat starts off pretty boring. You can equip weapons (and later combat arts) to the face buttons, but pretty much all the fighting just means you holding down which ever button weapon you want to kill with. However, once you have more skills and combat arts, things get infinitely more interesting as you work your current classes skills into play. For instance, you can root your enemies to the spot and pick them off with throwing knives or bow type weapons, or you could throw a shield upon yourself to reflect enemy attacks back at them. My favourite is calling a pile of bones to appear from the ground and fire arrows at all enemies in the vicinity.

All items in the game are upgradable, and while I'm not sure what benefits you would get from making your armour modified with a element (might give you a resistance to that sort of damage, or deal damage to people who strike it, I have no idea), weapons definitely have an advantage to been modified. It's the usual fare with mods, fire and ice etc. All have specific enemies they are good and bad against.

Don't get me wrong, this game has it's fair share of problems, but from what I have experienced they are still outweighed by the good stuff. Once you get over the fact that it's not going to be the best game ever and take it for what it is you'll probably enjoy it once someone has explain how everything works. Besides, once you do eventually get into it you'll experience some of the best worst voice acting and script you have ever witnessed.

[Sly Reflex]

I'm at the final hurdle now, just the last boss to beat by the looks of things. I bet he's a right cheap cunt as well, I'm taking no chances and going in with as many potions as I can carry.

[Chinzon]

You are a one-man Waldorf and Statler.

[illdog]

Had to add this to the thread even though i have documented my feelings in the impressions thread.

Its just an awful broken peice of crap that should never have been released in its current state. They just concentrated on the story and forgot to finish the controls. Truly the most technically broken game ive ever had the misfortune to play and my cursed OCD made me finish it.

Its greatest accolade is that FHM have it 4 out of 5.

[spatular]

is that your copy illdog? if so and what technique did you use for smashing it? (if i had to guess i'd go for stamping on it)

[illdog]

is that your copy illdog? if so and what technique did you use for smashing it? (if i had to guess i'd go for stamping on it)

It sure is and id love to say i used my face but i put my boots on and gave it an old school kicking.

[Sly Reflex]

Well Sacred 2 has been finished, deep at heart it wasn't actually a bad game, just an average but enjoyable one.

So, I'm looking for some other shit obscure oddity to play now. I am thinking maybe THIS. I am open to suggestions, although it must look shit and be cheap as chips. You tube vids if possible so I can check out the shitness.