 Welcome back retro enthusiasts. This time we are looking at arcade conversions for the Amstrad CPC. This is the video where we don't allow nostalgia to blind us. It's all about the pass or fail. I've picked these games at random and will continue to do so with a little mini-series each week to ultimately find out which games which arcade conversions ported or were converted to the Amstrad CPC successfully or not. This is a no holds barred. I'm pulling no punches and in my personal opinion highly subjective of course if it's crap I'm calling it. Now you can see how the arcade original looked there in the top left hand corner and on the surface the Amstrad conversion looks alright. Appears to be very colorful to the eye. Admittedly it looks quite blocky and there's a nice little colorful winner circle there and then we're on to the next track. Just wanted to point out there's another game from the same stable on the Amstrad which is Badlands. It doesn't look great as you can see but it controls better and the collision detection is a lot better as well. It's just unfortunately really slow and that brings me to super sprint on the Amstrad. It's dog slow. In saying that I've played it on the other 8-bit conversions and this one although decidedly average betters the other conversions in almost every department. Even the looks. Sadly the engine noise in this just grates along. There's no music, no intermission sounds. You get the few odd explosions here and there or collision but in all honesty these Codemasters bad boys did it far much better because they understood the one vital ingredient for this type of game. Speed my friend, speed. It's as though the programmers were on to something here with this conversion but they either didn't test the game properly or completely ran out of time. I always hate to criticize programmers because there's so many different things that could have happened. You hear nightmare stories about they were only given a month or less to bring a game out to rush it out before Christmas. It was almost as if it was the impossible job, the impossible task with so many different variables against the programmer before they'd even started. Now I did pay for and own this game as a child. Well, it was bought for me for Christmas and I did play the cassette out of this but even as a kid I knew this game had massive issues but back then you kind of played through them. Probably out of desperation for a good racer. It was confirmed to me months later after visiting an arcade and playing this with the steering wheel and the big setup that the Amstrad CPC didn't deliver a convincing enough arcade conversion. So on that bombshell it's a fail from me. I'm sure this one has its 8-bit fans but I'm not one of them. Jesus Christ on a bike. What the bloody hell is this? It's not even a specky port. It looks far worse. It's like the specky port, the specky original 1.0 before they added all the bells and whistles. It's slow as well. God it's miserable looking especially if you're an Amstrad CPC owner and remember breaking out that Amsoft pack of 10 games and all that colour. I mean that's how it should have looked there on the left, the arcade original. Well not should have looked but we know what mode 0 can do on the Amstrad. We know that mode 1 can even do better than this. Not only are my eyes bleeding just watching this but my ears are bleeding as well with the sounds. Can you imagine all those poor kids at Christmas or their birthdays or whatever? Opening this, loading up the cassette tape, thinking oh god I can't believe we're playing this game. On the Amstrad CPC. I love the arcade version so much and then all of a sudden silence followed by tears and then Amstrad rage. Probably slinging the cassette across the room, smashing a few objects or items on the way, probably even a window. It was that bad. The Commodore 64 and the original ZX specky and this Game Boy version tops for me and these are the ones I play instead of these Amstrad ports as you can see. But there's quite a few actually. There's quite a few Bionic Commando ports that turned out really good. Now if you were stuck with the game, as I were unfortunately back in the day, there is, it is playable. And I hate to say that and I don't want to admit to that. There is a game there and you can progress and I think from memory I even completed this a few times. But when you look at the NES version there on the left, I mean, God this pales in comparison to anything, to everything. Thinking back, it was torture. And I guess a bit like Stockholm Syndrome for me. Can you imagine being the programmer that had to convert this from the specky? It must have been stomach churning. A real feeling of I'm going nowhere in life. I'm just a specky porter. A real low point of any programmer in his life. I mean, to add insult to injury, we get a pink intermission loading screen. Oh God. But the worst is yet to come with this second level. Again, although it's playable, I mean, you scroll along. I mean, look at that. The Amstrad CPC has colour clash. How? It's impossible. You can't even get colour clash if you try. And the the enemies appear out of nowhere. You're just walking along. Oh, and that's the other thing. The bloody screen doesn't even scroll. Look at that. It's just a green beret style flick. And that guy was just standing there in midair. I mean, it's just an absolute insult to the eye. And to parents who would have purchased this for Christmas. So this is go, which I believe is a subsidiary of US Gold. This really is a piss poor effort from US Gold. It should never have made it through the QA session. And if there even were game testers, they should have been sacked on the spot. No surprise then that this is a big massive epic fail. Oh, now that's a sight for sore eyes. She's a bit blocky, but she's yellow where it counts. I remember seeing this intro and thinking we're in for something special here. We're in for something special. I have to admit, though, by this point, I'd already moved on to the Sega Mega Drive and played this. But I was aware it came out on the Amstrad CPC. So I just had to have a go. I just had to play it. And as you can see, from this screen, the music, the presentation, I was expecting big things until this happened. Just look at the speed there of the arcade original. So fast, so smooth. And then look at the specky port as well. The specky port moves along, zips along quite nicely as well. But then look at the Amstrad. It's so slow, which makes it even worse because it looks decent. There's animation as the guy turns the wheel. You can see in the rear view mirror are the spectrum and the arcade ports are blocking it slightly. But then the reality kicks in when you when the first turn comes, and you smash against the roadside objects only on the left, hardly ever on the right. They've balled up the collision detection as well. The Amstrad CPC can do really good fast convincing road games. I look at the scroll there. I mean, look at the pseudo 3d as it's coming towards you. There's pretty much nothing that's different between the way that road's moving and this road's moving. Apart from this version on the Amstrad of Super Monaco, it's absolute dog slow. I mean, that's rally two from, say 1984 1985. Surely things are supposed to get better. Codes supposed to get tighter. What happened? What went wrong? With the spec, he can do it. Why couldn't the Amstrad? In fact, I've just proven that the Amstrad can do it. So coming up right here, here's one of the big problems with the Amstrad version. Did you see that? The collision detection can't make its mind up whether it's going to work or not. Okay, so this is super cycle and motorcycle game. But again, it shows that the Amstrad can deliver fast screen updates. So once again, screw you US gold. You screwed us over once again. Admittedly, this is kind of playable. You can complete the game. You can work around the issues with the collision detection and the slow speed. But why would you want to when the superior versions out there? I would say play this on the Sega Mega Drive, play Super Monaco, the first one and also play Super Monaco 2, the airton's center version. Both of those games are absolutely unbelievable for the time and still hold up quite well today. So now we've qualified. We're on to the race and I just wanted to show you what that looked like. So we're off again. What's interesting if you look, the little details that have gone into this game, the tires look as though they've got this animation as if they're spinning. The scenery in the background of Monaco looks and moves really nice, I think. I like the fact that the grass has that stripe effect on it. I like the fact that the road is a different color. You've got the roadside signs telling you where the corner's coming, which is why it hurts to give this one a fail. Because it seemingly does everything that you'd wanted to do as an arcade conversion, but sadly there's little elements, important elements that are broken, which unfortunately can sign this to the dustbin. And I think Amstrad action for being overly generous when they gave this one 74%. Ah, altered beast. I had this on the Sega Mega Drive and absolutely loved it. They couldn't possibly ball this one up on the Amstrad. Surely not. Presentation is lovely, the music starts off great. Initial thoughts on the graphics are that they're colorful, a bit blocky. On the bottom right is how it looked in the arcade original. So one might say it does look authentic at this point. But then what's happened to the speed? Why is the guy kicking so slowly? Why can't he punch? Why is it scrolling so slowly? I thought this was an app division conversion, not a US Gold. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit hasty here, but let's give it a chance. Things hopefully will improve. The kick seems quite effective. There's quite a few enemy characters on screen at any one time. Those explosions look good when the zombie gets eliminated. We need to upgrade our character here where he basically turns into a wolf after collecting three pickups. On the top right there is the Sega Mega Drive version that I once upon a time owned. But instantly you can see we've got an issue on the Amstrad with the speed and this game was all about speed in my opinion. Which again is a crying shame because the music's unbelievable and you know although the graphics aren't scrolling smoothly it's it's all right. I could have lived with it. It seems like the screen's quite busy. So it looks and sounds authentic but unfortunately sadly alas it just couldn't pull it off in the gameplay department. And because of this Activision have slayed the beast before it's even got going. Trust me I want to love this game on the Amstrad CPC. I've played it up until completion but the reality is it was painful doing so. I'm not going to lie to you I hated every last minute of it. The Sega Master System version on the top left as you can see on the other hand is absolutely brilliant. Nice smooth scrolling nowhere near as vibrant in the color department but it does the basics it delivers the gameplay and the hardware is pretty similar. We've all played Savage, Traventor so we know the Amstrad CPC can deliver this type of game which for me made it all the more difficult to swallow. It does slightly improve when you manage to turn into the wolf. You can dart around the screen and have a lot faster. You can take down multiple enemies zombies in one fell swoop. At that point it does feel a little bit more like the arcade. It still feels slow but it's almost bearable. Still I'm not going to make excuses it is a terrible awful conversion but as a game in its own right there is still something there. It's still playable I think but personally for me I just kind of wanted to reach for the off switch. I mean this was 1990 when this came out. I can see why Amstrad Action only gave it 50% and between US Gold and Activision I'm not sure who made the worst arcade conversions. In fact let me know. In your opinion what are the worst Amstrad CPC arcade conversions? A bunch of very very clever people have already remade lots of failed arcade conversions for the Amstrad CPC. R-Type being one of them got ghost and goblins or golden ghost and let's hope one day we can add altered beast to that collection. You are cool, the engine's hot, the girl is gorgeous, a tank full of gas and an open road. The rest is up to you just not on the Amstrad CPC. I first discovered and played Outrun whilst on holiday in a seaside town of Wales, north Wales I believe. My cousin and I gathered round the arcade machine in the hope that I could play it but the queue was absolutely massive. This would have been around 1986 probably early 1987 and you can see at the top left hand corner what it looked like on the arcade and as a young kid this would have absolutely blown anyone away. So you can imagine how happy, how ecstatic I felt when I saw it advertised in computer and video games and Amstrad Action for a release on the old Humble ZX-Becky 64 and Amstrad CPC. Then all the fake screenshots started to come out in the magazines. One magazine had stills of the Amstrad CPC version and it looked absolutely unbelievable. US Gold put lots of energy into all the merchandise, t-shirts, advertisements but as we Amstrad CPC owners sadly found out it was all complete bullshit and hyperbole. The music playing in the background of this video came from the cassette version that they gave away with the game because the bastards couldn't be asked to include music whilst you were driving around. The ZX-Becky version, the 128K version and the Commodore 64 they featured music and it was bloody good music too. The Amstrad did feature music on the intro screen but that was it, it was complete silence once you loaded. So you can see on the upper left the ZX Spectrum version and it's not perfect but it runs quicker, it runs faster than the Amstrad CPC. The car spins, flies in the air, there's extra animations. The code doesn't feel as unfinished and buggy as the Amstrad CPC version and I actually played it a lot back in the day and thought it was really a really good faithful conversion despite all its faults. The car in the Amstrad CPC version, it looks bloody good. I just, you know, to put all that effort into the car and then zero effort into the speed and the graphics. It's just bewildering, absolutely bizarre that they'd let this happen. I mean this is their product, Probe's product, US Gold's product and it looks absolutely shite. Seriously, they'd been better off not releasing it at all on the Amstrad. It just gave them a really bad reputation. So there's two of my favorite versions there you've got on the left, the PC Engine version which is an 8-bit console with 16-bit graphics I believe and then the Sega Mega Drive version which looks a bit washed out there but that's not fair. I think only the Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Switch and 3DS versions obviously bettered it because they were arcade perfect but up until that point this was the definitive version. There are some weird moments in this Amstrad CPC version where you're driving along over 180 miles per hour and the screen looks as though the road is going backwards in reverse. It doesn't happen throughout the game on all stages but it's massively off-putting when it does happen. Things could have been a lot worse though, I know, can you believe it? The Amiga version was an absolute dog. As they say, for me once, shame on you, for me twice, shame on me. So then how do I sum this one up? Probably one of the worst arcade ports conversions on the Amstrad CPC of all time. Without question, a resounding fail. So this is the end of episode one, I hope you enjoyed it. Episode two will look at more Amstrad CPC arcade conversions. Sadly in this episode they've all been massive failures. Hopefully in the next episode we'll have some winners. If you like this video and like what I'm doing, please do me the honour of liking, subscribing and leaving a comment. Oh and don't forget to ring that bell. Bye!