Pit Fighter - Various

...I'm... just going to have a cry in the corner...

Oh dear God please kill me. No seriously, smite me now for having to put up with this abortion of video gaming. Please someone, take my brain and run it through a bleach-coated cheesegrater on the hope that even in my dying moments that I will NEVER REMEMBER THIS GAME AGAIN. It's Pit-Fighter. (Shit-Fighter, I'll drop this one in now and promise to not use this punchline again).

Words... fail me.

Let's give it some credit though, it's the second fighting game to use filmed actors for animatation, before Mortal Kombat hit the scenes a few years later. The fact that it's the second game to do this should be a huge indicator that this game was never going to be anywhere as polished as it could have been given the almost ground-breaking foray into the field, but Pit-Fighter seems to have lost its way with the game play, and the graphics which is the ultimate irony there.

A shame nobody executed the product staff.

Game wise, Pit-Fighter is for up to 3 players to enter into an underground arena of illegal bareknuckled fighting and combat their way to the top against established pricks of varying magnitude. Join Buzz, Ty and Kato as they take on the underground circuit it a choppily animated and complete lack of flow between frames, fight to the top. Scoring points and cash on the way up by fighting in various styles and winning specific criteria or getting flawless/perfect victories against bosses that take priority with their attacks over your own. Fairness is out of the window from the start and so it's down to who can exploit the AI fastest.

I really wish I hadn't made it.

If you even could! The controls are sluggish and unresponsive at the best of times and Pit-Fighters use of combat is risable at best and downright insulting at worst. Using your mess of a jump, kick and punch, it's down to you to fight and beat multiple boss-like opponents either solo or in a 3vs1 battle with your friends (you will soon lose these friends if you're the one that suggested to play this abysmal game). The joystick lets you move in 8 directions around the arena including moving to the background and foreground while you try to buy some distance and time to learn the moves or pick up some items or just run away and play for a little bit long from the poison challice that is this Pit-Fighter.

It's like a real fight, only pure shit but just as painful.

The graphics in Pit-Fighter, look like people and quite rightly so given the technology used but the flow and style of the animation is horrible to watch and as such the collision detection for the fights are usually "off" from the images that are being shown. There remains some level of detail and colour, if a little pixelated, but for what it's worth, the items and people you see do look like the items and people they're meant to represent. But then a photo of an object should still look like a photo of that object.

Sadly you cannot grab the weapons and bash yourself to death with them.

Annoying, clashing, woefully digitised and barely recognisable. Key words anybody should be using to identify the audio within Pit-Fighter, but perhaps with all the graphics being used in the memory, there wasn't much left in the budget or the game itself, for decent sounds. It's another nail in the coffin here and for those that can find out how to, silence the game before playing it.

And now the background is painful.

There are some interesting aspects of Pit-Fighter though, the crowd can get involved in the fight if the combat strays too close to them, pushing players back into the arena or stepping in and attacking players that get too close, thankfully this includes the bosses of the arenas. Once you've beaten the selection of fighters, you'll end up fighting them all again anyway until you hit level 15 and then you get to fight the last boss and beat the game.

B is for BAD GAME, BLOODY AWFUL and BULLSHIT. Remember this well.

But you can't beat Pit-Fighter. Once you start playing, it has already won. Your money is in its chutes and anything you try from here on will just be a meagre attempt to regain what you've paid, and you will always find yourself coming up short in that regard. Stay away, and if possible, burn any machines you find of this game. I will now be carrying a lighter and aerosol can JUST for this purpose, at all times.

Dark Star - C64 (...run away)

Suicide mission is right, just not how they thought it would be.

Time to cleanse myself, time to sit back and look at another game that helps me realise what makes a good game and what makes a great game and basically if they're not doing what THIS game is doing, it's got to be worth playing more so than this heaping pile of slag.

And it looks like I just ejaculate shots at the enemies... awesome...

Dark Star. Two words thrown together that may or may not incite fear and horror in many a Commodore 64 player. A game so bad it gained a level of infamy despite it coming from the Mastertronic which had a shaky record of releasing good and bad games over the years as a result of their policy of basically publishing inconsistent works for a myriad of bedroom programmers (me too, but was too young at the time to actually publish anything).

Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull...

So what do we have here? Dross. Shit. Pile of wank. But it's all very easy to band around amusing names (fuckpig) but what we need to do is assess WHY it's a bad game. First off, the graphics are piss poor for most games released around that time on the C64, enemies are dull and unimaginative while the level/game is based rather largely on the trench run from Star Wars but if you want to see that idea done well, go play Death Star Interceptor (Actually I might in the next review), while in this game it's drab, dull and boringly repetitive.

On one hand, I screwed up. On the other hand, this is the best thing to happen to me since starting the game.

Controls are ok, a little unresponsive at times but the scrolling of the levels judders and as such it's easy to hit... ANYTHING and be killed, instant game over and you suck harder that a Dyson in Vacuum (might need to test that idea, add it to NASA for next launch). One Hit Wonder at its finest (or worst to be fair), touch a wall, enemy, bullet or anything that isn't the black background and you're dead, game over.

Yay... Spikes.

The sound... Switch it off and play a horde of babies screaming while using an orchestra of pneumatic drills, it'd be far more preferable and wouldn't repeat as much as the music in this game does. The same few bars of poorly composed, unimaginative, bland and flat music will assault your auditory senses for the duration of the game until death finds you and gives you temporary release from this fucking BLIGHT of a game. (Yes the more I review it, the worse I feel about it). Though even the shooting and dying noises are abysmal, actually... not the dying noise, it signifies the end of this game! Such blissful release!

Whoo... I avoided death again. I envy the dead.

But the game itself. You travel down a trench and every now and then you have to make a choice to go either left or right. The right choice leads to another choice, the wrong choice kills you. You have to progressively remember the right route and make sure to take it like some utterly unfair and backwards game of Simon Says where you have to guess what Simon Says BEFORE SIMON SAYS IT!

Or switch the machine off, DO IT!

Avoid this crap by all means and if you see a diskette or tape of it, I'm officially issuing a TEP on it.