Ocean question

[Frozone212]

Why were so many of the games made by Ocean software for consoles such pieces of crap? Addams family for NES: Ocean software. Jurassic park for NES: Ocean software. Robocop for NES: OCEAN SOFTWARE!

 

I keep hearing good things about their PC ports so i hope someone can enlighten me as to how they managed to turn Golden PC games into Shitty NES ports.

Granted this is not just for NES games. Stupid idiotic programmers ruined my childhood. It made me hate the NES. To this day, i can't play Terminator 2 for nes without nearly getting a heart attack or robocop without getting angry. The Addams family on nes...I wish i could destroy every single cart ever made. I'd rather play ET for atari.

[Tanooki]

The irony of an ocean being a sea of garbage.  I think it came down to impatient American publishers and licensees wanting something out before the movie was out of the viewing period from seating or VHS releases.  So they'd give these usually unrealistic deadlines, cheapo budget, and a small team to make a miracle, and well they'd make something alright.

[Reaperman]

I haven't played most of those, for whatever reason, but I don't think NES Jurassic Park was really disliked.

It looked good, sounded incredible, and handled well. I recall it took some figuring out as far as where to go, but was decent fun.

The intro graphics and menu was especially nice.

 

wikipedia seems to confirm that its reception wasn't terrible and my memory isn't that far off (link)

Edited September 30, 2021 by Reaperman

[CapitanClassic]

3 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

Why were so many of the games made by Ocean software for consoles such pieces of crap? Addams family for NES: Ocean software. Jurassic park for NES: Ocean software. Robocop for NES: OCEAN SOFTWARE!

Did Ocean have an in-house software development group, or were they just a publisher? I suppose ultimately, you can blame the publisher for putting out bad games by developers they contract, as they could always hold off on publishing.

 

https://www.mobygames.com/company/ocean-of-america-inc_

 

[electricmastro]

Might as well list some of Ocean's best games they developed and/or published:

 

Super Turrican 2

 

Theme Park

 

Micro Machines

 

Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues

 

Worms

 

Mr. Do!

 

Mr. Nutz

 

Push-Over

 

Syndicate

 

Lemmings

Edited September 30, 2021 by electricmastro

[carlsson]

Generally turning movies into video games is difficult. It is true that Ocean took care of publishing most of those conversions, maybe because others didn't want to spend money on licensing of games with high risk of turning bad. The same is true on home computers, though when I browsed through Lemon64 a while ago, I found that the average scores on Ocean's movie conversions was quite higher - at least in the range of 6-7/10 - than I would have imagined. Perhaps people are forgiving, or we remember many of those games to be worse than they really were. Or maybe the console versions like NES and Genesis etc truly were even worse than the games for PC, C64 etc.

 

I believe it is relevant to keep apart original games or cloned games published by Ocean, from their movie licenses as those were a different chapter.

[Mikebloke]

Groups like Ocean and US Gold were on the cheaper end of development. They were responsible for a lot of ports, particularly on other microprocessor systems like the Amstrad. They probably took on jobs that other companies didn't take, or was the lowest successful bidder. They make up the majority of failed systems such as the GX4000 and C64GS. In some cases this went really well as the list by electromastro mentioned, and other cases they are absolutely poop. 

[CatPix]

2 hours ago, Mikebloke said:

They make up the majority of failed systems such as the GX4000 and C64GS.

Which mean zero thing because those system can run, respectively, CPC (classic) and CPCPlus code, and C64 code; so it basically cost them nothing to publish games on those systems save for the cost of cart support (which might have been paid partially by Amstrad/Commodore to attract early publishers).

 

Computer of the era and the NES had very different architectures and game building was different; so the developers were facing machines with vast differences * (less RAM, limited ROM space, but instant loading, hardware sprite support, scrolling, etc...) and facing public with different expectations (in general, computer games were much cheaper : a good game on most 8 bits would sell for 20 quids, average ones for 10, and cheap games as low as 5!, making the buyer more forgiving on the game quality).

Also, computer video games started in the early 80's, so many programmers were used to older style arcade games and games with a "few" screens. All famous 8 bits computers lived from the early 80's to 1990, meaning that unlike what happened with the NES, they had to "evolve" with newer and bigger game styles emerging on consoles while they were "stuck" on their platforms.

 

*And let's consider that the difference goes to the core : the most successful European computers (Ocean was British) were based on Z80 processors (Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Vtech Laser 200, Philips VG 5000), the NES is based on the 6502 (arguably present in the C64 and Atari 8bits, and the BBC micros... but in Europe those tented to have game ports by different developers!), both 8 bits CPU, but that has little in common in the way they work.

 

This meant that porting computer games for NES and/or employing game developers used to computer games to make NES game was a recipe for trouble.

See how many mediocre and confusing games Rare made (Beetlejuice...) before breaking through with BattleToads and later SNES games.

Or compare the PC version of Blues Brother by Titus and the NES one.

Edited September 30, 2021 by CatPix

[IntelliMission]

Ocean has a pretty epic catalog for the Amstrad CPC, including great and colorful conversions of Contra/Gryzor and Combat School/Boot Camp and one of the best games based in a movie ever, the side scrolling platformer Batman: https://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?page=staff

[carlsson]

I went through the Lemon64 library. I'm not sure if I caught all the movie conversions or if I mistakenly included some that are not but the list with average ratings looks like this:

 

The Addams Family (1992) - 6.0
Batman (1989) - 7.7
Batman: The Caped Crusader (1988) - 7.6
Cobra (1986) - 4.5
Highlander (1986) - 1.9
Hook (1992) - 6.8
Knight Rider (1986) - 2.2
Lethal Weapon (1992) - 6.3
Miami Vice (1986) - 4.7
Mutants (1987) - 7.6
The Neverending Story (1985) - 5.8
Navy Seals (1990) - 8.2
Platoon (1987) - 8.1
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1986) - 7.5
Rambo III (1988) - 7.0
Red Heat (1989) - 3.6
Renegade III: The Final Chapter (1989) - 5.7
Robocop (1989) - 6.4
Robocop 2 (1990) - 6.2
Robocop 3 (1992) - 6.1
The Simpsons: Bart vs the Space Mutants (1991) - 5.8
Sly Spy: Secret Agent (1989) - 7.5
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - 6.0
Top Gun (1987) - 3.7
Total Recall (1991) - 5.6
Transformers (1985) - 5.8
The Untouchables (1989) - 7.5
V - The Computer Game (1986) - 5.1

 

So out of those 28 titles, 6 games (21%) have scores below 5.0 of which 4 games (14%) even are below 4.0 on a scale 1-10 which probably is when a game is becoming poor. I understand that on the console side, numbers might look even worse, but one thing that strikes me is that with the exception of Red Heat, all the other games were published 1986-87 which was in the prime days of the C64. At the same time Platoon is the second highest rated game and that was also a 1987 game.

[carlsson]

1 hour ago, CatPix said:

This meant that porting computer games for NES and/or employing game developers used to computer games to make NES game was a recipe for trouble.

I wonder how generous Nintendo were with documentation and possibly even coding examples for the authorized development teams making games for other publishers (though of course cleared and sold through Nintendo). If most of the devs were on their own to figure out the system, various memory mappers that could be used etc, it would have affected the end result too. On the other hand Commodore probably had zero documents to offer as well, but the comparison is that the C64 had 5-10 years on the market during that time period while the NES had 2-6 years (a few years more if you consider Famicom, but most Western developers probably never made Famicom games anyway so they could not have any own first-party experience).

[CatPix]

True, I didn't even considered that aspect. AFAIK for computers, at least early ones, developers were on their own. They had access to typical documentation about the system but certainly no game dev tools. It was a thing for 16 bits computers at least (I recall French developeprs commenting on their rather poor experience in trying to acquire Atari Falcon computers to develop games on them) but I'm not sure it was considered for 8 bits platforms.

 

I know Nintendo had dev kits but I'm not sure those were common or easily available for smaller developers (most likely not, I recall reading that Nintendo was very stingy about providing them, unlike Sony that made and provided Net Yaroze kits like cakes); and let's not forget that before 1990 in Europe, Nintendo presence was with the help of Mattel and Bandai, which might not have any way to provide dev kits at all.

 

 

One thing to consider is also that game tie-in are usually rushed, money is spent toward acquiring licence rights (and it's not, as we can think about, a complete package, unless the movie is fully-in house stuff, like Disney or Warner Bros and their own studios might have - studios would have to acquire the movie name, the movie plot and the movie music; and since the 90's, the actor's appearance as well. Now you know why many cheap movie games feature watered down movie themes and a lookalike actor), and usually to cash on a movie release, you want the game to be out ASAP.

 

Nothing new in here, we can name the Atari 2600 Indiana Jones game that is build on the E.T game engine (or the opposite) to save money.

 

But that probably explain why some of those games failed to be good, as they would be rushed, made without even having seen the movie (remember, UK developers has testified that in order to port arcade games, they would go in bars and hog an arcade cab for hours taking pictures of the screen because the arcade developer wouldn't provide them anything! I don't see why film makers would be more generous and provide a script and photographies of the movies!) and without much time nor cash (which was spent to get the licence). And we're talking about a time where markets carried much less money, no less...

 

[carlsson]

A lot of good points. AFAIK, Indiana Jones came out first but HSW had spent a good amount of time on that one. From what I can tell, negotiations about E.T. didn't begin until the launch date of the movie, which may have been the norm in the early years to not speculate about producing games and other merch based on a movie until you knew if it would fly. Then again with Spielberg behind the movie, it had been quite a surprise if the movie had been a flop.

 

Now fast forward some 5 years, and I would presume both the movie and video games industries had found eachother much better and started to consider that games must be available around when the movie opens, not 6 months later. But it still probably was true that development times were tight as scripts, previews etc would not be available until the movie was cut. Also I think the software department even within 20th Century Fox or Lucasfilm was quite separate from the movie department. The later did Ballblazer and others, but the rights to Star Wars were already outsourced to Parker Bros etc. Not that the SW games are particularly awful or would've been better if those were developed within Lucas' company structure.

 

Mobygames has a category "Inspiration: Movies" which obviously covers more than the officially licensed games. I remember that the James Bond based ones from Parker Bros and Domark weren't that good in the beginning as well (Lemon64 scores: 5.0, 6.1, 6.8, 7.3 as the series progressed). Blade Runner (CRL 1985) is rated 5.0/10 on Lemon64 and 2.31/5 on Mobygames. Electric Dreams also published some sub-standard games like Back to the Future (3.7/10) and Big Trouble in Little China (2.4/10) but I don't know if that publisher ever carried over to the console side.

 

Edit: Aha, Electric Dreams was a subsidiary of Activision, specialized in computer games 1985-1990.

Edited September 30, 2021 by carlsson

[IntelliMission]

I accidentally copied a "responsive" URL in my previous message that displays a blank search. This is the one I wanted to paste with the Amstrad CPC releasese from Ocean Software. I'm not sure about other systems, but their games for the CPC were pretty solid and well programmed. Here's a more detailed list:

 

- Great 16 color arcade conversions: Gryzor/Contra, Green Beret/Rush 'N Attack, Combat School, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Afterburner, Secret Agent/Sly Spy, Chase HQ. (some of these games had the best graphics for the system at the time).

 

- Great, original games from Ocean Software: Head Over Heels, Matchday 2, Rambo III, The Great Escape, Target: Renegade, Batman (1989).

 

- Special arcade conversion with original content for 8-bit computers: Robocop (yeah, this version was actually a good game!).

 

Maybe NES users suffered from the problems mentioned by other users, but we Amstrad CPC users were quite happy with Ocean.

[+GoldLeader]

Quick comment,   first thought...

 

Insane difficulty aside,  I didn't mind Addams family games on NES or SNES...Some games have a hard to place quality (Usually the sentence starts with,  "If they'd just fix one thing"), that I call "Good-Average Games".   What I mean by that,  at least in my own head is that some average games on one system might be pretty good (or even Great) games when compared to other games on other consoles...Seems like Ocean is a poster child for this type of deal.  I can think of many bad games...But,  I don't remember Ocean having too many "Really Bad" games,  just not enough Stellar ones.

 

FWIW,  I Liked and enjoyed Cool World on the SNES.  It may have weird gameplay,  but some of the graphics,  and especially music were just excellent!  I'll always be fond of it...

[Frozone212]

On 9/30/2021 at 6:42 AM, IntelliMission said:

Ocean has a pretty epic catalog for the Amstrad CPC, including great and colorful conversions of Contra/Gryzor and Combat School/Boot Camp and one of the best games based in a movie ever, the side scrolling platformer Batman: https://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?page=staff

That's what infuriates me. How can a company so beloved in the UK churn out pure crap like Total recall for NES? 

[high voltage]

9 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

That's what infuriates me. How can a company so beloved in the UK churn out pure crap like Total recall for NES? 

Don't worry they did (mostly) crap for the 8 bit computers as well.

But, they had gorgeous girls at exhibitions, so that's in their favour.

Edited October 4, 2021 by high voltage

[carlsson]

I would say that Ocean mostly published a-ok games on the 8-bit computers. Some were stinkers, a few stood out as excellent but it is the bad ones that stand out over time.

[high voltage]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

I would say that Ocean mostly published a-ok games on the 8-bit computers. Some were stinkers, a few stood out as excellent but it is the bad ones that stand out over time.

Thats how I was gonna mention.

[carlsson]

A good number of the C64 titles are 6/10 or above. On the CPC as mentioned by IntelliMission, Ocean was seen as a quality publisher. Then again if they cooperated with lowest bidder on the development side, that could also explain quality dips. If there were fewer studios developing NES games and the better ones get better payment from other publishers, it means Ocean would have to work with the bottom of the barrel, compared to the C64 side where they both may have longer term business relations as well as the selection was bigger so easier to find a studio who knew what they were doing (probably paid less than their NES colleagues, but perhaps also easier to get decent results).

[roots.genoa]

On 9/30/2021 at 2:49 AM, Tanooki said:

The irony of an ocean being a sea of garbage

and US Gold being British crap! ?

 

(I kind of like some of Ocean and US Gold games, I was just joking ?)

 

I think one of the best ideas from Ocean was to ask Data East to create a good game based on RoboCop and port it rather than trying to create an original game themselves.

Edited October 4, 2021 by roots.genoa

[Tanooki]

Good point, I guess Ocean in some ways is like Hyperkin of this year.  So bad, they're like a broken analog clock, they can eventually be right.

[high voltage]

19 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

and US Gold being British crap! ?

 

(I kind of like some of Ocean and US Gold games, I was just joking ?)

 

I think one of the best ideas from Ocean was to ask Data East to create a good game based on RoboCop and port it rather than trying to create an original game themselves.

US Gold imported American games to the UK, that was a good move anyway

[roots.genoa]

Yeah, I know that's why they called US Gold - even though they may be more (in)famous for their Capcom ports. ?

(at least they had a redeeming quality on the Atari ST: you could edit the sprite sheets with Degas Elite for instance)