Shit Game Time: Green Beret + Cassette 50

[ivarf]

I played Green Beret back in the day and enjoyed it a lot. It seems there were many of us that did that

[Puresox]

Yeah I enjoyed it tbh , but when looking from the C64 or Speccy version , it is going to be ridiculed unfortunately

[the KING]

I loved playing Green Beret 

[Cholo]

Pretty poor attempt to review Green Beret. I guess he never had a amstrad & heard everyone non-amstrad droning on how bad the amstrad version scroll was. Its true its not as easy as the really drap, cut down, slow scrooling c64 & spec versions that both felt very generic and you can just rush thru them in less than 10 mins with little efford.


The difficulty is probably what makes the amstrad version so disliked by other 8bitters even though they should know better being 8bitters themselves. I recall getting the game back then and being really impressed with the many multicoloured enemies & their variation .. aka some of them chase you, some dont,  some you can jump & some you can duck etc. Easily played it for weeks untill i beat it and it felt like i actually done something. Felt the game was really faithfull to the arcade as well.


Then i got online 20 years later and it seem everyone was just blindly hating on the amstrad flip screen scrooling and Green Beret being flagged as the worst one. The amstrad version do have slightly "heavy" controls so perhaps that is it.


Anyways, the video is quite clearly just a "first impressions" video mixed with a lot of "prior opinon adoptation" that is sadly trending on youtube with modern games.

[sigh]

Pretty poor attempt to review Green Beret. I guess he never had a amstrad & heard everyone non-amstrad droning on how bad the amstrad version scroll was. Its true its not as easy as the really drap, cut down, slow scrooling c64 & spec versions that both felt very generic and you can just rush thru them in less than 10 mins with little efford.


The difficulty is probably what makes the amstrad version so disliked by other 8bitters even though they should know better being 8bitters themselves. I recall getting the game back then and being really impressed with the many multicoloured enemies & their variation .. aka some of them chase you, some dont,  some you can jump & some you can duck etc. Easily played it for weeks untill i beat it and it felt like i actually done something. Felt the game was really faithfull to the arcade as well.


Then i got online 20 years later and it seem everyone was just blindly hating on the amstrad flip screen scrooling and Green Beret being flagged as the worst one. The amstrad version do have slightly "heavy" controls so perhaps that is it.


Anyways, the video is quite clearly just a "first impressions" video mixed with a lot of "prior opinon adoptation" that is sadly trending on youtube with modern games.

I didn't feel it was very faithful to arcade at all even when I played both the arcade and cpc version back then as it plays very different when you compare them to each other in terms of hit detection, scrolling and character speed.

In terms of speed in completing the game, with the cpc version your able to get 3 characters on screen at once (including your own), you can run through the whole level as those 3 characters chase you. No other characters will come on screen during that time, so your able to complete it quite quickly compared to the other versions from what I remember.

[MacDeath]

I always feel bad when someone tells green berets was "bad"... it wasn't that bad and quite enjoyable when you are 8 years old.

[Shaun M. Neary]

I always feel bad when someone tells green berets was "bad"... it wasn't that bad and quite enjoyable when you are 8 years old.

8?! I was still enjoying it at 12 and 13! 

[||C|-|E||]

The 8 years old me had a very bad impression of it  However, the 8 years old me was a terrible player (pretty much as nowadays) and he never had the patience to go on with the game. I was dying time after time, I got very frustrated and I never loaded the tape again, hehe.Luckily, it was a gift. I remember that one of the things I disliked was the pace of the game, I usually do not mind if something is very difficult but I have all the time in the world to make my decisions and move the character, however with this one you had to be very fast and accurate, just the opposite of me 

[Puresox]

If it is a game in its own right , it is enjoyable . If you were to buy it in the expectations of playing something like the arcade game or after having played your mates Spectrum version or commodore version you would not be as impressed.Its playable and enjoyable and if you lived a life that was sheltered from C64 /Spectrum and Arcade machines you could easily feel that its alright . Probably as an 8year old it would be preferable to the tougher C64 and Speccy versions which were tough esp Speccy version .

[dodogildo]

Amstrad Green Beret does most certainly not deserve to be featured as a Shit Game vid. Especially being an early conversion  and considering there are scores of real bad Amstrad titles out there..

[ivarf]

Amstrad Green Beret does most certainly not deserve to be featured as a Shit Game vid. Especially being an early conversion  and considering there are scores of real bad Amstrad titles out there..

He has PC Outrun on the same list of shit games 

[Gryzor]

I was really enjoying Green Beret as a child on my mate's MSX - even now looking at those screens with the missiles and the mines and all brings back memories...


When I played it on the CPC many years later I remember thinking, wtf, was it really THAT bad?


Yes, reading other people's comments I have to admit it's not really a shitty title - problematic and seriously lacking, yes, but not that bad as the video makes it out to be. But still a far, far cry from my experience on the MSX... (I should revisit that one)

[chinnyhill10]

Amstrad Green Beret does most certainly not deserve to be featured as a Shit Game vid. Especially being an early conversion  and considering there are scores of real bad Amstrad titles out there..

Yes, it's hard and flawed but I enjoyed playing it on my CPC.  It's hardly "shit".

[Shaun M. Neary]

If it is a game in its own right , it is enjoyable . If you were to buy it in the expectations of playing something like the arcade game or after having played your mates Spectrum version or commodore version you would not be as impressed.Its playable and enjoyable and if you lived a life that was sheltered from C64 /Spectrum and Arcade machines you could easily feel that its alright . Probably as an 8year old it would be preferable to the tougher C64 and Speccy versions which were tough esp Speccy version .

And even at that it's subjective.
I enjoyed both the CPC *and* the arcade versions. The problem with a lot of youtubers is they're playing games and judging by modern standards. Very different story compared to playing up to two or three years after they were released, really.
And that was pretty much the version you had. You didn't have emulators to compare, or multiple systems. You played the game and you played it through in most cases. Now you have armchair "retro experts" (some of which weren't even born when the game was released!), labelling a game as shit after playing it once or twice.


It's like the Nirvana superfan who was born in 1997.

[chinnyhill10]

And that was pretty much the version you had. You didn't have emulators to compare,

I was quite lucky and really had a good spread of systems to try via my friends. I also managed to get a Spectrum and C64 so I had all three main 8 bits while they were on the high street.

[ukmarkh]

Why is it not as good as the arcade?

Maybe this is why:

I am sure that for some arcade conversions the companies didn't have the arcade machines near them. Sometimes they had to visit
the local arcade and put money in and play it to find out.

They didn't have a dump of the graphics, sound or code and no description of how the game worked, it's gameplay, it's secrets etc
and all they could go from is playing it at the local arcade and possibly recording videos of them playing it. This is in the early days
of VHS too.

Unfortunately that means they don't know about the secrets and they probably miss quite a lot of things in the game play too.
So potentially they loose quite a lot that makes it so fun compared to the arcade.

I believe later they had access to the machines in their offices, and some did dump the data from the roms to get more
accurate sprites and level layout. With it being in the office they had more chance to find things when they played it, it
was often set to free play and still they probably missed some secrets etc because they were not told how to trigger or activate them or were not good enough
to play and find them.

Also Green Beret is an early game in 1986 so maybe the programmers were not quite so good with the CPC then.

The basics are all there, the programmers captured the arcade perfectly. But all their efforts were massively undone with the crap scrolling and lousy collision hit detection. Fix this, and it's one of the best action games on the CPC.

[ukmarkh]

And even at that it's subjective.
I enjoyed both the CPC *and* the arcade versions. The problem with a lot of youtubers is they're playing games and judging by modern standards.

Nope! I thought it was crap back in the day too.

[sigh]

And even at that it's subjective.
I enjoyed both the CPC *and* the arcade versions. The problem with a lot of youtubers is they're playing games and judging by modern standards.

Nope! I thought it was crap back in the day too.

It was also slated by reviewers back in the day too. Many people thought that the CPC was no good at scrolling (or games) because of it from what I remember.
(Xyphoe gives a lot more details on this on his analysis.)

[Shaun M. Neary]

The basics are all there, the programmers captured the arcade perfectly. But all their efforts were massively undone with the crap scrolling and lousy collision hit detection. Fix this, and it's one of the best action games on the CPC.

The scrolling didn't bother me as much, scrolling wasn't a major thing in 86, but that hit detection being so off at times did make me want to throw my CPC to that floor a few times, I won't disagree with you there.

[ZEUSDAZ]

Pretty poor attempt to review Green Beret. I guess he never had a amstrad & heard everyone non-amstrad droning on how bad the amstrad version scroll was. Its true its not as easy as the really drap, cut down, slow scrooling c64 & spec versions that both felt very generic and you can just rush thru them in less than 10 mins with little efford.


The difficulty is probably what makes the amstrad version so disliked by other 8bitters even though they should know better being 8bitters themselves. I recall getting the game back then and being really impressed with the many multicoloured enemies & their variation .. aka some of them chase you, some dont,  some you can jump & some you can duck etc. Easily played it for weeks untill i beat it and it felt like i actually done something. Felt the game was really faithfull to the arcade as well.


Then i got online 20 years later and it seem everyone was just blindly hating on the amstrad flip screen scrooling and Green Beret being flagged as the worst one. The amstrad version do have slightly "heavy" controls so perhaps that is it.


Anyways, the video is quite clearly just a "first impressions" video mixed with a lot of "prior opinon adoptation" that is sadly trending on youtube with modern games.

I was a teen in the mid 80's so was gaming at the perfect time of the golden 8 & 16bit machines owning all 3 main 8-bit machines, spectrum 128k+1 (still own to this day), C64c (still own to this day) and a cpc464 which sadly for Amstrad was known in the U.K as "the third machine" or "the runt of the litter" (not that I'm slagging it or gave it those nick names), not many kids wanted to own one back then, I only own one now for either the challenge vids myself and Novabug are doing or Shit Game Time vids which are requested by viewers for me to do,...so no it is NOT a first impression review of Green Beret. Not all of them make it into that section as some of them are not shit, for instance someone asked me to SGT Project-X on the Amiga, I refused, it has It's flaws but It's not shit, Tempest on the Amstrad was also a very good conversion but I was asked to put it into the SGT,...again I refused, Green Beret on the other hand IS a poor conversion even for cpc464 standards especially for an Ocean / Imagine game, very unplayable with terrible side scrolling unlike It's other 8-bit counterparts which are far superior, you can see from comments on the Youtube SGT of this that the general feelings towards the game is negative. I also own an Amiga A500 which is my original since 1989,...my most beloved machine along with 128k+1 spectrum but I still include some of their games into the SGT section to prove I am not bias towards any machine, if a game has been requested for me to do a SGT review I will judge it myself before I decide to put it in there, in this case Green Beret deserves that place. Usually It's those who cannot see out of the box because in their eyes their favourite machine never delivers bad games and if it does the owners of those machines will heavily defend it no matter how bad that game really is, I've been playing games for over 30yrs and I know what are classics, failures, good games, bad games and lost opportunities, Green Beret is an awful conversion from such an impressive software house, Rastan on the Amstrad is also the worst conversion ever officially done with immense jerky scrolling, bland backgrounds and no music in the game and will feature on the next SGT video in a weeks time. Outrun on the Amstrad was pretty bad on all formats but again the Amstrad won the prize for the worst which is why I also placed that into the SGT section and yet an Amstrad fanboy reviewed it himself on youtube way before I reviewed it and just kept telling himself it was pretty good, yet in reality it is total garbage at 2fps animation, he just couldn't wake up and smell the roses to the reality that it was in fact a crud conversion which is what I said in the SGT vid of Outrun Amstrad. The SGT section is non bias, all formats feature in it not just Amstrad so don't feel I'm aiming at one machine, I own many of them but they all have bad games and good games, Green Beret deserved the position this time round. If you haven't yet, my advice is to start heavily playing a load of games on the C64 and Spectrum 128k of the same games, it wont be long before you also start seeing the slow jerky scrolling issues of those certain Amstrad conversions. Just don't take anything personal, I'm here to review, play and have fun, not to create enemies.
Just loosen up and accept shit games appear on all systems (including your beloved cpc) and if they are requested for me to do I will look at them first and then decide if they will feature on a SGT video no matter what system that game is on.

[Carnivius]

I didn't enjoy Green Beret on any format.  I got the CPC one in the superb value Dixons Top 20 pack for 99p and it was one of my least liked games on the whole thing and I thought eh maybe it's just a bad conversion and it probably is but after playing it on other formats a long time ago ago including the arcade version I just find it a poor game in general.

[ZEUSDAZ]

I didn't enjoy Green Beret on any format.  I got the CPC one in the superb value Dixons Top 20 pack for 99p and it was one of my least liked games on the whole thing and I thought eh maybe it's just a bad conversion and it probably is but after playing it on other formats a long time ago ago including the arcade version I just find it a poor game in general.

Well I'm glad you can see for what that conversion really is weather It's comparing it back in the day or to today's way of thinking,...BAD GAME.
It just amazes me that certain fanboys of certain machines cannot accept when a game on their beloved machine is garbage and just defend it to the end (shaking my head in sadness and disbelief).
It is a poor conversion,...fact.


Hope you pop by the Zeusdaz Youtube channel :-D

[Dr Tiger Ninestein]

not many kids wanted to own one back then, I only own one now for either the challenge vids myself and Novabug are doing or Shit Game Time vids which are requested by viewers for me to do

There we have it, a member of an amstrad forum that only owns one to make 'shit game time vids'.


I wonder why he even bothers to post here?...... Oh yeah, to get hits on his YouTube channel

[ZEUSDAZ]

There we have it, a member of an amstrad forum that only owns one to make 'shit game time vids'.


I wonder why he even bothers to post here?...... Oh yeah, to get hits on his YouTube channel

Dude, grow up, jeez, getting more hits only matters if money is involved via monitizing,...I don't monitize my vids, so your second statement is flawed.
Second,...blame those Amstrad fans that ask me via either the request video or through the Amstrad forums to SGT those certain Amstrad games, I don't simply pick one out of the blue and slate it, they choose it, I look at it and then decide if I sgt it or not,...do your revision before saying anything!, god forbid if you were called to do Jury duty,...the poor bugger would be found guilty within seconds,....REVISION FIRST!
Yes a reality check for you,...It's mainly Amstrad fans that ask me to do the SGT vids for Amstrad games!!!,...so complain to them.

[arnoldemu]

14f1 - appears to be collision code for bullets
143a - is collision code with enemies, more specifically with knifing them I think
2451 - is collision with player character.
539 - update enemy movements
af3 - I think this is sound related
216b - input relatedf.

EDIT: So what exactly is wrong with the collision?

EDIT: "Scrolling" is using LDIR to move the entire screen to the side. It's not even software scrolling like on later ocean/imagine games. The action stops while it scrolls too. Can the CPC do scrolling? Yes look at later ocean games.
Maybe it was somebody's first game?