Licensed Grocers

[redballoon]

Are there any licenses - film, television or arcade - that Ocean went for, never got and watched in horror/delight as the game was snapped up by another software house and the game turned out to be rubbish/really good?

[Mark Jones Junior]

I remember that in 1984 Ocean were advertising an 'Airwolf' game the same time as Elite were. Elite's came out and Ocean's advert and game was never heard of again. I presume both were bidding for the same licence and Elite got it.

Ocean's ad can be found here:
www.ozkan.co.uk/gtw/Pages/Scan_Airwolf.htm

[Gary]

There was an article in USA Today about a forthcoming TV show which sounded great. I gave a strong recommendation to the head of Ocean US, but he had never heard of it and didn't like the sound of it.

A few months later the first show was broadcast and was an instant hit. By then however, Acclaim had already licensed it for all formats. We had to make do with the 'scraps' by sub-licensing the home computer formats from Acclaim.

Oh yes, the title was some obscure cartoon called 'The Simpsons'.

[Swainy]

What happened with Double Dragon? I always assumed that Ocean/Imagine would pick up the license after the success they had with Renegade.

Then there was the C64 cartridge version of Double Dragon by Ocean that was never released.

[fgasking]

Well, it was *kinda* released... but ok, thats debatable

Did Airwolf get started by anyone at Ocean?... i'm really curious to know.

[AndyC]

Swainy said:

Then there was the C64 cartridge version of Double Dragon by Ocean that was never released.

There was a GX4000 version advertised around the same time. Was that also an Ocean version? I've never seen the actual cart (if it existed), the closest is a screenshot on a french GX4000 advert - which looks suspiciously like an Amiga/ST one (the Batman pic next to it certainly is from a 16-bit version)

[Swainy]

There were two Amstrad versions released by Melbourne House, the one on the left was the 464 version and the one on the right was the 6128 version.



Both were coded by Binary Design.

[Paulie]

I remember remastering Double Dragon on the C64 for some compilation and in the instructions there was an apology from the developers about the horrendous flickering sprites... I thought I'd seen it all!

[Brian]

BDL also did a HORRENDOUS c64 conversion.

So bad it was, that they icluded an "apology sheet" explaining why the characters had a gap between their waists and their bodies...

They attributed it to "pushing the c64 to it's limit" as opposed to "our programmer didn't have the faintest fucking idea"

[Brian]

hahaha! beat me to it by seconds!!

[tssk]

That apology in full according to c64.mobygames.com/game/trivia/gameId,1839/

"A NOTE FROM THE PROGRAMMERS:
Dear Game Player,
During our Herculean task of cramming as many as possible of the multitude of animation and graphic elements that make up the arcade game into the Commodore 64, we were faced with a problem. To get both one- and two-player options, and to achieve the authentic feel of two-player simultaneous action, simply took more memory than we had available.
But we knew how dissapointed you would be if the game didn't have the same two-player mode as the arcade game you know and love. So we came up with a memory-saving solution. We implemented sprite stacking techniques to create the animated characters (using two smaller sprites instead of one larger one to create each figure).
The resulting small gap you may notice in the characters at waist level, is the compromise that the architecture of the C64 forced us to make.
This should not impair your enjoyment of the game in any way.
The Programmers"

Dismal, especially with Target Renegade showing the lazy fools up.

[Brian]

Tranlsation:

A NOTE FROM THE PROGRAMMERS:

Dear Sucker.

During our half assed pseudo effort of wasting as much time as possible trying to get a barely functional piece of crap to resemble a game, we were faced with a problem.

Our programmer simply could not grasp the basic concept of sprite multiplexing and overlay techiques.

So we sat at the pub wracking our brains as to an excuse to get the game out of the door and into the hands of easily suckered gamers.

So we came up with this complete fabrication.

We copied a technique pioneered at ocean to create the animated characters overlaying mono sprites over expanded ones..

The resulting small gap never appeared on any of ocean's nor thalamus' titles that utilised this novel trick... to be honest we haven't the faintest f*cking clue how to fix this hideous bug that would have been met with howls of derisive laughter at the hands of John Meegan.

Hopefully this note should be a good enough excuse to prevent returns, and possibly even dupe a few reviewers that pretend they know tech stuff... actually sod that.. we won't even get it reviewed..

Screw you! We've got your money!!

The programmers

[Gary]

Wasted as an artist, Brian.


You should have been in PR!!!!

[Paulie]

LOL!

'Ere I've just remembered a better one - one of the 64 compilations had a truly dire conversion of Karnov on it (it was a 1:1 port of the spectrum complete with attribute clash).

We started getting lots of returns as it bombed out after a few levels, so I was shatting myself "uh-oh I missed something in the original's protection" etc etc.

Nope, the original product did the same - there was no level data past (say) level 5, maybe they assumed no one would get that far! The code just tried to load the next level and BANG!

Pure class!

[Brian]

Gary said:

Wasted as an artist, Brian.


You should have been in PR!!!!

Yeah me and simon are quitting as artists and getting into PR... we plan to infiltrate EA and destroy them from the inside before it's too late.