I blogged earlier about buying an Evercade and some of the experiences I've had with that system, mostly playing 80s/90s console games and some cool obscure arcade titles. Blaze Entertainment, which makes the Evercade, is a British company so it was perhaps inevitable that they'd start dipping their toes into releasing emulated Commodore 64 and Amiga games, because unlike in the US and Japan the British gaming scene was dominated by micro computers, many primarily gaming machines.

Now despite being an American I was actually a pretty big PC gamer in the 80s and 90s. I had an NES and a SNES but my dad liked the PC more and I ended up playing more PC games than console games during that period. PC gaming used to be pretty rough. In fact the Apple and Mac environments were considered better for games back then. You had your flight sims and your Sierra games and your RPGs, but action games were very iffy and tended to control much worse than their console counterparts. Commander Keen, considered a good PC platformer, came out AFTER Super Mario Bros. 3 and is so much worse than that game that it's hard to believe Mario 3 isn't a full decade newer.

This all changed in the late 80s and early 90s with upgraded graphics cards and games like Sim City, Civilization, and, above all, Doom, which gave PC gaming its own flavor and in many ways were better than their console counterparts. By the mid 90s PC games still aren't as good as their console counterparts in certain genres but are much better graphically and in some ways more advanced.

Over in Britain, however, the micro computers are holding on and the games released for those all feel like 80s pc action games, which is to say off brand versions of actual good games. There's a game called Qwak that was released in 1989 and again in 1993 (1993!), and it's a single screen platformer game in the mode of Snow Bros. though not as good looking and while at first it seems okay it has all kinds of weird aspects (like a hidden timer that will start dropping spiked balls on you out of nowhere) that make it a frustrating and baffling experience when you start. If you had tried to sell this in the US in 1993 people would have litearlly laughed in your face. Then there's Body Blows, a 1993(!!!!!!!!!!!) 'fighting game' where all moves are executed with 1 button including blocking, which requires pressing backwards and your attack key. This would have been bad during the era of Street Fighter 1 but in a post Street Fighter II world it feels like a horrible prank.

And yes, every era and area has bad games, but then you look at how these games were received in Britain and it's like looking into bzizaro world. Wikipedia shows that Body Blows got a bunch of 90% ratings from magazines, was proclaimed "a true corker" and even better than Street Fighter II, which is only true if you're trying to play Street Fighter II with a one button control pad.

You watch British gamers on Youtube going through their old favorites and they're like "This four color game I played in 1992 is 20 minutes long and has 5 screens. It's amazing! Better than Streets of Rage 2!" Or my favorite was when a guy literally said "This game is great. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do or how to advance but it's fantastic and I want to keep playing." It's literally like watching someone who grew up in an entirely different world and doesn't know what good video games are supposed to be like.

Now I'm not going to pretend that there were NO good British games in the 80s or 90s. Lemmings is a classic. Another World (whcih is French but comes from a similar milieu) looked truly amazing. Cannon Fodder is fun. Obviously once Rare abandoned the microcomputers where they got their start and moved over to the NES and SNES they made some truly spectacular titles (though they didn't really become masters until the N64.) There were some games that are legitimately good by global standards that came out of that scene.

But then you look at something like Body Blows or Stormlord (a 1989 game that is worse than any game you've ever played in your life) and see the glowing reviews and the entire British gaming scene of the period comes off as some kind of weird practical joke. I do understand that a lot of these games were much cheaper than their Japanese or American counterparts, but that doesn't matter. Stormlord is worse than having no video games at all. 93% from Your Sinclair. A "Crash Smash" from CRASH magazine with a "buy it" recommendation.

You've got to be taking the piss.

I'm not convinced anyone writing for those magazines were actual adults.

My assumption here is that the media/reviewers mentioned here are the same type of people Gerstmann used to talk about from the 90s who would make glowing reviews of absolute garbage games because they didn't want the gravy train of free games and their newfound job of reviewing games to stop.

@ben_h: Payola, either direct or implicit, is generally a good bet but I've seen real live British people in the 2020s proclaim some of these games good and it's clear they're on some medical grade nostalgia.

"Oh the Dizzy series is all great!"

"Sure it is Nigel, sure it is."

I've played some early to mid 90's British games over the last year, and they're all bad. Even well regarded stuff like Lemmings was never actually good. The trend of garbage British games would have begun in the 80's, and likely were due to a strange confluence of early PC adoption, ease of importing small numbers of American games, lack of a strong arcade culture, diverging computing standards with America, small internal market, and late adoption of console gaming. It seems like the early concepts of computer games got across the pond, but the big developments in action gameplay didn't, so a parallel culture of PC game design sprang up that was largely disconnected from the rest of the world.

The connections that were established across the Pacific by console and arcade manufacturers provided enough back and forth for correct game design standards to begin forming. Since the Brits wouldn't get involved in that until the Mega Drive showed up, they developed a lot of bad design habits which took the entirety of the 90's to get beat out of them. Even then, there was an enormous bloodletting in the 15 year period from roughly 1992 to 2007. The large majority of British development teams didn't survive integration with the global market, and the rest consolidated or were sold off. I mean, look at the fate of Psygnosis. These days, you only have Rockstar, Rare, Media Molecule, and some random indies left on that island.

Like, if you look at something like German game development from the previous 10 or 15 years, there's some wacky shit coming out of there. Small time German developers got started in German speaking markets, which is small compared to the international scale of the video game business. By the time a German studio is able to localize their games to English and get it over to the States, the damn things are wacky and busted. There's more nuance to the dynamics within insular game markets that I can't get into, but that's probably the culprit for old British games being hot garbage.

I thought nearly everything I played on the school microcomputers was bad. My teacher was like "It's important history though, right?" and to this day I'm certain he really wanted me to find something to like about these things since he clearly liked them a lot.

I had better games available on my Gameboy.

The simpler those games were, the better. IK+ and ... erm ... Chuckie Egg? Oh, Footballer of the Year was good.

There. That's three. I want to like Jetpac more.

As for the media, I'm skimming through an old issue of Amstrad Action and there's just not a lot to the reviews. I'm reading this 3% rated review of Count Duckula 2 (because why not) and the first half of it is a jokey preamble. Tell my why Count Duckula 2 is shit, please. Don't give me this courtroom skit because you needed to get your word count up.

I suspect it's not just the payola but this desperation from the writer to make something of themselves. Anything other than where they're at.