Way before Action 52, there was this "fantastic" collection.
Oh man! Giantbomb has finally given this not-so-fantastic "game" a page. Now I can finally tear this thing to shreds. I remember a sort of parody of this, a joke game called Don't Buy This, was released on the ZX Spectrum in the mid-to-late 1980s, though it only had five games in comparison to this and Action 52. As far as I know, quantity over quality is never, ever a good idea ever! So, anyways, this is Cassette 50, a 1983 package game consisting of 50 minigames, as its name implies, on one single cassette, released only for systems that can be hard and overpriced nowadays to obtain such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. It was advertised to hell and back, and didn't meet its intended expectations. The games vary depending on which version the player owns. In this case, this means that not all 50 games are available on a given system (for instance, the Acorn Electron version cuts two of the games out for no given reason (specifically Exchange and The Force), reducing the number to 48 and making the title misleading). The version I had for the C64 is in fact no better, as I have noted that a lot of the time the games crash for reasons that I probably don't need to explain. Oh, and to rub salt in the wound, the ZX Spectrum version adds in new games that replaced some of the old ones! Speaking of, if you have the slightest interest in playing Cassette 50, the Spectrum version is in fact very low-priced on eBay. The fact that the game was written in then-ubiquitous BASIC (we still use BASIC commonly today, of course) meant that the game's visuals would be occasionally hard to decipher, and is of generally poor quality, which is what this game is infamous for. Additionally, the majority of the games are inane and unplayable due to fidgety controls, or poor command inputs. And, as I said earlier, they can crash constantly. Nowadays, it inspired the ever-present "crap game" competitions where players struggle to finish a bad game to the end. It also led to a (now defunct) website reviewing bad games called Somewhere Over Cassette 50 to be launched. Like Action 52, give this a miss when it ran off. Stick to playing Robotron rather.