Ocean : Did they make good games?

Pigman II

.... or were they just a bunch of licence/tie-in chancers?

What do you think?

LoGiE

Ocean will be remembered for all time as one of the best publishers on the c64 and Amiga. When it came to movie licence games they excelled! Thats probably why people kept going back to them:)
- Batman The movie.
- Robocop 1-3.
- Platoon
- Short circuit
- Bart simpson Vs the space mutants
- T2
- Total Recall
- The Untouchables


And loads more.Some of the best games ever released on the c64 .They did loads of arcade conversions for Taito and midway and a few others to boot. In short they ruled:D

Pigman II

Are you sure rose tinted glasses aren't swaying your opinion of ocean Logie?

I agree they made a lot of good games and conversions in their time:

addams fmaily
beach volleyball
batman games
cabal
parallax
midnight resistance
rainbow islands
rambo 2
robocop 1
run the gauntlet
toki
untouchables
wizball

but they also made a lot of junk that was equally heavily pushed :

adidas football championship
chase hq
firefly
match day 2
miami vice
great escape
narc
op wolf
rambo 3
robobcop 2 *
simpsons bart v space mutants (< - don't agree with you on that game!)
terminator 2 *
top gun
total recall
transformers
v
vindicator
viz (this game is SOOOOO bad it has to be played to be believed!)
wwf wrestling

* = deserve particular naming and shaming as I seem to be remember them cost twice the average game price due being part of the infamous and short-lived 'cartridge rebirth' line.

KdjaCL

Like any games company really, some hits and some misses but on C64 they had a lot of games.
I loved Chase HQ tho.

kdjac

bugs

Ocean had quite a good precentage of good games to bad ones really in comparison with other development houses. They really only started dropping quality in the days of the snes.
The only company that really has a huge percentage of popular games is namco, and even then, they have some terrible stinkers, but they have a knack of hiding these games fairly well

From way back i remember that seeing the nice big OCEAN logo was always a pretty good chance that it was a good game, much alike seeing the THQ logo meant that you had just gotten something that was definetly going to suck

TinCool

You can't fault EPYX for making crap games. All the games I owned from them were brilliant. Impossible Mission, Pitstop II, Summer Games I + II, California Games, World Games (I always loved those "<insert game type here> games" games that EPYX were famous for).

Other great publishers on the C64 which must be mentioned in no particular order: elite, firebird, imagine, activision, US Gold, Software Projects (ah yes, Jet Set Willy).

God, I'm such a nostalgia bum. Old Skool

LoGiE

chase hq
miami vice
op wolf (A damn good conversion of the arcade)
rambo 3
robobcop 2 (Cartridge version was good!)
terminator 2
total recall
transformers

:eek: The games above are classics!
I think it all went wrong for ocean when they released "Nutz" on the snes. Rainbow Arts and codemasters where pretty good also

Ronan|Raven

I wont have a bad word said about Operation Wolf

Sarky

Ocean Joint published Worms with Team 17.
Worms is the best game in at least this universe, and possibly several others.
QED.

DiscoStu

dont forget the classic new zealand story

LoGiE

They also released Rainbow Islands, Pang and *Drum roll* Wizkid! I'd forgotten Ocean published TNZS:) had it on the C64 and the Amiga. Of course now I play the arcade original:)

LoGiE

I'd like to add Lethal weapon the list of good games from Ocean. Was playing it today and reminds me of The adams family game. Same graphics or something.

bugs

I woulda said that lethal weapon was one of the games that was the end of them really.....who knew ppl actually liked that

LoGiE

No I seriously think its a good game! I think an unsucessful move to the PC was a big problem (Games like Inferno) but in the end they where just bought out by a "Super publisher"

hamster

Let's not forget about Ocean's Wizball either.... look at this worship site. http://marticus.midnightrealm.org/wiz/