So I thought I'd start a new one ...
I'll start the ball rolling by saying I was particularly disappointed with the ending for Barbarian, after the time I put in to beat it. The game's ridiculously repetitive and virtually impossible to complete. Beating the practice mode results in a simple message telling you to go on to the Fight to the Death version. When you finally beat all ten warriors in that version, you find there's no big fight with Drax which I'm pretty sure was implemented in the Spectrum version, and presumably the others by Palace. Instead you get a similar short message from Drax saying essentially you can take the princess ... chicken! I felt somewhat short-changed ...
Like Barbarian, Ravenskull is similarly disappointing - giving you just a basic screen with a four word congratulation message. You don't even get that if you manage a full 100% score because you have to die to achieve it, and it also loops around to display just 00%! I didn't feel quite so cheated, tho - at least you came away with a sense of completion.
The lack of endings in Model B Elite and Chuckie Egg I can forgive as they're essentially designed to just keep going (though a message from someone (Galactic Navy?) when you reach Elite might've been nice!).
Despite completing it many times, I can't actually remember the ending for Repton, though I think it just tells you to go through and do it without passwords if you want the competition code. I can't remember if I ever attempted that or not ...
Peter Scott's Pandemonium was another disappointment - again, because of effort put in. The point of the game is to collect all pieces of "the core". I seem to recall finally managing to do it ... and ... nothing. No screen. Game doesn't stop. You just carry on playing until you lose enough energy to die ... unless there was somewhere you were supposed to go, and I'm fairly certain I wandered about quite a bit. Gah.
I did complete Bug Eyes II as it was quite easy if I remember rightly, but I can't remember much about the ending. I seem to think I was expecting it to be good as the quality of the graphics through the game were pretty good, but then being somewhat disappointed (again). I could be wrong about that, though - really can't remember it at all! Ditto for Escape From Moonbase Alpha (tho the graphics for that weren't good - I completed it by hacking the BASIC program, I think!).
Tynesoft's Beverly Hills Cop was stupidly easy. I got to the last level on my first ever go, and after a couple of trial and error attempts at wandering around the 3D maze, I finished it on my third shot at it. The game was fun to play, albeit too easy, but the ending was also just a short text note, I think.
Maybe I was (am) expecting too much, given the resources of the machine, but I always thought that it wouldn't have been that hard to load a nice end screen from disc ...
Does anyone, then, know of any beeb games which actually had a decent ending? Short of the obvious text adventures and educational programs like Granny's Garden and L - A Mathemagical Adventure which tended to finish up the story with appropriate text and/or graphics?
Sam.
I never got that far with Pipeline ... my walkthrough's for Ravenskull!