Tiertex Design Studios

"Tiertex...I knew you'd come eventually. This list would be incomplete without one of the UK software world's most notorious hack companies, infamous for the terrible games they made for the likes of U.S. Gold back in the 80s and 90s. At least they weren't purposefully making garbage like Canvas were, I suppose, but my lord, their games were shite."

- Kim Justice

Tiertex Design Studios (commonly referred to as Tiertex) was a British game developer founded in 1986. They were most well known for their partnership with U.S. Gold and mh:awesomegames:THQ due to this partnership, many of their games were arcade ports for the British home computers, after the last game, Carrera Power Slide, moved to other business.

The company used to focused on embedded designs, developing USB development boards and USB LED matrix displays, a move founder Campbell explains was made to return to the company's roots as programmers of 8-bit games. However, the current viability of the company is unknown since the website is unavailable as of July 2017.

Why Their Games Were Designed Poorly

 * 1) Most of their arcade ports are vastly below the standards of the systems they were on, and are often inferior to other games on the computers at the time.
 * 2) Most of their original games, such as Human Killing Machine, are even worse than their arcade ports, which implies that they themselves don't know how to properly develop, or even code games.
 * 3) Their games have low framerates, as their games ran 10 fps to 20 fps instead of 60 fps, which can be compared to Micronics' games, which their games ran 10 fps to 30 fps insted of 60 fps.
 * 4) Weird borders that were meant to simulate an arcade cabinet, but just ended up looking awkward.
 * 5) Cut out mechanics that would have been easy to implement. For example, in their ports of Thunder Blade (no counting the C64 version, which was developed by a different company), you can't increase or decrease your altitude while firing in the 3rd person segments.
 * 6) They often made home computer exclusive sequels to the games they ported, such as Strider II. These are often known as the "black sheep" of their respective franchises.
 * 7) Worst yet, some of their ports went to the Sega Genesis, such as the previously mentioned Strider II and Turbo Outrun, which they are still bad.
 * 8) Most of their games have terrible music, one of the example is their Bob The Builder: Fix It Fun!, the music sounds like an off-key version of the Bob The Builder theme song.
 * 9) Some of their games have unspeakable difficulty, Toy Story 2 is quietly hard because of this.
 * 10) Drab graphics in some of their games.
 * 11) Sometimes, their GBC games use same assets and sound effects, similar to Shouei System's NES games.
 * 12) Due to how bad their games are, their games were almost even worse than Micronics' games.
 * 13) Ear-bleeding sound effects.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) To be fair, at least they did some good games, such as their ZX Spectrum port of Rolling Thunder and 720°, Sega Master System port of Paperboy, Gauntlet and James Pond 2: Codename RoboCod and many of their SNES and Sega Genesis sports games.
 * 2) Their Game Boy games have Super Game Boy support.

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