Dempsey and Makepeace

"Fans of bad British '80s television may well be intrigued by the existence of a freaking tie-in game for bloody Dempsey and Makepeace! Fans of lousy British 80s games may wonder why this title only appeared for the Amstrad and nothing else. It's odd for licensed games like this one to be a platform exclusive after all, and when you play it, it just kind of makes sense. There's actually two types of game here, the main part where you explore building isn’t actually all that offensively terrible, but it’s the driving section that ties the buildings together where the game falls. It is quite simply, the worst top-down driving ever. The car is not controllable, you have these endless tight turns which can only be done at top speed and the car seems to only take them at some completely random point after you’ve pressed the corresponding button for the freaking turn. You will not be able to do anything but crash the car a million times over, the only amusement being that it seemingly only takes Dempsey a few minutes to find a new car after totaling the last one. There must be some GTA-style carjacking going on that we just don’t see, Dempsey’s quest to seemingly crash every single vehicle in the neighborhood continues, until you find another building you can enter, or more likely, you turn the game off in disgust, and throw the tape at the wall."

- Kim Justice

Dempsey and Makepeace is a video game released exclusively for the Amstrad CPC in 1986, published by Britannia Software. It is based off the British TV show of the same name.

Description
You have two hours to locate and rescue your partner, who has been captured and held somewhere over a vast area in London.

Driving and shooting sequences combine with 3D exploration sections in the search for clues required to complete your mission.

Your final rating will not only depend on you successfully rescueing your partner, but also on the time taken and on how many other crimes you can solve on the way.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) False advertising: The promotional material claims you can play as Dempsey or Makepeace and rescue the opposite partner, but in the game, you can only play as Dempsey with Makepeace as the designated damsel in distress, and there's no character select screen to choose between Dempsey or Makepeace.
 * 2) The title screen has bad music that jams up on a droning note 15 seconds after it starts.
 * 3) The graphics are very ugly, even by Amstrad CPC standards.
 * 4) One part of the game is a boring exploration game where you have to find clues inside buildings to rescue Makepeace.
 * 5) *The clues are invisible, and finding them is completely luck-based.
 * 6) *Even if it looks like something can be found and interacted with inside buildings, when examined, the game will often say that nothing was found.
 * 7) Sometimes, when Dempsey goes into another room, the game suddenly switches to a top-down shooter, where you have to shoot down an enemy.
 * 8) *Even if the enemy was killed in the room, if Dempsey leaves that room and goes back in, the enemy may sometimes respawn, forcing Dempsey to shoot them again.
 * 9) Reloading the gun is incredibly annoying. Instead of Dempsey's gun reloading automatically, you have to move a cursor to a bullet and then put the bullet in the gun chamber one at a time, which is very slow and will likely get Dempsey shot. It's also possible to lose the bullet just by putting it in the wrong place of the gun chamber.
 * 10) The controls are terribly unresponsive.
 * 11) To travel between buildings, Dempsey has to drive a car, and this part of the game puts the driving sections of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the NES version of Dick Tracy to shame.
 * 12) *During the driving sections, it's very easy to crash into other cars, which causes a few minutes to be taken off the timer as Dempsey finds another car.
 * 13) *Dempsey's car may sometimes stop at random due to the aforementioned unresponsive controls, and it's impossible to outrun the enemy cars.
 * 14) *The enemies have no regard towards traffic laws and will always attempt to crash into Dempsey's car, unless they encounter another destroyed car, in which case, they turn around.
 * 15) *Dempsey can only shoot forward from his car, and cannot shoot backwards.
 * 16) *Even if an enemy car is destroyed, Dempsey cannot drive through them without crashing his car.

Videos
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Trivia

 * The Dempsey and Makepeace game was advertised to come out for the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, but only the Amstrad CPC version was released, and the other versions were cancelled for unknown reasons.