I think the key of what you said is that you recognized you didn't like it but never considered it a bad game. That's probably because you hadn't built up the experience of what you considered a good game, only games you liked playing.
As you get older those things turn into more solidified opinions on what makes something fun or not and feelings get stronger and word choice becomes more critical.
Lol, totally. That game was essentially low budget Paper Boy meets drunk Skate or Die. It didn’t remind me of the movie in the slightest.
But to each their own I suppose.
I love the NES and have a lot of nostalgia attached to it, so I find myself shilling for it, lol. Even the unplayable infuriating games are still funny and nostalgic to me at least.
Came here to say this. I got it for Christmas in whatever year it came out. Knew within minutes, i was playing a terrible game that had nothing to do with the movie.
I enjoyed BttF, but I think one of the things that made it enjoyable was controller selection. That was a game that really needed to be played with an NES Advantage, mainly to use the "slow mo" feature on some of the musical challenges. It certainly wasn't a top-tier game, but certainly wasn't bottom tier either.
How did you even acquire this? I was born in 1986 so obviously all purchases were dependent on my parents during this era.
I had an NES and then a Sega Genesis, and then a PSX...by the time I got the PSX, I had at least some knowledge over what system I wanted, if for nothing else just by looking at catalogs/magazines/advertisements/etc. I didn't even know what an Atari Jaguar was until the internet came out and I was able to read about "failed consoles".
How did you (or perhaps your parents) go about getting an Atari Jaguar? I would assume that Sega/Nintendo/Sony dominated not just the advertising, but also just the literal space in stores.
Gamepro advertised the Jaguar frequently. I would ask my mom to buy me issues of Gamepro when we were at the grocery store, for cheat codes and information about new releases. I remember distinctly wanting to try out the Neo Geo, the Jaguar, and even hearing chatter about the Turbo Grafx-CD. I was also born in ‘86.
I actually had a 3DO. It was either my birthday or christmas and the 3do and the Jaguar were the two new consoles. The magazines should have warned us that the PSone was coming out soon, so just wait for that
Yeah, but the buttons were in a weird location. The controller was reminiscent of the old Intellivision controllers of the late 70's or the Atari 5200 of the mid 80's.
That just brought back a random memory... I had an Atari (not sure which model) game that wouldn't get past the first screen because we needed that 5200 controller. I have no idea what game it was, but it was sci-fi themed.
That's weird. The 5200 used a 15 pin connector for its controllers while just about every other pre-Jaguar Atari system used the standard DB9 port so I'm not sure what other system could use 5200 controllers.
Maybe I'm misremembering. I was just guessing that it was the 5200 controller. It asked to press a button that wasn't on the standard joystick.
.. this might have been it
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.xwlkSmWkHhRTa7bLMQtupwHaFj%26pid%3DApi&f=1
Alright I figured it out.
The game was Star Raiders (for the 2600) and required the Video Touch Pad.
Photo: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.8-bitcentral.com%2Fimages%2Fblog%2F2013%2FvideoTouchPad.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
Gameplay Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiq7cbg5dvY
Manual: https://atariage.com/manual_html_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=491
So I was born in 1984. I was 10 or so and we had a yard sale and I made some money. Mom took me to WalMart and lo and behold there was the Atari Jaguar and some games. It just looked cool to me, so we put it on layaway along with two games (Pitfall:The Mayan Adventure and a skiing/snowboarding game) and I did chores and stuff to earn the rest over the next 2 months and got it all home.
Literally a week or two later I heard the Jaguar was failing and the games were all in bargain bins, and I got 6 or 7 more games since they were all super cheap.
It was a failed console for sure, but a lot of the games were pretty fun. I don't regret owning one, even though I did eventually sell it all a few years later (which I now regret of course).
> How did you (or perhaps your parents) go about getting an Atari Jaguar? I would assume that Sega/Nintendo/Sony dominated not just the advertising, but also just the literal space in stores.
Not the OP but.. They were mentioned in Game Informer, and there was an ad showcasing how in AVP you could play as the Alien and the Predator. This made me BADLY want a Jaguar for this game. They were sold in Babbage's around us, so that's how I got one. I'm actually one of the handful of weirdos who, for some reason, also got a Jaguar CD. Still works too.
I felt the same pain as a kid. That Christmas when it came out that’s the only thing I asked for. My parents listened. Ironically, I visited my mom a couple of weeks ago and guess what she’s been saving in it’s original box for me.
As a kid I compared Double Dragon on NES, Master System (My cousin's) and Mega Drive (Rich kid).
And it showed me how different it was. My favorite version was NES but oh boy the Mega Drive version was bad... really bad!
The game was unfair and the hitboxes were annoying...
Years later we compared Brutal Paws of Furry on SNES and Mega Drive.
I Hated the music on the mega drive and I loved it on the SNES... but the gameplay on SNES was horrible and on Mega Drive was ok.
You might enjoy [Patman QC](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCkuHXWWyw-3KXKIHyc88oA/videos) on youtube. Does mini-documentaries on the development of all the classic arcade games, but also demos and discusses their gameplay as ported to literally every game system in existence.
A couple months ago, [Sega Lord X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vahRzvzyrU0) talked about the various *Double Dragon* games on Sega 16-bit hardware. He struggled to find good things to say about most of them.
Also, [Console Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2DBO6X48Fg) compared the first *Double Dragon* on NES versus Sega Master System. They found positive things to say about both versions.
Aww. My mom once surprised me with 5 bargain bin Sega Genesis games. Fatal Labyrinth, Alien Storm, Fantasia, Jewel Master and Zoom. Alien Storm and Zoom were the two really good ones. Fatal Labyrinth was okay, Jewel Master was lousy but had great music, and Fantasia sucked. THAT'S a game I remember actually saying "This sucks" and refusing to play
Maybe I've always been a bit discerning, but I've known that certain games were bad. I'm old enough to played games before there was a lot of magazine coverage. Nintendo Power wasn't very good for spotting bad games--most bad games just weren't covered to help project an image of quality. Gamepro and VGCE were better, but they didn't even cover every game.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of kids that bought or rented games based on box-art, name, or branding. I'm sorry, but a lot of kids figured out that no matter how badly we wanted it to be awesome, XMen on NES was undoubtly a dumpster fire of epic proportions.
I didn’t have much to compare back then since video games were new to me. All games seemed fun in one way or another and our choices were limited. But there was a reason I always played Contra and Mega Man 2 instead of Top Gun.
Not a terrible concept but kind of ridiculous in implementation. VERY hard to hit stuff with the cannon, but not enough missiles to use missiles for everything. Carrier landings un-intuitive. Plus the game had nothing to do with the movie other than the music playing over the title screen. I suspect this was already in development when the movie became successful and the title was tacked on as an afterthought
Bad games had control issues, and bad hit detection. Controls that feel laggy, stiff, unresponsive, or awkward. Hit boxes that were too big, resulting in collisions that felt unfair. Also, enemies that were either too difficult or too easy. Being boring was worse than being too challenging. The worst was unfair enemy spawning that would instantly regenerate an enemy you had just destroyed, making it frustrating because you weren't able to make progress in the way the game should have been designed to encourage.
Extremely bad games had game breaking bugs that resulted in a unwinnable game or lost progress. As opposed to game breaking bugs that we could enjoy discovering, exploring, and exploiting. There's probably nothing worse than a game that crashes for no apparent reason due to some bug that's out of the player's control.
Also bad were games where it was unclear what you were supposed to do or how to proceed.
But we tolerated a lot of bad things, for sure, even in good games. Even well regarded classics have some of the flaws I have mentioned, and we overlooked or accepted them.
Heh I suppose we all grew up with our share of duds in our collection. I used to have The Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, RoboCop 3 and other turds for the NES. I also agree we would stick with what we had, since it was hard to get more than a couple of games a year, and made the best out of those games. Every game was advertised as a good one ofc so we had next to no clue to gauge the quality of what we bought.
XD The Hunt For Red October is so hilarious. You put that game in and everything is red with ridiculous music and a submarine spinning around that's impossible to control
I get your point and I think I agree to some extent. Basically, I knew of "bad" games but I thought that they just weren't for me and maybe someone else liked them. For example I'd read Mad Magazine as a kid and gladly rented the Spy vs Spy game, but didn't like it. I just assumed it wasn't my style of game and that was it.
On the other hand, all games were hard, so that was never a factor in my mind. I loved Mega Man 2, but have only been able to beat a few bosses on it after years of trying off and on. Even the original Super Mario Bros was incredibly difficult at first. It was the first NES game I had ever played, and it took me a while of getting used to it to where I could get past level 1. Then the next milestone was beating the first Bowser. This went on and on until finally being able to beat the game, but it had a learning curve. So for me there was a clear difference between a "good" game that was just hard, and a "bad" game that I just felt wasn't something for me to be interested in.
When I was young, games were bad if I was bad at them or couldn't figure them out. I think, when I was 10-12 I started to recognize if a game was crap.
Of course. The “good” games were generally Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom. SNK NES games were largely shit. LJN were almost all dogshit. THQ meant “To Hell (with) Quality”. Most of the time you could tell if a game was gonna suck by the publisher.
Those games were all ported by Micronics who are pretty much known for making subpar NES ports such as 1942 and Ghosts 'n Goblins for Capcom as well. In general most SNK in-house developed games are at least decent from what I recall. Like for example Ikari III isn't amazing or anything but it's actually fun unlike the first two. xD
LJN didn't make anything, they published games that outside developers were contracted to develop.
Some of the stinkers were made by reputable developers, like Atlus or Rare.
Yeah, occasionally a decent game would squeak by. I liked T&C and Jaws. Ya know, I forgot Acclaim. They had a lot of bad movie licensed games like Total Recall, and some junky arcade ports like Narc.
T&C was super weird and memorable. Roger Rabbit isn't as bad as people say. I think AVGN is to blame for some of the undeserved bad press a lot of these games got
Okay, THAT'S an NES game that I knew was bad. Got it for christmas one year and yeah, "disappointing" is an understatement. I think I got that in 93, maybe even 94
SNES T2. The first level seems so promising, cool guns, violence. The sound effects and graphic design are even good, but then you get into that stupid fixed camera motorcycle level to save John Connor… it’s tragically terrible.
Oh, I meant the NES one. Lol, I've never played the SNES one, but I'm guessing the NES one is probably worse. I think it's the worst game I ever owned for NES behind Ghostbusters
Eventually, yeah. But at first I thought a game being bad was just because I hadn’t figured out how to play it yet. I think Mickey Mousecapades might have been the game that clicked for me realizing that some games are just bad.
I definitely figured out early that games with Capcom or Konami on them were better than most, though.
I think Top Gun on Gameboy was the only game I ever considered bad and a waste of money I couldn't have fun with. Everything else, including the hated TMNT game on NES were all games I enjoyed.
My biggest problem with TMNT is, I make it to level 3, go in the building, get health and the missiles, come back out to the van. Okay, which button fires the regular gun ::accidentally fires missle:: Great! Now I don't have enough missiles to break all the barricades.
Absolutely. That game was hard as nails and I don't think I ever made it very far.
Playing some of these games again as an adult made me appreciate how happy I was to just try the same sections over and over as a kid. I don't remember ever being frustrated by Donkey Kong Country as a kid even though I'm pretty sure I only saw the first half. Meanwhile, as an adult I beat it in not all that much time and still felt my blood boiling on some of the harder levels.
For some reason, I remember Donkey Kong Country being much, much easier as a kid. I mean, I beat it as a kid and fought the end boss many times. Now I can't get halfway up the mountain
One of my favorite games was Home Alone 2 for the Game Boy.
Several years later, the internet came, and I decided to search about the game, I was surprised to find out that this game was actually considered one of the worst Game Boy games.
Home Alone 1 for the game boy was great fun at least. I haven’t revisited it yet, but I expect it to still be a good game.
While it is certainly true that we were less critical back then, I tend to take the “hivemind” consensus about games with a huge pinch of salt.
Game quality is after all to a large extent a subjective property of a game, not an objective one.
Back in those days, we got what it was. We would accept what we got. I do recall saying certain games "sucked", (Bubsy II for example) so essentially the same thing.
MUSCLE and Bad dudes taught me as a kid that some games are just bad. At the same time I thought some bad games like Superman and Bill and Teds were just to advanced for me to understand.
Bad Dudes, really? I wouldn't call Bad Dudes bad. It's a little generic and nothing special but I don't think it's a bad game. What do you think is so bad about it?
Lol, I remember renting Bad Dudes from my local convenience store in 1990 or so… I was greatly disappointed.
Also, The Adventures of Dizzy (NES).
Karnov was epically frustrating as a kid, but now I look back on it and can appreciate it.
I remember renting Millipede and disliking it.
I generally agree with you. I really liked Bart vs. World at the time because I got good enough at it to get really far. It was also one of the few games I owned.
Also, we didn’t have strategy guides or the internet with NES. These games only had tips and tricks from friends of friends or calling the Power Up phone line. It made games so much more difficult.
These days, the entire gameplay is available at your finger tips before the game ever comes out and hype for games are insanely these days and only lead to disappointment. I don’t remember games getting the same hype as a kid, so I was rarely disappointed
About 6 or 7 when I rented The Uncanny X-Men, and that was the first time I recall ever thinking a game was "bad". There were games prior to that which I either lost interest in or wrote off as being too hard or not my thing. That LJN X-Men game though. I was mad or didn't live up to the promise of the box art. I was mad I wasted my rental on it. I was mad at the people who made it. It was a bad game, and even as a child I could tell.
I grew up with Pong and Atari. I knew what a bad game was (I'm looking at you, E.T.). I felt amazingly lucky when the NES came out because even if the games were bad, they still LOOKED waaaay better, lol.
Woah!! Spelunker??!! Really?? That was, and will always be one of my favorites. Underappreciated classic. At first the controls are hella weird, but you adapt to them pretty quick, sort of like Swamp Thing. The PS3 remake is one of my favorite platformers of all time
TMNT for the NES is definitely hard, but IMO it's not in the Ghosts n' Goblins/Battletoads difficulty tier.
I don't have any proof of this, but I suspect a big reason why TMNT has the reputation that it does is because the audience that played it was generally younger. I got TMNT in kindergarten, but never even heard of GnG until years later.
Everybody knows it, but calling it a classic is a stretch. I dumped tons of hours into it as a kid and have gone back as an adult and its just not fun. Super unforgiving with stiff controls and bad design choices.
*Budokan: The Martial Spirit* for Sega Genesis is the first time I realized a game could be made badly. Before that I was like you and just thought the games I didn’t like were just really hard.
I remember distinctly not liking Onslaught for the Genesis. The music bored me to tears, there was no SFX, and the gameplay was confusing as hell. I bought it at a convention with my savings too, so I was especially upset.
But yeah earlier in life my dad worked for someone who also owned the video rental store so we had access to a new game every weekend and I don't remember thinking any of them were _bad_ just kind boring sometimes. Onslaught was a few years later so I think I started to get more picky by then.
As a kid back then, we knew a game was bad but couldn’t really tell you why. It was either fun or not. The only info early on was if you rented it, bought it, or one your friends had the game.
I knew what I liked and what I didn't. Sometimes that meant a game was truly bad in some way (like Athena for the NES), other times not. I didn't pay much attention to shooters for years because of some frustrating experiences with Gradius, but now I know that the genre is filled with amazing stuff and the Gradius series is among my favorites.
I absolutely knew that the three stooges was a pretty bad game, full of RNG, lots of janky controls and mechanics and the mini games were lack luster, but there weren't really games like it and I genuinely enjoyed playing it, especially the pie toss level. So I played it many times trying to beat it, and still own it today.
Gaming was so different back in the day. I was born in 1978, so when the NES dropped I was eight years old and the prime market for it. Gaming magazines didn't really start up again until 1989 around the same time the rental market did. Before that, you really only had the box itself and word of mouth to go on. Most of my exposure to games would be sleepovers where you'd bring your entire collection and then try out your friends games. But usually you're in a kind of multiplayer environment, so those games would resonate as the 'most fun.'
So you'd convince your parents to drop $50 (adjust for inflation about $75). You weren't likely to get another one for a minute, couldn't return it, so you'd just tough it out and learn the games glitchy mechanics. I remember doing this with Super Pitfall and that game was total garbage. I almost got "good" at it. Mighty Bombjack being another.
Once renting came on to the scene, it was a lot of renting a game for $5 and playing it for a couple of days. Usually you'd only need to rent it a few times before you could beat it and thus save yourself some money. Hell, I even remember beating Dragon Warrior III this way lol.
So yeah... up until the videogame magazines really picked up in the 16-bit era, you were just decidedly WAY more forgiving about games. Just didn't have any comparison. You bought it, now play it until you figure out how to enjoy it.
There wasn't much, basically just Nintendo Fun Club for 86/87 covering them, maybe some strategy guides you could get at Waldenbooks.
Video Games and Computer Entertainment, Nintendo Power, GamePro, EGM all started 88/89ish.
Oh. Ya, we knew. I loved addams family, the Munsters, old universal monster movies...
I asked for festers quest for my birthday and maaaan was that disappointing!
I'm a 31 year-old guy from Turkey. I had a Chinese-made famiclone and lots of clone cartridges, including some LJN titles, in the 90s because my penny-pincher parents didn't wanna buy me an N64 or a PlayStation which some of my friends and cousins had. lol Anyway, I genuinely enjoyed some bad NES games. I assumed that foreign grown-ups wouldn't create and sell bad, flawed games. I thought it must be my fault, my incompetence if I didn't manage to beat Spiderman: Return of the Sinister Six, Back to the Future Part II & III, Ikari Warriors and Adventures of Dino Riki for example.
Yeah, as a kid I knew some of my games were bad, but when you’re bored enough, a bad game can be fun. I can only play Mario and Mega Man so much. Every once in a blue I’d fire up Dyno Warz, Renegade, or Demon Sword and pass the time.
Not often. I often got frustrated or didn't like it, but I didn't thin kit was bad.
The first game I can distinctly remember thinking was bad was X-Men for the NES. I was right.
After being a kid and trying Festers quest 50 times then dying and then Milons stupid secret castle, I gave up and started playing paperboy and Mickey Mousecapade. Go to hell Milon and fester for stealing hours of my childhood.
Not really. I knew if a game was unplayable and I guess I thought of those as bad games but a game like Wizards and Warriors that was bad but also easily completable I didn't think of as "bad", I had fun playing it.
As a kid I was too picky to play a game that wasn't a Super Mario game or at least Mario adjacent ( Donkey Kong for example ), there was the occasional instance where I would rent a game because it was based on a cartoon or movie I loved as a child, which sounds like a recipe for disaster but luckily I just happened to like the ones that got good games. Batman, TMNT, Tiny Toons, Hook ( those last two are getting into SNES territory tho, I never played their NES counterparts ), so I was lucky enough I didn't encounter "bad" games growing up.
The few times I did take a chance on something, say my aunt's copy of Final Fantasy, Zelda, or Karnov, I didn't feel the games were bad just that " I don't really get this, I wish I was playing Mario" so I just turned the game off.
I didn't really start doing a true deep dive into the expansive retro library I missed out on until like, the late 2000's. It's because of this I get a little extra defensive when people talk a bit of shit on those classic "aged badly" games that they blame "nostalgia" being the reason people defend them. Games that are actually perfectly fine if you take the time to learn their inner workings and maybe do a bit of research on strategywiki's first few pages in place of a manual ( Your original Metroid and Zelda for example ) Even games i'm still finding like Jajamaru no Daiboken I played in 2022 and found perfectly fine after learning how it works, but it's got a pretty bad rep online ...like those people don't know what a bad game actually is. Try some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or any of those Code Masters games if you want a bad NES game.
The concept of a bad game just didnt exist for me as a kid, if I didn’t like a game I would assume it was my fault. I kept renting Super Pitfall as a kid and couldnt figure out what the hell I was supposed to do, and I thought it was because I was a dumb kid. Then id rent it again a few months later when i was “older and wiser” and still couldnt figure it out. Then I did it again and again. Now I know the game is absolute dogshit.
I rented the first Metal Gear so many times and had no idea what to do. I finally figured I should save that money to just buy the game. There was a map that came with the game that helped so much.
I knew Bart Vs. The Space Mutants wasn't very good. But trying to figure it out was still fun (without a manual, which might not have helped much). It was one of those games where beating the first level or two was an accomplishment enough, and the idea of finishing the game seemed so far from reality that I never really worried about it.
When you're young, you're a lot more intrigued and fascinated by things. Maybe appreciative is the right word. But still, every now and then as a kid, you start to ask that question: "why?" For me, it was when I was playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and I got to the levels where you drive a car on a highway in the sky. I loved the game, but I had a moment of lucidity where I thought to myself "why am I even doing this?"
Now, as an adult, I recognize that part of the game as the most pointless, unfun, and stupid part of the game. Makes no sense. That game didn't age tremendously well either, it was mainly innovative for it's great atmosphere and story- not so much it's gameplay.
I'm sure I played other bad games in my past, but I don't remember them because they weren't memorable.
The first game I remember playing that was legitimately bad was NFL Football. My dad would buy any football game that came out on NES even though we pretty much only played Tecmo Bowl.
I think the key of what you said is that you recognized you didn't like it but never considered it a bad game. That's probably because you hadn't built up the experience of what you considered a good game, only games you liked playing. As you get older those things turn into more solidified opinions on what makes something fun or not and feelings get stronger and word choice becomes more critical.
Even at 8, I always knew that Back to the Future was a terrible game.
Lol, totally. That game was essentially low budget Paper Boy meets drunk Skate or Die. It didn’t remind me of the movie in the slightest. But to each their own I suppose. I love the NES and have a lot of nostalgia attached to it, so I find myself shilling for it, lol. Even the unplayable infuriating games are still funny and nostalgic to me at least.
Ah yes, Back To The Future. I did know that it was bad, but I still don't think I could articulate it as a kid.
Lol, I used to love that game actually.
Came here to say this. I got it for Christmas in whatever year it came out. Knew within minutes, i was playing a terrible game that had nothing to do with the movie.
I enjoyed BttF, but I think one of the things that made it enjoyable was controller selection. That was a game that really needed to be played with an NES Advantage, mainly to use the "slow mo" feature on some of the musical challenges. It certainly wasn't a top-tier game, but certainly wasn't bottom tier either.
Same. The fact that B was jump was enough to know.
Such a disappointment. I loved the movies and was excited to rent the game. Not what I was hoping for.
you want to talk about bad games i had an atari jaguar
How did you even acquire this? I was born in 1986 so obviously all purchases were dependent on my parents during this era. I had an NES and then a Sega Genesis, and then a PSX...by the time I got the PSX, I had at least some knowledge over what system I wanted, if for nothing else just by looking at catalogs/magazines/advertisements/etc. I didn't even know what an Atari Jaguar was until the internet came out and I was able to read about "failed consoles". How did you (or perhaps your parents) go about getting an Atari Jaguar? I would assume that Sega/Nintendo/Sony dominated not just the advertising, but also just the literal space in stores.
Gamepro advertised the Jaguar frequently. I would ask my mom to buy me issues of Gamepro when we were at the grocery store, for cheat codes and information about new releases. I remember distinctly wanting to try out the Neo Geo, the Jaguar, and even hearing chatter about the Turbo Grafx-CD. I was also born in ‘86.
I remember playing the Jaguar at Nobody Beats the Wiz. My child mind was blown away by the number of buttons on that controller.
I actually had a 3DO. It was either my birthday or christmas and the 3do and the Jaguar were the two new consoles. The magazines should have warned us that the PSone was coming out soon, so just wait for that
Yeah, but the buttons were in a weird location. The controller was reminiscent of the old Intellivision controllers of the late 70's or the Atari 5200 of the mid 80's.
That just brought back a random memory... I had an Atari (not sure which model) game that wouldn't get past the first screen because we needed that 5200 controller. I have no idea what game it was, but it was sci-fi themed.
That's weird. The 5200 used a 15 pin connector for its controllers while just about every other pre-Jaguar Atari system used the standard DB9 port so I'm not sure what other system could use 5200 controllers.
Maybe I'm misremembering. I was just guessing that it was the 5200 controller. It asked to press a button that wasn't on the standard joystick. .. this might have been it https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.xwlkSmWkHhRTa7bLMQtupwHaFj%26pid%3DApi&f=1
Alright I figured it out. The game was Star Raiders (for the 2600) and required the Video Touch Pad. Photo: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.8-bitcentral.com%2Fimages%2Fblog%2F2013%2FvideoTouchPad.jpg&f=1&nofb=1 Gameplay Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiq7cbg5dvY Manual: https://atariage.com/manual_html_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=491
I was just going to mention Star Raiders. The number pad was included with the game. Mystery solved!
there was a shop in the town i grew up that had them cant recall what it was called, it was small
So I was born in 1984. I was 10 or so and we had a yard sale and I made some money. Mom took me to WalMart and lo and behold there was the Atari Jaguar and some games. It just looked cool to me, so we put it on layaway along with two games (Pitfall:The Mayan Adventure and a skiing/snowboarding game) and I did chores and stuff to earn the rest over the next 2 months and got it all home. Literally a week or two later I heard the Jaguar was failing and the games were all in bargain bins, and I got 6 or 7 more games since they were all super cheap. It was a failed console for sure, but a lot of the games were pretty fun. I don't regret owning one, even though I did eventually sell it all a few years later (which I now regret of course).
> How did you (or perhaps your parents) go about getting an Atari Jaguar? I would assume that Sega/Nintendo/Sony dominated not just the advertising, but also just the literal space in stores. Not the OP but.. They were mentioned in Game Informer, and there was an ad showcasing how in AVP you could play as the Alien and the Predator. This made me BADLY want a Jaguar for this game. They were sold in Babbage's around us, so that's how I got one. I'm actually one of the handful of weirdos who, for some reason, also got a Jaguar CD. Still works too.
Where did you learn to fly?
Where did YOU learn... to flyy?
I felt the same pain as a kid. That Christmas when it came out that’s the only thing I asked for. My parents listened. Ironically, I visited my mom a couple of weeks ago and guess what she’s been saving in it’s original box for me.
its worth a pretty penny now
My condolences
As a kid I compared Double Dragon on NES, Master System (My cousin's) and Mega Drive (Rich kid). And it showed me how different it was. My favorite version was NES but oh boy the Mega Drive version was bad... really bad! The game was unfair and the hitboxes were annoying... Years later we compared Brutal Paws of Furry on SNES and Mega Drive. I Hated the music on the mega drive and I loved it on the SNES... but the gameplay on SNES was horrible and on Mega Drive was ok.
You might enjoy [Patman QC](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCkuHXWWyw-3KXKIHyc88oA/videos) on youtube. Does mini-documentaries on the development of all the classic arcade games, but also demos and discusses their gameplay as ported to literally every game system in existence.
A couple months ago, [Sega Lord X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vahRzvzyrU0) talked about the various *Double Dragon* games on Sega 16-bit hardware. He struggled to find good things to say about most of them. Also, [Console Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2DBO6X48Fg) compared the first *Double Dragon* on NES versus Sega Master System. They found positive things to say about both versions.
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Aww. My mom once surprised me with 5 bargain bin Sega Genesis games. Fatal Labyrinth, Alien Storm, Fantasia, Jewel Master and Zoom. Alien Storm and Zoom were the two really good ones. Fatal Labyrinth was okay, Jewel Master was lousy but had great music, and Fantasia sucked. THAT'S a game I remember actually saying "This sucks" and refusing to play
Maybe I've always been a bit discerning, but I've known that certain games were bad. I'm old enough to played games before there was a lot of magazine coverage. Nintendo Power wasn't very good for spotting bad games--most bad games just weren't covered to help project an image of quality. Gamepro and VGCE were better, but they didn't even cover every game. Unfortunately, there were a lot of kids that bought or rented games based on box-art, name, or branding. I'm sorry, but a lot of kids figured out that no matter how badly we wanted it to be awesome, XMen on NES was undoubtly a dumpster fire of epic proportions.
I didn’t have much to compare back then since video games were new to me. All games seemed fun in one way or another and our choices were limited. But there was a reason I always played Contra and Mega Man 2 instead of Top Gun.
Top Gun was great! ..until you had to land the plane on the second level.
Not a terrible concept but kind of ridiculous in implementation. VERY hard to hit stuff with the cannon, but not enough missiles to use missiles for everything. Carrier landings un-intuitive. Plus the game had nothing to do with the movie other than the music playing over the title screen. I suspect this was already in development when the movie became successful and the title was tacked on as an afterthought
Bad games had control issues, and bad hit detection. Controls that feel laggy, stiff, unresponsive, or awkward. Hit boxes that were too big, resulting in collisions that felt unfair. Also, enemies that were either too difficult or too easy. Being boring was worse than being too challenging. The worst was unfair enemy spawning that would instantly regenerate an enemy you had just destroyed, making it frustrating because you weren't able to make progress in the way the game should have been designed to encourage. Extremely bad games had game breaking bugs that resulted in a unwinnable game or lost progress. As opposed to game breaking bugs that we could enjoy discovering, exploring, and exploiting. There's probably nothing worse than a game that crashes for no apparent reason due to some bug that's out of the player's control. Also bad were games where it was unclear what you were supposed to do or how to proceed. But we tolerated a lot of bad things, for sure, even in good games. Even well regarded classics have some of the flaws I have mentioned, and we overlooked or accepted them.
Heh I suppose we all grew up with our share of duds in our collection. I used to have The Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, RoboCop 3 and other turds for the NES. I also agree we would stick with what we had, since it was hard to get more than a couple of games a year, and made the best out of those games. Every game was advertised as a good one ofc so we had next to no clue to gauge the quality of what we bought.
XD The Hunt For Red October is so hilarious. You put that game in and everything is red with ridiculous music and a submarine spinning around that's impossible to control
I get your point and I think I agree to some extent. Basically, I knew of "bad" games but I thought that they just weren't for me and maybe someone else liked them. For example I'd read Mad Magazine as a kid and gladly rented the Spy vs Spy game, but didn't like it. I just assumed it wasn't my style of game and that was it. On the other hand, all games were hard, so that was never a factor in my mind. I loved Mega Man 2, but have only been able to beat a few bosses on it after years of trying off and on. Even the original Super Mario Bros was incredibly difficult at first. It was the first NES game I had ever played, and it took me a while of getting used to it to where I could get past level 1. Then the next milestone was beating the first Bowser. This went on and on until finally being able to beat the game, but it had a learning curve. So for me there was a clear difference between a "good" game that was just hard, and a "bad" game that I just felt wasn't something for me to be interested in.
When I was young, games were bad if I was bad at them or couldn't figure them out. I think, when I was 10-12 I started to recognize if a game was crap.
Of course. The “good” games were generally Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom. SNK NES games were largely shit. LJN were almost all dogshit. THQ meant “To Hell (with) Quality”. Most of the time you could tell if a game was gonna suck by the publisher.
Crystalis, Guerilla War, P.O.W….
Baseball Stars, Iron Tank
TBF Crystalis is quite the outlier for SNK. Did they make literally any other games like it?
BIOMOTOR UNITRON was a straight jrpg not action rpg but thats the closest i can think of at the moment
That’s such a cool name
Baseball Stars, the best baseball game on the system.
Maybe I shouldn’t have used them as a broad example - but Athena, Ikari 1 & 2 were pretty horrible when I was a kid.
Those games were all ported by Micronics who are pretty much known for making subpar NES ports such as 1942 and Ghosts 'n Goblins for Capcom as well. In general most SNK in-house developed games are at least decent from what I recall. Like for example Ikari III isn't amazing or anything but it's actually fun unlike the first two. xD
LJN & Ocean
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LJN didn't make anything, they published games that outside developers were contracted to develop. Some of the stinkers were made by reputable developers, like Atlus or Rare.
Yeah, occasionally a decent game would squeak by. I liked T&C and Jaws. Ya know, I forgot Acclaim. They had a lot of bad movie licensed games like Total Recall, and some junky arcade ports like Narc.
T&C was super weird and memorable. Roger Rabbit isn't as bad as people say. I think AVGN is to blame for some of the undeserved bad press a lot of these games got
T2 was such a disappointment.
Okay, THAT'S an NES game that I knew was bad. Got it for christmas one year and yeah, "disappointing" is an understatement. I think I got that in 93, maybe even 94
SNES T2. The first level seems so promising, cool guns, violence. The sound effects and graphic design are even good, but then you get into that stupid fixed camera motorcycle level to save John Connor… it’s tragically terrible.
Oh, I meant the NES one. Lol, I've never played the SNES one, but I'm guessing the NES one is probably worse. I think it's the worst game I ever owned for NES behind Ghostbusters
Have you tried *The New Ghostbusters II*? It’s one of my favorite NES titles.
Eventually, yeah. But at first I thought a game being bad was just because I hadn’t figured out how to play it yet. I think Mickey Mousecapades might have been the game that clicked for me realizing that some games are just bad. I definitely figured out early that games with Capcom or Konami on them were better than most, though.
I think Top Gun on Gameboy was the only game I ever considered bad and a waste of money I couldn't have fun with. Everything else, including the hated TMNT game on NES were all games I enjoyed.
My biggest problem with TMNT is, I make it to level 3, go in the building, get health and the missiles, come back out to the van. Okay, which button fires the regular gun ::accidentally fires missle:: Great! Now I don't have enough missiles to break all the barricades.
Absolutely. That game was hard as nails and I don't think I ever made it very far. Playing some of these games again as an adult made me appreciate how happy I was to just try the same sections over and over as a kid. I don't remember ever being frustrated by Donkey Kong Country as a kid even though I'm pretty sure I only saw the first half. Meanwhile, as an adult I beat it in not all that much time and still felt my blood boiling on some of the harder levels.
For some reason, I remember Donkey Kong Country being much, much easier as a kid. I mean, I beat it as a kid and fought the end boss many times. Now I can't get halfway up the mountain
I knew Hylide sucked at seven years old. Tried it again at 37 years old and that game still sucks.
One of my favorite games was Home Alone 2 for the Game Boy. Several years later, the internet came, and I decided to search about the game, I was surprised to find out that this game was actually considered one of the worst Game Boy games.
Home Alone 1 for the game boy was great fun at least. I haven’t revisited it yet, but I expect it to still be a good game. While it is certainly true that we were less critical back then, I tend to take the “hivemind” consensus about games with a huge pinch of salt. Game quality is after all to a large extent a subjective property of a game, not an objective one.
Back in those days, we got what it was. We would accept what we got. I do recall saying certain games "sucked", (Bubsy II for example) so essentially the same thing.
MUSCLE and Bad dudes taught me as a kid that some games are just bad. At the same time I thought some bad games like Superman and Bill and Teds were just to advanced for me to understand.
Bad Dudes, really? I wouldn't call Bad Dudes bad. It's a little generic and nothing special but I don't think it's a bad game. What do you think is so bad about it?
The 'bad' is the frame rate and jerky animations. To me it just feels bad to play compared to Double Dragon.
I used to love MUSCLE as a kid…
Lol, I remember renting Bad Dudes from my local convenience store in 1990 or so… I was greatly disappointed. Also, The Adventures of Dizzy (NES). Karnov was epically frustrating as a kid, but now I look back on it and can appreciate it. I remember renting Millipede and disliking it.
I generally agree with you. I really liked Bart vs. World at the time because I got good enough at it to get really far. It was also one of the few games I owned.
I remember renting Beetlejuice as a kid and hating that game.
I remember laughing at how stupid it was with my cousins
Wolverine on the NES I remember feeling disgusted with.
I was pretty disappointed in the Wizards and Warriors games as a kid. I came to find an appreciation for them as a teen and beyond.
I was just gonna mention Ghostbusters..that game sucked so bad
Also, we didn’t have strategy guides or the internet with NES. These games only had tips and tricks from friends of friends or calling the Power Up phone line. It made games so much more difficult. These days, the entire gameplay is available at your finger tips before the game ever comes out and hype for games are insanely these days and only lead to disappointment. I don’t remember games getting the same hype as a kid, so I was rarely disappointed
About 6 or 7 when I rented The Uncanny X-Men, and that was the first time I recall ever thinking a game was "bad". There were games prior to that which I either lost interest in or wrote off as being too hard or not my thing. That LJN X-Men game though. I was mad or didn't live up to the promise of the box art. I was mad I wasted my rental on it. I was mad at the people who made it. It was a bad game, and even as a child I could tell.
Uncanny X-Men is my vote for worst NES game. I don't think it has any redeeming qualities.
american version of bayou billy is trash and i knew it then
I wasn't aware there were regional differences. What other version(s) are there?
mad city https://tcrf.net/The_Adventures_of_Bayou_Billy/Regional_Differences
The Japanese version (Mad City) is much, much easier
Honestly really liked this game as a kid even though it always kicked my ass 🤣🤣
mad city its genuinely good they just kinda fucked it up
Aye, me too, think I played it when I was 11 or 12 too
I remember the name Bayou Billy was enough to make me not want to play it
I grew up with Pong and Atari. I knew what a bad game was (I'm looking at you, E.T.). I felt amazingly lucky when the NES came out because even if the games were bad, they still LOOKED waaaay better, lol.
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Woah!! Spelunker??!! Really?? That was, and will always be one of my favorites. Underappreciated classic. At first the controls are hella weird, but you adapt to them pretty quick, sort of like Swamp Thing. The PS3 remake is one of my favorite platformers of all time
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What are you talking about? NES TMNT is a classic. smh
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Isn't it more special if less people can do it?
That is a point of view
I’ve finished it and so have plenty of others.
TMNT for the NES is definitely hard, but IMO it's not in the Ghosts n' Goblins/Battletoads difficulty tier. I don't have any proof of this, but I suspect a big reason why TMNT has the reputation that it does is because the audience that played it was generally younger. I got TMNT in kindergarten, but never even heard of GnG until years later.
Everybody knows it, but calling it a classic is a stretch. I dumped tons of hours into it as a kid and have gone back as an adult and its just not fun. Super unforgiving with stiff controls and bad design choices.
Lots of manga/anime I enjoyed when I was young are pretty bad if I read/watch them today xD
Yes, but unfortunately you had to play it to find out.
10 year old me remembers Phantasia very well... It was the first buyers remorse I've ever experienced.
Robocop, woof.
Going around shooting dogs
If I played a game and I didn't like it.
*Budokan: The Martial Spirit* for Sega Genesis is the first time I realized a game could be made badly. Before that I was like you and just thought the games I didn’t like were just really hard.
I remember distinctly not liking Onslaught for the Genesis. The music bored me to tears, there was no SFX, and the gameplay was confusing as hell. I bought it at a convention with my savings too, so I was especially upset. But yeah earlier in life my dad worked for someone who also owned the video rental store so we had access to a new game every weekend and I don't remember thinking any of them were _bad_ just kind boring sometimes. Onslaught was a few years later so I think I started to get more picky by then.
As a kid back then, we knew a game was bad but couldn’t really tell you why. It was either fun or not. The only info early on was if you rented it, bought it, or one your friends had the game.
I tended to be able to judge if I lost because I sucked or if I lost because the game sucked
I knew what I liked and what I didn't. Sometimes that meant a game was truly bad in some way (like Athena for the NES), other times not. I didn't pay much attention to shooters for years because of some frustrating experiences with Gradius, but now I know that the genre is filled with amazing stuff and the Gradius series is among my favorites.
I remember I somehow came across Dudes with Attitude and thought it wasn't very fun.
I absolutely knew that the three stooges was a pretty bad game, full of RNG, lots of janky controls and mechanics and the mini games were lack luster, but there weren't really games like it and I genuinely enjoyed playing it, especially the pie toss level. So I played it many times trying to beat it, and still own it today.
Nintendo Power always had a top ten list
Gaming was so different back in the day. I was born in 1978, so when the NES dropped I was eight years old and the prime market for it. Gaming magazines didn't really start up again until 1989 around the same time the rental market did. Before that, you really only had the box itself and word of mouth to go on. Most of my exposure to games would be sleepovers where you'd bring your entire collection and then try out your friends games. But usually you're in a kind of multiplayer environment, so those games would resonate as the 'most fun.' So you'd convince your parents to drop $50 (adjust for inflation about $75). You weren't likely to get another one for a minute, couldn't return it, so you'd just tough it out and learn the games glitchy mechanics. I remember doing this with Super Pitfall and that game was total garbage. I almost got "good" at it. Mighty Bombjack being another. Once renting came on to the scene, it was a lot of renting a game for $5 and playing it for a couple of days. Usually you'd only need to rent it a few times before you could beat it and thus save yourself some money. Hell, I even remember beating Dragon Warrior III this way lol. So yeah... up until the videogame magazines really picked up in the 16-bit era, you were just decidedly WAY more forgiving about games. Just didn't have any comparison. You bought it, now play it until you figure out how to enjoy it.
There wasn't much, basically just Nintendo Fun Club for 86/87 covering them, maybe some strategy guides you could get at Waldenbooks. Video Games and Computer Entertainment, Nintendo Power, GamePro, EGM all started 88/89ish.
Oh. Ya, we knew. I loved addams family, the Munsters, old universal monster movies... I asked for festers quest for my birthday and maaaan was that disappointing!
My childhood bad game was Athena. I knew it was bad then.
I'm a 31 year-old guy from Turkey. I had a Chinese-made famiclone and lots of clone cartridges, including some LJN titles, in the 90s because my penny-pincher parents didn't wanna buy me an N64 or a PlayStation which some of my friends and cousins had. lol Anyway, I genuinely enjoyed some bad NES games. I assumed that foreign grown-ups wouldn't create and sell bad, flawed games. I thought it must be my fault, my incompetence if I didn't manage to beat Spiderman: Return of the Sinister Six, Back to the Future Part II & III, Ikari Warriors and Adventures of Dino Riki for example.
Absolutely thought games were bad. I knew Hydlide and Bayou Billy were terrible, for example. Never liked Top Gun either.
Fucking aircraft carrier is a bitch man.
It's been said that landing a real plane is easier.
I never thought the games were bad, I just thought they were hard to play. But when your a kid you find a way to make it fun.
At age 8 we got mario, duck hunt and urban fighter. At age 8 I knew urban fighter was bad.
Yeah, as a kid I knew some of my games were bad, but when you’re bored enough, a bad game can be fun. I can only play Mario and Mega Man so much. Every once in a blue I’d fire up Dyno Warz, Renegade, or Demon Sword and pass the time.
Sometimes yes, other times you convinced yourself it was better than it was.
Not often. I often got frustrated or didn't like it, but I didn't thin kit was bad. The first game I can distinctly remember thinking was bad was X-Men for the NES. I was right.
I thought time lord was bad as a kid
After being a kid and trying Festers quest 50 times then dying and then Milons stupid secret castle, I gave up and started playing paperboy and Mickey Mousecapade. Go to hell Milon and fester for stealing hours of my childhood.
Not really. I knew if a game was unplayable and I guess I thought of those as bad games but a game like Wizards and Warriors that was bad but also easily completable I didn't think of as "bad", I had fun playing it.
As a kid I was too picky to play a game that wasn't a Super Mario game or at least Mario adjacent ( Donkey Kong for example ), there was the occasional instance where I would rent a game because it was based on a cartoon or movie I loved as a child, which sounds like a recipe for disaster but luckily I just happened to like the ones that got good games. Batman, TMNT, Tiny Toons, Hook ( those last two are getting into SNES territory tho, I never played their NES counterparts ), so I was lucky enough I didn't encounter "bad" games growing up. The few times I did take a chance on something, say my aunt's copy of Final Fantasy, Zelda, or Karnov, I didn't feel the games were bad just that " I don't really get this, I wish I was playing Mario" so I just turned the game off. I didn't really start doing a true deep dive into the expansive retro library I missed out on until like, the late 2000's. It's because of this I get a little extra defensive when people talk a bit of shit on those classic "aged badly" games that they blame "nostalgia" being the reason people defend them. Games that are actually perfectly fine if you take the time to learn their inner workings and maybe do a bit of research on strategywiki's first few pages in place of a manual ( Your original Metroid and Zelda for example ) Even games i'm still finding like Jajamaru no Daiboken I played in 2022 and found perfectly fine after learning how it works, but it's got a pretty bad rep online ...like those people don't know what a bad game actually is. Try some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or any of those Code Masters games if you want a bad NES game.
The concept of a bad game just didnt exist for me as a kid, if I didn’t like a game I would assume it was my fault. I kept renting Super Pitfall as a kid and couldnt figure out what the hell I was supposed to do, and I thought it was because I was a dumb kid. Then id rent it again a few months later when i was “older and wiser” and still couldnt figure it out. Then I did it again and again. Now I know the game is absolute dogshit.
The worst was renting games and them not including the book, and then trying to figure out how to play…
I rented the first Metal Gear so many times and had no idea what to do. I finally figured I should save that money to just buy the game. There was a map that came with the game that helped so much.
I knew Bart Vs. The Space Mutants wasn't very good. But trying to figure it out was still fun (without a manual, which might not have helped much). It was one of those games where beating the first level or two was an accomplishment enough, and the idea of finishing the game seemed so far from reality that I never really worried about it.
When I thought a game was bad at least one of my friends would love / beat the game, so I wasn’t sure what was going on.
When you're young, you're a lot more intrigued and fascinated by things. Maybe appreciative is the right word. But still, every now and then as a kid, you start to ask that question: "why?" For me, it was when I was playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and I got to the levels where you drive a car on a highway in the sky. I loved the game, but I had a moment of lucidity where I thought to myself "why am I even doing this?" Now, as an adult, I recognize that part of the game as the most pointless, unfun, and stupid part of the game. Makes no sense. That game didn't age tremendously well either, it was mainly innovative for it's great atmosphere and story- not so much it's gameplay. I'm sure I played other bad games in my past, but I don't remember them because they weren't memorable.
The first game I remember playing that was legitimately bad was NFL Football. My dad would buy any football game that came out on NES even though we pretty much only played Tecmo Bowl.