Games that are actually worse than you remember.

[gutsman004 | 83]

On 11/23/2019 at 11:35 PM, captmorgandrinker said:

I'll put you to the Pepsi Challenge on that one.  
I can rattle off a list of 100 Atari games and there's no way that 95 are terrible.   

Or for quick reference, pull a game list from any of the recent Atari Flashback units.   Maybe 25% of the games on there suck, tops.

Fair point. There were a lot I didn’t like though. Many were more fun than a lot of people will give credit to. 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

On 11/24/2019 at 12:35 AM, captmorgandrinker said:

I'll put you to the Pepsi Challenge on that one.  
I can rattle off a list of 100 Atari games and there's no way that 95 are terrible.   

Or for quick reference, pull a game list from any of the recent Atari Flashback units.   Maybe 25% of the games on there suck, tops.

You really have to chase the chuckwagon to find that 25% Basically anything made by Activision was great. Except Dragster. Even I will admit that's awful.

[mbd39 | 2,024]

6 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

You really have to chase the chuckwagon to find that 25% Basically anything made by Activision was great. Except Dragster. Even I will admit that's awful.

Dragster is a popular speed running game because runs are so fast.

https://www.speedrun.com/dragster

 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

3 minutes ago, mbd39 said:

Dragster is a popular speed running game because runs are so fast.

https://www.speedrun.com/dragster

 

I'm not surprised, but my main issue is that's the entire game. It may be the shortest game in history and from the looks of it 5.570 seconds is the fastest possible time.

Edited November 26, 2019 by Bearcat-Doug

[gutsman004 | 83]

Okay so I’ve played quite a bit of Mega Man X7 for the past several days and here are my thoughts revisiting it after not playing it for s long time.

it’s not as bad as my initial revisit,but it is still the worst game in the X series.

The music is good (as you would expect) and the ride armors you get to use are cool. The auto aim feature is cool and the glide feature with X’s leg armor is sweet as is Axl’s floating. Playing as any of the three Maverick hunters is fun although X and Axl are more enjoyable in my opinion.

There is definitely a learning curve to this game. The button layout is awkward and takes getting used to. While a few are pretty cool,most of the level designs are just weird. One thing that kills this game is the camera angle and limited movement of that. Some stages or parts of those stages you can rotate the camera for a better look and some you can’t. Often being able to rotate the camera would be super helpful but no dice and it makes gameplay awkward in some spots. What bothers me the most is not being able to move the camera to look up. 

While I do like most of the Maverick designs,most of the actual Maverick battles are more annoying than anything although fighting Vanishing Gungaroo and Tornado Tonion are pretty fun. 

Speaking of Mavericks,most of the voice actors for the Mavericks were great,which is offset by the voice actors for X,Zero,Signas,and Alia,which were absolutely atrocious.

The reploid rescue system was brought back althought it probably would have been better off had it not. The difficulty on rescuing them is skewed. Most of them are easy to rescue but some are very easily killed which results in an annoying game reset to try again. 

Overall,not a terrible game,but very flawed. 

 

[Alder | 243]

A Bug's Life on PS1. Most early 3d games can fall into the same category.

Also, Mario Paint. But only because of the mouse. Maybe mine's defective, but after decades of using an optical mouse, any imperfections with the ball mouse are magnified. 

[Control Issues | 18]

It's not a case of "worse than I remember" because I never was really that big of a fan.  But I never did get into Ocarina of Time.  First Zelda game I really enjoyed was WindWaker.  And yeah, I'm old enough to have played all the others when they were new.  

I think a lot of times, we feel games are worse than we remember because there are similar games that came long later that just did the same thing better.  So now we're used to that new way of doing things and going back is too difficult.  For example, I LOVED Tomb Raider when it first came out.  Played the heck out of it.  Bought the sequels...  but these days, there are so many 3D action adventure style games that do it so much better, that it really shines a light on the flaws of the original.  

Or Phantasy Star 2, which I recently played through.  It takes 22 button presses just to save a game.  That includes having to put in a name for the save file every single time, it could be a few more or less depending on your file name, but still... TWENTY TWO!  These days, there's auto-saving, or at the very least, just streamlined saving where it only takes four or five...  do you want to save?  yes.  which file?  this one. Okay to overwrite?  yes.  Save complete, press x to continue.  Or, if you wanted to heal more than one character in your party, now you can go to the menu, select the character, select the heal spell, select who you want to heal, heal them, then select another character and heal them, then select another, and heal them, then exit from the menus.  On PS2, get the menu up, select the character, select the spells, select the spell, select who you want to heal, heal them...  then the next button press backs you completely out of the menus so you have to go all the way through it each time you want to heal another character.  It's these little "quality of life" issues that make going back to some old school RPGs difficult.

The Suikoden series is like this.  If you play the first and second ones, it quickly becomes apparent how much they refined the menu system and buying things and inventory...  the rest of the game plays really pretty similar, but the way you actually play the game makes quite a difference in how much fun it is.  (IMO)

But for all their issues.  I still like playing them.  I spent 48 hours playing Phantasy Star 2 from beginning to end.  I'm not going to do it again any time soon, but I did have fun.  And then started up Phantasy Star III.  Who knows... maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment. 

[cj_robot | 542]

5 hours ago, Control Issues said:

It's these little "quality of life" issues that make going back to some old school RPGs difficult.

It's this particular issue that really made Earthbound almost intolerable for me. Saving your game, inventory management, even accessing the money you earn from battles are things that should be really simple, but are instead ridiculously annoying. Even back in 1995 those kinds of things were already pretty much figured out, but Earthbound seemed intent on mimicking the oldest of old-school RPGs in every facet.

I can't believe nobody ever mentions that stuff when they talk about Earthbound, because it drove me nuts.

[Inzoreno | 102]

Sonic 3D Blast. For some reason, I really enjoyed it as a kid and it was the Sonic game I played the most despite have 1, 2 and 3 (Not & Knuckles). Today, while I still think the music is good, that's about it. Sonic is way too damn slippery and it's really difficult to judge where to attack an enemy in the 3D isometric view.