NES games that disappointed you

[schuwalker]

20 minutes ago, Gemintronic said:

Speaking of games with random mysterious unexplained objectives:

 

Athena was already a sub par platforming experience.. THEN you get stuck with an invincible end boss unless you collect certain hidden things.  The game gets so tough though I just thought I had to "git gud" so I spent hours trying to defeat the last boss!

I believe that was Micronics that made that one too...

[Tanooki]

Micronics was largely an NES dumpster fire of failure, even when they got it pretty close enough to right, they cheapened the look/sounds of the games just enough to where you know their art department and coders were sub-par as the company was as more could have been done (like Ghosts n Goblins.)

[zetastrike]

From the POV of someone exploring the library years after the fact, Metal Storm can go straight into the fire.  I was very excited to try it after seeing screenshots, I love 80s Japanese mechanical designs, I saw the parallax and was very impressed.  Then I played it.  Watching yourself die over and over again while struggling with controls and needing to plan your moves is never a fun experience.  I guess I wanted it to be more Mega Man like, but that's just not what it is.

[Game&Watch]

Ninja Turtles, that was way too hard, and bit just as a kid--that game is a nightmare in terms of difficulty. Too bad, because there's a good game buried there.

[glazball]

Dragon Power because... well, have you played it??  The box art looked decent enough, only to get it home to discover you play as a silly monkey boy and the gameplay is completely unsatisfying.

 

One bullet I luckily dodged was Urban Champion, mentioned above.  I clearly remember being at Target as a kid holding it and Karate Champ in my hands trying to decide which to get.  I went with Karate Champ, which was only slightly better.  Neither aged particularly well.

[Tanooki]

Dragon Power is Dragon Ball, neutered, and messed with in many ways  beyond just censoring out Goku and his adventure.

[Cynicaster]

On NES I remember being quite disappointed by virtually all arcade ports from roughly '88 - maybe '89 - onward. 

 

There was a fairly brief period of time in the early-to-mid 80s where the NES was able to support very nice home versions of arcade games.  The most faithful ports are probably the ones that were popular in arcades a few years before coming to NES (think Star Force and games like that).  There were also examples of nice ports that arrived not too long after being popular in arcades (highlights for me were 1943; Bubble Bobble; Konami hits like Contra, Jackal, and Rush N Attack). 

 

But by the end of the 80s - and especially into the 90s - the "hot" new arcade games of the day were just too divergent from the NES in hardware.  The result was compromise-ridden, watered-down, underwhelming ports, kind of analogous to what we had seen on the 2600 several years prior when its reach started to exceed its grasp.  Someone mentioned NARC - that is a very good example among many (for me, others include: Bad Dudes, Klax, Robocop, Smash TV, Afterburner).  Even if some of those ports are "pretty decent considering the limitations of the hardware" that's kind of beside the point because it offers no consolation; the games still pale in comparison to the arcade experience, which created the disappointment factor for me.   

 

ETA: this widening gap between arcade experience and home was the prime driving factor behind me emptying my bank account to buy a Genesis in '91.  I was salivating over arcade ports of Altered Beast, Golden Axe, After Burner II, Ghouls N Ghosts, etc. and the system did not disappoint.  

Edited December 10, 2021 by Cynicaster

[4300]

Festers quest and Rambo immediately come to mind.  Those games were frustratingly awful,  even as a kid. 

[jeremiahjt]

On 12/8/2021 at 9:43 AM, wongojack said:

These comments make me realize that I have never seriously tried to play Super Pitfall.  I know the point of this thread is to tell me to stay away, but maybe I'll give it a try?

I rented it as a kid, well because it was Pitfall, and was not impressed.  I always wanted to beat it though.  Within the last year or two I went through it to the end.  With a guide handy there is some fun to be had, but I cannot imagine beating that game without a guide.  Even if you map everything and realize that jumping in random spots makes things appear how could you ever figure out jumping into that bird.

[mbd39]

13 minutes ago, jeremiahjt said:

I rented it as a kid, well because it was Pitfall, and was not impressed.  I always wanted to beat it though.  Within the last year or two I went through it to the end.  With a guide handy there is some fun to be had, but I cannot imagine beating that game without a guide.  Even if you map everything and realize that jumping in random spots makes things appear how could you ever figure out jumping into that bird.

 

I've encountered people who claim to have beaten it without a guide. I'm with you, I don't understand how it's possible. Game is way too cryptic.

[Frozone212]

Mylon's secret castle and Kung Fu can go straight to hell.

[crade]

Uncanny X-Men was the worst..  How come GI-Joe and Batman had good companies license them and my favorite comic gets frickin LJN

[+Razzie.P]

On 4/4/2022 at 3:41 PM, crade said:

Uncanny X-Men was the worst..  How come GI-Joe and Batman had good companies license them and my favorite comic gets frickin LJN

As a fan of Conan The Barbarian, I completely understand.

 

[+FujiSkunk]

On 9/23/2021 at 9:47 AM, NE146 said:

Oh speaking of disappointing NES games I got another. Donkey Kong. It was pretty baffling at the time popping that in hoping for finally a 'good' version of Donkey Kong that you knew your NES could do, only to realize that as good as it looked, it was still half-baked with missing animations and no 2nd stage/conveyer belts.

I'm just now reading this thread, so I'm late to the punch, but I have to second Donkey Kong and also throw in Mario Bros.  How the company that made the arcade games and the more-than-capable home hardware couldn't also make accurate ports of those games on that hardware still mystifies me.  Donkey Kong Jr. fared better, though it still baffled American players who weren't used to seeing all four screens in the very first level.

 

I wasn't an NES owner back in the day, trying my best to stick with Atari and the 7800, so of course the real disappointment for me here was how Atari used creative license interpretation to port games from their fiercest competitor to their own console, and then based those ports on the inferior NES versions!

[Joe C.]

On 3/6/2022 at 5:11 PM, Frozone212 said:

Mylon's secret castle and Kung Fu can go straight to hell.

Bummer, I love both of these games. Milon's can be very frustrating though.

[Frozone212]

Kung fu is either hit or miss. I never liked it. I jumped ship to Sonic as soon as I was able. Felt too simplistic and yet hard as hell.

[MaximRecoil]

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

 

My very first experience with a Nintendo was in 1986 at my cousin Mike's house. He was the first person I knew to get one and one of the games he had for it was Excitebike. When I saw that cartridge sitting on his shelf I wanted to try it immediately, because I'd been playing Vs. Excitebike at the arcade for about a year at that point, since before I or most anyone else in the US had even heard of a Nintendo console. When I started playing it on Mike's Nintendo I was amazed, because the graphics, sound, and gameplay were all identical to the arcade machine. That was the first time I'd ever played a console game that was even close to its arcade counterpart, let alone identical. This gave me an inflated sense of the Nintendo's capabilities, i.e., I figured if they could do that for one arcade game, they could do it for any arcade game. What I didn't realize at the time was that the Vs. Excitebike arcade game was running on NES/Famicom architecture in the first place, so the NES version wasn't even a port, but rather, it was the original version and the arcade version was just an official hack.

 

I started playing Punch-Out in the arcade when it was a brand new game in 1984, and I was immediately hooked on it. Then in early 1987 Super Punch-Out showed up at a different arcade and I liked it even better than PO, and to this day it's still my all-time favorite arcade game, and it was the first arcade machine I ever bought (in 2005).

 

In late '87 or early '88, a kid I went to school with named Ryan said he just got a Nintendo game named "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out." He told me because I was known for playing Super Punch-Out at the arcade, and he wanted me to come over to his house after school, thinking I could help him play his new game better.

 

Based on my misconception that arose from playing Excitebike on the NES, I was expecting great things as I walked with Ryan to his house on that bitter cold Maine winter day. I wasn't sure how the game would deal with only having one screen rather than two, but I expected graphics, sound, and gameplay to be identical to arcade PO/SPO. What a huge disappointment when I actually saw the game. Instead of the big opponent's sprites, which could get even bigger due to the sprite scaling capability of the arcade hardware, the MTPO opponents were tiny, and had no shading:

 

And instead of the normal-sized see-through wire-frame playable character, there was "Little Mac," who appeared to be a 2' tall, 15-pound dwarf. Instead of an announcer with a realistic sounding human voice, there was an out-of-place and out-of-proportion Mario who said something that sounded like "wah wah wah." The graphics and sound downgrades weren't even the worst part though; I hated the gameplay changes. Instead of your gloves staying where you put them and blocking automatically, your gloves defaulted to "down," and you had to hold up on the D-pad to punch high, and you had to, counterintuitively, press down to block high. Then there were the ridiculous hearts and stars, neither of which have anything to do with the two arcade games; the multiple rounds which mean you potentially have to knock your opponent down up to 7 times before he stays down; having to button-mash to get up from a knockdown; the unskippable bike riding / running scenes; the reduced number of frames of animation in general, and so on.

 

I was far more impressed with Super Punch-Out for the Super Nintendo when I first played it in 1995. My only complaint was that your gloves defaulted to "down" like in MTPO, but at least they blocked automatically like they should, i.e., if your gloves are already down, covering your gut, why should you have to do anything beyond that to block a low punch? Other than that, it was on par with arcade SPO. The graphics were even technically improved over the arcade versions, though I still prefer the look of the arcade graphics.

 

My next disappointment was with Double Dragon, which again was due to it being a drastic downgrade from the arcade version, which I played a lot. It wasn't as big of a disappointment though, because arcade DD wasn't my all-time favorite game, and my expectations of the NES had already been drastically lowered due to the MTPO fiasco.

Edited November 2, 2022 by MaximRecoil

[+wongojack]

2 hours ago, MaximRecoil said:

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

 

My very first experience with a Nintendo was in 1986 at my cousin Mike's house. He was the first person I knew to get one and one of the games he had for it was Excitebike. When I saw that cartridge sitting on his shelf I wanted to try it immediately, because I'd been playing Vs. Excitebike at the arcade for about a year at that point, since before I or most anyone else in the US had even heard of a Nintendo console. When I started playing it on Mike's Nintendo I was amazed, because the graphics, sound, and gameplay were all identical to the arcade machine. That was the first time I'd ever played a console game that was even close to its arcade counterpart, let alone identical. This gave me an inflated sense of the Nintendo's capabilities, i.e., I figured if they could do that for one arcade game, they could do it for any arcade game. What I didn't realize at the time was that the Vs. Excitebike arcade game was running on NES/Famicom architecture in the first place, so the NES version wasn't even a port, but rather, it was the original version and the arcade version was just an official hack.

 

I started playing Punch-Out in the arcade when it was a brand new game in 1984, and I was immediately hooked on it. Then in early 1987 Super Punch-Out showed up at a different arcade and I liked it even better than PO, and to this day it's still my all-time favorite arcade game, and it was the first arcade machine I ever bought (in 2005).

 

In late '87 or early '88, a kid I went to school with named Ryan said he just got a Nintendo game named "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out." He told me because I was known for playing Super Punch-Out at the arcade, and he wanted me to come over to his house after school, thinking I could help him play his new game better.

 

Based on my misconception that arose from playing Excitebike on the NES, I was expecting great things as I walked with Ryan to his house on that bitter cold Maine winter day. I wasn't sure how the game would deal with only having one screen rather than two, but I expected graphics, sound, and gameplay to be identical to arcade PO/SPO. What a huge disappointment when I actually saw the game. Instead of the big opponent's sprites, which could get even bigger due to the sprite scaling capability of the arcade hardware, the MTPO opponents were tiny, and had no shading:

 

And instead of the normal-sized see-through wire-frame playable character, there was "Little Mac," who appeared to be a 2' tall, 15-pound dwarf. Instead of an announcer with a realistic sounding human voice, there was an out-of-place and out-of-proportion Mario who said something that sounded like "wah wah wah." The graphics and sound downgrades weren't even the worst part though; I hated the gameplay changes. Instead of your gloves staying where you put them and blocking automatically, your gloves defaulted to "down," and you had to hold up on the D-pad to punch high, and you had to, counterintuitively, press down to block high. Then there were the ridiculous hearts and stars, neither of which have anything to do with the two arcade games; the multiple rounds which mean you potentially have to knock your opponent down up to 7 times before he stays down; having to button-mash to get up from a knockdown; the unskippable bike riding / running scenes; the reduced number of frames of animation in general, and so on.

 

I was far more impressed with Super Punch-Out for the Super Nintendo when I first played it in 1995. My only complaint was that your gloves defaulted to "down" like in MTPO, but at least they blocked automatically like they should, i.e., if your gloves are already down, covering your gut, why should you have to do anything beyond that to block a low punch? Other than that, it was on par with arcade SPO. The graphics were even technically improved over the arcade versions, though I still prefer the look of the arcade graphics.

 

My next disappointment was with Double Dragon, which again was due to it being a drastic downgrade from the arcade version, which I played a lot. It wasn't as big of a disappointment though, because arcade DD wasn't my all-time favorite game, and my expectations of the NES had already been drastically lowered due to the MTPO fiasco.

Great post - don't ever lose that rage!

[MaximRecoil]

18 minutes ago, wongojack said:

don't ever lose that rage!

What rage? I was disappointed (which is what this thread is about), not in a rage. I've owned MTPO now for quite a few years, and have beaten it once. It's not a bad game, but I still much prefer the arcade and SNES versions. I like it better than the Wii version though, which I played one time about 7 years ago for long enough to beat it, and never played it again.

Edited November 2, 2022 by MaximRecoil

[mbd39]

It isn't fair to expect NES Punch-Out to look and play just like the arcade. I was a kid at the time and I didn't expect home games to match the arcade, and it didn't bother me as long as the gameplay was still there.

 

I think MTPO is great for an 8-bit NES game, with the large and well animated characters. That the main character is so small gives it an even greater sense of playing as the underdog. It's gone down as being much more popular and beloved than the original arcade so history agrees with me.

 

As for Double Dragon, the worst part is probably the missing co-op, but it plays fine as a one player game. Double Dragon 2 fixed htat.

 

EDIT: SNES Super Punch-Out is underrated. I like it just as much as the NES game, maybe more. Others are disappointed that it isn't closer to MTPO.

Edited November 2, 2022 by mbd39

[+wongojack]

1 hour ago, MaximRecoil said:

What rage? I was disappointed (which is what this thread is about), not in a rage. I've owned MTPO now for quite a few years, and have beaten it once. It's not a bad game, but I still much prefer the arcade and SNES versions. I like it better than the Wii version though, which I played one time about 7 years ago for long enough to beat it, and never played it again.

I leveled you up to RAGE - just go with it for the sake of drama.

[Tanooki]

1 hour ago, mbd39 said:

It isn't fair to expect NES Punch-Out to look and play just like the arcade. I was a kid at the time and I didn't expect home games to match the arcade, and it didn't bother me as long as the gameplay was still there.

 

I think MTPO is great for an 8-bit NES game, with the large and well animated characters. That the main character is so small gives it an even greater sense of playing as the underdog. It's gone down as being much more popular and beloved than the original arcade so history agrees with me.

 

As for Double Dragon, the worst part is probably the missing co-op, but it plays fine as a one player game. Double Dragon 2 fixed htat.

 

EDIT: SNES Super Punch-Out is underrated. I like it just as much as the NES game, maybe more. Others are disappointed that it isn't closer to MTPO.

I was just going to leave the confused icon, but yeah, pretty much this.  Anyone disappointed in the NES game because of the arcade even in 87/88 when it came out in mass to stores really needed to have a reality check, it's a home console vs a more powerful dual crt arcade game with custom hardware meant for it.  That's like getting upset that your NES can't make TMNT2 a perfect copy, or why can't SNES truly do Killer Instinct?  The game had to be adapted not only to the limits of the internal hardware which was given a one off special MMC2 special chip to allow those large and animated sprites as it is, but also not having the same setup as the arcade you adapt to the d-pad 2 button solution best you can.  I mean I get the complaints, but don't see how someone could be disappointed so much to write all that either even more.

 

Double Dragon though, argh... I have it, got it back recently, I just pretend it's a unique game using similar names/look...because it is, and then it's fine.  So in the end it's good, but not great, and sucks if you like 2P as that's out.

 

Up side, 4 years ago PO and SPO were added to the switch for $8 each, totally so worth it.

[MaximRecoil]

2 hours ago, mbd39 said:

It isn't fair to expect NES Punch-Out to look and play just like the arcade. I was a kid at the time and I didn't expect home games to match the arcade, and it didn't bother me as long as the gameplay was still there.

 

I already wrote about why I expected it to look and play just like the arcade, i.e., Excitebike did, so why couldn't any other arcade game? I didn't know anything about computer hardware when I was 11 and 12. I knew from experience that previous consoles couldn't match arcade games, but the Nintendo was brand new to the US at the time, and the first game I played on it was a perfect match for the arcade game I'd been playing for the past year or so (Vs. Excitebike wasn't running on true arcade hardware, but I had no way of knowing that at the time).

 

Also, the gameplay wasn't there, which I also wrote about in my previous post. And that wasn't because of any hardware limitations, it was because they just wanted to re-imagine the gameplay.

 

Quote

I think MTPO is great for an 8-bit NES game, with the large and well animated characters. That the main character is so small gives it an even greater sense of playing as the underdog.

 

Being somewhat smaller than the opponent is one thing (like Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago), but MTPO takes it well into the realm of absurdity. "Little Mac" is literally about the size of one of the larger opponent's legs, so maybe 2½ or 3 feet tall; about the size of a toddler.

 

Quote

It's gone down as being much more popular and beloved than the original arcade so history agrees with me.

 

How many of those kids back then even played arcade PO and/or SPO, and how often? Arcade games are in a different category than home console games. But either way, I've never taken popularity into consideration when deciding what I like or don't like.

Edited November 2, 2022 by MaximRecoil

[MrTrust]

Kemco's Superman was pretty brutal.

[mbd39]

2 minutes ago, MaximRecoil said:

 

I already wrote about why I expected it to look and play just like the arcade, i.e., Excitebike did, so why couldn't any other arcade game? I didn't know anything about computer hardware when I was 11 and 12. I knew from experience that previous consoles couldn't match arcade games, but the Nintendo was brand new to the US at the time, and the first game I played on it was a perfect match for the arcade game I'd been playing for the past year or so (Vs. Excitebike wasn't running on true arcade hardware, but I had no way of knowing that at the time).

 

Also, the gameplay wasn't there, which I also wrote about in my previous post. And that wasn't because of any hardware limitations, it was because they just wanted to re-imagine the gameplay.

 

[quote]I think MTPO is great for an 8-bit NES game, with the large and well animated characters. That the main character is so small gives it an even greater sense of playing as the underdog.[/quote]

 

Being somewhat smaller than the opponent is one thing (like Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago), but MTPO takes it well into the realm of absurdity. "Little Mac" is literally about the size of one of the larger opponent's legs, so maybe 2½ or 3 feet tall; about the size of a toddler.

 

 

It's easy to nitpick, but compare Mike Tyson's Punch-Out to other 8-bit boxing games. If you want more "realistic" you can play Ring King, but I never thought it was all that much fun.

 

I think the overall goofiness such as Little Mac's short stature and Mario as referee is part of the charm. And there's kind of a story there with the underdog winning championships and then the dream fight with Mike Tyson, which I think is also an improvement over the arcade where you're a generic boxer that just keeps fighting six guys on a loop.

 

Overall it probably depends on what you're more used to. I'm old enough so that I was around for the original arcade, but I never played it much, so I was more open to MTPO.