No Accounting for Taste - Your Guilty Pleasures and Unpopular Favourites

[WavyGravy]

I feel like we all have those games where we like something, but we also know it's just us. I'm talking about a game that's reviewed poorly, generally disparaged, or is just otherwise unpopular, but it just scratches an itch for you. What are your SNES guilty pleasures, and what do they do for you?

For me, I feel like Jurassic Park seems to get a lot of flack. I actually really like the game and the way it's structured. There's some resource management, Zelda-like exploration with some run and gun mixed in there, and definitely some nice music and sound. I think it gets a worse rep than it deserves, although it is made into a far better game by using save states, as it is decently tough and long. Even the FPS segments are kinda neat if you can acclimate to the often single-figure framerate.

I'm also a staunch defender of Equinox, but unlike Jurassic Park, I can absolutely see why people don't like it. It's got wonderful graphics, a really cool "soundscape" approach to the OST, and it's responsive and runs well, but it has a major flaw: It's weird. You have to get to grips with isometric controls (which isn't helped by the fact that the game will use the perspective to create optical illusions on purpose), your health isn't health so much as "tries" to get through a room (including bosses!) perfectly, and the structure of every dungeon is sort of a key hunt. I absolutely love it, it's unironically one of my favourite games on the system, and I will absolutely never recommend it to anyone unless I find out that they really liked Solstice or something. Which is weird because I don't like Solstice, so maybe even that's not a good test.

What are some of your favourite SNES games that get a hard time?

[Wayler]

Asterix

Remember a time when companies got licenses to IPs and the result was always a generic platformer? This is exactly that game. I know I only like it because I'm a fan of the comic and it's fun to PAF enemies, even though the so-so hit detection makes it hard sometimes. Don't know if it released outside the PAL region. 

 

58 minutes ago, WavyGravy said:

I will absolutely never recommend it to anyone unless I find out that they really liked Solstice or something. Which is weird because I don't like Solstice, so maybe even that's not a good test.

Yea, it's not a good test. I love Solstice but never could get into Equinox, although it feels like there's a good game hiding inside it. 😀  The isometric view wasn't a problem but I really hated the rainbow car crash color palette. And just something in the structure of it all doesn't sit well with me. Maybe it's the things you pointed out. 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Wayler

[WavyGravy]

49 minutes ago, Wayler said:

Yea, it's not a good test. I love Solstice but never could get into Equinox, although it feels like there's a good game hiding inside it. 😀  The isometric view wasn't a problem but I really hated the rainbow car crash color palette. And just something in the structure of it all doesn't sit well with me. Maybe it's the things you pointed out. 

Yeah, I can definitely see that. The colours and graphic style are one of my favourite parts of the game, but I can definitely see why it would be divisive, as it's pretty out there. The boss battle theme is a banger, though, I will brook no dissent on that!

I'm going to put Ys 4: Mask of the Sun out there as well. I think it applies to Dawn of Ys and Ys 1&2 on the PCE, as well. The whole bump combat thing is pretty take-it-or-leave-it, and having the game inside that weird frame on the consoles is a pretty odd way to do things. I really enjoy them, though, especially the boss fights once you get magic in the mix.

[Punisher5.0]

Gotta be Revolution X for me. Lots of nostalgia with that one and I'll still play it maybe every other year or so.

 

 

[jeffythedragonslayer]

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

[Kirk_Johnston]

Rendering Ranger R2: It's not particularly popular, it's not particularly good, but it's a technical marvel on SNES, and it's a guilty pleasure for me because I like to celebrate it for that reason, even though it's not exactly great to play and I personally think its particular rendered visuals are honestly slightly fugly. I don't see many other people raving about it outside of its technical merits either.

Edited February 25, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[WavyGravy]

52 minutes ago, jeffythedragonslayer said:

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

That's an interesting one! From seeing it played, Mystic Quest always sort of struck me as a Game Boy game that escaped, if that makes sense. Not in a bad way, but simplified in the way that Game Boy games tended to be. What about it works for you?

[jeffythedragonslayer]

41 minutes ago, WavyGravy said:

What about it works for you?

It's hard to get lost and not see a poorly drawn cave opening (as in literally zero pixels wide) like on the mountain in Final Fantasy III (US) because you're on rails in the overworld map select screen.

Edited February 26, 2023 by jeffythedragonslayer

[Tanooki]

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest I would have never considered for this, but then again I remember when it came out all the advertising was for it to be basic so you learn how to handle JRPGs as they were relatively fresh new things had you not dabbled with FF1 or the Dragon Warrior titles more or less on NES.

 

I have a great suggestion though for this space, and I still own it.

Ultraman: Towards the Future: Yup, seriously.  In the early 90s Fox Kids as like the last of the blocks of stuff (11 or 11:30am) ran the TV show, it was a short syndication that had just 13 episodes here (and Japan) which they then hopped over to a short but a bit longer Ultraman Tiga to round out US airing rules.

Either way, somehow Ban Dai saw fit to release the SFC game here to the US, no real text to it to worry about so it was a quick and easy port of sorts to have out well in advance of Street Fighter II being made public knowledge.  Enjoying that program a lot I went and picked up the game at some sale at the time.  I guess where the issue is with this one, people just crap on it for being bad but anytime I've asked someone who gave it a try they dumped on it for the controls, that's it for the major issues.  The thing is they figured it should handle like the SF2, MK1, or Fatal Fury arcade titles and it most definitely doesn't. ...so therefore it sucks.   And yes if you want that it is awfully poor excuse for a fighting game.  BUT, if you go into it looking at it for what it is, a pair or 50ft+ call lumbering huge monsters having hand to hand combat, the rules change.  They're big, their motions are exaggerated, and as such they move slower or dash high into some air moves or slashes of one appendage over another.  That's how it is here.  Ultraman plays like the episodes of the show of which all the monsters are pulled from.  You basically use a series of kicks, a few punches, largely overdone diving face kicks to the enemy.  As you play a power meter grows as he absorbs power from the sun if I remember correctly.  That meter has 4 levels, within around 40 sec (of a 3min match) it hits max (LV4) and IF the monster has been beaten into submission (FINISH STATUS) you hit the button, blast off a LV4 strike, and they explode into atoms... just like on TV.

 

If you go into this as an interactive way to play the TV show fights without all the dubbed in ramblings of the humans and plot, and just go for the oversize combat it's a solid B title.  If you want a Capcom, Midway or SNK fighter it's a good D, you can do worse, but not by much.

[SlidellMan]

@WavyGravy I concur on the Super NES JP. So many people were so focused on its first-person segments that they were blind to its open world/sandbox. By the way, there is also a Save RAM patch on ROMhacking.net.

 

@Kirk_Johnston I wouldn't call Rendering Ranger a bad or even mediocre game, but merely punishingly difficult at times.

 

Mine:

Road Runner's Death Valley Rally: I know a lot of people have knocked this game for its inertial jumping and floaty controls, but I managed to take advantage of them.

 

Addams Family Values: I would not call this game terrible by any means, but the lack of proper Save RAM and the lightning attack tied to Fester's Ill-Health dampened the experience. Keith Tinman's excellent music is worth listening to at the very least.

 

Vortex: This was one game that was ahead of its time, and would have benefitted from a remake on the Gamecube or X-Box. Justin Scharvona's magnificent soundtrack is still great to this very day.

 

Spriggan Powered: Given Micronics' execrable track record, this game turned out far better than it had any right to be.

 

Castlevania Dracula X: I think this game got too much shit for the past twenty-or-so years just because it wasn't Rondo. It would have benefitted from having Super Castlevania IV's eight-directional whip, however.

 

Doom: I'm actually in the middle on this one. On one hand, I do agree that it ran slower than molasses. On the other, it had excellent renditions of Bobby Prince's soundtrack, as well as the most in terms of content. Randy Linden mentioned that he has plans to go back to this and add further optimizations.

 

Thunder Spirits: Granted, this wasn't bad all things considered. Of course, with the advent of FastROM/SA-1 hacks, I expect this to get that treatment.

[Tanooki]

That's a largely well done post.  From Vortex down I totally agree with it @SlidellMan Vortex had its problems largely being choppy but it's actually a decent title with a good idea there.  Spriggan, I owned this up until my 05 large forced selloff and I miss it, and that is on the nose micronics of all things making something that good makes you wonder if they fired their staff and contracted some coders with more than two brain cells to rub together as it's great, really great.

 

Dracula X I don't get it, didn't in the 90s, 00s, ever since.  I've chocked it largely up to two groups.  Sega console war warriors looking for a reason to be a bitch about it, and then the PCE owners/lovers who don't like it exists and love to take shots to prop up supposedly how much better their system is due to the disc (even if it's not and I'm a big PCE fan.)  The game point blank isn't Dracula X and the name fuckery is part of the pain, but in Japan it's XX and is sold as a side story to the PCE game as an independent title, but hey in the US two X's is one X short of a strip show.

 

Doom I'm not in the middle, it still blows me away.  The music is a fantastic take with the samples, nothing beats it but the original and in some cases may exceed it which says a lot.  The thing is, as slow as it may be due to an oversight by Randy at the time(which you said he's going to correct after learning a simple trick to nearly double it) the game is the most accurate home port of the old DOS original for stage design and totals until it just ended up being emulated with the BFG/Doom 3 collection years later in the 2000s.  The fact he got so many stages in there, accurately setup the maps, and kept so much of it intact while stuck in a 2MB space is incredible.

[WavyGravy]

@SlidellMan That's a damn good list. I have such fond memories of renting Road Runner from the video store as a kid, but I just can't get back into it these days. Vortex, I totally agree, there's a really cool game in there, but like Star Fox 2, most of the game's problems stem from it being on the SNES and it just can't handle it.
And I'm going to throw down what is probably a hot take: I think I like Dracula X as much or more than Bloodlines, but I'll throw in the caveat that I don't like Bloodlines a ton. Bloodlines' controls are a little loosey-goosey, the graphics are unappealing to me, the setting is weird, the theming is sort of off (gems instead of hearts etc.), it comes together to make the whole thing seem like store-brand Castlevania to me. Dracula X is competent, just very unremarkable, outside of what might be the worst final boss fight in a Castlevania game. It feels like an authentic Castlevania game, though. Rondo and SCV4 do give it quite the kicking, though.

[Kirk_Johnston]

5 hours ago, SlidellMan said:

Doom: I'm actually in the middle on this one. On one hand, I do agree that it ran slower than molasses. On the other, it had excellent renditions of Bobby Prince's soundtrack, as well as the most in terms of content. Randy Linden mentioned that he has plans to go back to this and add further optimizations.

Doom is a great example imo. Despite the hate it often gets now, it was utterly mind-blowing to see this running on a 16-bit console back in the day. None of the other consoles at the time had an fps even remotely on this level technically. And it's Doom, so we're already talking about one of the best fps games of all time in terms of classic gameplay and the like too. It was a huge deal for SNES to get this back in the day, and be the only home console that did. And, imo, it's still actually fun once you adjust to the slower frame-rate (and have the patch to allow strafing at the same time as moving--silly oversight on Randy there). Considered this was an actual '90s commercial game on SNES and not obsessing about judging it in the context of the gaming industry today, it's just as impressive to me as it ever was. Now, if Randy Linden and whomever else can double that frame-rate as they have talked about, I'd be more than interested to give that a go.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Wayler]

Wow, I'm surprised to see so many positive things being said of Dracula X. I hate that game with a passion. The difficulty is brutal because of the awful level design that accentuates Richter's poor controls. Bats and medusaheads and those long-speared dudes everywhere and in places where you are bound to get hit. It's just not fun to play and a huge stepback from SCIV. 

[Kirk_Johnston]

49 minutes ago, Wayler said:

Wow, I'm surprised to see so many positive things being said of Dracula X. I hate that game with a passion. The difficulty is brutal because of the awful level design that accentuates Richter's poor controls. Bats and medusaheads and those long-speared dudes everywhere and in places where you are bound to get hit. It's just not fun to play and a huge stepback from SCIV. 

The thing I hate about X most is just the ugly [imo] almost blurry-watercolor look to most of the pixel art. I really wish they'd just stuck with the original gorgeous [imo] PC Engine pixel art. For me personally, that would have made all the difference.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[SlidellMan]

I wanted to mention this about the Super NES version of Doom: Randy Linden also posted the source on Github.

[Tanooki]

Uhh Dracula X is hard, it's made to be a challenge like the original or Castlevania III, not an easy remaster and expansion that SCV4 was playing off the original.

 

Randy was good posting that source I saw when he did that, and that's when someone found out he glitched decades ago and had done one style to display the visuals, when a couple bytes of code could have been swapped and nearly doubled it which blew him away he made that oversight.  What I don't get in the slightest, if this works, and surely it does, WTF with not releasing it on romhacking.net?!  I think a good many would be pleased to patch that sucker and feel the difference, honestly really, you could also patch in the slight Japanese update while you're at it and allow whatever difficulty to play any of the 3 missions.

 

It's a shame there was no room for saving or a password, but the rest can be addressed in the limited room left.

[newtmonkey]

I must agree with Jurassic Park.  I got that as a present back in the day during/after the hype for the movie, and I was pleasantly surprised.  It's got a really fantastic soundtrack, and the (admittedly poor) FPS sections help break the action up nicely.  I never got anywhere close to beating this one, but I enjoyed exploring the world.

 

It really suffers for not having a password system, though.

 

People seem to really dislike Xardion, but that's another one I loved back in the day (though I did complete this one).  It's a very short game, which is maybe one reason why it's so disliked... I am pretty certain I finished it over a weekend.  It's a very cool concept, though, and it's too bad it didn't do well enough to get a much larger sequel.

[Wayler]

13 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Uhh Dracula X is hard, it's made to be a challenge like the original or Castlevania III, not an easy remaster and expansion that SCV4 was playing off the original.

This was the problem for me in a big way. I don't mind a hard game as long as the challenge is fair and the hits and deaths are the result of the player. But I felt Dracula X went crazy balls on the game design in accentuating Richter's deficiencies and bombarding the player with endless flying enemies. And the removal of the grace period after a hit feels so cheap. But I suppose the frustrating difficulty level is there to pad the runtime of the game, which is criminally short for a 1995 title.

 

I guess this just "wasn't for me".

[newtmonkey]

I love the NES Castlevanias (even II), but cannot stand Dracula X.  I rented it back in the day and hated it.  I was expecting a sequel to SCIV, but it felt like a massive step down in nearly every way... graphics, controls, everything.  Why were the graphics so plain?  What happened to the glorious multi-layer scrolling from SCIV?  I've tried revisiting the game several times since then, but it's just not interesting.

 

The music is pretty good though.

Edited February 28, 2023 by newtmonkey

[Tanooki]

@Wayler I could see that I guess for shortness, it's an 8bit era short game stage wise because as a sidestory it doesn't do the same.  I don't think it's that short though as it has 7 (technically 9 due to the sub-stages) levels to take down.  There's a pretty good comparative writeup on the thing.  They(it and PCE) clearly  have the similar title and roots, but also have some stark changes that really help the game stand on its own, and even on the fandom sites around say it's one of the hardest of the franchise if not the nastiest so I can see how it's a turnoff.  I sure as hell can't finish it, not now, in the 90s I could.  I've just happened to be smart enough to buy it that year it came out and held onto it as the toxic pricing now I wouldn't touch anything but a bootleg, emulator, or a flash kit at this rate.

 

https://castlevania.fandom.com/wiki/Castlevania:_Dracula_X

[Atariboy]

I've never seen much love for Super Off-Road: The Baja or The Hunt for Red October, but I've been a fan of both since back in the day.

[Kirk_Johnston]

23 minutes ago, Atariboy said:

I've never seen much love for Super Off-Road: The Baja or The Hunt for Red October, but I've been a fan of both since back in the day.

I don't think it plays particularly good or bad, but Baja is definitely a bit of a technical showcase. It could just about pass for an early Saturn or PlayStation games at times with that almost texture polygon look on the courses imo:

 

 

If the vehicles had a few more animation frames, and they put a little more artistic effort into some of the sky and hill backgrounds (they looks a bit half-assed and fugly imo), I think it would have totally convinced a bunch of people it was running on one of those consoles. And, honestly, I think having those extra frames of animation on the vehicles would have made people feel like the game was running smoother too.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[SlidellMan]

I also have to mention this about Jurassic Park: The reason why it has no password or save system is due to how the game's sprites were programmed. By the way, Stuart K Reilly of Working Man Games also liked it. Now for a few more.

 

Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions: While I never did figure out the save system, but for a Looney Tunes run-&-gun, it isn't bad in a concrete, nuts-and-bolts way. You would have to do some exploration if you want to get enough money for fuel and ammo, however.

 

Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday: I will say that the gameplay of this game is as generic as you can get. On the other hand, what Dark Technologies/Phoenix Interactive did with its randomly-loading tilesets was quite clever, and I wish that more games would implement that.

 

Aero the Acro-Bat: This may not be one of the best game on this, but I like its music. The flaws with the level design and camera are nothing that ROM hacking can't fix.

 

Bugs Bunny in Rabbit Rampage: Yeah, this game took some getting used to with having to hold Y in order to stomp on enemies. Of course, ICOM Simulations managed to capture the feel of Jones-era Looney Toons. Your mileage may vary on this and the previous three.

[Wayler]

1 hour ago, SlidellMan said:

I also have to mention this about Jurassic Park: The reason why it has no password or save system is due to how the game's sprites were programmed.

I vaguely remember something about this and I guess I could also look it up but could you elaborate on this further. Sounds so weird.