What supposed "bad" games do you like?

[zzip]

On 1/26/2024 at 1:33 PM, Razzie.P said:

I've been playing through Evil West, and parts of it remind me of The Order (PS4).    I really enjoyed my playthrough of that one, but if I remember right, it was kinda considered a bit of a turd.

Oh yeah The Order 1886-   The community reaction to that was something like "I hate this game, and I demand a sequel!!"  

 

Really the main complaint was that the game was too short--   you could beat it in 6-hours or something.   But otherwise it was fine-  beautiful graphics, great atmosphere.

[dudeguy]

I also wanna say one thing ... sports games are continually shit on over and over again. I'm not a diehard sports fan. I don't remember the last time I sat and watching a full game of anything from start to finish. but I've always loved the simplicity of the sports games. something about whacking a ball (golf/baseball/tennis) just feels right, whether it's IRL or in a game. hell I'd rather play Golf on the NES than Chrono Trigger.

 

Racing games are the second most disliked genre, the cousin to sports games. You rarely meet anyone who says their favorite game is {racing games} but I think I'm one of the few. I've spent more hours playing Gran Turismo 3 than I think any game I ever played. those endurance races had me going all night. there was no "B-spec" mode where you let the computer play. no rewind feature. and you had to pass the license test to get into the race. now that's hardcore. today's games are soft. id say it's more favorite game of all time

[scifidude79]

10 hours ago, dudeguy said:

I also wanna say one thing ... sports games are continually shit on over and over again. I'm not a diehard sports fan. I don't remember the last time I sat and watching a full game of anything from start to finish. but I've always loved the simplicity of the sports games. something about whacking a ball (golf/baseball/tennis) just feels right, whether it's IRL or in a game. hell I'd rather play Golf on the NES than Chrono Trigger.

 

Racing games are the second most disliked genre, the cousin to sports games. You rarely meet anyone who says their favorite game is {racing games} but I think I'm one of the few. I've spent more hours playing Gran Turismo 3 than I think any game I ever played. those endurance races had me going all night. there was no "B-spec" mode where you let the computer play. no rewind feature. and you had to pass the license test to get into the race. now that's hardcore. today's games are soft. id say it's more favorite game of all time

I'm not a big sports fan, but I love racing games. I don't know why they get crapped on as much as they do. If they aren't an "ultra realistic" simulation, then they get crapped on for being not realistic enough. Then, if they go with the über realism, then they get crapped on for being too difficult. It's like these gaming companies can't win. I bought Gran Turismo 7 slightly before I got my PS5. Even on the PS4, I found it to be really enjoyable. But then I looked online and saw people complaining that it was "too realistic." (aka, too hard) I'm like: "did they skip every game from GT3 through 6 or what?" GT3 is where that series switched from arcade style racing to more realistic sim racing.

 

Sports games that release annually tend to get low ratings because many times they're just the same game re-released that year with roster updates. People complain that they don't add enough new features but, when they do add new features, people complain that they don't like the new features.

 

Honestly, game companies that make sports titles really can't win. But, they make them because they're so profitable. Those same people who complain about annual sports titles still buy them.

[BydoEmpire]

10 Yard Fight on the NES

[Tanooki]

I find the usual suspects for a solid sports game are those that are not licensed, or not at least fully licensed.  The outright card carrying stuff is rightly dumped on because you can only do so much other than roster updates, then charge a full price game for window dressing and stat changes...and deserves it.  But then you have your Wii Sports, your Mario (Sport name goes here), HOt Shots Golf, Baseball Stars, Neo Turf Masters, or with racing your karts and f-zero style stuff people love ...they're not slammed.

[GiygasKaz]

Virtual Hydlide's bizzare and singular atmosphere as one of those surreal early 3D titles always appealed to me despite the obvious flaws. The Hydlide franchise in general seems to have an unwarranted bad reputation.

[dudeguy]

On 1/30/2024 at 8:57 AM, Tanooki said:

I find the usual suspects for a solid sports game are those that are not licensed, or not at least fully licensed.  The outright card carrying stuff is rightly dumped on because you can only do so much other than roster updates, then charge a full price game for window dressing and stat changes...and deserves it.  But then you have your Wii Sports, your Mario (Sport name goes here), HOt Shots Golf, Baseball Stars, Neo Turf Masters, or with racing your karts and f-zero style stuff people love ...they're not slammed.

yeah I don't really care if the characters are real or fake. in the NES baseball games you basically had "black guy", "white guy," "Hispanic guy" you couldn't see their faces. and somehow this was enough for us.

[Rhomaios]

On 1/5/2024 at 10:46 PM, Razzie.P said:

Tomcat Alley

  I had several days of fun with this as a kid. A friend had it and we played it for the novelty factor, I think. It still holds a soft spot in my heart, but you know, there's a reason we leapt back into Genesis classics like Mortal Kombat, Golden Axe II, and Crue Ball.

 

Oh, yeah, that's my addition to this thread: Crue Ball is fun, and Motley Crue tunes lick!

 

I think another Genesis game that I love that no one else did was WWF: Royal Rumble. Way better on the Genesis, in my youthful mind, than the SNES one, too. Undertaker ruled!

On 1/6/2024 at 2:32 AM, Steven Pendleton said:

Metroid II, which is a great game, not a bad one.

I didn't realize this one was supposed to be bad. It's obviously not anywhere near Metroid or Super Metroid, but it's a great Game Boy game imo. I'd rather play this than the railroaded Metroid Fusion.

[scifidude79]

11 hours ago, dudeguy said:

yeah I don't really care if the characters are real or fake. in the NES baseball games you basically had "black guy", "white guy," "Hispanic guy" you couldn't see their faces. and somehow this was enough for us.

Yeah, people get so hung up about seeing their favorite players in the game. Is it that important? Probably not. It got so bad that EA Sports lost their license for NCAA Football due to using players' likenesses, which was a violation of their license. Now, I'm not sad for EA, everyone knows they do shady stuff all the time, this is just one case of them getting proper punishment for it. However, I used to watch American football and I liked the NCAA Football games. But, they were taken away over some petty BS to insist on having players' likenesses in the game. 🙄

[Tanooki]

@Rhomaios Well to many back then it was pretty divisive and that stuck around.  When it showed up for the holiday season in 1991 it looked great and people were all over that just like the Kid Icarus sequel along side.  The problem was because of the lack of color it made it far harder not to just get spun around confused in circles, which is why I mentioned the map issue on page1.  Another was just it was well different than the first and a lot of it was hot/cold on who you asked and I guess to some it felt too linear because of the section by section nature with a lot of regional backtracking not being as open as the first.  It's just an odd one, not a bad game, but it did turn off people.  TUrned me off eventually that I just won't do it anymore but I did finish in the last time.  I kept going in circles way too much and some textures on the old DMG just didn't look usable or walkable, it was just almost too visually busy for the lack of color.

[Video]

On sports, I don't care for the uber realistic. Most I love are bs in some way, from rbi with instant homeruns, or the ball busting your tv, lol, or NBA jam where you can be Clinton and dunk from across the court, while on fire, or world cup where you can do a back flip kick the ball knocking the goalie into orbit. I love these games, we don't need the updated roster, or in some cases good graphics, just fun, sometimes quirky play elements.

 

On racers, semi real. The need for speed series is one of my favorite of all time. I don't mind 'hard' as long as I can realistically improve to the point of being a contender. Atari is wild on racers, Atari karts, club drive, hard driven, all great games, that have decent physics, and realistic (for their time) graphics, but aren't a Strait forward racer. Driving, but not necessarily racing, smugglers run is one of my favorites, combat stuff like revolt or twisted metal. Really, about anything goes.

[scifidude79]

2 hours ago, Video said:

On sports, I don't care for the uber realistic. Most I love are bs in some way, from rbi with instant homeruns, or the ball busting your tv, lol, or NBA jam where you can be Clinton and dunk from across the court, while on fire, or world cup where you can do a back flip kick the ball knocking the goalie into orbit. I love these games, we don't need the updated roster, or in some cases good graphics, just fun, sometimes quirky play elements.

 

On racers, semi real. The need for speed series is one of my favorite of all time. I don't mind 'hard' as long as I can realistically improve to the point of being a contender. Atari is wild on racers, Atari karts, club drive, hard driven, all great games, that have decent physics, and realistic (for their time) graphics, but aren't a Strait forward racer. Driving, but not necessarily racing, smugglers run is one of my favorites, combat stuff like revolt or twisted metal. Really, about anything goes.

I agree on sports games. I think Tecmo Bowl for the NES is still one of the best football games ever. And it's definitely got great graphics, by 1980s standards. The playbook is four offensive and four defensive plays. And, like that exploit you were talking about with Clinton in NBA Jam, you could play as the Raiders in the original Tecmo Bowl and use Bo Jackson, who could get 1000 yards in a game and was basically unstoppable. (Bo knows football) Who needs realism when you can have that kind of fun? 😁

 

For racing, I like a mix. I'll do super realistic games like Gran Turismo 7, but I also love a good arcade racing game or a kart racer. It depends what I'm in the mood for.

[CapitanClassic]

16 minutes ago, scifidude79 said:

I think Tecmo Bowl for the NES is still one of the best football games ever. And it's definitely got great graphics, by 1980s standards. The playbook is four offensive and four defensive plays.

That's technically Tecmo Super Bowl, the sequel. The original only had 4 total plays, the sequel had 8 total (4 Pass / 4 Run) and a customisable playbook.

 

But you can have the best of both worlds, and play Tecmo Super Bowl with updated rosters, thanks to the people at TecmoBowl.org who have been updating the rosters each year.

 

[scifidude79]

1 minute ago, CapitanClassic said:

That's technically Tecmo Super Bowl, the sequel. The original only had 4 total plays, the sequel had 8 total (4 Pass / 4 Run) and a customisable playbook.

 

But you can have the best of both worlds, and play Tecmo Super Bowl with updated rosters, thanks to the people at TecmoBowl.org who have been updating the rosters each year.

 

Thanks, I tend to get Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl confused. Either way, they're fun games.

 

As for the fine folks at TechmoBowl.org, I'm well aware of their work. Back when I was watching Football, I had a custom cartridge done with the teams and rosters from 2018.

There was a seller on Etsy who made these. They would put artwork from your favorite team on the cartridge.

[RetroSonicHero]

Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but I was surprised to hear that Top Gun on NES was concerned a pretty bad game. I thought it was pretty decent actually, and it's often a go-to of mine when testing emulators. I'm assuming it got the reputation it did because of that admittedly funny AVGN video, and how the landing mechanic is not particularly easy to understand at first. But overall? Not a bad game, in my opinion

Top Gun 2 though? I find it WAY too twitchy..

Edited February 2 by RetroSonicHero

[RetroSonicHero]

On 1/8/2024 at 10:22 AM, BassGuitari said:

32X - Doom

 

Genuinely a pretty decent version for it's time in terms of gameplay. Honestly, it feels WAY more responsive compared to the Saturn version..

As for the music, you're definitely gonna wanna mute that. Play some Metallica on vinyl and you're all set.

[Tanooki]

@RetroSonicHero Yeah it gets panned, and to be fair, like one I think I mentioned right off (Silent Service) it's dunked on for the dumbest of reasons really.  Top Gun gets slammed for being poor more or less entirely around one thing, just like SS was.  In the case of TG it's the carrier landings and for SS1 its seemingly around lacking some function making it a problem.

 

You know what the problem is?  It's as vintage as the bs shocked pikachu face moment people have with Duck Hunt thinking it's a SHOCK that you can use the 2nd controller to move the ducks... R T F M!  If you read the manual the game tells you how to set the speed and altitude to successfully land on the flat top pretty easily and in the case of SS1 you read the manual and learn as it's a PC port 2P controller is required to look without turning, shoot a 1/3 (all rear) of your torpedoes, and the game saving(once) blow ballast to stop you from sinking after taking a beating.

 

Top Gun is pretty easy if you just nose up and down, get the alt and then speed under control the landing is not hard to stick at all, but when you don't bother or try and get cute you splash.  TG2, it lacks that, and it has better control and some solid stages, not sure why it gets some hate, even added a 2P combat mode for 1on1.

[scifidude79]

7 hours ago, RetroSonicHero said:

Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but I was surprised to hear that Top Gun on NES was concerned a pretty bad game. I thought it was pretty decent actually, and it's often a go-to of mine when testing emulators. I'm assuming it got the reputation it did because of that admittedly funny AVGN video, and how the landing mechanic is not particularly easy to understand at first. But overall? Not a bad game, in my opinion

Top Gun 2 though? I find it WAY too twitchy..

Wait, Top Gun is considered bad? I honestly didn't know because I consider it good.

[Bill Loguidice]

11 hours ago, scifidude79 said:

I agree on sports games. I think Tecmo Bowl for the NES is still one of the best football games ever. And it's definitely got great graphics, by 1980s standards. The playbook is four offensive and four defensive plays. And, like that exploit you were talking about with Clinton in NBA Jam, you could play as the Raiders in the original Tecmo Bowl and use Bo Jackson, who could get 1000 yards in a game and was basically unstoppable. (Bo knows football) Who needs realism when you can have that kind of fun? 😁

 

For racing, I like a mix. I'll do super realistic games like Gran Turismo 7, but I also love a good arcade racing game or a kart racer. It depends what I'm in the mood for.

Your Gran Turismo 7 comment is how I am with sports games in general. Sometimes I want to play the wonderful sports simulation/RPG hybrid of MLB The Show and sometimes more arcade-like baseball games. Same with Madden football, Fight Night boxing, etc. When modern sports games are done right, they're unbelievably good games in my opinion. What stinks is that sometimes they just tweak things to tweak things with the new versions, e.g., I really didn't like last year's Madden versus the previous year's.

[scifidude79]

20 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Your Gran Turismo 7 comment is how I am with sports games in general. Sometimes I want to play the wonderful sports simulation/RPG hybrid of MLB The Show and sometimes more arcade-like baseball games. Same with Madden football, Fight Night boxing, etc. When modern sports games are done right, they're unbelievably good games in my opinion. What stinks is that sometimes they just tweak things to tweak things with the new versions, e.g., I really didn't like last year's Madden versus the previous year's.

I get the strong feeling I'm going to wind up playing some NFL Blitz later. I have 2001 for PlayStation and 2002 for Gamecube to choose from. It's a shame they don't make those anymore, but they're considered "bad" due to their portrayal of violence in football. 🙄 Like playing that game was going to make a football player who never did late hits before suddenly start delivering piledrivers after the whistle. 🙄

[bigfriendly]

I had to think about this for a while but I finally thought of a couple. D on the PS1 had cool graphics for its time but it hasn't aged well. My friends and I had a blast playing Herzog Zwei back in the early 90s. The slow down was horrible when the screen would get crowded with all your and your opponets armies. Both games were actually fun but really not playable today.

[RetroSonicHero]

 

Ridge Racer - 1994, PlayStation

 

This may be a stretch, but hear me out.

I know a bit of a catch-all statement used by some people is that PS1 games haven't aged particularly well in terms of gameplay and looks. Typically, however, you'll still have a dedicated group of people that will heavily defend that game, or even consider it to be a masterpiece to this day. 

 

Ridge Racer is unique, because the exact opposite happened. I hardly ever see people stand up to it and say it's a good racing game for the PS1. Instead, the most positive things people say are something along the lines of "it was an excellent launch title and showcase of the PS1's hardware. Other than that, it sucks when compared to the plethora of racing games that came later and had vastly more content". For me personally, while it is undeniably true that it isn't one of the PS1's best racing games by any means when compared to the likes of GT, GT2, or R4, I feel like it's a perfectly non offensive title, so long as you treat it like an arcade game — because, that's exactly what it is. It's a port of an arcade game with some additional content. Perfectly non-offensive to me, and actually quite a bit better than the "worst" racing games on PS1. It was quite literally the first PS1 game ever released if we go by the Japanese serial number of SLPS-00001. It's goal was to showcase how incredible the PS1 was for its time, while bringing a fun and addictive arcade racing game to the home. From that perspective, it did what it was designed to do remarkably. 

Edited February 4 by RetroSonicHero

[Tanooki]

Well it did what I sought out to do, and it deserves to be said as much.  It's not a bad game, but by the time of R4 and some of those GT games coming out it looked aged and played as an older arcade game feel at the time.  That said.... Namco had faith enough to make it a 2nd free game included in R4 and they also redid it slightly bumping the resolution up and I think a little more, a borderline remaster I guess before that term took off.  R4/RR was one of the last games I kept when the PS1 was on the way out.

[RetroSonicHero]

On 2/4/2024 at 8:35 AM, Tanooki said:

Well it did what I sought out to do, and it deserves to be said as much.  It's not a bad game, but by the time of R4 and some of those GT games coming out it looked aged and played as an older arcade game feel at the time.  That said.... Namco had faith enough to make it a 2nd free game included in R4 and they also redid it slightly bumping the resolution up and I think a little more, a borderline remaster I guess before that term took off.  R4/RR was one of the last games I kept when the PS1 was on the way out.

Indeed. Not only did it run in 480i mode, but they also upped the framerate to 60 fps. It was a testament to how far they came.

[Tanooki]

Semi related I guess, but maybe it's the fact it came out in the last effective year of the system and is why it only moved globally around 400000 units, but I've seen some people really well dump on Ridge Racer for N64, and others (like myself) feel it was really fantastic and brought something nice to the table with the mix of cars and terrain, also that new control style that really worked super well with that controller/stick setup.

 

I've seen pretty lame comments, maybe it's PS saltiness since it came over thanks to NST working with Namco to do it, or maybe it's the filters on n64 since it's prettier than the PS1 titles except debatably the R4 experience which was pretty sharply detailed.  It was a pure arcade racer on N64, it didn't do the bonus stuff and perks of R4, but it did what Ridge and Rage Racer did, a good combination of both those games it was set out to be.  The game moves fast, it moves smooth, lots of tracks and courses, some really solid clean audio for the cart as well.  I got it when it came out, always have retained the cart as it's a fun one to go back to.  Was it really a unique game, both definitely not and yet in enough ways yes, but it was no R4 either which I think came out just a year earlier so close enough not to go back to the drawing board given by 2000 it was getting late.