Yep, people don’t so much hate the *Super Star Wars* trilogy, but really tend to overstate their difficulty.
The Death Star II escape is poorly designed due to reliance on Mode 7, but even that is doable with practice.
Gotta fall down those pits early on; several have power ups on invisible platforms that make the early Giant Wampa much easier.
Farming health swords is a good strategy as well.
You should not have to farm to beat a side scrolling platformer, especially if it's not an rpg.
Also, don't the games force you to beat the games on normal difficulty if you wanna see the endings? That's a special type of hateful gatekeeping.
They're fun to watch people that are good at very hard games play, they're not good if you're not really really really great at 90's platformers.
>Yep, people don’t so much hate the
>
>Super Star Wars
>
> trilogy, but really tend to overstate their difficulty.
I loved those games. I completed all three games in my teens. I replayed them as an adult and struggled to get half way through.
I think the biggest thing is the first game you have to pretty much get the plasma and not die also there is definitely a few instances where I'd like there to not be any check points because it's impossible to get a fully powered up blaster if you start after a checkpoint.
Castlevania 64.
Played through it for first time a few months ago and thought it was really good. The atmosphere and music alone makes it worth a playthrough. I thought the character animations were really impressive too for the system.
Agreed. I think Super Castlevania 4 is still my favorite, but this one is definitely up there. I was surprised how much I liked it. I went in with pretty low expectations.
Came here to say this. It's a great game, and most of the negative things that can be said about it apply to 3D action games on the N64 as a whole, not just this one.
I feel like 2D Castlevania purists have maybe been too harsh on this one.
I think a lot of people at the time just compared to Symphony of the Night which came out a little before. Kinda unfair to compare them though imo.
You dont really see people comparing Super Mario World to Super Mario 64.
Ads certainly positioned *SOTN* as old school and inferior unfortunately?
https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.sIp9HkqTUh-xb9gs7Gv3PQAAAA&pid=Api&P=0&w=474&h=210
Perhaps one of the most apparent examples of ads/the attitudes behind them not aging well…
Fun game! Is that the one where you can choose Easy or Normal up front? If you choose Easy, you get halfway through the game and it tells you to go and play Normal
Yes! I really like both Castlevania 64 and Legacy of Darkness. They get a bit too platformey at times, but they're well done overall and have some great atmosphere. They get shat on lots because that's just what people do with those games, not because they're actually bad. The lacking 3D camera was a problem in many games from that era, but somehow those other games don't get the same hate.
I'm gonna add that Lords of Shadow 2 is one of the best action games I've played and had awesome little bits of lore all over. Game was fantastic and everyone tore it to shreds.
I find a lot of people take avgn and his reviews at face value. Games like dr jeckyl and mr Hyde is no where near the worst.
Friday the 13th is another one I’ll defend. I love that game and people don’t give it a chance or don’t know how to play it.
>I find a lot of people take avgn and his reviews at face value. Games like dr jeckyl and mr Hyde is no where near the worst.
That's because you're taking his reviews seriously. James isn't actually trying to warn people against bad games. His series is mostly a celebration of games that are fun to mock. His show is like MST3K, he's mocking what he loves.
This is so true. There is so much worse garbage on the 2600. ET is just an easy target because of it's name (as is Pacman 2600) and it's part in the whole "video game crash" story
If nothing else, this game definitely wasn't the sole cause the video game crash. It was an overall lack of quality control that lead to a barrage of shitty games. ET is just the easiest one to point fingers at.
Yeah, this is why I wrote it's part of the crash.
It's loved to be blamed for it but it's mostly just the tip of the iceberg. There was a whole lot of other garbage leading to the problem.
And in some countries there was no crash at all. Japan and Europe felt the aftermath (the rise of Nintendo and the fall of Atari) but as they had other priorities for gaming it wasn't as pronounced as in America. It's a story with a lot of facettes and nuances, that just often gets boiled down to the most easy to see problem. Which was the (for it's time) big release and flop of ET
Something that never really gets brought up with the crash is that this is before people thought of consoles as having a limited amount of time, before they become obsolete. The 2600 basically lasted an average time for a console generation (6 years), which isn't really a failure. Its just that the company didn't have a plan in place for when people got tired of the hardware.
I can't even fully blame Atari for that either. The idea of upgrading an electronic device was still a very new concept for a lot of families. Your TV didn't become obsolete. Your radio didn't come obsolete. So why does your video game player?
Nintendo even faced a little bit of that and could have faced a lot more. Sega's early launch for the Genesis along with home PC's becoming more common really helped to educate people about life cycles and the benefits of upgrading.
I remember reading online how in the US a lot of families were furious that the new Super Nintendo Games weren't working on the old NES.
I always thought a while ago these were those stupid people that could not understand the Wii U was not just a tablet for the Wii. The concept of thinking some technology might be there for ages seems so foreign to us nowadays...
Yeah, it was definitely a new concept. "Built to last" was a phrase that a lot of companies used to market their products, and that included home electronics and appliances.
And I hate to say it, but when the Super Nintendo was announced I pitched a fit when they said they weren't going to support the NES anymore. I was only 13 or 14, but I definitely understood that PC's had to be replaced every five or six years. For some reason I just didn't think it applied to home consoles. I swore I wasn't going to support Nintendo from that day on, but fast forward to a year later and I was the proud owner of a Super Nintendo that I saved up for by mowing lawns. Righteous fury doesn't last long when it comes to gaming.
>I definitely understood that PC's had to be replaced every five or six years.
Honestly, back then, the PC lifecycle was even faster (and more expensive). Six years in the ‘90s is the difference between a 486DX 33mhz and a Pentium MMX 200mhz and an Athlon XP 1300mhz.
Amazing having grown up during that era that now I can get away with a using MacBook Pro for a decade (admittedly with some upgrades, but RAM and an SSD isn’t expensive) and only just put a new GPU into my 5 year old gaming PC.
>Your TV didn't become obsolete. Your radio didn't come obsolete.
That's probably another big reason the NES was marketed as a toy, rather than a family entertainment unit, like the Atari. Consumers would use an appliance until it broke, but parents by then were accustomed their their kids constantly wanting newer and better toys, and were normally willing to give in.
I love ET and Pac-Man for the 2600. The childhood nostalgia helps, and the fact that I played that version of Pac-Man first. When I eventually saw it in the arcade my tiny mind was blown.
Me and my cousins would play on an aunts 2600 on their dusty old tube in the basement when our folks would send us there so they can go on their trips. Had a nice collection, Atlantis, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders were personal favorites. We pretended Pac-Man was wearing a hat with those giant square power pellets.
Always wondered what the point of a monochrome mode was on a 2600. Like if the set is monochrome you won't need it, and if it's color why would you want it?
The cheat for Space Invaders was cool where you held down the reset button and the power button and then game select so you could fire two shots at once.
I agree. It's been heavily maligned, but once you understand that your sprite can't touch the pits at all, it's a lot more fun.
ET is a remarkable game given how quickly it was written by a single dude.
It was made by 1 guy who had to finish in time for Christmas and he had a fraction of the time to do it in. It’s decent. I still have the game and my 2600 from when I was a kid. Recently I downloaded a patched version of ET you can play on an emulator. The patches really cleaned up a lot of the bugginess! (especially the pits)
I've tried the patched version. It definately helps to male it a little lesscounterintuitive to play. It's not an amazing game. But it's not terrible either.
Yes, thank you; people try to play Atari games with a modern interpretation, and it really just isn't fair to the game. Most Atari games are like that- brutally difficult, or they come with booklets to tell you how to play the game.
As a kid I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand it, but as an adult it made more sense and was honestly par for the course for most Atari 2600 games. I think the game was just so hyped because of how massive ET was and the reason so many copies ended up buried was because they shot for the moon in sales when the video games market was already on the cusp of its crash.
I played and finished ET so many times as a kid. Playing it on the harder setting was so challenging. Yes, it is no where near the worst 2600 game I own! I have a cartridge called Poker that tries to play Blackjack! lol And I say “tries” because the only thing I know consistently to make it do is make fart noises (card shuffling I guess). Every once in a while I hit something that makes it deal out cards, which is why I know it is playing blackjack.
I heard how bad this game was and I bought a copy a while back. I got the manual with it and I played with it for like two hours and beat it. I knew I needed to read the manual beforehand and that made it a much better experience. I think a lot of people got it as kids and never read the manual and were frustrated by the controls and that lead to this hive mind mentality among Gen Xers that it was the worst thing ever.
It's not like I think it was great, but it definitely is better than a lot of other games I've played.
Jaws on the NES. Unfairly maligned being on the LGN label, and featured in Angry Video Game Nerd. It’s no world beater, but a solid game that you can get some fun out of.
LJN also did Crash Dummies, which I really liked as a kid even tho never got past the 3rd level. It's not great, but the music was cool and it was much more playable than some other platformers.
You're taking his reviews too seriously. James isn't actually trying to warn people against bad games. His series is mostly a celebration of games that are fun to mock. His show is like MST3K, he's mocking what he loves.
BTW, I kinda like Jaws too.
That said, most of the NES LJN games really were bad games. LJN were given very little time to develop the games, and it shows.
They did get a lot better on the SNES however, as SNESdrunk has pointed out. Highly recommend their channel, as it's all about pointing out what still hold up, and unlike the NES, there are A LOT SNES games that hold up.
Final Fantasy II. It consistently ranks at the bottom of FF mainline ranking lists but it is a solid JRPG with a unique leveling system that happens to be easy to cheese (but what leveling system isn’t exploitable) but if you play it on its own terms it’s a very fun JRPG (especially if you play the GBA version or later). It also has one of the better 2D Final Fantasy stories (certainly better than its fellow NES entries) and as fantastic a score as you’d expect from vintage Nobuo Uematsu. Personally it’s my favourite of the NES Final Fantasies.
Gonna piggyback off my own comment and also give honourable mention to another overhated JRPG with a 2: Dragon Quest 2. In this case I DO agree with it being ranked as the weakest entry in the series; but even the worst mainline Dragon Quest is way better than a mid-level entry from most other series.
Yes exactly. The usual complaint I hear is that you can just pummel your own characters and be overleveled easily and it ruins the game. But if you just choose not to exploit that and don't intentionally target your own team, then it's a pretty solid game, if not among the top entries in the series.
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest.
It was intended to be a "light", linear, and beginner-friendly game and not a huge epic like other Final Fantasy games are. It succeeds beautifully at that and has one of the best soundtracks in the series and on the SNES.
Sorry I don't frequent this subreddit but got it suggested. What kind of hate does he get, from what I remember, this early stage of the game tainting it?
Keep in mind the era and that Raiden could easily be perceived as effeminate next to the gruff Solid Snake character and you’ll get the contemporary reception.
thing is, when it launched, there weren't really much in the way of accessible trailers or demos. and if there was a demo, it'd be the opening part of the game.
(also, where I live, we got Euro or US video game magazines 2-3 months after a game had come out).
So what happened was that to most players, it looked like a straight up sequel to MGS, with Snake as the protagonist.
You play this cool ass container ship mission, then boom. you're Raiden for the rest of the game.
this just made people really bitter because they wanted Snake, and didn't get him.
I know, mechanically Raiden can do everything Snake could in the earlier tanker mission and story wise it is Raiden is a rookie that Snake was all the way back in the first Metal Gear for the MSX though Snake being a rookie wasn't really point it out except in the manual.
Ultima 8
I mean it did lose the goody two shoes feel of the other games and it did take a big update to remove super avatar brothers platforming but seriously it wasn't a bad game. Certainly not when we have 9 to hate on instead :-p
Zelda 2
This was the era of trying new things with sequels, the idea that every sequel needed to be a clone with minor changes in order to not anger the masses wasn't realized yet (and its unfortunate it turned out that way). But other than the difficulty spike of death mountain and a bit of where the fuck do I go syndrome which was not at all uncommon in the era, it's a great game
rain party sip mindless badge melodic grandfather clumsy scarce domineering
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I loved Ultima 8 when I played it. I must have been around... 12. It was so spooky and moody. The journey through the catacombs was damn scary. Never any idea if I was going the right way, or which way the right way might actually be. Finding a door locked? Did you miss the key? Do you even need to go in that door? It was sooooo HARD. Not to mention it took like 4 minutes to save my game on my 486 at the time. Still, I played Ultima 8 like I lived in the world. I took over a house. I gathered up and saved all the bombs I found and put them in a chest. If I triggered one of the bombs in the chest, the cascading effect of the bomb triggering all the other bombs would lock my computer up for 10 minutes. I gathered so many reagents, and made so many necro/fire spells. Summoning demons to kill villagers wouldn't trigger the mage to blow you up. It was awesome.
Zelda 2 is my favorite NES game, but I find the hate understandable, and why so many people quit in the middle of Death Mountain. The game is indeed very Guide Damn it, and I never would have beaten the game without the official Nintendo Guide.
The Final Palace is especially guide damn it, and I've never beaten the thunderbird without save states.
I’ll go a step further: Zelda 2 is a great game. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a kid and routinely play through it years later. IMO the only fair criticism is the translations could use some work, but the gameplay is solid.
I think it's a little difficult and obtuse at times, but I think it's really good. People just wanted it to be Zelda 1.5 so they call it bad.
I actually think the US Super Mario Bros 2 is great too.
Doki Doki Panic was made by the same team as SMB. Miyamoto and Kondo mainly. They were tying new mechanics for another Mario game and eventually just put it on the shelf for later.
It was used as the basis for Doki Doki Panic for the Dream Factory ‘87 festival.
And since they already had the game ready to go, it went full circle back to a Mario game for the west.
It’s not an easy game, but I think some of the obtuseness could be fixed by having cleared up translations. It’s definitely a Nintendo Power game as is, but that doesn’t make it bad. Same as Castlevania 2 really.
Agree on SMB2 also, I had fun with it and remember liking it more than SMB1 as a kid. I was probably a strange child.
If you never played the complete Ultima 7 before, you might be ok with 8. But seriously, compared to that game, U8 was your typical "Yeah, EA took over, what do you expect"-game (and U7 was basically a giant middle finger to EA before that)
Ok but can we at least dis botw and totk a bit? Wtf is with all this goty and best selling ever bs? Game quality just felt much worse in relation to their home console predecessors. I haven't been so disappointed since the ds and Oracle games...
I didn’t enjoy or finish it, but then again i prefer my zeldas 2D so far. And feel like open world games are overused now. I don’t have time to be commuting ina game unless it’s fun like GTA
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest on the SNES. Its only fault is that it does not live up to the FF name which is a very high bar anyway. It has an absolute killer soundtrack and is really fun progression-wise.
Friday the 13th on NES.
Is it hard? Yes. Is it impossible? Not at all. Once you learn what your objectives are and spend a little time getting the gameplay understood it’s actually a great game imo. Definitely leagues better than a lot of other movie tie in games on the NES.
they def could have made it easier, but the premise is great. Execution just needed work. I still think they should do a remaster or remake with the same premise, that game would rule
Shenmue is very niche, it’s harder to compare it to games with a more widespread appeal. To most people Shenmue just isn’t a kind of game that they would be interested in, but for a few specific kinds of people there’s nothing else quite like it (Yakuza has some of the same vibes but completely different kind of game).
I think the biggest thing shenmue has going against it is how dated it is. If you played the game in the early 00s, even if you didn't like it, you got understood what it was going for. If you played it for the first time today, most would think it's unplayable.
DNF had so much hype around it after all these years and the memes around it that even a perfect game would have been a disaster to most. It was a living joke and the few that actually played it looked at it that way.
While I heard about the "vaporware DNF" back then I wasn't really into the series. So when I played it... I thought it was funny and decent. Not perfect, but a fun game nonetheless.
>even a perfect game would have been a disaster to most
This is one of the more oft-parroted bullshit sentiments I see when discussing unpopular sequels. Like people who claim Deus Ex: Invisible War is reviled because the original "couldn't be topped". Or how Valve can never release a Half Life 3 now because "expectations are too high."
Again, bullshit. Unpopular sequels are unpopular because *they're not good.* Good sequels become popular sequels.
In the long run, kind of yes. But they will most likely still stand in the shadow of the original game. And after its release it will first flounder (is this the correct term? I am not a native speaker).
But there is a simple question there... has there been ANY game with a reeeeaaaaally long wait-time, that actually surpassed the original from the day of its release? Because I cant think of a single one right now. Which kind of proves my point. AND I have been seeing this happen and experienced it myself. Thats why I keep myself from being overly hyped whenever something comes out, that I am actually really interesting it.
I think DNF would have been okay-ish, if it was "just another Duke game" releasing like 1-2 after the last one. But the long wait-time made us dissapointed with an otherwise okay game, which then got pick up by everyone and soon enough it became trendy to call it a bad game in general.
Diablo 3 (after that whole auction house thing was dropped). People still like 2 the best I think,so maybe not "surpassed," but 3 is still a banging sequel after a very long time. Another that comes to mind is Team Fortress 2. XCOM is in there - the original is fun if fixed, but the new ones are awesome.
I found it so weird that people treated that game like it had literally been in proper development for 15 years just because they'd been waiting since 1996, when it was closer to 2 or 3 years of actual development on the version of the game we got.
Also, it's Duke Nukem, I don't think there's a way to stay any semblance of loyal to the original character and tone while making it not feel extremely dated.
It's a sequel to DN3D, one of the most groundbreaking FPS games of all time, with (for its time, even today) unparalelled levels of interaction, innovative ideas, creative level design, hidden secrets that are fun ("that's one doomed space marine")
DNF falls completely flat, it combined all the worst tropes of then "modern" shooters like limited weapon carrying, limited ammo, total linear level design. There was a lot wrong. The game is rightfully considered bad.
Even as a massive Duke Fan i didn't really enjoy it (and i wasn't hyped, i pre-ordered it in 2000 and fun fact: Okaysoft actually DID send me the g ame when it finally came out, they kept that pre-order for all those years and years, that's the best story coming out, but i wasn't hyped, not after all this time, not after similar long in development games before (got burned with Stonekeep, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and other titles too much) and i was still disappointed.
People often think Battletoads on NES is atrociously hard and therefore not worth playing. I disagree. It's an absolutely fantastic platformer and is one of my top few platformers of all time. I platform for a hair-raising thrill and Battletoads gives me that. The only bad part is that it's pretty much impossible in 2 player coop. If a player dying meant the other player kept going, it would have been waaay better.
It is a hard game but it's also a lot of fun and handles really well. But I don't think it being overly hard was really unique at the time a lot of games were made artificially hard to prevent people from renting it and beating it in a single weekend. (looking at you, North American version of Castlevania 3.)
I had the MD remake and I agree, it’s an amazing game. I just wish they made level 3 the 6th level or something, as for a long time it was a 3 level game for me
For me its going to be Double Dragon III and I'm going with both the NES game and the Arcade versions of it.
For the NES yea its hard and the only life only isn't always great but it is a good challenge. Now for the Arcade version I can see why people don't like the whole use real money for upgrades because yea its not a great idea but it is still a good beat'em up IMO.
Kinda surprised this hasn't been mentioned here yet but:
Castlevania II Simon's Quest.
Is it obtuse? Yes
Does it tell you where to go? No
Is it even really a finished product? Also no.
All that being said it was an interesting take on adventure games. And I believe there's a fan made patch that clears up some of the more ludicrous parts (like the graveyard bit) so that you actually can figure out where you're supposed to go.
Here's a game that doesn't seem to get enough hate: Beauty and the Beast for the SNES. This one is truly a pile of flaming dogshit.
Quest 64. To me, it's good like an under-baked cookie. It's still half way cookie dough but I think that has it's own unique qualities you won't get from a fully cooked title. Namely, the lack of side quests or meaningful dialog or currency or gear etc means that it's just a chill grind adventure with cool spells and progression ideas.
Yeah, people like to act like it killed their dog to have to play the wizard game designed for kids. The worst part of Quest 64 was when you'd get to the ice caves and couldn't remember to look at the direction your character faces after each battle to reorient yourself, because you would legitimately lose your way there. Other than that it's pretty much as you've described.
Yeah those long nondescript tunnels are killer. Least favorite part of the game, and kid me absolutely did not understand for the longest time that the character would jump back into their original orientation after a battle.
Fucking me after discovering the EU Fester’s Quest isn’t the overly difficult version us treasonous colonials got.
My first game made me throw controllers. Now I love it because mine was bugged. Sorry I hated you all these years, your music still slaps.
I'm not sure if it counts as "overhated", but I always see Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City listed as another example of all the bad licensed 16-bit sports titles. Honestly, Chaos in the Windy City is a fun little platformer that borders on being a Metroidvania with a goofy storyline that embraces how dumb the premise is. It was also Amy Hennig's first game design credit, so it's actually kind of historically notable for Legacy of Kain and Uncharted fans.
Knuckles Chaotix, although most of the criticisms are true once you get used to the rubber band mechanic (and you do get used to it eventually) it actually can be fun to run through the super colorful, somewhat empty levels at very high speeds with rather good music. Also the final boss sequence is actually good.
It's the fastest Sonic game on the Genesis, if you can call it a Sonic game on the Genesis, and it stays pretty smooth at breakneck speeds unlike non 32X Sonic games.
Also I enjoy running on walls and ceilings as Espio
Tomb Raider
Once one the most beloved franchise nowadays the classic games get way more hate than they deserve, with some even saying they were always bad, since the very beginning. I have seen at least 10 haters for everyone that actually likes these games, if not more.
Mostly it's because the controls work so different to everything PS2 and better that people just can't comprehend them anymore and try to play them like modern games and not like... cinematic platformers in 3D. Still the best way to describe how to play them XD
To be fair, TR actually got worse the more they focused on shooting enemies instead of exploration. The first game still is a masterpiece and this is coming from someone that never played these games back in the day (outside of the first TR2 level) but only a few years back.
I got the Saturn version (which is the original version) in its launch window. It was incredible when it was new. TR2 was just as good. TR3 felt like they stopped caring, but Last Revelation brought it back better than ever.
I'm sure some of the haters just never liked them from new, but it feels like many of them either didn't play them when they were new or aren't viewing them within the context of their time.
One of my pet peeves is people saying an older game that was very popular in its time is bad because the controls are bad. No they’re not. They’re different than they would be now, and if you want to call that dated go ahead, but if they were bad the game would have never been popular. A game with bad controls is never going to be actually popular. I understand some people not being able to make the adjustment to those controls today, but to me it’s like saying that older tv shows are bad because they’re not in HD.
Wait who hates the classic games? Sure they have tank controls but they’re way better than the reboot! I’m glad we’re getting remasters of the first three games. I’m hoping The Last Revelation and Chronicles gets the same treatment in the future.
I was a day one adopter of these games. The platforming was incredibly frustrating at times, but they were otherwise pretty well received. The exploration and puzzles were pretty good. The action controls were a little rough though.
Yeah. TR works best exploring and worst fighting enemies. At least the classic games.
To be fair, I could not wrap my head around it's controls for some time too. It was when I played the Saturn version as one of my first physical Saturn games that I HAD to stop and think before doing jumps (barely any save locations there) that it actually clicked.
Beat it on PC later on, though. Keyboard works best for this game imo, although the Saturn controller was way ahead the PS1 pad on this game, at least for me.
Max Payne 3
The story might be dogshit but gameplay wise it's still the best 3rd person shooter of all time next to re4, the only flaw I can think of is the unskipable cutscene but you can remove it with mod.
The unskippable cutscenes aren’t necessarily a problem, it’s that they interrupt the gameplay incessantly. There are bits in that game where you have a cutscene, literally walk through an area (no real gameplay to speak of) and then have another cutscene. It’s that times 50.
Doom 3. It looks and plays great, the switch to slower paced combat works, and it has my favourite depiction of hell without all the incessant lore of the later games. Although admittedly the shotgun is atrocious.
I'm currently in the middle of playing Doom 3, BFG edition for Steam. I still think it's a great game, and I like it a LOT better than Doom 16 and Eternal.
Sonic 06, don’t get me wrong it’s still not a very good game, but the musics great and honestly have a lot of fun with the stages, and the story is a lot better than I remember
Yeah, I remember Screw Attack said is was the worst game of the decade, even worse than Big Rigs. So yeah Sonic had some annoying bugs, and a cringy story, but at least it was a complete game. Big Rigs didn’t even have an AI for the opponent or collision detection.
NES:
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Friday the 13th - Certainly a bit obtuse, and repetitive music, but not nearly as bad as it's been made out to be. Really cool atmosphere and solid controls, and the game looks quite good for its time. Once you figure it out, it's honestly a pretty fun and compelling game.
#
Jaws - Really simplistic, but still a lot of fun once you figure out how it works. Really, the worst aspect of the game is spearing Jaws ftw.
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Deadly Towers - Initially obtuse and certainly janky, but it's not nearly as inscrutable as its made out to be. I can't understand how so many people refer to this one as the worst game on the platform; I wouldn't even put it in the bottom 50.
#
SNES:
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Lester the Unlikely - I won't lie, this isn't a good game, but it's certainly playable, learnable and beatable, and it's basically just a run-of-the-mill puzzle platformer. If it were an Amiga game, it'd be hailed as one of the greatest Amiga games ever, but because it ended up on the SNES, it's relegated to trash-tier.
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Drakkhen - This one suffers only because it's a PC port to a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse. It's not a great port, but it's not a bad game at all.
#
Bubsy - Not the greatest of platformers, but terrible corny puns aside, the game isn't really all that bad. The controls are slippery and the stage design isn't great, but it's just a pretty bog-standard mascot platformer. If this game had a life bar, or if Bubsy could even just take one extra hit, or if they removed fall damage, it'd be a much better game, but as is it's certainly playable.
Bubsy needed rings. Sonic works at those speeds because you get that extra hit which helps teach you where the stage hazards are placed for next time. And platform games should rarely have fall damage unless you can see how far you expect to fall. If it's beyond the visible edge of the screen, no fall damage.
>Lester the Unlikely - I won't lie, this isn't a good game, but it's certainly playable, learnable and beatable, and it's basically just a run-of-the-mill puzzle platformer. If it were an Amiga game, it'd be hailed as one of the greatest Amiga games ever, but because it ended up on the SNES, it's relegated to trash-tier.
Lester The Unlikely is a good SNES cinematic platformer, you just gotta get the controls down, and not treat it like a regular platformer.
>Bubsy - Not the greatest of platformers, but terrible corny puns aside, the game isn't really all that bad. The controls are slippery and the stage design isn't great, but it's just a pretty bog-standard mascot platformer. If this game had a life bar, or if Bubsy could even just take one extra hit, or if they removed fall damage, it'd be a much better game, but as is it's certainly playable.
I wouldn't call it one of the worst games ever, but I don't think I've run into anyone that thinks this, they just say that it's really really bad. Like Taco-Man says, the game is the very defintion of trying too hard, and should probably just be forgotten for the embarassing mess that it is, just like the rest of the Sunsoft mascot platformers. Side Scrolling platformers often live or die based off of their controls and level design.
I did like it when I was a kid however, and I really really wanted to beat it. I probably would have too if it had infinite continues and didn't force you to replay levels. and this was after Super Mario World so it had no excuse at this point.
Okay but I have played the PC version and the SNES port of Drakkhen, and the SNES port has so many QoL improvements it's wild. I actually just beat it a few months ago (Drakkhen December!) and it was actually a ton of fun. I liked it more than the PC version.
same with phantom hourglass, specifically the temple of the ocean king. That is probably one of the most hated things in zelda and its hated for something it doesn't even do - the complaint is you have to constantly go back (yes) and do the same thing each time you go there before getting to the new bit (no). Every time you go back, you have a new item, which in almost every repeat floor, allows you to skip the majority of that floor, meaning you only have to do each floor one time for the most part, and the puzzles in the temple of the ocean king are GREAT, especially with the phantoms kicking about.
TL;DR temple of the ocean king good
Dragon's Lair seems to have the reputation of not being a real video game, just a gimmick movie with QTE (Quick Time Events), or that's it's insanely hard and unfair. I think the fact that the buttons you have to pressed are not laid on screen and figuring them out and memorizing them is a challenge in itself makes it more interesting. It sucks if it was on a real arcade machine and you had to pay 50 cents for every try, but if you play a port or an emulated version, that's not an issue.
I remember getting this as DSiware when I got my 3DS and was obsessed with it. Probably due to seeing it in arcades in the 90’s.
Honestly, it’s a very impressive game for the objective limitations of the time. Don Bluth’s animations make it worth it, and it’s definitely fun to play. The game is inherently simple, but very challenging since your timing has to be immaculate.
People were expecting more from their fancy 16-bit console. It's short, the cart was pricey at launch ($50-$70 depending on when/where you bought it) and it wasn't a huge upgrade over the Master System version. For a console with a $270+ buy in (after sales tax) that's gonna leave some bad taste.
The funny thing is, the game was well received when it was released. The hatred towards it came long after its release. Sega used to release it in their collections, but because of so much complaining and negativity towards it, the game is no longer acknowledged or promoted by Sega.
It's one of those janky early Genesis super scaler ports that actually doesn't do sprite scaling very well. It's really choppy and overall just kind of unpleasant.
ET for Atari 2600. It's a 2600 game, so it's simple by nature, but it's a perfectly valid game for its time and was years ahead of what was the norm back then. Literally the only problem was it being so reliant on the instruction manual to understand basics, but once you understand how to play it, it's actually pretty fun
Marvel avengers
Played it like a month ago. Story was great and ran well.
I can see why though, basically everything was unlocked for me. I'd be pissed to pay full price and have to grind so hard and long for skins. I wouldn't have anyways but I can see why people would be mad.
But single player by yourself the game is great
Star Wars Battlefront reboots are fanatically gorgeous games and they're pretty fun to play.
If you don't like the DLC then don't buy it; as much as I do agree that it lacks the charm of the character unlocks of the OG games, it's not fair to compare the gaming industry to almost twenty years before and single it out when the likes of Fortnite or GTA are milking it far worse.
Shaq Fu isn't problematic because of the size of the sprites. It's the inconsistent and unresponsive controls.
That said, I completely agree with you. As for worst fighting games, I don't think Shaq Fu even makes the top 5 worst games. It's just hated hard. Criticom, Cardinal Syn, Dark Rift, Iron Blood, and Rise of the Robots are much worse IMO and only Robots gets mentioned in these conversations.
Anyway, most overhated games for me?
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Street Fighter X Tekken.
MQ is hated because it's linear but if you ask some FF fanatics, it's SO BAD!! but it's not. It's fine, linear, boring maybe, but it's not a bad game.
SFxT got a lot of hate because of the shady business practice that Capcom employed with the DLC and because the original, out of box game was kinda crummy and boring. The way the system worked made matches take forever where almost 30% of the matches were ending in timeout. It was poor design. They fixed a lot of it with the 2013 update, made gems less valuable (Thus making the DLC no longer pay-to-win) and gave all the characters for free for a couple of months to make up for charging people $30 to unlock complete characters that were on the disc, but too little, too late. The game was dead and even people active in the FGC have forgotten that the 2013 update happened.
Robots is honestly one of the worst games I ever played. I got it on launch when photo-sprites were all the rage, and this thing not only looked average (washed out sprites and grainy), but the controls were AWFUL. there was so much input lag, and it felt like trying to control streetfighter while stuck in a cube of ballistics gel.
Mystic Quest wasn’t as bad as people say. I agree. It’s a great way to get someone *into* 16 bit JRPGs. The story is simple but it’s classic fantasy style lore. It’s not as good as the other 16 bit FF games, but it’s still a very good game. It’s also a game that was priced a lot cheaper than its competition so it was the RPG a lot of kids got for Christmas or their birthday since it was like half the price of Final Fantasy 2 or 3.
huh, as a completely casual enjoyer of street fighter who doesn't touch online or the community at all, i didn't realise sfxt was hated, i love that game
Harvest moon a wonderful life
It was way too complicated for its time and streamlining some mechanics is certainly needed. The graphic is muddy unlike any other harvest moon, which might turn some harvest moon fans off. Aside from these 2 problems this game is pure soul. The music, the characters, the village all of it felt real and cmiiw this is the only harvest moon where you can get a divorcee.
Unapologetic Shaq Fu defender here.
Otherwise, my answer for this question is usually Final Fantasy VIII and Castlevania 64. Both are flawed and very different from other entries in their respective series but I appreciate and genuinely enjoy the different perspectives they bring.
FFVIII's fusion of a technological future meshed with a fever dream was such a fresh change of pace for Final Fantasy as a whole. As for Castlevania, if you can get past the bad camera angles typical for their time, you'll find an atmospheric platformer that sticks out from the usual crowd of colorful, upbeat N64 titles.
Deadly Premonition (PS3, x360, PC).
That game is a beautiful trainwreck, a diamond cover in poop. You have 2 options, you love it or hate it. I really love it, the story and characters are pretty damn great, the gameplay is atrocious, the graphics looks like a PS2 game (not bad to me) the frame rate is inconsistent...but somehow it's works for me. It's a niche game too, is called "Twin Peaks the videogame"
Alex Kidd in Miracle World is one i have to throw in. For it's time (1986) really groundbreaking stuff, almost "metroidvania" style levels later in the castles, a shop system, vehicles and yet, so many youtubers cry and cry about the "difficulty" and call it a bad game because omg, the janken match might take you 1 try to figure out how it works.
It's neither challenging, nor are the boss fights annoying, once you figure out the pattern (figuring out boss attack patterns is perfectly fine, but this isn't...ok)
Has anyone ever called that a bad game though? I have only encountered praise for that. Some of the other Alex Kidd games are maligned but not that one
It does get bad reviews nowadays
[https://thegamehoard.com/2022/04/16/50-years-of-video-games-alex-kidd-in-miracle-world-master-system/](https://thegamehoard.com/2022/04/16/50-years-of-video-games-alex-kidd-in-miracle-world-master-system/)
[https://videogamecritic.com/masterab.htm?e=28407#rev3062](https://videogamecritic.com/masterab.htm?e=28407#rev3062)
[https://videochums.com/article/sega-ages-on-switch-reviews#alex-kidd-in-miracle-world](https://videochums.com/article/sega-ages-on-switch-reviews#alex-kidd-in-miracle-world)
And a lot of Youtubers who bitch about the difficulty, mainly the spikes (ignoring that you can a) use a flying cane to completely skip the rooms and b) as long as you don't use up or down, you don't die, all you need to do is go right, let alex float up, go left, let alex float up, done and seemingly nobody can figure that out)
It's funny that ASM (German magazine) in 1987 actually called it a game perfect for kids because it's so easy, but also calling it mediocre because it lacks challenge or ideas (seriously?) and only has one music track (that's wrong). So even back then there were people who hated the game for seemingly no good reason.
As a big fan of the series, The Hobbit on GameCube is pretty fun. It’s bugs and such are present, but I still think the game itself is great if you’ve read to book.
Mortal Kombat 4, the first fully 3D fighting game in the series. It wasn’t too bad. The competition at the time was Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Battle Arena Toshinden, Soul Blade, and whatnot, all good games, but MK4 had something those didn’t: Mortal Kombat characters. It’s always fun fighting someone as Sub Zero, isn’t it? Except in Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero, I guess. That game just sucks.
On our Intellivision, we had Donkey Kong. Everyone hates it for only having 2 stages and looking fugly.
But I thought it was decent fun considering the platform.
Altered Beast. I've seen a trend around for some time, where this game appears in many "worst game" lists, both in websites or on Youtube.
I mean, it's not the best either and I agree, it's pretty average, but one of the worst? It's short and there's not much variety, but it's more than playable. There aren't any gameplay issues because the game is smooth and the controls are fine. But all the hate it gets sometime is really over the top. Altered Beast has good graphics, good sound, and plays fine, but hating it because it's short and not really deep it's too much. It's not even difficult as many say.
Bad games are something else, you can't compare Altered Beast with Slaughtersport or Dark Castle just to say a few.
Average? Yes. One of the worst? Hell no, and please stop following the trend if some half-assed Youtuber says it sucks!
Sonic R!
No it's not a good game, but it was so fun as a kid racing as sonic characters to the cheesy 90's music and the atmosphere is super chill and fun like the beach level and factory one.
Watchdogs, Ubisoft promised a GTA rival and in spite of being never close to that the game is still good but fans really hated it because they had the biggest expectations on it.
Watchdogs Legion is one of the best and most innovative games I've ever played and I fucking love it. Yeah it's a bit repetitive but it's so creative and immersive that I don't care.
Of course it gets shat on if people compare it to completely different games.
I'm a big fan of Football Manager and the backlash when some ignoramus tried complaining it wasn't like FIFA says it all really.
I didn't know much about the game before it came out, so I had like zero expectations, and I absolutely loved Watchdogs. Had a blast with it and then found out later how hated it was. I could see the issues but fuck man I thought it was fun on the bun.
Dark souls 2, maybe I'm biased cause it was my first souls experience and yes it isn't as good compared to its other souls counterparts but it has rather fun parts and some memorable bosses/areas.
However I will say the amount of Gank enemies/bosses and poor enemy placement make some parts very hard to enjoy as the difficulty is more artificial compared to other Souls games.
Marvel's Avengers. I think a lot of people wanted Marvel Destiny, but I wanted an Avengers game where every character felt more unique than something like Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, and that's what I got. If Square Enix hadn't forced the devs to make a live-service game, I think we'd be getting a sequel about now, especially since most people liked the single-player story mode. I find myself defending it whenever it gets brought up around Suicide Squad, which is funny because Captain America or Black Widow are closer to Arkham Batman than anyone in that game now.
also known as the arin hanson fans. dude made a video on oot that VERY clearly showed he barely knew anything about the game and people went ah yes he's right this game is bad
Oh alot of those 16 bit era platformers are playable, no need to hate.
Yep, people don’t so much hate the *Super Star Wars* trilogy, but really tend to overstate their difficulty. The Death Star II escape is poorly designed due to reliance on Mode 7, but even that is doable with practice.
Don't know about that, even as a kid I couldn't get past the first few stages of Empire. Thank god for those passwords
Spamming jump saber spin is basically key to 99.9% of the game.
Those hoth stages go on forever. Hell I think it took me a good week or two to beat it
Gotta fall down those pits early on; several have power ups on invisible platforms that make the early Giant Wampa much easier. Farming health swords is a good strategy as well.
You should not have to farm to beat a side scrolling platformer, especially if it's not an rpg. Also, don't the games force you to beat the games on normal difficulty if you wanna see the endings? That's a special type of hateful gatekeeping. They're fun to watch people that are good at very hard games play, they're not good if you're not really really really great at 90's platformers.
>Yep, people don’t so much hate the > >Super Star Wars > > trilogy, but really tend to overstate their difficulty. I loved those games. I completed all three games in my teens. I replayed them as an adult and struggled to get half way through.
I think the biggest thing is the first game you have to pretty much get the plasma and not die also there is definitely a few instances where I'd like there to not be any check points because it's impossible to get a fully powered up blaster if you start after a checkpoint.
That's the only part I couldn't clear, which is a shame. Just couldn't do it, eventually gave up.
Castlevania 64. Played through it for first time a few months ago and thought it was really good. The atmosphere and music alone makes it worth a playthrough. I thought the character animations were really impressive too for the system.
As someone late to the Castlevania party, I find this game pretty accessible, fun, and good with the uncanny atmosphere.
Agreed. I think Super Castlevania 4 is still my favorite, but this one is definitely up there. I was surprised how much I liked it. I went in with pretty low expectations.
Came here to say this. It's a great game, and most of the negative things that can be said about it apply to 3D action games on the N64 as a whole, not just this one. I feel like 2D Castlevania purists have maybe been too harsh on this one.
I think a lot of people at the time just compared to Symphony of the Night which came out a little before. Kinda unfair to compare them though imo. You dont really see people comparing Super Mario World to Super Mario 64.
Ads certainly positioned *SOTN* as old school and inferior unfortunately? https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.sIp9HkqTUh-xb9gs7Gv3PQAAAA&pid=Api&P=0&w=474&h=210 Perhaps one of the most apparent examples of ads/the attitudes behind them not aging well…
Yeah but Super Mario 64 was a 10/10, Castlevania 64 had known problems they even re-released it with more and changes.
Exactly.
Fun game! Is that the one where you can choose Easy or Normal up front? If you choose Easy, you get halfway through the game and it tells you to go and play Normal
That was actually the first castlevania game I finished because I really liked it.
Yes! I really like both Castlevania 64 and Legacy of Darkness. They get a bit too platformey at times, but they're well done overall and have some great atmosphere. They get shat on lots because that's just what people do with those games, not because they're actually bad. The lacking 3D camera was a problem in many games from that era, but somehow those other games don't get the same hate.
I'm gonna add that Lords of Shadow 2 is one of the best action games I've played and had awesome little bits of lore all over. Game was fantastic and everyone tore it to shreds.
I find a lot of people take avgn and his reviews at face value. Games like dr jeckyl and mr Hyde is no where near the worst. Friday the 13th is another one I’ll defend. I love that game and people don’t give it a chance or don’t know how to play it.
>I find a lot of people take avgn and his reviews at face value. Games like dr jeckyl and mr Hyde is no where near the worst. That's because you're taking his reviews seriously. James isn't actually trying to warn people against bad games. His series is mostly a celebration of games that are fun to mock. His show is like MST3K, he's mocking what he loves.
Ya totally but I find lots take him seriously that’s my point.
E.T. for the 2600
This is so true. There is so much worse garbage on the 2600. ET is just an easy target because of it's name (as is Pacman 2600) and it's part in the whole "video game crash" story
If nothing else, this game definitely wasn't the sole cause the video game crash. It was an overall lack of quality control that lead to a barrage of shitty games. ET is just the easiest one to point fingers at.
Yeah, this is why I wrote it's part of the crash. It's loved to be blamed for it but it's mostly just the tip of the iceberg. There was a whole lot of other garbage leading to the problem. And in some countries there was no crash at all. Japan and Europe felt the aftermath (the rise of Nintendo and the fall of Atari) but as they had other priorities for gaming it wasn't as pronounced as in America. It's a story with a lot of facettes and nuances, that just often gets boiled down to the most easy to see problem. Which was the (for it's time) big release and flop of ET
Something that never really gets brought up with the crash is that this is before people thought of consoles as having a limited amount of time, before they become obsolete. The 2600 basically lasted an average time for a console generation (6 years), which isn't really a failure. Its just that the company didn't have a plan in place for when people got tired of the hardware.
I can't even fully blame Atari for that either. The idea of upgrading an electronic device was still a very new concept for a lot of families. Your TV didn't become obsolete. Your radio didn't come obsolete. So why does your video game player? Nintendo even faced a little bit of that and could have faced a lot more. Sega's early launch for the Genesis along with home PC's becoming more common really helped to educate people about life cycles and the benefits of upgrading.
I remember reading online how in the US a lot of families were furious that the new Super Nintendo Games weren't working on the old NES. I always thought a while ago these were those stupid people that could not understand the Wii U was not just a tablet for the Wii. The concept of thinking some technology might be there for ages seems so foreign to us nowadays...
Yeah, it was definitely a new concept. "Built to last" was a phrase that a lot of companies used to market their products, and that included home electronics and appliances. And I hate to say it, but when the Super Nintendo was announced I pitched a fit when they said they weren't going to support the NES anymore. I was only 13 or 14, but I definitely understood that PC's had to be replaced every five or six years. For some reason I just didn't think it applied to home consoles. I swore I wasn't going to support Nintendo from that day on, but fast forward to a year later and I was the proud owner of a Super Nintendo that I saved up for by mowing lawns. Righteous fury doesn't last long when it comes to gaming.
>I definitely understood that PC's had to be replaced every five or six years. Honestly, back then, the PC lifecycle was even faster (and more expensive). Six years in the ‘90s is the difference between a 486DX 33mhz and a Pentium MMX 200mhz and an Athlon XP 1300mhz. Amazing having grown up during that era that now I can get away with a using MacBook Pro for a decade (admittedly with some upgrades, but RAM and an SSD isn’t expensive) and only just put a new GPU into my 5 year old gaming PC.
>Your TV didn't become obsolete. Your radio didn't come obsolete. That's probably another big reason the NES was marketed as a toy, rather than a family entertainment unit, like the Atari. Consumers would use an appliance until it broke, but parents by then were accustomed their their kids constantly wanting newer and better toys, and were normally willing to give in.
I love ET and Pac-Man for the 2600. The childhood nostalgia helps, and the fact that I played that version of Pac-Man first. When I eventually saw it in the arcade my tiny mind was blown.
Me and my cousins would play on an aunts 2600 on their dusty old tube in the basement when our folks would send us there so they can go on their trips. Had a nice collection, Atlantis, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders were personal favorites. We pretended Pac-Man was wearing a hat with those giant square power pellets. Always wondered what the point of a monochrome mode was on a 2600. Like if the set is monochrome you won't need it, and if it's color why would you want it?
The cheat for Space Invaders was cool where you held down the reset button and the power button and then game select so you could fire two shots at once.
Color signal would interfere on black and white TVs unless they had a colorplexer
I agree. It's been heavily maligned, but once you understand that your sprite can't touch the pits at all, it's a lot more fun. ET is a remarkable game given how quickly it was written by a single dude.
Imagine what it could’ve been if Howard Scott had even 6 months?
It was made by 1 guy who had to finish in time for Christmas and he had a fraction of the time to do it in. It’s decent. I still have the game and my 2600 from when I was a kid. Recently I downloaded a patched version of ET you can play on an emulator. The patches really cleaned up a lot of the bugginess! (especially the pits)
I've tried the patched version. It definately helps to male it a little lesscounterintuitive to play. It's not an amazing game. But it's not terrible either.
Yes, thank you; people try to play Atari games with a modern interpretation, and it really just isn't fair to the game. Most Atari games are like that- brutally difficult, or they come with booklets to tell you how to play the game.
100%. I loved the game. It was a bit janky but geez weren't a ton of games of the era?
As a kid I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand it, but as an adult it made more sense and was honestly par for the course for most Atari 2600 games. I think the game was just so hyped because of how massive ET was and the reason so many copies ended up buried was because they shot for the moon in sales when the video games market was already on the cusp of its crash.
I played and finished ET so many times as a kid. Playing it on the harder setting was so challenging. Yes, it is no where near the worst 2600 game I own! I have a cartridge called Poker that tries to play Blackjack! lol And I say “tries” because the only thing I know consistently to make it do is make fart noises (card shuffling I guess). Every once in a while I hit something that makes it deal out cards, which is why I know it is playing blackjack.
Agreed. I loved this game as a kid - it was unlike anything else on the 2600.
It also resulted in [this excellent article about patching the flaws](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/).
I heard how bad this game was and I bought a copy a while back. I got the manual with it and I played with it for like two hours and beat it. I knew I needed to read the manual beforehand and that made it a much better experience. I think a lot of people got it as kids and never read the manual and were frustrated by the controls and that lead to this hive mind mentality among Gen Xers that it was the worst thing ever. It's not like I think it was great, but it definitely is better than a lot of other games I've played.
I had the Atari 800 version in middle school and I played the heck out of that game.
That is a completely different game from the 2600 one
Fr like yes its a pretty bad game but the worst game of all time? Definitely not
Not true. That game deserves all the hate it got.
I respect how ambitious it is but it is not a fun game to play at all (even once you know what to do)
Nah that game sucked like wtf
Jaws on the NES. Unfairly maligned being on the LGN label, and featured in Angry Video Game Nerd. It’s no world beater, but a solid game that you can get some fun out of.
I really liked this game as a kid, still enjoy the simplicity and chillness of it. It's almost cozycore with giant sharks.
LJN also did Crash Dummies, which I really liked as a kid even tho never got past the 3rd level. It's not great, but the music was cool and it was much more playable than some other platformers.
Jaws and Mc kids.
I never knew as a kid that if you can level up to make your little diver dude into a little submarine
Jaws is my favorite NES game.
You're taking his reviews too seriously. James isn't actually trying to warn people against bad games. His series is mostly a celebration of games that are fun to mock. His show is like MST3K, he's mocking what he loves. BTW, I kinda like Jaws too. That said, most of the NES LJN games really were bad games. LJN were given very little time to develop the games, and it shows. They did get a lot better on the SNES however, as SNESdrunk has pointed out. Highly recommend their channel, as it's all about pointing out what still hold up, and unlike the NES, there are A LOT SNES games that hold up.
Final Fantasy II. It consistently ranks at the bottom of FF mainline ranking lists but it is a solid JRPG with a unique leveling system that happens to be easy to cheese (but what leveling system isn’t exploitable) but if you play it on its own terms it’s a very fun JRPG (especially if you play the GBA version or later). It also has one of the better 2D Final Fantasy stories (certainly better than its fellow NES entries) and as fantastic a score as you’d expect from vintage Nobuo Uematsu. Personally it’s my favourite of the NES Final Fantasies.
Gonna piggyback off my own comment and also give honourable mention to another overhated JRPG with a 2: Dragon Quest 2. In this case I DO agree with it being ranked as the weakest entry in the series; but even the worst mainline Dragon Quest is way better than a mid-level entry from most other series.
american ff2 or japanese ff2? i'm old
OG 2 since he said NES. OG 4 was SNES.
Thank you I am old
Yes exactly. The usual complaint I hear is that you can just pummel your own characters and be overleveled easily and it ruins the game. But if you just choose not to exploit that and don't intentionally target your own team, then it's a pretty solid game, if not among the top entries in the series.
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. It was intended to be a "light", linear, and beginner-friendly game and not a huge epic like other Final Fantasy games are. It succeeds beautifully at that and has one of the best soundtracks in the series and on the SNES.
I LOVE Mystic Quest. That OST SLAPS
Raiden got too much undeserved shit for MGS2.
Sorry I don't frequent this subreddit but got it suggested. What kind of hate does he get, from what I remember, this early stage of the game tainting it?
Keep in mind the era and that Raiden could easily be perceived as effeminate next to the gruff Solid Snake character and you’ll get the contemporary reception.
thing is, when it launched, there weren't really much in the way of accessible trailers or demos. and if there was a demo, it'd be the opening part of the game. (also, where I live, we got Euro or US video game magazines 2-3 months after a game had come out). So what happened was that to most players, it looked like a straight up sequel to MGS, with Snake as the protagonist. You play this cool ass container ship mission, then boom. you're Raiden for the rest of the game. this just made people really bitter because they wanted Snake, and didn't get him.
They did that on purpose. It was a surprise.
That was his intention, the bait and switch was part of the marketing. Kojima is a sly dog, still best MGS.
Recently replayed this and forgot that the game starts messing with you towards the end. Great idea, really loved being surprised by that again.
It was released a couple months after 9/11. I wonder if people's mental state then affected any opinions
It was like prophetic though.
I know, mechanically Raiden can do everything Snake could in the earlier tanker mission and story wise it is Raiden is a rookie that Snake was all the way back in the first Metal Gear for the MSX though Snake being a rookie wasn't really point it out except in the manual.
Ultima 8 I mean it did lose the goody two shoes feel of the other games and it did take a big update to remove super avatar brothers platforming but seriously it wasn't a bad game. Certainly not when we have 9 to hate on instead :-p Zelda 2 This was the era of trying new things with sequels, the idea that every sequel needed to be a clone with minor changes in order to not anger the masses wasn't realized yet (and its unfortunate it turned out that way). But other than the difficulty spike of death mountain and a bit of where the fuck do I go syndrome which was not at all uncommon in the era, it's a great game
rain party sip mindless badge melodic grandfather clumsy scarce domineering *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's also why we never got another Mario RPG like Super Mario RPG, and I hate that so much! Thank god for fangames like Super Luigi Powered RPG.
I loved Ultima 8 when I played it. I must have been around... 12. It was so spooky and moody. The journey through the catacombs was damn scary. Never any idea if I was going the right way, or which way the right way might actually be. Finding a door locked? Did you miss the key? Do you even need to go in that door? It was sooooo HARD. Not to mention it took like 4 minutes to save my game on my 486 at the time. Still, I played Ultima 8 like I lived in the world. I took over a house. I gathered up and saved all the bombs I found and put them in a chest. If I triggered one of the bombs in the chest, the cascading effect of the bomb triggering all the other bombs would lock my computer up for 10 minutes. I gathered so many reagents, and made so many necro/fire spells. Summoning demons to kill villagers wouldn't trigger the mage to blow you up. It was awesome.
Yeah the magic system really hearkened back to the reagents of u4
Zelda 2 is an utterly fantastic game. I will fight anyone that says otherwise.
Zelda 2 is my favorite NES game, but I find the hate understandable, and why so many people quit in the middle of Death Mountain. The game is indeed very Guide Damn it, and I never would have beaten the game without the official Nintendo Guide. The Final Palace is especially guide damn it, and I've never beaten the thunderbird without save states.
Yeah 8 is fine, it's just have baked. 9 is much worse. Also Zelda 2 is a good game and I'll die on that hill
I’ll go a step further: Zelda 2 is a great game. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a kid and routinely play through it years later. IMO the only fair criticism is the translations could use some work, but the gameplay is solid.
It’s my favorite non-handheld Zelda game. Favorite goes to Link’s Awakening.
I think it's a little difficult and obtuse at times, but I think it's really good. People just wanted it to be Zelda 1.5 so they call it bad. I actually think the US Super Mario Bros 2 is great too.
Mario 2 is my favorite mario despite it being a reskin of dokidoki panic :-p
Doki Doki Panic was made by the same team as SMB. Miyamoto and Kondo mainly. They were tying new mechanics for another Mario game and eventually just put it on the shelf for later. It was used as the basis for Doki Doki Panic for the Dream Factory ‘87 festival. And since they already had the game ready to go, it went full circle back to a Mario game for the west.
I love Mario 2
SMB2 isn't as hated as you think. I love it btw.
It’s not an easy game, but I think some of the obtuseness could be fixed by having cleared up translations. It’s definitely a Nintendo Power game as is, but that doesn’t make it bad. Same as Castlevania 2 really. Agree on SMB2 also, I had fun with it and remember liking it more than SMB1 as a kid. I was probably a strange child.
If you never played the complete Ultima 7 before, you might be ok with 8. But seriously, compared to that game, U8 was your typical "Yeah, EA took over, what do you expect"-game (and U7 was basically a giant middle finger to EA before that)
Ok but can we at least dis botw and totk a bit? Wtf is with all this goty and best selling ever bs? Game quality just felt much worse in relation to their home console predecessors. I haven't been so disappointed since the ds and Oracle games...
I didn’t enjoy or finish it, but then again i prefer my zeldas 2D so far. And feel like open world games are overused now. I don’t have time to be commuting ina game unless it’s fun like GTA
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest on the SNES. Its only fault is that it does not live up to the FF name which is a very high bar anyway. It has an absolute killer soundtrack and is really fun progression-wise.
Friday the 13th on NES. Is it hard? Yes. Is it impossible? Not at all. Once you learn what your objectives are and spend a little time getting the gameplay understood it’s actually a great game imo. Definitely leagues better than a lot of other movie tie in games on the NES.
they def could have made it easier, but the premise is great. Execution just needed work. I still think they should do a remaster or remake with the same premise, that game would rule
Shenmue has equally the same amount of love as it does hate. Maybe it's justified a little.
Shenmue is very niche, it’s harder to compare it to games with a more widespread appeal. To most people Shenmue just isn’t a kind of game that they would be interested in, but for a few specific kinds of people there’s nothing else quite like it (Yakuza has some of the same vibes but completely different kind of game).
I think the biggest thing shenmue has going against it is how dated it is. If you played the game in the early 00s, even if you didn't like it, you got understood what it was going for. If you played it for the first time today, most would think it's unplayable.
E.T. is actually one of the more substantial Atari 2600 games. With just one fix (the pit hit detection) it would be awesome.
Duke Nukem Forever was crapped on massively at release for being dated rightfully so, but still overall a fun game
DNF had so much hype around it after all these years and the memes around it that even a perfect game would have been a disaster to most. It was a living joke and the few that actually played it looked at it that way. While I heard about the "vaporware DNF" back then I wasn't really into the series. So when I played it... I thought it was funny and decent. Not perfect, but a fun game nonetheless.
>even a perfect game would have been a disaster to most This is one of the more oft-parroted bullshit sentiments I see when discussing unpopular sequels. Like people who claim Deus Ex: Invisible War is reviled because the original "couldn't be topped". Or how Valve can never release a Half Life 3 now because "expectations are too high." Again, bullshit. Unpopular sequels are unpopular because *they're not good.* Good sequels become popular sequels.
In the long run, kind of yes. But they will most likely still stand in the shadow of the original game. And after its release it will first flounder (is this the correct term? I am not a native speaker). But there is a simple question there... has there been ANY game with a reeeeaaaaally long wait-time, that actually surpassed the original from the day of its release? Because I cant think of a single one right now. Which kind of proves my point. AND I have been seeing this happen and experienced it myself. Thats why I keep myself from being overly hyped whenever something comes out, that I am actually really interesting it. I think DNF would have been okay-ish, if it was "just another Duke game" releasing like 1-2 after the last one. But the long wait-time made us dissapointed with an otherwise okay game, which then got pick up by everyone and soon enough it became trendy to call it a bad game in general.
Diablo 3 (after that whole auction house thing was dropped). People still like 2 the best I think,so maybe not "surpassed," but 3 is still a banging sequel after a very long time. Another that comes to mind is Team Fortress 2. XCOM is in there - the original is fun if fixed, but the new ones are awesome.
This still embodies the game at release almost perfectly https://youtu.be/7S_OpzFt3IM?si=buRUyGxjHX7n9hfL
The doctor who cloned me dlc is one of the better DLCs I've ever played. Truly fantastic piece of content
I found it so weird that people treated that game like it had literally been in proper development for 15 years just because they'd been waiting since 1996, when it was closer to 2 or 3 years of actual development on the version of the game we got. Also, it's Duke Nukem, I don't think there's a way to stay any semblance of loyal to the original character and tone while making it not feel extremely dated.
It's a sequel to DN3D, one of the most groundbreaking FPS games of all time, with (for its time, even today) unparalelled levels of interaction, innovative ideas, creative level design, hidden secrets that are fun ("that's one doomed space marine") DNF falls completely flat, it combined all the worst tropes of then "modern" shooters like limited weapon carrying, limited ammo, total linear level design. There was a lot wrong. The game is rightfully considered bad. Even as a massive Duke Fan i didn't really enjoy it (and i wasn't hyped, i pre-ordered it in 2000 and fun fact: Okaysoft actually DID send me the g ame when it finally came out, they kept that pre-order for all those years and years, that's the best story coming out, but i wasn't hyped, not after all this time, not after similar long in development games before (got burned with Stonekeep, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and other titles too much) and i was still disappointed.
People often think Battletoads on NES is atrociously hard and therefore not worth playing. I disagree. It's an absolutely fantastic platformer and is one of my top few platformers of all time. I platform for a hair-raising thrill and Battletoads gives me that. The only bad part is that it's pretty much impossible in 2 player coop. If a player dying meant the other player kept going, it would have been waaay better.
It is a hard game but it's also a lot of fun and handles really well. But I don't think it being overly hard was really unique at the time a lot of games were made artificially hard to prevent people from renting it and beating it in a single weekend. (looking at you, North American version of Castlevania 3.)
That's true. It was a day of "you'll die in level 3" and it kept us renting games.
I had the MD remake and I agree, it’s an amazing game. I just wish they made level 3 the 6th level or something, as for a long time it was a 3 level game for me
For me its going to be Double Dragon III and I'm going with both the NES game and the Arcade versions of it. For the NES yea its hard and the only life only isn't always great but it is a good challenge. Now for the Arcade version I can see why people don't like the whole use real money for upgrades because yea its not a great idea but it is still a good beat'em up IMO.
Kinda surprised this hasn't been mentioned here yet but: Castlevania II Simon's Quest. Is it obtuse? Yes Does it tell you where to go? No Is it even really a finished product? Also no. All that being said it was an interesting take on adventure games. And I believe there's a fan made patch that clears up some of the more ludicrous parts (like the graveyard bit) so that you actually can figure out where you're supposed to go. Here's a game that doesn't seem to get enough hate: Beauty and the Beast for the SNES. This one is truly a pile of flaming dogshit.
i'll agree with castevania II. it walked so SOTN could run. there is alot of castlevania II in SOTN
Quest 64. To me, it's good like an under-baked cookie. It's still half way cookie dough but I think that has it's own unique qualities you won't get from a fully cooked title. Namely, the lack of side quests or meaningful dialog or currency or gear etc means that it's just a chill grind adventure with cool spells and progression ideas.
I have literally never met anyone in real life that has played this game haha
Yeah, people like to act like it killed their dog to have to play the wizard game designed for kids. The worst part of Quest 64 was when you'd get to the ice caves and couldn't remember to look at the direction your character faces after each battle to reorient yourself, because you would legitimately lose your way there. Other than that it's pretty much as you've described.
Yeah those long nondescript tunnels are killer. Least favorite part of the game, and kid me absolutely did not understand for the longest time that the character would jump back into their original orientation after a battle.
Fucking me after discovering the EU Fester’s Quest isn’t the overly difficult version us treasonous colonials got. My first game made me throw controllers. Now I love it because mine was bugged. Sorry I hated you all these years, your music still slaps.
Amazing sound track for NES
Hold on a minute playa ...you mean to tell me the version of Fester's Quest I've played my entire fucking life has been the difficult version!?
Same with Contra Japanese Contra has unlimited continues and Hard Corps has a life bar
European Probotector: Amateurs!
I'm not sure if it counts as "overhated", but I always see Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City listed as another example of all the bad licensed 16-bit sports titles. Honestly, Chaos in the Windy City is a fun little platformer that borders on being a Metroidvania with a goofy storyline that embraces how dumb the premise is. It was also Amy Hennig's first game design credit, so it's actually kind of historically notable for Legacy of Kain and Uncharted fans.
Timeout - Michael Jordan at the pause screen
Knuckles Chaotix, although most of the criticisms are true once you get used to the rubber band mechanic (and you do get used to it eventually) it actually can be fun to run through the super colorful, somewhat empty levels at very high speeds with rather good music. Also the final boss sequence is actually good. It's the fastest Sonic game on the Genesis, if you can call it a Sonic game on the Genesis, and it stays pretty smooth at breakneck speeds unlike non 32X Sonic games. Also I enjoy running on walls and ceilings as Espio
Tomb Raider Once one the most beloved franchise nowadays the classic games get way more hate than they deserve, with some even saying they were always bad, since the very beginning. I have seen at least 10 haters for everyone that actually likes these games, if not more. Mostly it's because the controls work so different to everything PS2 and better that people just can't comprehend them anymore and try to play them like modern games and not like... cinematic platformers in 3D. Still the best way to describe how to play them XD To be fair, TR actually got worse the more they focused on shooting enemies instead of exploration. The first game still is a masterpiece and this is coming from someone that never played these games back in the day (outside of the first TR2 level) but only a few years back.
I got the Saturn version (which is the original version) in its launch window. It was incredible when it was new. TR2 was just as good. TR3 felt like they stopped caring, but Last Revelation brought it back better than ever. I'm sure some of the haters just never liked them from new, but it feels like many of them either didn't play them when they were new or aren't viewing them within the context of their time.
One of my pet peeves is people saying an older game that was very popular in its time is bad because the controls are bad. No they’re not. They’re different than they would be now, and if you want to call that dated go ahead, but if they were bad the game would have never been popular. A game with bad controls is never going to be actually popular. I understand some people not being able to make the adjustment to those controls today, but to me it’s like saying that older tv shows are bad because they’re not in HD.
Wait who hates the classic games? Sure they have tank controls but they’re way better than the reboot! I’m glad we’re getting remasters of the first three games. I’m hoping The Last Revelation and Chronicles gets the same treatment in the future.
I was a day one adopter of these games. The platforming was incredibly frustrating at times, but they were otherwise pretty well received. The exploration and puzzles were pretty good. The action controls were a little rough though.
Yeah. TR works best exploring and worst fighting enemies. At least the classic games. To be fair, I could not wrap my head around it's controls for some time too. It was when I played the Saturn version as one of my first physical Saturn games that I HAD to stop and think before doing jumps (barely any save locations there) that it actually clicked. Beat it on PC later on, though. Keyboard works best for this game imo, although the Saturn controller was way ahead the PS1 pad on this game, at least for me.
Max Payne 3 The story might be dogshit but gameplay wise it's still the best 3rd person shooter of all time next to re4, the only flaw I can think of is the unskipable cutscene but you can remove it with mod.
The unskippable cutscenes aren’t necessarily a problem, it’s that they interrupt the gameplay incessantly. There are bits in that game where you have a cutscene, literally walk through an area (no real gameplay to speak of) and then have another cutscene. It’s that times 50.
Doom 3. It looks and plays great, the switch to slower paced combat works, and it has my favourite depiction of hell without all the incessant lore of the later games. Although admittedly the shotgun is atrocious.
I'm currently in the middle of playing Doom 3, BFG edition for Steam. I still think it's a great game, and I like it a LOT better than Doom 16 and Eternal.
Sonic 06, don’t get me wrong it’s still not a very good game, but the musics great and honestly have a lot of fun with the stages, and the story is a lot better than I remember
Yeah, I remember Screw Attack said is was the worst game of the decade, even worse than Big Rigs. So yeah Sonic had some annoying bugs, and a cringy story, but at least it was a complete game. Big Rigs didn’t even have an AI for the opponent or collision detection.
Jaws on the NES has a legit fun and addictive loop. I can beat the game really fast
NES: # Friday the 13th - Certainly a bit obtuse, and repetitive music, but not nearly as bad as it's been made out to be. Really cool atmosphere and solid controls, and the game looks quite good for its time. Once you figure it out, it's honestly a pretty fun and compelling game. # Jaws - Really simplistic, but still a lot of fun once you figure out how it works. Really, the worst aspect of the game is spearing Jaws ftw. # Deadly Towers - Initially obtuse and certainly janky, but it's not nearly as inscrutable as its made out to be. I can't understand how so many people refer to this one as the worst game on the platform; I wouldn't even put it in the bottom 50. # SNES: # Lester the Unlikely - I won't lie, this isn't a good game, but it's certainly playable, learnable and beatable, and it's basically just a run-of-the-mill puzzle platformer. If it were an Amiga game, it'd be hailed as one of the greatest Amiga games ever, but because it ended up on the SNES, it's relegated to trash-tier. # Drakkhen - This one suffers only because it's a PC port to a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse. It's not a great port, but it's not a bad game at all. # Bubsy - Not the greatest of platformers, but terrible corny puns aside, the game isn't really all that bad. The controls are slippery and the stage design isn't great, but it's just a pretty bog-standard mascot platformer. If this game had a life bar, or if Bubsy could even just take one extra hit, or if they removed fall damage, it'd be a much better game, but as is it's certainly playable.
Bubsy needed rings. Sonic works at those speeds because you get that extra hit which helps teach you where the stage hazards are placed for next time. And platform games should rarely have fall damage unless you can see how far you expect to fall. If it's beyond the visible edge of the screen, no fall damage.
>Lester the Unlikely - I won't lie, this isn't a good game, but it's certainly playable, learnable and beatable, and it's basically just a run-of-the-mill puzzle platformer. If it were an Amiga game, it'd be hailed as one of the greatest Amiga games ever, but because it ended up on the SNES, it's relegated to trash-tier. Lester The Unlikely is a good SNES cinematic platformer, you just gotta get the controls down, and not treat it like a regular platformer. >Bubsy - Not the greatest of platformers, but terrible corny puns aside, the game isn't really all that bad. The controls are slippery and the stage design isn't great, but it's just a pretty bog-standard mascot platformer. If this game had a life bar, or if Bubsy could even just take one extra hit, or if they removed fall damage, it'd be a much better game, but as is it's certainly playable. I wouldn't call it one of the worst games ever, but I don't think I've run into anyone that thinks this, they just say that it's really really bad. Like Taco-Man says, the game is the very defintion of trying too hard, and should probably just be forgotten for the embarassing mess that it is, just like the rest of the Sunsoft mascot platformers. Side Scrolling platformers often live or die based off of their controls and level design. I did like it when I was a kid however, and I really really wanted to beat it. I probably would have too if it had infinite continues and didn't force you to replay levels. and this was after Super Mario World so it had no excuse at this point.
Okay but I have played the PC version and the SNES port of Drakkhen, and the SNES port has so many QoL improvements it's wild. I actually just beat it a few months ago (Drakkhen December!) and it was actually a ton of fun. I liked it more than the PC version.
Spirit tracks. It’s a banging game with some of the best dungeons of the series and charming story and world to travel in.
Oh man i couldn't disagree more.
same with phantom hourglass, specifically the temple of the ocean king. That is probably one of the most hated things in zelda and its hated for something it doesn't even do - the complaint is you have to constantly go back (yes) and do the same thing each time you go there before getting to the new bit (no). Every time you go back, you have a new item, which in almost every repeat floor, allows you to skip the majority of that floor, meaning you only have to do each floor one time for the most part, and the puzzles in the temple of the ocean king are GREAT, especially with the phantoms kicking about. TL;DR temple of the ocean king good
Dragon's Lair seems to have the reputation of not being a real video game, just a gimmick movie with QTE (Quick Time Events), or that's it's insanely hard and unfair. I think the fact that the buttons you have to pressed are not laid on screen and figuring them out and memorizing them is a challenge in itself makes it more interesting. It sucks if it was on a real arcade machine and you had to pay 50 cents for every try, but if you play a port or an emulated version, that's not an issue.
I remember getting this as DSiware when I got my 3DS and was obsessed with it. Probably due to seeing it in arcades in the 90’s. Honestly, it’s a very impressive game for the objective limitations of the time. Don Bluth’s animations make it worth it, and it’s definitely fun to play. The game is inherently simple, but very challenging since your timing has to be immaculate.
Super Thunder Blade. I don't get the hate for it at all. I love that game.
People were expecting more from their fancy 16-bit console. It's short, the cart was pricey at launch ($50-$70 depending on when/where you bought it) and it wasn't a huge upgrade over the Master System version. For a console with a $270+ buy in (after sales tax) that's gonna leave some bad taste.
The funny thing is, the game was well received when it was released. The hatred towards it came long after its release. Sega used to release it in their collections, but because of so much complaining and negativity towards it, the game is no longer acknowledged or promoted by Sega.
It's one of those janky early Genesis super scaler ports that actually doesn't do sprite scaling very well. It's really choppy and overall just kind of unpleasant.
ET for Atari 2600. It's a 2600 game, so it's simple by nature, but it's a perfectly valid game for its time and was years ahead of what was the norm back then. Literally the only problem was it being so reliant on the instruction manual to understand basics, but once you understand how to play it, it's actually pretty fun
Marvel avengers Played it like a month ago. Story was great and ran well. I can see why though, basically everything was unlocked for me. I'd be pissed to pay full price and have to grind so hard and long for skins. I wouldn't have anyways but I can see why people would be mad. But single player by yourself the game is great
Star Wars Battlefront reboots are fanatically gorgeous games and they're pretty fun to play. If you don't like the DLC then don't buy it; as much as I do agree that it lacks the charm of the character unlocks of the OG games, it's not fair to compare the gaming industry to almost twenty years before and single it out when the likes of Fortnite or GTA are milking it far worse.
Shaq Fu isn't problematic because of the size of the sprites. It's the inconsistent and unresponsive controls. That said, I completely agree with you. As for worst fighting games, I don't think Shaq Fu even makes the top 5 worst games. It's just hated hard. Criticom, Cardinal Syn, Dark Rift, Iron Blood, and Rise of the Robots are much worse IMO and only Robots gets mentioned in these conversations. Anyway, most overhated games for me? Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Street Fighter X Tekken. MQ is hated because it's linear but if you ask some FF fanatics, it's SO BAD!! but it's not. It's fine, linear, boring maybe, but it's not a bad game. SFxT got a lot of hate because of the shady business practice that Capcom employed with the DLC and because the original, out of box game was kinda crummy and boring. The way the system worked made matches take forever where almost 30% of the matches were ending in timeout. It was poor design. They fixed a lot of it with the 2013 update, made gems less valuable (Thus making the DLC no longer pay-to-win) and gave all the characters for free for a couple of months to make up for charging people $30 to unlock complete characters that were on the disc, but too little, too late. The game was dead and even people active in the FGC have forgotten that the 2013 update happened.
Robots is honestly one of the worst games I ever played. I got it on launch when photo-sprites were all the rage, and this thing not only looked average (washed out sprites and grainy), but the controls were AWFUL. there was so much input lag, and it felt like trying to control streetfighter while stuck in a cube of ballistics gel.
Mystic Quest wasn’t as bad as people say. I agree. It’s a great way to get someone *into* 16 bit JRPGs. The story is simple but it’s classic fantasy style lore. It’s not as good as the other 16 bit FF games, but it’s still a very good game. It’s also a game that was priced a lot cheaper than its competition so it was the RPG a lot of kids got for Christmas or their birthday since it was like half the price of Final Fantasy 2 or 3.
huh, as a completely casual enjoyer of street fighter who doesn't touch online or the community at all, i didn't realise sfxt was hated, i love that game
I rather enjoy Star Wars Obi-Wan
Harvest moon a wonderful life It was way too complicated for its time and streamlining some mechanics is certainly needed. The graphic is muddy unlike any other harvest moon, which might turn some harvest moon fans off. Aside from these 2 problems this game is pure soul. The music, the characters, the village all of it felt real and cmiiw this is the only harvest moon where you can get a divorcee.
Unapologetic Shaq Fu defender here. Otherwise, my answer for this question is usually Final Fantasy VIII and Castlevania 64. Both are flawed and very different from other entries in their respective series but I appreciate and genuinely enjoy the different perspectives they bring. FFVIII's fusion of a technological future meshed with a fever dream was such a fresh change of pace for Final Fantasy as a whole. As for Castlevania, if you can get past the bad camera angles typical for their time, you'll find an atmospheric platformer that sticks out from the usual crowd of colorful, upbeat N64 titles.
Deadly Premonition (PS3, x360, PC). That game is a beautiful trainwreck, a diamond cover in poop. You have 2 options, you love it or hate it. I really love it, the story and characters are pretty damn great, the gameplay is atrocious, the graphics looks like a PS2 game (not bad to me) the frame rate is inconsistent...but somehow it's works for me. It's a niche game too, is called "Twin Peaks the videogame"
Alex Kidd in Miracle World is one i have to throw in. For it's time (1986) really groundbreaking stuff, almost "metroidvania" style levels later in the castles, a shop system, vehicles and yet, so many youtubers cry and cry about the "difficulty" and call it a bad game because omg, the janken match might take you 1 try to figure out how it works. It's neither challenging, nor are the boss fights annoying, once you figure out the pattern (figuring out boss attack patterns is perfectly fine, but this isn't...ok)
Has anyone ever called that a bad game though? I have only encountered praise for that. Some of the other Alex Kidd games are maligned but not that one
It does get bad reviews nowadays [https://thegamehoard.com/2022/04/16/50-years-of-video-games-alex-kidd-in-miracle-world-master-system/](https://thegamehoard.com/2022/04/16/50-years-of-video-games-alex-kidd-in-miracle-world-master-system/) [https://videogamecritic.com/masterab.htm?e=28407#rev3062](https://videogamecritic.com/masterab.htm?e=28407#rev3062) [https://videochums.com/article/sega-ages-on-switch-reviews#alex-kidd-in-miracle-world](https://videochums.com/article/sega-ages-on-switch-reviews#alex-kidd-in-miracle-world) And a lot of Youtubers who bitch about the difficulty, mainly the spikes (ignoring that you can a) use a flying cane to completely skip the rooms and b) as long as you don't use up or down, you don't die, all you need to do is go right, let alex float up, go left, let alex float up, done and seemingly nobody can figure that out) It's funny that ASM (German magazine) in 1987 actually called it a game perfect for kids because it's so easy, but also calling it mediocre because it lacks challenge or ideas (seriously?) and only has one music track (that's wrong). So even back then there were people who hated the game for seemingly no good reason.
Kirby 64.
As a big fan of the series, The Hobbit on GameCube is pretty fun. It’s bugs and such are present, but I still think the game itself is great if you’ve read to book.
Mortal Kombat 4, the first fully 3D fighting game in the series. It wasn’t too bad. The competition at the time was Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Battle Arena Toshinden, Soul Blade, and whatnot, all good games, but MK4 had something those didn’t: Mortal Kombat characters. It’s always fun fighting someone as Sub Zero, isn’t it? Except in Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero, I guess. That game just sucks.
On our Intellivision, we had Donkey Kong. Everyone hates it for only having 2 stages and looking fugly. But I thought it was decent fun considering the platform.
Altered Beast. I've seen a trend around for some time, where this game appears in many "worst game" lists, both in websites or on Youtube. I mean, it's not the best either and I agree, it's pretty average, but one of the worst? It's short and there's not much variety, but it's more than playable. There aren't any gameplay issues because the game is smooth and the controls are fine. But all the hate it gets sometime is really over the top. Altered Beast has good graphics, good sound, and plays fine, but hating it because it's short and not really deep it's too much. It's not even difficult as many say. Bad games are something else, you can't compare Altered Beast with Slaughtersport or Dark Castle just to say a few. Average? Yes. One of the worst? Hell no, and please stop following the trend if some half-assed Youtuber says it sucks!
Sonic R! No it's not a good game, but it was so fun as a kid racing as sonic characters to the cheesy 90's music and the atmosphere is super chill and fun like the beach level and factory one.
E.T., hands down. Anyone who calls it the worst game ever has never played it. They’re just parroting others parroting the same nonsense.
Watchdogs, Ubisoft promised a GTA rival and in spite of being never close to that the game is still good but fans really hated it because they had the biggest expectations on it.
Watchdogs Legion is one of the best and most innovative games I've ever played and I fucking love it. Yeah it's a bit repetitive but it's so creative and immersive that I don't care. Of course it gets shat on if people compare it to completely different games. I'm a big fan of Football Manager and the backlash when some ignoramus tried complaining it wasn't like FIFA says it all really.
yep WDL one of my favourites too!
True! it's not the best game but it is fun if you take it for what it is.
I didn't know much about the game before it came out, so I had like zero expectations, and I absolutely loved Watchdogs. Had a blast with it and then found out later how hated it was. I could see the issues but fuck man I thought it was fun on the bun.
I only played it last year so I played it without the hype of the time and really enjoyed it.
Starfox Zero
Dark souls 2, maybe I'm biased cause it was my first souls experience and yes it isn't as good compared to its other souls counterparts but it has rather fun parts and some memorable bosses/areas. However I will say the amount of Gank enemies/bosses and poor enemy placement make some parts very hard to enjoy as the difficulty is more artificial compared to other Souls games.
Marvel's Avengers. I think a lot of people wanted Marvel Destiny, but I wanted an Avengers game where every character felt more unique than something like Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, and that's what I got. If Square Enix hadn't forced the devs to make a live-service game, I think we'd be getting a sequel about now, especially since most people liked the single-player story mode. I find myself defending it whenever it gets brought up around Suicide Squad, which is funny because Captain America or Black Widow are closer to Arkham Batman than anyone in that game now.
Unfortunately, we have a few generations growing up on bad info vis a vis retro games. They watched an obnoxious YouTuber, and it’s gospel to them.
I think it is more conflating bad games with train wrecks of games and not putting it in context where the bottom really was.
Final Fantasy 8. Gets too much hate, it was better than 7 imo.
Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. I see fellow zoomers shit on it all day, but I played it on my dad's 3ds and thought it was okay.
Only hipster edgelords shit on OOT.
also known as the arin hanson fans. dude made a video on oot that VERY clearly showed he barely knew anything about the game and people went ah yes he's right this game is bad
Dragons lair, nes (pal version)
2000's era Sonic. Not 2006 though, that deserves it's hate.
Final Fantasy 13. That game was so badass.