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“This platformer is a mess from top to bottom, and any of the occasional moments that don’t feel somehow broken only serve to make the game’s other flaws appear that much bigger.” - Gamespot on Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

“It goes above and beyond the boundaries of sensible game design and overflows with so much venomous malice that you have to wonder if one of the programmers was a misanthrope.” - HG101 on Atlantis no Nazo

“It’s an endless parade of inept programming, repetitive design, and outright stupidity.” - GameSpy on Action 52

“I love this game. It’s one of my favorites.” - dsheinem on Ballz 3D

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Welcome to the May, 2019, Together Retro Thread!

This month we celebrate bad games. The bottom of the barrel. The unplayable. The games that almost crashed the industry. The games that disappointed countless children on their birthdays. The games that squandered licenses and ended series. The horrible ideas and the ill-conceived ports.

We celebrate bad games this month by playing them for as long as we can stand them (no one expects you to beat these games!), jumping in the thread, and trashing these abominations. Maybe we’ll discover that these games are worse than we imagined...but, maybe, we’ll discover that some of their bad reputations and review scores aren’t entirely fair...maybe, even, we’ll discover that some of these games are...good?

This month’s criteria is pretty loose; so, have fun reading bad reviews and picking games. If you need help finding something, I suggest checking out:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... _reception

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/catego ... ly-kusoge/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegua ... e-part-one

I hope everyone has a great time - - and I can’t wait to read what the Racketboy community has to say about all these “classic” games!

I'm in.

I'm looking at playing Lagoon, Famicom Valis, and a multiple bad Atari games.

Nice.

I’m in too. On my list are;

Double Dragon (2600) - http://www.honestgamers.com/7083/atari- ... eview.html

Firefly (Atari 2600) - https://www.deafsparrow.com/2014/03/21/ ... 600-games/

Extreme Sports with the Berenstain Bears - http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/egm20.htm

Bubsy 3D - http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/egm17.htm

Contra Legacy of War - https://www.classic-games.net/contra-legacy-of-war/

Hooters Road Trip - https://m.ign.com/articles/2002/05/01/hooters-road-trip

Street Fighter: The Movie - https://www.fightersgeneration.com/game ... movie.html

I’ve got a few more up my sleeve, and I’m going to start writing these up tonight!

Holy mother of God.

Fire Fly is just as bad as they said it would be. By "they" I mean people who have played enough Atari to discover those truly terrible games.

It plays like absolute garbage. The controls are laggy. Objectives are nonsensical (you can complete a stage simply by flying past the enemies). The game doesn't even seem to keep score on the default difficulty. Is this some early "you're playing on easy mode!" type of taunt?

I found a weird glitch. When hit you can begin your death animation in once stage and then complete it in another. Using the term "stage" loosely here.

Enemy patterns start repeating after like 10 seconds. Subsequent loops never seem to get any harder.

Just a brutally abysmal game. I may put a little more time into it. I'd like to consider it "beat" but first I have to see if I've touched on everything game has to offer. I doubt there's much more.

Next on the queue is Fire Fighter on the 2600 (I'm sensing a theme...). Supposedly one of the worst titles by the otherwise excellent Imagic. Had to dig out my old woodgrain system as Imagic games won't play on the 7800. Hilariously, despite being a 2600 game, Fire Fly only plays on my 7800. I feel like I've been trolled here.

I will play this tonight. I read the instructions on Atariage. Apparently, it keeps score if you adjust the difficulty level? I’ll try that out.

Yes, default mode is "practice mode" where a smiley face is displayed in lieu of a score.

You’ll do great! Just tell us what you didn’t like about them. (Or...did like about them. Games with a bad rap aren’t all necessarily bad.)

Also, I hear you on the old games. Some can border on completely broken and non-functional. With newer games, however, the pain might be stretched out for a very long time. At least, old games were over pretty quickly.

So, Fire Fighter is just strange. You play as, well, a firefighter trying to rescue a man from a burning building. The up button shoots water from a hose vertically to extinguish blazes in windows. When the fires are out a ladder must be extended from the firetruck to reach the man. You also have to steer your firefighter onto the ladder, and head up to meet him. The controls are odd. I thought you had to be on the truck to control the ladder, but no, holding the joystick button switches to "truck mode" with the stick altering the angle of the ladder. It works, but it's an odd system.

Also, there's little incentive to keep playing. There's no score tallied, but a timer instead. It's not a timer that counts time, simply a time tracker that counts up. Okay? It's also impossible to lose or "die." Even if flames engulf the building the trapped man simply goes on the roof. And the flames also, eventually, extinguish themselves. An odd, and unimpressive, sort of game.

Another supposed "bad" Atari game is Space Jockey, by Quaker Oats. This one isn't stellar, but it's playable and occasionally kinda fun. It's a shooter, and depending on the difficulty it plays like a fixed shooter or a true scrolling shooter. You're a ship, you shoot things, go for a high score. That's about it. It terms of controls and graphics, it does feel half-baked compared to the likes of River Raid. Also, I'm pretty sure there's a safe zone, where it's impossible to get hit. Place your ship there, hold down fire, wait an hour and the score rolls over. Nice. Objectively not a terrible game, but it lacks the pizzazz of so many Atari shooters.

Ordered myself a Famicom Mini yesterday and today I played some Atlantis No Nazo!
GOODNESS this is a bad ol' time

I didn't even make it to the bits of the game that are so infamously indecipherable with horrible secrets. The game is just all around unfair and bad in a way so many 8-bit games are. It ticks all the boxes of bad 8-bit game design:
- Poor to no play control. You make a jump, that jump is HAPPENING.
- Enemies with unpredictable spawn patterns. If you're running at full tilt, you're probably fine and you can kinda predict it, but you basically can't do that becuase you die in ONE hit and there is tricky platforming. Many times you'll make a jump and two enemies will spawn instead of one, or the bats will spawn at a different height than you're hoping, and suddenly you're about to die and there's NOTHING you can do about it.
- Comically useless weapon. You have what are effectively grenades whose main purpose is to find secret doors and open closed ones, because they're absolutely useless for killing nearly every enemy in the game who is some combination of invulnerable to them (they fly), can shield, takes lots of hits, or is so mobile that trying to kill them is pointless.
- Timer for no reason. This game may as well be a runner like Adventure Island with how strict its time limits get so quickly (by like the 6th level or so), but it has tons of super narrow corridors packed with tricky platforming and enemies (who one-hit kill you!), so you need to take your time. Combine that with unpredictable enemy spawns, and you frequently need to get lucky to make it through a level without dying.
- Long length and NO continues. You have seven lives to make it through a game that is packed with super unfair enemies, very tricky platforming, and deliberately impossible secrets/puzzles. Good luck!

Yeah, this game is bad. Not completely unenjoyable, granted. I'm sure you could really get into a rhythm with the platforming and enemy out-maneuvering if you really started memorizing each level. I honestly nearly did at times. But it's just such a painfully mediocre and constantly unfair game that there is no reason to play it, let alone justify its presence on the Famicom Mini.

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While we're on the topic, let's talk about the Famicom Mini as well, because this thing has so may reasons it sucks for absolutely no reason.

For the sake of nostalgia faithful to the original design, there are several bits of horrible design that the original Famicom had compared to its successors or even the NES that are either faithfully recreated or made even worse! For starters, the controllers are hard-wired into the back, just like the original. Sure, it comes with two controllers, and the NES Classic didn't, but they're HARD WIRED INTO THE BACK . The controller port on the front is fake as well from what I can tell, so you can't even get a 3rd-party controller to get around that like you could with the original Famicom Mini. The cables for the controllers are still SUPER short, I think maybe even shorter than the original Famicom's cables.

To top it all off, the controllers obviously need to slot into the sides. This IS a Famicom after all. However, that means they need to be small enough to fit into this mini Famicom! Mini Famicom; mini controllers! They're like half the size of a proper NES/Famicom controller and it makes the games SO much harder to play by just muscle memory. It makes hard games like Atlantis No Nazo or even Mega Man 2, a game I'm very familiar with and can usually get through with no problem, SO much harder. If my hands were even like 10% bigger (I'm like 5'8", so I'm super average height in America and like top-of-average height for Japan males), I basically couldn't use these things even close to comfortably.

And this thing has Atlantis No Nazo but DOESN'T have Punch Out OR Kid Icarus! At least it has River City Ransom and Solomon's Key, I suppose

Amazing post, Partridge. I thought about importing a Famicom Mini, but now...Nope!

I spent some time this evening with Double Dragon (2600) and Firefly (2600). I’m not yet convinced either is bad. So far, Double Dragon is pretty much the most realistic beat em up ever in that: (1) you are terrible at fighting; (2) you get your ass kicked in a few seconds; and (3) it isn’t fun at all. That said, it’s an insanely ambitious 2600 game, and I’m going to give it another try. Firefly just seems like a really dull game with terrible music...and with a middle finger animation when you die. I’m going to give it another shot too. (Bone: Did you figure out how to get the pixy? It seems impossible to me...)

I did beat one game tonight, though, the execrable Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls (SNES). Unlike its beat ‘em up predecessors, it’s a 2D one-on-one fighting game with looks and plays like it was designed by a company called Leland Interactive Media. (That is, everything about it sucks.) It’s like they wanted to make a game that captured the appeal of both Street Fighter II and TMNT but had no idea what makes either of those things appealing in any way, and ended up shitting all over a classic video game franchise in the process. With one exception (a rad, jean-shorts wearing, sunglasses-popping, machinegun-wielding skeleton named Bones), the character design is incredibly lame in a cheap, cancelled-after-three-episodes, mid-90s Saturday morning cartoon sort of way. (Captain Planet has cooler enemies than Billy and Jimmy Lee...with one notable exception, Bones, who rules.) Also, the penultimate boss is a busty, leather-clad, whip-carrying dominatrix, which seems a bit risqué for a game ostensibly aimed at children...Not sure what they were thinking there, if they were thinking at all.

The animation and fighting engine are both terrible. Special moves are difficult to execute, and completely worthless. Low punches, low kicks, medium punches, and medium kicks are also worthless; so, you pretty much just wail away on your opponents with heavy attacks until you win. If an opponent presents the least challenge, you just turtle and counterattack with heavy punches and kicks until you win. (In case you haven’t guessed, the single-player mode is very easy.) Moreover, there aren’t really any combos; so, fights consist mostly of trading blows with your opponent. There is a (very tame) fatality system, and I executed one computer-controlled opponent during my playthrough. I have no idea how I did that, however, and I think the fatalities occur at random. There certainly isn’t a “Finish him!” prompt of any type.

There’s a tournament mode and a quest mode, which are distinguished only by the presence of a picture and scrolling text between matches in the quest mode. (All of the text is awkward, and some of it is unintentionally hilarious. The sensei has to sneak in the words “fight with honor” every time he says anything, apparently: “Fight with honor and look out for his flying sawblades!” “The Shadow Master is trying to poison Metro City! You have to stop him and fight with honor.”) You can also distribute points between attack, defense, and special moves at the beginning of a new game, but I found the distribution have no impact on the gameplay at all. I was tempted to take everything down to zero to see if it would still be possible to win, but the game wasn’t compelling enough even for a stupid experiment. The backgrounds are flat; the music is a collection of horn sounds; the announcer sounds like he has a sinus infection; and the “gong” effect sounds like someone hit a frying pan with a wooden spoon. In short, Double Dragon V is a terrible mis-step and a horrid fighting game (that still somehow ended up being one of the best games for the Atari Jaguar ).