Highlighting old, crappy games no one played

[Freedan]

My original topic seems to have been lost when the boards crashed last time, so I thought I would revive the dead horse and highlight some crappy games.

Some of the games I'll get around to, I haven't played to completion. That won't stop me from feigning authority on everything about them. Neither will anyone who has finished them pointing out where I may be wrong.

I'm fairly sure I did this one in the first thread, but it's so reprehensibly awful that I felt it deserved a mention anyway. Also, it's my list, and I'll put in the games I want.

I'll add more games later. When I feel like typing that much again, maybe.


HYDLIDE (NES)




Ever play Dragon Warrior? This isn't anything like it. But it looks like it might be, so if you finished DW 12 times and wanted something like it, you might have been one of the unlucky bastards that tried Hydlide.

Hydlide was forced through the pooper of T&Esoft, a company I've never heard of before, and can't imagine many others did either. The reason for that is because they apparently released games that were only 10% complete.

The story is: an evil blue dragon uses magic (looking more like spitting Pepsi) on a princess, splitting her in to three fairies. In the NES days, 'slay the dragon and rescue the princess' was overdone in a couple of short years, but at least some games managed to make it work. Super Mario Bros. all but invented it as far as the NES went. Even Dragon Warrior managed to make it work because of the huge amount of backstory spread around. In this case, you're out to slay the dragon because the dragon is there, and that's what dragons are for.

To save Fairyland (you can make your own jokes), Jim (that's you... the knight with a name without a hint of knighthood to it) will need to find several treasures with no immediately apparent use, and 3 jewels for some reason; I'm assuming to make the game longer. But not so fast; you'll need to spend a good amount of time leveling up, because despite being a knight tasked with slaying the all-powerful demon, you're so pathetically weak that you'll feel death's embrace if an enemy coughs at you.

You level up by taking on the endless supply of 2-frames-of-animation enemies by holding down the A button and walking in to it from a direction that it's not moving in. With any luck, you might kill it and gain a small sliver on your EXP meter. The much more likely result is that it'll turn around and walk in to you, killing you instantly. If you do manage to finish it off, congratulations; only another 90 or so to go before your first level advancement. And prepare to see a lot more of the blue blobby things, because you'll need to grind to level 3 before you even think about taking on anything else.

In a game where it's so easy to take damage, you'd assume there might be some kind of inn or recovery items. There aren't. Instead, you slowly recover health by standing in 'safe' terrain, like flat plains. Unfortunately, there are also terrains that kill you. Like deserts, and for some reason, forests. I found that out the hard way when Jim keeled over and died for no reason as I was walking through the trees.

Also, you can't continue when you die. And you'll die. If it isn't from combat, Jim will find some other way to terminate his existence. In one case, I was searching through trees to find one of the fairies (yes, you need to find all 3 to finish the game), because for some reason, they put one of them in a random, non-descript tree. I examined the tree, and a swarm of bees flew out and killed me. If you remember to get it, there is a password system in the game... which would be fantastic, if Hydlide had a battery. But it doesn't, so the password is only good until you shut the game off.

And if you ever want to give the game a try for some reason, be sure the volume on your speakers is never set to anything other than 0. The music (seemingly inspired by Indiana Jones) sounds like it's emanating from a child's toy, and it plays EVERYWHERE. Title screen, overworld map, castles. And it lasts about 15 seconds before it loops, which means you'll hear it thousands of times before you finish the game.

It's more of a computer-science major's final project than a game... and even they'd get a D+, if only because you can get from start to finish without getting an error message.

[SoulBlazerFan]

Playing this game was like getting for foot amputated without a local. Or getting your flesh torn off and then dragged for an hour through salt flats. :/

[Freedan]

Bart vs. the Space Mutants




If you've never played this one, count yourself lucky. I've played all of the Simpsons games for the NES, and this was the crappiest one by far; and they were all really bad, which really says something.

Here's the story: aliens are planning to invade Springfield. That's pretty much it.

Problem number 1: Kang and Kodos aren't even the aliens. They were first introduced shortly before the game came out, but it's not like NES games had 3-year development times. Surely, it wouldn't have taken much effort to at least put them in the little talky-scenes between levels. Instead, there's generic bi-pedal aliens discussing their plans between levels.

Problem number 2: The game plays like garbage. At the start of every life, you can take two hits, with no way to heal yourself after you take the first one. It took pixel-perfect jumping accuracy (jumping on a possessed townsperson at the wrong angle would hurt you), and you have no continues. That might all be somewhat tolerable if Bart didn't handle like a sack of wet shit. He walks and jumps like he crapped his pants, and you can be sure you'll be taking some cheap hits because of the bad controls.

Also, they did something here that, off the top of my head, I can't remember any other game doing; they mapped the 'run' and 'jump' commands to the same button. I think most NES players are familiar with the standard set-up: hold B to run, press A to jump. Super Mario Bros. wasn't the only game to do that. Here, you run by holding A, and jump by pressing it. That makes running jumps impossible. Not that it matters, since I can't see most people playing past the first 5 minutes anyway.

Bart may be a shitty hero, but the aliens are so braindead, they deserve to be stopped by someone so useless. Their method of taking over the world is... by building a machine that runs on purple objects. Their genius plan can be stopped by destroying or spray-painting everything purple in Springfield, or at the very least, getting it out of the aliens' view. Drop a towel over a purple flower pot, and the aliens have no idea it's there.

Apparently, there are only 24 purple things in Springfield, since getting rid of that many will completely fuck the aliens' plans up. Not to be defeated, the aliens modify the machine... and now, instead of running on purple objects, it runs on hats. Yeah, hats. But again, their plans are foiled when Bart collects 25 hats. Unless this machine needs every fucking hat in the world to function, I fail to see how the loss of 25 will stop anything.

The aliens aren't done, though. Since death-by-hats didn't pan out, they've moved on to balloons; but only as long as Bart can't get 40 of them. Never mind that you can buy, like, 100 of them for $1.50 at any convenience store.

I think you see where this is going; the aliens also move on to EXIT signs (?), and power rods (the only one that sounds like it makes any sense at all). But as long as you take a few of them, that ruins their whole plan.

This game makes me wish that instead of a 'power' button, the NES had a 'fuck this shit' button that launched the cartridge across the room so it would shatter on the wall. Sure, there would be a few concussions, but there's bound to be some collateral damage with new technology.

[EverPhoenix]

Freedan, the Dark Knight wrote:

This game makes me wish that instead of a 'power' button, the NES had a 'fuck this shit' button that launched the cartridge across the room so it would shatter on the wall. Sure, there would be a few concussions, but there's bound to be some collateral damage with new technology.

judging by the sound of the game, they should have that button on a lot of things.

and another weird game ive never played more than 2 minutes of...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNgsvDmpReY

[Brainfire2008]

http://cinemassacre.com/AVGN/Nes_Nerd.html