May Together Retro: Bad to the Bone!

[prfsnl_gmr]

So...Street Fighter: The Movie (PS1) is just a horribly re-skinned version of Super Street Fighter II Turbo with one extra character (Sawada) and without Dhalsim, Fei Long, and T. Hawk. The controls are tight, and it plays almost identically to the SSF2T. The new character, Sawada, plays a lot like someone from a SNK Fighter, and he integrates well into the game. The challenge in the single-player mode is spot-on, and the loading times are actually a lot better than they are for other PS1 Street Fighter games. The game also features a choose-your-own-adventure “movie” mode where you play through the films events as Jean-Claude Van Damme...I mean...Lyon Gaultier...err...Chance Boudreaux...I mean...Guile. I don’t like playing as Guile, but it’s fine. It’s also incredibly corny, just like the movie...which is, I think, the basis for all the game’s hate.

Let’s face facts here, Street Fighter: The Movie wasn’t exactly a triumph of casting or costume design. No one cast in the movie really looks like anyone from the game, and the costumes look like amateur cosplay. This aesthetic bleeds over into the game, and everything about it looks horrible. As noted above, however, the fighting engine is rock solid, and the game is a good fighter. Now, when we intentionally embrace these cheesy aesthetics, I think the game deserves a re-evaluation. It is fun to play, and the fact it looks so corny just adds to the fun. It is the video game equivalent of a very bad, but competently made, immensely entertaining movie, the kind that form the basis for the best MST3K episodes.

[Nemoide]

PartridgeSempai isn't the only one with a Famicom Mini, only I have the Shonen Jump version so a large number of the games are PRETTY TERRIBLE. I don't think I need to reiterate too much but the Famicom Mini is really awkward to play on. Those controllers are so tiny and the cord is so short. It works but is FAR from ideal; the US definitely got the better deal with the NES version.

So today I decided to hook that bad boy up and start playing the original Fist of the North Star! (It's worth noting that the NES Fist of the North Star is the second game.) I already had experience with 8-bit Fist of the North Star in the form of Black Belt for the SMS. I'm a fan of the anime incarnation of Fist of the North Star, so I was looking forward to seeing the game in its original form rather than the generic karate themed game that is Black Belt. I know Black Belt isn't a great game, but I have some fondness for it and expected this game to be similar. But maaaan, it's reputation for being a terrible game is definitely accurate.
Right off the bat, it's obvious that the graphics are extremely awful, even by 8-bit standards. The sound effects are also bad and repetitive. When you punch people and make their heads explode they kind of wobble and make a weird sound for a while before dying; it's pretty obnoxious. Kicking is less weird but enemies just FLY OFF THE SCREEN and the effect just makes it seem like lazy programing. Theoretically, you can hit projectiles back to enemies and hit them with it, but I guess my timing is always off because usually they just hit my fist and I take damage.
Like Black Belt, you go through the stage punching & kicking weak, infinite-spawning bad guys. But the game has another mechanic that makes it near impossible without a walkthrough: to reach the boss of each stage, you need to follow a specific path and go through certain doors to find different areas. So if you just keep walking straight, I'm pretty sure the game just infinitely loops. What doors do you walk through? Well, sometimes you'll go past a doorway and you'll see a character waiting there (Bat or Lin) - that means you can go through the doorway; they're in a lot of the doors and so they won't always guide you on the right path. So which doors SHOULD you walk through? GOOD QUESTION: I had to use a walkthrough because I saw zero indication of this aside from trial and error! But there's a guide on GameFAQs that will tell you which doors to take which removes what I'd consider the most annoying part of the game.
The game is still far from easy; you only get three lives and zero continues. While most bad guys can be taken care of with no problem, sometimes you get weird "sliding" enemies that go by very quickly on the ground or in the air and it's hard to avoid damage. Sometimes projectiles come flying from off screen and while MOST of them can just be avoided by ducking, some come at an angle and there's no sure way to know if should be avoided by going forward, going backward, staying still, ducking, or jumping. The bosses are fairly simple but they DO usually land a few hits on you. None of this would be that bad except to my knowledge, THERE IS NO WAY TO RECOVER HEALTH, even after clearing a stage! Nor is there any way I know of to gain more lives! So if you beat a boss by the skin of your teeth, you'll probably die quickly in the next stage, taking away one of your precious lives. Sometimes I see text floating upwards coming out of enemies after killing them and maybe I should collect it, but every time I notice it, it's out of reach too quickly. Thankfully playing on the Famicom Mini means I can use save states!

So I mentioned, there's a guide on GameFAQs although I wonder if that guide's offer was actually playing the same version I did or if there's a buggy ROM floating around out there on the internet. The guide seems to indicate that you can't die at all AND that all of the correct doors to walk through are the ones with Lin. However I found death very possible (especially against bosses) and some of the doors it said I should go through had Bat waiting in them and sometimes Lin would show up by doors I wasn't supposed to walk through. Still, the doors the guide tells me to walk through worked at getting me to the boss, so they're clearly talking about the same game. The guide's author thinks this game is ridiculously stupidly easy and while I don't think that's right, we are at least in agreement about it being an awful game.

I got as far as the final stage with two extra lives. I need a break before I go forward, but I'm pretty confident I'll be able to finish the game some time this month because I can be a masochist.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Wow.

I’ve played the NES game, and it is dreadful. I admire you sticking with that one. It sounds, unbelievably, worse than it’s sequel.

[PartridgeSenpai]

I've played the Master System Fist of the North Star game because it's in the PS4 game as a bonus unlockable, and the NES game sounds just as bad if not worse

And you certainly have me beat on the software side of things with that JUMP Famicom Mini! That's a veritable treasure trove of bad games

[BoneSnapDeez]

Unlike the NES, it's difficult to find "Worst Atari 2600 games ever" lists. Or at least lists developed with any kind of consensus in mind. Lists by individual people can be found.

Anyway, I'm gonna stick with the 2600 for a little while longer (for some reason!) and try some titles that were given an F rating by The Video Game Critic. Although I question the judgement of someone who gives an F rating to Oink! and Super Cobra!!! Next game to be played is Air Lock, by Data Age.

In the meantime, I sunk some more time (way more time than any rational human being should) into Fire Fly, Fire Fighter, and Space Jockey. Played on all game modes until I felt I could cruise forever. In Atari Land, I consider these games "beaten" and will post detailed reviews in the appropriate thread later (or not-so-detailed reviews, these games give me little to work with!) All are, indeed, bad.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Yeah... I spent more time with Firefly. It’s bad. It’s primary fault, besides the ear splitting music and the completely inappropriate middle finger it gives you when you die, is that it’s just dull. It just repeats and never gets any more difficult. Once you know what to do, you can just play forever without anything changing.

You know what other Atari games are bad? Double Dragon and Pac Man. The first is incredibly ambitious. It has levels! It has bosses! It has scrolling backgrounds and an ending! You’ll never see any of those things, though, because the first two thugs you encounter are going to mop the floor with you until you beat them by luck or by exploiting the game’s AI through incredibly tedious play. Don’t worry, though. The next wave of thugs will annihilate you before you really make any progress. Pac Man is just a lazy, poorly programmed port of a great game, if you play it back-to-back with the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac Man - which is great - it’s like night and day.

Speaking of bad games...I started up Contra Legacy of War this morning, and...holy hell is it a mis-step for that series. The graphics are atrocious, the camera is horrible, the game plays terribly....just everything is wrong with it. I’m going to try to beat it at some point, but man, it will be painful.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Have you played the licensed Alien game on the 2600? Interesting take on the Pac-Man formula.

Well, I got through Airlock but it took some time. It's one one those games that is hampered by the inherent simplicity of the 2600. There's not much to the game, but unless you read the manual you'll have no idea how to play it. And the game has a strict timer (in 10 seconds increments) so you can't goof off.

For starters, this is a platformer with only two stages. For some weird reason, the default ("1") game mode only allows you to play the first one. To play the first and second you need to select mode "3." 2 and 4 are the one and two-stage modes for two players. Yeah...

So, you play as a man escaping a rapidly sinking submarine. To escape he needs to head up elevators. To switch the elevators on he needs keys. On each floor a "fat" key must be grabbed first, then a "skinny" one. All the while there are stationary obstacles to leap over, as well as torpedos. You have a limited amount of time to escape each floor. One life per game, epic cutscene upon death. Epic ending upon game completion.

THE TORPEDO SPRITE IS LITERALLY THE SPRITE OF THE MAN BUT CUT IN HALF. IN OTHER WORDS IT'S THE MAN'S HEAD AND ARMS AND PART OF HIS TORSO I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING AT THIS IT'S SO DAMN STUPID

Controls are kinda clunky but, honestly, the game's not that bad. An issue I have is that's it's really easy on easy mode and very very hard on hard mode. No middle ground. There's a nice looking title screen, but it only displays the name of the developer instead of the name of the game itself. lulz.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I think there’s an inverse relationship between the quality of an Atari game’s title screen and the quality of its gameplay.

[Michi]

You guys are killing me. You're only a couple pages in and already this thread could be the basis for a hilarious article about the worst Atari 2600 games

[prfsnl_gmr]

Join us!

I’m playing Extreme Sports with Bernstein Bears this weekend. Should be a good time!