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4/30/2015

Top 100 Worst NES Games, #70-61

70. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (Imagineering, 1992)

Ah, Imagineering.  A company that brought us many underwhelming licensed titles including the three Simpsons licensed games, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors (the title that brought us the notorious minigame Desert Bus) and a couple other turkeys we'll get to later on this list.  Home Alone 2 holds a very special place on a lot of gamer shitlists, though.  Programmed in only three months to coincide with the film's release, and it definitely shows in the presentation - ugly visuals and numerous sound effects recycled from their earlier titles.  But then you pair that with clunky controls, unclear objectives, confusing design decisions (a boss that's immune to all weapons, but strangely vulnerable to your knee-slide move - which doesn't damage anything else in the game?) and an overall length of only four levels, and you've got a recipe for disaster.  But the real tragedy of this game is that it's actually dedicated in memory of someone, as seen in the opening scroll...

69. Platoon (Ocean Software, 1988)

Ocean + Licensed property = crap.  We've seen this formula in action several times already on the list, but one of the most prominent examples of this is a game based on the war film Platoon.  In adapting it, though, they seem to have intentionally gone for the parts that make the least compelling gameplay.  From a seemingly endless maze of similar looking jungle screens (blargh) to searching villages for booby traps (as in, walking around, searching objects and hoping you don't trigger one and blow up, instantly losing a life) to even more maze-wandering in a sewer, Platoon is terminally dull and repetitious.  But perhaps the most shocking thing about it is that it was published by Sunsoft, a company known for creating several highly acclaimed NES titles like Batman, Journey to Silius and Blaster Master...

68. Days of Thunder (Beam Software, 1990)

I've never been huge on racing games, and titles like Days of Thunder probably didn't do much to improve my perception of the genre.  Also loosely based on the movie of the same name (another warning sign!), Days of Thunder attempts to be a more realistic style of racer, requiring you to pit to rotate out your tires and fix your car's engine throughout.  The problem, though, is that this is done far too often to make it any fun - it's only a couple of minutes after the beginning of the race before your tires start to go, and so much as nicking another car will damage your engine.  Worse, pitting isn't an automatic process - you have to manually select each member of your pit crew and get them to do their jobs one by one, which eats up tons of time unless you know exactly what you're doing.  Later games on the SNES would do realistic racing much better, but Days of Thunder is one to be forgotten.

67. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance (Natsume, 1991)

Another example of a game that was fairly innovative for its time on the home computer formats, but which really did not translate well to the NES.  The PC version of Heroes of the Lance was a departure from the usual D&D game formula, attempting to turn it into more of an action-oriented side scroller.  Fair enough, but when it came time to port it to the NES, Natsume seemingly went out of their way to make it as uncompelling an experience as possible.  From the tiny sprites with limited animation, the grating 30-second music loops, the cumbersome game interface (oh, I have to hold down to hurt that enemy, even though my sword is clearly clipping into their head?), the lousy hit detection and the overall short length of the game (one can complete it in less than fifteen minutes once they figure out the correct route), Heroes of the Lance lost any appeal its PC counterpart may have held.  Its sequel held up considerably better when it got ported to the Famicom, but unfortunately never made it out of Japan.

66. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Atari Games, 1988)

A very lackluster downport of an otherwise passable arcade game, Indiana Jones is also just a plain rotten experience.  The confusing layout of the levels (two boards each that one must swap between and which each wrap around at the edges) makes navigation much harder than it should be, and the gameplay itself a a tedious affair of rescuing children just to collect one-use weapon icons and maybe, eventually, find the key that will take you to the next board.  Also not helping matters are some wonky collision detection with platforms and some very awkward jumping - you're seemingly always being pulled toward the bottom of the screen when you jump, which means that you can't platform across horizontal pits as you'd expect to, and narrowly missing a jump to a minecart or a lower platform either results in you getting lost or falling into a lava pit and dying.  And then there's the two penultimate levels, which require you to build a makeshift bridge out of dead dragons across a lava pit (not as awesome as it sounds since there's six possible paths and only one will completely bridge the gap) and find a hidden doorway leading to the exit by bombing a very specific spot that you'll only know where to look for if you've collected all the seemingly useless map pieces from the previous stages.  Temple of Doom is an exercise in frustration, and the gaudy color palette and crummy music and sound effects don't help its case either.

65. Back to the Future (Beam Software, 1989)

Another prime example of a bad movie-to-game tie-in - take a classic film and try to shoehorn in game elements, no matter how unfitting or cumbersome they are.  To that end, Back to the Future mostly plays out like a top-down shoot-em-up, just without the shooting element (unless you collect a power-up, that is) - walk down endless streets avoiding enemies and collecting clocks to prevent yourself from fading out of existence.  The only breakup in this monotony comes on every fourth stage, in the form of one of four minigames - throwing milkshakes at swarms of bullies (made harder than it needs to be thanks to the awkward viewpoint), blocking kisses with a book (ditto), a music game that plays like Guitar Hero only a thousand times worse, and a terminally un-fun racing segment where you try to maintain your speed while avoiding constant bombardment by lightning that destroys the pavement in front of you and slows you down.  That's bad enough, but then the whole experience is made unbearable by a grating 30-second music loop that plays from the title screen to the very end of the game...

64. The Adventures of Gilligan's Island (Human Entertainment, 1990)

I think just about everyone's heard of the TV show "Gilligan's Island", but I doubt any of them would say that it had the stuff of a decent video game adaptation.  Human Entertainment proved that notion right with the NES game, a title that attempts to provide nonlinear exploration and comedy elements and fails miserably at both.  In addition to completing repetitive missions and enduring tinny, repetitious music, you also get to endure all sorts of "wacky antics' from Gilligan as he falls down pits, off waterfalls and directly into enemies at every turn, and you have to constantly backtrack to save him because without him at your side, you can't complete most of the missions in the game.  In essence, the whole game is a giant escort mission, except instead of just giving you a game over when your charge dies, they make you go back and get them, over and over again, and every time you do he has another "hilarious" one-liner for you that you've already heard a dozen times over.  Jeez.

63. Mario's Time Machine (Radical Entertainment, 1994)

It was a tough choice between this one and Mario is Missing, as both are lousy educational titles that aren't any fun to play.  However, I eventually went with Time Machine.  Yes, Mario is Missing was dull, repetitive and had little-to-no real educational value, but at least it wasn't a complete guessing game and a waste of a cool idea, unlike this one.  Mario' Time Machine's gameplay looks promising at first, having you bop Koopas in a Mario Bros. style minigame to collect items, then time-travel and replace them in their proper time periods, but this quickly becomes a chore once you realize that nothing in the game can harm or even impede you in any way.  Worse, you have to place each object in a very specific spot in its respective time period with only a few vague clues to guide  you, and if you guess wrong, you have to exit out of the level entirely and bop Koopas again to get the item back so you can try again.  That alone earns it far more crap points than Missing in my book!

62. Transformers: The Headmasters (Takara, 1987 in Japan)

Just about everyone knows of the notorious Famicom Transformers game and how much of a frustrating experience it turns out to be with its awkward physics, one-hit kills and fidgety hit detection.  Well, Takara seemingly took a look at all the heat that game caught and said "You think that's bad?  You ain't seen nothing yet, baby!".  And thus was born Transformers: The Headmasters, a Famicom Disk System exclusive that took all the problems of its predecessors and magnified them tenfold.  The brunt of the game's pain comes in its driving stages, where your Transformer's brake lines have seemingly been cut and you're under constant attack by swarms of enemies, with your only means of fending them off being a shot that goes straight ahead or upward at an awkward diagonal angle that never seems to hit anything, and with mines in the road every fifty feet that you have no chance in hell of not hitting unless you slam into reverse the instant they appear onscreen.  Each of these get topped with an equally frustrating boss battle, with you having to weave between swarms of bullets (with the same unresponsive controls) whilst landing dozens of hits on a very precise magic pixel in the bosses' midsection.  Then you move on to 2D side-scrolling stages, which consist of clearing similar-looking rooms full of enemies and collecting icons to open doors, with each of these culminating in a frustrating, overly long battle that plays out like the game "Outlaws" on the Atari - ricocheting bullets around a central obstacle in the room to try and hit your opponent in the back or side.  Oh, and did I mention you have to find four other captured Transformers throughout these levels in order to move on to the final stage, and that failing to find one means you have to do that entire two-level segment again?  ..Mmyep.  The original Transformers game has nothing on this brand of awful!

61. Castelian (Bits Studios, 1991)

This one seems to have flown under a lot of NES enthusiasts' radars, and rarely if ever gets mentioned in the same breath as other bad games on the platform.  I think I'll pin that on its relatively late release though, as it debuted on the NES after the Super Nintendo was already taking the world by storm.  But the few who did play Castelian were in for one hell of an experience.  Yes, the visuals are solid.  Yes, the rotation effects on the tower are pretty impressive for an NES game.  Less impressive, though, is its gameplay.  Your character moves excruciatingly slowly, both of your actions (firing a ball that stuns enemies and destroys certain obstacles) and your jump are inexplicably mapped to the same button (leaving the B button completely unused) and getting hit sends you plummeting several floors back down the tower, meaning you'll be retreading the same stretches of ground an awful lot.  Oh, and you're on a very strict time limit too, so if you get hit more than once, you may as well just throw in the towel right there.  Despite its colorful graphics and cute characters, Castelian is a Sisyphean chore and should be avoided.

4/29/2015

Top 100 Worst NES Games, #80-71

80. Faria: A World of Mystery and Danger! (Game Arts, 1991)

Game Arts is a beloved company to many old-school gamers, responsible for the Lunar and Grandia franchises, as well as for some other cult favorites like Silpheed on the Sega CD and Alisia Dragoon on the Sega Genesis.  One of their earlier outings on home consoles, however, was not so well received.  Faria has all the makings of a good 8-bit RPG - well-detailed visuals, charming characters and a creative fantasy world - but the gameplay unfortunately does not stack up.  Combat in the game, rather than a turn-based format, is done in real-time, with you trying to defeat enemies in an overhead battlefield before they deplete your HP.  Unfortunately, some spotty hit detection makes it difficult to take hits without being hit yourself, and you die very easily, especially early on, when you can go straight from an encounter with some weak bug enemies to getting your face punched in by a hulking red monster many times your current level.  Running from combat only docks you further, causing you to lose experience, gold, or even equipment you've picked up (which really sucks when you drop a piece of gear you just spent hours grinding for).  Pair that with uninteresting dungeon designs and a extraordinarily high encounter rate, and you have a game that just isn't fun to play.  You'd expect a lot better from the studio that brought us the legendary Lunar games just a few years later, but Faria is an RPG that sadly ranks among the system's worst.

79. Cool World (Ocean Software, 1993)

A lousy, underperforming Ralph Bakshi movie mangled by the studio into something unrecognizable from the original pitch, and of course, Ocean - makers of too many crappy film tie-ins to count - was there to make a game out of it before its five minutes of fame were up.  It does at least have a pretty creative gameplay element - you can suck up doodles (cartoon characters, basically) using a pen to eliminate them, but once you fill up the pen, you have to find an empty inkwell to empty it before you can use it again.  Sadly, that's about the best thing that can be said of it - the asinine, unintuitive puzzles, glitchy hit detection and lack of invincibility after a hit (meaning any hazard can and will drain a huge chunk of your health on contact) make it a pretty obnoxious game to endure, to say nothing of the garish visuals and grating music.  At least it followed in the footsteps of its tie-in film and was forgotten pretty quickly after it launched.

78. Transformers: Convoy no Nazo  (ISCO, 1986)

Transformers, as massively popular and prevalent a media franchise as it is, surprisingly has very few worthwhile video games to its name.  Probably the most notorious of all of these (though not the worst, as we'll see later on this list) is Convoy no Nazo - an early Famicom platformer that tried to cash in and ended up being a pretty wretched experience.  The game is ridiculously tough, with one-hit kills, cheap enemy patterns and your character having both a huge hitbox and tiny projectiles that never seem to hit anything you want them to.  The stage design only compounds this, frequently forcing you to jump blind across gaps - usually straight into an enemy bullet - and funneling you into narrow tunnels where you can't avoid any hazards that come your way.  There's even a much more annoying version of Super Mario Bros' looping castles in Stage 9 and it forces you to track down seven letters hidden in obscure "secrets" in each stage and play through it all AGAIN to get the true ending (which, trust me, is not even remotely worth it).  There are a lot of great platformers on the NES, but this is definitely not one of them.

77. T&C 2: Thrilla's Surfari (Sculptured Software, 1992)

I don't know who was clamoring for a sequel to T&C Surf Designs of all games, but apparently enough people were that Acclaim saw fit to commission another one.  This time, development duties were handed off to Sculptured Software (a house that brought us such classics as Metal Mech, Day Dreamin' Davey and Captain Novolin) and the game's focus was shifted into more of a sidescrolling action title.  Unfortunately, this genre shift did not make it any less of a frustrating experience.  There are still tons of obstacles to deal with every step of the way, and even the slightest tap against one will send you careening out of control into a death animation and all the way back to the beginning of the level.  Oh, and you only get three lives and no continues to complete the entire adventure, so good luck.  Even some nicely detailed visuals couldn't save this one from being not only bad, but worse than its already appalling predecessor...

76. Superman (Kemco, 1988)

While Superman is a pop culture icon and probably the single most well-known superhero of all time, his adventures in the realm of gaming have unfortunately been mediocre at best and disastrous at worst.  But while the NES Superman game certainly isn't the worst he's done, it was still crummy in every facet, with lazy combat (get close and mash the punch button!), a confusing map layout and having to collect icons to use any of Superman's  powers.  Hell, you can't even fly around on your own; you need to find a power-up icon, and even then you can only take off and land at specified spots in the overworld.  The missions in the game are also just dull, consisting almost entirely of going from place to place and punching a building full of generic enemies into submission over and over again.  I suppose the open world aspect of its design was pretty innovative for 1988, but when everything else about the game is so unappealing, it really doesn't amount to much.

Fun fact: The Famicom version of the game is ever-so-slightly better, if only because it actually contains the iconic John Williams Superman theme (omitted from the US release due to copyright issues, only to be replaced with music from the Famicom RPG "Light of the Indras").

75. Tag Team Match M.U.S.C.L.E. (TOSE, 1986)

Just another bad wrestling game for the NES, only noteworthy for the fact that it was among the earliest examples of one.  M.U.S.C.L.E. was based on the Kinnikuman franchise in Japan, which spun off into a line of tiny plastic figures in North America.  That's clearly reflected in the game's sprites, which are tiny, featureless little men with minimal and stiff animation.  Move variety is virtually nonexistant, and the only thing that stops every match from being a mindless slap-fight is the occasional power-up ball that grants whoever grabs it the ability to unleash a more powerful attack that quickly whittles down the opponent's health bar.  In short, the whole game just boils down to stalling for time until you can grab said orb and effortlessly curb-stomp your opponent in a matter of seconds.  No skill, no strategy, none of the athleticism or spectacle of professional wrestling.  M.U.S.C.L.E. is a bomb.

74. Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble (Electronic Arts, 1990)

Like Thrilla's Surfari elsewhere on this list, Skate or Die represents a sports title taking an ill-advised leap into the action-adventure genre.  In this case, it has your character venturing through stages (some maze-like in layout... ugh) collecting items, fighting bosses and buying occasional power-ups for your board.  It's not as fun as it sounds, largely due to clunky controls and unappealing level layouts that get repetitive very quickly.  The first Skate or Die title was no masterpiece, but at least provided a bit of fun with its numerous events and pick-up-and-play oriented style.  This lousy campaign mode is just a waste.

At the very least, there is a silver lining here: The game retains a half-pipe event, serving as a minigame where you try to collect as many points as possible within a time limit by doing tricks. While not incredible, it's certainly much more enjoyable than the lame story mode...

73. Conan: the Mysteries of Time (System 3, 1991)

One of many NES games published by Mindscape, a company with a penchant for porting existing games and rebranding them to try and turn a profit from unsuspecting fans.  Mad Max was a rebranded version of Road Raider, Last Starfighter was a repackaged Uridium, and Conan is in reality a lackluster port of a well-regarded title called "Myth: History in the Making."  So if you were staring at that screenshot this whole time and wondering what ancient Egypt had to do with Conan the Barbarian, now you know: Absolutely nothing.

I wouldn't even mind the blatant recycling if Conan were remotely enjoyable, but that is definitely not the case here.  Undetailed visuals with heavy pixelation (ported straight from the C64 version of Myth with no improvements), lousy hit detection, the worst kind of guesswork puzzles and some truly poor decisions in the control department (pressing down on the D-pad to jump and A+Down to duck?  Really guys?) make it an unpleasant experience on every front.  Utterly shameful.

72. Super Pitfall (Micronics, 1987)

There's no kinder way to put it: Super Pitfall is the death of a classic franchise.  Pitfall was a hit on the Atari and its sequel was quite possibly the most impressive title on the platform, but when it came time to create an NES sequel, the ball was dropped hard.  Now the game is all about obtuse item-hunting whilst dealing with  some truly lousy level design that seems to deliberately be designed to be as frustrating as possible - screens full of nothing but pits, difficult jumps and instant kill hazards around every corner.  Not to mention a plethora of graphical glitches and bad hit detection making the game even less of a pleasant experience.  Cap that off with ugly graphics, choppy animation and being haunted by one constantly looping music for 90% of the game's running time, and Super Pitfall amounts more to torture than a gaming experience.  The fact that a game with such a golden legacy could end up being this crummy only makes it all the more depressing.

Fun Fact: Atlantis no Nazo (a Sunsoft-produced adventure infamous for its extreme difficulty and awkward controls) was planned to be localized under the title "Super Pitfall II."  However, that plan fell through because this game was so poorly received.

71. The Lion King (Dark Technologies, 1995 in Europe)

I'll be honest; I didn't think this game was real at first.  I thought this was just some low-quality Hong Kong bootleg cart somebody mislabeled a ROM image of as a joke.  It looks the part of one, it sounds the part of one, and it abruptly ends halfway through the film's story, so it's got that in common too.  But nope; this was officially licensed and published by Virgin Interactive in 1995 - a time when even the 16-bit consoles were starting to be phased out.  The lowest of the low when it comes to cashins, and I'm honestly surprised Disney even allowed their property to be licensed to something of such abysmal quality.  The 16-bit version was no masterpiece either, but it was at least a competently-made and entertaining title; this one's just a quick and dirty cash-grab that isn't worth anyone's time.  And the fact that it was the very last licensed NES game ever released just makes it a very sad sendoff to a legendary console.

But the real kicker is that there's a bootleg version of Lion King that's much more faithful to the 16-bit versions.  It's pretty bad when software pirates do a better job with the license that you probably paid a lot of money for!

4/28/2015

Top 100 Worst NES Games, #90-81

90. American Gladiators (Incredible Technologies, 1991)

One of many games brought to us by GameTek, a publisher primarily known for their games based on Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy (as well as the infamous Robotech game for the Nintendo 64, which spent many years in development only to be cancelled as the company went bankrupt).  They weren't exactly known for quality entertainment throughout their career, and American Gladiators is just another example of that.  The game gives you five events to play - jousting, wall climbing, human cannonball, Powerball (think "capture the flag") and "assault" (overhead shooting).  Which would make for a pretty fun game if they were enjoyable, but they also suffer from choppy animations, questionable hit detection and some truly grating music, not to mention outrageous difficulty.  The only up-side of the package was a rather amusing digitized scream when a character was defeated and plummeted offscreen.

89. T&C Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage (Atlus, 1988)


Another underwhelming title from the early days of Atlus and LJN, T&C Surf Designs certainly puts on a respectable front with its large character sprites and colorful visuals.  The same cannot be said for the gameplay, however.  The game is split between two events - skateboarding and surfing - and unfortunately neither one is particularly fun to play.  Both suffer from lousy controls, and those paired with the large character sprites make avoiding obstacles much harder than it really should be.  You get eight lives per event, but they don't work as traditional video game lives usually do - taking a particularly bad fall can deplete two or even three lives from your reserve, and there's no way to get them back.  There's also no real goal to the game other than to get a high score, so any thrill of accomplishment is quickly diminished there as well.  The NES did have some good summer sports games (Kings of the Beach, the original Skate or Die and California Games come to mind), but T&C was definitely not one of them.

88. King's Knight (Workss, 1989)


Before Square achieved runaway success with their Final Fantasy franchise in Japan, dominated the world in the Playstation era with Final Fantasy VII, then flushed all their success down the crapper with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, they tried their hand in a few other fields like racing games, 3D platformers and this, a weird hybrid of a platformer, an overhead shooter and an RPG. Collecting powerups will make your characters faster, boost their attack power or defense, or restore health.  An interesting concept to be certain, but unfortunately, a good concept doesn't necessarily equate to a good game, especially when finding said powerups just equates to mindlessly blasting everything on the screen over and over again, including whittling your way through entire mountains one block at a time until you find something.  Being forced to slowly pace your way through hails of enemy fire through five extremely slow and repetitious stages doesn't make the action any more compelling, either, and you absolutely need all four characters alive for the final stage if you want to beat it.  King's Quest is a decent idea dragged down by a completely lackluster execution.

87. Last Action Hero (Teeny Weeny Games, 1993)


Last Action Hero was one of Arnie's less popular films that attempted to bring self-referential satire to the proceedings, with it mostly just coming off as clunky and unnecessary.  The game, on the other hand, is your typical bad movie licensed fare - taking a few scenes from the film, then pasting some lackluster gameplay on top just to get it on store shelves in time to ride the movie's hype wave into profitdom.  To that end, Last Action Hero is a terminally repetitive beat-em-up with nothing to distinguish it from any other game like it.  Nothing good, anyway - most other games in the genre at least had competent hit detection, let you move through the levels faster than a snail's pace and had at least some degree of variety to their action.  They also didn't feature some of the most harshly contrasted and ugly digitized stills in video game history just to say "it really is based on the film, you can see it if you squint really hard, honest!".  Last Action hero is overall just a lousy experience, especially when you consider the huge plethora of better beat-em-ups the NES platform brought us...

86. Predator (Pack-in Video, 1989)

Yes, this section of the list is really laying it on thick with the licensed titles, but can you blame me when so many of the NES' bad licensed titles make LJN's game library look positively magnificent by comparison?  At a glance Predator is just another lousy platformer game with a license pasted on, but the sheer asininity of its design earns it a badge of notoriety.  In addition to slippery physics and being able to fall through the sides of platforms (never good things in a game with lots of precision platforming), the game seemingly goes out of its way to frustrate the player into submission.  Weapon icons are seemingly always placed in the most inconvenient spots possible (placing fist weapons right before a hallway full of enemies being a commmon sight) and some levels are devoted entirely to blasting your way through bricks, one by one, with well-placed grenades.  So in addition to having to precisely place the things so you don't make the level unwinnable, you often have to get them awkwardly wedged in walls just to make sure they blow up the right brick and allow you to proceed.  Did I mention you can never blow up more than one brick at a time too?  ...Yeah.  Some solid music can't save this turkey from being a frustrating ordeal.

85. WWF Wrestlemania (Rare, 1989)

One of many licensed professional wrestling games released on the NES, but as this and many others proved, the genre still had a long way to go.  Not that they weren't trying over at Rare, though - the game's presentation is top-notch, with colorful title cards and well-animated characters (complete with many of their signature moves), as well as spot-on 8-bit renditions of many of the wrestlers' themes.  Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the gameplay.  Slow-paced action, weird hit detection, and AI that literally cheats by giving itself super-speed and doing much more damage with attacks than your character can makes the game a chore to play.  Not to mention missing elements present even in earlier wrestling games on the NES - there is no action outside the ring, and even basic controls like pinning vary wildly from character to character, making the game not only frustrating to play, but unintuitive as well.  With games like this, there's a good reason professional wrestling video games never really became well-known and loved until the Nintendo 64 and Playstation rolled around.

85. Cliffhanger (Spidersoft, 1993)

Yes, the date on that header is correct; this game really was released in 1993.  And yes, that screenshot is an accurate representation of this game's visual style.  You can probably already see one of my major gripes with this game.  Well, there's a lot more that can't be gleaned from just that.  Like the shrill random noise that's supposed to pass for music, the lousy collision detection that makes killing enemies a chore, and the fact that even from the very first stage of the games, the platforming requires pixel-perfect jumps or you'll likely fall down, hit spikes and die instantly.  In short, pretty much everything that can be done wrong in a platformer is done wrong here, and the fact that this game was released this late in the NES' lifespan and had several better games in the genre to draw inspiration from is simply shameful.  But I guess I can take some solace in the fact that, being a late release on the platform, nobody really played it either.

83. Rocket Ranger (Beam Software, 1990)

Cinemaware was a bit of an institution among PC gamers in the late 80s and early 90s, attempting to turn games a more cinematic experience with high-resolution character sprites and animations despite the limited hardware of the time.  In that regard they were partially successful, creating games that looked fantastic and captured an epic serial-like feel, but whose gameplay wasn't quite as high-tier to match.

Now take that concept and try to port it to a platform with much less to offer in terms of technical specs, and the results are... less than stellar, as Rocket Ranger proves.  While the game still looks solid for an NES title, the gameplay does not follow suit, mostly just consisting of simple and repetitive minigames dragged down by clunky controls and questionable hit detection.  Not to mention cutting several elements from the PC game, leaving behind a scaled-down experience of the original game with none of the benefit of its visual gimmick.

82. Barbie (Imagineering, 1991) 

Barbie isn't exactly the first character who comes to mind when you think of prolific video game heroes and heroines, and yet she's somehow managed to star in a larger number of games than most big-budget companies' characters can even dream of.  The first was a Commodore 64 game from all the way back in 1984, but her first console release was this one.  Published by the ever so popular Hi-Tech Expressions (we haven't seen the last of them on this list, trust me), Barbie is a confusing blend of platforming and puzzle elements, with neither one being done particularly well.  The platforming for Barbie's large size, sluggish jumping and single walk speed (also glacially slow), and the puzzles for being utterly nonsensical, having you throw one of three "charms" at various objects in the environment in order to get them to do what you want (which often isn't entirely clear anyway).  Still, once you master its quirks, the game is also extraordinarily easy and can be cleared in under half an hour.  I think even the game's target audience of little girls was clamoring for a better game shortly after buying and starting up this turkey...

81. Bible Adventures (Wisdom Tree, 1991)

Here's our first entry from Wisdom Tree, a company known for trying to push the Bible in the realm of gaming but having no actual talent at making games, so it all rather came to naught.  Still, they made a surprising number of them in their short career, and probably the best known of them was Bible Adventures, a compilation of three different games based on three Biblical stories - Baby Moses, Noah's Ark and David and Goliath - with an engine that loosely copies that of Mario 2.  that means lots of picking up objects and platforming.  Unfortunately, the clumsy physics and cheap enemies make getting through the stages a very arduous task, especially in Baby Moses where the soldiers like to knock you down, then toss Moses in the river.  Not that the game seems to mind much if you just go on without him, though, merely giving you the message "Congratulations!  But you forgot Baby Moses" at the end of the stage.  The other two games, Noah's Ark and David and Goliath, pretty much just amount to tedious collect-a-thons with the latter at least having a little bit of variety by giving you a weapon and some enemies to fight with your sling (including Goliath himself, who goes down in one hit - accurate to the story, but not exactly compelling game material).  An overall inept game, though it's at least pretty harmless.  And downright tolerable compared to a lot of other junk the company would release on the platform...

4/27/2015

Top 100 Worst NES Games, #100-91

I got to thinking that it was high time I did another top list, but where could I turn?  I'd exhausted almost every video game platform I own.  I could do PC or Arcade games, I suppose, but I don't think I'd be giving a lot of them a fair shake because I hadn't played a huge number of those games in their heyday and wouldn't really be able to give them a fair assessment as a result.  But then it hit me: Why not do a list of bad NES games?  That platform brought us a lot of immortal gems, certainly, but there were also a lot - and I mean A LOT - of bad ones.  And the ones everyone knows about (mostly from exposure to the Angry Video Game Nerd and other caustic critics) are only scratching the surface of the awfulness the platform had to offer.  So I decided, why not.  Let's bring some other obscure baddies to the surface and give them the shellacking they deserve.

Oh, and I also imposed one simple rule: I'm only counting games that were commercially released in the heyday of the system (1985-1995).  So no homebrews or reproductions, no unreleased games, and none of those penis-laden racist ROM hacks every twelve year old with a copy of Microsoft Paint churned out back in the late 90s.

100. Amagon (Aicom, 1989)

Amagon is yet another dime-a-dozen side scrolling shooter with platforming elements, and does nothing to differentiate itself from any other game like it.  The visuals are bland and unappealing, the levels are just flat plains full of enemies, you can only fire in one direction (straight ahead), your bullets require extremely precise hit detection and don't even travel the full length of the screen, and your jump is the same awkward jump you've seen in every bad Game Maker game on the Internet - go straight up at one speed, hit the peak of your jump height, go straight down at the same speed.  All  in all, just a thoroughly mediocre experience.  But this game wouldn't have been nearly as high on the list were it not for one factor: that bloody ear-rape they call audio.  Every tune in the game is high-pitched, tinny and annoying, and every sound effect (few though they are) is seemingly engineered to sound awful - the bullets are just a flat burst of static, and every enemy dies with the same shrill noise.  Amagon isn't a game so much as it is psychological torture.

99. Renegade (Technos, 1987)

Kunio is a beloved franchise among many old-school gamers, particularly with River City Ransom and its numerous over-the-top sports games that put as much emphasis on pummeling your opponents as they did on scoring points, but it did not get off to an auspicious start.  While the two-directional attack scheme was pretty innovative for the time, the clunky hit detection, overall difficulty and ugly visuals certainly didn't win it a lot of points.  Nor did the later levels, which were very frustrating exercises in trial and error as you attempted to maneuver through mazes of doors, with one wrong move taking you all the way back to the beginning of the level and forcing you to try again while giving you none of your health back.  At at the end of it all you had a final boss who could whip out a gun in the blink of an eye and shoot you dead in one hit, bringing a quick end to your run and forcing you to start the game from scratch.  The NES had quite a lot of good beat-em-ups, but there's a very good reason people always go for Double Dragon, Mighty Final Fight, TMNT and the later Kunio titles over this one...

98. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Hillsfar (Marionette, 1993)

Released on PC platforms between two Dungeons and Dragons PC titles (Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds) and intended to be an "in-between" adventure players could use to build their levels and gold reserves before the latter's release.  As you could imagine, though, this makes the NES version's existence rather pointless since there was no practical way to transfer data between games (and Azure Bonds was never released on the NES, or any other console for that matter).  Which is a shame, because the game has just about everything it needs to be a decent title in its own right - some good graphics and animation, clever minigames that range from archery, lockpicking and traveling paths on horseback while avoiding potholes, and of course good old fighting.  Hillsfar attempts to create an action-oriented D&D experience and honestly succeeds for the most part, but the lack of a real plot or any direction to its gameplay unfortunately just makes it all feel meaningless.  If you want a more substantive game in this style, try out Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; while not a perfect experience itself, it plays much better than this turkey does.

97. Wall Street Kid (Sofel, 1990)

One of those "why does this even exist" games, Wall Street Kid, as its name suggests, is about investing in the stock market to earn a big enough profit in order to not be disowned by your rich family.  Exciting, right?  Well, even the developers seemingly thought that weak premise wasn't enough to carry a game, as they tried to work in a dating sim element as well - you have to work out to maintain your health and spoil your girlfriend by buying her things and going on trips with her, or your character will fall into depression and end the game.   So if you ever wanted to play a simulation that highlights the life of being a negative stereotype of a rich person - shallow, greedy and obsessed with lording their wealth over others - I guess this is the game for you.  The rest of us would probably be better served by investing in a more entertaining game.  Or in the actual stock market; your choice.

96. Magmax (Nihon Bussan, 1988)

Magmax is a perfect example of a competently designed game that just isn't much fun to play, taking the form of a dull, side-scrolling shoot-em-up with a generic futuristic motif.  Said motif is really the only thing of note about it, having you fighting some fairly clever boss designs (pictured: three-headed robo-dragon) and your ship being able to add parts onto itself until it becomes a giant walking mecha with a laser beam firing from its chest.  Other than that, though, Magmax is purely one-note and repetitious, with irritating music, an overall bland aesthetic and levels that seem to stretch on forever.  The NES had plenty of other unremarkable shoot-em-ups, but Magmax is one that particularly grates on me for having a cool concept that it utterly fails to take advantage of...


95. Urban Champion (Nintendo, 1986)

Yes, even Nintendo themselves weren't exempt from making some pretty lousy and underwhelming NES games.  Coming to us from the "black box" era, Urban Champion was a lame, shallow one-on-one fighter where you attempt to punch your opponent off-screen three times and eventually land him in a manhole.  Then you get to do it again.  And again.  And again.  Repeat add nauseum until you get bored, shut the game off and go back to playing Mario.  Yes, they attempt to break up the monotony by having hazards like a lady dropping a flower pot on your heads or the police rolling by, causing both players to reset their positions, but that just drew the tedium out even further.  The one-on-one fighting game genre was still in its inception back in the '80s and wouldn't hit its stride until the early '90s, but I can't imagine that utterly forgettable games like Urban Champion helped shape it into anything bigger and better...

94. Mystery Quest (Carry Lab, 1989)

The NES was home to a lot of legendary platformers that are still played to this day, including Ninja Gaiden, Mr. Gimmick, Castlevania, the Mega Man series, and of course the quintessential classics, the Mario trilogy.  One you've probably never heard of on the platform is Mystery Quest, and there's a good reason for that; the game just isn't very compelling, with very generic gameplay and level design overall.  We also got a vastly stripped down version from the original Famicom Disk System version, which had a greater variety of castle mazes (six in total, compared to the US version's two); a pretty staggering decision considering ROMs that could hold well over the capacity of a FDS game were common by 1989.  They basically just gave us an inferior version of an already none-too-great game for a quick buck, which definitely earns it a lot on this list.

93. The Great Waldo Search (Radiance, 1992)

If you're of a certain age you probably remember the Waldo books - enormous elaborate illustrations you had to spot Waldo (and various other objects) in.  Fine enough stuff for a book; not so much for a video game.  Especially one that costs substantially more than one of the books ($50-60 at the time) and which can be finished in roughly five to ten minutes.  Yeah, that has to be a record for the least amount of content in an NES game made in the '90s.  Hell, even the early ports of old arcade games mostly had more depth to it than this game provided.  But as bad as all that is, I do at least have to give it credit for having detailed graphics and relatively large sprites that actually allow you to find Waldo; as low a bar as that is, it's still much more than can be said for another Waldo game we'll be seeing much further down this list!

92. Aladdin (NMS Software, 1994 in Europe)


Yep, there was a port of Aladdin on the NES; a port that uses the Game Boy version (itself a very trimmed-down copy of the Genesis version) as a template.  Not even a fraction of the Genesis game's smooth animation or fast-paced gameplay is on display here; it's slow as molasses and they made no attempt to use the wider color palette available.  A pretty pathetic display for a 1994 game on a console that was capable of producing some downright beautiful graphics (and hell, even most of the games on this list look better).  But the real kicker is that there is a competent and even relatively fun Aladdin game on the platform - a pirate production based on the Super Nintendo version of Aladdin!  This was just a last-ditch cash grab of the worst kind.


91. Contra Force (Konami, 1992)

A spinoff of the Contra franchise, pitting the player, as one of four characters, against a team of terrorists.  However, in contrast to the easy to learn, tough to master run-and-gun gameplay that made the series a favorite, Contra Force feels very overdesigned; the game includes a Gradius-style weapon upgrade system, though it's somewhat counter-intuitive in that your upgraded weapons are often harder to use than your standard gun (and you can't switch back without dying).  One can also summon a computer-controlled ally for a short time to attack enemies in order to do some damage while remaining relatively safe themselves.  But for all its ideas, Contra Force plays absolutely terribly, having copious amounts of slowdown even with relatively few enemies onscreen and a marked lack of challenge, with most bosses being easily defeatable by simply finding a single spot outside of their attack range and firing away.  To date, it remains one of only three Contra games never released in Japan (alongside the two notorious Playstation Contra games), and it's not hard to see why - because it's a far cry from the classics that came before it!

4/26/2015

Spoony Plays Terranigma, Part 5

We skip ahead to the dawn of humanity and also the dawn of overdone zombie mods.

4/19/2015

Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 4

Much ado in the town of Moonshade.



Items Recovered


  • Dagger -> Severed hand - One of many severed limbs found among Erstam's home.  You can trade for your dagger back if you want.
  • Map of Britannia -> Ice Wine - Made by the Rangers at Moonshade's winery, but your map is not there.  (This is a design oversight - your map is nowhere to be found in the winery or anywhere else.)


Items Still at Large


  • Magebane -> Blue egg - It's in a penguin nest up North, as viewed through Erstam's telescope.  We haven't been up that way yet though.
  • Magic Helm -> Fur cap - Frigidazzi in Moonshade is said to have had such a cap.  We haven't had a chance to talk to her just yet though.
  • Blackrock Serpent -> Fine stockings - They belong to Columna and both she and Torrisio want them back.  They seem to have no knowledge of the Blackrock Serpent, nor is it anywhere to be found in their manor.
  • The Black Sword -> Ruddy rock - Pothos mentions that it's a piece of "stoneheart", an illegal type of rock used to make the potent reagent "bloodspawn."  He gives no clue to its origins, however.
  • Rudyom's Wand - Lab apparatus - Ask around in Fawn and Moonshade.  (Erstam claims that it's his, but this is not correct.  It's actually in the possession of another character we'll meet later).
  • Spellbook -> Pumice piece - Krayg mentions the dungeon of Furnace, said to be an extremely hot place where rocks like this appear.
  • Glass sword -> Pinecone - Most likely came from the forests to the north.
  • Burst Arrows - > Hairbrush -> Made by the goblins that plague Monitor.


Ah yes, and one important thing I neglected to show on camera:


Once you've got the Serpent Jawbone, talk to Erstam and he'll give you two more teeth for it.  Each tooth opens up one of the gates on the Dark Path when placed in the jawbone, and each gate takes you to a connecting Serpent Gate somewhere on Serpent Isle.  Some areas can't be reached in any other way (short of cheating) so when you find a tooth, be sure to put it on the Jawbone right away so you don't lose it!

Serpent Jawbone


Bonus Video: Erstam's Retreat

A well-known hidden area in the game, akin to the Trinsic cheat room in Ultima VII in that it contains not only a treasure trove of equipment, spells and reagents, but many plot-essential items as well.  As such, visiting here is considered "cheating" and should only be done for entertainment value.

4/12/2015

Spoony Plays Terranigma, Part 4

We restore animalkind to the earth and help a young lion cub reach his destiny.  Kind of like the Lion King, except with less plagiarism.



Oh, and I went ahead and ground out the extra cash I needed for the Fur Coat.


4/09/2015

Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 3

We have a kangaroo court in Fawn and then walk into another one of Batlin's ever-so-clever traps.


Items Recovered

Swamp boots - > Slippers -> A teleport storm exchanged them for Devra's slippers at the Sleeping Bull.  We traded them back.

Items Still at Large

The Black Sword -> Ruddy rock - ?
Spellbook -> Pumice piece - Krayg mentions the dungeon of Furnace, said to be an extremely hot place where rocks like this appear.
Magic Helm -> Fur cap - Frigidazzi in Moonshade is said to have had such a cap.
Blackrock Serpent -> Fine stockings - Unknown.
Glass sword -> Pinecone - Most likely came from the forests to the north.
Dagger -> Severed hand - Said to not be dead by Renfry, kept alive by some kind of magic.
Map of Britannia -> Ice Wine - Said to be made by the rangers of Moonshade.
Rudyom's Wand - Lab apparatus - Ask around in Fawn and Moonshade.
Magebane -> Blue egg - Presumably came from a bird from the north.
Burst Arrows - > Hairbrush -> Made by the goblins that plague Monitor.

Stuff I did off-camera

Just did some training at the List Field (for Shamino and Dupre) and exchanged some currency with Devra at the Sleeping Bull; in addition to the usual currency trades, she buys gems for 25 Monetari apiece and gold nuggets for 10.  She also buys jewelry for 100 Monetari apiece if you have any.

We'll have to hold on to those gold bars a bit longer, though, as the only person who exchanges them for money is in Moonshade.


Oh, and I also remembered that one of Batlin's goons that attacks you at the bank has a Sword of Defense, so I went back and got it.