Spoony Plays Terranigma, Part 9

More sidequests, then we rescue Will. No, not the Illusion of Gaia character.

 

Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 9

We get pulled into a rather arbitrary side-story (but we get a Serpent Item out of it so whatever) and then we get to bop around in the woods for a while to find the Hound of Doskar and track Cantra.  Remember that subplot?  I don't blame you if you don't.



Before you move on from this point, make sure you have a set of "warm" gear (boots, cloak, helmet) for each member of your party.  If you're short, you can buy some more from Cellia in Monitor.

(The Helmet of Light also counts as warm headgear.)

You should also spend any training points you have now, as we're coming up on a point of no return.

---

No reclaimed items or teeth this time.

Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 8

We depart Moonshade and, after a long trip through Furnace, end up back next to Monitor, where we finally decide to complete that whole "stopping the goblins" quest we started a while back.



I accidentally skipped a key item here.

I overlooked the other scroll on the table in the Goblins' hoard.  It contains a second letter implicating Spektor.  If you show both to Caladin or Brendann, they'll both be jailed.  If you're missing one or the other when you show him the evidence, though, you won't get a second chance!

This also allows you to talk to Marsden and Spektor in jail, then to Lucilla, who will point you to a secret stash and give you a key.

Enter a fake wall here and you'll find a cache with several powder kegs and four locked chests that contain some cash and gems (as well as Cantra's deceased father).

You can also get a confession from Spektor if you kill him while he's out of jail, but this doesn't seem to trigger the plot flag that causes Lucilla to give you the key...

And for a few other things I missed:

Pomdirgun's house has our missing Burst Arrows, so we can finally ditch that hairbrush we've been carrying around for the better part of the game.

And our missing spellbook is just northwest of the bridge to the Monitor cave path in Furnace.  As that dungeon is a fiery inferno, though, it's now quite unusable.  Not that we need it anymore after our trip to Moonshade, but it's at least a bit of closure.

(Double clicking on it causes it to be hit by lightning and explode, by the way)

Much more vitally though, one of the trolls in this room has a key.  Behind a nearby locked door is another of the Serpent Items, the Serpent Staff.  This is absolutely necessary to finish the game, so don't forget to grab it!

Oh, and I did some training off-camera because we haven't had an opportunity to do that in a while.  As you can see, our party is now quite beastly.

Finally, I went ahead and got the few spells Ensorcio has that no other mage carries - namely Great Douse, Sleep and Fire Ring.  That all but fills out our spellbook, save for three slots (which will all be provided to us as the plot dictates).

(You will have to talk to Ensorcio quite a bit to get him to offer you spells.  Click on the various options until Moonshade comes up, then click storms, Batlin, thugs, mentor and spells.  He accepts Guilders or gold coins, so be sure to bring some of those too.)

Items Recovered

• Spellbook -> Pumice piece -  Found in the possession of some trolls in Furnace, quite destroyed.
• Burst Arrows - > Hairbrush -> In the possession of the Goblin King himself.

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.
• 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.
• 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).
• Glass sword -> Pinecone - Most likely came from the forests to the north.

Serpent Jawbone

Spoony Plays Terranigma, Part 8

Exploring the world, solving problems and watching cities grow.  All that good stuff.

(This entry is mostly comprised of sidequests)

Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 7

We have a fling with the Magelord's mistress, go through another kangaroo court (Serpent Isle's justice system sucks...) and eventually win our freedom through many trials.  Then we get to sort out a final few pieces of business in Moonshade before we depart (for good, hopefully).



Items Recovered

• Magic Helm -> Fur cap - In Frigidazzi's dresser.  You can return the cap if you want, but I kept it since we'll need some warm headgear for everyone in our party later on anyway.
• The Black Sword -> Ruddy rock - Recovered from an inmate in Freedom.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

Spoony Plays Terranigma, Part 7

A tough dungeon and an even tougher boss await us in Sylvain Castle.  Then it's time to expand capitalism!

Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 6

We complete the Silver Seed, attaining one of the most broken items in video game history in the process (and some other good stuff too).



I'll go through the whole process of False Coining and buying every spell in Moonshade off-camera.  It's great fun, don't get me wrong, but it does get a bit repetitive to watch.

We're off to a great start after we traded in all of our gold and gems from the Silver Seed though!

While most spells are easy enough to buy from the various mages, there are a few that are hidden away and must be found (whether for plot purposes or for just being too awesome).  Fortunately I've highlighted the ones we can currently get to below.

Rotoluncia's house has Fire Snake locked up in the chest (use a lockpick to open it) as well as Paralyze if you haven't bought it already.  Not like she needs them anymore.

Don't forget to grab the serpent tooth from the bag on her table either!

Frigidazzi's lab has two more spells to find - Cold Strike and Create Ice.  You can find a key to the door underneath the flower vase on the table outside.

Gustacio's basement has the Summon spell...

...while Vasculio's (the ruined house on the northwest edge of town) has Invisibility All.

Stefano's house (little building just outside the west wall of town) has a locked and trapped chest containing two Create Food scrolls, as well as Protection and False Coin.  The key to the front door can be found in a hollow tree just southeast of the house.

Finally, Columna's basement has Time Stop (use the key in the chest just inside her house to open it).  It's guarded by some booby traps though, so be careful of those.

She's also left around some rather incriminating evidence...

Serpent Jawbone

Spoony Plays Terranigma, Part 6

Across the desert, through some scary woods and into democracy we go.



I also went ahead and did a bit of grinding off-camera to afford the Silver Plate.

Our best armor yet, plus it nullifies poison while equipped.  I'll take it!

Top 100 Worst NES Games, #10-1

10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Advance Communication Company, 1989)

Another game that doesn't seem to have been purposed as a playable adventure at all, but instead simply made as some sort of stress test for gamers' sanity.  The game alternates between two modes - as Jekyll, you  must move very, very slowly through a town full of people and animals who all seem to be interested in making you utterly miserable, whether dropping bombs at your feet, shooting you with slingshots, dropping turds on your head or just constantly assaulting you with musical notes and making it nearly impossible to pass.  When your sanity finally gets depleted, you become Mr. Hyde and must shoot away at zombies and brain-monsters to restore your sanity before you reach the point in the stage Jekyll reached - if that happens, you get struck by lightning for an immediate game over.  The concept is interesting in a way, but trying to play it is absolutely miserable and frustrating beyond belief, particularly when you can't even muster the patience to get through the first level.  I guess even that wasn't good enough for Japanese gamers, though, so the US version removes some levels and replaces them with stages be recycled wholesale from earlier in the game.  So if you hated that level the first time, be prepared to endure it again!

9. Bokosuka Wars (ASCII, 1985 in Japan)

A game as notorious as it is misunderstood, Bokosuka Wars presents itself as an Ys or Zelda styled adventure game, but is actually more of a crude real time strategy title.  You move your main character around the map, attempting to build an army by touching trees to turn them into soldiers of two different types, and use them to battle enemies.  Unfortunately, there's no real strategy to any of these battles - when two units collide, the game just rolls a die, and you have a roughly even chance of seeing the enemy or your own unit die (and if  your main character dies, it's an instant game over).  You can upgrade units and make them slightly stronger if they win enough battles in a row, but even that doesn't help much when you're so hopelessly outnumbered and combat just boils down to a single roll of the dice.  Also definitely not helping its case is the harsh music, which is roughly ten seconds long and loops endlessly throughout each and every battle.  Come on guys, Super Mario Brothers managed to have some distinct, catchy tunes that didn't make your ears bleed, and that came out the same year as this game!

8. Where's Waldo (Bethesda Softworks, 1991)

The single most shameful game ever released by Bethesda Softworks.  How do you mess up a simple concept like Where's Waldo?  By making all of the graphics so tiny and indecipherable that you can't even find Waldo!  I did not doctor that screenshot in any way - you're fully expected to find a tiny sprite of Waldo that looks exactly the same as every other tiny indistinguishable sprite on the screen.  They also attempt to mix things up with some minigames like finding Waldo in the dark (just as fun as it sounds), navigating a maze of subway tunnels (ditto) and a slot machine for the final level, but when the core concept of the game is so fundamentally broken, adding more tedium on top only makes it pretty much unbearable.  Not to mention that once you figure out all the spots on each screen where Waldo can appear, you can literally complete the game in under three minutes (about 70% of which is just watching him slowly plod from place to place on the map screen.  And no, you can't skip it.).  All I can say is that thank god Bethesda used the money from this turd to move their efforts upward to much bigger and better things.

7. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (Radical Entertainment, 1992)

It's the old formula once again.  Classic cartoon meets terrible developer and produces a slipshod video game.  Rocky and Bullwinkle is definitely one of the worst offenders though, simply for how putrid and nonsensical its design is.  Game crashing bugs, lousy hit detection, the fact that you can't attack enemies without losing health (counterintuitiveness at its finest) and nonsensical mechanics (only Bullwinkle can go up stairs?) make it a mess.  The fact that it's extremely short, lacks in anything that made the carton memorable and has looping shrill music tracks and such drab, uninspired visuals makes the whole experience pretty much satanic.  That's all bad enough, but then you also consider that the game is this late in the NES' lifespan and yet is this awful, and Rocky and Bullwinkle's existence becomes completely inexcusable.  As is the fact that Radical Entertainment is still around today after producing such insipid garbage as this, the Terminator, Wayne's World and Bebe's Kids in their early days.

6. The Mutant Virus: Crisis in a Computer World (Rocket Science Productions, 1992)

A title that left me scarred for life; I'd never even heard of it until the early 2000s, but I saw it in a K-Mart bargain bin for $10, so I figured "why not" and plunked down the cash.  Then I went home to play it and... oh lord oh lord, what a mess.  The Mutant Virus is simply broken as a concept, essentially taking Conway's Game of Life and attempting to work it into an action setting.  To that end, you shoot the little "viruses" to convert them to your color and hopefully create a chain reaction to crowd out the bad viruses, eventually clearing the board so you can move on.  The problem is that this just doesn't work - it doesn't take long before the purple side just starts overwhelming you with such massive numbers that you can't manage to get a foothold at all without collecting a ton of powerups (but good surviving long enough for that!) or going through a lot of tedious trial and error to figure out the exact right spots to shoot at before you get overrun.  Also not helping are the sluggish controls with floaty physics that make even getting around, let alone lining up shots, much harder than it should be.  An interesting concept but a terrible execution, the Mutant Virus is a game that I and many others should have just left collecting dust.

5. Secret Scout in the Temple of Demise (Color Dreams, 1991) 

What do you do after you've made one bad game?  Color Dreams' answer is apparently "take that same bad game and make it ten times worse"!  That's my theory after seeing Secret Scout, at least, a game which takes the core engine of Operation Secret Storm, changes a few graphics and then inexplicably has a spike fly at the back of your head every three seconds as you fight, making surviving the first section of the first stage, let alone the entire game, a near impossibility.  Then you dogpile on the usual Color Dreams staples of confusing level layouts, ear-shredding sound effects and music and clumsy hit detection, and you just have an experience that's plain infuriating in its awfulness.  Oh, and in stark contrast to the pro-America message of its predecessor, this game literally has you kicking bald eagles to death; that's lovely.  Color Dreams made a lot of awful crap, but this is the worst of it in my book.

4. Hoshi wo Miru Hito (Another, 1987)

Regarded by all who have played it as one of the worst RPGs ever made, if not the very worst. There's a good reason for that, too, as Hoshi wo Miru Hito is not just bad - it's fundamentally broken in every respect.  Your character's movement is excruciatingly slow.  Enemies are ludicrously overpowered (throwing spells that completely disable party members with a 100% success rate at you from the outset).  You start with no money or equipment and simply have to hope and pray you survive long enough to afford a weapon.  The first weapon available is actually weaker than your bare fists, all but dooming you if you buy it.  Exiting any town or dungeon puts you right back at the beginning of the game rather than, say, just outside the area you exited.  But the most unforgivable flaw has to be its save system, which loses points for being password-based (rather than battery backup) and also for being non-functional as it does not save your progress at all - no matter how far you got in the game, every password puts you back at the start with none of your experience points or levels.  All this from a game that came out a full year after Dragon Quest and the same year as the genre-defining Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star.  Hoshi Wo Miro Hito is simply inexcusable.  Yet somehow the game is also a cult classic, inspiring numerous bug-fixing patches and even an entire fan remake.  Japan is crazy, what can I say.

3. Karate Champ (Data East, 1986)

Karate Champ was a pretty popular arcade game in the early 1980s, providing some decent one-on-one fighting action in both single player vs CPU and two-player variants, and even some surprisingly fluid animation for its era.  But when it came time to make a home port, Data East completely botched it.  Gone were the fluid graphics, smooth gameplay and clever minigames.  What remained was an absolute nightmare plagued by incredibly unresponsive controls and nonexistent collision detection that turned every match into the gaming equivalent of watching two blindfolded monkeys swinging sticks at each other while shoulder-deep in mud.  Then the victor gets jars flung at his head that he attempts to bat down (the only minigame in this version) before the next match begins.  There were a lot of lousy arcade ports on the NES, but the fact that this one is not just bad, but virtually unplayble, and created by the same company that made the original game... that is an absolute travesty.  In fact, this may just be the worst one-on-one fighting game ever made, and that is saying something considering the sheer volume of awfulness that genre has brought us!

2. Action 52 (Active Enterprises, 1991)

A game notorious among NES collectors the world over, Action 52 is an original multicart created by a short-lived company based in Florida.  However, while most Multicarts just take a ton of existing copyrighted games and put them together on one cartridge, Action 52 actualy has 52 original games.  Unfortunately, every single one of them is irredeemable garbage, mixing terrible music, hideous visuals, and some of the most broken controls in video game history (particularly the common jumping controls, which lock your left-right movement as the jump button is pressed, requiring you to tap the button and then quickly move left or right to clear a gap).  Each one also has a plethora of glitches and crashes, and some games don't even work at all on the actual NES hardware, forcing you to track down an obscure emulator just to sate your curiosity about just how awful every last title on the cartridge truly is.  Still, for all its faults, you have to at least admire the sheer arrogance of the development team behind it.  I mean, these guys literally thought that Cheetahmen was good enough to become the next big media franchise to rival TMNT and they even had plans to compete directly with Nintendo and Sega...

1. X-Men (Unknown developer, 1989)

It's extremely rare that one finds a game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  Even the very worst games out there have at least something to point to and say "well, at least that was okay" - a decent music track, a clever idea with a poor execution, or even some ironic amusement at the sheer ineptitude of its design and the hubris of its developers (see previous entry on this list).  X-Men on the NES, however, is one example of a game completely without merit.  Ugly, cluttered and uninspired visuals, ghastly music, sound effects consisting of nothing but square waves and white noise, the worst kind of mindless overhead shooter gameplay, unclear objectives, confusing level layouts, bad AI and a useless HUD that requires you to pause the game to see your remaining health (not that it matters much anyway since there is no recovery time after a hit, meaning any given enemy can knock you dead in a second).  Not to mention the complete waste of a license that lends itself perfectly to video game adaptations.  Oh, and you can't even complete the game without inputting a very obscure cheat code.  There's not even any ironic entertainment value here; the game is so bland and effortless in every respect that it's as if the developers were actively going out of their way to make sure it was completely unsalvageable, and for that reason it is my pick for the very worst NES game ever created.  Who greased whose palms at Nintendo to get the Seal of Quality on this turd?  We may never know, but perhaps it's for the best that they remain anonymous.

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Top 100 Worst NES Games, #20-11

20. NFL (Atlus, 1989)

I'm not really a sports guy, but even I can admit there are some pretty good sports games on the NES - Tecmo Super Bowl in particular being a legendary one that still has a huge fan following to this day.  Easily the worst I know of is the blandly-titled NFL, developed by Atlus and published by good old LJN.  The game is just uninspired and ugly to look at, with horrendously slow gameplay, choppy animation and the barest minimum of sound design (with a constant blast of white noise standing in for a cheering crowd).  But the biggest idiot move of all was the fact that there's no onscreen play selection; hell, it's not even in the manual.  All the plays were listed on a poster that came in the game's box, which made it much easier to lose.  It was at least notable for being one of the very first video games to actually use the NFL license, but when even the Atari 2600 has more enjoyable football games, it's all a bit moot.

19. Swamp Thing (Imagineering, 1992)

When you go from licensing hot properties like the Simpsons and Ghostbusters to a low-tier comic book character like Swamp Thing, you know your game company is in trouble.  Moreso when the already clumsy gameplay of the Simpsons titles somehow gets even more tedious, and any of the clever ideas that made them redeemable get tossed out in favor of stiff platforming and repetitive combat with the same small handful of monsters.  Slow, plodding, overly difficult and backed by annoying recycled sound effects and uninspired music, Swamp Thing is another bad platformer on a platform that brought us some of the finest examples of the genre.  Imagineering's games were generally bad, but I dare say this is the worst thing they ever released.

18. Dirty Harry (Gray Matter, 1990)

Mindscape brings us another licensed turkey, once again taking a book/film franchise with some solid video game potential and botching it on every front.  Sluggish controls, cheap enemies, lousy hit detection and levels that seem to be intentionally designed to be as obnoxious as possible.  The first stage alone is a gargantuan maze of buildings and sewers that you can potentially get lost in for hours, dying to death traps and gun-toting goons that assault you every five steps.  That's bad enough, but then you throw in illogical puzzles (you have to wear a white suit to get past that goon, otherwise he'll just punch you across the room!), a soundtrack comprised of ear-grating noise and the fact that you can only input a password to save at the end of the level (meaning losing your last life means losing all of your progress on stages that can take well over an hour to complete) and you have a very miserable experience.  The only highlights are some decent digitized voices on the title screen and during the ending.

17. Athena (Micronics, 1987)

Micronics again?  More like Migraines, because that's what their games inevitably give to you with the sheer ineptitude of their design.  They threw out halfassed ports without a care throughout most of the 80s - Ikari Warriors, Ghosts n' Goblins, Ghostbusters, and now Athena.  Loosely based on the arcade game by SNK, the game is a sidescrolling adventure that, frankly sucks on every level.  Stiff controls, a jump height that seems to be completely random, and harsh random note music combine to make Athena a thoroughly unpleasant bout of gaming to try and sit through.  But the most unforgivable sin of all is that, like a Week of Garfield, you have absolutely no post-hit invincibility, so any enemy can and will drain your health to nothing in under a second.  And considering you're constantly swarmed by the damn things, it's a miracle if you ever make it past the first stage.  The NES had plenty of great classic platformers, but Athena is definitely not one.

16. King Neptune's Adventure (Color Dreams, 1990)

I'm not going out of my way to pick on Color Dreams; I'm really not.  But when you put out such large and consistently terrible waves of games that you make LJN look like Capcom in comparison, it doesn't really give me much of a choice.  King Neptune's Adventure is not only among their worst, but it's so bad that it's nearly unplayable.  In addition to garish visuals with backgrounds that constantly flash psychedelic colors (epileptics be warned) and harsh sound effects and random note music, you have two impotent attacks that your enemies seem to actively avoid, stages that seem to drag on forever and incredibly broken screen scrolling that requires you to be at the very edge of the viewable area, all but ensuring that you're going to run into every enemy you come across.  It all culminates in you getting killed long before ever accomplishing much of anything, which isn't the mark of anything resembling a quality game.

15. Color a Dinosaur (Farsight Technologies, 1993) 

Why would you even make a coloring book game on a system that can only support 8 on-screen colors at a time?  Not only that, the game doesn't even seem to ever use all eight colors at once, just giving you three or four to work with in various patterns to kinda sorta give the illusion of multiple colors.  Then you add in janky music on the menus and the cursor rigidly being locked to specific points on the screen to color in, and you really must question what the point of even making this game was when Mario Paint was released in the same year.  ...Oh, right, to cash in on that.  There's really not much else to even say about it, it's just shovelware in its purest form.  But when it's brought to us by the company that produced the Genesis version of Action 52, are you really surprised?


14. Metal Mech: Man and Machine (Sculptured Software, 1991) 

Sculptured Software (a company that brought us such gems as Day Dreamin' Davey and Captain Novolin) tries their best to horn in on the success of Blaster Master.  Unfortunately, this was their best even after three years of technological improvement.  A game with choppy controls and cheap enemies swarming you every three seconds, with your bullets being so small and rigidly locked into directions perpendicular to your mech's cockpit that they're guaranteed to never hit anything.  You'll also frequently have to leave your mech behind to accomplish objectives on foot, but frustratingly, it can still take damage even when you're not in it.  And it will, since enemies never stop swarming and attacking even when you're elsewhere.  It'll be a miracle if you can survive long enough to see past the first few screens of the game, let alone complete a stage.  Metal Mech is overall simply plodding, ugly and frustrating.  If you want this same concept but done well, then do yourself a favor and play the real deal - Blaster Master - instead.

13. Hokuto no Ken (Toei, 1986 in Japan) 

Everyone with a passing interest in anime and manga has at least heard of Fist of the North Star, the classic tale of a martial artist named Kenshiro wandering the post-apocalyptic landscape and making hooligans explode with superpowered martial arts.  Unfortunately, while Hokuto no Ken's manga and anime outings stand as staples of the action genre to this day, its video game adaptations remain some of the worst ever devised.  Probably the most well-known and infamous is the 1986 Famicom release, which features lousy visuals (looking like corrupted graphics you'd see on an NES with corroded connectors) and levels that seem to loop endlessly.  Which they do, unless you know to follow Lin via the extremely intuitive method of standing in doorways and pressing Up+A+B.  That's all fine and good, but after the first few levels she begins to lead you astray, making level navigation a matter of complete guesswork.  Pair that with constantly swarming enemies that never cut you a break and cheap bosses that can whittle your health bar away in no time flat, and you have a true disaster in the realm of gaming.  Not even being able to explode enemies with your fists (in a surprisingly gory display for an NES title) could make the experience tolerable.

12. Ganso Saiyuki: Super Monkey Daibouken (Techno Quest, 1986 in Japan)

A game based on the classic Chinese tale "Journey to the West", which you'd think would lend itself well to video game adaptations; alas, there are very few of them that are any good.  Super Monkey Daibouken in particular is regarded as one of the very worst games on the Famicom, and it certainly isn't hard to see why once you start playing.  80% of the game is slowly trudging across a huge, bland world map with very few points of interest, taking passages to other equally nondescript portions of the map and trying to make your way to the end.  Throughout, you're taken to Zelda II style sidescrolling combat sequences (pictured), though with none of that game's polish or entertainment factor - movement is stiff and awkward and hit detection is almost nonexistent, making winning these segments a matter of pure luck.  Oh, and you're in a constant race against time too, as running out of food or water makes your health drop rapidly until you die.  It's also one of the few Famicom games to prominently feature load times, showing just how much of a poorly optimized piece of crap it really is.  Ganso Saiyuki is regarded as a legendary kusoge among Japanese gamers, and it's not hard to see why after playing it for any length of time.

11. Robodemons (Color Dreams, 1989) 

Yep, it's Color Dreams again, and yep, their games just seem to get worse and worse.  Robodemons is a blend of their usual broken platforming engine and quite possibly the worst standalone shmup ever made.  In the latter regard is the fact that you are such a massive target, but your weapon is a small, awkward to use boomerang that can only have one hsot onscreen at a time and takes several hits to bring down anything (especially the bosses, who are all but guaranteed to take you down before you can do enough damage to defeat them).  The platforming stages are no better either, with hordes of tiny enemies that always seem to appear just outside of your weapon's range and are all but guaranteed to hit you.  Garnish with the usual suspects of grating music and harsh buzzes for every sound effect, and you have another bomb from a company that consistently made nothing but.

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Top 100 Worst NES Games, #30-21

30. Raid 2020 (Color Dreams, 1989)

Color Dreams attempts to copy a classic arcade game (NARC), but once again, their ineptitude at game design overshadows their efforts and prevents it from being any fun.  Every enemy you encounter takes multiple hits to kill, sound effects are harsh and ear-piercing, it has that infamous random-note music that seems to permate a lot of terrible NES titles.  But the worst thing of all are its unintuitive controls - rather than simply moving up and down when one presses up or down, you move diagonally parallel to the lines on the ground.  Which doesn't sound bad at first, but the frustration quickly rises when you try to line up a shot on an enemy and end up waltzing right into a landmine for an instant kill, or just get clipped into another enemy's sprite and watch your health deplete at a staggering rate.  Trust me, it's not fun.  If you want to play a good game in this style, then do yourself a favor and play NARC instead; you'll have a much better time.

29. Deathbots (Odyssey Software, 1991)

Another game that probably suckered more than a few gamers in, particularly with its absolutely metal box art and aesthetic that overall resembles a classic arcade game (Gauntlet).  Then you learn that American Video published it, and, well, it's all downhill from there.  Deathbots is a terminally repetitive, slow-paced series of endless shootouts with identical, plodding robotic enemies, with each and every one of them taking multiple hits to put down.  Worst, the game sees fit to limit the amount of ammo any given weapon you carry can hold, forcing you to frequently run around with no way to fight back until you find some more weapons to use.  Enemies also attack in such huge numbers and with such persistence that just one room can drain more than half your life bar, to say nothing of the rest of the stage you have to slog through.  Conceptually awesome but terribly executed, Robodemons is a complete waste.  Just play the game it obviously draws its inspiration from and forget this crap.

28. Peter Pan and the Pirates (Equilibrium, 1991) 

Based on a Fox cartoon from the early 1990s that I recall honestly being pretty good, but as with most licensed properties, its leap to the realm of gaming was... lacking, to say the least.  The level design is thoughtless and generic (and even recycles several stages wholesale just to make the game longer) and you can lose all of your health in an instant thanks to the lack of post-hit invulnerability and the fact that enemies will literally drop from the sky with absolutely no warning to get at you, or have a long-ranged attack that all but requires you to take several hits in order to get in close enough to attack them. You do at least have Pan's power of flight, but controlling it is awkward and unintuitive - you must hold Up and then press A, which causes you'll continuously move in one direction  until you press a different one.  Oh, and you only have a limited supply of flight power and you can't attack at all until you've landed again.  And of course, no bad NES game is complete without short, annoying songs on a constant loop throughout the entire adventure.  Just another lousy, uninspired licensed cash-in.

27. Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six (Bits Studios, 1992)

Spider-Man is a character that lends himself well to video games - swinging on webs, fighting bad guys with acrobatics and web-powers, and of course having a colorful cast of villains who all prove to be a worthy match for him in spite of his abilities.  Unfortunately, Bits botched that up when it came time to make an NES game, and in that regard, the main problem is the controls.  They tried to give Spidey all of his familiar abilities, but on a controller with only two buttons, they did it in just about the most asinine way possible.  That means that swinging on webs, punching enemies, performing jump kicks, throwing web balls, and doing various heights of jump are all mapped to two buttons, and controlling it is a frustrating ordeal of figuring out what pattern and length of time you need to tap buttons in to do each move (and not forget it in the heat of the moment when batting foes).  Then you consider that the game gives you one life, one health bar, one continue and no easy way to recover energy (not even finishing a stage causes it to be refilled), and you have a perfect example of how not to handle a superhero game.

26. Back to the Future II and III (Beam Software, 1990) 

The original Back to the Future on NES is one of the platform's most despised games for its utter waste of a license and uninspired gameplay, so how do you do even worse than that?  Well, Beam Software found a way.  Much like Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure, it takes a great concept and makes it into a dull scavenger hunt that goes on for far too long.  You travel about numerous similar maps bopping enemies and entering "puzzle rooms" to collect items, then you must take the item somewhere else on the map, unscramble a word and select the proper item to return it.  If you try to place the wrong item, you lose the item and have to go back and get it again.  Oh, and you have to do this about forty-five times in order to finish the game, and there's absolutely no save feature to keep track of your progress.  Tedious beyond belief, and a complete mockery of a classic film franchise...

25. Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum (Beam Software, 1990) 

With a title that corny, you just know the game's going to be a bomb.  When Beam Software is at the helm, that fate is all but assured.  The game is a hybrid of a puzzle game and a platformer that does neither one well.  Taking place within a huge maze (the titular asylum), the game alternates between overhead block-pushing puzzle rooms (the laziest of game design puzzles) and sidescrolling platforming levels replete with awkward physics, slow movement and the uninspired goal of just having you collect items in order to open a door and reach a new section of the maze.  But of course, they also had to punctuate it with some ear-bleedingly bad sound design and putrid visuals - Beam Software seems to have a propensity for picking out the gaudiest color palettes the NES could produce, and nowhere is that more evident than in Dash Galaxy.  Lots of bright yellows clashing with grays and dark browns...

24. Tag Team Wrestling (SAS Sakata, 1986) 

The NES certainly had a lot of mediocre-to-awful wrestling games, but Tag Team Pro Wrestling is arguably the worst of them all.  Each and every hit you land in this game (assuming you can land any owing to the crummy hit detection) brings up a prompt to attack, and, depending on the number of times you press the B button during that three-count, you do one of your special moves.  Much more intuitive than, say, using the D-pad and the attack button in tandem and actively taking part in the actions your character performs.  The tag team mechanic also works against the game rather than with it, as you can whittle your opponent down to virtually nothing, only to have him tag in his partner who is at full health, and while he's sitting on the sidelines, he's regaining health as well, causing matches to drag on for nearly forever.  It all snowballs into a tedious experience that you barely play and can barely stand to sit through a single match of, let alone the 35 you need to complete the game.  But, if nothing else, this game did at least bring us a pop culture icon in the form of Strong Bad.

23. Best of the Best: Championship Karate (Loriciel, 1992) 

Best of the Best is a prime example of a game trying to do something a platform just isn't capable of - in this case, having realistic, fluid animation on its characters, something the limited capabilities of the NES did not lend themselves to at all.  Still, they tried, and while the result is impressive in a way, it does not make for a particularly good game.  Instead, the game just turns into a frustrating affair of throwing dozens of punches and kicks and hoping in vain they hit your opponent before you get hit yourself, with absolutely no indication as to where either character is vulnerable and where their attacks can theoretically land.  Even Flying Dragon and Flying Warriors - games which came out years prior - at least gave some indication as to your character's weak points and gave you options to avoid them.  Characters also slowly regain health over the course of the match, which only makes for a more frustrating experience as you're seemingly unable to do any lasting damage at all.  Best of the Best is a lousy fighter on every front, and seeing as Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were already out at the time of its release, I doubt much of its target audience would have been clamoring to play it anyway.

22. A Week of Garfield (Mars Corp, 1989 in Japan)

A Japanese-exclusive game based on an American comic strip is pretty strange, but it never getting an overseas release is also pretty unusual.  Or maybe not once you consider the quality of the game itself.  A Week of Garfield is an arduous task, having you traverse uninspired levels full of tiny enemies that can drain all of your health in an instant.  You do have some special weapons to fend them off, as well as an extremely short-ranged kick (which can also be done in mid-air and will still damage enemies despite having no animations there), but when just one enemy can deplete your entire health bar in under a second and you get one life to complete the entire game, it really doesn't make a lot of a difference.  Oh, and did I mention that items are all hidden from view by default and you have to walk or jump over them to make them appear?  Or that this also applies to the key you need to open the door to finish the level? Well, I did now.  And now you see why this game never made its way overseas.

Oh, and the in-game timer counts up, rather than down...

21. Tagin' Dragon (Sachen, 1990)

Tagin' Dragon sounds like a simple enough concept on paper - the player controls a dragon and defeats other dragons by biting their tails.  Ultimately nothing too special, but something that, executed well, could lend itself to some simple but addictive arcade-styled action.  But sloppy hit detection, sluggish controls and ugly graphics quickly drag the concept down, turning it into an exercise in pure frustration that isn't worth anyone's time time, even as a momentary diversion.  But when it's from the brilliant minds that brought us Master Chu and Little Red Hood, what else would you expect?  And as a true testament to its quality, guess who published it?  Yep, our old buddies at Bunch Games, aka Color Dreams aka Wisdom Tree.

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