Be Excellent To Each Other

I really really hate Manic Miner. I hate the graphics, the sound, the pixel perfect jumps, the difficulty... everything about it. Always have done since I were an child. Matthew Smith I could quite happily slap purple, if he didn't seem to be a genuinely nice man that is.

Ultimate Play The Game made one good game: Atic Atac. Hated everything else they've made, from Jetpac to Sabrewulf.

When getting into retro gaming, I was shocked at how these were held up as paragons and worshipped as gods. I just couldn't comprehend it.

Are there any much loved games/series/developers that you dislike?

Who made Trans Am?

And what was wrong with Jet Pak? I loved that.

Metal gear Solid - 3% great gameplay buried under ponderous portentous bullshit dialogue and crap story telling
Resident Evil - hated it when it came out, it's just fucking redundant as a gameplay model now, but then Crapcom have built a career out of milking their franchises.
Final Fantasy VII - just rubbish

Elite really was boring shite. Yet it continues to appear in farcical top 100 lists the world over, because it's the only old game they can remember, so they bung it in for posterity.

Exile? Now THAT was a game. At the time of release, it seemed to be doomed to obscurity, but as the years have passed it's slowly picked up a following.

I have never, ever, saw anything in Strider. Either 'back in the day' or now.

The Puyo-Puyo games (aka Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine/Kirby's Avalanche) are, to me, near unplayable random garbage masquerading as a successful puzzle game series.

And Tetris Attack/Panel De Pon/Puzzle League can fuck off as well.

Trans Am was Ultimate as well.
I have to agree, I never saw anything in the Ultimate games at the time, and they don't really appeal to me from a retro perspective either.

Manic Miner, on the other hand, was, and still is, fantastic.

All of the Mario 2d platformers are shit, slippery messes full of uninteresting level design and bland visuals.

Elite was ace, as one could do what one wanted to. It's legacy can be traced through loads of games, even up to Freelancer and EvE online.

It was only as ever boring as one made it, as you controlled the storyline.

One can't fault the ambition.

FTFY

All computer games are shit, apart from Count Duckula 2. And possibly The Jetsons.

I already mentioned this elsewhere, but Golden Axe. Can't even hold a candle to Streets Of Rage.

At least in SOR you could counter-attack and avoid getting the absolute shizzle kicked out of you at every opportunity.

To be fair, I don't think many people actually claim Golden Axe to still be remotely good in 2009. At least I hope not.

I never liked rainbow islands, and when I was younger I couldn't even beat the spider boss, which probably didn't help.

- Double Dragon is just horrendous. Although I'm not sure it's really rated now.
- Final fight is even worse, however. pressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirewalkalongabitpressfirepressfirepressfirepressfire
pressfirepressfirepressfirewalkalongabitinsertcoinpressfirepressfirepressfirepressfirepressfire... play an actual game instead.
- Also see: Golden Axe, Dragon Ninja, ninja turtles, most arcade scrolling beat em ups.
- Sonic. The reason the new ones are shit is because they were always shit.
- Underwurlde would be my overrated ultimate game. Love Jet Pac, Cookie, Lunar Jetman, Atic Atac etc. but this one never got me.
- FF X is probably the most overrated game of all time. Boring, boring, boring. and this is coming from someone who loves 6 and 7.

Love manic miner and even the druggy mess that is jsw, though. It's a sublime work of art is that.

This. Elite is the crap version of Pirates!

Also yes, Final Motherfucking random battle Fantrandombattlesy 7.

I started FFVII again yesterday for the first time in a long while. I'd forgotten how slow it is to get going to be honest.. looking forward to it opening up later though.

For random battles, the Phantasy Star games seemed far worse.

The fighty formula was perfect in IK+, simple moves to master, three fighters on screen, mini games.

And then comes Street Fighter II. Stupid pad-widdling combined with button mashing to pull off daft moves. "Characters" with "backstories" so badly written it would disgrace a six year old. All taking a fun genre and turning it into a dull nerd fest inpenetrable to all but the most hardcore.

And Manic Miner/JSW can fuck off.


But Elite was wonderful for its time. Its flaws show up now with the advent of better processors and more memory, but not then.

Atic Atac - Shit collect 'em up.

Knightlore - You can see why they held Alien 8 back. And that is still shite once you've played Batman or Head Over Heels.

Street Fighter (any version) - Ramdomly mash buttons until you win or lose. Bonus points to the Spectrum version for stripping away all the window dressing and exposing a mediocre game underneath.

Elite - Frontier is great, Elite is just dire. People cry "but there's so much freedom", yeah and a million and one ways to die. Would be more fun if the auto dock came as standard.

Lemmings (CPC version). - Amstrad Action gave this a stonking rating and on the face of it they were right. Except the level password system was screwed up beyond about level 12, which meant you had no chance of making serious progress unless you wanted to do it all in one go. So a brilliant game should have had 10% knocked off the score.

Anything by Psygnosis come to think of it.

Creatures and Creatures 2 (C64) - Nice graphics, but totally lacking.

Chase HQ on the Amiga and ST. Oddly the only versions that stand up today are the Speccy and CPC versions as both are triumphs of coding and therefore you can overlook the shortcomings. The mags screamed that the 16 bit versions were virtually arcade perfect. But today they just look slow and lacking.

All Mario platform games - Shit collect 'em ups. Oh and the wandering around bits in Mario Golf. I wanna play golf not wander around!

Modern Sonic games - Mario wannabes. Liked the first few though (Sonic 1 and Sonic 2).

Cannon Fodder 2 - Full price for what are essentially some extra levels? Fuck off.

And finally any 16 bit or 16 bit console game ever reviewed by C+VG. The idiots who wrote for that mag thought that good graphics meant good gameplay. Always knock 10%-15% off their scores.

Elite has to be one of the biggest gaming experiences of my life. I played the speccy version right up until elite status and the third mission, but there's no way I'd ever do it again. I've made several attempts over the years to play different versions and got bored really quickly. I just don't have the attention span anymore. Stuff like Fallout 3 offers such an immersive experience without any effort.

The original was all in 32k, ffs. 8 Galaxies, with 256 systems in each, 20 (ish) odd ships, trading, piracy, docking etc.

My brother actually bought it off someone at school for next to nothing, and the tit who sold it to him thought he'd ripped him off because 'it's all only lines'. Not like those proper graphics you'd get in a Mastertronic game or whatever....

Any fighting games - just can't get into them at all.

Sighs.



Fun map-em-up.



Fun map-em-up.



Mash buttons if you want to lose.



Frontier was impossible on the computers at the time. The Amiga could hardly cope with it.

Lovely game on my A1200. Of course if you had five year old hardware (i.e a A500) then what did you expect? If you tried to play the latest GTA on a five year old PC you'd be in for abit of a shock.

As for Knightlore, it is just shit. The straw that broke the camels back was the stupid day to night animation every few minutes which just distracts from the gameplay. Alien 8 is more playable precisly because it doesn't have that distraction.

Just to prove other people could do it better than Ultimate, try Hydrofool.



Some great ingame music as well.

Knightlore, released 1984

Hyperfool, 1987

Not quite equal.

I agree that Knight Lore isn't much fun to play. As my dad tells me, it was stunning at the time of release, staggeringly amazing, but, the 'turn and thrust' control system is just too irritating to get past. The game structure isn't that great either by today's standards either.

Resident Evil, eh? Played many of them, right up to RE4 which I played on the Gamecube, and they all have the problem of horrendously broken control systems.

All RPGs with 'leveling up' and 'experience points' and the tedious life-wasting grinding that goes with them.

It seems that most of the SAMZOMGEE games from yesteryear rely on technical brilliance at the time, rather than if they were good games or not. I suppose that's inevitable when retro magazines and websites just talk to software developers of the time.

Well, maybe all games should copy Halo's scheme and have done with it, eh?

The control schemes are like that for a reason, compare Devil May Cry and RE: Code Veronica's schemes (as they were released in a similar timeframe, and use similar tech) if you slotted DMCs control scheme into Code Veronica, then you would have an entirely different game, one that doesn't do what RE games set out to do.

This. Well sort of. Atic Atac was utter shit. Random spawning enemies and sprawling mazes. Ack!

Trans Am was a bit better than the rest. All the isometric games they did were shit.

I'll go you one better. So was Head Over Heels.

There have been two good isometric games. Quazatron and Ant Attack. That's it.

Yeah, I didn't like Head Over Heels either. Liked Batman, though.

Dunno. Never played any of the Halo games. Don't like FPSes.

Here's one: Sensible Software. Entire back catalogue = shit.

oh... 3DC was good. I forgot that one.

Okay, I didn't like Ico.

I wanted to but it just wasn't very interesting once you took the niceness out of the equation. After that it's Tomb Raider levels of dull but without the agility and escort missions were never much cop so a whole game of it just didn't really interest me. I gave it a fair crack but was never anything other than bored. Liked SOTC though.

GTA3, VC and 4. Could never get into them. I preferred the 'score 10000000 pts to get to the next level' approach of GTA1. All that mission stuff just got in the way of the sandbox fun and yet oddly I'm totally in love with Saints Row 2 (never expected that).

Finally, is it just me or are the Silent Hill games not all that? All the backtracking, shit boss fights and awful combat you expect from a survival horror game shrouded in a lot of fog.

That's because Saint's Row hasn't forgot it's a game, and has therefore kept the fun bits. GTA5 will just be a fat man sitting in a room pressing F5 every 5 seconds.

Tish and piffle. Parallax is much underrated.

3 and VC are most excellent. It is SA where everything else began to get in the way.

That. I've probably bucked the trend by liking all the RE games up until 4. I actually like the control system, but then again I am a bit of a gaming masochist sometimes.

All. Soccer. Games.

RE control schemes are perfect for each game in the series, if you have problems coping it's because your brain and hands are gay.

I found Crackdown to be uninteresting and confused. Cannon Fodder on the Amiga never tweaked my buttons at all. Pretty much all beat-em-ups seem like random acts of button mashing to me. I endured a few hours watching a friend play FF7 and was bored to tears. Diablo was click-click-click tedium. I can't imagine how people get addicted to WOW or any grindy RPG.

Although I've tried most and own all of them that came out since 2004, I've never really liked any Legend of Zelda games.

Or that your brain is under the bizarre misapprehension that it's actually possible to walk whilst pointing a gun/holding up a knife.

Like Myps bedroom skillz


Health & Safety, innit.

I enjoyed Ocarina of Time but looking back I think a lot of that was ZOMGiness of the graphics and the setting. That isn't necessarily a criticism as I don't really care why I'm enjoying something so long as I am but I can't see myself enjoying it if I tried to play it now.

Manually docking a spaceship in Elite was one of my bestest gaming moments, ever. AutoDock is for gayers

My feelings about gta3 exactly. I was blown away when I first got it and played for weeks. I tried to play it again recently and it seemed plain and overly simple. So that's ruined.

You can't help yourself can you?

Of all the games that revolve around you doing the same takes-less-than-a-second action forever with little variation, TAPDPPL are the best. The game relies on how good you are at that action, rather than any hidden or random cack. If you mess up in TAPDPPL, it's because YOU messed up. ("Oh no! I don't have sufficient panels to trigger the clearing of the ranom block above me! I can't clear anything, so I lose." = "I should have pushed up the stack and acquired some extra panels in preparation for the incoming garbage: I mean, I could SEE the garbage coming at the top of the screen in my incoming queue. What a fool."). If you DO get killed by some random cack, it's because you're playing a rubbish implementation (Planet Puzzle League) that has uncertain rules.

I can't stand the EDF games. They don't seem to be very colourful, and they don't seem to have any music or dialogue at all. The weapons all seem ineffective and inaccurate, so I don't really feel like I'm making much progress. Also, the enemies all make screeching or 'shikkie-shikkie' noises. That's all I can hear, and it's just not fun.

I want cool voices, cool sound effects and meaningful locations and stuff!

Wot?

I agree a lot with people mentioning Street Fighter 2. I also loved IK+ for all the reasons people mentioned here. I never understood the need for 3 or 6 buttons for every beat em up after SF2. Its a genre that really does nothing for me.

I don't believe the people who say mario 2d games. If those are bad, what platformers are good?

I have to say almost every post FFVII (and also a bit of FF6) jRPGs are shit. I liked Phantasy Star, Shining Force and i like Fire Emblem. Those games concentrate on what's good, either exploration or tactical combat. They don't have the irritating characters and the pretentious but completely shallow and neverending dialogues of FF games (fire emblem could still cut a bit on that though). I really tried to play FF7 after so many people insisted, but it's an experience that still haunts me to this day.

and now that we're at it, Number of the Beast is one of the worst Iron Maiden albums

I haven't played Knight Lore since I had it on the speccy, butcertainly remember the entire family (even my Dad!) enjoying it at the time.

Street Fighter II is one of the finest videogames ever made, you Kings of Wrong, you!

Defender, on the other hand. I fucking hate Defender. Always have. What an absolute pile of shit that game is - and not just nowadays, it was every bit as gash when it was released. Why people fawn over it so I'll never know.