Was there such a thing as "Shovelware" on the NES?
The NES is no stranger to have a large selection of games that were either poorly planned (Deadly Towers) or just unimpressive (most Bandai games). Would such games be classified as shovelware? And what is the proper defition of that term?
If there was shovelware, what publishers and developers were known for such things? Were the infamous TOSE and Micronics part of the problem? Was Bandai nothing more than a shovelware publisher? LJN was mostly publishing games that were based on hot/trendy franchises of the time.
This, hopefully, would shed some light on this serious dillema.
If there was shovelware, what publishers and developers were known for such things? Were the infamous TOSE and Micronics part of the problem? Was Bandai nothing more than a shovelware publisher? LJN was mostly publishing games that were based on hot/trendy franchises of the time.
This, hopefully, would shed some light on this serious dillema.
Comments
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien 3
Back to the Future
Back to the Future II & III
Beetlejuice
Bill & Teds Excellent Video Game Adventure
Friday the 13th
Jaws
Karate Kid, The
T2 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I like Wolverine ( LJN ), and Chubby Cherub ( Bandi )
...
Originally posted by: JosephLeo
LJN comes to mind with all their movie-game titles.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien 3
Back to the Future
Back to the Future II & III
Beetlejuice
Bill & Teds Excellent Video Game Adventure
Friday the 13th
Jaws
Karate Kid, The
T2 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Really, I enjoy all of those games except for Roger Rabbit, Beetlejuice, and the back to the future games.
nightmare is a competant platformer, T2 is actually the best game based on the movie, the snes and sega versions of it suck, Jaws is cool, Karate Kid ain't great but it's fun if you want a nifty Kung fu clone, Friday the 13th is a badass game, I don't care what anyone says.
You're forgetting X-Men which is awful, and Wolverine which I actually like pretty well, although the damage thing in it is all jacked up. Yeah, they're liscensed games and some are pretty mediocre but I think shovelware, I think of shit like color a dinosaur, Waldo, Cool Spot, hell, even Yo Noid. I'm sorry, say what you want about the quality of that game, anytime you make a game based on a pizza mascot, I'd call that much worse than making one based on a movie.
Silver Surfer
XMen
Dick Tracy
Ghostbusters
Nintendo's version of Tetris
Gloveball
Bad Street Brawler
Action 52
Originally posted by: JosephLeo
LJN comes to mind with all their movie-game titles.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien 3
Back to the Future
Back to the Future II & III
Beetlejuice
Bill & Teds Excellent Video Game Adventure
Friday the 13th
Jaws
Karate Kid, The
T2 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Im one of those few people that love Jaws, Friday the 13th, and Karate Kid. They just have an odd charm that I like about em.
Originally posted by: JosephLeo
LJN comes to mind with all their movie-game titles.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien 3
Back to the Future
Back to the Future II & III
Beetlejuice
Bill & Teds Excellent Video Game Adventure
Friday the 13th
Jaws
Karate Kid, The
T2 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Sounds like someone needs to quit watching horrible reviewers of these games.
Granted they aren't the best games on the NES, but I enjoyed Roger Rabbit, Jaws, and The Karate Kid when I was growing up, and I knew quite a few who liked them plus others, even to this day still. And they still make games based on movies, so I hardly count that as shovelware.
As for shovelware on the NES.. if you count pirate games, then yeah, sure, but since they weren't marketed like the rest of games, I wouldn't even count them. Comparing to the Wii, where you have just 9 out of 10 titles are crap that 3rd party developers put out, then no, the NES has none. Nintendo actually forced companies to a standard back in the day to prevent the things that happened with Atari and previous consoles, though they seemed to have lost that tight control in the SNES - N64 era, which is why we most likely see the shit that's out now.
Originally posted by: SamSpade
Originally posted by: JosephLeo
LJN comes to mind with all their movie-game titles.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien 3
Back to the Future
Back to the Future II & III
Beetlejuice
Bill & Teds Excellent Video Game Adventure
Friday the 13th
Jaws
Karate Kid, The
T2 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Really, I enjoy all of those games except for Roger Rabbit, Beetlejuice, and the back to the future games.
nightmare is a competant platformer, T2 is actually the best game based on the movie, the snes and sega versions of it suck, Jaws is cool, Karate Kid ain't great but it's fun if you want a nifty Kung fu clone, Friday the 13th is a badass game, I don't care what anyone says.
agreed. LJN games aren't that bad. Friday is actually my favorite NES game. SMB3 coming in second.
Nintendo actually forced companies to a standard back in the day to prevent the things that happened with Atari and previous consoles
Dude, all the "seal of quality" was was a licensing fee. Actual quality was irrelevant. They only cared about s&p stuff like blood and boobs.
That said, for me shovelware sort of implies minimum effort for maximum sales, it doesn't really say anything about the quality of the final product. So NES era LJN games sort of fit that bill nicely. Just crank out some movie games to try to make some cash.
Thankfully some of those games wound up being pretty decent.
Another poster said that they thought shovelware is basically intentionally crappy software. I pretty much agree to an extent, saying it's software that doesn't care about quality. Not necessarily that it's intentionally bad, but that the main focus is to exist and sell. That to me defines the Action 52. The creators just wanted Action 52 to exist to wow kids with 52 games in one cartridge and slap $200 and justify it by the number of games on the cartridge. It just needed to exist to sell. That's definitely Shovelware.
I'd throw Color Dreams/Bunch Games/Wisdom Tree games in the mix too, but those are of higher quality than Action 52 games for sure. In fact, even though some are downright terrible, I like them. Robodemons comes to mind. For some reason, I have a lot of fun playing that game despite the entire thing being a mess. It's quirky and fun.
Shovelware games are sometimes just as fun as an experience than a good game would be as a game.
Originally posted by: OSG
Originally posted by: dra600n
Nintendo actually forced companies to a standard back in the day to prevent the things that happened with Atari and previous consoles
Dude, all the "seal of quality" was was a licensing fee. Actual quality was irrelevant. They only cared about s&p stuff like blood and boobs.
That said, for me shovelware sort of implies minimum effort for maximum sales, it doesn't really say anything about the quality of the final product. So NES era LJN games sort of fit that bill nicely. Just crank out some movie games to try to make some cash.
Thankfully some of those games wound up being pretty decent.
The seal of quality wasn't what was important, what was important was that they put a limit on the number of games each company was allowed to put out within a certain timeframe.. It wasn't perfect, and Konami got around it with Ultra and such, but it did help keep the crap down.
Originally posted by: ndcapo
Originally posted by: SamSpade
Originally posted by: JosephLeo
LJN comes to mind with all their movie-game titles.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Alien 3
Back to the Future
Back to the Future II & III
Beetlejuice
Bill & Teds Excellent Video Game Adventure
Friday the 13th
Jaws
Karate Kid, The
T2 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Really, I enjoy all of those games except for Roger Rabbit, Beetlejuice, and the back to the future games.
nightmare is a competant platformer, T2 is actually the best game based on the movie, the snes and sega versions of it suck, Jaws is cool, Karate Kid ain't great but it's fun if you want a nifty Kung fu clone, Friday the 13th is a badass game, I don't care what anyone says.
agreed. LJN games aren't that bad. Friday is actually my favorite NES game. SMB3 coming in second.
Hell yeah, Friday the 13th is awesome. I truly enjoy almost all of the games on JL's list, especially Jaws.
Originally posted by: cradelit
The seal of quality wasn't what was important, what was important was that they put a limit on the number of games each company was allowed to put out within a certain timeframe.. It wasn't perfect, and Konami got around it with Ultra and such, but it did help keep the crap down.
Acclaim bought LJN to use to release their excess games in the late 80s. So uh. Shrug!
To sort of answer some other people, not too many people in here are really parroting youtube yelly guys' opinions about this stuff. People who highlighted LJN (for example) also said that the games were not necessarily bad. Some are even good. Some were made by Rare, and we all know what those guys were capable of. The guys who made Jaws went on to make Wonder Boy in Monster World. Like, real studios worked on these things.
It probably didn't help their image, though, that they became a place for Acclaim to release their excess games in the late days of the NES. Acclaim was basically a shovelware company too! They banged out a lot of licensed games and cheap sports titles and they passed on the lesser of those games to LJN.
Originally posted by: OSG
Originally posted by: cradelit
The seal of quality wasn't what was important, what was important was that they put a limit on the number of games each company was allowed to put out within a certain timeframe.. It wasn't perfect, and Konami got around it with Ultra and such, but it did help keep the crap down.
Acclaim bought LJN to use to release their excess games in the late 80s. So uh. Shrug!
To sort of answer some other people, not too many people in here are really parroting youtube yelly guys' opinions about this stuff. People who highlighted LJN (for example) also said that the games were not necessarily bad. Some are even good. Some were made by Rare, and we all know what those guys were capable of. The guys who made Jaws went on to make Wonder Boy in Monster World. Like, real studios worked on these things.
It probably didn't help their image, though, that they became a place for Acclaim to release their excess games in the late days of the NES. Acclaim was basically a shovelware company too! They banged out a lot of licensed games and cheap sports titles and they passed on the lesser of those games to LJN.
Like I said, not perfect, but you can hardly say it didn't work. Compared to the 2600, the any crapware on the NES is negligable.
So while I would consider the Atari 2600 Pacman to be shovelware, the NES version wasn't, and most arcade ports to the NES were actually pretty faithful to the originals. I'm trying to think of some horrible licensed games that were released for NES, and Athena comes to mind. That game had the worst physics engine I've ever seen.
But as far as unliscensed developers such as Wisdom Tree and Color Dreames, AVE etc, some of them, while bad, are still fun to play. Yes, there's replay value in Bible Adventures, even if it's just laughing your butt off while throwing baby Moses into the river. I also enjoyed Mermaids of Atlantis (the PG version of Bubble Bath Babes) and it has a wonderful light-hearted story which pokes fun at the evils of the Nintendo licensing structure.
I think the best examples of licensed shovelware on the NES are actually nintendo puzzle games like Yoshi's cookie and Wario's Woods. I think they made an earnest attempt at a good puzzle game with Dr Mario, and then tried to cash in on its success.
EDIT - Reiterating that an exploitation title isn't necessarily shovelware.
OSG: Actually, Westone developed the first Wonderboy game, and every subsequent one. Sega just owns the WB license.
In my definition, I agree with "it exists only to sell" and "profit over effort". But I also suspected that the NES would have less shovelware, due to how much more difficult it was to develop a game for the NES. And I think LJN commissioned Rare the most for their games, as I think they have 3 games!
Originally posted by: SamSpade
I think of shit like color a dinosaur, Waldo, Cool Spot, hell, even Yo Noid.
Color a Dinosaur. Best. Game. Ever.