Did I quit too soon on Deadly Towers and Super Pitfall back in the day or do those qualify as major stinkers? I never gave Guardian Legend or Legacy of the Wizard a chance because of Deadly Towers so I guess it just goes to show that not all publishers that have one bad game are all bad
The developer is usually more of a significant factor in a game's quality than the publisher.
SMB and SMB3 - Not a quality thing, just personal taste. Never liked 'em, never will. Goddamnit, put the pitchforks away!
I can understand. I had both, NES and SNES, Mario games when kid/teenager. Technically perfect, nice music, and everything.
They made a big impact on people, and that was likely deserved. They are definitely not games to avoid.
However, if I had to spend a couple of hours playing alone, I would rather play, for instance, Zelda, Zelda III, or any FF title; and with a couple of hours playing with someone else, SFII, NBA Jam, or similar player vs. player titles on the NES, would be the choice. Mario was pretty much the alternative for when everything I had and liked better was played recently. I always considered Mario titles kind of over rated, but probably it is just me not being enthusiast for platform games in general, bar few exceptions like Prince of Persia.
I'm going to take a different stance in this thread. I don't think any game should be outright avoided. I think we need to experience crappy games once in a while, to better appreciate the good games we play. I think bad games give us something to talk about, and help expand our palette, and you never know when you might wind up loving that game that someone else said not to play(SMB3? Really?).
Bad games will never go away. A lot of time, they started out as good games, and something happened in development(budget cuts, rushed deadlines, etc) that make the game turn out bad.
I think there's a huge difference between "games we don't like" and "games to avoid completely." I'll gladly play a bad game, even if just for the experience, so when the inevitable thread pops up, I have something to chime in. Sometimes, games seem really bad at first, but it was just that I didn't understand them. Once I got what was going on, the game turned out terrific(Ultima Exodus is a big one like that for me).
^Great point. Some games that people claim are total garbage are the exact same games I've played and enjoyed, found totally addictive, or at least been fascinated and amused by.
They're sometimes uncharted territory, too: I got more satisfaction out of taking down a few of those Action 52 games than from beating some AAA titles that practically held my hand through the whole game. And I've played the hell out of some obscure PlayStation shovelware games, and because I was determined to extract every ounce of gameplay I could from them, they turned out to be rewarding in a roundabout way.
I've gotten a kind of perverse enjoyment from a couple of the games I mentioned earlier. Andre Agassi Tennis is a disaster, but figure out how to win and there's a certain amount of fun in humiliating the CPU with bizarro-world tactics...
...except for the fact that it expects you to marathon through 16 matches to beat the game. Ugh. Still, I got more out of mastering that game -- which seemed impossible to beat at first -- than from beating any number of slicker-looking and smoother-playing games that were easy to annihilate with one simple pattern.
Another one is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties for 3DO. Terrible? Sure, if you consider it a "game". But if you approach it like a cross between a visual novel and a ridiculously half-assed straight-to-video movie, it's pretty fun and intermittently hilarious. And it'll take 90 minutes of your time, max: well worth it for the amusement value.
Really, the one unforgivable sin a game can commit is wasting my time. Most other things can be overlooked, but a game that deliberately or carelessly wastes my time -- by making my fate dependent on RNGs instead of skill; by making me sit through 30 seconds of loading screens to restart a level; by withholding crucial information so that it can be put in a strategy guide instead -- those things torpedo it completely for me.
Basically, mastery is more fun than "fun" -- and being open-minded is more rewarding than trying to be the AVGN and show that you're "above" allegedly shitty games.
Comments
Did I quit too soon on Deadly Towers and Super Pitfall back in the day or do those qualify as major stinkers? I never gave Guardian Legend or Legacy of the Wizard a chance because of Deadly Towers so I guess it just goes to show that not all publishers that have one bad game are all bad
The developer is usually more of a significant factor in a game's quality than the publisher.
SMB and SMB3 - Not a quality thing, just personal taste. Never liked 'em, never will. Goddamnit, put the pitchforks away!
I can understand. I had both, NES and SNES, Mario games when kid/teenager. Technically perfect, nice music, and everything.
They made a big impact on people, and that was likely deserved. They are definitely not games to avoid.
However, if I had to spend a couple of hours playing alone, I would rather play, for instance, Zelda, Zelda III, or any FF title; and with a couple of hours playing with someone else, SFII, NBA Jam, or similar player vs. player titles on the NES, would be the choice. Mario was pretty much the alternative for when everything I had and liked better was played recently. I always considered Mario titles kind of over rated, but probably it is just me not being enthusiast for platform games in general, bar few exceptions like Prince of Persia.
Bad games will never go away. A lot of time, they started out as good games, and something happened in development(budget cuts, rushed deadlines, etc) that make the game turn out bad.
I think there's a huge difference between "games we don't like" and "games to avoid completely." I'll gladly play a bad game, even if just for the experience, so when the inevitable thread pops up, I have something to chime in. Sometimes, games seem really bad at first, but it was just that I didn't understand them. Once I got what was going on, the game turned out terrific(Ultima Exodus is a big one like that for me).
They're sometimes uncharted territory, too: I got more satisfaction out of taking down a few of those Action 52 games than from beating some AAA titles that practically held my hand through the whole game. And I've played the hell out of some obscure PlayStation shovelware games, and because I was determined to extract every ounce of gameplay I could from them, they turned out to be rewarding in a roundabout way.
I've gotten a kind of perverse enjoyment from a couple of the games I mentioned earlier. Andre Agassi Tennis is a disaster, but figure out how to win and there's a certain amount of fun in humiliating the CPU with bizarro-world tactics...
...except for the fact that it expects you to marathon through 16 matches to beat the game. Ugh. Still, I got more out of mastering that game -- which seemed impossible to beat at first -- than from beating any number of slicker-looking and smoother-playing games that were easy to annihilate with one simple pattern.
Another one is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties for 3DO. Terrible? Sure, if you consider it a "game". But if you approach it like a cross between a visual novel and a ridiculously half-assed straight-to-video movie, it's pretty fun and intermittently hilarious. And it'll take 90 minutes of your time, max: well worth it for the amusement value.
Really, the one unforgivable sin a game can commit is wasting my time. Most other things can be overlooked, but a game that deliberately or carelessly wastes my time -- by making my fate dependent on RNGs instead of skill; by making me sit through 30 seconds of loading screens to restart a level; by withholding crucial information so that it can be put in a strategy guide instead -- those things torpedo it completely for me.
Basically, mastery is more fun than "fun" -- and being open-minded is more rewarding than trying to be the AVGN and show that you're "above" allegedly shitty games.