8 over-rated classics

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8 over-rated classics

Post by Dalty »

8 retro games that have aged terribly

By Red Bull UK on 26 November 2013 in Features
Slap the rose-tinted specs off your face - not everything old game you remember was great.

Retro games are a sure-fire way to lose a while to in-depth discussion on the fineries of Sonic's jumping ability or Chuck Rock's belly-bounce.

But they're also a trap, because the mind plays tricks on us - it makes us think everything 'back in the day' was oh-so-great and wonderful. But you know what? It wasn't. Some things have aged, and they are haggard.

Take these for example...

Altered Beast
It seems any time anybody ever brings up older games, Altered Beast is mentioned. This means a lot of people played it as kids, and a lot of them enjoyed it as kids.

Know why this is? It's because kids are dumb and have low standards. Altered Beast was, is and forever will be absolute dross - and you can rub this in the face of any adult who remembers it fondly.

Super Mario Bros 2
People couldn't get enough Mario Bros in the heyday of the NES, so a sequel to one of the best platformers of all time was always going to be eagerly gobbled up.

But Mario 2 was a re-skinned version of a totally different game - as in, it wasn't actually a Mario game. And when you go back to it these days, you see it's not even a good game.

The same can be said for Zelda II, actually.

Double Dragon
Fond memories of pumping 10p pieces into the arcade machine and battering your way through an army of goons in Double Dragon are great. Keep hold of those memories. Cherish them.

Just whatever you do, don't go back and play the original ever again, because its plodding, idiotic, cheating nonsense will ruin your entire childhood and make you question everything you once held dear in life.

GoldenEye 007
Is this treason? We're pretty sure this is treason. GoldenEye on N64 is held up as one of the true greats of gaming - and it is.

Well, it was. In its day, it revolutionised the FPS on console. In this day, where we are now, it revolutionises how quickly you can get bored and annoyed with such a clunky, slow, ugly mess.

Mortal Kombat
Street Fighter II holds up. Mortal Kombat does not hold up. Street Fighter II is still fun to play. Mortal Kombat is not still fun to play.

Where once we were drawn in by the digitised actors and heart-ripping antics of the K-heavy brawler, we now see it for what it is: a shallow lake coated with thin ice.

We're ashamed for ever giving MK a chance, frankly.

Tomb Raider
The fact the game is stilted and awkward to play in modern times isn't the most surprising aspect of Tomb Raider.

No, that's the fact that back in the mid-90s this polygonal mess of pointy bits and things we think were supposed to be limbs was something gamers of a certain age wanted to see naked.

If anything shows there's no hope for humanity, it's this simple fact.

Resident Evil
Remeber the scares you had when those dogs jumped through the window? Actually that might still make you jump.

But pretty much nothing else about Resident Evil holds up when looked at through a modern lens. You 'drive' characters like tanks, the dialogue is nauseatingly bad and it all feels so woefully cheap.

Then again, we could never truly give up on the hero that is Barry Burton, so at least Resident Evil has that.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

I'm annoyed by the use of "overrated" and "underrated," but I think I've already bitched about this in the past, so I'll just talk about a few of the games mentioned.

I don't feel like all that many people played Altered Beast--at least not where I grew up in Alabama. I understand that it was an arcade game, but we didn't really have arcades. The Wal-Mart in Boaz usually had a single machine out front. It was Street Fighter II for a while, then it was Mortal Kombat, then it was Cruisin' USA. I was a passable Street Fighter II player, but I got really good at Mortal Kombat and Cruisin' USA.

The only arcade within forty miles of my hometown was in the Gadsden Mall, and it didn't have Altered Beast. It did have Ms. Pac-Man. I got better at Ms. Pac-Man than any other game.

I don't think of Altered Beast as a classic. If anyone does, it's because it was one of the early arcade games ported to the Sega Genesis. I was the first person in town to have the Genesis. I lucked into it. My ex-stepbrother, who was in the navy at the time, came for a visit and gave me his Genesis, since he was about to be stationed on a submarine for a year and would have no way to play. He gave me all his games, too. Among them: Joe Montana II: Sports Talk Football, Ghosts 'n Ghosts, Pit-Fighter, Spider-Man, Rambo III, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario Lemieux Hockey, Golden Axe, and Altered Beast. I played the shit out of almost all of those games. Ghosts 'n Ghosts was the exception. It was just too damned hard.

The Genesis was slow to gain popularity in our area. For a while, I was the only one who had one, and I became briefly cool. When I say brief, I mean it. Within months of being given the Genesis, the SNES came out, and I was a nobody again.

If it hadn't been for owning the Genesis, I don't know that I would even have known of the existence of Altered Beast. I liked it. It was a little too easy, maybe. It had the same look and sounds as most of the Genesis's too-easy button-mashing platformers. The only thing that really separated it from Golden Axe in terms of play mechanics was that Golden Axe allowed the players to move to the top or bottom of the screen. (Golden Axe was still a side-scroller. It wasn't an overhead game or an isometric game. Pit-Fighter was the same way. If you wanted to go to the top of the screen, your player character did this awkward foot shuffle. You could only ever face right or left with these games. Rambo III was different. It was a true overhead game most of the time, with some limited first-person gaming for bosses. I wasn't that good at it, but I liked it.)

Anyway: Altered Beast. Not a game I would consider a classic, but still pretty fun. Also pretty easy.

* * *

I feel like whoever ghostwrote for Red Bull UK has a beef with Super Mario Bros. 2 for being unlike the others. Also, I get the impression he just wanted to let us know that he knew that it was a reskinned version of a non-Mario game. At this point, I feel like it's common knowledge, so it's not like it's a bit of arcana anyone can brag about knowing.

While I'm sure the game wouldn't have gotten the exposure it got if it had never been tied to the Mario series, I don't think it's a bad game by any stretch. I also don't think it's viewed by the average person as a classic. I feel like a lot of people think of it as a bizarre, quirky little thing that never felt much like a Mario game in the first place. Most people just look past it and focus on the first and third Mario games.

It introduced a couple things to Mario gaming that stuck. Lifting and throwing objects, slippery snow levels, and player characters with different abilities were all introduced in Super Mario Bros. 2. On the whole, I think it was a good addition to the series.

It was one of the first two NES games I owned. In November of 1988, my father called me to ask me what video games I liked to play most. I told him Super Mario Bros. 2 and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! were my favorites. He sent them to me for Christmas. It was a cool gift, but I had no way to play them. I guess he just assumed that I had an NES like every other kid in America. Whenever I wanted to play them, I had to go to the video store and rent a system.

This went on for a few months. One day in March, I came home from school and found my druggie ex-uncle (he was still my uncle at the time) and my ex-stepfather (still my stepfather at the time) playing the first Super Mario Bros. on a Nintendo in my bedroom. I said, "What's going on?" Instead of just telling me it was for me, my then stepfather (now ex) told me that he'd bought himself "one of them Intendos," and that he was playing it in my room because my mother didn't want him playing it in the living room. He then told me I couldn't play on it, because it was his. He did douchey things like that from time to time.

My mother didn't really have the money for it. My father's gift forced her hand. I wouldn't be surprised if she borrowed money from my grandparents to be able to afford it.

My father would often assume I had things I didn't have. I guess it's because he lived among business men and jet setters and had probably come to think that everybody's kids had the same shit his friends' kids had. It was late in '88, I guess. At that point, most kids probably *did* have an NES.

He did something similar with CDs. In August of '93, he asked me if there were any new songs or bands I liked. I told him I liked Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Duran Duran's "Come Undone." He mailed me the CDs both those songs were on for my birthday in September. Did I have a CD player? No. This time, my mother made him send me a CD player for Christmas. For three months, the CDs just sat in my room collecting dust.

* * *

Double Dragon's kinda lame. I prefer Double Dragon II--especially if I'm playing with another person. The co-op mode's pretty sweet. I prefer the setting that doesn't make players take damage from each other. I wish Battletoads would also let you choose not to take damage from the other player. That game's already hard enough.

I could be wrong about this, but I feel like most people prefer Double Dragon II. If there's a beloved game in that series, it's not the first one.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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I've only briefly played Zelda, but I like and prefer Zelda II. I also like Battle of Olympus, which is practically identical to Zelda II, only with Greek shit in it instead.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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Zelda II's not bad. I don't know it very well. It felt weird to me as a kid. Every time I picked it up, I'd always start right back at the beginning. I never owned it. I only ever got to rent it. I've since watched playthroughs on YouTube and have decided I probably would have really gotten into it if I had owned a copy.

The Legend of Zelda is one of my all-time favorites. I'd probably put it in my top ten--maybe even top five. It can get repetitive, but it can also be a lot of fun. The later dungeons are challenging without being impossible. I never owned it as a kid. A friend and I swapped games for about six months. I let him borrow Super Mario Bros. 2, since that was the game of mine he liked the most.

The only other Zelda-like NES game I really like is StarTropics. That game's the shit. I also like the original Final Fantasy, but I never really thought of it as a Zelda-like game. I thought of it as being more like a suped-up Hydlide. I also didn't get to play it that much until I was older and downloaded a ROM of it.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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Like Goiter said, it seems like the writer of the article just wanted to show off he knew something about Super Mario Bros. 2 that's fairly well-known among anyone who cares even moderately about the game. Even though it's essentially a reskin of another game, SMB2 is still canon in the Mario universe. The Shy Guys make their first appearance in this game and so does Birdo. These are characters that come back in other Mario-related games down the road, so I don't think one can dismiss this game as a cheap clone without lasting value.

I agree with the assessment of Mortal Kombat, but maybe that's because I never got to play it as a kid. I wasn't allowed to play any fighting games until I was about 12 or 13. I had played Street Fighter II at a friend's house a few times, but only enough to be able to recognize the characters - I wasn't any good at it. The first game in the series that I actually owned was Street Fighter Alpha 2 on the SNES (as far as I know, it's the only SNES game that had loading times). Once I got a bit older, I overcompensated for my deprivation from fighting games, by playing the shit out of them. The one I played the most was without a doubt Street Fighter Alpha 3, but I eventually got around to the Mortal Kombat series, too. At that point, however, the game had been about seven years old already and was beginning to show its age. What struck me the most after playing SF games for so long was the stiffness of the MK characters. They were simply not as responsive as I would have liked them to be - everything felt a bit clunky, slow, and stilted. Even some newer games in the series suffered from that same issue. I own Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance for the GameCube, and while the graphics are certainly updated, the gameplay feels just as clunky and unintuitive as it did on the SNES.

Never was much of a fan of the Zelda games, to be honest, but that's probably because I didn't give them much of a chance. I didn't own a real NES (only a clone with some preloaded NES games on it, such as Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros., and Hogan's Alley), so I didn't get to play the original Legend of Zelda during its heyday. Once I got an SNES, I didn't really go back to the series. Not until the age of emulation did I try the original, but I wasn't all that impressed with it. It was kind of boring, to be honest, but I was probably also not as easily impressed after ten years of active gaming.

I do kind of share the author's feelings toward Golden Eye, Tomb Raider, and Resident Evil. Those games were early 3-D titles on the fifth-generation consoles, so it's understandable that they would look rough. I remember thinking even then, however, that they looked sort of ugly and that moving in those environments was all kinds of awkward. At the time, I was a bit sad that games were moving in this direction because I was so in love with the SNES. It felt like Sony was trying to force-fad the Play Station and 3-D as these awesome things that they clearly weren't at the time. The one game that stood out to me in those days as being somewhat more skillfully made was Super Mario 64. Maybe the more cartoony graphics help it look a bit better than some of the games that try to imitate realistic shapes. I think Super Mario 64 is one of the few 3-D titles of that generation that still holds up after all these years.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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I never did make the transition from SNES to the 3D gaming. Once things went in that direction, I just lost interest and stopped playing altogether. I don't remember what happened to my SNES system, but eventually I bought a used one on ebay (or possibly the yahoo auctions that no longer exist), and picked up a couple of games I had before or some I wanted to try. I don't play them much anymore, but every once in a while I get the itch. I just beat Super Star Wars this weekend (on easy, of course. The middle level is really, really tough even when your skills are top notch. And the expert level is nigh impossible. I can't remember if I ever beat it on that level, but I wanna say I did beat it the one time.)
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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The levels in Super Star Wars are just so damn long. And even if you manage to power up the blaster to the highest level they can be challenging because the amount of health you gain in the course of the level may not be enough to beat the boss at the end.

I never even attempted playing the game on the hardest setting. As Quasar said, the medium setting was already hard enough. There's a level when you're supposed to escape from Mos Eisley and the boss fight is against this flying craft piloted by Stormtroopers. On the medium difficulty level, I can never get to the end with more than half of my life bar intact and I end up getting killed before I can cause any significant damage. You get to restart the level just before the boss, but you don't keep any of your power-ups, so the blaster is at its lowest level and does crappy damage. It's pretty frustrating.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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I'm gonna recant my assumption that I beat the game on Jedi. That fucker in the cantina is hard enough to beat on easy. I can't believe I could ever beat him on Jedi. If the Rebels would just spend all their resourses on recruiting that motherfucker to the cause, the Empire wouldn't stand a chance!
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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I didn't write much about Mortal Kombat, even though I meant to. Maybe it's for the best that I'm only getting to it now. That one post of mine is pretty fucking long.

I had planned to write that I loved Mortal Kombat when I was younger, but that I've grown to like it less with time. I mentioned above that I got really good at it. That was a big part of the appeal for me. I could beat almost anyone I played, and I could do it with any character.

Mortal Kombat came first for me. Looks like Street Fighter II had been out in arcades for more than a year when Mortal Kombat came to our Wal-Mart, but we almost never went to the Gadsden Mall when I was that age, so Mortal Kombat was the only arcade fighting game I had any real exposure to.

When I look at timelines, I see that Street Fighter II came to the US version of the SNES a couple months before Mortal Kombat hit on arcade. I never owned an SNES, so I didn't really get to play on one with any regularity until my stepbrother moved in with us in 1993 or 1994. This is my stepbrother from my mother's third marriage, and is not to be confused with the ex-stepbrother mentioned above.

The only real reference I had for a game like Mortal Kombat was the Pit-Fighter game my ex-stepbrother gave me when he gave me the Sega Genesis. Both games utilized live-action shooting, so they have a vaguely similar look. Here's how Pit-Fighter looked on the Genesis:



I've never actually played it in the arcade, but here's how the arcade version looked:



Mortal Kombat is admittedly pretty stiff, but it's a lot less stiff-looking than Pit-Fighter, and the models are real people. I liked what I took to be a pretty realistic look. I also liked the absurdity of the fatalities, the clumpy blood, and how easily the special moves could be pulled off. I didn't like how easily a player could get trapped in a leg sweep loop. That was bullshit, and it it could make the game pretty un-fun if the computer trapped you in a corner and leg swept you to death. Inexperienced players could also button-mash their way to victory against experienced players way too easily.

I did get to play Street Fighter II a little bit before my stepbrother came to live with us. He would spend Friday or Saturday night with us sometimes, and he'd bring his SNES with him. He'd absolutely destroy me, which made it not quite as fun as it could have been. It was tough getting used to the controls, too. There were the two on top and the four to the side, and I felt a little out of my depth.

I could see that the game was more fluid than Mortal Kombat, and it was obvious that the hit detection was leagues better, but I still preferred Mortal Kombat for a while, because it was what I knew and was good at. I didn't really have a chance to appreciate Street Fighter II until Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition. That was the Genesis port. (I've never known what the apostrophe was for, but it always gets included when people talk about it, so I'll preserve it here.) It was pretty awesome. It featured a shit-ton of new characters, and the gameplay was great.

The Sega folks bet big with their port. They even created a new controller just to go with it and Mortal Kombat. (Mortal Kombat was in stores first. Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition followed a couple weeks later.) The traditional Genesis controller only had a start button and three fire buttons. You could play both games with the original controller, but it wasn't optimal. Special moves were harder to pull off, and you had more configurations to remember.

I liked the new controller. It wasn't as radical a change for me as the SNES controller was. It was essentially just like the old controller, except that it had another row of three buttons above the old buttons. The layout was essentially like the arcade button layout. Just in case I'm not explaining it well enough, the original looked like this:

Image

The new one looked like this:

Image

I played Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition a lot, and I got pretty good at it. It looked a little clunkier than the SNES version, but I had come to expect that with Genesis games. The Genesis was a fairly old system by the time the SNES was on shelves.

The SNES was more powerful by a good bit. It's my understanding that Sega's game developers started to emphasize speed and storytelling over graphical intensity once the SNES began to dominate the market. For a short while, anyway. It didn't take long before they were cooking up dumb add-ons for the Genesis like the Sega CD and 32X. Some hardcore gamers appreciated the speed-over-graphics approach, but it was the early nineties. People were obsessed with graphics and flash over gameplay. (The same thing was happening in comics, I guess.)

The previous paragraph is more a that's-what-I've-always-read sort of thing. I don't know that I have any game examples at the ready.

Anyway, back to Street Fighter II to Mortal Kombat. I came to prefer the former over time. Mortal Kombat doesn't hold up well at all for me. I suppose Mortal Kombat II addresses some of people's frustrations with Mortal Kombat. It's more fun to play than its predecessor. I don't think it's better than Street Fighter II, but it's definitely better than Mortal Kombat.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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James and Mike from Cinemassacre go apeshit (Punintendo!) over the speed of this unreleased NES game:



They keep saying how it would have blown Sega's claim to unmatched speed out of the water.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Mike looks like he's been hittin' the heroin.
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Finally finished watching the video. I wanted to jump into the screen and tell them how to get to the other side during that one long stretch. I've never played the game before, but it seemed pretty obvious. They just kept floundering. "Here, guys. This is how you shot web. Shit."
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Re: 8 over-rated classics

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I know, it was a bit painful to watch. Sometimes it feels like they've never played this type of game before.
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