godslabrat Posted March 13, 2012 Share Posted March 13, 2012 I vote for Acclaim. I remember being 9 years old and thinking "Why do they keep buying the rights to use this stuff if all the games suck?" 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnnyBlaze Posted March 13, 2012 Share Posted March 13, 2012 Acclaim/LJN. DEFINITELY Acclaim/LJN! This says it all: 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillyHW Posted March 13, 2012 Author Share Posted March 13, 2012 I always avoided games based on movies like the plague. 95% of them are just garbage. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SEgamer Posted March 13, 2012 Share Posted March 13, 2012 Another one I never liked were the games made by Titus. The only memorable one (and for all of the wrong reasons) is Superman 64 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paranoia Dragon Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 In Japan, Pack-in Video made the worst on pretty much every system they made games for. Pack-in Video was the first company that came to mind for me! Although, most of my exposure to them is on the PC Engine/TG16, but they we're pretty consistent on their crappiness! There are a couple of good games, Road Spirits comes to mind, but then again, they might have only published it & had someone else develop? LJN was pretty bad as well though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 I always avoided games based on movies like the plague. 95% of them are just garbage. The first thing I thought of when I saw this thread was Ocean Software, who had some truly terrible licensed titles for Nintendo systems. I guess they had enough good games to make up for it, though. Color Dreams put out a lot of garbage, but they get a free pass from me since they made Adventures of Captain Comic for NES. That and Firehawk are probably my two favorite unlicensed NES titles. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tr3vor Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 color dreams also did bible adventures and other horrid games like that, although under a different name. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulBlazer Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 I always avoided games based on movies like the plague. 95% of them are just garbage. Spider-Man 2 was a awsome game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jess Ragan Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 Acclaim. It's right in the name, man... Ack, Lame. That's inevitably the player's reaction five minutes after popping in the cartridge or disc. I choose them as the worst developers for the NES, Genesis, Playstation, and PS2 eras, because they were turning out turds for nearly twenty years before they finally, mercifully went bankrupt. Acclaim was at its most insulting when it released a series of natty Genesis games under the Flying Edge label ("because we're too cowardly to risk the wrath of Nintendo"), and tried to convince parents to rename their children after a fictional dinosaur hunting Indian as crass promotion for one of their games. When the company finally went under, I remember someone in my circle of retro gaming nerds literally uncorked a bottle of champagne in celebration. I would have done that too if I had the champagne to spare. In short, that company sucked with the force of a thousand hurricanes, and its existence was barely justified in the NES era, let alone the three that came afterward. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jess Ragan Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 In Japan, Pack-in Video made the worst on pretty much every system they made games for. Pack-in Video was the first company that came to mind for me! Although, most of my exposure to them is on the PC Engine/TG16, but they we're pretty consistent on their crappiness! There are a couple of good games, Road Spirits comes to mind, but then again, they might have only published it & had someone else develop? LJN was pretty bad as well though. Weirdly, the first game I ever bought for my NES was developed by Pack-In-Video. They created Rambo for Acclaim, likely one of the most ridiculous movie-licensed games ever made. As Rambo, you fought skeletons, moths, and caricatures of the villains from the movies, whose heads expanded into Macy's day parade balloons when you attacked them. When you returned home from your tour of duty, you could turn your superior officer into a toad by throwing a Japanese letter at them, then lure the amphibian to a teleport square where you could repeat the process. I have an odd fascination with this game. Not so much because it was good, but because it was such a surreal interpretation of a familiar film. How do you turn something like that into something like THIS? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paranoia Dragon Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 In Japan, Pack-in Video made the worst on pretty much every system they made games for. Pack-in Video was the first company that came to mind for me! Although, most of my exposure to them is on the PC Engine/TG16, but they we're pretty consistent on their crappiness! There are a couple of good games, Road Spirits comes to mind, but then again, they might have only published it & had someone else develop? LJN was pretty bad as well though. Weirdly, the first game I ever bought for my NES was developed by Pack-In-Video. They created Rambo for Acclaim, likely one of the most ridiculous movie-licensed games ever made. As Rambo, you fought skeletons, moths, and caricatures of the villains from the movies, whose heads expanded into Macy's day parade balloons when you attacked them. When you returned home from your tour of duty, you could turn your superior officer into a toad by throwing a Japanese letter at them, then lure the amphibian to a teleport square where you could repeat the process. I have an odd fascination with this game. Not so much because it was good, but because it was such a surreal interpretation of a familiar film. How do you turn something like that into something like THIS? Good gravey! Now I want to play this game, just to experience the wackiness of it all! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulBlazer Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 In Japan, Pack-in Video made the worst on pretty much every system they made games for. Pack-in Video was the first company that came to mind for me! Although, most of my exposure to them is on the PC Engine/TG16, but they we're pretty consistent on their crappiness! There are a couple of good games, Road Spirits comes to mind, but then again, they might have only published it & had someone else develop? LJN was pretty bad as well though. Weirdly, the first game I ever bought for my NES was developed by Pack-In-Video. They created Rambo for Acclaim, likely one of the most ridiculous movie-licensed games ever made. As Rambo, you fought skeletons, moths, and caricatures of the villains from the movies, whose heads expanded into Macy's day parade balloons when you attacked them. When you returned home from your tour of duty, you could turn your superior officer into a toad by throwing a Japanese letter at them, then lure the amphibian to a teleport square where you could repeat the process. I have an odd fascination with this game. Not so much because it was good, but because it was such a surreal interpretation of a familiar film. How do you turn something like that into something like THIS? Um....I actually enjoy Rambo on the NES..... For the most part I agree about Acclaim. They had a few good games (Swords and Serpents, but they were just the publishers) but a lot of their stuff was very average. It was still better then their second label, though, LJN. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Austin Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 Meh, I think the loathing of Acclaim is overplayed. Not much different from many other companies of their time, they naturally published plenty junk. I can think of plenty of games they published here in the US that I enjoyed thoroughly though: Double Dragon parts II and III on the NES, the Bust-A-Move series during the 32-bit generation, Darius Gaiden (Saturn), Galactic Attack (Saturn, actually the reason I wanted the system to begin with), the first two home Mortal Kombat releases, Smash T.V. on the SNES, the Wizards and Warriors series for the NES, Trog on the NES, D (for the Saturn, PSX and PC), the Turok N64 games, the NBA Jam series (primarily the regular and T.E. edition 16/32-bit releases), and the list goes on. They had their awful labels (Flying Edge, LJN), but Iguana developed some awesome stuff for them, not to mention they localized quite a few solid Japanese games that might have otherwise been left to rot. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulBlazer Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 Meh, I think the loathing of Acclaim is overplayed. Not much different from many other companies of their time, they naturally published plenty junk. I can think of plenty of games they published here in the US that I enjoyed thoroughly though: Double Dragon parts II and III on the NES, the Bust-A-Move series during the 32-bit generation, Darius Gaiden (Saturn), Galactic Attack (Saturn, actually the reason I wanted the system to begin with), the first two home Mortal Kombat releases, Smash T.V. on the SNES, the Wizards & Warriors series for the NES, Trog on the NES, D (for the Saturn, PSX and PC), the Turok N64 games, the NBA Jam series (primarily the regular and T.E. edition 16/32-bit releases), and the list goes on. They had their awful labels (Flying Edge, LJN), but Iguana developed some awesome stuff for them, not to mention they localized quite a few solid Japanese franchises. See, I forgot DD 2 and 3 -- I thought Tradewest had published those, like DD 1. My bad on that. I likewise forgot about Smash TV. Great game! Wizards and Warriors I never 'got', but I agree those seem to be popular games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Charlie Cat Posted March 16, 2012 Share Posted March 16, 2012 Acclaim & Midway! (later 90's-2000's) I'm soory to say that these two were pretty bad! Even LJN & earlyT-HQ*, and Culture Brain games were much better! Midway, as the company went into the 3D gaming era, the characters where too repetitive and had limited quotes to say! Most did the same physical movements and dull actions! I never thought that they were into spending time and polishing their games! Acclaim was the same thing! With the exception of DD II & iii, and Bigfoot! When they did the Legends of Wrestling Series they just did a terrible job! But as a wrestling fan, I accepted it for what it was! No wonder WWE let Acclaim & Midways contracts expire, because they were not good games! Thankfully T-HQ* does a hell of a better job then those two! Anthony.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarilovesyou Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 I agree with the OP. The reason why Color Dreams isn't the winner is because at least with those pieces of crap, you could tell right from the box that these games were junk. But the THQ and LJN stuff looked just as good as anything else...and woe be you if you got one of those under the ol' Christmas tree! But I do hear that Friday the 13th is actually not bad...never played it, but it didn't look like my kinda game. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarilovesyou Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 ...and Acclaim was indeed junk for the NES, at least any of the games that they themselves designed. Just not good at all. I'll never forgive them the abomiation that was WWF wrestling...ick. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
high voltage Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 So most worst games were put out on NES Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reaperman Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 (edited) Software Toolworks is probably my guess on this one. I think the closest they got to a winner was mega race (which I did like), or the chessmaster titles which somebody must have liked because there were so many of them. But let's not forget their educational slant with the keyboard and piano trainers and all of those lousy mario games. Runners up: LJN had crap but also some pretty darn solid (nearly identical) Marvel-licensed beat'em ups on snes/genesis--the green jelly soundtracks on those were especially noteworthy. DSI came to mind as well for all of the GBA crapware (worst ever marble madness port), but they published a decent amount of solid (even great) experimental titles on the system too. Vivendi Universal, maybe, but I can't seem to find a good list of games sporting their logo and wikipedia ties them strongly to activision/blizzard/sierra to the point where I don't really know what they did. Koei--I've had fun with them a couple times (heir of zendor, la pucelle tactics) but even then I felt that they were still trying to be really boring--they were just failing at their primary mission in those games. Edited March 19, 2012 by Reaperman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tr3vor Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 Well, we forgot atari games, like the guys who made firefly and crap like that also whoever made Awesome Possum for the Genesis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godslabrat Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 Just played a batch of THQ games from the late NES era. Has anyone ever done an interview with one of the designers? I'd love to hear one say "Yeah, my boss only gave me a week to make this level, and said I'd be fired if I missed the deadline." 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NinjaWarrior Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 Acclaim, LJN & Color Dreams Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldenegg Posted March 19, 2012 Share Posted March 19, 2012 I vote for myself! I made some really horrible PC games back in high school 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oge Posted March 20, 2012 Share Posted March 20, 2012 I'll toss in with LJN as well, along with Acclaim. Ever play Total Recall on the NES? 'Nuff said. Man, Total Recall on NES was a shame. And I remember people that paid good money for that game around 1991... For the C64, it was Us Gold. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulBlazer Posted March 20, 2012 Share Posted March 20, 2012 I'll toss in with LJN as well, along with Acclaim. Ever play Total Recall on the NES? 'Nuff said. Man, Total Recall on NES was a shame. And I remember people that paid good money for that game around 1991... For the C64, it was Us Gold. I may be one of the only people who LIKED that game..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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