I remember a time when there were no bad games.

[accousticguitar]

Up until Pac-Man I didn't encounter any bad games, but I knew Pac-Man was bad. It was pretty obvious.

[phoenixdownita]

Up until Pac-Man I didn't encounter any bad games, but I knew Pac-Man was bad. It was pretty obvious.

Well Pac-Man Atari is a 1982 release, assuming you got the VCS at launch day in 1977 that gives you almost 5 solid years worth of oblivion to bad games, then I venture from your sentence (Up until...) it's been turtles all the way.

[with that I mean you experienced the existence of bad games ever since]

[Papa]

See I miss rental stores from the old days. Yeah you an Red Box now for some newer games but back then we saw commercials and wondered how the game would be so either buy it or rent it. I would rent like 2-3 titles a weekend with friends and we would play whatever we brought home. Some good some bad and some better than we thought.

 

Sword of Sodan for Genesis...Bad

Last Battle Genesis.. playable and not real terrible.

Hard Drivin for Genesis ... Bad to the point of being fun sadly.

Faxanadu for NES... pretty damn good

Crystalis for NES... also damn good

 

Yeah it can be subjective but now you can get multiple views on games to get a better feel and then emulate or ROM it (ever drive style) before buying it.

 

I just end up buying games I can remember and then still seeing if they have lasting appeal or not. Some are definatly not keepers anymore.

 

We (Old Kentucky Kitty Buttons and I) lived in a small town (Saint Olaf) where there was a man named Rancer (sp?) who had a rental store my mother worked for and so my brother and I would get to watch and play new rentals all the time after school before she got off of work. This guy had the extremely good idea of combining VHS, NES, and FOOOOD and HE DELIVERED!! SO anyone could just call his store up and order strombolis, pizza, drinks, movies, and games all from the same place and they would bring it to your door!!

 

IT WAS AWESOME!!

 

Yeah, the quality of games was in and out but we always had a backup plan. If the game sucked, watch the movie or the other way around.

 

We both remembered that as being one of the big positives in our hometown.

[accousticguitar]

Well Pac-Man Atari is a 1982 release, assuming you got the VCS at launch day in 1977 that gives you almost 5 solid years worth of oblivion to bad games, then I venture from your sentence (Up until...) it's been turtles all the way.

[with that I mean you experienced the existence of bad games ever since]

When I bought the VCS it came with Combat and I bought Space Invaders at the same time, so I'm guessing it must have been around 1980. I had a few games before Pac-Man, including Combat, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Star Raiders, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Warlords. It was a pretty good lineup before Pac-Man ruined it.

[NE146]

The game I remember feeling was a disappointment, and "bad", and actually regretting buying when games were like gold... was Freeway.

[Skippy B. Coyote]

This guy had the extremely good idea of combining VHS, NES, and FOOOOD and HE DELIVERED!! SO anyone could just call his store up and order strombolis, pizza, drinks, movies, and games all from the same place and they would bring it to your door!!

 

That is the single most amazing and awesome business model ever! If high speed internet with streaming services, digital downloads, and torrents hadn't come along and laid waste to the entire rental market then I think that's the sort of store that should have been in every city. Pizza, games, and movies delivered right to your door sounds fantastic!

[MarioX]

A friend of mine who I often play games with suggested we try Hoops for nes. It was one of his original games from childhood. We tried it for about 5 minutes and both agreed it was garbage. He said "I used to play the crap out of that game. I got it for Christmass and was so excited, I thought it was great". I had similar situations. I didn't have many games but I loved all the ones I had. I certainly knew certain games were better than others. Some things never occurred to me. Like that the controls may be horrible I just thought I wasn't good at it, and I would still play it quite a bit and I never thought man this game sucks. Looking back this seems silly to me. I cant believe how much time I spent playing Heavy Shreddin on my NES, or Ren and Stimpy on my Gameboy. Im curious if anyone else experienced this and what games actually seemed good to you through the eyes of a child.

 

I played Hoops on NES at 6 years old and knew it was garbage lol. I could actually play it better now with more patience than I could as a kid. When I played a crappy game as I kid I would turn it off within 10 minutes, now I try to at least play longer to see if the game gets better or I warm up to it.

Edited July 27, 2016 by MarioX

[0078265317]

The all sucked compared to today. Bad graphics. No save stste or memory card. Had to leave my beloved nintendo on for hours just to finish a game. Abd the pea soup gameboy waz just awefull. Should of been color all along.

 

But it was good enough for back then. And we loved the hell out of it.

Edited July 27, 2016 by 0078265317

[+GoldLeader]

Nostalgia...A hell of a drug! (Excellent Bassguitari...Excellent!

 

There was a time when we simply didn't have as much in the way of choices...For example I knew I liked space Invaders and Air/Sea Battle better than Skydiver or Hangman or Human Cannonball. (Also like someone else said), I very much remember Night Driver. My friend had it and he made it look So Fun (When he played it)...He said, "This is the most Realistic Racing game on Atari!"...And I considered him an expert on racing games, since he was better than me at them and he played them a lot in the arcades...So I ran out and spent my $30...Then I justified it to myself saying, "Man! This is so much better than Street Racer!" haha!

 

Also I was So Disappointed in Laser Blast (But we had to believe and hope that other companies besides Atari could eventually give us good games)...FWIW we liked Freeway calling it "Pretend Frogger"...

 

I would probably argue that (Right) before the Crash, we had a Lot of Choices, many of them bad, but before the crash we had Less Choices, many of them bad...So I'd rather have many choices...

 

On a side note, I wonder how I ever got so many sports games in my collection, considering I almost never play them....I suppose it's because if you want 3 good Genesis games, you also have to take 10 Sports games off someone's hands...Or if you buy a lot of Famicom games, just know that half of them will be baseball for some reason...Unfortunately you'll also get a handful of "tile games" or "pachinko" games which are no fun at all despite their supposed similarity to pinball...(This is also true for the Super Famicom,...unfortunately)...

 

 

Just another note: I enjoyed Atari Pac Man BITD only because I knew it was the "only" way to play Pac Man at home....(Not because it was a good game)...And Dragon Warrior was similar...I played it saying, 'This is even better than Dragon Stomper!' Haha...And I still like it for some mildly sadistic reason...

[GameGirl420]

There are definitely bad games from the 70's era. Recently played the arcade game Super Bug from 1977 and omg does that game suck lol. Pointless driving game. The car moves so slow too.

 

Played a few others but can't recall their names. Like they were just made to showcase the "Ooh I can actually move something on a screen.." which must've been pretty mind blowing back in 1978 despite having no good plot and pointless gameplay.

[fiddlepaddle]

I have a slightly different perspective. Yes, some games really ARE bad, those where something just doesn't work, or controls are imprecise or where collision detection is plain incorrect, for example. I usually think of these types of games as basically unfinished, untested, or programmed by someone incompetent (Data Age and Mythicon come to mind).

 

Some games are better than others, of course, and I enjoy some types more than others. But most games CAN be fun with the right mindset and conditions. Even Tic-tac-toe with paper and pencil can be fun with your 5 year old niece. I always like to put myself into the head of the developer and try to imagine what they were thinking when THEY played the game...what's really cool about this game, where is the challenge; how can I create a challenge for myself with score, or time or whatever.

 

When we're kids, we aren't picky...we take the world as it is. Fun is all in the mind, and that's instinctive until we learn to discriminate and get exposed to all the variety and find out we can actually choose. In many ways, choice is a curse.

[bretthorror]

I believe familiarity in and of itself plays a huge role in what makes a game playable, or good... or whatever label you want to put on it. If you're stuck in Super Metroid, it's the worst game in the world. If you're actively discovering things, it's the best. Back then we really put our time into our games and got good at them. In today's busy adult life, you do have a tendency to want to breeze through something, that's why I'll kill time playing Super Mario Land on Game Boy over most anything else. I know I'm gonna beat it in half hour or so and I may screw up a few times still, just to keep me honest. We're better at games as adults, but the fact is if you put in a random game, it's gonna likely take you a day or two, if not a helluva lot more to get decent at it. No one can wander around lost in an RPG for 2 days as an adult, let alone for months.

 

I'm going to use Contra as a random example. I never played it as a kid and recently used an unlimited lives code to beat it through. It seemed really hard, well, less hard, more time consuming with trial and error and time consumption. It wasn't rewarding to beat it cheating, but judging from the game itself, it wasn't really exciting and seemed like it'd be a waste of time to learn the patterns to get through it the rewarding way. I remember playing Back to the Future for NES even when I was like 11 and not really questioning how fuckin' weird it was and how silly it was to be collecting these clocks. But, looking back, damn near every other game I had made no damn sense either, so that's no surprise. I was just trying to get further, that's it, that's all. And for as "bad" as Back to the Future for NES is, I'd still rather play it over so, so many old school games out there.

 

As others have said, variety sometimes doesn't help your cause. Realistically, I could buy that NES mini that's coming out for $59.99 and play that thing solely for two years with junk food and beer and have a hell of a time vs. my own collection + emulation if I just focused on that. The mind is a tricky thing. There is just too much choice out there. Plus, bust your ass all day at work, deal with bullshit and come home to infuriating games like Werewolf on NES? No thanks, it's reasons like that adults will go drink a beer in their backyard and just chill the hell out. Look at it two ways; one, we just don't have as much fun as when we were kids or, two, we're too smart to deal with that dumb shit when we don't have to.

[spacecadet]

A lot of it is just that most of us were kids. Kids latch on to things and they think everything about those things is great. If you decided the Atari 2600 was the coolest thing ever, as I did when it first came out, then the games themselves basically didn't even matter. Everything's going to be awesome as long as you've got that controller in your hand and stuff's happening on the screen.

 

You see the same stuff now; I belong to some tech sites and there are clearly a lot of young kids on those sites who will defend their chosen smartphone or whatever to the death, along with every single thing it does. Kids are natural fanboys and fangirls.

 

I do remember at least knowing that some of the Atari 2600 arcade conversions were pale imitations of the originals. It was pretty forgivable because even as kids I think we understood that compromises needed to be made to get these games in homes. I'm sure we didn't fully understand but on some level I knew arcade machines were big, expensive things and you couldn't fit everything into a little box that normal people could buy. So I was probably a little disappointed in Asteroids and Pac-Man but I still played them and tried to enjoy them. I'm sure I turned them off pretty quickly and moved on to other games, though.

 

I do remember that when I got my Intellivision in 1980, I don't think I had anything I considered a bad game or even a disappointing port. I know they do exist, but I feel like even today, when I play Intellivision and Atari games, the signal to noise ratio is a lot better on Intellivision. And I think by that point I was already starting to be more selective, so I only bought (or asked others to buy) games I knew had gotten good word of mouth.

[homerhomer]

You know, I can remember seeing pac-man on the 2600 and thinking"that's pac-man?". But still paying it and enjoying it at the Atari kiosk.

[Professor Gull]

 

We (Old Kentucky Kitty Buttons and I) lived in a small town (Saint Olaf) where there was a man named Rancer (sp?) who had a rental store my mother worked for and so my brother and I would get to watch and play new rentals all the time after school before she got off of work. This guy had the extremely good idea of combining VHS, NES, and FOOOOD and HE DELIVERED!! SO anyone could just call his store up and order strombolis, pizza, drinks, movies, and games all from the same place and they would bring it to your door!!

 

IT WAS AWESOME!!

 

Yeah, the quality of games was in and out but we always had a backup plan. If the game sucked, watch the movie or the other way around.

 

We both remembered that as being one of the big positives in our hometown.

You know what though I recall something similar when I was in Connecticut....ok it really was not similar at all but you could go rent games and or movies and there was a flyer by the door for a delivery service. The service would literally pick up anything you wanted to eat and send it to your house. So bring on the Pizza Hut, Burger King,Duchess, Mcdonalds, Taco Bell, or even the local places even chocolate and ice cream. It was a great idea but dies I am sure to gas costs.

[high voltage]

With the NES so many bad games arrived, but that was to be expected.

 

Jaws, Tom Sawyer, Friday the 13th, To the Earth, Beetlejuice, Taboo The Sixth sense, Zombie Nation, Bad Street Brawler, The Adams Family, Gilligans Island, Amagon, Cliffhanger, Banana Prince, Last Action Hero, Where's Waldo, The Punisher, and not forgetting Back to the Future games. The Sesame Street games shined when compared to those.

 

Gosh, probably many more without even checking.

 

 

I was interviewing a NES fan way back, he said we only ever played the popular games like Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania and a few others. His mother always came home with rented games from Blockbusters, stuff like Back to the Future, The Punisher, Rocky and Bullwinkel, they were tried out, found out to be 'just no good', to be placed on the kitchen table for returning, and back we went playing Mario, Zelda Castlevania.......

Edited July 28, 2016 by high voltage

[Chuck D. Head]

There are definitely bad games from the 70's era. Recently played the arcade game Super Bug from 1977 and omg does that game suck lol. Pointless driving game. The car moves so slow too.

 

 

Well, the car moves too damn fast for me. You did shift out of first gear, right? Any time I got into third, death was imminent.

[7800fan]

I think I remember 1981 being the last year I went without a single stinky game. So 35 constructive years of finding shitty games...

[+GoldLeader]

I notice a lot of talk of renting games. And I did that too once in a while (Actually It's kind of nostalgic to think of times when you could rent games)....But whether it was a holdover from the Atari days, when renting was not an option, or maybe something similar to the way I bought a lot of music; There were many times when I just bought a game because I thought it looked cool and somehow knew I was going to like it...A lot of times I was right, too. I think I put more value in the "First Impression" than a lot of people. I wanted to be surprised, and at the same time know I Owned the game...And I didn't want my first impression ruined by a previous rental.

[spacecadet]

I wanted to be surprised, and at the same time know I Owned the game...And I didn't want my first impression ruined by a previous rental.

 

I feel like renting games made me less likely to buy them, even if they were good. Maybe it was just the kinds of games I'd rent - mostly sports or action games that I knew I didn't have to spend 40+ hours to finish, and also games I was pretty sure already that I wouldn't be buying - but I'd usually have played them out by the time the rental period was up. I can't think of a game I rented and thought was so unexpectedly good, and in a replayable way, that I just had to buy it.

 

This was later anyway... I mostly rented Genesis games. At that point I knew bad games existed. I read various magazines and I was in college so I heard a lot of word of mouth, and I just didn't touch games everybody said sucked. So I think I probably didn't even rent very many bad games.

[Professor Gull]

There is a rental system kinda now a days with downloading a demo but many of us know you can ut the best part of the game in the demo and make it suck later or at the end just be so unfulfilling.

 

I remember quite the PC game plethora back in the day as well and really not being able to judge much more than seeing the box art and possibly a review. Most often though it was "This looks cool" to the "Aw just buy it" that resulted in getting some games that just were not worth it. I do have some fond memories of some games though that others passed over that I found fun like Star Saga One ( although you needed a big table but who does not have one of those really.) and some sort of Road Warrior Mad Max game I can't recall.

 

Console stuff though was a lot of word of mouth to deciding on taking it home or not but that never stopped me from snagging stuff like Night Trap and Time Gal just to try it anyhow.

[Cynicaster]

My mom brought home Sorcerer for the 2600 one day in the 80s and we played it quite a bit. I don’t remember particularly liking it or disliking it, I just remember playing it because I had it. Playing it now, though… I just can’t do it. No way, no how. The interesting thing is that I don’t believe my opinion of the game has changed much on a fundamental level over the last 30 years; what has changed is my perspective. Call it death by juxtaposition for Sorcerer—I’ve experienced so many other games that I actually love, leading to Sorcerer being revealed for what it is (and is not).

 

Sometimes though, it’s a simple matter of changing tastes, and it happens in both directions. I thought Dolphin was killer back then, now I just can’t enjoy it one bit. I never cared much for Megamania and Kaboom in the heyday, but now they’re top 10 for me.

 

Arcade games are a whole other animal. To think I actually fed money into games like P.O.W. and Robocop… mind boggling, based on what I think of those games now.

[jhd]

I only had a small handful of cartridges growing up -- mostly arcade games (i.e. Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Berzerk). I used to trade games with my one (elementary school) classmate who also had an Atari 2600. I recall that he had Pac-Man and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

 

I doubt that we were even aware of the existence of video game magazines at the time, so purchasing decisions were based largely upon the catalogue descriptions. Somehow, we obtained a Data Age catalogue, and I persuaded him to buy Airlock. This was my first major gaming disappointment! Even by 1982 standards, this game was not very much fun.

 

As for renting games, a local video rental store began renting Atari cartridges ($7 per week) in about 1982. There was a fairly substantial selection, albeit nothing really rare or obscure. I specifically recall having rented Cosmic Ark, Adventure, and Star Raiders (there was an extra charge for the special controller); and there were probably other titles that I have long forgotten. Once I discovered rental games, I did not purchase anymore titles before I sold my 2600 in 1983.

[+GoldenWheels]

I mean in the rental days I will readily admit to sometimes mentally polishing some turds. If it was the only new game I got for "Friday night/Saturday/Sunday until we return it" I was going to look for some redeeming factor and try to focus on it. Yeah you might know the game was ass but you tried to make the best of it....I found very few games SO bad that I couldn't at least do that.

 

Oddly by forcing myself into playing games in this way it would sometimes get me over the learning curve/a tough spot and I'd actually end up genuinely liking the game. NES games could be kind of obtuse and kids I think were wont to turn them on twice and get turned off quickly by bad/unclear mechanics, especially if your rental place had long ago lost the copy of the copy of the copy of the instructions.

 

Being "stuck" with a rental could also get you into other things you might not like normally....I somehow rented Desert Commander as a kid but did not like strategy games (maybe my mom picked it out). Since it was all I had for the weekend, I played it, and really ended up getting into it.

[BassGuitari]

To think I actually fed money into games like P.O.W. and Robocop… mind boggling, based on what I think of those games now.

Ha, for a brief time, I loved P.O.W. There was this was little place in the park next to the fairgrounds that had a carousel, a pool, mini golf, a little train that ran around the park, food and ice cream and stuff (including the best cheese curds I've ever had in my life), and of course a little arcade which had P.O.W. My best friend and I would ride our bikes over there after school or during the summer, and for a little while we played the hell out of P.O.W. Not long after, I found a used copy of the NES version in a clearance bin at K-Mart for $5 or something, but we kind of lost interest by that point. (This was around '95.)