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What's a game NO ONE likes?


InfernalKeith

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The Attack is one where I try periodically to play it again, thinking I must have missed something (after all, it took me years to get the point of Chisholm Trail). Spores, and big bugs, and big dumb numbers... I like the bugs and I like the theme music, but the game itself has the appeal of watching paint dry.

 

Any rabid The Attack fans out there willing to defend this steaming pile? Or add games of their own to the list of duds?

 

To put it in context, I was playing marathon sessions of The Attack when the coolest game on the block was Atari 2600 Space Invaders.

Sure, it was dog slow, but to this 9 year old it was scary.

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lol- even if I'm the only person on Earth that likes Zero Zap I'm gonna keep my stance. I have a black label cart and the original artwork book, just like my Grandpa had. :P

 

imo Burger Builder is a crappier game than Zero Zap!

I also like ZeroZap. Burger Builder? Literally just Burgertime, but crappy.

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There was no Zaxxon on the TI. Sega literally told Texas Instruments they were insane when they said "You have to fit it in an 8K ROM".

 

Burgertime is a pretty bad port. In particular, the developer(s) didn't seem to get that restarting the music AFTER every sound effect is a horrible effect.

 

To elucidate on my post from earlier, Star Trap has the look from a screenshot of being a cool Star Wars arcade game, or even Star Raiders. Instead you get a static unmoving screen, recycled Parsec laser sounds, and other than bitmap drawn lines for laser blasts, something that could have been easily written in Extended BASIC. On a cartridge for $29.95. A total freaking rip-off.

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I feel there should be a poll here for rating the games, and have the results sent to Ashens on Youtube to help him with his next Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of book. I know he has a TI for testing these games on, so it would be worthwhile to direct him to some of them for analysis for his next book.

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Bottom 5 for boring- let's watch the paint dry... yes a lot of these are really two player games...

Soccer

Football

Moonsweeper (I can keep the score going up without any threat!)

Meteor Belt

Slymoids

and to make up for the two player games which don't belong here-

Buck Rogers

 

 

Bottom 5 for - I last two seconds-

Espial

Zaxxon

Chisholm Trail (I last longer but have no idea what is happening or what to do, after reading the manual!)

Miner 2049er (much too sensitive to half pixel positioning)

Moonmine

 

I disagree with Meteor Belt - One you know the various tricks, like capturing satellites, it was a game my brother and I played quite a bit when we were younger.

 

Also, disagree with Chisholm Trail, again, once you learn how to wipe out the side-by-side cacti to stop respawns. However, my opinion is probably biased as it was one of the first games I played (for many hours, I might add) on the TI-99.

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I liked The Attack not so much for the gameplay but for the game's title/end game music. It was also one of 2-3 games I received with my TI. Our previous game experience consisted of a PONG console so almost any game was exciting and an improvement. Finding an old 13" color monitor in the alley/trash a year later (to replace the 12" B&W TV) made things so much better*for our gaming experiences. The color TV, Tunnels of Doom and summer vacation were the perfect combination.

 

*color did not improve some of the games already identified in this thread

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Chisholm Trail was so counterintuitive to me for years, and once I figured it out, it became so much more fun. I like the idea of Tombstone City but I think it needs something, either some other level, or a boss, or a change of scenery... one more ingredient to keep it from getting boring.

 

What about a Tombstone City type game model but in a series of tunnels like Shamus? You fight off a number of baddies, clear each section of the map, then move on to the next patch of desert, till the whole map is clear...?

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ZeroZap sucked in that the patterns were largely predictable (Xs made the arrow go one way, Diamonds sent it another) and all you did was launch the arrow. But I really enjoyed making my own fields with the editor and saving them to cassette.

 

Someone mentioned the music in BurgerTime, and yeah, that's annoying as hell. Other than that and the sprites disappearing, it was a decent port.

 

The Attack was pretty boring and slow, though if you upped the difficulty level to 3 or 4, you at least got some panic-inducing moments.

 

Alpiner had a decent premise, but at times it was just impossible to avoid "falling objects" and being able to see right through your climber's head was disconcerting.

 

But I think a fair number of BASIC games were pretty horrible. Camelot had decent graphics, but it was also slow and basically just a computerized game of rock paper scissors.

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In all fairness to some of those older games, we're looking at them with a filter of some of the amazing games and ports by AA users over the past few years.

 

Some of you guys have quite literally decades of experience with the ins and outs of the TI's hardware, which the original programmers did not have. Many of you are also smarter than the average bear and have a vested interest in the machine.

All of this combined leads to better software.

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In all fairness to some of those older games, we're looking at them with a filter of some of the amazing games and ports by AA users over the past few years.

 

Some of you guys have quite literally decades of experience with the ins and outs of the TI's hardware, which the original programmers did not have. Many of you are also smarter than the average bear and have a vested interest in the machine.

All of this combined leads to better software.

 

I don't think we're half as clever as the developers of the 80s - we only have a lot better tools. ;)

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Surprised there has been no non-love for Hunt The Wumpus. How could a fairly basic computer game (and literally able to do in BASIC), become a full-fledged cartridge game?

 

I think it gets a pass because it's actually a pretty good implementation of the game. Yes it's a simple game, but on cartridge it responds quickly and well. It's also way MORE exciting and thrilling to a small child than any of the education carts were. :)

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Hunt the Wumpus seems unique to me, even by today's game standards; I mean, you're the one hunting the monster, not the other way around, and the fact that you need to use clues and avoid traps to do so and that you only get one shot makes it kind of nerve-wracking, to a point. I've never really seen another game out there that has the premise of "You are here, in a maze, you are actively hunting down a monster that will kill you if you don't kill it, first, and you've got one shot to do it with. Good luck." I honestly can see a remake done with a Minotaur myth setting or something.

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I think it gets a pass because it's actually a pretty good implementation of the game. Yes it's a simple game, but on cartridge it responds quickly and well. It's also way MORE exciting and thrilling to a small child than any of the education carts were. :)

The game over scene TERRIFIED me when I was little. I was honestly scared of that game because of it.
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I feel like this thread has answered the original question pretty decisively: there definitely isn't a game that nobody likes. We've even heard nice things said about ZeroZap, MunchMobile and The Attack.

 

People like different games for different reasons. I've been surprised to see games I consider among my favourites on the "worst of" lists of some here. But then, what they bring to the table for me (say, great music, or compelling environments, or good two-player gameplay) might not be what others are looking for in them (say, responsive controls, or gameplay challenge).

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Hunt the Wumpus seems unique to me, even by today's game standards; I mean, you're the one hunting the monster, not the other way around, and the fact that you need to use clues and avoid traps to do so and that you only get one shot makes it kind of nerve-wracking, to a point. I've never really seen another game out there that has the premise of "You are here, in a maze, you are actively hunting down a monster that will kill you if you don't kill it, first, and you've got one shot to do it with. Good luck." I honestly can see a remake done with a Minotaur myth setting or something.

TI’s Hunt the Wumpus is a remake of an early text based mainframe computer text game. They put a nice graphical front end on this famous game. It came out on cartridge because it was wildly famous before microcomputers were a thing:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

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