Powerups, The good, The bad

[DeV0]

I was playing 1942 on the NES today and it got me thinking if there was any other game on the planet with a more useless powerup than 1942. You know that quadruple fire which does exactly what the normal fire does except with a different sound? It also got me thinking into the entire powerup topic and i started to remember games that you couldnt finish without a powerup, Slapfight and altered beast come to mind. But really 1942's powerup basically blows.

 

Can anyone think of a more useless one? Or maybe a favourite? BubbleBobbles shoes, yellow, red, blue candy, now theres a powerup

[Bratwurst]

Most of the items in Wizards and Warriors NES was laughably lame. Invisible cloak that made you disappear, yet you still took damage!

[chrisbid]

i always thought the speedup shoes in sonic the hedgehog were a waste of time, he already ran fast as it was, going faster in fact made the game a little more difficult

[Chris++]

Has anyone ever played any 8-bit version of Gradius? Some of the so-called power-ups are actually detrimental to firing accurately. Rrrrrr.

[Ze_ro]

I though the powerups in Dynamite Headdy were pretty cool. You'd put on a whole new head, and then you could do things like vaccuum all the on-screen enemies into your mouth, or turn invisible , or small, or whatever. Very nicely done in my opinion.

 

Kid Chameleon was fairly similar actually, except that you didn't get nearly as many powerups, and you didn't get they nearly as often.

 

My favorite powerup of all has to be Kuribo's Shoe in Super Mario Bros 3. It's only available in one level, but damn was it fun to get in that boot. I sometimes played the game specifically so that I could get to that level... and then kill myself before I finished it so that I could play it again. It's too bad they didn't have more of them in the game

 

Some of my least favorite powerups were the bouncing shots in Turrican and Turrican II... they never seemed to be nearly powerful enough, and they were mostly unpredictable. I also had a hard time controlling Mario while he was wearing the frog suit in Super Mario Bros 3.

 

--Zero