Games you loved but with hindsight seem terrible

I had a Spectrum when I was a kid but my best friend had a C64. I remember going round to his house one day and playing his latest game - "Samurai Warrior: The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo". I was absolutely blown away by it. The action was fast and furious, the music great, the characters wonderful and the fudal Japan setting really atmospheric. Fantastic!

So I was feeling in a nostalgic mood today and decided to download a C64 emulator to have a go on one of my all-time favourite games. Only to find that it sucks. Really sucks.

With hindsight it doesn't even meet the standard of other C64 games that were released around the same time. Usually I still enjoy playing the old games that I loved as a kid, even though they are technologically dated, but in the case of Samurai Warrior I can't believe I ever liked it in the first place. All I can think is that I must have been easily pleased as a kid.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Yep, ninja rabbits aren't anywhere near as cool as they used to be. :)

Another "I'm sure it used to be better than this?" moment would be Defender of the Crown.

Dune 2

Dune 2 is still amazing. :)
I played Target Renegade on an Amstrad emulator the other day, I'm still blown away by its greatness. But I agree, some games you think my god this game hasn't aged well at all.

no, Dune 2 is still Good, its not amazing anymore. But your right it isnt terrible. So forget Dune 2 everyone

I never played Dune 2. Target Renegade is still my second favourite beat 'em up and I also like the original Renegade too. I try to pretend that Renegade in Time was never made.

Oh, maybe that Myst title or Riven possibly. i always thought those had potentials. That, and I'm still reminiscing on Descent through today, one of the best console flight sims in existence.

heh I find that with most old games. They just aren't as good as I remember in part because my expectations are higher. Back then, I didn't expect much because of the limitations of technology. And nothing better existed.

C64 Last ninja

Now that I think about it, Stunts by Broderbund wasn't all that shabby at the time, but when your more realistic driving sims came about, Stunts was nothing as opposed to Need for Speed, PGR 3, Ridge Racer, or Gran Turismo...

Solaris for the Atari 2600.....awesomest graphics and concept for its time. Just played it the other day and now it kinda.....sucks....

> I try to pretend that Renegade in Time was never made.

It had some freaking awesome music tho (cpc464)

This is a though question. Out of the stomach i can't think of one as normally i like something and am faithful or i don't like it from the beginning, so ...

I always remembered the tune in the CPC version of Shockway Rider as being really good, so I listened to it again recently and... it sucks.

It's not just the advance in graphics that have killed our memories of old favourites. :(

It needn't be games that are even that old - I remember being stunned by GT1 and 2 during the life of the PSX, but trying to play GT2 on the PS2 (after playing GT3) was just impossible - the frame rate was soooo slow and the graphics too blocky to even see the road ahead.

I also remember playing Stunt Race FX on the SNES (the game with the SuperFX chip) but having tried it again recently when I found my SNES in the cupboard it's just to slow to play. Street Fighter 2 and Super Mario Kart however are still just stunning!! Pure playability wrapped up in gorgeous 2d graphics...

Oh come on, none of those games featured a map-editor, which allowed you to toss corkscrews after corkscrews after loop-de-loops followed by 10 consecutive jumps...

Regarding games I loved at one time and are technically terrible, cant recall any off the top of my head, will bbl when I can think of one.

I must confess that every time an old game thread is started I have never heard of any of the games. By my reckonlng you should all be in your mid 30's to have even heard of these old games. It s a bit sad that the only thing yu can look back on is an old game.

Heh heh. And you must be quite young then, to not be able to relate to having a fond memory of some childhood thing.

Er, who said it was the only thing? This is a game programming forum so that's what we talk about - games. Bad day at work, was it?

It would be sad if it was true, but who decided it was the only thing we can look back on?

I'm low 30s and old games rock(ed)! Some moderns ones do too. Old games were about gameplay (well some were). New games are about gameplay too and fancy graphics and an old dude like me can see through graphics to pap gameplay a mile off whereas others aren't so lucky ... I see people making totally uninformed decisions on buying in shops. I never(rarely) buy unless I've played a demo or seen a review.

That's never changed. People used to make totally uninformed decisions based on the screenshots on boxes back in the day, too. Which was why there was so much outrage at one point when people got fed up with buying a C64 game and expecting to see Amiga quality gfx like the box had ;]

I remember for the longest time I wanted to find another copy of Merv the Merciless (Amiga) because I remember it being really cool... This carried on for years, I just couldn't find a damn copy of it (was a game for Zero many moons back). It got to the point where friends kept trying to shut me up saying 'you're going to play it and think it's crap now anyway'... but they were wrong. When I finally found a copy (thank you TOSEC) I was playing it for days. I love that stupid little frustrating piece of junk. Love it to death.

...

Do I sound conflicted?

But back on topic, I remember quite loving Law of the West (C64) back in my day. Played it again more recently and... well, yeh. It's not great. Actually I can't get into C64 games at all anymore. They look and play like poo.

Moreover, if we even try to talk about anything else, it gets deleted XD

I don't generally play old games much, as I think they're best left in the past to avoid ruining your memory of them. The only ones I do play are generally SNES Rpg's and those are all awesome, better than some modern ones.

Exile (little thrusty space guy and squabbling monkeys in caves) on the amiga is one of those games that still plays absolutely great - it never had great graphics to start with which might have help it be taken for what it was - totally absorbing.

Most games on the Amiga still play great. I'm playing tonnes of Amiga games again lately. My g/f loves getting slaughtered in Knights. =]

The games on C64 are still good enough, it's the Gfx that
no longer is what it used to be. The C64 totally blew all
competition (like succy Speccy) away but nowdays the blurry
TV-images don't look so polished on a sharp LCD screen.
The SID tunes still totally ROCK though !!!! :D

Marble Madness. Its the cheapest excuse for a game and it can't entertain me for a minute. Somehow I used to think it was soooo cool :)

Highway Encounter on ZX Speccy is still an old favourite.

*fires up SpecX*

Can't think of any games I liked then but suck now though....

what Wedoe said.

Honestly... MULE on the Atari 800XL. I mean it was OK but really simplistic and silly!

MULE multiplayer is still one of the coolest games ever.

OK it was cool to play against 4 others... but still it was extemely simplistic!

7th Guest

I paid about 70quid for 7th Guest. Which was anout 80 quid too much. Terrible.

7th Quest was just like an interactive movie wasn't it? :)

Most movies are more interactive.

SiN

It was a whole bunch of unrelated little puzzles (mostly single-screen), strung together by rendered videos of you moving around.

You could find clues to some of the puzzles in different places, e.g you could find the solution to the maze in the basement by looking at the patterns on a floor rug somewhere.

LOL :)

It's sounds like it was a revolutionary genre at the time. Bet it was an early CD game.

I actually enjoyed 7th Guest. I thought they did a great job of creating a spooky atmosphere. I'd play it again if I could run it on my Mac. :)

Granted, the puzzles were a little random, but I always viewed them as being just a hurdle to pass before being able to advance the plot and see more of the story. While they were more obvious in their arbitrariness, I don't think they were really that much worse than the puzzles in the Sierra adventures of the day. I mean, is a logic puzzle involving moving chess pieces around really that much worse than having to guess that the bridle you need is in the old rowboat (see King's Quest IV)?

Oh, and yes, it was an eary CD game. Pre-Myst, actually.

I did quite enjoy 7th Guest, too. Then again, it was something new when it first came out. As I remember, it was pretty much THE killer app for CD-ROMS, when they first became affordable and mainstream.

However, as I can now hardly remember a thing about the game, that would seem to suggest it wasn't such a great game, per se. 'Day of the Tentacle' (my second CD-ROM game) on the other hand...

'Realms of the haunting' was '7th guest-esque' and was a 4 CD'er with mature cheddar for a plot, but was genuinely scary and well worth playing even today - it had a really great control and interactivity system. Anybody play this? I wish I had it now.

Played it. Worked for the company that made it. Both sucked.

Played which game? ROTH? If so, was Gremlin really that bad a company?

Yes to both questions. Of course, the latter is purely my personal and highy subjective opinion.

Well, don't drool, Red Ocktober, but one game that I have had over the past 10 years or so, is one made by an old company called, Tsunami Media (not even sure if they're around anymore). The game (a FMV Strategy), was called, "Silent Steel." That was really addictive during the old days of FMVs, and was one of the first to show it off as an FMV RPG Strategy-type sim. I only wish that Tsunami would've survived, they were one of my favorite companies of the olden days of PC gaming.

Bad Dudes

How about a game that "seemed like it was terrible at first,
but in hindsight, ended up being one of the best games I've
ever played"?

Trespasser was that game for me. I still get cravings
for it at least once a year. Yes, I can see that it's an
unfinished, buggy attempt at something too big for it's own
good, but I love it.

Terminal Velocity... Was great back in the day.... shallow and boring today. Doom, also... thought is was great... now... its so boring and unplayable.

Pretty much any game that was something totally new... is crap today... Perfect Example... Populous.

I totally agree with this 100%. I was big on Terminal Velocity, and to a point, it was better than Descent. However, that being a popularity contest, Descent took the cake back then. That sucked to know that Descent stole the popularity away. Apogee/3D Realms is amongst the best game development/production houses around to date, after Prey was released (even tho Human Head did the development, Broussard was keeping tabs and making sure it was to 3DR specs), they are bigger in FPS games than flight sims, as you well know. However, for a flight sim, they did give Interplay a fight for their life. Rather much something to look into for today's flight sim standards.

There aren't many games I played back in the day that I despise and such now. Some have felt like they lost their touch a bit though, like Two Crude Dudes. I used to love that game...

recently played uridium - i remembered the game being
good...hmmm, problem is not so much that the game seems
pants now, but that my reflexes are crap..its way hard.

most all games are far harder than i remember them being..
perhaps ive jst gotten used to the reasonably relaxed
gameplay of modern games...

i still like most of the games i used to play on older platforms,
arkanoid,gauntlet,green beret,xenon2,chaos engine,alien
breed....this list is near endless :p :]

Ports Of Call seemed like a good idea at the time; the rest must have been quite awful.

The memory of it being fun on the Amiga was so great that I even bought the PC version fairly recently (still in development all these years later!)

I know how good it is now though, I don't bother playing it anymore. I'm just glad I didn't cave in and buy the dearest of the 3 price gouging levels, really don't want to encourage that sort of thing.

Eco Quest. I first played it when I was 8 but now that I look back that game is a piece of crap.

Hmm, maybe a game that I played on the SNES was cool, was the SNES version of Doom. However, I had that before I got the PC version, and when I played the PC version of Doom, the SNES version was thrown out to dry, never to see the light of day ever again. Doom's been ported to sooo many platforms, that nothing, and I mean NOTHING was better than the original PC version... PERIOD. I'm just glad to see how far the PC version of the game came, none of the console versions lived up to the hype at all, IMHO.