shmups.system11.org

One of my (probably weird) goals in life is to become a kusoge connoisseur. Yeah, don't ask.

I absolutely love Sonic R and various terrible bootlegs and other trash like Deep Blue on PC Engine, Somari, Action 52, and CrazyBus. What else should I play?

Have I got a list for you:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kusoge/

From that list I'll say China Warrior. Big ass sprites and jank as fuck. More recently I would say maybe John Wick: Hex. Solid but could have used a little more time in the oven. Def some jank.

8/16 bit? Acclaim/LJN/Flying Edge are good places to start. T2: Judgement Day is especially bad on the Genesis.

Time Killers/Bloodstorm for fighters. This channel may provide some fodder for you:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... sJUyLEc_H_

Yeah there is something charming about Kusoge.

The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy and Night Slashers.

Data East at their finest.

Castle of Dragon (arcade). 10 whole mins of pure awesomeness. Be sure its the JP version for Medusa tits.

Those Fist of the North Star fighting games where there's infinites where you bounce your opponent up and down like a basketball, that's kind of the point. Frankly a *good* Fist of the North Star game would be quite painful for its audience by this point.

Sonic R at least has the excuse that it was rushed to absolute hell and is absurdly technically impressive otherwise. I still say it's probably the actual best looking 3D Saturn game, period [still a bit baffled as to why they didn't just turn off the transparency fade in 2p mode though, since they had to gut the draw distance there anyway, but again, rushed].
Also, one thing that makes Sonic R control infinitely better: don't use forward to accelerate, ever. Nearly everyone I know who hates the game does it, and it makes controlling the characters super awkward. Starting with Knuckles instead of Sonic helps too, since Knux is more controllable.

As for other kusoge... hmm. Part of me actually kind of likes Metal Head on 32X despite it being like, really bad.
I dunno, there's just something neat about the game despite it all. Also god, those hideous talking head animations are something else. Speaking of the 32X, I think Chaotix is great. It's a hilariously unfinished tech-demo product with copy-pasted levels and a baffling gimmick and nearly no enemies... but like, it is better than the sum of its parts, and some of those parts are genuinely top-class [like with Sonic R, the music and visuals are fantastic].

The CDI Zelda games are an obvious choice, but also some of my favourites. They excel IMO because they actually have some cool ideas backing them, they are actually playable since the terrible jank can all be learned (it's mostly unintuitive collisions), and the funny video clips everyone knows and loves are sprinkled frequently throughout the entire game.

Yep, I've played that one! It was a launch game for the PC Engine, and it was apparently extremely impressive for the time! I know about a few on that list like Hoshi wo Miru Hito and of course Big Rigs, and I've played a few, like Sonic 4, Bubsy 1 and 2, Earthworm Jim Menace 2 the Galaxy, GBA Revenge of Shinobi (I tried this on my Everdrive recently since I thought it was going to be a port of Genesis/MD Revenge of Shinobi, but instead... lol), and Awesome Possum.


Yeah, you can find some enjoyable kusoge if you play the right ones, mostly stuff that is so broken or janky that it's fun to see how bad it actually is. Some games are just bad, but the ones that are so bad that the badness is entertaining are a lot of fun. Terrible translations are also excellent; I've been looking at Vroom in the Night Sky on Switch, which is pretty famous for being both bad and terribly translated. The legendary Life of Black Tiger also falls into this category. I REALLY want to try that one someday.

Switch eshop has all sorts of things that look bad, though... stuff like Deep Space:Action Fire Sci-Fi Game 2023 Shooter Strike Simulator Alien Death Ultimate Games. Yes, that is its actual title.


Yeah, Sonic R is a lot of fun, even though it's pretty terrible, or maybe because it's super terrible. Once you learn how to play it it becomes pretty enjoyable; it is my favourite 3D Sonic game by a very large margin, unless you want to count Sonic 3D Blast for being "3D". People say Sonic 3D Blast is bad, but it really isn't, and it has a stupidly beautiful soundtrack, at least on the Genesis/Mega Drive.


I do kind of want to play those. CD-i is one system that I don't want to buy, so maybe I'll just find a CD-i emulator and try those there.

Sonic 3d Blast on Saturn has the best special stages of any Sonic game and an absolutely bangin Richard Jacques soundtrack, so of course we only ever get ports of the inferior genesis version (though admittedly the genesis soundtrack is pretty good too). I certainly wouldn't call either R or 3D Blast kusoge.

My favorite kusoge was probably Winroids, a really crappy generic late 90s asteroids clone for windows. Spent a couple months with a friend trying to out high score each other.

Wait, does BRAD: the game count as kusoge? If it does, then BRAD: the game wins handily.

If we're sticking to something resembling an official commercial release, then I gotta give it up for NINJA BLADE! I actually love it unironically, but it sure gets shit on an awful lot, so I'm counting it. NINJA BLADE isn't a good game in the traditional sense, but it fucking rules in every way that actually matters.

Yes that soundtrack is awesome. Richard Jacques defined the sound of Sega for a while there in my opinion; wish he was still doing that.

If we're bringing up PC games here, there's always the critically acclaimed masterpiece Ganja Farmer.

DOS really had a smashing smattering of raw possibilities back then.

This also reminded me of the unkusoge but massively overlooked and ignored game, Abuse.

The Japanese Sega Saturn has some wicked-bad hilarious kusoge. Death Crimson is absolutely abominable, surely the worst light gun game released past the 1970s, and one of the worst anything games ever. But it's internet famous in Japan, so you might already know that one.

南の島にブタがいた (There Was a Pig in the Southern Islands) is like if someone made Castlevania as an early JAVA cell phone game starring a pig, and failed spectacularly at it. It opens with a lengthy anime FMV that leads you to think it had some production heft behind it, but then the game starts and you realize you've seen all the heft it has to show.

南方珀堂登場 (Minakata Hakudō Appears) is a mystery-adventure game that is structurally really lame and sidelines the decisions the player makes. But what I really remember about it was when I got my first Saturn with a pile of garbage the store wanted to get rid of for like ¥8000, this game among it. And just drinking in the entire experience of the incredible art (seriously, look at the middle guy) combined with FMV with no M.



I turned on the auto-generated captions on YouTube making this gif just to give some sense of what it's like to experience it in full non-motion. Sometimes the characters' lips do move, or their body might have 1 or 2 frames of animation. There was a lot of FMV garbage in that pile of games, but this one really stood out in my memory.



They put Musya on that list? I haven't played it since I rented it when it came out. Even though I was well aware it wasn't an exceptionally well-made game at the time, I though the vibe was really cool and side-scrolling action-platformers were always welcome on the system.



Yeah, I used to own in back in the day, and I thought it got some unfair treatment from reviewers. It was kind of a victim of time. When it came out in Japan in November 1987 Spartan X/Kung Fu Master was still cool, and this obviously blew the doors off it visually and served as a flagship launch window game for the PC Engine. It was also a victim of technology, first gen HuCards just didn't have that much storage capacity, and given the size of its character sprites it simply couldn't have that many of them.

By the time it hit North America in fall 1989, the game's late 1984 design template felt ancient after Double Dragon and a couple of years of iteration had changed everything for brawlers. And worse, its direct competition that fall was the Genesis launch with Altered Beast packed in and Golden Axe on the way. Even on its own platform, Irem's superior Spartan X spiritual sequel Vigilante shipped right alongside it.

The game is super memorization heavy, you won't get through it without memorizing the waves of enemies and their spacing. But I stuck with it and beat it, and had a decent time doing so. Not enough to re-buy it now, but enough to say it's probably still on the interesting end of the kusoge spectrum.

This is just my personal speculation, but I think the arcade game Gladiator / Ougon no Shiro may have given some inspiration for China Warrior as well. It has the same layout of scrolling obstacle courses, leading up to 1-on-1 boss fights.

Recently I've found Arcade Archives to be a good source of jank-but-enjoyable games. Trio the Punch in particular, holy shit this game lolol.

Would Hokuto No Ken on the Mega Drive count here? I always wanted to play it BITD but having seen videos of it I'm glad I didn't

We don't talk about that one here, because it always results in me writing a fifty page essay about the thing that no one wants to read.

Perhaps the most pertinent observation of mine is how you can be in this extremely intense and technical fight where spacing and footsies are absolutely important, and half a second's error will leave you eating dirt.... and to an observer on the outside you just look like this jackass repetitively walking back and forth.

And I think that's why Kung Fu clones never became a real genre despite their massive potential. They don't look cool. But Street Fighter 2? It doesn't matter how braindead one of its endless clones is, they always look cool.

And as every shm'upper knows, looking cool is cheating.

Alongside a walkthrough for the awful maze stages and to see where the boss fights are - but play it as Last Battle for the full kusoge experience. The dialogue is so hilariously incomprehensible that it's worth it just for that. Bring save states too because it's unforgiving.

Friend at school had it, he hated it because he was terrible at it but I managed to get about halfway through (to a pirate ship I think). It's frustrating because the overworld has no indication of what's what and whether you've been there before. It's easy to stumble into a boss fight without having powered up, and get destroyed. lol game over, soz. When that happens deep into the game it's easy to just go "nah" and never go back to it.

It is terrible though, the maze levels largely see you dodging a tonne of flying arrows and axes - which of course are perfectly safe to just punch/kick out of the way. The rest is simply walking and punching whatever wanders towards you, with the occasional boss fight which will probably destroy you the first time you encounter each one of them. And whoops, one life and no continues.

I think Raging Fighter on GB might be the jankieat game I ever fully enjoyed. The soundtrack is great and the animation quality is high for the GB, so not quite full kusoge. Let's just say it plays a little bit like dog shit. But hey it was an original fighter you could actually play on the GB.

Here's a timestamp of what I was talking about earlier.

It looks incredibly lame, but it is actually pretty intense. Half second error margins at best.

The full kusoge elements are when you're attacked by guys from behind and you defeat them by... continuing to walk forward while they swing at air. But don't confuse the leapers and axe throwers with the posers, those are completely different enemies. They only look exactly the same on the outside.

I also like how you have to let yourself get hit from behind if you want to move faster. Pro strats, man.
____

I'ma gonna repeat how sad I am games like this never took off. Kung Fu, Splatterhouse, Zelda 2... all dead dead deader than dead.



The continue system is Super Mario style. A+B+C+Start.

That one definitely counts as a good bad game, something not uncommon with other Allumer games.

If we count Sand Scorpion as kusoge then yeah I think this is a "good" one. Didn't really mind with the slowdown and looks doable for sickgrab 2-ALL.

For fans of games like KungFu/Hokuto No Ken, go play "Guerriere Lyeward" for X68000. Just do it!

Anyone actually like Super Star Wars and its sequels? I played it on the Vita for the first time a few years ago and I was not very impressed with it at all, although I'm not really sure if it's actual kuso-tier since I didn't get far. Maybe it gets better once you know what to do, or maybe it gets better later in the game, but it sure sucks to play in the beginning.

I've not played the first one (as I had Star Wars for the SMS and money is tight as a teenager!) but got Empire and Jedi in '95. Jedi is a fairly low effort licensed platformer with gimmicky Mode 7 stuff thrown in (as per the fashion at the time). It's streamlined compared to Empire and is often unreasonably easy. It has a couple of absolute bollocks opening stages (a silly Mode 7 speeder bit with iffy collision detection, then a platform maze where if you stay near the top of the stage you'll come to the boss... otherwise it's easy to get lost) which give a bad impression but largely improves after that.

Empire is the better game of the two but is very hard and basically needs you to not die/password continue with certain characters or the loss of gun power levels becomes tough to overcome. As with a lot of Western-developed action games it's not especially tight (i.e. some damage is unavoidable and a generous health bar) but nor is it broken kusoge. The non-platforming levels are fairly naff (Hoth is cool on harder difficulties though) but I remember it having some good challenging boss fights. Played both to death (cleared on the hardest difficulty) but haven't been back to them in over a decade.

Edit: it also has weird abridged dialogue in the cutscenes, which sort of reads like someone's just going on memory rather than having the actual script. There's no need for it and it's not an All Your Base style bad translation, it's just really odd to see all these truncated plot points and additional exposition mashed up!

I beat Super Star Wars last year and thought it was total dogshit. Dull, rhythmless levels with nearly constant unavoidable damage only leavened by constant health drops, terrible-feeling low-level weapons, several bosses that are borderline unfightable if you reach them with poor weapons and that are largely damage races even if you are appropriately leveled. It sucks. I can't speak for the sequels though.

I always thought Super Star Wars was garbage. Around the time of its original release there was a game store I used to hang around in and I never played this, but watched a lot of people try it, and never could understand why it was generally well liked. Probably just because of the license? That's all it had going for it really, and since I was never a fan of Star Wars either, I wasn't swayed by that aspect.

I never saw the sequels though.

The graphics and music were absolutely mind-blowing in its time, especially if you didn't have access to a CD-based system. But it was another one that even then it was clear that it wasn't masterfully designed, it takes cheap shots at you all over the place. But you got to be Han Solo in an era where - if you can believe it - the world wasn't yet saturated with Star Wars media. It was one of those things everyone knew, but aside from Ewok cartoons it had been on kind of a pop-culture hiatus since return of the Jedi, the toy line had long since stopped. The early 90s were when the whole Star Wars-as-literal-cult thing was just getting going in earnest. So just on that basis, it was a unique and worthwhile experience in its day.

Super Star Wars series has great presentation, but yeah, it's absolute dogshit. Punishingly hard, but not in a fair 'my character handles well and these mechanics are fluid' fashion. It would maybe be a bit better if not everything was spongey as fuck. The first stage of Empire makes all of this really evident. Except Jawas die in a hit, scream hilariously, and then fly off the screen. That part of SS is lovely.

*Edit, oh, Sengoku basically said everything I wated to.

I remember people speaking so fondly of Super Star Wars way back when, and I always thought it was just me who just didn't like it. The presentation definitely is really cool, but like, I remember it just not being fun at all to actually play.

To really put the shittiness of Super Star Wars into perspective, the first one came out exactly 2 months before X-Wing on PC. It was TOTALLY possible to make a good Star Wars game back then, they just didn't care.

ETA: Also I love how the kusoge thread has just turned into a Fuck Super Star Wars thread.

lol this has turned interesting!

Basically I never had a Super Nintendo and nobody that I knew who actually had one had this game. Somewhere around the time of its rerelease on Vita or whatever I heard about this game for the first time and I went online and everyone said it's so good and stuff. Then I played it and I was like

uh

no

I'm guessing this is like some sort of "it was the only thing I had, so I forced/brainwashed myself to enjoy it" type of thing. That's kind of how I managed to beat Bubsy II, but at least in that case it was a rental and I fortunately didn't actually own it.