Shitty games given to us as kids

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

This thread is inspired by TransatlanticFoe's hilarious rhetorical question

who hasn't had a mad aunt that's bought something awful that you've had to Stockholm Syndrome some love for

So we all had games as kids that were shit, that we knew were shit, but we still played them since carts were expensive and in those days you had to play what you had.

For me, it was the atrocious Robin Hood gameboy game. Got it on my birthday from a friend's mum who bought it heavily discounted at the local supermarket. Bless her heart, but it was a shit game

[bbbhltz]

Fun idea.

Out in the boonies of Canada, the nearest town had a K-Mart and a Zeller's. In fact, K-Mart set up in the former Zeller's location when the new mall was built. Anyway, what had to happen happened and K-Mart pulled out of Canada and sold everything at massive discounts.

My mother was a shopaholic at the time and was first in line. She elbowed her way to the video games and swept everything into the cart.

My brother lucked out on the Sega front. Lots of good quality stuff (UMK3, Earthworm Jim, Comic Zone, Vectorman, Sonic(s), Space Harrier, a really awesome RNG, and so on).

Edit: the RNG was Doom Troopers, I thought it was awesome at the time.

I had the Nintendo consoles and got a single shitty NFL game for my SNES, Emmitt Smith Football, and a few Game Boy titles...

I tried my best and did get some joy out Torpedo Range, Raging Fighter and Battle Bull even though I was initially very upset. I hid my pain and still have those games, boxes and all, today. I did convince myself that Raging Fighter is probably the best of the fighting games I had for the console, and the other games are pretty good for the genre.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

My brother lucked out on the Sega front. Lots of good quality stuff ...
I had the Nintendo consoles and got a single shitty NFL game for my SNES

Did your brother not let you play on his Genesis?

[Lord British]

My dad hated videogames and bought a fucking Phillips CDI for Christmas 1992 (and we were not rich). But to his credit, it's a great choice if you hate videogames. Two years prior we (my brother and I) wanted a TG16. What did we get? A Miracle keyboard. My dad was and still is an uber troll.

[Steven]

I got Fellowship of the Ring for GBA for Christmas. Among other non-functional things, it was the original revision of the game that was guaranteed to crash in a room in Moria that you are required to pass through. Boring, awful game, and one of the most dysfunctional things I have ever experienced, with almost nothing functioning correctly, and with zero redeeming qualities at all, but I still beat it at least twice that I can remember. You have to pause and save the game as you enter the crash room. Then, once the game crashes, you can load your save and play normally.

Apparently there is a revision of the game that fixes the crash glitch. Too bad it didn't fix the rest of the game. Seriously, if you hate yourself, you need to play this game. It's so bad.

[bbbhltz]

Did your brother not let you play on his Genesis?

Yes, of course, until "the event" when I learned how to spam Kabal's combos in UMK3 and absolutely and gleefully destroyed him again and again. Soon after that the Genesis and the Game Gear were packed away and he got into PC games.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Did your brother not let you play on his Genesis?

Yes, of course, until "the event" when I learned how to spam Kabal's combos in UMK3 and absolutely and gleefully destroyed him again and again. Soon after that the Genesis and the Game Gear were packed away and he got into PC games.

Hahaha
Dang, I remember on the first day when I got my Neo Geo CD with Samurai Shodown 2, best mate spammed jumping slash with Jubei when he found out I didn't know how to defend against it, which made me fume with rage, and I banned that specific character

[R79]

Athena on Spectrum

Challenging!

[SuperDeadite]

Where's Waldo - NES. Loved it as a kid, and still find it fun today... but yeah it's terrible...

[Udderdude]

The first three games I had for the NES were SMB/Duck Hunt, TMNT and Friday the 13th. One good game, one gimmicky game, one mediocre game and one awful game. Later shit that got tossed into the NES collection included Bad Dudes, and I remember renting some garbage like Home Alone. That one was my fault, though .. lol.

[AGermanArtist]

Xmas 1984 I wanted a C64, but my dad insisted it was MSX or nothing. He was an early 'computer buff' meaning he watched Data Base, Micro Live and read Personal Computing magazine, and reckoned it was the future of computing.
He picked up a Toshiba HX10 the week before Xmas with a Toshiba joystick, but couldn't find any software for it locally. I picked up a copy of Computer and Video Games in the local newsagent because I'd flicked through it and found a listing in the classifieds section for a place called Tavistock Hi-Fi in London that sold MSX games and applications, so we ordered some Konami carts and a cassette game, and paid extra for 48hr shipping. These were Konami's Comic Bakery and Athletic Land, and Hunchback. Tavistock Hi-Fi had a mailing list you could sub to by supplying your details on and returning a sheet of paper that came with your first order. They'd send you a newsletter every month listing incoming games you could pre-order.
I was glad I got it, I just wanted a computer that year, because it was the thing.
2 of my friends got ZX Spectrums which I hated, and another got a C64 which is what I wanted and was envious of the fact he could just save his pocket money for a couple of weeks and pick up games easily, whereas I had to pay £35 for each Konami cart and had to use mail order.
As I started to build a nice collection of Konami's games in the following years, I grew to love that thing, but I still held a resentment towards my dad for not getting a C64 and was still somewhat envious of my friend and his.
I had
Antarctic Adventure
Athletic Land
Circus Charlie
Comic Bakery
Goonies
Green Beret
Hunchback
Hyper Rally
Jet Set Willy
King's Valley
Knightmare
Manic Miner
Maze of Galious
Nemesis
Nemesis 2
Penguin Adventure
Road Fighter
Salamander
Sweet Acorn
Yie Ar Kung Fu
Yie Ar Kung Fu 2


I considered a MSX 2, but my next move came at Xmas 1989 when I got a Japanese Megadrive with a step down converter bundled with a copy of Super Shinobi from Tavistock Hi-Fi. I was 100% happy with that, especially considering it wouldn't be available in the UK until the following year. I had to buy import games, but I didn't care - the artwork was just so much better.

[neorichieb1971]

I chose all my own stuff. I got a Philips videopac (Oddysey 2 for you Americans) which I believe the C64/Spectrum was already out by then. Was probably 1983/1984.

My first console was a 3DO in 1994 with Road Rash, Shock Wave, Fifa etc. Was a good console but I upgraded to the Japanese PS1 in late 1994. The only game I regret buying in 1995 was Cybersled. Cost £80 from Raven games and I played it for 20 mins.

I never had parents that would randomly go shopping for you and say "hey, look what I got you today". That never happened.

[Sumez]

Well, video games were extremely expensive back then, so I was never just randomly "gifted" anything.

The few games I did have on contemporary consoles were all picked by myself, and I think generally I lucked out, or actually knew what I was picking. Super Mario Bros. 1 was the game that made me immediately wish for an NES in the first place, and my mom managed to secure one with the game included at a queue-up sale at a local supermarket.
Of course you can't really go wrong with that. The first Super Mario remains a solid classic to this day.

My other picks on NES were generally poorly informed but surprisingly fortunate - Tiny Toon Adventures based entirely on the appeal of the license and pretty graphics. I was not familiar with the name "Konami" at the time, and I think it actually being a really good game was entirely luck on my part.
Shadowgate and Lemmings were other picks. Lemmings was a famous game, so I knew exactly what I was getting into. In hindsight I'm not a big fan of the game, but you can't really call it shitty. Shadowgate looked cool, and I loved it at the time. I don't think it's a good game at all, but a lot of people still regard it as a classic today. My bigger mistake was picking the Swedish language version thinking I'd be able to understand any of it lol.

My final contemporary NES game, and more interesting pick was Solstice, famous today mostly for its amazing soundtrack.
This was picked up from a bargain bin of really cheap NES games. I actually picked The Guardian Legend first, based entirely on the cool box art (European version, not the shitty US one). From the back of the box it looked like an awesome top-down action adventure game akin to Zelda. I was surprised when I got home and it was actually a shoot'em up and I was too shitty at shooters at the time to make any headway into the game at all. In what I realise now was a really regrettable decision, we went back to the store and were actually able to return the game since the box was completely intact.

I picked Solstice instead, from the same bargain bin. This game appealed a lot more to me, but eventually I couldn't figure out how to make progress, and I didn't manage to clear it originally, leaving it just lying around for years.
Eventually I found a set of cheat codes for infinite lives and refilled magic potions, and picked the game back up. Managed to map out the whole game, and after spending a while with it again, I actually ended up liking it a lot. Of the games I had it's probably the one most commonly recognized as a "shitty game". But I'm here today to tell you that Solstice actually rocks. You just have to delve into it and give it the time it deserves.


By the time SNES rolled around, I knew what I was doing, read magazines to keep up with the news, and if I was curious about other games I'd just rent them instead. So my entire library there was qualiy

[RGC]

I never had parents that would randomly go shopping for you and say "hey, look what I got you today". That never happened.

Yeah likewise. I selected all my own shit, and paid for most of it too (Raven Games...not heard that name in a while!). When I got into console gaming as a kid, there were hardly any shops in the UK where parents could walk in and just buy stuff off the shelves anyway. It was all done via mail order and sending off cheques in the post. I think our nearest physical shop was about 70 miles away down in Kent, a place called Whizzkid Games. My mind was blown the first time I made the pilgrimage and saw rows of japanese MD and PCE games along the wall. At this point I hadn't even started buying gaming mags, so a game's quality was largely spread by word of mouth. My parents did occasionally buy me games for birthdays and whatnot but it was 100% my choices and I would have to do most of the work to sort out the order(s).

Edit: All this said, if we go back a bit earlier to the Speccy days, our household acquired some atrocious shite. It was kind of a shared system, so I didn't really consider the games mine as such. But it's true that I persisted with playing some games that didn't deserve more than 5 minutes, just through lack of alternative choice. I sure tricked myself at the time into thinking some of those were good, but I'd like to think deep down I knew better.

[AGermanArtist]

I paid for my games from funds I robbed every week from the local catholic church I was an altar boy at. It was my job to collect all the 'collection' money from the pews once the last Sunday mass was over, and dump it in a bucket. I figured the church was robbing people, so I'd rob the church. I didn't believe in god, I only volunteered to be an altar boy because you'd get money for doing weddings and you'd get out of school for 2hrs every day for a week every month to do 10am mass, where you'd also get money for doing funerals. I probably had more disposable 'income' then than I do now.

[Sweatlord_STG]

Ecco the Dolphin and Prince of Persia (both Game Gear)

[Sengoku Strider]

Christmas 1989 my grandmother, knowing nothing about videogames other than that I liked them, got me Cybernoid for NES. Her budget was not high and I assume it was in a bargain bin already, it was the most broken game I've ever owned. It was a port of an old Euro micro shooter written by a lone 21 year-old, published by Acclaim and which kept the micro computer flip screen scrolling.

But the enemy patterns were governed by forces known only unto the ancient ones, and you'd frequently be smashed to smithereens the instant you entered a new screen. Several sections contain moving environmental traps which are all but unnavigable. The game was incredibly confusing, didn't explain itself well even in the manual, and had all the cryptic BS and limited scope of a Showa era Famicom game combined with the bleh controls and fixed screen visuals of a ZX Spectrum game. Thank goodness my dad, also knowing nothing about video games, randomly got me Konami (excuse me, Ultra)'s NES Gyruss that same Christmas and the holidays were saved.

I've heard UK people say the original Cybernoid was good, but TBH over the years I have learned there are few whose views on games I can trust less than people who grew up Stockholm-syndromed by 80s Euro micros. I cannot see what elements of Cybernoid, from the visuals to the weapons to the enemy layouts to the stage design to the hitboxes, would comprise the good part. This console exclusive game over screen had by far the best/only graphics of anything in the NES version:



There are, to my knowledge, only two people on YouTube who have beaten it legit, and one of them is Arcus.

[TransatlanticFoe]

When I got into console gaming as a kid, there were hardly any shops in the UK where parents could walk in and just buy stuff off the shelves anyway

Curious as to when this was, because the damn things were everywhere by the time I got a Master System in '91. Anywhere that had an electronics department stocked them - Woolies, Boots, Debenhams, John Lewis (under their original partner names), rando newsagent chains like John Menzies and United News, even independent record shops.

[Herr Schatten]

I've heard UK people say the original Cybernoid was good, but TBH over the years I have learned there are few whose views on games I can trust less than people who grew up Stockholm-syndromed by 80s Euro micros.

It's decidedly less shitty than the NES version, but calling it good would be a stretch.

The original versions (Spectrum and Amstrad) had very pretty graphics for the systems and the C64 version had amazing music. Back in the day, that was enough for a game to review well.

As for the folks who claim to have enjoyed playing it, they were probably playing pirated copies with unlimited lives cheats, just cruising along and enjoying the audio and/or visuals without actually playing the game.

[RGC]

When I got into console gaming as a kid, there were hardly any shops in the UK where parents could walk in and just buy stuff off the shelves anyway

Curious as to when this was, because the damn things were everywhere by the time I got a Master System in '91. Anywhere that had an electronics department stocked them - Woolies, Boots, Debenhams, John Lewis (under their original partner names), rando newsagent chains like John Menzies and United News, even independent record shops.

Probably an overstatement on my part. We're talking '88-89, before the consoles me and school friends were playing were readily available outside Japan. I do recall seeing SMS and occasionally NES carts in shops, but only very small selections. If you went into Hamelys in London you'd see a lot more, but generally it was mostly computer games (spectrum, c64, etc), I remember seeing in towns' electronic stores and whatnot.

[Sengoku Strider]

As for the folks who claim to have enjoyed playing it, they were probably playing pirated copies with unlimited lives cheats, just cruising along and enjoying the audio and/or visuals without actually playing the game.

Now that you mention it, it does feel like a game that was designed with full awareness it would be cracked.

I get it though. I bet if my first encounter with Blood Money or Xenon II was on some console port instead of cracked Amiga versions where you could see all the scenery and hear all the music without torturing yourself, I'd have very different memories of them too.

Probably an overstatement on my part. We're talking '88-89, before the consoles me and school friends were playing were readily available outside Japan. I do recall seeing SMS and occasionally NES carts in shops, but only very small selections. If you went into Hamelys in London you'd see a lot more, but generally it was mostly computer games (spectrum, c64, etc), I remember seeing in towns' electronic stores and whatnot.

Richard Branson acquired European distribution for the Master System in '88 under his Virgin Mastertronic label. Things suddenly improved notably for the system's presence in stores, which accounts for the shift you remember. Nintendo were distributed by Mattel, an American toy company who didn't have much of a network in Europe and it showed, it was the only major region the NES never got traction.

[TransatlanticFoe]

When I got into console gaming as a kid, there were hardly any shops in the UK where parents could walk in and just buy stuff off the shelves anyway

Curious as to when this was, because the damn things were everywhere by the time I got a Master System in '91. Anywhere that had an electronics department stocked them - Woolies, Boots, Debenhams, John Lewis (under their original partner names), rando newsagent chains like John Menzies and United News, even independent record shops.

Probably an overstatement on my part. We're talking '88-89, before the consoles me and school friends were playing were readily available outside Japan. I do recall seeing SMS and occasionally NES carts in shops, but only very small selections. If you went into Hamelys in London you'd see a lot more, but generally it was mostly computer games (spectrum, c64, etc), I remember seeing in towns' electronic stores and whatnot.

Ah the tricky launch window! That makes sense - it took a while before we adopted instant load times and more than about 8 colours - C64 and Speccy stuff was everywhere in the late 80s. I don't remember seeing anything else

As above, the Virgin distro must have made a huge difference - the Mega Drive and Master System II hit at the same time, the absolute masterstroke of premium gaming or a cheaper option that's still a huge jump from what we were used to! I got it precisely because my parents walked into a shop and saw a Master System II with Operation Wolf, which I was obsessed with in the arcades but could never find the Speccy version of.

[AGermanArtist]

There was only 1 kid at school who had a NES. I have no idea how he got it (likely a catalogue) because we didn't have Toys R Us yet and I didn't see it for sale anywhere. We traded for a weekend. I gave him my MSX and all of my games, and I got his NES with Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt and Punchout. Admittedly I wasn't crazy about SMB (I thought Pac Land and Wonderboy were superior games), but I loved Punchout. Back then in the UK it was viewed as being quite limited and 'just a toy'. Even though it was the home computer that was the thing here, most people just used them to play games. I didn't, my dad and I got into BASIC in a big way and gobbled up a bunch of books. Later, I did a HND in the local polytechnic (a 2 yr UK course that's in-between A-Level and BSc) in comp sci, but didn't take it any further. A polytechnic is like the UK equivalent of a community college. Back then you could get a decent paying job with a HND and do a BSc part time. I found formal education in computing incredibly boring. They took something exciting and sucked the life out of it.

[Sengoku Strider]

There was only 1 kid at school who had a NES. I have no idea how he got it (likely a catalogue) because we didn't have Toys R Us yet and I didn't see it for sale anywhere. We traded for a weekend. I gave him my MSX and all of my games, and I got his NES with Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt and Punchout. Admittedly I wasn't crazy about SMB (I thought Pac Land and Wonderboy were superior games), but I loved Punchout. Back then in the UK it was viewed as being quite limited and 'just a toy'. Even though it was the home computer that was the thing here, most people just used them to play games. I didn't, my dad and I got into BASIC in a big way and gobbled up a bunch of books. Later, I did a HND in the local polytechnic (a 2 yr UK course that's in-between A-Level and BSc) in comp sci, but didn't take it any further. A polytechnic is like the UK equivalent of a community college. Back then you could get a decent paying job with a HND and do a BSc part time. I found formal education in computing incredibly boring. They took something exciting and sucked the life out of it.

Here in Canada (and I assume North America in general) it was largely the same until Mario mania caught on and in 1988-89 suddenly every kid had an NES. I remember my friend across the street had one first with Punch Out!!, and seeing those full screen round transitions, the cut scenes and huge expressive characters I couldn't believe it, they were like watching a TV broadcast.

Before that Commodore 64s were the most common household gaming machine, and some of those people moved on to Amigas. If someone's dad used a computer for work, then they might've had a DOS machine at home that could run The Bard's Tale or do a choppy rendition of Thexder. MSX I never even heard of until decades later I when started learning about old Konami games.

The biggest difference with the UK I think is that at the beginning of the 1980s the government there spent a lot on the domestic computer industry, and computer education in general. Which makes sense, Britain is where it essentially started, they should've worked much harder to protect it than they did in the 1990s. But that produced a number of domestic platforms and a larger percentage of home users than most every other country in the world during the 1980s. Where I was, computers were still widely seen as kind of mystifying and not relevant to most adults' lives until they started to boom in the 90s (even then, my dad needed his arm twisted by work and when he finally got one he didn't get a graphics card).

More importantly to this discussion, I don't think in North America there was a cheap entry-level gaming computer like the UK had with the Spectrum or Amstrad with a gaming library anybody cared about, that was essentially the slot that the more expensive C64 filled here. Which meant the price of entry for computers was mostly only for the comfortable middle class or the very motivated. So when the NES got a price cut it was able to just naturally fill that broad, open niche. Sega had a tiny North American marketing team (like 2 guys) and the Master System just wasn't able to catch anybody's attention to compete.

[Sumez]

Nintendo were distributed by Mattel, an American toy company who didn't have much of a network in Europe and it showed, it was the only major region the NES never got traction.

What kind of crazy logic inferred that "the NES never got traction in Europe"?
Nintendo was huge here. It wasn't the only dominant player it might have been in the US (I wouldn't know). But it was huge. And it's what a vast majority of people from my generation have nostalgia for.

[Sengoku Strider]

What kind of crazy logic inferred that "the NES never got traction in Europe"?

Me consuming too much UK nostalgia content lately, rather than actually looking the numbers up. They talk like the NES didn't exist in Europe and SNES owners got beat up by well 'ard Mega Drive owners if they even dared show their faces in public.

[AGermanArtist]

My own experience of being raised in a small UK city of 90,000 as a 10 yr old in 1984-5. I spent a lot of my weekend time shopping with friends as most people did then and didn't see a NES for sale in any of the places that sold hardware/video games inc Boots which was a dominant retailer at the time. I didn't see an MSX either or its games sold anywhere. I found 4 other people locally, because I used to hang out in 3 different pool halls with arcade games and I'd been introduced to them by friends/friends of friends there and we'd go to each other's houses and loan each other games (it's how I got to play the Konami games I didn't already own like Ping Pong/Track & Field/Hyper Sports/Boxing etc) and home-made pirate cassette comps of games available on cassette - back then the twin tape deck was a new thing! lol
That aside, the UK magazines were all geared to home computers, not the NES or MSX.

[Sumez]

What kind of crazy logic inferred that "the NES never got traction in Europe"?

Me consuming too much UK nostalgia content lately, rather than actually looking the numbers up. They talk like the NES didn't exist in Europe and SNES owners got beat up by well 'ard Mega Drive owners if they even dared show their faces in public.

The UK had their own ecosystem entirely, they even had their own region code for the NES. I was never there as a kid, so I can't speak for them, but the other countries in Europe I did visit as a kid (Germany, France, etc) always had Nintendo games as easily available as they were here in Scandinavia. Obviously, Europe isn't one big homogeneous entity.

That said, the NES probably didn't have much presence anywhere here until the very tail end of the 80s, so you can't really look at how prominent it was in say '86-87.. I'm not old enough to remember much details before, but a lot of prominent games didn't come out here until years after Japan. The oldest Nintendo magazines I have from my childhood are from 1989 I think.

[neorichieb1971]

Nintendo were distributed by Mattel, an American toy company who didn't have much of a network in Europe and it showed, it was the only major region the NES never got traction.

What kind of crazy logic inferred that "the NES never got traction in Europe"?
Nintendo was huge here. It wasn't the only dominant player it might have been in the US (I wouldn't know). But it was huge. And it's what a vast majority of people from my generation have nostalgia for.

Only certain stores could stock NES systems. In my town it was Boots. Console systems were not popular at all around me. I never knew anyone that had a NES/SNES. A few folk got Megadrives and Master Systems. But most had computers.

[Sumez]

That's incredibly anecdotal though. Claiming that the NES had no traction in Europe is revisionist history at best
"Nintendo" became the grandma synonym for video game console here as well as most other places.

It was very much seen as a kids' toy though. Where I'm from older people would gravitate more towards the Amiga.