"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" shmups

[GrimoreLibrarian]

I'm surprised no one brought up Toilet Kids yet.

[renardqueenston]

I'm surprised no one brought up Toilet Kids yet.

shit, i entirely forgot about this. i've only played my copy a couple of times, really just to show people when they come over. i don't even know if it's so bad it's good. as gross and hilarious as it is, it's pretty unenjoyable :[

[Ixmucane2]

Jets N Guns Gold. Such an absurd game, but loads of fun once you start blowing stuff up.

And loads of non-fun once you get the unfair "plasma wheel" weapon and just ram everybody to death, with gigalasers, for recreational sniping, and guided missiles, for when 99% isn't enough, on top of that.

I consider Jets'n'Guns Gold a mostly good but tragically flawed "euroshmup": with adequate playtesting it could have become a classic.

[Mortificator]

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" shmups

I don't think these really exist. You can sit back and laugh at a bad movie or TV show, but with video games, you still have to play the thing.

[renardqueenston]

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" shmups

I don't think these really exist. You can sit back and laugh at a bad movie or TV show, but with video games, you still have to play the thing.

yeah, so they have to play hilariously - as i mentioned, Twin Eagle II and Explosive Breaker are pretty hilarious, alongside a few that were mentioned in the thread (Hacha Mecha was my favorite up to this point).

just remembered another one! on the pc engine, ROCK-ON is really, really entertainingly bad. you can get so many speed ups it's hilarious

[GrimoreLibrarian]

There is also Microcosm, an old PC game with surreal yet ugly pre-rendered visuals. I can't get over how goofy it is having a battle in some dude's brain like it's the trenches of the Death Star. Some of the bosses looked silly along with the various FMV sequences. It also came in a unique box that was a slight pain to figure out how to open, but it did come with a shirt and a sound track cd. The music is also performed by rock legend Rick Wakeman![/end marketing ploy]

I also played Space Invaders 95 which I found kinda boring and uninteresting. That is until the Lobster Girl boss showed up.

[AKRATEN]

I was thinking about this game the other day , its super weird and very fun.

Illvello


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhLTRy47JjQ

[mjclark]

Space Bugger deserves a mention just for it's name alone. I was wondering if it was an 8-bit ancestor of Cho Aniki but I guess "bugger" meant something different to the developers.

[gs68]

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" shmups

I don't think these really exist. You can sit back and laugh at a bad movie or TV show, but with video games, you still have to play the thing.

Big Rigs.

[BuckoA51]

There is also Microcosm, an old PC game with surreal yet ugly pre-rendered visuals

Yeah I had that on Amiga CD-ROM, used to watch the intro all the time, best bit about the game!

I nominate the C64 port of 1943. I used to love that when I was a kid, it's so laughably easy though. Course Zero Wing counts too, but only because of the intro.

[Treasurance]

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" shmups

I don't think these really exist. You can sit back and laugh at a bad movie or TV show, but with video games, you still have to play the thing.

Big Rigs.

Custer's Revenge

[GrimoreLibrarian]

There is also Microcosm, an old PC game with surreal yet ugly pre-rendered visuals

Yeah I had that on Amiga CD-ROM, used to watch the intro all the time, best bit about the game!

I nominate the C64 port of 1943. I used to love that when I was a kid, it's so laughably easy though. Course Zero Wing counts too, but only because of the intro.

And the ending.

[drauch]

Custer's Revenge and Big Rigs are both not "so bad they're good". They are both so bad they are terrible.

[DocHauser]

I never actually got round to playing Harpooned, but it looked pretty funny:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR4KN6EfX6M

[Kollision]

Toilet Kids was a good suggestion, at least for its hilarious opening cinema.

[renardqueenston]

Custer's Revenge and Big Rigs are both not "so bad they're good". They are both so bad they are terrible.

you're telling me you didn't laugh yourself silly playing Big Rigs? i had a blast driving at 1,000,000,000+ mph in reverse and having my truck deform itself! you should've seen my face when i drove straight through the first bridge

[Drum]

Another one: Sky Fox (arcade, 1987). Sexy valkyrie babes riding flying snakes. Then they start flashing you and dancing or something and monsters come out from underneath the hobo blankets they are wearing. idk. Must play shooter action.

[Hair]

Boogie Wings.

It's not "bad" per se, in fact it is a great game and one of my favorite horizontals, but it feels like it was made by people who had never made a shmup before. The game doesn't look or feel like any other shooter, and it has slightly akward overall feel, but it works. The people that made it are geniuses and the game is full of great quirks, details, and is obviously a labor of love yet not to be taken seriously. I'd put it up there with any Parodius game, but while Parodius is a direct copy of Gradius gameplay, Boogie Wings is totally unique. No developer that is known for shmups could have ever made Boogie Wings.

If you've never played it, Mame it. It's a biplane hori with a lot of steam punk elements before steam punk was cool. When your plane is hit you jump out and it turns into a run-and-run game with countless different vehicles you can use (many of which are hilarious). Your biplane has a hook that you can use the grab, swing, and throw bombs, enemies, random object etc... The game is full of humor but also has great shooting elements and scenes.

One of my favorite parts is when you try to take down a *HUGE* enemy airplane with your arch-enemies (who you chase through the whole game) on it. You jump out of your plane and enter the enemy flying fortress and work your way through many rooms to massive cargo bay. The fortress goes into a dive and there is an anti-gravity effect as all of the crates, enemies, and animals in the cargo bay start flying around while you continue shooting. When everything settles you eventually get to a hanger bay with some fighter biplanes ready to go, board one, and get out of the flying fortress as it goes down in flames just moments behind the arch-enemies you were chasing.

There is also a Christmas theme level with a RoboSanta boss.

[AKRATEN]

HAHAH Boogie Wings is awesome.
the Santa boss is amazing.

[renardqueenston]

HAHAH Boogie Wings is awesome.
the Santa boss is amazing.

agreed! that santa boss is such a perfect visage of "so bad it's good"! love it.

[emphatic]

How about Zing Zing Zip? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5tPx-CnDEU

[Sumez]

The Cho Aniki games always come up in discussions like this, but I don't know if I'd qualify them as "so bad they are good"...
I absolutely genuinely enjoy Ai Cho Aniki. It's not a particularly good game, but I don't know if it's -bad- per se. It just has so much twisted personality it's hard not to like it.

[Demetori]

Deathsmiles II X

So bad it's good. It's literally the only Cave game that I bother playing when I go to the arcade.

In one of the countless arcades that New Zealand has to offer?

Last time I checked Yifans, the only Cave shmup I found was Mushihime-sama. But yeah, we do have several arcades. Yifan's being the most populated. Games come and go every week there, I'd say the only consistent machines are the Puzzle Bobble ones, not including the 20 odd photo booths... Yifans is huge.

[Kollision]

Ai Cho Aniki belongs to the "Stinkers" thread. I'll check it now, if I don't see it there I'll take some action.

[Sumez]

No game that has a naked man in a Venus clamshell attacking you with raining eggplants deserves to be a "stinker".

The strobe light "raving" end boss alone is worth it. I hope a game of a much higher quality adapts that idea some time in the future!

[BarfHappy]

Atomic Robokid...
It was the freebie PCB for my ComboAV so i played it... at first i thought it was garbage... but yet... i got hooked after forcing myself to play the game. The walking gimmick didn't make sense...

I would say Macross on the famicom too... it had less than stellar gameplay, poor graphics, 3 enemy types "blocks" boss... but then again got hooked.

[Evilmaxwar]

When i was a kid i had Gadget twins on the Sega Genesis. At first i was like Wtf is this crap ? But then i ended up having fun with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2V1xUxcE-A

[BIL]

this game is legitimately effing hilarious, from the enemy text (i want to say the top-right guy you can select says "I'M CRAZY COME AT ME BOY" or something equally ludicrous)

That cracked me up too when I saw it in Rob's "hidden gem search" thread, glad I'm not the only one. It's so ominously fruity!

[renardqueenston]

this game is legitimately effing hilarious, from the enemy text (i want to say the top-right guy you can select says "I'M CRAZY COME AT ME BOY" or something equally ludicrous)

That cracked me up too when I saw it in Rob's "hidden gem search" thread, glad I'm not the only one. It's so ominously fruity!

fuck, that's the one! this game friggin' killed me

Atomic Robokid...
It was the freebie PCB for my ComboAV so i played it... at first i thought it was garbage... but yet... i got hooked after forcing myself to play the game. The walking gimmick didn't make sense...

me and robokid have a good history together, it's such a wonderfully nonsense game. i've had some funny glitches during it too, like getting hit and having it freeze with robokid doing the "hit" animation continuously.

When i was a kid i had Gadget twins on the Sega Genesis. At first i was like Wtf is this crap ? But then i ended up having fun with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2V1xUxcE-A

wow, okay, i've gotta play this. it looks like it plays poorly enough but has enough personality to be smile-inducing throughout.

[Estebang]

I'd like to mention GaiaSeed as an example of a shmup that's commonly described as "so bad it's good" or just plain bad, where it's actually a quality game in its own right.

Techno Soleil obviously took a lot of inspiration from the Darius series, particularly Metal Black. The dreamlike quality of the stages and bosses, the Engrish narration, the ecological and anti-nuclear overtones, the psychedelic color scheme, the rocky corridors, even the enemy patterns are all dead ringers for Taito. The main difference is that they clearly wanted to make a shmup that anyone could 1CC with a little practice. That's not a terrible sin unto itself, especially considering it was never an arcade game (and come on, most PC-Engine shmups are baby easy and I never hear anyone bitch about them.)

An amazing Zuntata-esque soundtrack, gorgeously abstract graphics (they remind me of Evangelion designs rendered on an Amiga), the most schizophrenic cutscenes in maybe any game ever, and a difficulty curve that's perfectly sloped, even if the game never gets hard. How can you just dismiss it as "that ps1 kusoge with halo regen?"