Poll of the Day > What are some old bad games that are only bad in execution?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like, it has the basis of a great game - the devs just didn't do it right.

My example; Athena (both NES and arcade). It has a tons of great ideas, but its broken with bad controls and lack of logic

Phantasy Star 3.

It was an interesting idea but the scope was too big for the technology of the time and the shortcuts that were taken to make it work as well as it did made the whole thing suffer.

drakengard 3 has legendarily bad performance

hot take but dark cloud 1 is (or at least, can very easily be) ruined by the weapon system. let it break and you lose what is the equivalent of all your levels. it's just so insanely punishing

scroll of taiwu had the basis of a great game but the devs keep fucking around reinventing everything instead of listening to their playerbase and finishing out the game

I think this is a fascinating topic ( the subject of discussion, not this literal topic thread)

The gen 1 pokemon games. The people who made them had little to no game design experience and so the mechanics are held together with duct tape and prayers, and a ton of things straight up do not work as intended.

falsebound kingdom could have been so good
honestly a option to turn off attack animations might bump it to a 7/10 alone

They aren't that old but Multiversus and NASB might've been able to hold a candle to Smash but they fell short.

man101 posted...

The gen 1 pokemon games. The people who made them had little to no game design experience and so the mechanics are held together with duct tape and prayers, and a ton of things straight up do not work as intended.

hyper beam not needing a recharge if you ko, sleep being super overtuned, freeze being permanent, special being one stat, crits (+ focus energy being bugged), missing 100% accuracy moves, AI spamming type-super-effective moves even if they were non damaging, wrap/etc incapacitating mons, the bug type just massively sucking...

that gen was a HOT mess of glitches and bad balance

agesboy posted...

hyper beam not needing a recharge if you ko, sleep being super overtuned, freeze being permanent, special being one stat, crits (+ focus energy being bugged), missing 100% accuracy moves, AI spamming type-super-effective moves even if they were non damaging, wrap/etc incapacitating mons, the bug type just massively sucking...

that gen was a HOT mess of glitches and bad balance

And yet it was awesome at the time because we didn't know any better. The lack of special/physical damage split and the sheer number of pokemon who never learned any good offensive moves of their own type make it almost unplayable now. Or at least strategically unsatisfactory.

There is something to be said for being a stupid little kid who just loves picking the best thing and beating everything else up with it, with no concern for how balanced or well-designed that is.

Yeah, I'm not sure Pokemon RBY qualifies as "bad"- poorly-balanced and broken six ways to Sunday, sure, but it was certainly fun and some people even still play it competitively to this day.

I have a submission: Neverwinter Nights. Most specifically, the single-player campaign that was glacially slow in every possible way: the plot was plodding, the combat was sluggish, and most of the quests were unengaging and, yes- time-consuming. Add in the fact that you could only have one companion at a time - a companion who was AI-controlled and practically required you to sift through the games radial menus for several minutes just to figure out how to stop them from being incredibly braindead 100% of the time, and you have a sluggish exercise in frustration and boredom.

The game's powerful modding tools only served to punctuate the point, as players made campaigns that were vastly snappier, quicker, faster, and much more engaging than the one the game shipped with- which makes you wonder how the developers missed the mark so badly.

adjl posted...

There is something to be said for being a stupid little kid who just loves picking the best thing and beating everything else up with it, with no concern for how balanced or well-designed that is.

Oh how I wish I had never developed a critical perspective on games and I could still just enjoy almost everything as simple entertainment. I envy the people who can buy the yearly installment of whatever derivative AAA franchise and genuinely feel in their hearts that it's a 10/10 game. :/

Kallainanna posted...

Yeah, I'm not sure Pokemon RBY qualifies as "bad"- poorly-balanced and broken six ways to Sunday, sure, but it was certainly fun and some people even still play it competitively to this day.

It's definitely a borderline case. I'd say they're only bad in hindsight and compared specifically to the later iterations that have improved everything. People playing them now probably are doing so out of nostalgia or because they fell in love with the franchise later on and wanted to check out the originals. I have no idea how someone would feel about them playing them for the first time today with absolutely no context of the series as a whole. You're correct that they weren't considered bad at the time they were released unlike some other games mentioned.

man101 posted...

Oh how I wish I had never developed a critical perspective on games and I could still just enjoy almost everything as simple entertainment. I envy the people who can buy the yearly installment of whatever derivative AAA franchise and genuinely feel in their hearts that it's a 10/10 game. :/

It kind of just comes with experience. As much as it was (and still is, in some ways) fun to brainlessly exploit poor balance, experiencing games with better balance (or at least that offer the imbalance in a better-designed way, like something like Binding of Isaac where you can break the game wide open and have your way with it and that's what makes it fun) has led us to realize that they're actually more fun.

Personally, at least, I don't think it's limited my ability to enjoy games. Yes, I'm very guilty of optimizing the fun out from time to time (my efforts to get through SMT Devil Survivor are being stymied by this as I get bogged down trying to min-max but don't actually know the game well enough to do so effectively), but I have no shortage of games to play and the vast majority of the things I've chosen to buy for myself have ended up being fun enough that I don't regret the purchase. I also just enjoy the act of critiquing media. Thinking about and discussing what I do/don't like is itself an enjoyable enough process that even a game I wasn't big on can offer me something of value.

Kallainanna posted...

and some people even still play it competitively to this day.

tbh it's a really good example of why community competitive rules are a good thing- if people played without them with the knowledge we have now, it'd just straight up be boring and unfun, with very little team variety. smogon tiers are players saving the game from itself

Yeah, as much as people get butthurt over competitive bans and tier restrictions and whatnot, at the end of the day, they really are just a matter of addressing the games' balance concerns so the playing field is more level. Banning a Pokemon that's so powerful that every team needs to run a counter to it increases the variety of people's teams within that tier. Being mad about such bans decreasing variety fundamentally misunderstands the issue.

CoD: BlOps

There was one level where you controlled drones and it was horrible >.<

Dunno how that series got 5 sequels, MW was where it was at

man101 posted...

The gen 1 pokemon games. The people who made them had little to no game design experience and so the mechanics are held together with duct tape and prayers, and a ton of things straight up do not work as intended.

It is a literal miracle that Pokemon has become the most successful media franchise in world history. The quality of the games has always been very questionable, although the GBA era was reasonably decent. I don't think there's a wider example of something that was such a great idea that was done so poorly and yet still was so successful as Pokemon.

From the absolutely broken mechanics of the first generation, combined with the missing content and extremely poor level progression of the second generation, along with the tedious map designs of the third and fourth generations, as well as the complete refusal to embrace decent online functionality in the fourth and fifth generations, and lastly the low development effort and gimmicky gameplay options of every generation since the sixth generation, Pokemon as a game franchise has been run in such a careless way (while still very much holding its appeal with its target audience).

agesboy posted...

hyper beam not needing a recharge if you ko, sleep being super overtuned, freeze being permanent, special being one stat, crits (+ focus energy being bugged), missing 100% accuracy moves, AI spamming type-super-effective moves even if they were non damaging, wrap/etc incapacitating mons, the bug type just massively sucking...

that gen was a HOT mess of glitches and bad balance

Ghost-Types meant to be strong against Psychic, but all available Ghost-Types having no real damaging moves leaving them offensively ineffective, while also all being dual Poison-Type so also being weak defensively. That just straight up feels like a cruel joke.

I always thought the mortal Kombat mythology games idea could've been really cool but the first one was just so bleh.

I still think the idea could work but you'd have to do multiple characters within a game, show how they converge at the tournament.

Was this what inspired this topic, OP?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8UJgAuLF3I

for all its problems its not "a miracle" pokemon got so big, just looking at its faults is missing the forest for the trees
when comparing pokemon to the other games available on the game boy at the time pokemon is just doing so many things, and by doing 100 things right even tho they did 50 things wrong, it was easy for people to fall in love with it
the creature design is a bigger win than bad balancing is a loss and so on

JixHedgehog posted...

CoD: BlOps

There was one level where you controlled drones and it was horrible >.<

Dunno how that series got 5 sequels, MW was where it was at

I think the good thing about CoD Blops is that there were three separate modes and I know for a fact that this satisfied the needs of a variety of players. Personally, I only played Multiplayer and occasionally the Zombie mode on my own, never the campaign. But I know people who exclusively bought the game for Zombies. Or even just the Multiplayer. Like, my friend was vehemently against CoD culture but loved the Zombie mode so much he got the Blops 3 PS4.

Salrite posted...

Was this what inspired this topic, OP?

not this time; this time it's cuz people hatin' on Athena

faramir77 posted...

It is a literal miracle that Pokemon has become the most successful media franchise in world history. The quality of the games has always been very questionable, although the GBA era was reasonably decent. I don't think there's a wider example of something that was such a great idea that was done so poorly and yet still was so successful as Pokemon.

From the absolutely broken mechanics of the first generation, combined with the missing content and extremely poor level progression of the second generation, along with the tedious map designs of the third and fourth generations, as well as the complete refusal to embrace decent online functionality in the fourth and fifth generations, and lastly the low development effort and gimmicky gameplay options of every generation since the sixth generation, Pokemon as a game franchise has been run in such a careless way (while still very much holding its appeal with its target audience).

Oh yeah I forgot about the more recent Pokemon games. I should add Arceus to this topic. They added a cool new real-time catching mechanic and then forgot to build an actual game around it. The open world is sparse and boring, the new "boss battles" play like a collection of the absolute worst bosses in the whole Souls franchise, and there are like four trainer battles in the entire game all of which are piss easy because your opponents only have a couple pokemon and they're all under leveled.

They're absolutely terrified to make a Pokemon game that has any real challenge to it even though the people who played and loved the first game are all now in their 30s, at minimum, and Arceus specifically plays like a proof of concept that they just shipped rather than build out. It sucked so bad I basically wrote off the entire franchise going forward, and from the reviews I read of the newer ones, I was probably right to do so.

Maybe not exactly a game, but Color a Dinosaur was probably just way too early to be any good. So many adults seem to like coloring now.

https://www.coloringonline.com/coloring-page/animals/dinosaurs

Zelda 2

maybe Body Harvest (N64). it's not really a bad game, but it's very very clunky but otherwise a fantastic game underneath. really could use a remake or spiritual successor.

Sahuagin posted...

maybe Body Harvest (N64). it's not really a bad game, but it's very very clunky but otherwise a fantastic game underneath. really could use a remake or spiritual successor.

The N64 in a nutshell; like, I really like Hybrid Heaven... it actually has a pretty dang good story and a perfectly campy ending, but several of its core mechanics don't work and the rest are easily exploitable.

Lokarin posted...

not this time; this time it's cuz people hatin' on Athena

What did my niece's cat do?

Revelation34 posted...

What did my niece's cat do?

Japanese people can't pronounce her name

Salrite posted...

Japanese people can't pronounce her name

Is she in the new Assassin's Creed or something?

The first 3 Ultima games. Too confusing, horrible controls (half the "controls" are troll buttons) and really odd design choices. That said, JRPGs as we know them probably wouldn't exist if not for them. Also, arguably invented the "good guy needs to do evil things for the greater good" trope.

Umihara Kawase. The elastic grappling hook physics were incredible for the SNES. But the game is bogged down by too many layers of fake difficulty (instant deaths, limited lives, limited time, respawning enemies) in an era where reducing difficulty was the path to success. There's also no story, not even an ending.

ZeldaMutant posted...

Umihara Kawase. The elastic grappling hook physics were incredible for the SNES. But the game is bogged down by too many layers of fake difficulty (instant deaths, limited lives, limited time, respawning enemies) in an era where reducing difficulty was the path to success. There's also no story, not even an ending.

yeah.....ost is straight bangers tho

ZeldaMutant posted...

Umihara Kawase.

on a quest to remember a game from my childhood with grappling hooks (it ended up being FF Mystic Quest), i stumbled upon that game yesterday actually. it looks really neat for a SNES game

agesboy posted...

on a quest to remember a game from my childhood with grappling hooks (it ended up being FF Mystic Quest), i stumbled upon that game yesterday actually. it looks really neat for a SNES game

the trilogy is on steam...

...which means I have to beat them :V

Super Pitfall

Someone made a remake of it and it is actually really good.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Super Pitfall

Someone made a remake of it and it is actually really good.

Wasn't Super Pitfall technically a remake of Pitfall 2?

So a remake of a remake?

Oh, I just remembered a good one: Gladius! It's got a cool set-up: an apocalyptic war, Not-Rome and Not-Germania setting aside open war in favor of heavily-regulated gladiatorial combat competitions, one protagonist from each major realm, lots of different classes and abilities, tactical combat...how could it go wrong?

Well, as it turns out, in a whole hell of a lot of ways. First and foremost: the game was very obviously rushed out the door: Not-Rome feels complete and varied, Not-Germania less so, then you get to Not-Steppe Nomad land and you really start realizing how few new classes there are.
And then Not-Egypt is just a goddamned joke. The plot is bog standard fantasy dreck, and the class balance is terrible. Worse: you have a pretty low cap on how many gladiators you can even have in your school, and your main characters take up slots and are basically all the same weight class, meaning there's very little room for any medium class gladiators. Not-Rome has a lot of traditional Roman-inspired classes that are mostly pretty distinct, even if Centurions are stupidly OP, but it gets much worse from there.

Other issues include the fact that most battles are glacially slow, taking place in over-large arenas, with little variation in gameplay between battles, it gets really repetitive really fast. Everything is real-time, which means you spend a lot of time waiting for your gladiators to trudge from point A to point B.

Really, this game was terribly undercooked and failed a genuinely interesting premise: building a traveling school of gladiators seeking to become World Champions in Mid Antiquity World is enough without shoehorning shadow whatever nonsense into it. The battles also needed more variety and to go faster.

loved gladius even if it was really bad. undercooked is precisely the way to describe it lol