Preface: Well, here's my list. You'll find in here some terrible games, but others will be decent-to-good games in their own right that I was disappointed in otherwise. Any misspellings are probably intentional, and any censoring is done for effect.
10. Secret of Mana (SNES)
Hoo-boy, this is going to get me a lot of flak. I'll prolly even get over what's keeping me from enjoying the game and love it eventually, but for right now it stands here as a testament to the generation gap in gaming, and my laziness. I had learned to LOOOOVE Seiken Denetsu 3, the inexplicably Japan-only sequel to SoM, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about with SoM. I load it up (mind you, I emulate most of the games I play) and start. I'm going through the first fields, killing some "mobs", and not having a terrible time, but wondering about a few things. Specifically - why do I have that charge gauge if it's not proportional? I get to 99% charge and jump the gun on the attack button. I do a whopping two damage. If they give you a gauge like that, it should be proportional. At full power, I do 20 damage to a Rabite. Then why, when I am at 50% charge, do I do 2 damage instead of the 10 that it would seem logical I do? Continuing on with my narrative, I progressed to that ant-boss-thing. That's where it all went south. Upon testing of my experiences, the boss has a move that is 1. undodgeable, 2. shaves a fifth of your lifebar and c. knocks me out, so that he can chain them. The fucker literally got me into a hitstun that I didn't leave until I was dead. From full health. I don't care how much invuln you have because of that old dude, that is NOT first-boss behavior, and it is NOT conducive to leaving a good impression on me. From there, interest in the game took a sharp downhill decline, and that is why I don't like this game. SD3 4 lief, baby.
9. Metroid Prime 2 (GCN)
What I have against this game is that it's not Metroid: Prime 1, and it started moving the Metroid: Prime series toward more standard shooterizing, with more enemies, less "cannon fodder" enemies, and a much less interconnected world map (IIRC). The beam ammo system wasn't terrible, but it does not belong in Metroid, and I don't care how FPS it is (unless it's Hunters. Then it's O.K. because it's supposed to be and FPS, not an adventure). I hated the lack of figuring shit out for yourself, too - I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like it was a lot harder to figure out where to go next in that game. Instead, the game made you rely on the Hint System. My final, biggest complaint is that Retro took out sequence breaking, my favorite part of Metroid games. The reason I love Prime 1 so much is because of the mad sequence breaks you can pull off. Prime 2 removes this because Retro doesn't love us, and this makes me sad.
8. Final Fantasy V (SNES/Super Famicom)
For whatever reason, I just can't like this game. I tried, believe me, and there is a lot to like. The job system is, as Pat says, amazing, but I just couldn't get into this game. I have no idea why. The graphics were fine, the sound was fine, and the gameplay was good, so why can't I like it is my question to myself. Maybe I didn't get to the good part or something, I don't know.
7. Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (GBA)
The second of the three GBA Castletroids, and by far the worst. It's standard Castletroid fare, only it doesn't control well (read: no air control makes my vagina hurt) and there are some stupid decisions that plague OCD completionists. The big one is the whole "levelled experience" or whatsits. It's the whole "you get less XP from weak mobs the higher your level", but by level 70-something, everything is giving you 1 measley XP. The fastest method for levelling is killing the 16 enemies in this one room or something. It's not pretty or fun or fast. It's 16 XP/room. In Aria of Sorrow, by comparison, I get 1200XP/sec for almost no MP cost. Yeah, levelling is tough. There's some cool shit in the game, too, which makes me really sad that it sucks. There's these weird hoverboots you can get, which do what they sound like, and other stuff like that. It's a shame that I hate the game so much.
6. Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (GBA)
So I torrented a random pack of GBA ROMs (because I needed a GS:TLA ROM for a friend, but I digress), and I came across this little number in it. After looking around on Game[REDACTED]s, it got semi-favorable reviews, so I gave it a shot. Maybe halfway in, I realized the game was total shit. This isn't a game many have heard of, so I explain. You are a Craftknight or something, and you make weapons that you fight with, with the help of a Guardian Spirit
. You need two things to make a
weapon - a recipe and raw materials. What this means is that at the beginning of the chapter, you get a recipe for a sword. You have to delve into a 100-level dungeon (which is the main area of the game, really) to find some materials, which you then schlepp up to your forge, where you can make your weapon. Also, random battles ahoy. In said battles, you engage in Tales-style linear motion battle. Where it falls flat is that while in Tales, you got the Techs system, in this you don't get jack shit. So combat, the main area in the game, is bland and monotonous, while not quite sinking to the level of terrible. The plot sucks, so the only thing that kept me going was that my Guardian Spirit (it's not worth explaining) is an enormous lesbian for my character.
5. Halo (XBOX)
Kaz of the 8EB forums summarized my feelings on Halo.
"Man, the more I think about Halo as a basic, non-gamer-friendly FPS the more true it seems. Fairly slow, simple action, recharging armor, two weapon types, repetitive levels..."
Of course, he goes on to say he doesn't think it was a bad game, but it's all the reasons I don't like it in one sentence.
4. Aladdin (Genesis)
II don't know what that one guy on Progressive Boink was thinking when he said this was one of his favorite games. It's total shit. It's everything that goes wrong with liscensed games today; shitty hit detection, bad level design, and bad platforming. I will admit that the art was well done, but it doesn't make up for the fact that it blew ass. What makes this worse is that as a kid, I was somewhat starved for games. I could only play Sonic 3 so many times before it got a little old, and I needed moar. So I got this piece of shit, and I played it. For whatever reason, I failed to recognize that it was a horrendous game and I played it up until the escape from the Cave of Wonders. That level still gives me nightmares. It was the biggest heap of BS game design I have seen. It requires that you run from falling superheated rocks, but it just doesn't work. IIRC, it requires
pixel-perfect platforming to make some of the jumps they hand you. I think I only got past the level because of the ABBAABBA code.
3. Animaniacs (Genesis)
See above, ony with a different IP and that I actually saw it through to completion, which somehow makes it worse.
BREAKING NEWS: Thanks to Peaches' Top 25 list, I figure out that this game is a Lost Vikings rip. So if you want a gameplay synopsis, imagine Lost Vikings with about a hundred times more suck.
2. Megaman Battle Network 4-5 (GBA)
I am a huge Megaman Battle Network nerd, going right down to the very first one. I got two sometime after it came out, and loved it to death (even after it reset itself some 7 times). Same goes with number three (resets included). They were good games, for reasons detailed elsewhere, but MMBN 4-5 are absolute shit, especially when compared to #3. Three had it strongest where it counted; a solid endgame. There were a huge number of effective chips to experiment with (the RFF, the intarweb repository of good folders, has 20-30 folders) and some pretty good superbosses to play with. 4 and 5, however, did not. 4's chip selections were somewhat watered-down and balanced
out because 3 was pretty imba, but it was a shit game that introduced some terrible concepts to the series. #1 was that chips now came in three codes instead of five, which hurt folder construction a lot. #2 is the introduction of the Soul System, the replacement for the Style system. Souls are more interesting, overall, but they didn't implement them well at all, and it took two games to fix them. The
n, of course, the fact that the campaign is terrible. You have to play through the game three times to get everything. There is so much wrong with this its unbelievable, and I shouldn't have to expound. Moving on to 5, it overbalanced folder construction to
hell and back. They kept the Soul System and the lack of chipcodes, and they also nerfed PA's by allowing only one per battle. For the uninitiated, a PA is when you select certain chips in a certain order, and they combine to form a
MASSIVE ULTRA-AWESOME attack. These often form the bases for many folders, and with 5, they suck. At least the singleplayer is tolerable.
1. Sonic Heroes (GCN)
I was raised on my Genesis that I got in like 1998. I was a bit late on my consoles. Anywho, my Genesis provided me with motherfucking Sonic, and that's about it. I didn't know abour your "Phantasy Stars" or your "Gunstar Heroes". I had Sonic, Sonic 2, and Sonic 3 with motherfucking Knuckles. That was more than a few years of my life until I got my Gamecube, first game being Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. I may be alone, but I enjoyed that game, as well as Sonic Adventure. Sonic Heroes, however, sukk'd. It sucked
so hard it gets an intentional misspelling. It's just not fun. Sure, the speed still happens, but it's most of the level. It actually kills the core of Sonic's gameplay. I don't know how they managed that. Sonic games are obviously platformers, where the level is enemy #1 and enemies themselves are a distant second. Sonic Heroes decided that it might be a good idea to reverse that, so enemies no longer get bopped on the head and run the fuck past. Now it involves actual hitbars, and this makes me sad. I did appreciate the Knuckles: Chaotix cameos, but they were gimmicky and annoying. This game might not have been so annoying had it been for my previous experiences with Sonic. ALSO: the last level with the whole Sonic-uses-the-power-of-the-Chaos-Emeralds involves the cast pulling the emeralds
out of their furry little posteriors. I shit you not. Look it up on Youtube. That game wrecked Sonic for me, and I hadn't been the same until he was announced for BRAWWWWWL.
