Slashdot Mirror
Games They'd Like Us To Forget
Games Radar has a short piece up talking about some games that otherwise very accomplished developers would probably like us to forget. They call them "Secret Shame" games, and run the gamut from cheesy cash grabs (Shaq Fu and Justice League: Task Force) to notable flops (the Miyamoto-produced Stunt Race FX). From their discussion of Justice League: "Originally, this game was to be published by Sunsoft, but was picked up by Acclaim after Sunsoft went under bankruptcy reorganization. We'd almost say they should have known better than to put this out, but this is notorious sh**-peddler Acclaim we're talking about. Thankfully, the game was rightfully ignored, and due to its relative obscurity, Blizzard is almost never subject to mockery for it. Up until now, at least."
4 of these games are nothing to be ashamed of. Ninety-Nine Nights and Stretch Panic were pretty good games, granted they both had a few play control issues but no show stoppers. 18 Wheeler did very good in the arcade, so no shame there, it just never translated to the home market. The inclusion of Stunt Race FX really blows me away. This game sold very well, and was a damn good game, it had a great sense of speed. Great play control. A really well done game. If there was one thing I would say bad about it, is the graphics have not held up with age and now it's a very difficult game to try and watch. If I was trying to play it now on the Wii for the first time, I might slam it. But having played it when it was released originally on the SNES, that game was hot shit at the time, and put to shame Virtual Racing on the Genesis (it's competition at the time).
Survey says? No. You may be thinking of Stargate (aka Defender II), not Defender. Unless you really thought that having your spaceship disappear every time you fired to save the nameless city (WTF?) from UFOs was a good port of the arcade.
No, no it wasn't. It was an amazingly terrible port that kids played because they were so excited about having any sort of Pacman at home. If you actually pulled out your 2600 today and played it again, you would be shocked at how bad it was. The ghosts were headache inducing, the colors were outright ugly (not to mention unnecessary), the maze was poorly laid out, and Pacman couldn't even be bothered to turn his head when he moved up or down! (None of this is surprising once you realize that Tod Frye hated Pacman. He did a decent job for the tight timetable, but it was never going to be a very good port.)
Now if you've tried Ms. Pacman or Pacman Jr. for the 2600, those were good ports. They even fixed the God-aweful colors in Pacman Jr. to be less like 2600 Pacman and more like the Pacman Jr. arcade.
I know all about its limitations. I have actually written a game for it. (Depending on how things go, you might actually see it published as a homebrew one day.) It was a limited system, but the programmers knew how to work around those limitations. Most of the tricks developed for the system were developed before it was even released.
The problem was that Atari constantly short-changed their programmers. They wanted arcade ports done quickly with no real eye toward quality. They regularly pushed them for one more title to sell to the masses. Sometimes the programmers managed to do good work in that environment, sometimes they didn't. Many of the good ones simply left to work for Activision. So Atari kept hiring new programmers and churning out sub-standard games.
Again, it's the perception goggles. Take them off and look objectively. You'll find that Atari really did produce a lot of stinkers, and that E.T. was nowhere near the worst.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade