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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."
Too easy.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I know it's the game that everyone loves to hate, but E.T. wasn't *that* bad. If it had had more playtesting (primarily to expose the issues with constantly falling in holes you didn't want to fall into), we wouldn't be having this conversation today. But in Atari's infinite wisdom, they only gave HSW five weeks of development time in order to meet the Christmas holiday.
What's even more amazing is that some exec in Atari changed the order size for the game to an incredible 4 million units! They were so sure that it was going to be an instant hit that they effectively bet the farm on a game done in only 5 weeks.
Brilliant, wasn't it?
The coup de grace came from Intellivision with these commercials starring Henry Thomas:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsmIma0ZQtQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3xqu4VrwsU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mPERZhkboc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOvMi7Wzqo
Of course, Intellivision didn't realize that assisting in Atari's demise was assisting in their own demise. Whoops.
"WE'RE CLOSED NOW!"
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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).
That was a fun game. A little bit awkward to play, but the bouncy mechanics made it a lot of fun. If you compare it racing games of today, Burnout and so on, Stunt Race fx comes off feeling really slow. If you compare it to the racing games of the mid 90s when it came out, 4d Stunts, Mario Kart, maybe not f-zero, it was pretty normal. The motorcycle was pretty fast too. :)
Ah, don't take it too seriously. These days everyone has to throw together some smack talking "top X worst Y", just to show that they're hip and irreverent like that, and you better believe them that when, by contrast, they give 95% to EA's latest game they really mean it.
There are a ton of games who were worse, or did worse for other reasons. Daikatana, ET, etc.
The reasoning starts to get dubious right on the first page linked from the summary. So a console fighting game is bad because by the 90's everyone was sick and tired of fighting game clones? Well, gee, I guess they never heard that fighting games _still_ sell on consoles, a decade later.
Second page... from what I understand, so that game was bad because it was a button-mashing Diablo clone. Well, gee, someone tell that to the people _still_ selling button-mashing Diablo clones.
Etc.
As I was saying, just another "top X worst Y", and not even well thought out at that.
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