@@rayfincham1595 That was why Nintendo originally had the black boxes with screenshots of the gameplay on the box, so that there was no confusion with games that had box art that looked nothing like the game itself. Nintendo tried to do everything they could to disassociate themselves with the video game industry early on, after the market crash.
That's why I overall prefer the Sega Master system. It sure had some stinkers but their worst games are not as bad as the ones in this video for the NES
The worst thing as a kid was when your parents would surprise you with a game, but they had absolutely no concept of game quality. I remember one Christmas I received "Mega Man 3"...but the DOS version. I think they knew I liked Mega Man, but maannnnn I was soooo disappointed at the time. I look back now and think their heart was in the right place. 😅
I received The Great Waldo Search for Christmas from an Uncle and Aunt. They were trying their best and I love them- I still have it in my NES collection.
Like the one time as a kid I was having a really bad day so my mom rented me a snes game. We loved the movie Wizard of Oz so she rented me that for snes. She had no way of knowing how good or bad the game would be. She just knew we loved the movie. I still enjoyed it because I wasn't about to not, but I didn't get very far lol.
@@polocatfan Why not? It is still a commercially sold game. A poor quality game is a poor quality game no matter who makes it. Fan game or not is irrelevant. I've seen fan games that were actually close to first-party quality, so that is a moot point.
For me it was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a Christmas gift. I forced myself to keep trying until I started making solid progress, but it wasn't fun and I never came close to beating it.
@@graalcloud PS2 has a better ratio of good games. N64 has a small library which helps its ratio, only like 400 games and like 40-50 were good. PS2 has at least twice as many good games, but out of like 3000 that's actually fewer good games in terms of percentage.
A a kid who used his allowance to get games I think I played Robocop 2 so much I tricked myself into liking it 😅. I remember getting so good at ice skating around I could clear levels quickly.
Please make a part 2. Hell, please do this topic for every console you owned back in the day. I'd love to see you do this for Sega CD. I'm pretty sure you did Saturn already, think I might go back and watch that one again. Great stuff, SLX!
Deadly Towers IS a deep and complex adventure, but it is also an absolute slog. Think Zelda Second Quest, but without the sword, only having the blue candle, everything takes you out in one hit, and you lose your rupees if you die. Also, the shops are all on the opposite corner of the map with all of the hardest enemies in between, and in order to get the wooden sword, you have to beat a room full of wizzrobes and darknuts with said blue candle. "Deep and complex" does not mean remotely fun or interesting. I grew up on it and can beat it legitimately, but I won't defend the game from those who detract it.
I'm not familiar with what you're comparing it to, but your description makes it sound really difficult at least from the beginning I hope the password system works well for that game in saving progress
@@justanobody0 It cannot be understated just how underpowered you are at the beginning of the game. Many enemies take 20-30 hits to clear out of the way.
He should do em for as many retro consoles/old PC as he can. like Atari 7800 , Sega master system, Sega Gen , C64 games , etc.. curious my self to see the dookie list lol
I played Urban Champion back in the day. It came with a many-in-one cartridge. I can't imagine playing through 130 something round of that lol For me when the lady throws confetti, that game's as good as finished.
Think he was hard on Urban Champion The Dev we're probably going off Arcade High Score logic... it was the 80s fighting games weren't plan out all that perfectly yet
I applaud you for branching out into non-Sega videos. As long as you keep it retro i'm good - which I guess is everything south of the PS2 nowadays lol
Hate to say but even the PS2 can now be considered retro, or it is now starting to become retro. "Typically, the term retro is given to items which are at least 20 years old."
Mike Tyson's PunchOut is almost perfect. How can it be so good? It really is amazing when you think about how old it is but how it is still better than a bunch of the new stuff released today.
Back in the day, I was the last of my friends and family to get an NES. Since I had already played Super Mario Bros. to death at their houses, I decided to get just a control deck and a game other than Super Mario Bros. The bad news was that I wanted Castlevania but it was out of stock and I was forced to blind purchase a different game. The good news was that my blind purchase was Mega Man 2.
Robocop looks like it was originally made to be an entirely different game and was changed last minute to become a Robocop game by throwing in your main character and a few Robocop-style bosses. Nothing besides your main character looks like it was meant to be part of this franchise.
Absolutely love your scathing yet at the same time professional reviews. I remember playing Toobin at the arcade on my birthday. The next day I was so excited to see it at the rental store. I was just crushed with disappointment and disbelief at how bad it was.
Exactly!!! A lot of the time all you had was the box art and whatever was on the back of the box. After a while you kinda learned that first party games and those from publishers like Konami and Capcom were usually a pretty safe bet but even they put out occasional duds. My first NES blind buy with my own money was Mega Man 2 so I pretty much hit the power ball with that selection since at the time it was arguably the best game for the console at the time.
I had a neighbor that had Aladdin on the NES and he was really let down by the game and even more so after seeing Aladdin on my Sega Master System, which wasn't a simple port but an entire different game on it's own which even follows the movie more closely.
Even as someone who doesn’t hate Urban Champion like most people do (I’m cool with playing it for a good 5-10 minutes), hearing that you traded Pro Wrestling for the game made me wince. Jerry pulled a fast one on you no doubt.
As a kid, my dad nearly bought me Deadly Towers because we didn't have online reviews back then and all we had to go with was the box, and he thought the box art looked cool. Thank goodness we never bought it, and went with 1943 instead
The Tyson story had nothing to do with his legal troubles, it had to do more with Nintendo didn't see a point in resigning him since he was an undisputed heavyweight champion and his price would've gone up. Anyway, nice video.
A note about Robocop 2: it appears to be a port of the Commodore C64 version, that came on cartridge instead of cassette and was considered incredibly good compared to these types of games that came before on the C64.
I actually liked Deadly Towers. I did consider it a "cheap" game (as we called them) but It was still fun for me and I drew maps & finished the game in a couple weeks.
Yeah, this is exactly what I did, too. If I was renting an NES game and it had Capcom or Konami stamped on it, it usually was pretty good. This especially rang true for the arcade games as well. _Usually_ first-party Nintendo titles were safe bets, too, but Nintendo did make some stinkers as well on their own system.
We did the same thing with PS1/2 games in the late 90s as well. There was one kid who would show up with his pockets full of games and reviews for each one of them.
I think the problem was that the companies would hire game designers that already had their own games designed in advanced or a rough idea of one and then given the task to "adapt" the IP to said games. So the games rarely resemble anything that's recognizable from the IP. In other words, they dig into their bag of generic games and slap on a few IP themed sprites and off they go.
When I was a kid I wrote a letter to Nintendo asking them if they'd reduce the price of NES carts because my mam couldn't afford them. They were about 50 quid over here in England which was expensive at the time (still is if I'm honest) I never got a reply lol.
Oh man, I love CLU CLU LAND! This was the only other game title, apart from Super Mario Bros, that my older sister would actually sit down and play with me, so I would practice for hours. We wasted so many hours of school holidays on that silly little game, its actually quite brilliant))
Just wanted to say - really appreciate you uploading these videos with proper Closed Captions in place (instead of the ones automatically generated by TH-cam)!
I bought this console on a trip to Japan way back in 1983 with two games the awfully repetitive Urban Champion but thankfully the second game was Mario Bros.
I was 7 years old when I got my first Nes and I remember my parents buying games that looked like fun on the box but sucked ass and I remember hearing the other kids at school bitching about saving up for weeks just to buy a crappy Nes game. I learned with a quickness that I didn't want to end up in that situation so I learned to rent games first before buying and believe me, doing that saved me money and time. 20 to 50 bucks in the 1987-88 era was a shit load of money and it took much longer to get then today. I glad that I was a 80s kid and experienced a time that will never be again, Saturday cartoons, REAL breakfast cereal and of course the Nes.
I remember renting deadly towers as a kid. My dad and I sat down to play it and it was so bad that we joked for years about how bad it was. My dad said he debated getting me it for Christmas just to mess with me.
Crazy you mentioned deadly towers. I borrowed that game for a few days and ended up losing it to another friend who took it from me. I had to pay 40.00 and lost zelda and punch out and was grounded for two weeks because of it. It was a lesson learned. I bought the game for 3.00 and have it in my collection because of that incident lol.
You made some really good picks. One stinker I remember was Tagin' Dragon. And Anticipation. Karate Champ was one of the 1st NES games I ever played. I assumed it was a good game even though I had played it. That was how mesmerized I was with the NES.
The first NES game (and also first video game ever) that I disliked was Mag Max. Ugly graphics, repetitive gameplay, etc., etc. The box art is awesome and I was nine years old. I took that game home from the rental store and learned the hard way how deceptive box art can be.
great work as always SLX keep it up. As for the the nes/famicom, yeah had a lot of stinkers on it. Going through a complete rom list all back in early 2000's showed me how broken/janky so many of these 8bit games where as a teenager.
So many fond memories of the "barter system" of cartridge borrowing in the 80's and early 90's...I remember the best borrow= Quackshot on Megadrive. Worst borrow = Robocop 2 on NES lmao
Yeah, the barter system was pretty great to try new games as a kid. Quackshot is a great borrow! I think the best barter I received from a friend was Ristar on the Genesis/Megadrive.
Indiana Jones & the last crusade was a childhood favorite. I always thought the tough combat was a punishment for not getting a whip kill to avoid the encounter. Bad programming mechanic but the soundtrack & branching paths always brought me back
Man this flooded me with nostalgia big time! I third grade (1993 for me) I remembered having traded Excitebike for Superman because I was hellbent on having a Superman game to go with my Batman game (kid logic) I obviously hated it and wanted to try and get Excitebike back but the kid ended up MOVING AWAY! I eventually convinced another kid to trade me Zelda 2 for Superman and a day later his mom drove up to the school demanding the office call my parents to bring the game up to the school. They brought me up to the office and that little shit was sitting there looking like he had been crying and wouldn't make eye contact with me. I had to call my mom at work to go get the game at home and bring it up to school. Of course, I got in double trouble because she had to leave work and found out I had been trading games away. It was a bad month for me lol.
You're not missing anything with the Famicom Disk System Transformers game. It's just as bad as the first. It's also crazy that Mystery of Comvoy requires the player to beat it twice! Once as Ultra Magnus then a second time as Rodimus Prime. Supposedly this game was made to help fill the game between season 2 and 3 of the G1 cartoon. As Transformers: The Movie hadn't premiered in Japan at that time.
At least transformers the headmasters added a health bar, imagine how much more difficult it would have been if it had its predecessor's one hit deaths.
Deadly Towers was a pretty good game. You need to grind it out and get some armor, and other items, you'll die often, but it is a great journey with 8 directional fluid movement and perfect controller response.
I remember renting Superman back in the 90s, we were getting our gas tank filled up and I saw they had a video game rental section. Add the fact that it didn't come with a manual and there was no internet so the game was extra difficult and perplexing to try and play through....I think the owner of the gas station must have had a bunch of bad games that his kid didn't like and so he put them up for rentals for some kids to pick up, and making his money back for the games that he bought which were garbage....🤣😂🤣 I was so frustrated and disappointed by the game....😁
Can't deny those are some dire titles. Some similar ordure includes BAD STREET BRAWLER, SUPER PITFALL CHUBBY CHERUB, MYSTERY QUEST and DASH GALAXY IN THE ALIEN ASYLUM. On the other end of the spectrum, TECHNOS SAMURAI is hella fun and definitely worth getting an English patch for.
Despite being on point about all these I still managed to have some fun with a couple of them. Helped a lot starting 1989 my local video store had a deal of 5 games for 5 nights for 5 dollars so I would get a huge mix of titles with the good often tempering the bad. Like I really enjoyed Superman but in hindsight a major reason for that was once it would annoy me I would just jump to whatever else I had rented.
URBAN CHAMPION was one of the first games I owned in early 1986. My brother and I had some fun with it, but it was clearly simplistic. You can't really fault Nintendo though. How many great VS fighters were out by 1984? Not many. Karate Champ I know I played before UC, had I not played that first I may have thought more of UC.
They also had to cram the entire game into a first generation famicom cartridge. You can't expect much content out of 24 kilobytes its seems. Though by the time it was rereleased in North America in 1986 it was clearly already obsolete.
If you put the time in memorizing Robocop 2, it's actually a great exciting game. Personally I did not care for the Robocop movies so I die not care a movie representation.
I HATED 3 Stooges. I remember getting cracked up at the Ghostbusters gag at the beginning, and then spending the next 24 hours trying to figure out WTF I had rented from the store.
I enjoyed that game, but it's certainly not a mind blowing game. The sad part is that it's Beam Software's best NES game... Yeah, they weren't exactly a software powerhouse. After all, they're the same guys that brought us the Back to the Future games on that system. After seeing the low quality stuff they released on that system, it makes me wonder how they managed to stick around for as long as they did.
Yup. The _Nintendo Seal of Quality_ meant absolutely nothing. Yeah, there were a lot of awful games on the NES and it was easy for kids to get burned by them. The problem was you were stuck with it if you were borrowing, renting, (or worse) owning. Luckily, the majority of time, I was able to avoid most of the trashware just by exposure to good games through friends and family.
The worst thing about Urban Champion is that Nintendo keeps rereleasing this dud when there are many other games in their vault more deserving that are lingering on their old hardware to this day.
I played Karate Champ at a friend's house and remember us having a lot of fun with it. Strange that I've got no recollection of the issues you showed here. Either there was more than one version, or my nostalgia must be working overtime.
Early in the life of the NES Karate Champ wouldn't have been horrible compared with whatever else was available. Games like Super Mario 3 and Battletoads came out much later.
Nintendo was willing to put their seal of quality on anything that didn't have crucifixes, boobies, or the ability to microwave a hamster like in Maniac Mansion. The only thing they cared about was that the check cleared.
Master System's Aladdin was actually good, a few auto scrolling levels and then it turns into a surprisingly decent platformer, especially compared to this.
The Robocop game makes me think of the movie game, Darkman. Hearing the SFX from Swamp Thing, I can tell it came from Akklaim and probably had the same engine they used for the Bart Vs. Simpsons games. What you might not know is that there's TWO Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade games. This one was the better of the two IMO. Something about it just made me dig in my heels and beat that awful game. One particular salty moment in it, I got to the section of the game where you walk on the tiles of letters spelling Jehovah. Being such a fan of the movie(I saw it like 5-7 times in the theatre) I remembered the scene where Indie almost fell down because in it's original spelling Jehovah's name began with and "I". I started with an I and immediately earned my game over.
I love that you’re doing this, I wish you would highlight one of the worst rental games you ever got. Lol there were so many times when I did my chores got my homework done on Friday and asked to go to the movie rental place for a game. Getting all set up and pushing on, only to have the game be a complete piece of garbage. That was your weekend plan lol
I agree with you on Deadly Towers. I borrowed that game from a friend back in the day and lost interest after only playing the game for about 30 minutes. I returned it to my buddy the next day. Oh and let's not forget some sadist put a time limit on entering the game save passwords.
@@xenofett7008 it's less horrible than it could've been. A 1 minute timer would've been more frustrating than a 5 minute one but I've definitely started a game, went to the password screen, and then did something else for sometime, and if there was a timer I definitely could be timed out while entering it
@@justanobody0 Yeah! Like I said I don't exactly remember what the precise time limit was, but I remember it was frustrating pressure entering the codes.
With mentioning RoboCop 2, I'm surprised you didn't bring up Darkman. Its gameplay was very similar with the slippery controls. But I didn't outright hate the game.
Wow, I remember the rampant swapping of games at my school and neighborhood, but never heard of permanent swapping of your games till now, for my area, it was always a week and almost always on friday or saturday, then the next week you traded back.
I gotta say the audacity of trying to fit the amazing sega Aladdin onto an 8 bit gets points just for how hard a transition that was for the period. That was a visual masterpiece and I would have sweated trying to make it even function on a smaller platform.
Great video Sega Lord X. Personally i would put Kid Icarus, as one of my least favourite NES Games maybe even my least favourite NES game innto this list. You should definetly make a part 2. P.S. you heard the man Jerry, give him his wrestling game back.
Aladdin looks like one of those late Master System games that came to Brazil really late, and was loved by people in Brazil because it was what they had. It also looks like it could be used in an argument about whether the "Sega version" or the "Nintendo version" of Aladdin is better... ;D
I agree with all of picks. I bought power punch II and treasue master(not on this list) at my local Blockbuster(tm). I hated both of these games. I always thought that Power Punch II was a tie in to movie called, Arena(1989)? Arena was a fun movie and the game that it reminded of......I was so wrong.
If you want to see a truly bad Transfomers game, check out the European game for the C64. It's a platform game where you have to find a bunch of cubes, and it's INCREDIBLY easy to die. In fact, I was never able to get anywhere in it. You have six different Transformers, and they were all usually dead in less than a minute.
My goodness, when I first watched this video with you talking about Aladdin, I had to scroll down a little to make sure I was reading the title of the video right. That Aladdin game literally looks like a game boy game. Yikes. Love your channel by the way.
I had a next door neighbor that owned Adventures of Dino Riki. I always thought his screams were attributed to his short temper. I dismissed that as an excuse after my turn to play it. I had another friend who owned LJN's X-Men. He also owned a Master System. We always played that instead. I had another neighbor who was way younger than me and he wanted to watch me play Hydlide. I was actually very good at it and I enjoyed playing it. It was years later that I heard it actually sucked.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I've always really enjoyed Urban Champion, even despite its simplicity. Single player gets kinda repetitive, but the multiplayer can be quite fun.
I've heard the Famicom Transformers game was made to cash in on the absence of the Transformers movie in Japan. They got a new season of the show years before the movie. So Japanese kids wouldn't understand why Optimus Prime was gone (he died in the movie). I guess you were supposed to play the game and find out Megatron killed him? But... there's nothing in the game that reveals that. Unless you count that one secret room with Megatron's tiny picture in the background? Was THAT supposed to be the big reveal? What?
Yays! I agree with the whole list, but at the beginning I saw Clu Clu Land, that was a pretty good game and glad it wasn't on your list. I rented most of the games for a buck and probably played them for 30 minutes or less. The only game I bought new was Deadly Towers, thinking it was a role playing game, and I always have to get my monies worth so I have to beat anything I buy and I couldn't beat that heap of trash. I bought Karate Champ for $5 used so no loss there, but they couldn't make the arcade version because the arcade game was just 2 joysticks, no buttons. It was better at the arcade, but still slow.
The sad reality is that the box art was usually better than the game
Yea, maybe if you were autistic.
Almost always.
The same can be said for almost any game especially when the Atari 2600 was popular
@@rayfincham1595 That was why Nintendo originally had the black boxes with screenshots of the gameplay on the box, so that there was no confusion with games that had box art that looked nothing like the game itself. Nintendo tried to do everything they could to disassociate themselves with the video game industry early on, after the market crash.
That's why I overall prefer the Sega Master system. It sure had some stinkers but their worst games are not as bad as the ones in this video for the NES
The worst thing as a kid was when your parents would surprise you with a game, but they had absolutely no concept of game quality. I remember one Christmas I received "Mega Man 3"...but the DOS version. I think they knew I liked Mega Man, but maannnnn I was soooo disappointed at the time. I look back now and think their heart was in the right place. 😅
I received The Great Waldo Search for Christmas from an Uncle and Aunt. They were trying their best and I love them- I still have it in my NES collection.
Like the one time as a kid I was having a really bad day so my mom rented me a snes game.
We loved the movie Wizard of Oz so she rented me that for snes. She had no way of knowing how good or bad the game would be. She just knew we loved the movie. I still enjoyed it because I wasn't about to not, but I didn't get very far lol.
to be fair that was basically a fangame that capcom bought the rights to so you can't be too hard on it.
@@polocatfan Why not? It is still a commercially sold game. A poor quality game is a poor quality game no matter who makes it. Fan game or not is irrelevant. I've seen fan games that were actually close to first-party quality, so that is a moot point.
For me it was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a Christmas gift. I forced myself to keep trying until I started making solid progress, but it wasn't fun and I never came close to beating it.
I applaud you for being able to keep this video to 22 minutes. NES was a great system but damn there was a lot of garbage on it.
Imagine how hard it would be to do one of these videos on PS2 and keep it short... almost all the games are shovelware lmao
same on game boy
🤣
@@graalcloud PS2 has a better ratio of good games. N64 has a small library which helps its ratio, only like 400 games and like 40-50 were good. PS2 has at least twice as many good games, but out of like 3000 that's actually fewer good games in terms of percentage.
PS2 is the best selling console of all time. It makes it appealing to shovelware developers.
The only two consoles i ever owned was PS2 and nes
A a kid who used his allowance to get games I think I played Robocop 2 so much I tricked myself into liking it 😅. I remember getting so good at ice skating around I could clear levels quickly.
Right it was Robocop on ice 🤣
@@FWDSUXARSE Talk about artistic license, lol, kinda different from the extremely slow lumbering Robocop from the films.
Please make a part 2. Hell, please do this topic for every console you owned back in the day. I'd love to see you do this for Sega CD. I'm pretty sure you did Saturn already, think I might go back and watch that one again. Great stuff, SLX!
Deadly Towers IS a deep and complex adventure, but it is also an absolute slog. Think Zelda Second Quest, but without the sword, only having the blue candle, everything takes you out in one hit, and you lose your rupees if you die. Also, the shops are all on the opposite corner of the map with all of the hardest enemies in between, and in order to get the wooden sword, you have to beat a room full of wizzrobes and darknuts with said blue candle. "Deep and complex" does not mean remotely fun or interesting. I grew up on it and can beat it legitimately, but I won't defend the game from those who detract it.
I'm not familiar with what you're comparing it to, but your description makes it sound really difficult at least from the beginning
I hope the password system works well for that game in saving progress
@@justanobody0 It cannot be understated just how underpowered you are at the beginning of the game. Many enemies take 20-30 hits to clear out of the way.
More like "large and unnecessarily convoluted and padded"
Why does he throw crotch daggers?
"Deep and complex".
I own about 200 NES games, on cartridge, and have played them all. Deadly Towers IS AWFUL! Your opinion, AWFUL!
Do a part 2, please!! I’d also like to see your least favorite Sega Master System games.
his least favorite Master System games will likely be filled with those bad titles from Virgin Games lol
He should do em for as many retro consoles/old PC as he can. like Atari 7800 , Sega master system, Sega Gen , C64 games , etc.. curious my self to see the dookie list lol
@@joezar33 C64 lmao, there's probably 2000+ of those...there's like what 7000 titles? 😁
Or least favorite 32X games!
I played Urban Champion back in the day. It came with a many-in-one cartridge. I can't imagine playing through 130 something round of that lol For me when the lady throws confetti, that game's as good as finished.
lol everyone had this crap, it used to come with those NES clones.
@@agauerm yeah I had an nes clone :D
Think he was hard on Urban Champion
The Dev we're probably going off Arcade High Score logic... it was the 80s fighting games weren't plan out all that perfectly yet
I applaud you for branching out into non-Sega videos. As long as you keep it retro i'm good - which I guess is everything south of the PS2 nowadays lol
Hate to say but even the PS2 can now be considered retro, or it is now starting to become retro.
"Typically, the term retro is given to items which are at least 20 years old."
@@Gatorade69 I keep forgetting how long ago my childhood actually is now.
@@clearspira *was. How long ago your childhood was :P
@@clearspira Same.
@@Gatorade69 if ps2 is retro then 80's console are vintage.
Mike Tyson's PunchOut is almost perfect. How can it be so good? It really is amazing when you think about how old it is but how it is still better than a bunch of the new stuff released today.
ikr
It's kinda crap
@@Vulpas Punch Out is better than the trash ass Steam Deck that's for sure
I'm okay with it being good as long as people don't think it's an actual boxing game. It's a rhythm and timing based game that features boxing.
@@burr1aj yea facts
Back in the day, I was the last of my friends and family to get an NES. Since I had already played Super Mario Bros. to death at their houses, I decided to get just a control deck and a game other than Super Mario Bros. The bad news was that I wanted Castlevania but it was out of stock and I was forced to blind purchase a different game. The good news was that my blind purchase was Mega Man 2.
Renting Video Games on weekends was no different than dating as a kid. Some nights were regrettable some were remarkable!
Robocop looks like it was originally made to be an entirely different game and was changed last minute to become a Robocop game by throwing in your main character and a few Robocop-style bosses. Nothing besides your main character looks like it was meant to be part of this franchise.
The second one sucked but the first one, based on the arcade game, was great.
I like the 1st Robocop game.
Swamp Thing also looks like it was a rebrand of an existing title after scoring a known property. Embarrassing and awful.
Theres albo Robocop 3,which is pretty nice.
Absolutely love your scathing yet at the same time professional reviews. I remember playing Toobin at the arcade on my birthday. The next day I was so excited to see it at the rental store. I was just crushed with disappointment and disbelief at how bad it was.
It was a painful experience gaming in the 80s, finding a good game was like winning the lottery.
Exactly!!! A lot of the time all you had was the box art and whatever was on the back of the box. After a while you kinda learned that first party games and those from publishers like Konami and Capcom were usually a pretty safe bet but even they put out occasional duds. My first NES blind buy with my own money was Mega Man 2 so I pretty much hit the power ball with that selection since at the time it was arguably the best game for the console at the time.
I had a neighbor that had Aladdin on the NES and he was really let down by the game and even more so after seeing Aladdin on my Sega Master System, which wasn't a simple port but an entire different game on it's own which even follows the movie more closely.
Even as someone who doesn’t hate Urban Champion like most people do (I’m cool with playing it for a good 5-10 minutes), hearing that you traded Pro Wrestling for the game made me wince. Jerry pulled a fast one on you no doubt.
As a kid, my dad nearly bought me Deadly Towers because we didn't have online reviews back then and all we had to go with was the box, and he thought the box art looked cool. Thank goodness we never bought it, and went with 1943 instead
The Tyson story had nothing to do with his legal troubles, it had to do more with Nintendo didn't see a point in resigning him since he was an undisputed heavyweight champion and his price would've gone up.
Anyway, nice video.
A note about Robocop 2: it appears to be a port of the Commodore C64 version, that came on cartridge instead of cassette and was considered incredibly good compared to these types of games that came before on the C64.
I actually liked Deadly Towers. I did consider it a "cheap" game (as we called them) but It was still fun for me and I drew maps & finished the game in a couple weeks.
One of my favorite Chanel on TH-cam Sega Lord x
Thank you.
Funny how “Super game” made a better bootleg version of Aladdin then the official one
As kids my brother and I went to the game store we knew if we saw a Capcom or Konami on the box that was probably going to be good
Yeah, this is exactly what I did, too. If I was renting an NES game and it had Capcom or Konami stamped on it, it usually was pretty good. This especially rang true for the arcade games as well. _Usually_ first-party Nintendo titles were safe bets, too, but Nintendo did make some stinkers as well on their own system.
I remember when we used to trade nes games in school lol...many moons ago. I wish kids these days could experience the 80s and how we did things 👍
We did the same thing with PS1/2 games in the late 90s as well. There was one kid who would show up with his pockets full of games and reviews for each one of them.
@@psycomutt 👍 nice
I think the problem was that the companies would hire game designers that already had their own games designed in advanced or a rough idea of one and then given the task to "adapt" the IP to said games. So the games rarely resemble anything that's recognizable from the IP. In other words, they dig into their bag of generic games and slap on a few IP themed sprites and off they go.
When I was a kid I wrote a letter to Nintendo asking them if they'd reduce the price of NES carts because my mam couldn't afford them. They were about 50 quid over here in England which was expensive at the time (still is if I'm honest)
I never got a reply lol.
Oh man, I love CLU CLU LAND! This was the only other game title, apart from Super Mario Bros, that my older sister would actually sit down and play with me, so I would practice for hours.
We wasted so many hours of school holidays on that silly little game, its actually quite brilliant))
Notice that a lot of the NES games on this list were poor interpretations of movies or IP licences.
Just wanted to say - really appreciate you uploading these videos with proper Closed Captions in place (instead of the ones automatically generated by TH-cam)!
I was looking for one of the 4 abysmal WWF games! I can't believe you didn't cover one LOL
I bought this console on a trip to Japan way back in 1983 with two games the awfully repetitive Urban Champion but thankfully the second game was Mario Bros.
that aladdin for nes really feels like a homebrew that some random guy made while learning the tools of the trade...
I was 7 years old when I got my first Nes and I remember my parents buying games that looked like fun on the box but sucked ass and I remember hearing the other kids at school bitching about saving up for weeks just to buy a crappy Nes game. I learned with a quickness that I didn't want to end up in that situation so I learned to rent games first before buying and believe me, doing that saved me money and time. 20 to 50 bucks in the 1987-88 era was a shit load of money and it took much longer to get then today. I glad that I was a 80s kid and experienced a time that will never be again, Saturday cartoons, REAL breakfast cereal and of course the Nes.
I remember renting Superman at Blockbuster Video. Man that game was abysmal, but gave me a quick lesson in the value of money and how to spend it.
I remember renting deadly towers as a kid. My dad and I sat down to play it and it was so bad that we joked for years about how bad it was. My dad said he debated getting me it for Christmas just to mess with me.
I am mini triggered by Bad Dudes being in the intro that was my jam. The ending made my friend and I die of laughter back in the day.
Same...Bad Dudes wasn't that bad.
The games shown in the beginning were to set up the video. There was no commentary meant for their quality.
Superman NES - "I'm a terrible game."
Superman 64 - "Hold my beer."
Horrendous though it was, at least Titus designed Superman accurately.
Crazy you mentioned deadly towers. I borrowed that game for a few days and ended up losing it to another friend who took it from me. I had to pay 40.00 and lost zelda and punch out and was grounded for two weeks because of it. It was a lesson learned. I bought the game for 3.00 and have it in my collection because of that incident lol.
You made some really good picks. One stinker I remember was Tagin' Dragon. And Anticipation. Karate Champ was one of the 1st NES games I ever played. I assumed it was a good game even though I had played it. That was how mesmerized I was with the NES.
The first NES game (and also first video game ever) that I disliked was Mag Max. Ugly graphics, repetitive gameplay, etc., etc. The box art is awesome and I was nine years old. I took that game home from the rental store and learned the hard way how deceptive box art can be.
Back to the Future was probably my least favorite. trying to avoid obstacles was tough and the mini-games were hard to come by.
great work as always SLX keep it up. As for the the nes/famicom, yeah had a lot of stinkers on it. Going through a complete rom list all back in early 2000's showed me how broken/janky so many of these 8bit games where as a teenager.
So many fond memories of the "barter system" of cartridge borrowing in the 80's and early 90's...I remember the best borrow= Quackshot on Megadrive. Worst borrow = Robocop 2 on NES lmao
Yeah, the barter system was pretty great to try new games as a kid. Quackshot is a great borrow! I think the best barter I received from a friend was Ristar on the Genesis/Megadrive.
Indiana Jones & the last crusade was a childhood favorite. I always thought the tough combat was a punishment for not getting a whip kill to avoid the encounter. Bad programming mechanic but the soundtrack & branching paths always brought me back
Man this flooded me with nostalgia big time! I third grade (1993 for me) I remembered having traded Excitebike for Superman because I was hellbent on having a Superman game to go with my Batman game (kid logic) I obviously hated it and wanted to try and get Excitebike back but the kid ended up MOVING AWAY! I eventually convinced another kid to trade me Zelda 2 for Superman and a day later his mom drove up to the school demanding the office call my parents to bring the game up to the school. They brought me up to the office and that little shit was sitting there looking like he had been crying and wouldn't make eye contact with me. I had to call my mom at work to go get the game at home and bring it up to school. Of course, I got in double trouble because she had to leave work and found out I had been trading games away. It was a bad month for me lol.
You're not missing anything with the Famicom Disk System Transformers game. It's just as bad as the first. It's also crazy that Mystery of Comvoy requires the player to beat it twice! Once as Ultra Magnus then a second time as Rodimus Prime. Supposedly this game was made to help fill the game between season 2 and 3 of the G1 cartoon. As Transformers: The Movie hadn't premiered in Japan at that time.
At least transformers the headmasters added a health bar, imagine how much more difficult it would have been if it had its predecessor's one hit deaths.
Deadly Towers was a pretty good game. You need to grind it out and get some armor, and other items, you'll die often, but it is a great journey with 8 directional fluid movement and perfect controller response.
I raise my hand to "Who bought Robocop 2 for NES?" And I completely agree with your assessment of the game, @Sega Lord X
I remember renting Superman back in the 90s, we were getting our gas tank filled up and I saw they had a video game rental section. Add the fact that it didn't come with a manual and there was no internet so the game was extra difficult and perplexing to try and play through....I think the owner of the gas station must have had a bunch of bad games that his kid didn't like and so he put them up for rentals for some kids to pick up, and making his money back for the games that he bought which were garbage....🤣😂🤣 I was so frustrated and disappointed by the game....😁
Please keep this series going because you've just saved me some serious time and energy on these bad games. My low point was playing Robocop 2...
Can't deny those are some dire titles. Some similar ordure includes BAD STREET BRAWLER, SUPER PITFALL CHUBBY CHERUB, MYSTERY QUEST and DASH GALAXY IN THE ALIEN ASYLUM. On the other end of the spectrum, TECHNOS SAMURAI is hella fun and definitely worth getting an English patch for.
I'd definitely like to see you tackle more in a future video. Always great to see you break out in some variety
Despite being on point about all these I still managed to have some fun with a couple of them. Helped a lot starting 1989 my local video store had a deal of 5 games for 5 nights for 5 dollars so I would get a huge mix of titles with the good often tempering the bad. Like I really enjoyed Superman but in hindsight a major reason for that was once it would annoy me I would just jump to whatever else I had rented.
I used to LOVE Bad Dudes when I was 10. Going back to it today is rough, though thankfully the arcade version is easily available.
4:05: That quote! I see what you did there :-D
Nice content, as always.
URBAN CHAMPION was one of the first games I owned in early 1986. My brother and I had some fun with it, but it was clearly simplistic. You can't really fault Nintendo though. How many great VS fighters were out by 1984? Not many. Karate Champ I know I played before UC, had I not played that first I may have thought more of UC.
They also had to cram the entire game into a first generation famicom cartridge. You can't expect much content out of 24 kilobytes its seems. Though by the time it was rereleased in North America in 1986 it was clearly already obsolete.
1986, on the NES, when this came out, there was no other option for a two player fighting game. So there really wasn't much to compare it to.
If you put the time in memorizing Robocop 2, it's actually a great exciting game.
Personally I did not care for the Robocop movies so I die not care a movie representation.
I HATED 3 Stooges. I remember getting cracked up at the Ghostbusters gag at the beginning, and then spending the next 24 hours trying to figure out WTF I had rented from the store.
I enjoyed that game, but it's certainly not a mind blowing game.
The sad part is that it's Beam Software's best NES game... Yeah, they weren't exactly a software powerhouse. After all, they're the same guys that brought us the Back to the Future games on that system.
After seeing the low quality stuff they released on that system, it makes me wonder how they managed to stick around for as long as they did.
Yup. The _Nintendo Seal of Quality_ meant absolutely nothing. Yeah, there were a lot of awful games on the NES and it was easy for kids to get burned by them. The problem was you were stuck with it if you were borrowing, renting, (or worse) owning. Luckily, the majority of time, I was able to avoid most of the trashware just by exposure to good games through friends and family.
A new series has born. Waiting for part 2 and beyong
I loved the Karate Champ arcade. I’m glad my friend got the nes game before i did. Bullet dodged
Virgin did a better job with the Genesis version of Aladdin.
I honestly thought the NES version was a bootleg all these years. It looks like a bad port of a Gameboy Color game.
@@LorenHelgeson Funnily enough, the bootleg one is way better than that one.
I love that you're using the Streets of Desolation theme from Batman! Such a slapper!
Yes, please do a part 2 to this, especially with other systems!
The worst thing about Urban Champion is that Nintendo keeps rereleasing this dud when there are many other games in their vault more deserving that are lingering on their old hardware to this day.
I played Karate Champ at a friend's house and remember us having a lot of fun with it. Strange that I've got no recollection of the issues you showed here. Either there was more than one version, or my nostalgia must be working overtime.
Early in the life of the NES Karate Champ wouldn't have been horrible compared with whatever else was available. Games like Super Mario 3 and Battletoads came out much later.
Aladdin by NMS was developer by EUR devs for the UK market. This slow moving game was probably considered "normal speed" by PAL standards.
I grew up in PAL territory and let me tell you: No, it was not considered "normal speed" over here.
The game boy port of Aladdin is better. Just shows how bad the NES port was.
Nintendo was willing to put their seal of quality on anything that didn't have crucifixes, boobies, or the ability to microwave a hamster like in Maniac Mansion. The only thing they cared about was that the check cleared.
For one Christmas, one brother received 1943, another Gradius. I was stuck with Hydlide. Wheeeeee!
The way you talk about bad games in a subtle but demeaning tone always cracks me up 🤣🤣
Brings me back to when you reviewed Barney
Master System's Aladdin was actually good, a few auto scrolling levels and then it turns into a surprisingly decent platformer, especially compared to this.
I do enjoy a good garbage list. We can all relate to it and think of our own experiences getting burned when a rental or a trade.
The Robocop game makes me think of the movie game, Darkman. Hearing the SFX from Swamp Thing, I can tell it came from Akklaim and probably had the same engine they used for the Bart Vs. Simpsons games. What you might not know is that there's TWO Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade games. This one was the better of the two IMO. Something about it just made me dig in my heels and beat that awful game. One particular salty moment in it, I got to the section of the game where you walk on the tiles of letters spelling Jehovah. Being such a fan of the movie(I saw it like 5-7 times in the theatre) I remembered the scene where Indie almost fell down because in it's original spelling Jehovah's name began with and "I". I started with an I and immediately earned my game over.
Damn you reminded me of The Swamp Thing movie. I loved this movie so much as a kid, especially Adrienne Barbeau. lol
I love that you’re doing this, I wish you would highlight one of the worst rental games you ever got. Lol there were so many times when I did my chores got my homework done on Friday and asked to go to the movie rental place for a game. Getting all set up and pushing on, only to have the game be a complete piece of garbage. That was your weekend plan lol
The mountains backdrop in Transformers look well drawn 😉
Fact: The Japanese Famicom version of Superman is based on the Christopher Reeve movie and uses the 8-bit rendition of the John Williams score.
I agree with you on Deadly Towers. I borrowed that game from a friend back in the day and lost interest after only playing the game for about 30 minutes. I returned it to my buddy the next day. Oh and let's not forget some sadist put a time limit on entering the game save passwords.
how long is the time limit on entering passwords
@@justanobody0 I can't exactly remember. This was way back in 1988. Probably around 5 minutes or so.
@@xenofett7008 it's less horrible than it could've been.
A 1 minute timer would've been more frustrating than a 5 minute one
but I've definitely started a game, went to the password screen, and then did something else for sometime, and if there was a timer I definitely could be timed out while entering it
@@justanobody0 Yeah! Like I said I don't exactly remember what the precise time limit was, but I remember it was frustrating pressure entering the codes.
I'm really enjoying seeing all these new Sega Lord X notification of new videos!
That Transformers music is so familiar. I feel like it was in an old Screw Attack bumper or something.
With mentioning RoboCop 2, I'm surprised you didn't bring up Darkman. Its gameplay was very similar with the slippery controls. But I didn't outright hate the game.
I'll admit, that "Ripped" Deadly Towers cartridge art cover got me as a kid 😄
Wow, I remember the rampant swapping of games at my school and neighborhood, but never
heard of permanent swapping of your games till now, for my area, it was always a week
and almost always on friday or saturday, then the next week you traded back.
I gotta say the audacity of trying to fit the amazing sega Aladdin onto an 8 bit gets points just for how hard a transition that was for the period. That was a visual masterpiece and I would have sweated trying to make it even function on a smaller platform.
Great video Sega Lord X.
Personally i would put Kid Icarus, as one of my least favourite NES Games maybe even my least favourite NES game innto this list.
You should definetly make a part 2.
P.S. you heard the man Jerry, give him his wrestling game back.
Game is fantastic you must be talking about one of the other 600+ games that are worse that Kid Icarus.
Aladdin looks like one of those late Master System games that came to Brazil really late, and was loved by people in Brazil because it was what they had.
It also looks like it could be used in an argument about whether the "Sega version" or the "Nintendo version" of Aladdin is better... ;D
I agree with all of picks. I bought power punch II and treasue master(not on this list) at my local Blockbuster(tm). I hated both of these games. I always thought that Power Punch II was a tie in to movie called, Arena(1989)? Arena was a fun movie and the game that it reminded of......I was so wrong.
The NES is my favorite console of all time (followed by the Genesis), but yeah, there was definitely a ton of shovelware on the NES.
If you want to see a truly bad Transfomers game, check out the European game for the C64. It's a platform game where you have to find a bunch of cubes, and it's INCREDIBLY easy to die. In fact, I was never able to get anywhere in it. You have six different Transformers, and they were all usually dead in less than a minute.
My goodness, when I first watched this video with you talking about Aladdin, I had to scroll down a little to make sure I was reading the title of the video right. That Aladdin game literally looks like a game boy game. Yikes. Love your channel by the way.
These type games made me so mad when you'd spend money on them based on the cool box art only to discover that the game was borderline unplayable
For some reason, I kept coming back to play Urban Champion. Is there some sort of ending that is there after completing like 130 rounds?
I had a next door neighbor that owned Adventures of Dino Riki. I always thought his screams were attributed to his short temper. I dismissed that as an excuse after my turn to play it.
I had another friend who owned LJN's X-Men. He also owned a Master System. We always played that instead.
I had another neighbor who was way younger than me and he wanted to watch me play Hydlide. I was actually very good at it and I enjoyed playing it. It was years later that I heard it actually sucked.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I've always really enjoyed Urban Champion, even despite its simplicity.
Single player gets kinda repetitive, but the multiplayer can be quite fun.
Most of my disasters were rentals, thankfully. And I rented plenty! Mystery Quest, 8 Eyes, Super Pitfall, and Hydlide were some of the worst.
I've heard the Famicom Transformers game was made to cash in on the absence of the Transformers movie in Japan. They got a new season of the show years before the movie. So Japanese kids wouldn't understand why Optimus Prime was gone (he died in the movie). I guess you were supposed to play the game and find out Megatron killed him? But... there's nothing in the game that reveals that. Unless you count that one secret room with Megatron's tiny picture in the background? Was THAT supposed to be the big reveal? What?
LOL at the story with Jerry. He got you!
Robocop 2 doesn't look so bad. But probably should have called it Skatecop 2 or something.
Yays! I agree with the whole list, but at the beginning I saw Clu Clu Land, that was a pretty good game and glad it wasn't on your list. I rented most of the games for a buck and probably played them for 30 minutes or less. The only game I bought new was Deadly Towers, thinking it was a role playing game, and I always have to get my monies worth so I have to beat anything I buy and I couldn't beat that heap of trash. I bought Karate Champ for $5 used so no loss there, but they couldn't make the arcade version because the arcade game was just 2 joysticks, no buttons. It was better at the arcade, but still slow.
you're just not good enough to beat a deep & complex NES game sorry
Someone gave me "Taboo: The Sixth Sense" for Christmas, when I was 8. It might as well have been a lump of coal.