I say the wrong number in a few spots.. It's a long story, basically I counted something twice on accident and didn't realize it until late, didn't think to readjust my voice over. Uploaded the video and immediately left town to go on a trip, so I can't fix it.
Also, I swear that 94% of all reviews are from Australian/English/Welsh/Irish/Scottish people who never played anything besides the Spectrum or, (if they are young,) the XBox.
Well that's part of the charm behind don't trust anyone who needs a haircut I suppose.. I say leave em in. Don't aim for them, but don't bother to edit either.. idk though, don't trust a guy with fake teeth.
One of my favorite cosplays I ever encountered was a guy dressed as NES Jason, with purple jumpsuit and teal mask and gloves. He posed with me for a photo and gave me a round sticker that says "YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD. GAME OVER."
As long as one counsellor and one kid was still alive, you'd win after defeating Jason! Although, I think "win" is kind of a loose term here. All of your friends have been butchered and you have to explain to 11 angry families (and law enforcement) how all those kids were murdered while under your watch....
Given that you almost certainly didn't survive without taking a hit or two I am sure all of the people that lost their children will be understanding. Even Pamela Voorhees might have been, it isn't like you were making out with Crissy in the woods while all this was going on, right Mark?
i don't lkke using chrissy and mark because they jump too high and are hard to control. I always won with laura. The trope is called "final girl" for a reason.
ok, this is hilarious. I rewatched the SNES video and was like "I wonder if he made anymore of these videos." And lo-and-behold, I find that you released a new one less than an hour ago.
Some of these scores will be inflated, not only because of the "AVGN factor", but also because of the "disappointment factor". For instance, imagine you're the biggest Ghostbusters fan in the world-- you watch the movies every other day, you own most of the toys, watch the cartoon religiously, eat the cereal, etc.-- and then you play Ghostbusters on NES and it breaks your heart into pieces; it's nothing that you wanted a Ghostbusters game to be. I suspect if a game *REALLY* disappointed someone, they're more likely to rank it as "worse" than some forgettable, no-name game that is deservingly worse.
the results of both this video and the snes one remind me of camwing's video on the few games to recieve the "Overwhelmingly negative" review rating on steam. In order to get an overwhelmingly negative or positive rating, you have to have a minimum number of reviews, so overwhelmingly negative isn't actually populated with the worst games on the platform, those don't get enough players. overwhelmingly negative is mostly full of games from beloved multimedia franchises, and incomplete and abandoned kickstarter games.
yeah, Disappointment is a factor in reviews. personally i grew up with the Master System version, which was better. but in the end, Ghostbusters on NES DOES suck.
@@UltimateGamerCC same here with the master system-- first video game I ever played was Alex Kidd in Miracle World. My cousins had Ghostbusters and I played the mess out of it when they visited and brought it over.
The reason why Jekyll and Hyde works in such a weird way (speeding up with more happening on screen) is quite fascinating. There's a youtuber that goes by the name Displaced Gamers. He made 2 videos explaining how that game works under the hood, and it's quite unconventional, to say the least. Old games were very janky sometimes.
His analysis is awesome. Deserves to be preserved like any scientific journal publication, since he's sort of doing a historical analysis of gaming software development.
Its rather unfortunate in a lot of ways. People see AVGN as a reviewer or something, but they themselves have said many times that AVGN is just an exaggerated character that doesn't actually represent their own views about these games. Both have said in the past that they don't think Silver Surfer or Turtles are even actually bad games, I have a feeling Mike Matei likes Friday the 13th as well but I may be wrong.
Fond memories of Barbie on the NES. My little sister couldn't beat the game but wanted to see it so I set out to finish it for her. Did the same with Lion King on the SNES. Bad games can still have some good memories attached to em.
@@eightcoins4401 It was, but it wasn't very uncommon for games of that era. A lot of NES games, good or bad, were pretty brutal, usually due to a combination of knowledge checks and absolute Game Overs when you ran out of lives, same as Barbie does. The concept of 'casual' gaming, even in a very casual theme like Barbie, hadn't really been invented yet.
i'm going to guess that Dark Castle will be #1 with his formula there, and Awesome Possum & Slaughter Sport will also be in the top 5. X-Perts and Sword of Sodan should be easy top 10 as well, possibly Heavy Nova too.
@@scottdorsch5149 That's basically what the speedrun is. A few people have beat it without glitching it but most people just get the wet bandits stuck and wait for the timer to run out. I heard someone say they can save a couple lag frames but the speedrun board (thankfully) doesn't do frames, just whole seconds.
@@scottdorsch5149 If you ever wanted to get a (tied) speedrun WR, it's a pretty good option. The trick isn't too difficult, although it's easy to screw up. Or you can just beat it straight-up if you wanna flex on a couple hundred people :D
21:09 As someone who is in the know, the problem is that old school shmups like Silver Surfer were difficult purely because of memorization. The game is just a huge beginner's trap with hazards too fast to react, so you have to learn everything through trial and error. But once you know in advance what's supposed to kill you and how to dodge, it's not bad. Getting sent back to a checkpoint on every death is annoying, but even at the time there were shmups like Gradius with far more brutal checkpoints that practically asked you to beat the game without dying once. By the mid 90s, shmups had already evolved to not rely on raw memorization and instead actually push your skills with intricate patterns and complex scoring systems. Silver Surfer has a brutal skill floor and a low skill ceiling, while bullet hells are the opposite. It's not an easy game by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to what shmups have become, it is indeed kind of a meme. Music slaps tho
It was a terrible shmup even for the time. It came out 3 years after R-Type. It doesn't do anything interesting or new. It's just a basic af shmup with RECOGNIZABLE IP!!!! paint slapped on. Even for "memorization era" shmups its boring af. But atleast it wasn't weeabo garbage. I like my shmups to be dark and gritty, but nowadays 90% of them are uwu kawaii :3 chinese cartoon trash. Makes them pretty much worthless unless you're a coomer.
@@eightcoins4401 You could say that being able to select your stage route was relatively new for the genre. Yes, it doesn't hold a candle to R-Type, but back then very few games did. Not saying it's a good game, but the points that everyone criticizes it (checkpoints, contact damage, lack of a turbo button) were also present for almost all shmups at the time. And for an 8 bit game, it looks good and sounds amazing. Also, L take for the gritty aesthetics. People don't want to look at the same generic ships and space setting all the time.
Bootsy from Cinemassacre beat this game a while back. Without a Turbo controller. Also, endless praise to Tim Follin for the music, truly the most overqualified person for the job
I hope you were referring to the rendition of that song from the golf game. That's Passepied by Debussy, and it's been featured in a ton of games, was massive inspiration for the overworld tune in DQ, and was featured in Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge.
5:48 wow! That's a classical piano piece by Claude Debussy called Passpied, and it's the second time I've heard it in a video game! The first was Castlevania 2 for the Game Boy, where it sounds MUCH better.
Thanks for this list! It unfortunately highlights a fact: people should stop watching angry / comedic reviews of games and take them at face value. For two main reasons: 1) Those reviews are made to be entertaining, not factual. They will probably exaggerate a lot of details or issues, and will skip boring or mediocre games altogether, since they wouldn't make for good material. 2) Those reviews usually do not explain the context in which the games were published, and as such they usually penalize games that were innovative, or ahead of their time. Critiques are a conundrum in and of themselves, because they can artificially color the public perception of a "product", and even change its legacy and memory. But at the very least, angry / comedic reviews should have the least sway because of their very nature.
Agree on 1) and that's how Karate Kid looked worse than it is because James ran into enemies to make it look more frustrating, he said he never done it since. Hard disagree with early AVGN on 2) because ambition is worth jack shit when the context is a kid without hintbook and internet unable to land that plane / find that whirlwind / jump over that gap. If anything it's modern reviewers who take game's history and have 20 years of collective walkthroughs and speedrunning experience stacked who get the wrong picture of how the game would be played back then. So likes of Top Gun, TNMT, Castlevania 2 and clumsy NES RPGs get way HIGHER scores now than they deserve based on the context they would be played. You know, without a walkthrough.
@@KasumiRINAwell, Castlevania 2 and TMNT 1 were really entertaining for the time for the first hour or two at least. You started a new game, played until the point you always got stuck, and accepted that as fun. Some kids did anyways. It's not like there were many significantly better games available to most kids at the time. I see the criticism of games like these is part because they could have been so much better if the developers spent a few more months to patch things up. Lost potential. Cv2 with the latest romhack patch is 10x better.
The worst NES game I’ve played is Ghostbusters. Normally, I would sell games that I don’t like, but I’ve held on to that one because I occasionally like to remind myself how shitty it is.
@@jhudsu1 Metal Gear on NES is not S tier, unless the S means Shit. It's one of the worst games ever made, so bad that Kojima disowns it. It has barely anything to do with the game he actually made for the MSX.
While I do consider Infiltrator to be a bad game, and it is; it's VERY in depth and definitely worth a play... it doesn't really feel like a proper game until you already know what all the mechanics mean.
Rambo actually blew my mind as a kid. I first played it at a friends house, which was also where I played the NES for the first time. All of my previous video game experience had come from the arcade and Atari 2600, and I thought it was incredible that your character actually spoke to other characters in the game and that you were even able to choose what you wanted to say during the introduction. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the first time I encountered an NPC in a video game. Even though Rambo is a 'meh' game in hindsight, it was a huge step up from Missile Command and Asteroids on the 2600.
Should have linked the Super Nintendo video so we could go look up your method directly. Instead I had to go Graves digging and you had to read this bad pun.
Man I forgot all about Seanbaby, he really is the OG in this sphere. I remember finding his website in the 90's when I first got an internet connection.
He's still around! Has done a lot more MMA and "dunk on MAGAs" stuff than gaming though - he was a guest on the Behind the Bastards podcasts on Vince McMahon.
@@joshthefunkdoc obligatory *points a finger and laughs* at "drain the swamp" types giving education system to McMahon family and "taking power from establishment" by installing another Kennedy.
10:25 Boi, this is a classic action RPG. Starter weapon sucks because that's the point, you are supposed to get better one on the next screen. Athena was so legendary she still appears in SNK stuff, and Athena Asamiya from KoF is her descendant. P.S. I head NES port sucks, but it was released on PSP and PSN, I played it on PS3 of all things.
“a lot of bad games become enjoyable once you learn all the ins and outs of them” omg yes! Let’s put that on a t-shirt! It’s something my cousin and I were saying in the early 90s 😂
Stylized graphics are cute. Game itself was fun for a few minutes it has only two buttons but one of those is running the ropes and it felt like bouncing on rubber lol. But really, NES had only two fighting games worth the name: Urban Champion and Yie Ar Kung Fu.
Bad games then were so much easier to live with than bad games now. Maybe it's the knowledge that many years and hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted that makes them so hard to comprehend in the modern era, and back then it was like five guys in an office quickly throwing something together to fill out a contract. E.T 2600 was a five week project from start to finish and the poor guy worked his best to make something in that short time, like. Top notch vid, really tickling my creative senses and inspiring me to create something from up here in the arctic circle.
E.T. 2600: 5 weeks of development, 20-25 million dollar budget (63-79 when adjusted for inflation, plus maybe a little more for manufacturing costs) Concord: 8 years of development, 400 million dollar budget
I did, but I loved the game. It's one of my top 5 favorite NES games. The music was great, traversal across the maps was novel and fun, and although the controls take getting used to, once you do, its good fun. Sure, it gets pretty hard, especially the last level, but proper resource management makes it a doable affair. As stated in the video, it's better than the beat-em ups that came after it. It's a game I always went back to, while TMNT II: the Arcade Game and TMNT III: The Manhattan Project collected dust once I beat them.
Another point about Silver Surfer is that it has a kickass soundtrack, top 10 on the NES imo. Seriously, go listen to it. Same composer who did Plok btw. Great video Jason, I really dig this series, you should do it for more consoles.
This comment will probably get buried, but I wanted to add in my input. I've tried 570~580 NES games so far (550+ on an emulator) as one of my goals is to at least try every licensed NES game. I won't add my input on every game that'd be too long of a comment, but I'll insert some. I also rate each game (subjective of course & sometimes write a reason why, sometimes I don't). Here's some I found funny after watching your video & then seeing what I wrote about them/rated them. "NFL Football: 2/10. Game has no proper pause function, movement is extremely slow as well as boring, when calling plays a screen does not come up showing the plays. Does have 3 effective difficulty levels as you can give yourself up to two handicaps. Works better than the other games I’ve rated a 2, but it is less fun than all of them." "Winter Games: 4.5/10. Hot Dog Aerials: 6.3 Speed Skating: 0:53.6 Figure Skating: 0.0 Bobsled: 66.57." - Had to add this since you said you couldn't figure out how to get a score in Figure Skating, I couldn't either, haha. "Harlem Globetrotters: 3.5/10. Stealing & Blocking controls seem janky, Select & Start are action buttons for some reason. Lost 10-32 on Rookie Difficulty, 2 minute quarters." - For reference I gave Double Dribble a 5/10, Globetrotters was worse for sure. "Renegade: 6/10. Beat game on difficulty 1 of 3, Score: 180950. Mission 4, Difficulty 2 of 3, Score: 180150." - Probably unpopular but imo it was just as good as Double Dragon & DD III, I also found it easier as I beat it, but didn't beat those. DD II is better than any of the others, I gave that a 7. "Conan: 3.5/10. Some rough controls (up to jump, down also jumps, hold kick button then press up for a jump kick, etc.), rough mechanics (jump being an animation where you can’t change direction mid-jump) & lazy graphics (looks like graphics from 5+ years in the past). Level 1, Score: 730." Comments continued as replies to myself, lol.
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: 7.5/10. Level 3 (1 Round of Missiles Found): 96000. *Runner-Up NES game 1989*" - I'm not sure all my years are correct, but for what I had for games released in 1989 this was my 2nd favorite behind DuckTales (8/10). As a side note you mentioned the 2 Beat 'em Up follow ups, I gave TMNT II a 6/10, but I gave TMNT III a 8.5/10. For me it's by far the best Beat 'em Up on the system & is in my top 6 games (only 6 games out of the 575ish I've tried so far got a 8.5+/10, I'm a very harsh rate both on the low scale & the high scale, like a 1/10 or a 9/10 is a super rare rating where a game is either near the worst thing possible or an absolute masterpiece). "Back to the Future Part II & III: 5.0/10. The game lacks some basic understanding of how a platformer works (The game can spawn kill you over a hole after a life is lost for example). Score: 820." I often write out hints or how far I get like in the next entry. "Friday the 13th: 6.5/10. ~9 health taken off of Jason. Found 2 of the 3 Forest Cabins, only used a key on one of them. Go into the Cabin, near the Cave. There’s a Machete in a Cabin in the middle of the Woods. Go into one of the Cabins by the Lake. George: Slow. Mark: Fast. Paul: Slow. Laura: Average. Debbie: Slow. Crissy: Fast." - In my harsh rating system a 6.5 basically equates to "good", so it's not "great", but it's enjoyable & any game 6.5 or higher is likely in my top 150ish games or maybe even top 100. Can definitely see the "AVGN effect" as we get closer to the top 10. "Karate Champ: 2/10. Score: 300, can’t beat a single opponent. Controls are terribad, B -> kicks backwards while B
"Ghostbusters: 3/10. Game uses the opposite of logic. Caught 1 Ghost. Sometimes buildings blink when you have an alarm, sometimes they blink without an alarm, sometimes they don’t blink at all, and catching controls are bad." "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: 5.5/10. Stage 4 (Park)." - It was so average I didn't even expand upon my rating, it didn't feel bad to me, it didn't feel good either. Out of the 575ish games I've tried it'd probably be somewhere around 250th if I actually ranked them all. Doesn't deserve the amount of hate it gets though. It's taken me over 4 years to try 80% of the NES games, once I'm done that I plan to try every SNES game as well, so probably in 6 years you're going to get another long comment chain on your SNES video, lol.
Your videos are freaking great Jason. So glad you make all this stuff: I know you are hard on yourself but you kill it as much or more than the people you look up to
I think it would be fun to see the games that got single votes, thus didn’t make the list, and see if you think it should have. I think in a lot of cases it will just be lack of awareness, but that is sort of interesting in and of itself.
I think I must add some notes here to the lore for the young'uns who didn't grow up in the 80s/90s. In the late 80s and early 90s, renting video games was a big thing. Before you discovered things like girls and cars, you'd spend the weekend playing video games on your Sega or NES. And since most of us had no money to buy new video games every weekend, we'd go to the local video store (yes those were once a thing) and rent a game for the weekend. The problem here was, rarely, if ever, did the games come with manuals. You'd get a mylar box with the cartridge in it, that's it. So if the game was complicated, you needed to figure it out on your own. And since the internet wasn't around back then (only BBSes, which most kids didnt know how to use), unless you had a friend who owned the cartridge and could lend you the manual (if he still had it), you were screwed. Now for games like Renegade, that's not a problem. It's pretty obvious how to play it. But when you get a game like Friday the 13th, which had a LOT of complicated mechanics, you were lost unless you could figure things out, and fast. THAT is why a lot of these more complicated games are considered bad. I mean, they certainly werent good, but they got that level of scorn because a lot of us had no idea how to play the game, or at least not well.
cant get enough jason videos after finding this channel. editing is on point. as a boomer who grew up with all this shit, its awesome to see a younger generation say it like it is without having the hype from the time color his opinion. my favorite so far was the goodwill game hunting video. i would ask for more, but that shit gotta take a million years to put together.
I am a Total Recall NES defender. It was like the 3rd video game I ever played so I did not have much reference, and it is grandfathered in my NES favorites. As kids we never got past the firefighter who throws his hat boss. Years later I found out that was right before you got to MARS and the whole aesthetic and gameplay changes drastically.
My main takeaway: Beetlejuice only gets worse the further you get into the game, so if you were to do a deeper dive i think you'll find its placement justified. Rare's worst NES game by a mile!
"They were the Children of Doom. Doom's children. They asked my Lord to lay down his sword and return to the Earth, ha! Time enough for the Earth in the grave." Conan is pre-Internet meme material across the board.
Nah. There was no Gilligan's Island movie back then. We didn't have internet. Half of your friends didn't even have cable TV. Until Nickelodeon made Nick at Night, the TV stations stopped playing anything after a certain time and infomercials weren't even a thing. During the day during summer break, the only things on TV were The Price is Right, Family Feud and re-runs of Andy Griffith, Batman and Gilligan's Island and a bunch of other crap that we knew was ancient but only watched because there was nothing else on. Sounds crazy in 2024, but I'd argue that you probably wouldn't have been able to find a single person in America in 1990 who didn't know what Gilligan's Island was, no matter if they were 10 years old or 100 years old.
Bump and Fight mechanics really do rub me wrong, but i did eventually get used to it. like in a Strategy RPG, you dont try to attack an enemy from the Front, flank em.
@UltimateGamerCC I totally get that. We came from wizardy, which had a tonne of systems working and hydlide compacted it all into one move. There's a lot happening behind the scenes, but the player doesn't need to deal with it. That's why it was so successful. I think your distaste may have come from it being TOO simplified, where something like zelda adds one extra step to involve the player more, even if zelda is too simplified for my tastes.
@@dugonman8360 Think that's because he kinda moved away from gaming as his main thing over time, as he's also one of the early MMA writers and has done a lot more with that.
This was a very fun video. Thanks for making it! I was unaware of "NFL Football" on the NES. My friend got "NES Play Action Football" for Christmas one year and it was so slow and so bad that I thought there couldn't be a worse football game (excepting maybe 10 yard fight). I guess I was wrong. Also, I thought you gave AVGN a bit too much crap. In any case, this was a lot of fun. Thank you!
7:58 Either you just didn't figure out the controls, or English version is harder, as I am HORRIBLE at beatemups and I got to final stage of Japanese Renegade, Nekketsu no Kunio kun. On hardware Famiclone, not emulator. At the end there's a hotel and each room you enter has several doors, if you pick the wrong one, the game loops from a few stages back, so I never got to the actual finish because I got tired before I guessed the right exit. But it's very playable and not as Nintendo hard as most platformers.
As a kid the main problem with Top Gun was during the landing the numbers that allowed you to land perfectly every time were off to the side and hard to see while the stupid inaccurate commands that got me killed 90% of the time were shouted at you from the center of the screen. I cleared the game third time in college with an emulator.
I remember renting Rambo as one of my first NES rentals from local shop, I do recall getting a bit of joy out of it. The Winter Games on Commodore 64 is better, you need to get the skater to skate backwards in order to do any of her jumps and moves.
Running Score of Shit Games I Actually Liked: -Rambo: It made me feel smart finding my way around. -Destination Earth Star: I was an astronaut don't you tell me I wasn't! -Renegade: I actually beat this as a kid, and there were no guides I had either and no friends to tell me what was what because it was so unpopular. After beating it, no other beat'em up was ever a challenge ever again. -Top Gun: Fun! Figure out the landing and quit yer bitchin'! -Kid Cool: Yeah fuck that game. -Karate Kid: What an awesome game! My brother and I mastered the mini games, him the flies, me the drum thing. -Conan: My fav comics. My fav novels. My fav movies... .... ..... -TMNT: Fun game. Some jank, sure, not a bad game at all. In the water stage make sure to switch turtles if you are running low. -Karate Champ: If you know the moves, it's a great 2 player game! I can do the same move 50 times in a row. You're crazy! Moves land at a very specific distance. You have to know which move to do at which distance. 🙂 -Deadly Towers: Totally undeserved hate. It's a cryptic game, but get out your graph paper and have at it!
@@publichearing8536 Lol. I guess. It was more like I would get to rent a game for a weekend, and that was it. Have fun with it no matter what! And I was a kid I didn't know what was going to be good! Other times people would buy me games, I got about 3-4 games a year between my brother and I. So we had Karate Champ, Renegade, Top Gun, Deadly Towers, and TMNT. We also had all the Zeldas, Metroid, Marios, etc...
@@josephbradshaw6985 yeah it was that way for most folks, I guess I can remenber having fun with Gameboy games nobody in their right mind would've picked up, but they were alright to me anyways.
Gilligan's island still pops up in references often (somehow), so here's a summary: a sitcom. Seven very different people get stuck on a tropical island, and have to rely on each other to survive. Gilligan is a bumbling idiot. There's an overweight skipper, a millionaire who never works, the millionaire's wife, a Hollywood movie star who tries to use movie tricks to solve problems and ends up getting in trouble, the professor who's basically Spock, and a regular girl from Kansas. Now you know everything you need to know about it.
30 years ago my grand mom who lived like 7 hours away from me . i had no brother or sisters so when we went to visit for xmass or summer vacations , i used to play a 100 games nes casette , and see your video make me remember things i didnt for soooo long , thanks for the memories
There's no way that Deadly Towers is so much worse than most of the earlier games in the video. I feel like the people who hate-review that game never actually made it to the bell towers to burn the bells, and simply gave up after encountering a few of the (completely optional, mind you) hidden dungeons. With the speed boosting boots + gauntlets and the double shot upgrade, the game actually becomes pretty fun because having those eliminates the biggest pain points of the game (slow movement, slow attack, and 1 sword on the screen at a time).
This guy gets it, thank you. I get why people get turned off by the game and some of it can really grind on the player. Stuff like the brutal knockback (especially when it knocks you into a dungeon, or room to room inside one) or the music loop that restarts from one screen to the next but once you actually start burning the first of the bells, the more accomplished it feels. And with those upgrades, your arc does just feel a lot better
Tmnt and Friday the 13th are good games. It's weird to see them on this list. I thinks it's because video games are the one form of art criticism where we don't expect our reviewers to have a thorough understanding of the art they are critising. I.e. completeing a game. Imagine a movie review from someone who didn't finish the movie, or an album review from someone who only heard the album once while they were washing the dishes.
Disagree. Nobody completed Skyrim and people can judge it regardless. Some games are endless sandboxes. Even those completable by design, if the game is unplayable and broken you don't need to bloody finish it to see how bad it is. People walking out on movies is already a rating, and you don't need to finish the plate of bad food to know it's bad. And no lmao, judging the game on how it plays when you have 20 years of walkthroughs and speedruns helping you learn it is not more valid than the way these games were ACTUALLY played, with no walkthroughs or internet... So if anything, we as kids gave better reviews on the experience than some modern reviewer playing games for a living.
@@KasumiRINA I don't think the food analogy is a good one. The first bite of a steak tastes the same as the last but video games are not like that. For instance, I recently completed a Streets of Rage 2 hardest difficulty clear and I didn't really understand the game until I sunk about 40 hours into it. On the first normal clear I thought the game was cheap and easy, I could just spam "grand upper" through the whole game but playing it on "hardest" forced me to understand the game mechanics and how to exploit every player move as well as every enemy behavior. The game is really deep. I don't have much experience with shitty games, when a game doesn't appeal to me I stop playing it and move on. I don't review it on my channel because I don't know enough about it to warrant sharing my opinion with the world. I get what you mean about children having more relatable experiences to video games than hardcode gamers (gamers that do one credit clears, speed runs and no death playthroughs). The majority of gamers don't play games seriously. They still play games like children i.e. they pop a game in, play it for five minutes, until they die and turn it off and say it sucks, or it's broken or it's too hard. However not everyone plays games like this. A lot of us play games competitively. Or for speed runs etc. People taking games seriously have more valid opinions than children.
One game I never see on these lists is Castlequest. It’s an incredibly obscure, incredibly bad game where the goal is to reach the middle of a dungeon using careful management of several different colored keys. You get 50 lives to complete the game, and forced deaths and soft locks are all mechanics you have to deal with. It’s as fun as it sounds.
7:58 Renegade is pretty fun! Definitely more crude than its sequels, but it's fast-paced and has a fairly versatile amount of attacks for its age. If you ever consider giving it another chance, I have some tips that might help: If you're having trouble beating the opponents, pressing A + B together will do a jump kick. That's my go-to for handling the bosses - hit and run. The bosses are pretty dangerous if you try to just exchange blows. In stage 1 and 2, if you get close to the edge of the subway platform or the dock, you can hit an enemy to stun them, walk into them to grab, and then throw them off the platform for an instant kill. You can even do that to the first boss, Jack, but you gotta get him down to 2 HP or he'll break the grapple. If you're getting surrounded by enemies, the hit-stun-throw combo can be helpful for crowd control. Toss a dude into another dude to keep them away. The back kick is another useful way to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed. If you have the space, pressing down on a downed opponent will have you mount them, where you can punch them in the face to quickly finish them off. This isn't about strategy, but it is just cool to know: There exist ROM hacks for Renegade. There's one that translates Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun to English (keeping the Japanese sprites and story). There's another that replaces all the sprites with the super deformed art style of the sequels, like River City Ransom.
12:36 The European version of Fester's Quest was patched to make it easier than the North American one. The weapons will go through walls and do more damage, but to balance it, hot dogs cost $10 instead of $5. You can get a ROM hack that applies the PAL changes to the NTSC version, so you can still play at the right resolution and frame rate.
The biggest problem wirh friday the 13th is that on the player movea clockwise pressing left and counter clockwise pressing right. So if you are on top part of the map and want to go one cabin right press left on control pad. But everyone pressed right. Its easier and kinda fun when your other councellors dont lose half their health because yoy go the wrong way. Modern games rotate the map not move the player icon. Once i figured out the map the difficulty dropped signigicantly.
Rocky & Bullwinkle does have events that deliberately detune the music and play random notes, they’re supposed to encourage you not to take damage from the bombs. No one ever gets that part lol
"That's why there's game right? Because there was a movie in the 90s or some shit?" 🤣🤣🤣 Oh damn that had me laughing. The TMNT 18 year comment blew my mind.
Being 8 years old, late 80s I'd work my butt off to save for a Nes, then get to Toys r Us, looking for a long time trying to pick a cool game out and get excited to get home and then spend 15 minutes on the game to realize it a crappy game. I begged my mom to open a account at the movie store so I could rent games first before buying. That got me a few times buying a crappy game, never no more!!
I wonder what this list would look like without AVGN. Because some of these games aren't bad. Not good or great, but not bad. Just...fine. But on a system with something like 1000 titles (US), there are games that are worse that would likely be here without _Teh Nerd._
There's nothing "cathartic" about gameplay loops. They're mind-numbingly torturous. Ironically, I rented X-Men for the NES multiple times as a little boy. I was really getting into X-Men at the time, and I was convinced it was a good game, that I was just really bad at it.
A few comments, judged on how we felt when we played them on release Actually Good: Rambo Fine or acceptable: Golf Grand Slam, Flying Warriors, Bible Adventures, Friday the 13th Were unreasonably difficult for the audience: Top Gun, Silver Surfer We were kids, not speedrunners. Ninja Turtles Category: TMNT. The difficulty was a problem at the time because we didn't know and at a time where games were becoming more player friendly, it was not. Unlike some other games I list below, it should be judged more harshly for the time it was released (a couple years was a big deal in NES tech time due to better mappers), but not too much. Home computer ports that need manuals/don't work on NES as well/arrived too late: Infiltrator (Infiltrator II), Hydlide, Cona (Myth: History in the Making), Heroes of the Lance, Ghostbusters Seems bad because people expect too much from early NES games: Renegade, The Karate Kid Unfathomably Bad at the time (licensed, actual games): M.U.S.C.L.E. (I loved the toys as a kid), Tag Team Wrestling, Bill & Ted, X-Men (legitimately broken), Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde (We HATED HATED HATED it when we rented it. It is an insulting waste of time. I believe that people can beat it, but I would rather watch paint dry.). Felt like a rip off: BTTF, BTTF 2&3, Where's Waldo We expected the nothing we got from an old arcade port we didn't want: Karate Champ, Dragon's Lair Not a movie in the 1990: Gilligan's Island. It was in syndication forever. That's why there was a game.
I will say, sitting down to play some Karate Champ was funny for about 15 minutes, but it's not worth ANYTHING more. Plus, sitting through Advanced Dungeons and Dragons made me go insane, that game is the most archaic BS I've ever sat through and I will probably never play it myself.
i owned Fester's Quest as a Kid, and yeah... my Thumbs would HURT playing it. the best thing you can do is farm the nearest foes until you get your best Weapon, from there you try not to step into RED Gun icons, that'll downgrade you. also you get a Whip after beating the first boss, i recommend that you farm the Whip, as THAT is where the serious damage comes from.
Super Pitfall was the first time that I truly realized that my best friend didn't really "get" video games (ultimately he grew up hating them). He thought this was a good game. I was flabbergasted when he brought it over bragging.
I didn't realize how good I had it growing up. The worst titles I played on the NES Xenophobe, Hydlide, and Taboo. Considering my friends and I had all the classics plus games like The Guardian Legend, Might and Magic, Ultima IV, Astyanax, Godzilla, Destiny of an Emperor...
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
I say the wrong number in a few spots.. It's a long story, basically I counted something twice on accident and didn't realize it until late, didn't think to readjust my voice over. Uploaded the video and immediately left town to go on a trip, so I can't fix it.
Be better at maths, 0/10, kthxbye
Also, I swear that 94% of all reviews are from Australian/English/Welsh/Irish/Scottish people who never played anything besides the Spectrum or, (if they are young,) the XBox.
Well that's part of the charm behind don't trust anyone who needs a haircut I suppose.. I say leave em in. Don't aim for them, but don't bother to edit either.. idk though, don't trust a guy with fake teeth.
don't trust anyone who needs a haircut
YT's editor may be advanced enough to do that at this point, no?
One of my favorite cosplays I ever encountered was a guy dressed as NES Jason, with purple jumpsuit and teal mask and gloves. He posed with me for a photo and gave me a round sticker that says "YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD. GAME OVER."
Dear god, your pfp jumpscared me, My life will never be the same after watching Munchie 1 and 2 back to back.
As long as one counsellor and one kid was still alive, you'd win after defeating Jason!
Although, I think "win" is kind of a loose term here. All of your friends have been butchered and you have to explain to 11 angry families (and law enforcement) how all those kids were murdered while under your watch....
Given that you almost certainly didn't survive without taking a hit or two I am sure all of the people that lost their children will be understanding.
Even Pamela Voorhees might have been, it isn't like you were making out with Crissy in the woods while all this was going on, right Mark?
i don't lkke using chrissy and mark because they jump too high and are hard to control. I always won with laura. The trope is called "final girl" for a reason.
hahaha nice!
I still hold a grudge against Mario is Missing for tricking me into wasting a weekend rental back in the day.
Would it have helped if the game had been titled "Super Luigi Single Child"? :p
ok, this is hilarious. I rewatched the SNES video and was like "I wonder if he made anymore of these videos." And lo-and-behold, I find that you released a new one less than an hour ago.
Where is your closed quote? I'm still waiting!
@analogmoz it's fixed
Needs one for Sega and PS1.
Some of these scores will be inflated, not only because of the "AVGN factor", but also because of the "disappointment factor".
For instance, imagine you're the biggest Ghostbusters fan in the world-- you watch the movies every other day, you own most of the toys, watch the cartoon religiously, eat the cereal, etc.-- and then you play Ghostbusters on NES and it breaks your heart into pieces; it's nothing that you wanted a Ghostbusters game to be.
I suspect if a game *REALLY* disappointed someone, they're more likely to rank it as "worse" than some forgettable, no-name game that is deservingly worse.
This is absolutely how review scores work, its part of the problem with seeing these scores as “objective”
@@SpaceFrog999"objective" game scores are a flawed concept to begin with. Half the video is basically an indictment of the concept.
the results of both this video and the snes one remind me of camwing's video on the few games to recieve the "Overwhelmingly negative" review rating on steam. In order to get an overwhelmingly negative or positive rating, you have to have a minimum number of reviews, so overwhelmingly negative isn't actually populated with the worst games on the platform, those don't get enough players. overwhelmingly negative is mostly full of games from beloved multimedia franchises, and incomplete and abandoned kickstarter games.
yeah, Disappointment is a factor in reviews. personally i grew up with the Master System version, which was better. but in the end, Ghostbusters on NES DOES suck.
@@UltimateGamerCC same here with the master system-- first video game I ever played was Alex Kidd in Miracle World. My cousins had Ghostbusters and I played the mess out of it when they visited and brought it over.
The reason why Jekyll and Hyde works in such a weird way (speeding up with more happening on screen) is quite fascinating. There's a youtuber that goes by the name Displaced Gamers. He made 2 videos explaining how that game works under the hood, and it's quite unconventional, to say the least.
Old games were very janky sometimes.
His analysis is awesome. Deserves to be preserved like any scientific journal publication, since he's sort of doing a historical analysis of gaming software development.
It’s baffling how much Mike Mattei and Bimmy influenced the NES zeitgeist
They were the things we all watched at one point.
Big Ryan fan btw
Bimmy doesn’t have time to influence the NES zeitgeist
@@charlestonson2200 Just a little, until 5:40 tops.
Its rather unfortunate in a lot of ways. People see AVGN as a reviewer or something, but they themselves have said many times that AVGN is just an exaggerated character that doesn't actually represent their own views about these games. Both have said in the past that they don't think Silver Surfer or Turtles are even actually bad games, I have a feeling Mike Matei likes Friday the 13th as well but I may be wrong.
Fond memories of Barbie on the NES. My little sister couldn't beat the game but wanted to see it so I set out to finish it for her. Did the same with Lion King on the SNES. Bad games can still have some good memories attached to em.
Barbie NES is actually absurdly hard for some ungodly reason
@@eightcoins4401 might of been for rentals
@@eightcoins4401 It was, but it wasn't very uncommon for games of that era. A lot of NES games, good or bad, were pretty brutal, usually due to a combination of knowledge checks and absolute Game Overs when you ran out of lives, same as Barbie does.
The concept of 'casual' gaming, even in a very casual theme like Barbie, hadn't really been invented yet.
Awesome stuff. Loved the first video. Eagerly anticipating a MD/Genesis video. There's some low, low lows in that library.
i'm going to guess that Dark Castle will be #1 with his formula there, and Awesome Possum & Slaughter Sport will also be in the top 5. X-Perts and Sword of Sodan should be easy top 10 as well, possibly Heavy Nova too.
Home Alone has an infamous speedrun, since you can glitch the Wet Bandits and just chill for 15 minutes until the game ends.
Can it be speedrun? I thought the goal was to last 20 minutes, meaning if you beat the game it always takes 20 minutes
@@scottdorsch5149 That's basically what the speedrun is. A few people have beat it without glitching it but most people just get the wet bandits stuck and wait for the timer to run out.
I heard someone say they can save a couple lag frames but the speedrun board (thankfully) doesn't do frames, just whole seconds.
@@aaron2u243. That's interesting. I'll have to look it up. I personally like this game for how unique it is and nostalgia
@@scottdorsch5149 If you ever wanted to get a (tied) speedrun WR, it's a pretty good option. The trick isn't too difficult, although it's easy to screw up. Or you can just beat it straight-up if you wanna flex on a couple hundred people :D
21:09 As someone who is in the know, the problem is that old school shmups like Silver Surfer were difficult purely because of memorization. The game is just a huge beginner's trap with hazards too fast to react, so you have to learn everything through trial and error. But once you know in advance what's supposed to kill you and how to dodge, it's not bad. Getting sent back to a checkpoint on every death is annoying, but even at the time there were shmups like Gradius with far more brutal checkpoints that practically asked you to beat the game without dying once. By the mid 90s, shmups had already evolved to not rely on raw memorization and instead actually push your skills with intricate patterns and complex scoring systems. Silver Surfer has a brutal skill floor and a low skill ceiling, while bullet hells are the opposite. It's not an easy game by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to what shmups have become, it is indeed kind of a meme. Music slaps tho
It was a terrible shmup even for the time. It came out 3 years after R-Type. It doesn't do anything interesting or new. It's just a basic af shmup with RECOGNIZABLE IP!!!! paint slapped on.
Even for "memorization era" shmups its boring af.
But atleast it wasn't weeabo garbage. I like my shmups to be dark and gritty, but nowadays 90% of them are uwu kawaii :3 chinese cartoon trash. Makes them pretty much worthless unless you're a coomer.
@@eightcoins4401 You could say that being able to select your stage route was relatively new for the genre. Yes, it doesn't hold a candle to R-Type, but back then very few games did. Not saying it's a good game, but the points that everyone criticizes it (checkpoints, contact damage, lack of a turbo button) were also present for almost all shmups at the time. And for an 8 bit game, it looks good and sounds amazing.
Also, L take for the gritty aesthetics. People don't want to look at the same generic ships and space setting all the time.
shmups before the glorious TurbografX were cute but fundamentally flawed
I wouldn't call the 2nd and 3rd loop of Silver Surfer a meme.
Bootsy from Cinemassacre beat this game a while back. Without a Turbo controller.
Also, endless praise to Tim Follin for the music, truly the most overqualified person for the job
Conan is a reskinned version of an European computer game called Myth: History in the Making.
NiGHTS fan spotted 🗣️🔥🗣️🔥🗣️🔥
I hope you were referring to the rendition of that song from the golf game. That's Passepied by Debussy, and it's been featured in a ton of games, was massive inspiration for the overworld tune in DQ, and was featured in Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge.
The worst nes games in the age of loneliness
I see what you did there.
hey I know who kipp is. hey kipp.
Nintendo as a whole could use that kind of video. Yakuza, indoor shooting galleries, sex hotels, knock off legos and more!
5:48 wow! That's a classical piano piece by Claude Debussy called Passpied, and it's the second time I've heard it in a video game! The first was Castlevania 2 for the Game Boy, where it sounds MUCH better.
Thanks for this list! It unfortunately highlights a fact: people should stop watching angry / comedic reviews of games and take them at face value. For two main reasons:
1) Those reviews are made to be entertaining, not factual. They will probably exaggerate a lot of details or issues, and will skip boring or mediocre games altogether, since they wouldn't make for good material.
2) Those reviews usually do not explain the context in which the games were published, and as such they usually penalize games that were innovative, or ahead of their time.
Critiques are a conundrum in and of themselves, because they can artificially color the public perception of a "product", and even change its legacy and memory. But at the very least, angry / comedic reviews should have the least sway because of their very nature.
Agree on 1) and that's how Karate Kid looked worse than it is because James ran into enemies to make it look more frustrating, he said he never done it since.
Hard disagree with early AVGN on 2) because ambition is worth jack shit when the context is a kid without hintbook and internet unable to land that plane / find that whirlwind / jump over that gap. If anything it's modern reviewers who take game's history and have 20 years of collective walkthroughs and speedrunning experience stacked who get the wrong picture of how the game would be played back then.
So likes of Top Gun, TNMT, Castlevania 2 and clumsy NES RPGs get way HIGHER scores now than they deserve based on the context they would be played. You know, without a walkthrough.
Idk about Dark Castle tho
@@KasumiRINAwell, Castlevania 2 and TMNT 1 were really entertaining for the time for the first hour or two at least. You started a new game, played until the point you always got stuck, and accepted that as fun. Some kids did anyways. It's not like there were many significantly better games available to most kids at the time.
I see the criticism of games like these is part because they could have been so much better if the developers spent a few more months to patch things up. Lost potential. Cv2 with the latest romhack patch is 10x better.
I remember getting Karate Champ for Christmas. A couple hours later I stopped believing in Santa.
14:16 adult MOSES? Dude it has to be Noah with the animals. xD
The worst NES game I’ve played is Ghostbusters. Normally, I would sell games that I don’t like, but I’ve held on to that one because I occasionally like to remind myself how shitty it is.
1:21 its okay, hes whispering because he's so objectively wrong his parents in the living room would disown him if the heard him
WHERE ARE YOUR PAPERS?
THESE ARE TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE
BUHRHBURUHBHRH
that game actually looked kinda interesting, like Metal Gear is S tier so "shittier version of Metal Gear" might still be a game worth playing
That's Sgt. Arch Dornan's father right there
@@jhudsu1 Metal Gear on NES is not S tier, unless the S means Shit. It's one of the worst games ever made, so bad that Kojima disowns it. It has barely anything to do with the game he actually made for the MSX.
While I do consider Infiltrator to be a bad game, and it is; it's VERY in depth and definitely worth a play... it doesn't really feel like a proper game until you already know what all the mechanics mean.
Rambo actually blew my mind as a kid. I first played it at a friends house, which was also where I played the NES for the first time. All of my previous video game experience had come from the arcade and Atari 2600, and I thought it was incredible that your character actually spoke to other characters in the game and that you were even able to choose what you wanted to say during the introduction. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the first time I encountered an NPC in a video game. Even though Rambo is a 'meh' game in hindsight, it was a huge step up from Missile Command and Asteroids on the 2600.
26:45 gilligans island had so many reruns it was practically after school TV for kids in the late 80s/early 90s
is it good
@FerinitheBloodHusky as a TV show? It's alright. I liked I love Lucy more.
It was on my TV every morning before school for a few years for sure.
Should have linked the Super Nintendo video so we could go look up your method directly. Instead I had to go Graves digging and you had to read this bad pun.
Man I forgot all about Seanbaby, he really is the OG in this sphere. I remember finding his website in the 90's when I first got an internet connection.
He's still around! Has done a lot more MMA and "dunk on MAGAs" stuff than gaming though - he was a guest on the Behind the Bastards podcasts on Vince McMahon.
Ah ok, yeah I wouldn't want to listen to any of that
@@joshthefunkdoc obligatory *points a finger and laughs* at "drain the swamp" types giving education system to McMahon family and "taking power from establishment" by installing another Kennedy.
10:25 Boi, this is a classic action RPG. Starter weapon sucks because that's the point, you are supposed to get better one on the next screen. Athena was so legendary she still appears in SNK stuff, and Athena Asamiya from KoF is her descendant. P.S. I head NES port sucks, but it was released on PSP and PSN, I played it on PS3 of all things.
“a lot of bad games become enjoyable once you learn all the ins and outs of them” omg yes! Let’s put that on a t-shirt! It’s something my cousin and I were saying in the early 90s 😂
15:50 - "It's like I went to the circus and just started picking fights."
😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣💀💀
🤜💥🤡
There were muscle figures we collected as kids like garbage pail kids cards
I could swear the game is in the same franchise as the Ultimate Muscle cartoon show. That's a very familiar looking mouth on the box art.
@@Veylonit is. The NES game is based off the 80s anime which had a popular toyline in America.
Stylized graphics are cute. Game itself was fun for a few minutes it has only two buttons but one of those is running the ropes and it felt like bouncing on rubber lol.
But really, NES had only two fighting games worth the name: Urban Champion and Yie Ar Kung Fu.
@@KasumiRINA what about the Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighter game? I mean it’s rare as shit but it’s not bad
I had a bunch of those when I was little.
Bad games then were so much easier to live with than bad games now. Maybe it's the knowledge that many years and hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted that makes them so hard to comprehend in the modern era, and back then it was like five guys in an office quickly throwing something together to fill out a contract. E.T 2600 was a five week project from start to finish and the poor guy worked his best to make something in that short time, like. Top notch vid, really tickling my creative senses and inspiring me to create something from up here in the arctic circle.
No, its because it was one of the only videogames you owned as a child back then typically. So you had to like them.
E.T. 2600:
5 weeks of development, 20-25 million dollar budget (63-79 when adjusted for inflation, plus maybe a little more for manufacturing costs)
Concord:
8 years of development, 400 million dollar budget
23:38 People hated TMNT at the time because we expected the arcade game and it was nothing like it.
And the water/coral level at the dam
I did, but I loved the game. It's one of my top 5 favorite NES games. The music was great, traversal across the maps was novel and fun, and although the controls take getting used to, once you do, its good fun. Sure, it gets pretty hard, especially the last level, but proper resource management makes it a doable affair. As stated in the video, it's better than the beat-em ups that came after it. It's a game I always went back to, while TMNT II: the Arcade Game and TMNT III: The Manhattan Project collected dust once I beat them.
Another point about Silver Surfer is that it has a kickass soundtrack, top 10 on the NES imo. Seriously, go listen to it. Same composer who did Plok btw.
Great video Jason, I really dig this series, you should do it for more consoles.
This comment will probably get buried, but I wanted to add in my input. I've tried 570~580 NES games so far (550+ on an emulator) as one of my goals is to at least try every licensed NES game. I won't add my input on every game that'd be too long of a comment, but I'll insert some. I also rate each game (subjective of course & sometimes write a reason why, sometimes I don't). Here's some I found funny after watching your video & then seeing what I wrote about them/rated them.
"NFL Football: 2/10. Game has no proper pause function, movement is extremely slow as well as boring, when calling plays a screen does not come up showing the plays. Does have 3 effective difficulty levels as you can give yourself up to two handicaps. Works better than the other games I’ve rated a 2, but it is less fun than all of them."
"Winter Games: 4.5/10. Hot Dog Aerials: 6.3 Speed Skating: 0:53.6 Figure Skating: 0.0 Bobsled: 66.57." - Had to add this since you said you couldn't figure out how to get a score in Figure Skating, I couldn't either, haha.
"Harlem Globetrotters: 3.5/10. Stealing & Blocking controls seem janky, Select & Start are action buttons for some reason. Lost 10-32 on Rookie Difficulty, 2 minute quarters." - For reference I gave Double Dribble a 5/10, Globetrotters was worse for sure.
"Renegade: 6/10. Beat game on difficulty 1 of 3, Score: 180950. Mission 4, Difficulty 2 of 3, Score: 180150." - Probably unpopular but imo it was just as good as Double Dragon & DD III, I also found it easier as I beat it, but didn't beat those. DD II is better than any of the others, I gave that a 7.
"Conan: 3.5/10. Some rough controls (up to jump, down also jumps, hold kick button then press up for a jump kick, etc.), rough mechanics (jump being an animation where you can’t change direction mid-jump) & lazy graphics (looks like graphics from 5+ years in the past). Level 1, Score: 730."
Comments continued as replies to myself, lol.
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: 7.5/10. Level 3 (1 Round of Missiles Found): 96000. *Runner-Up NES game 1989*" - I'm not sure all my years are correct, but for what I had for games released in 1989 this was my 2nd favorite behind DuckTales (8/10). As a side note you mentioned the 2 Beat 'em Up follow ups, I gave TMNT II a 6/10, but I gave TMNT III a 8.5/10. For me it's by far the best Beat 'em Up on the system & is in my top 6 games (only 6 games out of the 575ish I've tried so far got a 8.5+/10, I'm a very harsh rate both on the low scale & the high scale, like a 1/10 or a 9/10 is a super rare rating where a game is either near the worst thing possible or an absolute masterpiece).
"Back to the Future Part II & III: 5.0/10. The game lacks some basic understanding of how a platformer works (The game can spawn kill you over a hole after a life is lost for example). Score: 820."
I often write out hints or how far I get like in the next entry.
"Friday the 13th: 6.5/10. ~9 health taken off of Jason. Found 2 of the 3 Forest Cabins, only used a key on one of them. Go into the Cabin, near the Cave. There’s a Machete in a Cabin in the middle of the Woods. Go into one of the Cabins by the Lake. George: Slow. Mark: Fast. Paul: Slow. Laura: Average. Debbie: Slow. Crissy: Fast." - In my harsh rating system a 6.5 basically equates to "good", so it's not "great", but it's enjoyable & any game 6.5 or higher is likely in my top 150ish games or maybe even top 100. Can definitely see the "AVGN effect" as we get closer to the top 10.
"Karate Champ: 2/10. Score: 300, can’t beat a single opponent. Controls are terribad, B -> kicks backwards while B
"Ghostbusters: 3/10. Game uses the opposite of logic. Caught 1 Ghost. Sometimes buildings blink when you have an alarm, sometimes they blink without an alarm, sometimes they don’t blink at all, and catching controls are bad."
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: 5.5/10. Stage 4 (Park)." - It was so average I didn't even expand upon my rating, it didn't feel bad to me, it didn't feel good either. Out of the 575ish games I've tried it'd probably be somewhere around 250th if I actually ranked them all. Doesn't deserve the amount of hate it gets though.
It's taken me over 4 years to try 80% of the NES games, once I'm done that I plan to try every SNES game as well, so probably in 6 years you're going to get another long comment chain on your SNES video, lol.
@@richardgallimore5976 Glad that you put some respect on TNMT. It's a great game, IMHO
Math is physically painful for me. Thanks for your sacrifice in doing the number thingy in the name of crappy games appreciation.
Your videos are freaking great Jason. So glad you make all this stuff: I know you are hard on yourself but you kill it as much or more than the people you look up to
I think it would be fun to see the games that got single votes, thus didn’t make the list, and see if you think it should have. I think in a lot of cases it will just be lack of awareness, but that is sort of interesting in and of itself.
33:13
Actually, the item _appears_ to "explode," but it _remains in your inventory_ regardless.
I think I must add some notes here to the lore for the young'uns who didn't grow up in the 80s/90s.
In the late 80s and early 90s, renting video games was a big thing. Before you discovered things like girls and cars, you'd spend the weekend playing video games on your Sega or NES.
And since most of us had no money to buy new video games every weekend, we'd go to the local video store (yes those were once a thing) and rent a game for the weekend.
The problem here was, rarely, if ever, did the games come with manuals. You'd get a mylar box with the cartridge in it, that's it. So if the game was complicated, you needed to figure it out on your own. And since the internet wasn't around back then (only BBSes, which most kids didnt know how to use), unless you had a friend who owned the cartridge and could lend you the manual (if he still had it), you were screwed.
Now for games like Renegade, that's not a problem. It's pretty obvious how to play it. But when you get a game like Friday the 13th, which had a LOT of complicated mechanics, you were lost unless you could figure things out, and fast.
THAT is why a lot of these more complicated games are considered bad. I mean, they certainly werent good, but they got that level of scorn because a lot of us had no idea how to play the game, or at least not well.
cant get enough jason videos after finding this channel. editing is on point. as a boomer who grew up with all this shit, its awesome to see a younger generation say it like it is without having the hype from the time color his opinion. my favorite so far was the goodwill game hunting video. i would ask for more, but that shit gotta take a million years to put together.
i LOVED Silver Surfer as a kid. i was *REALLY* Good at it, too! lol i could go through it without dying at all.
I am a Total Recall NES defender. It was like the 3rd video game I ever played so I did not have much reference, and it is grandfathered in my NES favorites. As kids we never got past the firefighter who throws his hat boss. Years later I found out that was right before you got to MARS and the whole aesthetic and gameplay changes drastically.
This is quickly becoming my favorite retro gaming channel. Thanks for this~
5:46 Terrible? Lol that’s Passepied, the fourth movement from Debussy’s Suite bergamasque
Gilligan's Island was a tv show, also much older than the 90s. I was born in 81 and it was before my time even.
damn so we would need to look for fossilized VHS tapes to find something?
@@publichearing8536it was running decades before VHS were a thing, during the time world was black and white and Jazz was still listenable.
@@publichearing8536vhs 😆
My main takeaway: Beetlejuice only gets worse the further you get into the game, so if you were to do a deeper dive i think you'll find its placement justified. Rare's worst NES game by a mile!
20:14 Stop right there! You need to go ahead and watch Conan the Barbarian right now. One of the best movies ever made.
"They were the Children of Doom. Doom's children. They asked my Lord to lay down his sword and return to the Earth, ha! Time enough for the Earth in the grave."
Conan is pre-Internet meme material across the board.
@@analogmoz contemplate this on the tree of woe
@@helenhomunculus5044What is best in life?
@@analogmoz crumb laughs at your four winds, laughs from his mountain
@@helenhomunculus5044 Gods, that movie is perfection.
I really love this series of yours and I'm looking forward to you tackling other systems and libraries in a similar format.
Nah. There was no Gilligan's Island movie back then. We didn't have internet. Half of your friends didn't even have cable TV. Until Nickelodeon made Nick at Night, the TV stations stopped playing anything after a certain time and infomercials weren't even a thing. During the day during summer break, the only things on TV were The Price is Right, Family Feud and re-runs of Andy Griffith, Batman and Gilligan's Island and a bunch of other crap that we knew was ancient but only watched because there was nothing else on. Sounds crazy in 2024, but I'd argue that you probably wouldn't have been able to find a single person in America in 1990 who didn't know what Gilligan's Island was, no matter if they were 10 years old or 100 years old.
Godzilla was treated the same way back in the 80s and 90s.Apparently the 60s Toho Godzilla movies were cheap af as liscense for tv channels.
You're experience with winter games is exactly my experience in my evercade intellivision vid.
That game sucks
It's an outstanding classic on C64!
I grew up with Hydlide and it was the coolest game to have in the schoolyard. It paved the way for Ys, which just blew our little minds.
Bump and Fight mechanics really do rub me wrong, but i did eventually get used to it. like in a Strategy RPG, you dont try to attack an enemy from the Front, flank em.
@UltimateGamerCC I totally get that. We came from wizardy, which had a tonne of systems working and hydlide compacted it all into one move. There's a lot happening behind the scenes, but the player doesn't need to deal with it. That's why it was so successful.
I think your distaste may have come from it being TOO simplified, where something like zelda adds one extra step to involve the player more, even if zelda is too simplified for my tastes.
Friday the 13th is awesome! I recommend looking up some guides to finish it easier then trying on your own.
hearign SeanBaby takes me waaaaaaaay back
Guy doesn't get enough credit for influencing guys like Yahtzee and AVGN yet still better.
@@dugonman8360 Think that's because he kinda moved away from gaming as his main thing over time, as he's also one of the early MMA writers and has done a lot more with that.
While I was watching this, I thought of Seanbaby and then you brought him up like 5 mins later. 😄
This was a very fun video. Thanks for making it! I was unaware of "NFL Football" on the NES. My friend got "NES Play Action Football" for Christmas one year and it was so slow and so bad that I thought there couldn't be a worse football game (excepting maybe 10 yard fight). I guess I was wrong.
Also, I thought you gave AVGN a bit too much crap. In any case, this was a lot of fun. Thank you!
7:58 Either you just didn't figure out the controls, or English version is harder, as I am HORRIBLE at beatemups and I got to final stage of Japanese Renegade, Nekketsu no Kunio kun. On hardware Famiclone, not emulator. At the end there's a hotel and each room you enter has several doors, if you pick the wrong one, the game loops from a few stages back, so I never got to the actual finish because I got tired before I guessed the right exit. But it's very playable and not as Nintendo hard as most platformers.
The mathematical odds Jason plays DW and is eternally grateful.
As a kid the main problem with Top Gun was during the landing the numbers that allowed you to land perfectly every time were off to the side and hard to see while the stupid inaccurate commands that got me killed 90% of the time were shouted at you from the center of the screen. I cleared the game third time in college with an emulator.
I remember renting Rambo as one of my first NES rentals from local shop, I do recall getting a bit of joy out of it.
The Winter Games on Commodore 64 is better, you need to get the skater to skate backwards in order to do any of her jumps and moves.
Running Score of Shit Games I Actually Liked:
-Rambo: It made me feel smart finding my way around.
-Destination Earth Star: I was an astronaut don't you tell me I wasn't!
-Renegade: I actually beat this as a kid, and there were no guides I had either and no friends to tell me what was what because it was so unpopular. After beating it, no other beat'em up was ever a challenge ever again.
-Top Gun: Fun! Figure out the landing and quit yer bitchin'!
-Kid Cool: Yeah fuck that game.
-Karate Kid: What an awesome game! My brother and I mastered the mini games, him the flies, me the drum thing.
-Conan: My fav comics. My fav novels. My fav movies... .... .....
-TMNT: Fun game. Some jank, sure, not a bad game at all. In the water stage make sure to switch turtles if you are running low.
-Karate Champ: If you know the moves, it's a great 2 player game! I can do the same move 50 times in a row. You're crazy! Moves land at a very specific distance. You have to know which move to do at which distance. 🙂
-Deadly Towers: Totally undeserved hate. It's a cryptic game, but get out your graph paper and have at it!
so are you seeking a help group for masochists or not?
@@publichearing8536 Lol. I guess. It was more like I would get to rent a game for a weekend, and that was it. Have fun with it no matter what! And I was a kid I didn't know what was going to be good! Other times people would buy me games, I got about 3-4 games a year between my brother and I. So we had Karate Champ, Renegade, Top Gun, Deadly Towers, and TMNT. We also had all the Zeldas, Metroid, Marios, etc...
@@josephbradshaw6985 yeah it was that way for most folks, I guess I can remenber having fun with Gameboy games nobody in their right mind would've picked up, but they were alright to me anyways.
Gilligan's island still pops up in references often (somehow), so here's a summary: a sitcom. Seven very different people get stuck on a tropical island, and have to rely on each other to survive. Gilligan is a bumbling idiot. There's an overweight skipper, a millionaire who never works, the millionaire's wife, a Hollywood movie star who tries to use movie tricks to solve problems and ends up getting in trouble, the professor who's basically Spock, and a regular girl from Kansas.
Now you know everything you need to know about it.
The music in Golf Grand Slam is actually from Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge (Game Boy) - Passpied
16:43 to be fair The Bible is incredibly violent in it’s own right
37:53 Probably the best Nerd impression I've ever heard.
30 years ago my grand mom who lived like 7 hours away from me . i had no brother or sisters so when we went to visit for xmass or summer vacations , i used to play a 100 games nes casette , and see your video make me remember things i didnt for soooo long , thanks for the memories
I didn't know referencing AVGN is a still a thing. It was mentioned more in this video than at least 5 years of watching classic video game videos😊
I love this series so far. Hope you do this for more consoles in the future.
There's no way that Deadly Towers is so much worse than most of the earlier games in the video. I feel like the people who hate-review that game never actually made it to the bell towers to burn the bells, and simply gave up after encountering a few of the (completely optional, mind you) hidden dungeons.
With the speed boosting boots + gauntlets and the double shot upgrade, the game actually becomes pretty fun because having those eliminates the biggest pain points of the game (slow movement, slow attack, and 1 sword on the screen at a time).
This guy gets it, thank you. I get why people get turned off by the game and some of it can really grind on the player. Stuff like the brutal knockback (especially when it knocks you into a dungeon, or room to room inside one) or the music loop that restarts from one screen to the next but once you actually start burning the first of the bells, the more accomplished it feels. And with those upgrades, your arc does just feel a lot better
I think those sorts of puzzle/adventure games are just an inherently unpopular genre to begin with
i think a lot of reviewers in the 2000s just copied avgns opinion after the game was forgotten for 20 years
Cheetahmen 2 actually isnt a prototype. Its the version intended for store shelves. They found it in a warehouse with 1000s of the carts.
I hope "Every SNES RPG" isn't over. It's been a minute.
Tmnt and Friday the 13th are good games. It's weird to see them on this list. I thinks it's because video games are the one form of art criticism where we don't expect our reviewers to have a thorough understanding of the art they are critising. I.e. completeing a game. Imagine a movie review from someone who didn't finish the movie, or an album review from someone who only heard the album once while they were washing the dishes.
ive seen a lot of reviews of heathers where they only watched the first couple minutes and wrote it of as a mean girls clone
Disagree. Nobody completed Skyrim and people can judge it regardless. Some games are endless sandboxes. Even those completable by design, if the game is unplayable and broken you don't need to bloody finish it to see how bad it is. People walking out on movies is already a rating, and you don't need to finish the plate of bad food to know it's bad.
And no lmao, judging the game on how it plays when you have 20 years of walkthroughs and speedruns helping you learn it is not more valid than the way these games were ACTUALLY played, with no walkthroughs or internet... So if anything, we as kids gave better reviews on the experience than some modern reviewer playing games for a living.
@@KasumiRINA theres a different between an opinion and a critical rating
@@KasumiRINA I don't think the food analogy is a good one. The first bite of a steak tastes the same as the last but video games are not like that. For instance, I recently completed a Streets of Rage 2 hardest difficulty clear and I didn't really understand the game until I sunk about 40 hours into it. On the first normal clear I thought the game was cheap and easy, I could just spam "grand upper" through the whole game but playing it on "hardest" forced me to understand the game mechanics and how to exploit every player move as well as every enemy behavior. The game is really deep.
I don't have much experience with shitty games, when a game doesn't appeal to me I stop playing it and move on. I don't review it on my channel because I don't know enough about it to warrant sharing my opinion with the world.
I get what you mean about children having more relatable experiences to video games than hardcode gamers (gamers that do one credit clears, speed runs and no death playthroughs). The majority of gamers don't play games seriously. They still play games like children i.e. they pop a game in, play it for five minutes, until they die and turn it off and say it sucks, or it's broken or it's too hard. However not everyone plays games like this. A lot of us play games competitively. Or for speed runs etc. People taking games seriously have more valid opinions than children.
@@FerinitheBloodHusky haha I read your comment after I posted mine. You summed up my three paragraphs in one sentence.
One game I never see on these lists is Castlequest. It’s an incredibly obscure, incredibly bad game where the goal is to reach the middle of a dungeon using careful management of several different colored keys. You get 50 lives to complete the game, and forced deaths and soft locks are all mechanics you have to deal with. It’s as fun as it sounds.
my new favorite video game channel. ok like 3rd but keep up the good work up my dude..
7:58 Renegade is pretty fun! Definitely more crude than its sequels, but it's fast-paced and has a fairly versatile amount of attacks for its age. If you ever consider giving it another chance, I have some tips that might help:
If you're having trouble beating the opponents, pressing A + B together will do a jump kick. That's my go-to for handling the bosses - hit and run. The bosses are pretty dangerous if you try to just exchange blows.
In stage 1 and 2, if you get close to the edge of the subway platform or the dock, you can hit an enemy to stun them, walk into them to grab, and then throw them off the platform for an instant kill. You can even do that to the first boss, Jack, but you gotta get him down to 2 HP or he'll break the grapple.
If you're getting surrounded by enemies, the hit-stun-throw combo can be helpful for crowd control. Toss a dude into another dude to keep them away.
The back kick is another useful way to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed.
If you have the space, pressing down on a downed opponent will have you mount them, where you can punch them in the face to quickly finish them off.
This isn't about strategy, but it is just cool to know: There exist ROM hacks for Renegade. There's one that translates Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun to English (keeping the Japanese sprites and story). There's another that replaces all the sprites with the super deformed art style of the sequels, like River City Ransom.
12:36 The European version of Fester's Quest was patched to make it easier than the North American one. The weapons will go through walls and do more damage, but to balance it, hot dogs cost $10 instead of $5. You can get a ROM hack that applies the PAL changes to the NTSC version, so you can still play at the right resolution and frame rate.
Love these rankings. Thanks for the work you put in!
Now do one for the wii
The biggest problem wirh friday the 13th is that on the player movea clockwise pressing left and counter clockwise pressing right. So if you are on top part of the map and want to go one cabin right press left on control pad. But everyone pressed right. Its easier and kinda fun when your other councellors dont lose half their health because yoy go the wrong way.
Modern games rotate the map not move the player icon.
Once i figured out the map the difficulty dropped signigicantly.
Rocky & Bullwinkle does have events that deliberately detune the music and play random notes, they’re supposed to encourage you not to take damage from the bombs. No one ever gets that part lol
Silver Surfer being anywhere near this list is an absolute travesty.
Yes, certainly. It's actually a pretty fun game.
"That's why there's game right? Because there was a movie in the 90s or some shit?" 🤣🤣🤣 Oh damn that had me laughing.
The TMNT 18 year comment blew my mind.
18:55 - "The spear?...idfk..." 😂😂😂😂
i loved the SNES one you did but i've been praying you would do this one too
Muppet adventures is giving me five night at Freddy's vibes with Fozzy bear trying to rip u apart
28:17 Missed opportunity to talk like the Inspector Gadget DVD Helper from that one James Role and Mike Matei vid... you know the one...
Being 8 years old, late 80s I'd work my butt off to save for a Nes, then get to Toys r Us, looking for a long time trying to pick a cool game out and get excited to get home and then spend 15 minutes on the game to realize it a crappy game. I begged my mom to open a account at the movie store so I could rent games first before buying. That got me a few times buying a crappy game, never no more!!
I wonder what this list would look like without AVGN. Because some of these games aren't bad. Not good or great, but not bad. Just...fine. But on a system with something like 1000 titles (US), there are games that are worse that would likely be here without _Teh Nerd._
There's nothing "cathartic" about gameplay loops. They're mind-numbingly torturous.
Ironically, I rented X-Men for the NES multiple times as a little boy. I was really getting into X-Men at the time, and I was convinced it was a good game, that I was just really bad at it.
A few comments, judged on how we felt when we played them on release
Actually Good: Rambo
Fine or acceptable: Golf Grand Slam, Flying Warriors, Bible Adventures, Friday the 13th
Were unreasonably difficult for the audience: Top Gun, Silver Surfer
We were kids, not speedrunners.
Ninja Turtles Category: TMNT. The difficulty was a problem at the time because we didn't know and at a time where games were becoming more player friendly, it was not. Unlike some other games I list below, it should be judged more harshly for the time it was released (a couple years was a big deal in NES tech time due to better mappers), but not too much.
Home computer ports that need manuals/don't work on NES as well/arrived too late: Infiltrator (Infiltrator II), Hydlide, Cona (Myth: History in the Making), Heroes of the Lance, Ghostbusters
Seems bad because people expect too much from early NES games: Renegade, The Karate Kid
Unfathomably Bad at the time (licensed, actual games): M.U.S.C.L.E. (I loved the toys as a kid), Tag Team Wrestling, Bill & Ted, X-Men (legitimately broken), Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde (We HATED HATED HATED it when we rented it. It is an insulting waste of time. I believe that people can beat it, but I would rather watch paint dry.).
Felt like a rip off: BTTF, BTTF 2&3, Where's Waldo
We expected the nothing we got from an old arcade port we didn't want: Karate Champ, Dragon's Lair
Not a movie in the 1990: Gilligan's Island. It was in syndication forever. That's why there was a game.
But don't they have the Official Nintendo Seal of QUALITY?
I will say, sitting down to play some Karate Champ was funny for about 15 minutes, but it's not worth ANYTHING more. Plus, sitting through Advanced Dungeons and Dragons made me go insane, that game is the most archaic BS I've ever sat through and I will probably never play it myself.
5:50 That's Claude Debussy
The music is terrible?!? Dude, do you know who Claude Debussy IS? Do you?? Lmao
Good Lord
Holy shit, this gold game has Passpied for music?
i owned Fester's Quest as a Kid, and yeah... my Thumbs would HURT playing it. the best thing you can do is farm the nearest foes until you get your best Weapon, from there you try not to step into RED Gun icons, that'll downgrade you. also you get a Whip after beating the first boss, i recommend that you farm the Whip, as THAT is where the serious damage comes from.
DESTINATION EARTHSTAR is cool, the main song lulls you into a weird trance.
Super Pitfall was the first time that I truly realized that my best friend didn't really "get" video games (ultimately he grew up hating them). He thought this was a good game. I was flabbergasted when he brought it over bragging.
I loved pitfall 2 on Atari when I was young so I kind of enjoyed exploring super pitfall.
9:30 yep. Also the reason sonic was always bad.
I'm a simple man. I see an hour long jason graves video. I click.
Nice video Michele!!
The two Game Grumps episodes where they play Muppets Adventure is a descent into madness.
Me when Jason doesn't know who Noah is: -_-
Good vid tho. keep it up to 20 K my dude
Baby Moses apparently evolves into Noah.
Pokemon has gotten weird lately
I didn't realize how good I had it growing up. The worst titles I played on the NES Xenophobe, Hydlide, and Taboo. Considering my friends and I had all the classics plus games like The Guardian Legend, Might and Magic, Ultima IV, Astyanax, Godzilla, Destiny of an Emperor...