If you want a solid FPS on Genesis, I'd recommend Zero Tolerance. The level progression can be a bit confusing at times. Outside of that it's a great game. Probably the best 16 bit FPS
I've played a bit of that one; it's definitely a LOT better than Cyber Cop, but I still find it a little tough to play personally. It's more of a Genesis FPS done right for sure though.
Fair list. Here is my alternative list of GOOD games. 0:37 mic and mac global gladiators. Recycling and good music. 2:47 king of the monsters. It has monsters. 4:31 zero tolerance, the only fps worth playing. 5:46 castlevania. Stairs but they work. 7:29 cyborg justice, robot fisting done well. 9:06 toy story, licensed games done well. 10:52 James Pond 2, the only one worth playing. 11:59 fatal fury 2. Its not street fighter. 14:09 eternal champions. Its also not street fighter. 15:02 comic zone. Its a comic. And a zone. Two things it does better than xperts.
Tongue of the Fatman made a lot more sense in the original home computer context. Before Street Fighter II, fighting games in planar 2D were inspired by "Karate Champ" controls, which assigned arcade motions to the control stick. I would say we knew this wasn't great, but we expected it. The 3D fighters were more like Beast Master. The developers took cues from Beat'em ups and made them easy to control, but they were usually very simple (usually not as simple as Beast Master). These are games like "King of the Monsters" or "Pit-Fighter", which were very popular in the arcade. These games had all flash and no substance. Tongue was a move in the right direction, but it was still beholden to Karate Champ. If the Genesis Slaughter Sport had the timing fixed it wouldn't be so obvious it was from before SF2. It would be fine. But if wishes were fishes...
@@kyleolson8977 I actually quite enjoy King of the Monsters. Slaughter Sport's fatal flaw really is the delayed inputs, otherwise it's pretty neat for the time
@@jankedjesus King of the Monsters plays well, but it is an arcade experience. It was one of the most appealing pre-SF2/Fatal Fury Neo Geo games. King of the Monsters is much more complicated than Beast Master, but that's not saying much. Most of the beat'em up style fighters hadn't figured out how to have the move complexity that Street Fighter II has. And it really is a shame the port of Tongue /Sport (or Mondu's Fight Palace in some places) botches one important thing. I wonder if anyone has tried to fix the rom.
Just found your channel and have been binge watching your videos and must say your videos are very good and I would expect you to start racking up subscribers any day now.🤘👍
Thank you so much! Been on the Twitch grind for a while, but haven't really gotten serious with RUclips until earlier this year. Been very happy with the growth so far, and I think things have really just begun!
X-perts needed to be seen to be believed. I had that game. It's so bad you can't even really play it. I remember the process being really confusing, frustrating, not getting very far, and more or less confused as to how to do basic attacks and what to do. Also, I remember Slaughter Sport. We rented it during a sleepover before a big day at a football game - we stayed up all night playing it, and honestly? It worked! 8 year olds are easy to entertain! We played it! You cannot simply "play" X-perts.
Hey there, JankedJesus, awesome list! I'm not...defending Awesome Possum, but I do enjoy aspects about it. This game is one of those "hard for the wrong reasons" kind of game for sure, and Dr Machino was cheap and a pain in the butt to beat back in the day. I would LOVE to see a remake of this game, fully iron out the jank and slowdown, improve the graphics and everything, make it a smooth experience. I'd love to see this done with what are considered bad/good-bad retro games most people know/have been made aware of over the years
I'll stick up for James Pond 2: Operation RoboCod, because they gave him robot arms so its more of a traditional platformer with swimming sections. And cutesy games never had a ton of competition on the Genesis, these were more for the littler kids, so they could compete with the other consoles for the family market.
It's a good list (of awfulness! 🙂). I've actually seen a RUclips suggest Awesome Possum is a hidden gem and I immediately unsubscribed seeing that is his taste. I'd offer Sword of Sudan as another suggestion. Looks good, seems like it should be good but it is so so bad.
Awesome Possum was a awful game indeed. I rented the game back then and regret it as soon as I played it. I bought Heavy Nova recently and I thought I might have found a hidden gem, but I guess not. I'm now having Buyer's remorse. At least it wasn't ludicrously expensive. Once upon a time I wanted to try X-Perts but I'm glad I never had the chance to. The concept wa good on paper, but was poorly executed. So I dodged a bullet there.
How you feel about X-Perts is how I feel about Heavy Nova; great idea on paper, but the execution is just sloppy and borderline broken. Glad you didn't pay too much for it.
James Pond is just one of those instances where you realise that Americans are just different to Brits. I think in much the same way as Americans have the label of struggling to understand irony, they also can't really get their heads around the idea of the character who's purposefully naff in a tongue and cheek way just for the joy of being naff and silly. Like that Christmas cracker joke that everyone groans at but still tells anyway. Its surprisingly difficult to explain to be honest. Regardless the huge contrast between the reception of James Pond II - Robocod on either side of the Atlantic cannot be missed, here in much of Europe it was critically acclaimed and almost unanimously considered one of the best games on the Mega Drive, while in the US its barely heard of or looked at as an almost ran or some such, its a pretty start contrast for those of us in our 40s. I always find myself wondering, how much of retro gaming is nostalgia? Do retro gamers not only look for that nostalgia by playing the games of their youth, but also games which remind them of the games of their youth? And if experiencing something unexpected, be it in controls or design ethos do they have an automatic negative reaction to it due to a lack of that nostalgia? Or was Robocod just popular in Europe due to better distribution and marketing there? Were tastes and expectations drastically different here during that time? Were the reviewers bribed?! So many different factors that its hard to come to any conclusion.
Some serious food for thought. You bring up some valid points, and I do think to a significant degree it could be a cultural thing. I for one am not big on "groaner" style jokes, and once the "haha, James POND, get it?" is removed from the equation, I had a hard time seeing anything in that game that I couldn't get a dime a dozen elsewhere with the deluge of other 2D platformers on the system.
@@jankedjesus Yeah I was mainly talking about the art design or character design in the first section about culture really, I would say the Dizzy series also have that kind of aspect. In fact maybe you could argue a TV show like Doctor Who is also purposefully "naff" or tongue in cheek or whatever the best way to describe it would be, and that show took many decades to get anywhere in the US. I agree that there is little that stands out from a game play perspective and that's what a lot of the second section I wrote is about, I think I did a poor explanation really (it was 2am at the time). While Robocod is widely popular among my demographic in the UK I am not that enamored with it personally. I will say though that in Britain a game called "The Newzealand Story" was massively influential here in a way that it doesn't seem to have been anywhere else and you can see its influence in Robocod, and, in fact Taito would generally be more influential in 80s Britain than Nintendo as the NES was not that popular here. A lot of our platform games have these massive, square, mazelike levels full of useless collectables, as opposed to being a linear run from left to right, people refer to them derogatively as "Euro-Style Platformers" but really as I said I think the source is probably Taito's arcade games (though Robocod specifically does have some Mario in it too). Its the maze vs linear line design ethos that makes me most wonder, is the maze platformer design inherently bad, is it unfocused as the criticism often reads, or is it just that people have come to expect platformers to play a certain way. When listening to Robocod fans they will often talk of searching every nook and cranny of the level to find these useless objects in order to get high point scores, I think this is something nobody would be interested in doing these days (and in fact I couldn't care less about points myself). Personally I would defend the Master System Robocod to an extent, its almost the same as the 16-bit versions even including parallax scrolling so I think its more competitive for the hardware, I actually think it benefits from having fewer levels as well to be honest! The Amiga version as well perhaps because it has more distinctive backgrounds that are more representative of a certain style and a certain time in video gaming history that only lasted for a few years that I find to be interesting. Anyway I've rambled long enough!
Dark Castle was to be played with a Mouse. Which Baffles me of Why they ported it to consoles that have controller inputs. Even the version I played (the C64) SUCKED. lol
hey man, don't be hard on james pond, he's not at all as terrible as you think because I find him really creative and cute, and out of all this rubbish additions you added to your list I've only played awesome possum and the first james pond and I liked them in some strange way, in short I am a fan of platform games which is why I appreciated them, I know very well how the awesome possum game can have a lot of defects but in short it doesn't have so many numerous problems as the obscure platformer and infamous skunny hardnut and quik the tunder rabbit which are even worse than his game!
James Pond and Crash Test Dummies aren't great, but I don't think they are among the worst ten. Agree about James Pond being a bad idea... How about Brutal and Pele instead?
@@CasperEgas I don't think Brutal is nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Sports games are hard to gauge for me as most come off as competent but uninteresting
Columns is definitely not a masterpiece, but I'd probably play it over everything on this list. EA had some great games actually, but their output wasn't perfect, and they had their fair share of duds
Beast Wrestler, when you have King Of The Monsters at home
OH YEAH!! KOTM!! 👍
Algothrithm knew I was subconsciously thinking about Megadrive games. I am now subscribed. Also, some of these games were awesome!
Thanks for subscribing!
Had the Test Dummy toys as a kid but never got to the games. Can't say I missed out on anything. Nice video JJ and Denis!
Thanks for watching Monica!
You coulda told me the last game was Robot Chicken on Genesis & I woulda believed you
Honestly never made that connection, but they do look kinda similar
🤣
If you want a solid FPS on Genesis, I'd recommend Zero Tolerance. The level progression can be a bit confusing at times. Outside of that it's a great game. Probably the best 16 bit FPS
I've played a bit of that one; it's definitely a LOT better than Cyber Cop, but I still find it a little tough to play personally. It's more of a Genesis FPS done right for sure though.
I still play it since i got it in 94 lol
Fair list. Here is my alternative list of GOOD games.
0:37 mic and mac global gladiators. Recycling and good music.
2:47 king of the monsters. It has monsters.
4:31 zero tolerance, the only fps worth playing.
5:46 castlevania. Stairs but they work.
7:29 cyborg justice, robot fisting done well.
9:06 toy story, licensed games done well.
10:52 James Pond 2, the only one worth playing.
11:59 fatal fury 2. Its not street fighter.
14:09 eternal champions. Its also not street fighter.
15:02 comic zone. Its a comic. And a zone. Two things it does better than xperts.
Some great alternatives! I really like King of the Monsters and Comix Zone especially.
Slaughter Sport makes Pitfighter look like Fatal Fury 2
Let's not get ahead of ourselves Ghost XD
@@jankedjesus alright, Eternal Champions 😅
@@Ghost01702 lmaoooo
Tongue of the Fatman made a lot more sense in the original home computer context. Before Street Fighter II, fighting games in planar 2D were inspired by "Karate Champ" controls, which assigned arcade motions to the control stick. I would say we knew this wasn't great, but we expected it.
The 3D fighters were more like Beast Master. The developers took cues from Beat'em ups and made them easy to control, but they were usually very simple (usually not as simple as Beast Master). These are games like "King of the Monsters" or "Pit-Fighter", which were very popular in the arcade. These games had all flash and no substance.
Tongue was a move in the right direction, but it was still beholden to Karate Champ. If the Genesis Slaughter Sport had the timing fixed it wouldn't be so obvious it was from before SF2. It would be fine. But if wishes were fishes...
@@kyleolson8977 I actually quite enjoy King of the Monsters. Slaughter Sport's fatal flaw really is the delayed inputs, otherwise it's pretty neat for the time
@@jankedjesus King of the Monsters plays well, but it is an arcade experience. It was one of the most appealing pre-SF2/Fatal Fury Neo Geo games.
King of the Monsters is much more complicated than Beast Master, but that's not saying much. Most of the beat'em up style fighters hadn't figured out how to have the move complexity that Street Fighter II has.
And it really is a shame the port of Tongue /Sport (or Mondu's Fight Palace in some places) botches one important thing. I wonder if anyone has tried to fix the rom.
So many of these were the worst weekend rentals i ever got.
I'm sorry your weekends got wasted on these. Hopefully you got some good experiences as well
Just found your channel and have been binge watching your videos and must say your videos are very good and I would expect you to start racking up subscribers any day now.🤘👍
Thank you so much! Been on the Twitch grind for a while, but haven't really gotten serious with RUclips until earlier this year. Been very happy with the growth so far, and I think things have really just begun!
The only fun way to play Slaughter Sport is 2 player VS, and that can be ridiculous fun.
So are we also going to see that list of crappy licensed games? Spider-Man and X-Men in Arcade's Revenge needs to be on their.
I've got one already filmed about movie licensed games, maybe I'll put together one for comic book/superhero licenses at some point.
X-perts needed to be seen to be believed. I had that game. It's so bad you can't even really play it. I remember the process being really confusing, frustrating, not getting very far, and more or less confused as to how to do basic attacks and what to do. Also, I remember Slaughter Sport. We rented it during a sleepover before a big day at a football game - we stayed up all night playing it, and honestly? It worked! 8 year olds are easy to entertain! We played it!
You cannot simply "play" X-perts.
@@neoconnor4395 Agreed, it's a confounding experience
@@jankedjesus Like, they charged money for that.
Hey there, JankedJesus, awesome list! I'm not...defending Awesome Possum, but I do enjoy aspects about it. This game is one of those "hard for the wrong reasons" kind of game for sure, and Dr Machino was cheap and a pain in the butt to beat back in the day. I would LOVE to see a remake of this game, fully iron out the jank and slowdown, improve the graphics and everything, make it a smooth experience. I'd love to see this done with what are considered bad/good-bad retro games most people know/have been made aware of over the years
I'll stick up for James Pond 2: Operation RoboCod, because they gave him robot arms so its more of a traditional platformer with swimming sections. And cutesy games never had a ton of competition on the Genesis, these were more for the littler kids, so they could compete with the other consoles for the family market.
Heavy Nova would have made me lose faith in my own gaming ability. I’m so glad I didn’t buy it.
Hahaha, even I had to wonder myself while playing it
james pond is kinda genius
As they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure 🤣
One of the few lists of this type that doesn't have Sword of Sodan - kudos for Heavy Nova, i streamed that once and NEVER AGAIN
Heavy Nova was a crushing disappointment. Sword of Sodan I actually kinda dig for how stupid it is, haha.
It's a good list (of awfulness! 🙂). I've actually seen a RUclips suggest Awesome Possum is a hidden gem and I immediately unsubscribed seeing that is his taste. I'd offer Sword of Sudan as another suggestion. Looks good, seems like it should be good but it is so so bad.
I have to admit, Sword of Sodan is a guilty pleasure of mine... one of those "so bad it's good" games for me
X Perts almost looks like a good game, we need a remake
Get Limited Run right on it! 🤣
Awesome Possum was a awful game indeed. I rented the game back then and regret it as soon as I played it.
I bought Heavy Nova recently and I thought I might have found a hidden gem, but I guess not. I'm now having Buyer's remorse. At least it wasn't ludicrously expensive.
Once upon a time I wanted to try X-Perts but I'm glad I never had the chance to. The concept wa good on paper, but was poorly executed. So I dodged a bullet there.
How you feel about X-Perts is how I feel about Heavy Nova; great idea on paper, but the execution is just sloppy and borderline broken. Glad you didn't pay too much for it.
Dude James Pond and Crash Dummies are great! 😆
James Pond is just one of those instances where you realise that Americans are just different to Brits. I think in much the same way as Americans have the label of struggling to understand irony, they also can't really get their heads around the idea of the character who's purposefully naff in a tongue and cheek way just for the joy of being naff and silly. Like that Christmas cracker joke that everyone groans at but still tells anyway.
Its surprisingly difficult to explain to be honest.
Regardless the huge contrast between the reception of James Pond II - Robocod on either side of the Atlantic cannot be missed, here in much of Europe it was critically acclaimed and almost unanimously considered one of the best games on the Mega Drive, while in the US its barely heard of or looked at as an almost ran or some such, its a pretty start contrast for those of us in our 40s.
I always find myself wondering, how much of retro gaming is nostalgia? Do retro gamers not only look for that nostalgia by playing the games of their youth, but also games which remind them of the games of their youth? And if experiencing something unexpected, be it in controls or design ethos do they have an automatic negative reaction to it due to a lack of that nostalgia? Or was Robocod just popular in Europe due to better distribution and marketing there? Were tastes and expectations drastically different here during that time? Were the reviewers bribed?!
So many different factors that its hard to come to any conclusion.
Some serious food for thought. You bring up some valid points, and I do think to a significant degree it could be a cultural thing. I for one am not big on "groaner" style jokes, and once the "haha, James POND, get it?" is removed from the equation, I had a hard time seeing anything in that game that I couldn't get a dime a dozen elsewhere with the deluge of other 2D platformers on the system.
@@jankedjesus Yeah I was mainly talking about the art design or character design in the first section about culture really, I would say the Dizzy series also have that kind of aspect. In fact maybe you could argue a TV show like Doctor Who is also purposefully "naff" or tongue in cheek or whatever the best way to describe it would be, and that show took many decades to get anywhere in the US.
I agree that there is little that stands out from a game play perspective and that's what a lot of the second section I wrote is about, I think I did a poor explanation really (it was 2am at the time). While Robocod is widely popular among my demographic in the UK I am not that enamored with it personally.
I will say though that in Britain a game called "The Newzealand Story" was massively influential here in a way that it doesn't seem to have been anywhere else and you can see its influence in Robocod, and, in fact Taito would generally be more influential in 80s Britain than Nintendo as the NES was not that popular here. A lot of our platform games have these massive, square, mazelike levels full of useless collectables, as opposed to being a linear run from left to right, people refer to them derogatively as "Euro-Style Platformers" but really as I said I think the source is probably Taito's arcade games (though Robocod specifically does have some Mario in it too).
Its the maze vs linear line design ethos that makes me most wonder, is the maze platformer design inherently bad, is it unfocused as the criticism often reads, or is it just that people have come to expect platformers to play a certain way. When listening to Robocod fans they will often talk of searching every nook and cranny of the level to find these useless objects in order to get high point scores, I think this is something nobody would be interested in doing these days (and in fact I couldn't care less about points myself).
Personally I would defend the Master System Robocod to an extent, its almost the same as the 16-bit versions even including parallax scrolling so I think its more competitive for the hardware, I actually think it benefits from having fewer levels as well to be honest! The Amiga version as well perhaps because it has more distinctive backgrounds that are more representative of a certain style and a certain time in video gaming history that only lasted for a few years that I find to be interesting.
Anyway I've rambled long enough!
I remember being a kid and actually liking awesome possum, i didnt think it was bad at all
I could see as a kid maybe liking it thematically, but even then, it's a technical mess
Dark Castle was to be played with a Mouse. Which Baffles me of Why they ported it to consoles that have controller inputs.
Even the version I played (the C64) SUCKED. lol
Put some respect on Awesome Possums name!
Hey, I recited the whole title 🤣
More like Lost Em' Possum as in it loses the player interest 1 stage in 🤪
hey man, don't be hard on james pond, he's not at all as terrible as you think because I find him really creative and cute, and out of all this rubbish additions you added to your list I've only played awesome possum and the first james pond and I liked them in some strange way, in short I am a fan of platform games which is why I appreciated them, I know very well how the awesome possum game can have a lot of defects but in short it doesn't have so many numerous problems as the obscure platformer and infamous skunny hardnut and quik the tunder rabbit which are even worse than his game!
James Pond and Crash Test Dummies aren't great, but I don't think they are among the worst ten. Agree about James Pond being a bad idea...
How about Brutal and Pele instead?
@@CasperEgas I don't think Brutal is nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Sports games are hard to gauge for me as most come off as competent but uninteresting
@@jankedjesus Rise of the Robots?
@@jankedjesus or Sword of Sodan?
@@CasperEgas Rise of the Robots is pretty rough, but I have a soft spot for it. Sword of Sodan is so bad it's good imo
This is a good list of bad games to avoid, but I feel Sword of Sodan is worse than most games on this list.
That game is bad, but I had actual fun with it unlike the games I discussed here. These were devoid of any joy whatsoever.
Sword of Sodan ia pretty shitty. You push the buttons and nothing happens.
I get why people hate that one, but I find it kinda fun haha
I would say anything released by EA besides Road Rash (which would include NBA live and all the fifas). Also Columns is not exactly a masterpiece.
Columns is definitely not a masterpiece, but I'd probably play it over everything on this list. EA had some great games actually, but their output wasn't perfect, and they had their fair share of duds