/vr/ - Retro Games

Here's one I don't see mentioned much: Championship Lode Runner. Not necessarily a shitty game in terms of gameplay, but it's probably just about the hardest motherfucker in the system's library which is saying something. The levels for this version were levels sent in by fans, these are the most cruel and sadistic Lode Runner levels possible that require glitches, exploiting the AI, and other illogical shit no one but the most dedicated Lode Runner players would ever think to do.

bumpan
old OP must see this

>>8252180
Ganso Saiyuuki: Super Monkey Daibouken

bumpity bump

>>8252180
Ninja-kun: Majou no Bouken & Ninja Jajamaru-kun

>>8254494
really early NROM titles, have some mercy here

>>8254507
no

>>8254494
Really not that bad. As >>8254507 sadi it's a pretty early game in the system's lifespan and is a decent enough arcade to console experience.

>>8252529
I remember when I first saw footage of it and I thought it was some insane rom hack. It’s absolutely diabolical, genuinely think it might be the hardest game ever made.
>>8252180
This is probably the worst famicom game I’ve ever played. Absolute suffering, shame really cause the cover makes it look like some fun Kunio-kun game but no, it’s just shit

Hey old OP here, glad someone made this thread actually cause I totally forgot about the other one. When I last checked I was playing Bokosuka wars, I think. I did play Hana no Star and it might be the worst to be honest. Already played Week of Garfield and Super Monkey. They’re both pretty awful, especially SMD. Thanks for resurrecting the thread

>>8252180
53 Stations of the Tokkaido is the worst fucking game I have ever played on any system

>>8252529
I've had that version on bootleg multicart, along with regular Lode Runner. Both versions were equally hard for me as a kid, but at least I could clear stages 1 and 2 in normal LR.

Also, around that time, I wrote my own walkthrough book for NES. Found it in the desk recently. Turns out I gave Championship Lode Runner the best description.

"It's just levels that can't be beaten. Better not play it." (c)

>>8254507
>>8254659
Iirc Ninja-kun games also sold pretty well in Japan.

Hikari no Senshi Photon: The Ultimate Game on Planet Earth

It manages to be obtuse, boring and unfair all at once. Truly a marvel.

A bootleg port of The Legend of Zelda and the Minish Cap. Uses turn-based combat and designed so that no matter how much you grind the enemies will always be WAY stronger than you.

>>8254848
It did. It actually spawned a full series with five games on the famicom, none of them ever released outside of Japan. It's probably the most popular series on the famiocm that never left Japan.

>>8254971
This one has a neat history at least. It's based on Photon which was the first successful commercial lasertag organization. It even had a live action television show but strangely the game has nothing to do with that despite them being from around the same time period.

>>8252180

Was it made by Micronics or Bits Laboratory? Then you don't even need to ask.

On-topic-ish, but I'm very fascinated by the bizarre, sometimes shitty Japanese developed games which are based on US properties, like A Week of Garfield, Predator, Die Hard, Friday the 13th, etc.

>>8255471
In a lot of cases it was LJN or whoever had the rights just farming development out to the lowest bidder and getting whatever they could squirt out before Black Friday came around.

Gimmick!

>>8255728
What's interesting is that some stuff, like Predator and Die Hard, were released in Japan a while before their US releases, which would seem to indicate that they were actually developed initially for a Japanese audience, with a US publisher picking them up later.

Bird week
Not necessarily a bad game, but it has really unfair difficulty

More people need to know about Ikki.
>first game ever given the title of "Kusoge", created in a column by essayist Jun Miura
>the cover art was drawn by a random kid the dev team found since none of them knew how to draw
>has become such a popular "kusoge" that it received a novel adaptation from a company that specifically adapts kusoge into novels
>somehow still sold 800,000 copies

>>8258285
>a company that specifically adapts kusoge into novels
what a time to be alive that must have been

>>8258285
This game is unfairly bullied. It was from 85 and like the first Famicom game Sunsoft did. Also it's not bad, has nice graphics and even 4 way scrolling pretty ambitious for a 16k NROM game. And don't you get a kick out of the bonus screens where he has to eat onigir...I mean jelly donuts for points? The one downside is the music is a bit shrill since it was so early and they didn't know how to use the 2A01 yet.

>>8258357
It's pretty damn bad anon. It's no Super Monkey Daibouken or Hoshi Wo Miro Hito but it's pretty damn bad. The auto aim of your weapon is a giant pain in the ass since you can be fucked simply by the game deciding you should hit a different enemy then you wanted.
>And don't you get a kick out of the bonus screens where he has to eat onigir...I mean jelly donuts for points?
Fun fact about this bonus stage: where the onigiri will be thrown is completely random meaning the game can throw two so far apart it's impossible to get both. This doesn't seem too bad, until you learn you only get a bonus if you get all ten so the game can lock you out of a bonus just by pure chance.

>Oh no, I just wasted a donut!

>>8258285
You have to give it to Sunsoft, their early titles known as stereotypical shitty FC games, and their late releases are some of the classics of the console.
Also, for a random kid, that's some pretty great cartoony cover art.

well whatever, most early Famicom titles were very simple, cheesy games, they hadn't gotten to Mega Man 4 or Final Fantasy 3 yet in 1986. ROMs were small they didn't have real mappers and didn't understand the hardware that well yet. these games are mostly useful as curiosities or multicart staples. is like the Mega Drive when Altered Beast compared with Vectorman.

>>8258729
Even among the famicom's earlier catalog there was a clear distinction between what games on the system were good and what were shit. There's a reason no one really cares about those first three years of the system's lifespan, almost all the game are irrelevant simply because it's library was almost entirely ports. Even more is that what original games it had were usually pretty terrible.That said while by today's standards they would be unacceptable some of these ports really were well done by console standards of that time. I don't think it would be too hard to see why Xevious and Mappy were better then Devil World and Ice Climbers.

People tend to shit all over Spelunker, but I love that game.

>>8258659
There's a conspiracy theory going around that 'the good Sunsoft' was Tokai Engineering, a mysterious developer credited in Blaster Master and only that game. There's a possibility that Sunsoft was able to contract a high talent developer and made them so much money that they continued contracting them. The slower income would also be why they had to higher western companies in the 4th gen, Tokai was getting too smart about their talent.

>>8259074
Nah, Spelunker is more just known for being hard as fuck. Dying from fall distance already is a weird idea for people to get used to nowadays and it doesn't help that die if you fall even slightly. The main problem is really that climbing feels slippery as fuck resulting in a lot of death just from slipping off while jumping on or climbing.

>>8254494
Ninja Jajamaru-kun is bad? I actually enjoy playing it. It's a fun, short game.

>>8259127
There's 100 games in that series, if no one liked them that wouldn't be the case. Jajamaru-kun is pretty fun.

>>8259091
It's definitely possible. Many publishers did this without clarifying if their games were made in-house. Contracting an outside company is hardly a conspiracy though.

>>8255751
is a very good game

>>8252180
Link to the old thread?

The intro sequence with the spaceship is missing when literally every other version had it, all because they could save 5 cents by using a smaller CHR ROM.

Taito's Front Line. Another early and very bad Famicom release.

You could post almost the entire Micronics library here, even their later ones like Yanchamaru 3. Their games were so sloppy, with Ghostbusters and their SNK ports being really notorious.

>>8260053
A lot of their games were written in C which is why they run so slow. Athena seems to be an exception.

>>8258285
I think at this point, most people know Ikki from how Blaster Master Zero 2 references it.

>>8258285
>>8260062
Oh, and there's also the equally-kusoge sequel, Nazo no Atlantis (which also gets a few nods in BMZ2). It claims to be bigger than Super Mario Bros., but quantity definitely came at the expense of quality.

>>8260076
*Atlantis no Nazo. Sorry, got it flipped.

Sunsoft made Super Arabian which is legit one of the best screen-clear style arcade games on the Famicom so all this "early Sunsoft is shit" sentiment I'm seeing can fuck right off

No idea who thought porting King's Quest V to the NES was a good idea.

Commando. The first NES game Capcom did in-house after taking over from Micronics and it's a total shitshow with graphics glitches everywhere.

>>8260031
>>8260020
Taito were a very mixed bag with their NES arcade ports--you had mediocre ones like Arkanoid and then others like Operation Wolf where a lot more effort and money were expended. The later ones like Rainbow Islands and The New Zealand Story were outsourced to the UK's Software Creations.

>>8260220
Good game, but that port isn't really too great honestly.

>>8260053
>Famicom Ghostbusters
I love how the original FC release doesnt even have an ending, just a bugged screen showing "riri"

>>8260053
Micronics didn't program Ghostbusters that was another shovelware outfit Bits Laboratory.

>>8260861
To think you guys beat up on ZX Spectrum games for being broken messes made by first year programming students. At least those broken messes weren't 50 USD a pop.

>>8261101
A valid point, anon.

>>8261087
Nice to know. Bits input is weird for what I found, ranging from low-decent to awful shit.

>>8261130
>>8261101
Yes the Famicom had a lot of awful games, but it also had FF3 and Kirby's Adventure while the Spectrum...did not.

>>8261141
Spectrum has some excellent games and was at the very least an incredibly influential machine.

The typical Spectrum game is comparable size and content-wise to an NROM/CNROM Famicom game. Obviously it didn't have the AAA 256k-512k epics like most later period Famicom stuff, and it wouldn't be possible to do so for many games since the Speccy's tape storage basically limited you to linear level progressions (so no RPGs), and multiload from tape was pants in any case.

Many of these games were shit due to time limitations on completing them, and programmers had to code in assembly language with very primitive debugging tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loUG1rKTKtE
More irritating than anything with that hellish music and noise.

>>8259074
>>8259109
Spelunker is a port from the Atari 8-bit/C64 and is another of the very popular "explore a tomb/cave/pyramid while collecting junk and avoiding baddies" game format. The NES is more-or-less a direct port that thankfully avoids unnecessary "improvements" the way Boulder Dash did.

I thought Nintendo was supposed to prevent Atari level of garbage through their quality assurance program.

>>8261264
In all honesty they did, it didn't stop garbage from being made but it stopped devs from flooding the market with new stuff. A lot of devs hated their "ten games per year" limit, even more so because Konami found a work around that Nintendo allowed since they were one of the most successful devs.

>>8260053
God I hate Ikari
at least on NES

>>8261148
but where Anons live it was C64