In a recent post, I mentioned that EGM spent a good deal of time talking up obviously shitty games. Here is a short, mostly visual, follow up to that thesis. At least this first game made a great movie… to ridicule. But please don’t do that, I’ve copyrighted both ironic enjoyment and hipster condescension.
What a sweet follow up ad to the Hudson Hawk preview. The next preview is for a game I actually owned and played a lot of. It was bad but I was young so it was good. Street Smart had some mild RPG mechanics – if I recall, you gained a stat point or two after winning fights. Numbers (or, in this case, boxes) going up was and is human-nip for me.
Here is another Genesis game I played as a childish child. It is also bad but has a weirdness about it that is offputting and cool. I can’t think of many other games that let you turn into a centaur or merman, though I have always wanted to play the PS1’s Meremanoid.
Reminiscing about Saint Sword almost put me in a crisis – maybe these are previews for sweet games, not bad games. But then I scrolled down and found the next preview is actually for something shitty. Bill Laimbeer was known for playing basketball like an asshole, so they gave him his own bad game.
This next game is a real treasure… master. It wasn’t good but at least the gimmick of the game – some player would win some treasure or something – possibly never happened and no one won anything. You could even say the people who played the game lost… at winning.
All Simpsons games I have played are bad. The ones I haven’t played are likely also bad. There was a run of them on Genesis and SNES that consisted of half a dozen minigames or so and they all played poorly and were stupid. This one, Bart’s Nightmare, is basically indistinguishable from the one I put the most time into – Virtual Bart.
Supposedly, this next game was developed as a sequel to Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! but then after Tyson raped someone, or threw someone down stairs, or some did some other normal, cool thing Nintendo dropped it. Why would Beam software, purveyors of quality titles such as Back to the Future and Fisher-Price: Perfect Fit be contracted to develop the sequel of an excellent, internal Nintendo series? They wouldn’t but I am not an investigative journalist nor a pursuer of truth (jet fuel can’t melt steel beams) so whatever, let’s say Nintendo paid for this game’s development and then another huge publisher (the world famous American Softworks) swooped in and picked it up after Yamauchi got cold feet. The point is the game sucks.
This game is NOT! good. I mean, NOT! this game is good. Wait… this game is good… IS! The Love Guru and Master of Disguise are my favorite movies so to see this execrable game made about my boys John Wayne and Garth Brooks made me angry. As if?
Coming (too) soon – a look at ads from middling companies that somehow found enough lost wallets to buy advertising space in a magazine. Party on Dwayne! Party on Bart!
Huh, I didn’t know Treco published more than a couple games in the US – I thought it was only Warsong and Sorcerer’s Kingdom (developed by two different companies), but they appear to have published 5 games.
Apparently Sorcerer’s Kingdom wasn’t the only bad game they published.
I was a Nintendo Power kid and I remember them mostly also saying all games were awesome. But in retrospect, Nintendo Power didn’t really pretend to be a neutral party.