Super Star Wars was released on the Virtual Console today. I remember putting a ton of hours into this game when I was a kid, but it's really just not that great to me now. I guess it was celebrated by the magazines at the time because of the music and that it was a movie licence game that wasn't complete balls, but the whole game seems pretty unbalanced and awkward, especially that first level.
So: Are there any retro games that you played as a kid that aren't really great games after all?
Heh, I used to have that game. I remember the Mode7 Sand Speeder level.
There are lots of games that I go back to and don't have as much fun as I remember. In fact, new games usually aren't nearly as fun to play as looking forward to them.
For that reason I don't buy or play as many games as I used to... I spend more time thinking about my own ideas to make. I still enjoy good games, just not as often.
There are loads that have ages extremely badly. Mostly due to the fact they were among the first games I had played. Here are two examples of bad arcade ports that I loved to bits as a kid but... well, they're pretty awful.
Ghosts 'n' Goblins - Amstrad cpc
The game was squeezed into 64 kilobytes so there are only 3 levels. The programmer decided to reduce the amount of colours to allow a much faster scroll. There are only 3 colours for sprites and 3 for the Background instead of 16 overall. Still it moved at a nice pace.
The Newzealand story - Amstrad cpc
This time we have a multiload game. Every single level loads seperately and it's very sluggish overall anyway. Notice how slow the scroll is when you use 16 colours at once a smaller screen size does little to speed things up.
The worst part about this are the bosses, they take AGES to beat. The arcade game's bosses can be killed in about 5 seconds if you're good enough but the slowdown in this version is just ridiculous.
Although it's not just a limitation of the hardware, some games have fullscreen + 16 colours and move at a very fast pace. It just takes some clever code.
I only ever played DOS games and they were meant for adults, like Blood, Duke 3D, all the other games I favourited on my Abandonia account (http://www.abandonia.com/en/user/13344 ), are better than ever for me now.
Discarded pizza boxes are an indispensable source of cheese.
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I still enjoy good games, just not as often.
