Worst. Game. Ever.
Offline Caution: The Following Will Be a Complete Waste of Your Time Unless You're a Really, Really Big Time Nerd
I want to share an experience with you.
First, just a morsel of backstory: I love my aging Nintendo 64. Mario 64, Starfox 64, Perfect Dark, Blast Corps (one of my most favorite puzzle/platformer games of all time)... I think I've logged more hours on that silly machine than I have on my DS and PC combined. The controller for the 64, IMHO, was one of the most neat and ergonomic released.
I was always disappointed, though, that the console featured so few pure beat 'em up or run 'n' gun games.
So I was in Blockbuster today, and browsing the bargain bin, I came across a copy of Superman 64 for 2.00. Now, I was well aware that the game has been lauded as perhaps the most horrendous game ever released for any system of any era, but I thought, "Bah. 2.00, and I'll just see how bad it is. Even if it's a bad beat 'em up, it's still a beat 'em up, and I'll just knock some guys around and/or fry them with x-ray vision, and that'll be that - even if it's not very satisfying or the controls aren't that responsive."
The clerk couldn't hold-in his laughter when I bought it. He tried to warn me, but I just told him that it was just 2 bucks anyway, and he insisted I'd have been better off tossing said two bucks down a sewer drain just to amuse myself with the sound they made.
I should've heeded his warning.
Oh. My. God.
I don't even know how to describe the past two hours. I just can't give the experience proper justice. You fire up the game, and it looks not all that bad from the get-go (you get a nice spash screen with a sharp-looking menu)... and then you start to 'play' (I use that term in the most loose way possible). You're presented wth a not-too-terribly modelled redition of Metropolis (for the time, anyway) and a series of rings to fly through within a given time limit.
So, you think, "Oh, okay. Some kind of training mission where you fly through these rings to get used to the controls,"
...So you start flying through the rings. It then dawns on you that this is going to be quite the chore, as 'sticky' doesn't even cover the responsiveness of the analog stick here. It's just awful - the absolute bare minimum to be even playable at all. And there are just so Goddamn many rings, and you have to fly through every single one of them within two minutes. Miss one? Back to start.
I think to myself, "Why the fuck is this damn training mission made so fucking hard???" but I persist so that I can eventually get to the beat 'em up portion of the game.
So, after perhaps half an hour, I beat the 'training mission'. The next level begins with a dialogue box... which lasts for perhaps a few fractions of a second before disappearing without giving me much of a chance to read it - and I just sat and watched as a car ran over some pedestrian. This apparently causes a 'Lex Wins!' situation, and I get to start all over again with the ring mission!
So after another 20 or so minutes I beat the ring misson again... and I managed to catch the dialogue box this time. Apparently I needed to pick-up the car and throw it before it got to the pedestrian, and then repeat this process for a second car. No biggie. So I go ahead and do that, and then...
More fucking flying through rings!
...Two training missions? Why?
It then occurred to me that these weren't 'training missions' at all. This was the whole game. Flying through Goddamn rngs with the some of the worst controls ever implemented.
I persisted for another few missions, trying to get to some point where I could just fucking punch something. Anything, really.
Nope. Not one level in the first 4 I clawed my way through where you actually do anything remotely resembling 'fun' at all.
This really is one of those rare games that doesn't have any one or two particular things wrong with it. It's just, at a conceptual level, fucked right up. Who the Hell decided that it would be entertaining to fly Superman through a lame ass obstacle course rather than, y'know, actually doing the shit you read about him doing in the comics? Like fighting villains and shit? Who was the asshole who sat down and said, "Okay - I've got it. We're going to label this game with the Superman franchise, because we don't have any actual design talent and the only way we can sell a shitty game like this one is if Superman is in it,"
Whoever that guy is, I want to rip him a new vagina and feed this used cartridge to him through it.
There is a 'multiplayer' mode of some kind that I was not able to explore as I'm the only one currently at home, so perhaps that has some kind of redeeming quality (perhaps that's where you use Superman's awkward-looking punch moves), but man, if you happen to still be buying Nintendo 64 games at all... do not buy this one (unless it's to perform a public service by destroying the cartridge).
"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
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I would take that whole "Bible adventures" and a "Care Bears" game for the NES over Superman 64...
... that should say something about how horrible it truly is... >.>
What Would Kharn Do?
Counter to Kevin, I perfectly despised the horrid design of the N64 controller (functionally and ergonomically), and also Nintendo's self destructive tactics in that generation, so my delving into the N64 was restricted to a very few games, most of which I own.
Fortunately, as a result, I never tried this one.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
I actually liked the controller for FPS like Perfect Dark and Golden Eye. The Z button at the bottom made it feel natural for a FPS.
I don't disagree. It worked very well for action/rpg like Zelda or Shadows of the Empire too. But the damn thing actually hurt. I can't play a N64 game that uses the analogue stick for more than an hour or two without my thumb being in massive pain. And it was absolutely useless for fighting games like MK or SF. Also, games like Rogue Squadron, the stick is both not responsive enough, and doesn't acknowledge all 360 angles like the Sony controller does. It recognizes maybe 8 or 16 angles.
Sony's analogue sticks for the same generation are infinitely better. I can play with them for a full day and feel no pain at all.
Though of course they are also completely useless when dealing with fighting games. The sticks are way too small.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
GoldenEye was such a fun game. Everybody except me hated the remote mines though. Maybe it was because I couldn't stop laughing whenever I blew someone up.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
KB, your post was entertaining. I laughed out loud. Actually laughed out loud. The thing is... this one line... so disturbing, dude.
I gotta tell you, I watched ten minutes of the last Hulk movie. After ten minutes, I turned it off and switched over to some South Park. I felt a little bad that I had wasted ten minutes of my life, and that I should have known better at five minutes.. or after the intro... or something.
Two hours?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Well, to be fair, I don't think there was a Street Fighter game released on the '64 anyway, and the MK games were:
A) Shitty anyway.
B) Played while holding the controller in the D-Pad position, if I recall correctly, in which case it essentially emulated the feeling of a 1st gen sony controller (with fewer shoulder buttons, granted).
Sucks that they made your wrist or thumb sore. I know that can really taint the experience (1st gen X-Box controllers just murdered my right thumb after a longer session. The controller was just too big, and the face buttons were too pronounced. Rounding them was a bad idea; it looked cool, but flat buttons are easier on the digit pressing against them).
The only mainstream console controller design I would call 'horrid' is the Gamecube controller. Condensing four shoulder buttons into two buttons with two different depression sensitivites was a pretty bad decision and the Z button felt pretty awkward as a 3rd tiny shoulder button; having the face buttons each shaped differently and unevenly space, while looking really neat, often lead to me catching the edge of my thumb on one button while pressing another, which made it sore after a while as well as causing plenty of fuck-ups in game; the 'C' pad was turned into an analog stick that was awkward to use because it was much smaller than the regular analog stick and the surface had no gripping texture to it; the D-pad was put in a bizarre location, right next to the analog stick, and as a result I never managd to find a way to hold the controller in a game that used the D-pad that felt comfortable.
Outside the mainstream (but still contemporarily), I think most people would likely agree that the Jaguar deserves the 'worst controller ever conceived' title. I mean, it just looks like a phone:
...If you can believe it, the one on the left is actually 2nd gen.
That's right. That's what they thought constituted, 'an improvement'.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Well, that's the thing. Unless you've been warned beforehand, you have no idea that the whole game consists of doing what you do in the first mission (fly through fucking rings).
Lots of games in that era had introductory training missions that were sort-of like that; then, after you beat the training mission and were used to the controls, you'd get to the meat of the game.
It took me about half an hour to beat that Goddamn first training mission, and then was kicked back to it after 'failing' the 2nd mission the first time, and spent another 20 minutes getting through it again. After that kind of time investment, I wanted to pull some kind of satisfaction out of the experience, so I kept playing in the hope of getting to 'the meat of the game'.
Only after 4 levels did I realize that this was the meat of the game.
I guess that's one advantage bad movies have over bad games - with a bad movie, you can usually tell that it's bad within the first few minutes. Shitty games you tend to not want to pass off until you've already wasted far too much time on them.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Wait, they're not phones? WTF are those tiny buttons on the bottom?!
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I spy with my little eye...
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Well, I like MK.
Although, MK 4 sucked total balls, and it was to my recollection the only MK to be released on the 64. And I think you're probably right that no SF was released on the 64. I don't think Capcom released much in the way of games for Nintendo during that generation. Most third party developers abandoned Nintendo after Squaresoft kicked them to the curb for sticking with cartridges.
Totally agree. I have played maybe a total of 6 XBox games, because I ignored them for the first 2-3 years due to their horrible controller. And then MS killed the system, so there wasn't any reason to get into it anymore.
After the N64 debacle and the stupidity involved in making custom discs that were of lesser quality than any of their competitors for an underpowered system being their next best idea, I'd pretty well given up on Nintendo. So I never played many games on the GC. Come to think of it, I am not sure that I played more than one (a Star Wars game based on Episode II that I wasn't at all impressed with). I generally buy a system for the games, as opposed to the fanboy practice of the reverse. Nothing on the GC impressed me enough to pay for the system, and I think I have known maybe one person who had one themselves, so opportunities to play on it were few and far between.
Heh. Thanks for reminding me about that. I did have a friend who had this system, but he also had a Genesis, and the Genesis saw more use. lol.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
...Well, that's the proverbial million dollar question, as it were.
Some games came with an overlay you could put over the buttons to tell you the function of each (FPS games often used them as an easy means of switching between weapons), but in the end, they were just too awkward to use.
To be fair to Atari, the 'phone dial' pads are sort of a trademark of every controller they released for every system after the 2600, so the Jag controller was just sticking to the tradition. Still a really bad decision, but I can see why they made it.
What cannot be excused is the enormous girth of these beasts. To get a sense of the scale, look at that TV in the background. The controller is perhaps a 3rd as wide as the face of it! The C button is justbarely accessible by your thumb, which makes it very uncomfortable to hold unless you have pretty big hands. The Z button on the 2nd gen controller you can just forget about - you're just not reaching that son of a bitch.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Touche.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
The remote mines were fun. I'd put on the invisibility code and infinite ammo code and stick them on guards.
Perfect Dark (and its remote mines) was even better, though.
Oddly enough, I've been playing a fair amount of Half Life and Half Life 2 lately on the PC...and I'm very used to using a keyboard and mouse. A few weeks ago I tried playing a game on my N64 (the only game console I own) and it felt weird. If I recall correctly, didn't the original Playstation controller lack a joystick?
It's still one of my all time favs. I loved the mines. I use to stick proximity mines just above doorways.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
They had phones that big?
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
It did.
Realistically, though, the 2nd gen Playstation controller (with the analog sticks) was released so quickly on the heels of the system that this wasn't much of a factor. I don't know too many people who are even really familiar with the G1 Playstation controllers anymore.
I've got to hand it to Sony - they did an excellent job of breaking into the console market and becoming a major player.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Yeah, if you look hard enough you can find games that don't support the sticks, because they weren't released until Nintendo released their controller, and the PS1 was on the market for 1-2 years before the N64 was released; depending on where you lived. And then it was another few months before Sony incorporated vibration into their controllers to match Nintendo's rumble pack adaptor that you had to buy seperately. The PS2 is the only PS console to only have one controller released for it so far. PS1 had 3(4 if you include the original "flight stick"
, and PS3 has had 2 so far.
It's been a long while since I played it, but I'm about 80% sure that Final Fantasy VII would be the perfect example of a popular game that was released before the sticks & vibration came out, and doesn't utilize them at all(at least, the original release). I'll confirm that within a day or two, depending on how lazy I am.
Editted for something I'd left out.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
How old are you? Lol. I remember phones as big as my head.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
It did use the vibration as it was also an option in the menu for on/off, that and I just checked it myself on my PS2, still have the game itself
The analog controls left was for movement and right for aiming/camera control
That makes me wonder what game I was thinking of. Hmm.
Maybe it was Legend Of Dragoon. The two games were very similar in visual style.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Wow, sounds like you got really bored.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Haha, but now, they really fucked up with PS3.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Sony systems are overtaking MS systems in sales in many regions. And the PS3 still has a projected 8 years left of life to it, on top of being by far the most advanced console currently in existence. Whereas MS has demonstrated a previous inclination to dispose of systems quickly, as per the XBox's 4 year lifetime. If their strategy continues, there will be a new XBox within a year or two. It will be superior to the current systems, but cost far too much in comparison to be worth it. For both publishers and customers.
Nintendo isn't a competitor as things stand. They have created a new niche, they haven't conquered the existing industry. They need a console capable of playing the top games to be an actual competitor to Sony and Microsoft.
The fate of this generation is still very much up in the air.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
I'm 24. I remember the huge phones. Just poking fun at old technology.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
My first video game system was the atari 2600, which my mom got on discount for me when I was 3 or 4 (instead of the NES).
She was kind enough to get me one game too. The only game I had to play, was E.T. the extraterrestrial.
I still have nightmares about it.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Is blogging contagious?