Coffee Talk #184: Games That Aren’t As Good as You Thought

RPadholic Big Blak posted some interesting and uncommon thoughts on Final Fantasy VII. He loves the game, but admits that he overrated it because of nostalgia. My problem with most “FFVII apologists” is that they can’t admit that. Some games are remembered fondly simply because they were played at the right time and at the right place.

Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Amazon selling more digital books than paper books, where Shaq will play next season, or the best soy latte that you ever had, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.

RPadholic Big Blak posted some interesting and uncommon thoughts on Final Fantasy VII. He loves the game, but admits that he overrated it because of nostalgia. My problem with most “FFVII apologists” is that they can’t admit that. Some games are remembered fondly simply because they were played at the right time and at the right place.

I remember opening up Joe Montana II on Christmas Eve 1991. I called up my friend Alex and he drove to my house. For one night, it was the perfect game to Alex and me. Looking through the retroscope, that game kind of sucked.

Are there any games that aren’t as good as you thought they were? Maybe there’s a game you thought was incredible, but now realize was merely good. Maybe there’s a title that you really enjoyed five years ago, but today you can’t fathom why you played so much of it. Let’s ruin some of our childhood memories and admit that some of the games we played aren’t nearly as good as we thought they were at the time.

Author: RPadTV

https://rpad.tv

42 thoughts on “Coffee Talk #184: Games That Aren’t As Good as You Thought”

  1. Goldeneye. Great then but horrible by the conventions of now.

    Also Virtual On: Ontario Teagram. So fun, so neat, so bad.

    I have to add Steel Batallion.

  2. Impossible Mission on Commodore 64. My friend and I used to play it over and over because it was the only game out at the time with a synthesized voice. "Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay foreveeeeeeeeer!!!" But the game itself was repetitive and sucked.

  3. Quest 64.

    At an age where I was craving RPGs, but only had a Nintendo 64, I was foaming at the mouth for anything remotely resembling an RPG. Quest 64 was the ONLY "RPG" on the N64 at the time and I bought it on day one with high hopes. I only felt that the game was kind of mediocre at the time because I was playing an "RPG" so I just bit the bullet and feed my addiction like a crack whore at a Rick James 80's convention.

    Upon further reflection, the game took away my gaming innocence by turning me into a masochist. I can never forgive it for doing that.

    -M

  4. i guess my game would be Oregon Trail. I loved playing that game on the way old school computers. I played it now on my iphone and it was pretty meh when i think of it. On my NES i think it was Double Dribble. I played the heck out of that game but i stopped once i got Tecmo basketball, that game was great it had the NBA license and had MJ where some basketball games didn't. I thought Double Dribble was a good game then i dl on the VC for the Wii and realized only being able to choose from 4 or 6 teams is pretty lame, along with the 3 point cheat.

    @Amazon selling digital books

    I'm not surprised if the iPad sold monstrous numbers and one of the main things touted by Apple is being used as an e-reader, it goes hand in hand.

    @Shaq

    he should just retire. He's more of a liability than an asset.

    @soy latte

    i've never had one.

  5. @smartguy

    WOW! it seemed more like a movie trailer than a game trailer. It made me want to buy the game but my laptop just crapped out on me.

  6. I'm getting it. I won't play online just because I don't care for RTS pvp since the Red Alert days. I think the single player will be amazing though. They set the bar very high with Warcraft3 so I expect them to eclipse that mark. Blizzard has never let me down. Best developer ever.

  7. Mystic Quest for the SNES. I sank hours of my life into that games, and in retrospect I can't for the life of me imagine why. There's really nothing memorable about it.

  8. I used to think that Driver (the first one) was the poo but it isn't, Its pretty bad actually lol. I used to think the same about Destruction Derby but I'm sure if I played it now I could see the poo all in it. Oh yea, what was the big deal about Knock Out Kings? (Please Don't know me out laugh out loud).

  9. As much as it pains me to say this, I have to go with WCW/NWO Revenge.

    The gameplay is ridiculously slow and the graphics are like playing Lego wrestling.

  10. @Big Blak I was at GameSpy when Driver came out. I loved watching the guy that reviewed it play. He never cursed out a game so hard in my three years with the company. I wish I filmed it.

    @N8R Obviously the writing isn't as good as SmacDown vs. Raw 2010. *snicker*

  11. @n8r

    wow! that link was teh awesomez! how do i listen to their music.

    @rpad

    I wonder if SvR 2011 will top SvR 2010 writing.

  12. @n8r

    nevermind! i had scrolled down! ha! I'll listen to their youtube vids later.

  13. @ tokz

    You might need to be on a computer. I'm not sure how the mobile version of myspace works.

  14. @n8r

    no i clicked on my work pc but i was just amzed with the kool pseudo Castlevania background that i thought that was it and the music was on some type of url link embedded somewhere.

  15. @rpad

    i will pick up this game! Maybe not day one but eventually. oh and from amazon direct too. so the awesome writers can get theirs and maybe one of them will benefit from it twice!

  16. The high point for me in regards to FFVII will always be the chocobo breeding. I think I spent more time finding the right birds, breeding for optimal speed, and racing for stats. I was actually kind of disappointed once I got the gold, in meant that my time spent was pretty much over.

    @topic – Friday the 13th. NES. That was hell. I don't think I ever played that game for longer then 30 minutes. Death would occur, and most of the time it was even Jason that caused it. Flipping ridiculous.

  17. Definitely Mischief Makers on the N64 for me. I used to play that game all the time when I was in maybe 4th grade or so. I think I beat it then, and bought it a couple years ago because it was cheap and I had fond memories of it….there was an amazing reason why it was cheap. haha.

    I think the second Hugo's House of Horror game wasn't that great (I wanna know if anyone else actually knows these games??). I also grew up a bit after I played the first one and the text based adventure game really wasn't my thing once I got my hands of an FPS. Supaplex is still a great game though!! That is one old game that I will probably always love.

    With newer games I think Wolfenstein was actually a bit of a letdown, it just feels too slow compared to how I wanted it to handle. With Doom 3 being too dark, then Wolfenstein being a little too slow, I would like them to really nail everything with Rage.

  18. @Tokz

    Mischief Makers was actually made by Enix before they became Square Enix in 2003. It was pretty much just your basic side scrolling puzzle game. You were a robot and the professor who made you got kidnapped and you had to find him.

    Hugo's House of Horror was actually a really cool old-school text based adventure game where you had to type in all of the commands for your character Hugo in his adventure to find his missing girlfriend Penelope. The second and third games weren't as good, but I think most of that is because they stayed text based and came out after Doom did…text based games definitely were not as popular anymore at that time when Doom was king.

    Supaplex was a 2D puzzle game (a Boulder Dash clone) which had maps designed to look like they were inside a computer (kind of). It was a fun puzzle solving game…my parents and I all used to challenge each other to levels and try to beat them the quickest or see who could get farther in the game in X amount of days, etc. If you ever play any freeware or shareware games these last two should be pretty easy to find.

  19. Mine was a Sega game that my brother and I played on Sega Channel almost every day. It was called General Chaos. We had loads of fun with it at the time, but after playing a ROM of the game recently I realized it should have stayed in the past.

    One game I could play for hours on end without purpose was GTA3 for the PS2. Unfortunately due to modern advances of the franchise I can't bring myself to play it anymore.

  20. I was going to list a bunch of old NES and SEGA games, but I realized. I don't know if they were so much bad as they were just different. I try playing some of my old games and I just get my ass handed to me but I know I used to be good. Games takes little to no skill anymore. A lot of games that are bad now are just that because my tastes have changed. I like great graphics and a great story, but I used to enjoy beating the heck out of people (and wow there were a lot of games were you do just that).

  21. Just for the sake of naming a few I was addicted to, but I have no clue if I would still like them (probably not)

    DoubleDribble (NES)

    Eternal Champions (SEGA)

    Some College Football game (SNES)

    BattleToads (NES)

    NARC (NES)

    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)

    Blast Corps (N64)

    Super Battle Tank (SNES)

    Clay Fighters 64 (N64)

  22. @slicky

    i think i would enjoy NARC more if it was the arcade version. The 8 bit NES version didn't do it justice. I never liked it. Which TMNT game are we talking about? It better be the arcade version cuz the turtles' game i'm thinking about blew all the way through. I didn't get to dl turtles in time. Maybe that will be my next PSN purchase. I'm running out of room on my 40GB PS3!

  23. @Slicky – I have played Blast Corps a few times recently. It's still somewhat fun but there's no way I could put in as much time as I did when I was younger earning all the medals. It gets old fast.

    Another game I wish I could still play is Body Harvest for the 64. I was on the last area of the game but never finished it. I loved that game too

  24. @Tokz

    The Turtles game that had the Street Overworld with steamrollers. I really used to like it but I played it kinda recently and I think I went through all for guys in the first sewer. I used to love it but it is just too hard now.

    @Smartguy

    I remember loving BlastCorps. They even had something similar to it on my last WinMo phone (some kind of Dozer game). In Blast Corps we used to get every medal, I remember when we first got to the Moon too. My favorite truck was that SideWinder thing.

  25. @ Topic

    Tobal No. 1 (which had the FFVII demo with it) was another game I molested in my youth. If you don't know what the game is it is like an adventure/fighting game (in what used to be) 3D. It was AWESOME in '96 but not so much in '02.

  26. @Big Blak Ah, the old game-that-comes-with-the-demo trick. Tobal No. 1 is the prime example of this, followed closely by the Metal Gear Solid demo people bought with Zone of the Enders.

  27. @ Rpad

    I forgot about the ZOE/MGS combo! I really didn't like ZOE but when I saw Snake in the rain puffing that cigarette I went comatose. Then he turned on the cloaking and jumped off the bridge, wow! I kind of miss those deals, like Crackdown and the Halo 2 beta.

  28. @raymond

    its so funny you mentioned "joe montana sportstalk football"

    if you ever want a laugh, punt on second down and listen to the totally realistic sounding announcer….

    its second and nine and i cant believe it…i got that game when i was in the 8th grade

  29. @TMNT on NES

    Side Note: I was thinking about buying some PS1 games on PSN for my PSP, Anyone know how they play on the psp???

  30. @TMNT Turtles in Time

    Best game ever, Reshelled sucked…. like the SNES game was an 8.5-9/10 the remake was like a 4/10

  31. @slicky/thundercracker

    i hated that turtles game there was nothing to like about it.

  32. @Arguello

    The PS1 games on the PSP look good, or as good as they can with the graphics back then. They handle very well also. They remapped the controls of all of the games to be pretty intuitive. PS1 games didn't use the require the analog sticks so it is an easy transition. I have 5 or 6 PS1 games on my PS3 so that I can just access my PS3 via my PSP and play the games remotely without using up my memory card space.

Comments are closed.