Did anyone ever play any of these??

http://web.archive.org/web/200110231.../nes/w20-1.htm

I havent but it makes me wanna go find them and see if he is being truthful!! (I only like 1 nintendo game really that is thiers: SUPER MARIO BROTHERS)

If you only like 1 Nintendo game you have not spent enough time with the NES and N64!

Every system has fadware that is only worth owning for anyone at the time it is new....I remember a time where classic Genesis games were still worth a decent chunk of allowance second hand and you'd have a hard time giving anyone a stack of Madden cartridges even to use for skeet shooting...

Fadware... gunna have to remember that term!

It is subjective of course, but yes, most of those are generally considered bad games.

If you notice, the majority of these titles are western games. I hate to say it, but western developers during that time made abysmal console games. For whatever reason, they just didn't seem to understand what made these games fun. I can only think of two western developers that made good games for Japanese 8/16 bit video game consoles and those are Rare and LucasArts. Even those can be questionable. Look at Battletoads by Rare. One of the most technically advanced games for the system, without a doubt. I won't take that away from it. But is it fun? When was the last time that you had fun playing Battletoads? Probably the very first time that you tried it. After that, unless you're 1 out of a million people who can beat that game, you just repeated the first two boring levels over and over. That game has 13 levels and only a small handful of people have ever seen more than 3.

A lot of western titles and a lot of games on the list you posted are licensed games. The developer gets paid usually more than they would to make their own titles, just to slap a piece of software on a name. It hardly matters how good it is. That hasn't changed too much today although the internet does make it harder for shitty software to hide.

If you're just getting into the whole idea of bad NES games, you should check out someone by the name of Angry Video Game Nerd or AVGN. He is the one who popularized the idea of online videos making fun of bad video games and the idea of classic game reviewing in general. I know there were some doing reviews before him like Classic Game Room, but AVGN really made it mainstream. Now everybody under the age of 40 wants to make game review videos. AVGN's schtick is all about bad games and some of his videos are hilarious. I recommend starting from the beginning as the earlier ones are generally the funniest and most connected to his personal experiences and opinions.

If you like getting a few friends together, having some drinks and cracking jokes at bad movies, then you might enjoy playing some bad games. I've had more fun with some horrible titles than I have with most half decent ones. Some I've enjoyed are Alf for Sega Master System, Cliffhanger for NES, and Earnest Evans on Sega Genesis. Just do it with friends though as any of those games will just be an exercise in frustration without people to make jokes with.

I think in general, most games are probably bad. Over half of the games for NES aren't worth playing. It's better than Atari though. That was the Wild West of software development. Whatever crap you can shovel!

I forgot I had tried SUPER PITFALL .... I dont understand it!!

And I looked at Muscle.... What a piece of crap :D

I have played and have owned some of those games when I was a kid. I don't remember Athena being that bad. Other ones I have played are Total Recall, Mighty Bomb Jack and X-Men at least.

Might Bomb Jack is awkward and if you don't get the two things on the way to the top, you hit a dead end and die and that's that. Annoying.

No LJN titles on this list, by the way. Which really says something.

Wisdom Tree sure made some of gaming's worst titles.

Yes, including Sunday Funday which came out in 1995, when the NES was basically obsolete, the last officially licensed game came out in 94.

An adaptation of Menace Beach, one of the "games" on the title is simply a midi version of a song by 4Him with words on the screen.

I remember back in the late '90s when I was a kid you could find NES cartridges for about 50 cents at yard sales all the time. Nowadays, I rarely see them, although a vendor at a flea market I go to has quite a few old and newer games and consoles.

And none of Wisdom Tree's titles were officially licensed, and many also copied heavily elements from secular games.

Its just the games are not as fun to me,the graphics dont look as nice.....

Atari 2600 for example has the BEST GRAPHICS and games of all 3 systems! (2600,5200,7800)

I always find it a bit hilarious that people bag on "bad games", and it almost seems that a lot of these were not necessarily "bad" but either "misunderstood" or subject to the developer's limitations and time.

It truly is a matter of opinion. I can't stand any of the Mega Man games, or Duck Tails, or Little Nemo - the last one I owned in a boxed copy for a long time. But then people get onto me about my preference for the original NES Dragon Warrior localizations of Dragon Quest - the 4th installment of which I used Little Nemo to trade in to get at our local game shop. Little Nemo had awesome music, as did Duck Tails and Mega Man, but it almost seems, to me, that's the only redeeming quality of Capcom releases.

However, I love Bigfoot for the NES and people think that's a crap game because just like E.T. for the Atari 2600 you have to read the manual to understand the side scroll races need you to press back and fourth on the D-pad ala button masher. If you get a Joystick, or have big hands and can right-hand-hammer-on guitar style like me, it's actually quite fun once you get used to it.

Honestly, I think if any platform had a lot of "stinkers" it's probably MS-DOS. So many shovelware, shareware, and horrid ASCII arcade conversions with all the control of a drunk who blows 29.5 on a breathalyzer test yet is somehow still alive. Yet I love that platform. Tons of commercial releases with lousy scrolling due to the difficulties in programming EGA, or poor control schemes because "mouse is new, let's use mouse, even though it makes zero sense in this scenario". I'm surprised AVGN has not yet got his hands on an old 8088-80486 era system to rip into things like Pango or "Floppy Frenzy".

A good reply mate!

I find this comment to be laughable, with all due respect. Anyone who has ever compared Pac-Man's appearance on the 5200 (which is about 90% as good as the arcade version) to the 2600 version (which is an utter piece of garbage), or Defender on the 5200 (again, at least 90% as good as the arcade version) versus Defender on the 2600 (they actually did make a quite good effort with this one, but it is still a big flickering mess since that game is just way beyond the 2600 hardware capabilities), could not -possibly- think the 2600 graphics were even comparable, let alone "better".

What the Atari 2600 -did- have, though, was massive improvement in quality in its games over the years it was in development. The awful Pac-Man was followed by a quite good and playable Ms. Pac-Man, and the original Home Run baseball game was lousy but the later RealSports Baseball cartridge was very good (within the limitations of the 2600). Many later 2600 cartridges (such as Centipede) were very enjoyable to play even if their graphics were limited.