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.

I doubt I ever played as many as 20 different ones on my Nintendo machine, but I do still have the 10-15 that I did buy. I even have the cartridge-slot replacement piece that I bought from MCM years ago, one day I will install it. Plus a Game Genie, but I was disappointed that it did not have a setting to allow me to shoot the dog in "Duck Hunt". :yes: :D

That list of bad games has lots of movie and TV-based ones on it, not surprising since most of those games were always lousy on any system. (Yes, I bought the "E.T." cartridge the day it came out, for something like $30 in 1982 dollars.)

:lmao: There should be bonus points for the dog.

That ET game is almost a decade older than me but I did end up with a copy a few years ago...I keep it for the oddity/as an example of how to not make a game.
The 2600 was an interesting system in that it had so many bad games it literally crashed the video game market, yet had plenty of good fun titles mixed into the garbage, and somehow it survived long enough that I was alive the last year of it's run.

LOL, Seanbaby.com - I remember that guy's site. Used to frequent there in the late 1990's a whole bunch. I probably played a bunch of these BECAUSE of his site, lol, out of morbid curiosity.

Here's what I've played

ATHENA - I found this on an old ROM Dump of a 150 in 1 multicart, and yeah, it's pretty rubbish. Terrible controls, it almost seems to me, as someone who never encountered this until it was considered "Vintage" that the sole appeal was "cute anime girl" and that's about it.

BIBLE ADVENTURES - once upon a time, I actually used to collect these out of humor. I lived in East Alabama and of course I'm sure the Bible stores made a killing on these in my area with all the well-meaning religious parents buying their kids games based around stories in the "good book". This one was not that bad, actually, Noah's Ark was actually a pretty fun game, and the bass-only soundtrack added an air of comedy to it I was not expecting.

SUPER PITFALL - I played this on a NES ROM out of curiosity that it lived up to the Atari 2600 originals I grew up with and loved. Total disappointment. Terrible controls, does not even feel like Pitfall. It feels almost like they were trying to Re-brand Pitfall to Compete with Super Mario. Looking back, it seems more like a bad clone of "Mountain King" or "Zeliard".

CHUBBY CHERUB - To me, this seems less of a bad game and more of a case of a game made for a Japanese culture market where they liked games that were a lot harder. Take the Super Mario Bros. 2 scenario for example. We got re-branded and eased-up Doki Doki Panic, and they got something similiar to the first game.


WHERE'S WALDO - Not a bad game in the classic sense, just boring and on a console that's not particularly good at displaying tiny, detailed objects. Which is all Where's Waldo's books really were - huge, fancy, actually quite funny and awesome pictures of various scenarios where you had to find some bespectacled man dressed like a barber pole with a cane.

MUPPET ADVENTURE - I never played the NES version, but I have some version of this for PC where the Muppets go to the Carnival, and it Suuuuuuuucks. Bumper cars looks like a programming exercise to make sprites bump into each other on screen. And it needs an 8088 based PC to work right, otherwise it runs too fast.

GILLIGAN'S ISLAND - I never played this but the "Let's Play" for this with Armake21 is still to this day one of my FAVORITE YouTube Let's Plays EVER. There's a part where he loses Gilligan in the quicksand, and roams around half the game looking for him, only to walk back to the quicksand and the cadence of his reaction was comic gold "(veers off on a tangent some random unrelated stuff....then gilligan's sprite walks up in the quicksand we were last at about 20 minutes ago).............GILLIGAN! What the f*** are you doing in the f***ing quicksand! What brain where you born with!?!?"

Honestly, what's so funny/messed up, is the 1990's was full of internet humor around old video games that have created some seriously terrible urban legends and bogus myths. I never found Atari 2600 E.T. or Pac-Man all that atrocious or terrible for example - just misunderstood. But people talk about it like you just dropped a turd on their brand new sofa if you liked those games. It got to a point that everyone was doing it, and this was before AVGN, who was kind of a result of that kind of humor. Now a lot of those "terrible" games turn out to not be so terrible after all, just misunderstood by random guys my age who played them without reading the manual.

Ill try and find those and see if they are any good........

I've had a similar experience with niche or quirky games that were supposed to be fun but ended up disappointing. I remember renting ""Where's Waldo"" from Blockbuster back in the day, and yeah, it was more frustrating than anything trying to find pixelated shapes on a screen that looked like a blurry mess. They didn't even test how it would play before releasing it. Funny enough, some poorly made games stick around just because they're hilariously bad, almost like a collector's badge of honor.

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The worse game I had was back in 1990-91 I bought a cheap game from Woolco and it turned out to be some kind of a Nintendo NES knockoff. The cartridge was a light blue color if I recall. It wouldn't fit into the NES even though it was suppost to.

I wish I could remember the title. I only had it for a day or so before it was returned. The screenshots on the back of the box reminded me of the arcade version of wonderboy.

LOL, Seanbaby's site was a classic! It also made me try some of these awful games out of curiosity. Super Pitfall was painful, and Athena felt it only sold because of the character.
I agree that '90s internet humor made some games seem way worse than they were. E.T. on Atari? It's not great, but it's not the disaster people claim. And Pac-Man 2600? It's alarming, but it could've been worse, considering the hardware. Some of these ""worst games"" just needed better instructions.
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I recently played Pacman on a Atari 2600 emulator. It would be a huge disappointment compared to the arcade even back then.

I've seen two versions of Pacman that ran on a 2001 8K Commodore PET that were better.

Sadly the 2600 emulator I have doesnt display pacman right.. The colours are all me$$ed up...