Strat’s Nuttiest Games ¶

List of retro games I’ve played starting with with nuttiest (non-derogatory) to shittiest:

1. Metal Gear Solid (1998-10-21, PS1) Konami
   • 11/10. Would be 12/10 if not for Kojima between a little creepy misogynist with mommy issues. Boss fights go hard.
2. Resident Evil / •Bio Hazard (1996-03-30, PS1) – Capcom / Capcom, Virgin Interactive Entertainment
   • It took me about 5h but I’ve played the game before. I also played the original Resident Evil 2 for the first time.
   • These games hold up IMO and their remakes are really good.
3. Super Mario World / •Super Mario World: Super Mario Bros. 4 (1991-08-23, SNES) – Nintendo EAD / Nintendo
   • Playing SMW and SMB3 back to back I can definitely say that SMB3 is the better game overall (at least playing it on the SNES through Super Mario All-Stars). Playing the NES version of SMB3 a few weeks ago prior to beating SMW felt pretty terrible but I’m not sure if it was my emulator or the game.
   • The only thing that SMW seems to have over SMB3 is a super high skill ceiling due to all the glitches, weird interactions between game mechanics. The high skill ceiling allows for people to make absolutely nuts romhacks, stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1jwZekUBjo which are really fun to watch.
   • But comparing the base games with each other, SMB3 blows SMW out of the water. Level design, music, SFX. We could argue about the core movement mechanics, I’d probably take SMW’s physics/gamefeel over SMB3’s but the levels in SMB3 are so much more interesting, thematically cohesive and fun to play – they more than make up for the movement being a little less to my taste.
   • One thing to note is that SMB3 is super hard and the bosses are toxic, but I prefer this over SMW’s piss-easy difficulty and pushover bosses.
4. Sin and Punishment / Tsumi to Batsu: Hoshi no Keishōsha (2000-11-21, N64) – Treasure Nintendo R&D 1 / Nintendo
   • Sin and Punishment is the first retro game I’ve played so far that I couldn’t brute force my way through with rewind/save states and a guide. It’s got some boss fights with some pretty subtle tactics to beat them ( Limited Range Heatbomb : you can’t use lock on here because it doesn’t do enough damage to kill it before you get instakilled by Saki’s nuke attack ). Youtube is helpful though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTclPNrbR80
   • EDIT: that’s an easy 6/5 game. It’s hard to believe that this game actually ran on n64 hardware. Visually impressive but gameplay was great too.
   • The VO was in English but I feel like I would have understood about as much of the story if it was in Japanese instead.
   • But I can’t complain, the game’s pacing is fast and doesn’t waste your time with long cutscenes. The “START -> SKIP” text overlaid on the screen during cutscenes is a vibe and not something I’ve seen since on a console game. The game felt very arcadey in more ways than one, especially with respect to the difficulty. I’d say that it was mostly fair but it’s a tough game.
5. Cybernator / •Juusou Kihei Valken (1993-04, SNES) – NCS Corp / Masaya(JP) / Konami(NA) / Palcom Software(PAL)
   • Cybernator is a proto-Armored Core, I wasn’t expecting that.
   • Despite the goofy name, we’ve definitely crossed a threshold graphically but also game structure-wise. If this came out today, we’d say that it’s old school and hard AF but it wouldn’t feel too out of place.
   • OK so fair enough, Nintendo probably wanted to remove one of the last shots/portraits in the game but it’s a shame they removed all of them in the English version. They really add a lot of flavor and much needed humanity to this very mechanical/robotic environment. - The Japanese game with the English-patch has a few typos but they’re worth it to keep the portraits in the game.
   • Once again, we’ve got a game that is way too hard but at least you have infinite continues (you might have to hold up, L+R and press Start on the start screen to get them though). You would have to be a real sicko to beat this game legit in current year.
     • eg. take the amount of health you think a boss should reasonably have in a hard AF old school SNES game and then multiply that by about 3 to 5 (10 for the final boss?) and that’s the health they actually have.
   • Unlike with Metal Storm, the movement in Cybernator feels like you’re moving around in a heavy mech. It really does feel like a proto-Armored Core. There can’t have been many previous games to have done this before (and even less that looked this good).
6. Bionic Commando (1988-12, NES) – Capcom
   • This might be the most “in my wheelhouse” game we’ve played so far. The hook shot feels really good.
   • For a game called Hitler’s Resurrection, Hitler doesn’t show up on screen for very long.
   • I do think that this might be the first game that we play that’s explicitly political (I’m not sure Link’s never mentioned Christianity counts as being explicit).
   • Weissman is a neo-nazi who has resurrected Hitler in both mind and body but he’s immediately overpowered by Hitler’s/fascism’s actual evil-ness. There’s also the American / World Police element at play here as well that could be dissected too.
   • It’s a NES game so we get the rough sketch of a story rather than a full one but what’s there is interesting I think.
   • Difficulty-wise, it gets pretty hard at the end. I’m excited for the game industry to leave that behind. I love hard games but I like easy to learn but hard to master games that aren’t needlessly punishing much more.
7. Castlevania (1987-04-30, NES) – Konami
   • I played about 10min of Castlevania (1) and already I can really imagine the Konami devs playing Ghosts ’n Ghouls and being like “hold my beer, watch this”.
   • C3: If you enjoy the experience and you want more, Castlevania 3 is a more faithful sequel to C1 than Castlevania 2 is. I’d recommend the Japanese version over the US one because it has better music, background colors and some sprites are really weird in the US version.
   • C2: C2 is a bit of a disaster but it also created the framework of what Castlevania became later on (open ended-ish non linear gameplay, backtracking, RPG systems, key items to unlock areas becoming more Metroid-ish giving us Metroidvanias as we know and love/hate today) starting with Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
   • CSotN: Trying to play Castlevania Symphony of the Night for the third time after having played C1 and C3, I “get” it now and I feel like if I can stomach the backtracking it might be fun but the lack of a map is insane (maybe you get one later?)
   • C4/CX: I booted these games up but haven’t played them really. I would probably start with CX because the music that the game starts with is nuts. Both these games seem to exemplify@masimar’s thoughts on the SNES era of games with oversized tall sprites, constant scrolling and sampled music that doesn’t sound as unique as NES music does. Both games, C4 in particular, are ugly as sin but in an interesting/striking way. I can’t say the visuals have aged well but I think they were probably weird at the time and continue to be to this day.
8. Jeanne d’Arc (2007-08-21, PSP) – Level-5 / SCEI / SCEA
   • It’s a great tactical RPG that I’d recommend to anyone wanting to get into the genre.
   • It’s not too fiddly UX and gameplay-wise but it’s got enough complexity to be interesting and allow for you to come up with some broken builds which is always fun.
   • The narrative doesn’t waste your time at all, it’s straightforward but it has moments of actual emotional impact which is rare in these games.
   • The 2D anime cutscenes bring the whole game together. The English with French accents VO is very fun. Grounding the story in history/myth rather than just pure anime bullshit untethered to reality works for me.
     • Henry VI being a little demonic fucker sending demons to attack France is gold.
     • Jeanne D’Arc hearing voices from “God” but maybe not really is also fun.
   • One con would be the Mii looking 3D characters. They’re pretty ugly.
9. Onimusha: Warlords / •Onimusha (2001-01-25, PS2) – Capcom
   • Resident Evil (game) + Samurai (kind of historical Japanese guy).
   • It’s campier than even the most campy Capcom games I’ve played previously. Other than the water puzzle section, it was a lot of fun.
10. Lemmings (1992-03, SNES) – SunsoftChat Noir / Sunsoft
    • Lemmings is one of the few games we’ve played so far that isn’t another take on the little guy jumping around genre. Hats off to the Legend of Zelda which is the only other game we’ve played that fits the bill.
    • Lemmings is pretty unique in that sense although it’s got some warts. The core premise is sound but, in practice, levels being shared between the difficulties is odd. With these shared levels the only difference being the number of types of skills you have access to is weird because if you have a really good solution for a level you’re being asked to replicate it more than once.
    • Lemmings 2 takes the premise of Lemmings, polishes it and makes it bigger and better:
      • No repeated levels.
      • No difficulty levels.
      • Levels are designed much tighter and more explicitly puzzle-like.
      • Non-linear design allows for you to go to another level “set” (each themed around a different tribe of Lemmings with their own set of skills) if you can’t beat the one you’re on.
      • Many more skills (from the 10 in Lemmings to something like 48 in Lemmings 2). You have access to a subset in each level.
    • It wasn’t as popular as Lemmings apparently but I’m not sure why. It’s a much better game.
11. Donkey Kong Country / •Super Donkey Kong (1994-11-21, SNES) – Rare / Nintendo
    • The Donkey Kong Country OST is fantastic, blows everything else we’ve heard on the NES/SNES so far completely out of the water. It’s going straight onto my media server
    • It’s hard as balls. I lost a lot of progress repeatedly and it’s starting to wear me down like that usually does. If I would have known how hard it was I would have cheated from the start. I’m not sure I’ll be finishing this one.
    • The visuals are really great. It makes the game so unique looking compared to everything else we’ve seen so far.
12. Metal Storm (1991-02, NES) – Tamtex / Irem
    • This was another short, cock and balls torture game for the NES with the best looking intro pixel art we’ve seen so far. It deserves its cult classic standing. And, flipping gravity up and down was a fun mechanic to build a whole game around.
13. The Legend of Zelda (1987-08-22, NES) – Nintendo R&D4 / Nintendo
    • Legend of Zelda thoughts: I’ve seen everything in The Legend of Zelda 100 million times before but that’s because of how influential it is. One of the most interesting parts of the game for me were the moments of light lateral thinking required for progressing through the game. Modern games have largely moved away from any kind of friction whatsoever so it’s nice to see a game that would have required the player to bash their head against the wall a few times to beat the game (or call Nintendo’s help line or read Nintendo Power magazines). If things were different, we might have lived in a world where more friction of this kind rather than less became the norm in games and we’d all be playing La Mulana-likes rather than Vampire Survivor-likes.
    • Zelda Link’s Awakening DX thoughts: This is a weird Zelda game. It’s steeped in Daoist philosophy (in particular Peng and The Butterfly Dream). It feels like a romhack because of the mismatch of what came before vs. what this is. Link starts the game by waking up (but he’s actually still sleeping/dreaming?) to a drunkard copycat of Mario (yes that Mario) and his daughter Marin who found him washed up on the shore of their island. There’s a lot to go into but one moment speaks volumes about this fever dream: there’s a fetch quest where you have to bring a letter from a bitter old anthropomorphic goat lady to a guy who likes writing letters but never receives any; you bring it over and a photo falls out, it’s a pixel perfect rendition of Princess Peach posing for the camera, the photo is labelled “Christine”. Literally WTF is going on. I’m a little more than halfway through the game and I adore it. It is weird and I love weird.
    • one thing I’d like to say before we move on from the Legend of Zelda is that Link is literally wielding a shield with a massive cross on it throughout the entire game. After LoZ I think they move away from Link being a warrior of Christ but it’s kind of wild that he started out as one.
    • “the core design principle of the game running out of steam halfway through and turning into a painful slog " hehe
    • I’ve always felt this way about Zelda games but never put 2 and 2 together about this being a core issue with all of them. Beating the later ones is an absolute ordeal but at least LoZ is really short.
14. Gargoyle’s Quest (1990-07, GB) – Capcom / Capcom / Nintendo
    • I wasn’t able to get through much of it in my 2 hours of no cheating play but I can see the vision. It’s definitely a more reasonable game than Ghosts n’ Goblins was difficulty-wise but it was still too hard for me. I think if I was more used to CBT (cock and ball torture) games I’d have been more into it.
    • I love a good challenge but I’m so much more into “easy to learn yet hard to master” games like SM64 than this much more punishing and backtracking heavy kind of game.
    • I enjoyed the goofy dialogue. The engrish with a weird/playful tone was fun to read.
15. Faxanadu (1989-07, NES) – Hudson Soft / Hudson Soft / Nintendo
    • The first “important” game we’ve played because the action-roleplaying gameplay in Faxanadu becomes so imbued into what modern games are/were for a very long time that it’s interesting to see a very early attempt at that kind of game.
    • Unlike Castlevania 2, it’s actually much more reasonable in terms of the hints that it gives you to figure out how to progress. Famously though, I hate backtracking and I hate grinding and so this was tough for me. If the gameplay held up a bit more and I was having more fun maybe I wouldn’t have needed to whip out the walkthrough.
    • I think Faxanadu is historically interesting and the series influenced a lot that came later but I can’t say it holds up.
    • Bionic Commando feels like a game at the opposite end of the spectrum – It doesn’t seem to have had any impact whatsoever on the games that came after but it’s still awesome to play to this day.
16. Prince of Persia (1992-11, SNES) – Arsys Software / Masaya(JP) / Konami(NA/PAL)
    • The animations must have been mindblowing at the time but actually playing this game is hell.
17. Ghosts ’n Goblins (1986-11, NES) – Micronics / Capcom
    • this game is fucking deranged, I love it (Editor’s note: I don’t love this anymore). From this walkthrough https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Ghosts_%27n_Goblins/Stage_5#NES: For whatever reason, Satan is invulnerable to the Axe in the NES version.
    • Is this the first rage game?
    • If you’re cheating it’s a very short game.
    • It is super hard. I can’t stress this enough. This is definitely the hardest game I’ve ever played.