Crappy Retro

Being a gamer in 2025 is easier than ever, the choice is greater than ever, and there are more great free products out there on all platforms to keep you and me entertained for the next decade. But of course there was a time when this wasn't the case, when games cost more than ten times our monthly allowance, and when we more than often bought absolute mega duds. As we all know, there are plenty of forgotten retro gems that were perhaps even better than what today considers but in the same breath there are just as many retro titles that in hindsight we shouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, if the gaming world had been different. This is Crappy Retro, the old games we struggled through because everyone else was doing it or because there were no alternatives. The games we should never have even touched, with tongs.

Kid Icarus (NES / 1986)
I loved Kid Icarus as a kid. I remember vividly how much the silver cardboard box appealed to me, and I remember how the cover art itself felt inviting in a way that Metroid, R.C. Pro-Am, and a few other NES titles did. I loved the music in Gunpei Yokoi's classic as the best in the format next to Mega Man and Duck Tales and I remember the aesthetics as enchanting. At the same time, I remember how brutally frustrating it was, that the height climbing in the levels felt tiresome and how I would have much rather seen a variation on that set-up and traditional structure (A-to-B, left-to-right). I also remember that the stiff game controls and excessive difficulty created frustration like few other big-name, big Nintendo releases did. Today, when I return to Metroid, Super Mario Bros, Mega Man and Kid Icarus, it's no secret to myself that this is a disastrously overhyped platforming adventure that, minus the clockwork protagonist and brilliant music, honestly didn't have much of value to offer.

Perfect Dark (Nintendo 64 / 2000)
I was running Missil Magazine when Rare launched Perfect Dark and after successes like Golden Eye 007, Diddy Kong Racing and Banjo-Kazooie, it seemed like the British gaming giant couldn't fail. That turned out not to be the case, however. Joanna Dark's 'Bond-inspired' agent story about aliens and imaginative killer weapons was hailed by many game critics and quickly became a raging sales success, but basically it was just a pale copy of Golden Eye with a splintered game design and a screen update that most resembled an overhead projector.

Grand Theft Auto (PC, PlayStation / 1997)
It would be downright dishonest of me to try to say anything other than that I love GTA, as a game series. I love pretty much everything that bears the Grand Theft Auto name and have given top marks to the third, fourth and fifth instalments. In the same breath, it would be dishonest of me to try and genius DMA Design for their work on the very first game and call it some kind of masterpiece, because honestly, it wasn't. It was fast-paced, pixelated and gooey graphically, and the missions were monotonously pointless just like the overall story. Sure, I had as much fun running over civilians as you did, and it would never have been a success without the over-the-top violence, but at its core this is actually a pretty rotten retro game.

Ninja Gaiden (Xbox / 2003)
I know, this is really like swearing in church and I am now fully convinced that my dear colleague and friend Jonas Mäki will do everything in his power to try and poison my lunch. Ninja Gaiden. Nobody says anything negative about it, not with impunity anyway. And yet that's exactly what I'm about to do, because as good as the fixed Ninja Gaiden Black was (definite, definite improvement), the base game was never worth all the accolades and hype it was rewarded with. The biggest reason for this in my opinion is the game's camera, which to this day stands out as perhaps the weakest in a game of this type from this generation of temporal action titles from a third-person perspective. Creating a difficult, unbelievably challenging ninja game where micromillimetre precision and perfect timing was the main course, and then not supporting it with a well-functioning camera - was a killer mistake by Team Ninja that I did not condone then, or today. I don't know how many 100s of times I died during my hours with Ninja Gaiden because the camera got stuck behind an object in the game's environments and obscured half my field of vision.

Killer Instinct (Super Nintendo / 1994)
Rare's fighting game is one of those titles that, in its original form (Super Nintendo), is often mentioned in discussions of those old retro gems, and is often lined up by fighting game fans as an iconic classic. I'm happy to describe it differently, as Killer Instinct was an over-hyped rubbish game that lived only on effective marketing and superb music. The whole point of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, for example, was to memorise attacks, patterns and combos - something that in Rare's own fighting game had been simplified to a single button press, which in itself ruined the whole point of spending hours on a fighting game of this type. It was also radically unbalanced and graphically a kind of copy of Mortal Kombat.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES / 1989)
Everyone in my social circle and everyone in my primary school class played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) at the time. Everyone. I remember there being more talk about this game in the schoolyard than could be classed as reasonable and my childhood friend Lönnå® regularly invited us home for game-soaked afternoons (we skipped after-school clubs) to play this best-selling Konami game. The only problem was that it stank of horsetail and always did. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) was and remains one of the most overly-loved retro games that should have been a giggle at best. This is because the game controls were downright awful, the bugs numerous (by far the sloppiest NES game I ever tried) and the graphics flickering.

Legend Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES / 1987)
Mixing genres such as role-playing, adventure and platforming elements in Zelda II would prove to be almost useless and I personally consider this to be the low point of the series. Exploration and the open design from the predecessor was of course the best part and what makes Zelda Zelda, and how Nintendo reasoned when they decided to skip all that, completely, is beyond all comprehension today. If this game hadn't had 'Zelda' in the name and didn't contain the iconic music, no one would have cared then, and no one would remember Zelda II today.