Worthy retro – – Gamereactor

Being a gamer in 2025 is easier than ever, choice is greater than ever, and there are more great free products on all platforms to keep you and me entertained for the next decade. But of course there was a time when this was not the case, when games cost more than ten times our monthly allowance, and when we bought absolute mega blinders more than often. As we all know, there are plenty of forgotten retro gems that may have been even better than what is considered today, but in the same breath, there are just as many retro titles that, in retrospect, we shouldn’t have touched with a three-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 even have touched, with pliers.

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 album cover 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 alongside Mega Man and Duck Tales, and I remember the aesthetic as enchanting. At the same time, I remember how brutally frustrating it was, that the altitude climbing in the levels felt exhausting and how I would have much preferred a variation on that setup and traditional structure (A-to-B, left-to-right). I also remember how the stiff game controls and excessive difficulty caused frustration like few other major Nintendo releases did. Today, as I return to Metroid, Super Mario Bros, Mega Man and Kid Icarus, it’s no secret to myself that this is a disastrously overhyped platform adventure that, minus the lead clockwork and brilliant music, frankly 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 such successes as Golden Eye 007, Diddy Kong Racing and Banjo-Kazooie, it seemed like the British gaming giant couldn’t fail. However, that turned out not to be the case. Joanna Dark’s “Bond-inspired” cop story about aliens and fantastical murder weapons was praised by many game critics and quickly became a raging sales success, but really 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 unfair of me to try to say anything other than that I love GTA, as a game series. I love virtually everything that bears the name Grand Theft Auto and have given the first, fourth and fifth installments the highest marks. In the same breath, it would be unfair of me to try to genialize DMA Design for their work on the very first game and call it some kind of masterpiece, because frankly, it wasn’t. It was fast, gritty and sticky graphically, and the missions were monotonously pointless, as was 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 to poison my lunch. Ninja Gaiden. No one says anything negative about it, at least not with impunity. And yet that’s exactly what I’m going to do, because as good as the regular 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 temporary action titles from a third-person perspective. Creating a difficult, incredibly challenging ninja game in which micromillimeter precision and perfect timing were the main course, and then not supporting it with a functioning camera – was a murderous mistake by Team Ninja that I did not approve of then, or today. I don’t know how many 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 about those old retro gems, and is often lined up by fans of fighting games as an iconic classic. I’m happy to describe it differently, because Killer Instinct was an overhyped crap game that lived only on effective marketing and excellent music. For example, the whole point of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat was memorizing 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 something of a copy of Mortal Kombat.

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

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