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Games that aren't as good as you remember


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Any older Dragon Warrior. I can't believe I had the patience to play through these.

Iron Sword. I can barely even control the character properly, let alone try to play the game. Guess it just shows how much my gaming skills have deteriorated.

haha I can't help but agree with the Iron Sword comment, I have no idea how I played and enjoyed that game back in the day, watched a speedrun on Youtube the other day and just can't believe it ever seemed that fun, that said, still love it's intro song!

As for the oldschool Dragon Warrior games, I still dig those, but I'm pretty ok with slow paced games. One old slow paced game that is too slow for even me now is The Bard's Tale, seemed ok at the time, now it's just something to launch to listen to the bad pc speaker music for a minute then quit.

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I watched my housemate play through my old copy of Terranigma over the last couple days. I remembered it as the last game for SNES I really sank a lot of time into back in the day and interpreted that as it being fun. Now I have to say, it has quite an ambitious concept, but the later gameplay just plain sucks. It ventures into firm adventure territory later on when it's mainly about pushing the cities' growth and all.

In the end he used a walkthrough to just get to the fighting parts and the final boss, eventually (I didn't even remember all the stuff I had to painstakingly find out by myself in '96).

Another thing is oldschool racing games. Even Super Mario Kart gets boring for me after a couple minutes. It's one of those genres that has only benefited from technological advancement, imo.

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I'll tell about some games that haven't aged a SECOND: Freakin' Viewtiful Joe and Viewtiful Joe 2. I really hope there's a third at some point. SSX 3 too.

More on subject, I remember playing Stubbs the Zombie at a buddy's place a while back, and when I saw that steam ws selling it for like 15 bucks, I figured why not.

As much fun as I had playing it years ago, after playing TF2, Gears of War and Portal, and pretty much realizing how shooters, third person or first person should handle, the game was incredibly frustrating.

It's a shame because it's fun and unique, but ionno, the difficulty curve and other factors just make it HARD TO PLAY.

Same goes for FF3. Playing it back in the day, before it came all pimped out to the DS, I remember really liking it. Then I bought it and got an unimpressive, frustrating grindfest. Gah.

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I don't have quite the same love for Illusion of Gaia that I used to. As a kid it was probably one of the two best games of ALL TIME for me (the other being FF4, which I still adore for different reasons than before). There's some really cool things in there, and some great gameplay, but the storytelling and translation are awful and there isn't a single character in the whole thing I like, except maybe poor old Hamlet the pig.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, there's Delta Force: Land Warrior. This was the first FPS I ever played on the PC, did a little online multi over modem, and I thought it was really cool. Going back, the whole damn thing is just so bland and the movement and feel is just not "right". I went from that straight to Half-Life though, and spent the next few years as primarily a PC gamer.

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Of all the parts of it that have deteriorated, the soundtrack has fared the worst. The tinny midi sound is horrible even by PSX standards...

Heh, I've always considered the MIDI'ish sound of FF7's soundtrack to be one of its defining qualities. In a positive way. Considering how good Suikoden's soundtrack sounds, it does make you wonder though why FF7 did things with that old school MIDI.

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they didn't use mp3s on the N64 until way late because it took until then for the carts to be able to hold their maximum (64mb). mp3s were just too large of a file format to use for audio when they had to cram all the rest of that content into the system. ps1 didn't have that limitation. once they figured out how to real-time compress the files so that it didn't take up half the cart, they were fine. by then, though, the n64 was on its way out.

ff7 used midi because it was early in development, yes.

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they didn't use mp3s on the N64 until way late because it took until then for the carts to be able to hold their maximum (64mb). mp3s were just too large of a file format to use for audio when they had to cram all the rest of that content into the system. ps1 didn't have that limitation. once they figured out how to real-time compress the files so that it didn't take up half the cart, they were fine. by then, though, the n64 was on its way out.

ff7 used midi because it was early in development, yes.

Suikoden 1 though predated it by a couple of years (one of the first RPG's on the PS1) and has a lot of tracks that sound like live instruments. Considering that Suikoden was only on a single disc, I can't imagine they were using mp3 or WAV. Thus, it seems to me that FF7 would have no excuse (if you're in the anti-MIDI camp).

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Suikoden 1 though predated it by a couple of years (one of the first RPG's on the PS1) and has a lot of tracks that sound like live instruments. Considering that Suikoden was only on a single disc, I can't imagine they were using mp3 or WAV. Thus, it seems to me that FF7 would have no excuse (if you're in the anti-MIDI camp).

FFVII has no excuse whatsoever. I think FFIV had better sound quality, and especially since from everything I've read, the PSX sound hardware is just an extension of the SNES sound hardware... Not to mention comparing other PSX games, not just RPGs, from the same era. The sound programming of FFVII was downright lazy, and obviously Squaresoft didn't think it was important to spring for decent quality samples.

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Suikoden 1 though predated it by a couple of years (one of the first RPG's on the PS1) and has a lot of tracks that sound like live instruments. Considering that Suikoden was only on a single disc, I can't imagine they were using mp3 or WAV. Thus, it seems to me that FF7 would have no excuse (if you're in the anti-MIDI camp).

don't forget that ff7 had (at the time) ground-breaking graphics, which was a major reason that it was on so many discs. they didn't know as much about compression and hadn't worked out some of the techniques to take up less space on a disc that they did with ff8. it wasn't lazy, vyse, it was just a technical choice to have better graphics and lower-quality music rather than the other way around.

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I never played it.

Myst wasn't nearly as breath taking as I remember it being.

The Final Fight games were off da chain! Play the third, especially with a 2P human player.

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Fun, but not as cool as when I was in fourth grade, which was 1998-1999. Sonic and Mario kicked so much more ass.

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I don't think there's anything wrong with the sound engineering in FFVII to be honest, but I did notice a difference in sound quality when they hit FFVIII although I could easily be wrong.

I can't really remember FFVIII's sound quality (didn't play it much), but comparing FFVII's soundtrack to, say... Castlevania: SOTN's soundtrack throws Square's laziness regarding sound quality into stark relief.

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