Shit games that could have been good

[Penis Drager 2.0]

I wanna sperg about Haze. It was kinda shit and very forgettable.

Futuristic FPS with a pretty generic plot: You're a drugged up supersoldier sent to kill some rebels but it turns out bad guy is good guy blah blah blah. It's a common, predictable trope. With these sorts of games, nobody gives a fuck about the plot anyway.

So let's talk multiplayer:
You could take the side of the Mantel Troopers and use their their drug (nectar) to more effectively run-and-gun. You press a button which would let you see enemies through walls, take less damage, move faster, etc for a short period of time. You could alternatively take the side of the rebels, which was much more methodical but allowed you to become invisible by playing dead or create IED's using the nectar capsules you scavanged off of dead troopers and make them shoot each other. This was asymmetric multiplayer: quite innovative for an FPS from 2008, really.
Here's the problem: The multiplayer was based around the Call of Duty model where run-and-gun is key. It was just objectively better to be a Mantel Trooper. The maps were small and chaotic and stealth wasn't really an option. Being a Rebel basically meant getting shot, playing dead, and waiting for an opporunity to kill someone who didn't know you were there. Meanwhile: everyone knows you have this ability and sees you fall in a small map. The real-time kill counter doesn't exactly help matters either.

Let's say they took after Battlefield instead:
You have a much larger and more sparsely populated map. Vehicles and whatnot. Better cover. Now you have a game where placing IED's is a lot more useful. Being cheap is less of a faux-pas and more "just how you play the game." The drug enhancements Mantel has access to become more of a necessity rather than overpowered bullshit. And it would just be a better game. Possibly iconic. It would be a game of "overpowered supersoldiers vs. dirty-fighting rebels." Being a Mantel Trooper means relying on shock-and-awe and easily doing away with anyone in sight while Rebels would actually have the opportunity to use their guerilla abilities to ambush and eliminate concentrated forces.

Any other examples like this where a slight modification could make a shitty game great?

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

Cyberpunk 2077. How can you fuck that up?

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

Cyberpunk 2077. How can you fuck that up?

Very easily. The concept is ambitious and the game had unreasonable GTA 6 levels of hype going for it and CDPR dropped the ball hard.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

YIIK

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

There's a shit ton if you go back to the NES and SNES. Many just need a tweak here or there, something like an improvement patch to iron out the kinks or decrease the bullshit artificial difficulty.

Ninja Gaiden NES would be an good example. Just fix the respawning nonsense and maybe enemy placement in a few sections, and you have a very playable game.

Knuckles Chaotix. You already know what I'm gonna say, cut the gimmicky banding system and you've basically got a decent Sonic spinoff. You'd have to do some significant work on the level design for it to actually be good though.

Donkey Kong 64 supposedly has a patch that allows switching Kongs on the fly. It's a really good example of the kind of thing that's a super obvious fix.

Speaking of N64 era games, just fix the camera and/or draw distance, and you've salvaged like 90% of bad games. Even already good ones like Mario 64 would be better.

Virtual Boy's entire library is probably much more playable just by making it full color, or at least black & white instead of a blinding red. Wario Land VB deserves better.

Donkey Kong Land would be just as good as DKC if the controls were tweaked to be more like DKC's, and if the screen crunch was fixed.

 

[Wesker]

 

[Billy_Sama!]

There's a shit ton if you go back to the NES and SNES. Many just need a tweak here or there, something like an improvement patch to iron out the kinks or decrease the bullshit artificial difficulty.

Ninja Gaiden NES would be an good example. Just fix the respawning nonsense and maybe enemy placement in a few sections, and you have a very playable game.

Knuckles Chaotix. You already know what I'm gonna say, cut the gimmicky banding system and you've basically got a decent Sonic spinoff. You'd have to do some significant work on the level design for it to actually be good though.

Donkey Kong 64 supposedly has a patch that allows switching Kongs on the fly. It's a really good example of the kind of thing that's a super obvious fix.

Speaking of N64 era games, just fix the camera and/or draw distance, and you've salvaged like 90% of bad games. Even already good ones like Mario 64 would be better.

Virtual Boy's entire library is probably much more playable just by making it full color, or at least black & white instead of a blinding red. Wario Land VB deserves better.

Donkey Kong Land would be just as good as DKC if the controls were tweaked to be more like DKC's, and if the screen crunch was fixed.

Make me glad that there are romhacking sites to provide patches to remove the BS of games to make them enjoyable. I wanted to go on some Pokemon Gen II nostalgia and didn't want to have to trade for pokemon I couldn't catch but used a patched version made any pokemon be obtainable in the game.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

Fallout 3, if it wasn't for some poor business choices and legal fuckery leading to Bethesda buy the IP outright rather than the rights to make a single game under the IP we could have had Van Buren.

I'm not one of those old fans who think's everything after Tactics is bad and Tactics was a low point, and Fallout 3 wasn't a bad game but it wasn't a Fallout game it was just a OK attempt at Post Apocalyptic game with a 50's skin and that's something they over use to kill the soul of the Fallout IP they have made it the 50's rather than the 50's idea of a Post Apocalyptic World.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

View attachment 4387596

Gonna need a lot more than a "slight modification" for that one, chief.

 

[A-Stump]

Life is Strange could have been pretty good with a competent writing team who weren't French. Life is Strange 2 is basically just a liberals nightmare of what Trump's America was, AKA white people literally coming out of the woodwork to hunt down Mexicans so that was unsalvageable. True Colors was funny if you have the narrative in your head that she's an autistic having temper tantrums at the drop of a hat.

No Man's Sky still needs TLC it'll never get. Sure it's a lot better but I was promised giant monsters and shit and all I get are flying testicles with four eyes.

Resident Evil 3 remake isn't a terrible game but feels like something that should have cost $20 max. I feel truly bad for those that paid full price for it, I take forever to finish games and finished it in two days. It had a shit multiplayer mode way after launch but who cares?

 

[Kheapathic]

Remember Me. It could just be me wanting a sequel to Oni (come the fuck on Bungie); but instead we got a barely standard 3D action/adventure with a unique mechanic that isn't used much. The punch to the gut is a decent concept of a game was made by Don't Nod; who after this went on to make the Life is Strange games. If this game was better, it could've saved us from autism simulator the game.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Streets of SimCity. Horribly rushed, buggy piece of shit that coincided with the death of Maxis as an independent studio. But it was still fun when it worked and had a nice soundtrack.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a buggy, bland, repetitive, dumbed down sequel to Morrowind. You can find 12 hour video essays on this for more details.

Duke Nukem Forever. Maybe it will never be made good even by fans because of trannies.

 

[Colon capital V]

If Mario Sunshine was given an extra few months or a year in development it could've been the masterpiece as some people like to claim it is.

 

[Testacles Maximus]

Mass Effect Andromeda has the perfect premise for a continuation of the franchise, but they fucked up the execution and killed their own good idea.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

If Mario Sunshine was given an extra few months or a year in development it could've been the masterpiece as some people like to claim it is.

I thought it was great. I actually like it more now.

 

[My Name is Ed]

I have two games, one of which maybe 21 other people have played and the other is fairly niche, and it stings me to think of them.


First off is a game I played long ago, so I'll have to be a bit sparse on details: Frozen Synapse 2. It's much the same as the first one, a tactical WEGO game with a sick cyberpunk aesthetic, but now with a strategic layer with multiple factions, where you move around task forces and basically try to conquer the map. It was effectively abandoned not long after launch, with multiple game-breaking bugs and horrible performance. I recall hearing the lead dev got cancer or something, so I guess the game just needed a cancer-free dev to be good, maybe.


Second is Phantom Doctrine. You ever wanted an XCOM game, but instead of fighting aliens you're doing cool Cold War spy shit? This game lets you play as either the CIA or KGB, and you have to unravel a global conspiracy while countering and subverting the other guys. It included a very cathartic corkboard minigame where you connect clues you pick up during missions to one another to advance the plot, which is also pretty solid. Where the game falls apart is the actual gameplay, especially regarding guns. It's a stealth game so gunplay should be your last resort, but between the wonky target mechanics (shots ALWAYS hit unless behind total cover, cover and distance just mitigate damage), infinitely respawning enemies when compromised, and fairly unreliable stealth mechanics, combat isn't even a resort. If the shooting starts, restart. Also it has an incredible crime noir aesthetic, but it's got a lot of obvious Unity jank that will take you out of it at the worst times. And much like FS2 it was dropped about a year after release. They're working on a sequel as well, but it's a different company and it's a third-person shooter, so I have negative hope for it.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

If Mario Sunshine was given an extra few months or a year in development it could've been the masterpiece as some people like to claim it is.

Fixed physics, a couple more stages and removing the blue coins would have improved Mario Sunshine greatly. The same could be said about Star Fox Adventures, it is not an awful game, but it needed at the very least another year of development.

 

[Calandrino]

As a matter of fact, my favorite such game, Space Harrier 2, recently received its long overdue fix.

The original Space Harrier is one of my favorite games ever, but I can't tolerate SH2 for more than a few minutes, despite the two playing similarly. Difference is, SH1 ran on powerful arcade hardware.... whereas SH2 was a Genesis launch title that ran at a low framerate, with choppy sprite-redrawing in lieu of scaling. It's hard to even understand what's going on. On top of that, the music sucks. A tragic waste of perfectly good sprites.



Last year, a remade version of the game was included on the Genesis Mini 2. It runs at a smooth framerate, uses proper sprite scaling, and replaces the music. Otherwise I don't think they changed much of anything, but the difference is night and day. Now that the game is playable, it's much easier, although there's a new "hard mode" to compensate.

The new version of the game is designed for modified Sega CD hardware so you might have to wait a while before it gets emulated.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Bubsy 1:

• Have a health meter like in Sonic (yarnballs = rings). I mean the whole point of that game WAS to copy Sonic, so it doesn't make sense when you give him the same speed and buildup as sonic and NOT have some sort of health system. Even after giving the player 9 lives (get it... because he's a CAT) it doesn't make up for the fact that one-hit deaths are LAME. Speaking of...
• REMOVE THE FALL DAMAGE!!
• I get that cats can't swim, but at least in Sonic he could still move around underwater even though he couldn't swim. This is just a personal prefference of mine but I ALWAYS hated the "water = death" trope.

Bubsy 2:

• See Bubsy 1
• For some reason they increased Bubsy's speedup so he goes from 0 to 10 in half a second. This was a bad change, as this makes exploring the worlds in the game much less enjoyable since you have shit attacking you all the time. They should have kept the build-up from the first game
• Also for some reason they reduced the number of lives back to the generic 3. This was also dumb, as this game is quite possibly harder than the 1st game.
• The camera in this game is wonky for some reason. I remember the camera in the 1st game being a little smoother.
• I think the general idea with the levels were to have more shorter ones than few long ones like the first game, but again, the sequel suffers from that, especially when in most stages there is no clear indication where is the start and where is the ending (i.e. the end goal could be smack dab in the middle of a stage that you have to enter a puzzle of tunnels at the beginning and end of level to get to. Just combine both wings into one and combine all the floors into just one simple yet challenging difficulty.

Bubsy 3D:

• See Bubsy 1
• DONT ALLOCATE ALL YOUR RESOURCES INTO THE GRAPHICS! It's the reason why this game looks like shit, the resolution is maxed the fuck out, and the rest of the game suffers because of it.
• Using "Jumping Flash" as an example on how to make a platformer was the worst thing the devs could have done. How they thought the immediate switch to top-down view every time you jump was a good idea is mindblowing.
• Tank Controlls... they're not fun.
• Enemies need fatter hurtboxes, especially the common grunts. Jumping on one is a coin-flip as to whether or not you hit them or get hurt yourself. Using the atoms as a weapon is a chore.

 

[Syntaxion]

Skull and bones, the pirate game made by Ubisoft.

They made AC4, they literally have the perfect foundation, a few touches and it'd be perfect. Yet they still fuck it up completely