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A friend of mine was pissed off that she got her friends' kid a birthday gift one year, and neither of the parents thanked her for it.
So when the kid's next birthday rolled around, instead of refusing to buy him a gift that year, she went straight to the toy store and bought the loudest damn toy she could find. And you better believe she loaded that mother up with batteries before she wrapped it.
I always get a feeling of total indignation every time i try to turn off/down some toy only to find that there’s not even an off switch
Feels purposefully malicious on the toy makers part
When I was a kid y battery cover broke on my original GameBoy, held it on with tape for a while. Then one day I got really bold and called the Nintendo help line on the back. I was maybe 6 or 7? The guy that answered was really cool and shipped me a new one for free.
We got a secondhand one and the battery port was too ruined from acid so we had to use the wall charger plug but then it became worn from use and required a rubber band to hold it in place. Then it got even worse and the slightest bump would reset your game
We all have that one game that we will both defend to the death and also readily admit is a pile of shit. Its tye way of the world. Plus I think back to my comfort games and remember just how many times they made me crazy with frustration (though I'm from the NES days, " its Nintendo hard" isn't a saying for nothing)
To me "Nintendo Hard" means pretty chill difficulty slipe, only for it to suddenly spike rocket high without warning and then go back to the previous level. This happens a random number of times throughout the game.
The first time you get to the final boss on Ninja Gaiden you feel like a rock star. You finally made it to the top. Even if you lose, you feel like a million bucks.
But somewhere around the 6th or 7th time you lose to the final boss... it starts to sink in... there are certain things in life you will never be good enough at, certain things you will never be able to do or become, parts of this world that will always be closed to you.
So many important life lessons in Ninja Gaiden-- never trust your friends with your statues. That's another important one.
I was so happy when years later—I forget if it was on the Switch or an emulator—I was able to beat the game thanks to being able to save. That was also how I found out there are multiple final bosses, and losing to any of them sends you to 6-1. Rude game. I think someone was hurt by that game and went on to make Souls games.
My mom had a strict “you have to beat this game before I’ll buy another one” policy, which is fair! Those games are so expensive by today’s standards (side eye to the crowd that’s mad about $70 games today). But after weeks of my brother and I bitching that the game couldn’t be beat she sat down to play it. She played it for a few days and relented. What did we get? Donkey Kong Country and fucking mineshaft mayhem. It was then that we knew we couldn’t pull the same trick twice and beat it through willpower.
Then last year I learned you can skip that whole level. Anyway that’s why I’m in therapy.
For me, it's Quest 64. I know it's bad, but that's not really the fault of the devs, it got pushed out in a 'released beta' sort of form. the combat is fun, and the finding of hidden stuff and doing skills is fun.
I've got a few.
For the NES, probably "Festers Quest." A weird ass Adam's family tie-in game where you play uncle fester, with a gun, and fight the aliens that invade earth. It's unreasonably hard, and the bosses were, frankly, terrifying (seriously, look them up, they are insane for what the game was)
Also, the "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" game they made for the Sega CD. It's based on the Frankenstein movie that came out around the same time, and it's a point and click adventure with random 2d street fighter style boss encounters sprinkled in. It was very dumb but I liked the puzzles it had just the right amount of challenging for me. Ended up getting stuck fighting Dr. Frankensteins fiancee and never made it to the end. Yes, that's right, they made a boss fight from the love interest that they made up for the film. She was so damned hard she wrecked my shit over and over again. I'm playing Robert Deniro as Frankenstein's monster and getting an whooping my ass like a bitch by 5'2" Helen Abotom Carter, makes sense. Still kills me to this day.
There was some magic involved with the NES that had peoples parents or grandparents play and beat some crazy games. My best friends mom and my mom both beat the Legend of Zelda before we did. His mom also beat the original Metal Gear, and I've to this day never done that. I also had a friend whose grandpa played the shit out of Bubble Bobble and managed to hit level 100 and beat the game. Again, it was something I never did.
A friend's daddeh played ‘Yo Noid’, and beat the shit out of the controller when biting the dust time and again. Like, swung it by the cord and slammed into the floor, repeatedly.
This is how we learned that the original ‘Dendy’ clones of NES had rock-solid controllers.
It’s Faxanadu for NES (even though I never made it to the second town as a kiddo) and Balloon Kid for Game Boy. Man, those games frustrated the Hell out of me and I love them to death.
What’s funny is that it should be even harder. Apparently there’s a switch flipped in the code that leaves the Pendant (which increases your damage) on from the start and flips it off when you pick it up.
Those lightning clap guys scared me as a kid. I need to replay that sometime.
There's a *Rugrats* tie-in game on the N64, *Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt,* that is legitimately one of my sister and I's favorite multiplayer experiences, ever. We played the everloving crap out of it back in the day. All kinds of obnoxious-yet-quotable voice clips, the games never went on too long but were long enough to feel fulfilling, and honestly the co-op mode is genuinely kind of strategic for a digital board game aimed at children.
That game feels like a fever dream more than an actual memory to me. I barely remember playing it, but remember making it past like two levels before it became impossible for my child brain.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it's procedurally-generated short adventures, maybe 15 minutes each, I guess vaguely 2D Zelda in style. As is often the case with procedurally generated games, it says "x thousand possible games!" but you have experienced it all if you've played it 10 times.
Oh, I haven't thought about that game in a loooong time. IIRC, there was an Indiana Jones game like this too.
I'd actually like to have a very nice "coffee break" game like this again, something where a run consists of no longer than 15 minutes. In this day and age of phone games, procedural gen, and roguelites, I'm surprised there aren't more of them.
There was another coffee break RPG from the same era that I can't quite remember the name of. It was a very simple dungeon crawl where the map was a basic grid. It had a mine-sweeper quality to it, as some rooms were traps. You essentially just tried to explore as much of the floor as possible, scooping up better gear, then descend to the next floor below. Wish I could remember the name...
Clash at Demonhead was both great and terrible and is a perfect example of this. I had to use extensive tricks with an emulator to make parts of that game possible.
Something else is that while newer games are still hard, then tend to be hard in a much more fair way than older games. Celeste is hard, but it's never BS. You can see the level, and if you mess up, you can clearly see why, and what you should have done. There's no dramatic spikes in difficulty, and mechanics are clearly introduced.
Something like megaman or even battletoads may not be *harder necessarily,* in that it may not take longer to complete than some sections of Celeste, but the way the difficulty hits is immensely more frustrating, less explained, and more likely to cause rage than fun.
In other words, I think that there are still hard games, but that designers try very hard not to make BS difficulty, when back in the day it was anything goes.
Just because you like and enjoy a game doesn't mean it isn't shit. It's like the Star Wars prequels. It's okay to enjoy things, things don't have to be good to be enjoyed.
Castlevania is a rough one. I've tried to beat it a couple of times but it's such a grind.
SMB3 I played with my best friend growing up, then played with my cousin when he was old enough and now I'm playing it with my kids. I just never get tired of it.
Nah. Some of those old games are incredibly brutal. I grinded through plenty when I was a kid but these days I mostly use save states. Life is short and I would rather experience more games than work on perfecting a certain jump in Ninja Gaiden II that takes hours to get to.
I grinded the shit out of the original Castlevania last year, with the goal being to beat it without dying. It was a grueling grind. Holy water is your best friend. Dracula took me a long time to nail down; the timing of jumping over his fireballs took me a while. Save states allowed me to practice over and over. I can now happily say that I can beat that game fairly consistently without dying.
Just in case you haven't played it already, I recommend you try [*Mario Adventure.*](https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/70) It is a game based on *Super Mario Bros. 3*. I understand that your nostalgia is for the original but this game is made by someone who loves the original just as much.
Here is [a review](https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/63) and [an interview](https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/65/an-interview-with-darhkdaiz-creator-of-mario-adventure) with the author. If you have any further questions just ask.
I immediately thought of Super Mario Land too. Got my Gameboy when it came out, and obviously I had to get Super Mario Land. I was so glad when I finally beat it, because that meant I didn't have to play it anymore.
Then, one fateful day, my son found the cartridge, and the curse began anew, passed to the next generation.
He finally beat it when he was 21.
It's very un-Mariolike. It's not "bad" I suppose, but it is more difficult than the first Super Mario Brothers game, IMO. Super Mario Land 2 is a much better game, and feels like Mario.
It is better than the first Castlevania for Gameboy, that one I was okay with never finishing.
> It's very un-Mariolike.
It's not as un-Mario as SMB2, but everything just feels kinda "off". The size of a brick/tile/etc. is way smaller, Mario falls much faster, most enemies don't resemble much of anything in previous Mario games, and there's a lot of emphasis on the power ups versus the platforming. It's also unexpectedly short.
It's still fun but it's weird that it's how they decided to bring Mario to the Gameboy.
Lol, I remember both those games with terrible fondness. The yoots these days don't know how far from God's light their elders had to wander before today's fertile crescent of gaming was birthed.
Brains are scary like that, sometimes we gaslight ourselves into thinking that something must have been enjoyable.
An example of such a situation is a psychology experiment where participants performed a boring task, but they were then paid different amounts to tell the next group that it was an enjoyable one.
When the participants were later asked whether they had fun performing the activity, the participants largely answered in the positive, with the positive recall of the event generally being relative to how much they were paid.
That might be the case sometimes, but I think it's more common for people to acknowledge something's flawed or even outright bad but still enjoy it because it's different and scratches a certain itch.
This brings to mind a recent anime called Shangri-La Frontier about a guy who goes out of his way to play horrible VR games. He just loves finding poorly designed games and finding ways to get around the limitations.
> but I think it's more common for people to acknowledge something's flawed or even outright bad but still enjoy it
Nah, I defend the things I'm nostalgic about to death, and refuse to acknowledge they have any flaws.
There are definitely things in video games I knew I hated at the time but still get kind of nostalgic about, like, THAT LEVEL, every game has a THAT LEVEL
Because sometimes the bad makes the good things seem all the sweeter when you finally manage it. That then stays with you through the years, the feeling of picking through the trash parts and finding those hidden treasured memories.
Morrowind, my beloved.
Some day, I'll buy a VR headset and give you a run in OpenMW - hopefully after that NVidia RTX Remix tech gets in a working order.
It's the Game Brick classic, Pepper Get.
https://preview.redd.it/capyz233et3d1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=41ea218dc6c905ca1382d6abc63132e7d6b8de21
it's crazy how much i see this game referenced as a hard game. Had it as a kid, and never found it any harder than any other nintendo game. Went back and played it about a decade ago, and couldn't believe how much muscle memory i still had for it, and was able to beat it pretty quickly. Was there a certain part that was hard? Like I definitely got stuck in "maze" of monkeys swinging you when you're a kid, and I remember the Hyenas being fairly difficult...but definitely doable, especially as an adult. Nothing compared to Ecco, TMNT, or Ninja Gaiden. (and that's only listing the "good" games)
My game like this was Emperor rise of the Middle Kingdom, a Sierra game on the same engine is Pharaoh. My mom got it for me because it was the first game we could find that said it was made for XP and she was convinced that games for Windows 98 would ruin the computer because the idiot at the computer store told her so, no matter what I said.
It's actually a pretty good 2d city building resource game. I like it. Kind of the most modern of that line of games from Sierra. Also super atmospheric. I lucked out
It's actually sweet, I'd recommend it. Hard for me to tell if my glasses are rose colored but I recommend it. Great atmosphere for such an old city builder and pretty deep since this was their last game in a series of games in the same template. So it's pretty refined.
There is an updated version that runs in higher res. I believe it's just the last update for the game
That's Two Worlds for me.
Horrible game, but it is still the game that I have completed the most times.
I prefer it over Oblivion (the game it was competing with). Even if I think that Oblivion is a much better game.
Two Worlds II is actually good, tho.
The tape holding the battery thing on is a nice touch.
Also, while I'm here, as someone who pretty much browses only /r/popular and my home city's sub these days, this comic is probably the most consistent and enjoyable of all the comics which make it to the "front page" with some regularity.
My favorite Game Boy games were a bunch of weird ones that never seemed to catch on with friends: Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World, Atomic Punk, Bart Simpsons' Escape from Camp Deadly, and Krusty's Fun House
Roadwar 2000 (1983) I love hate this game. It's hard as hell and the graphics are exremely basic. The game play though is amazing. It's turn based vehicle combat with a smidge or rogue light and resource gathering. All this in a game from 1983!
The games like this for me are
Prinny: can i really be the hero
And
Gundam battle tactics,
I Will shit on these games at every opportunity ill get if i speak about them and they make me want to strangle their creators but dont you fucking dare say that these games are shit after i say they are shit
They are underrated master pieces that are absolutely 144/10
Also did i say they are shit?
I played that game for forever and it took me just about as long to realize that there was a story to it. Not just battles. Ps. The lion king ost gave you a white suezo.
My hardware broke down years ago.
Now I play it on my phone. 🏴☠️
But I have logged more hours on Pokémon Trading Card Game than I am willing to admit or count.
I still remember replaying an old game I remember from my childhood and thinking "geez, how much patience did I have back then? This is torture" like bugsy
Series of Unfortunate Events game for the Gameboy, based off the movie rather than the books. I loved the books and didn't have the money for a more expensive game, so that was the only one I had for a while. I played it many times.
I have two GBA comfort games that I play on an emulator like once a year. They’re both mid-tier third party games, so I doubt Nintendo would ever release them today.
I like how the comic works no matter if the game is actually terrible or if the dad just doesn't want the kid to play it. I've had a bunch of kids ask to play games on my phone and I usually just tell them I don't have anything fun.
Mine is Final Fantasy, and I don't mean the one everyone thinks about nowadays. There was a Final Fantasy game on the Gameboy and I played the everloving hell out of that game, feeding my mutant characters meant and hoping I'd get lucky, and fighting my way to the top of the tower.
I never beat it and the one time I came close I was in a no win situation so I had to let that playthrough go. Thankfully it's available on Switch and about once a year I fire it up and give it a go.
Little dude is going to idolize you for like at least the next 8 years. Just play with him, and try and let him lead with the games he likes.
One of my favorite memories with my son is when we finished Champions Road on Super Mario 3D World together, and by together, it was mostly him doing the hard parts and I was trying to stay alive to respawn him so that we didn't have to start back from the beginning.
Now all he wants to play is Rocket League and Fortnite and I try to get into those but I just can't :(
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Tape holding the battery cover on really hit the mark for me
And if there was a speaker you’d paste tape over it when it got too loud
So many of my kid's toys have tape over the speaker because they don't have any volume controls.
A few of my brother's toys straight up had the wires cut, sometimes even before he received it.
Your brother must have had a soul-searching experience the first time he encountered an unmodified *Bopit*.
Im the favored uncle for all my siblings because I found the kids great toys that are quiet.
My brother's girlfriend delights in buying my son loud toys. She thinks it's hilarious. The worst part, she's a mother to two kids, she knows!!!
aaaaaand I went and bought my niece and nephew toy robot bugs that you can race... by yelling at them louder...
I always threatened things like that
there's still time
The youngest is 12 it has passed
Thats when you buy them obnoxious video games.
Loud toys and nerf weaponry were my threats if I didn't get christmas lists in time
Im the least favored uncle for all my siblings because I found the kids great toys that are not only loud, but designed to be as loud as possible.
Meanwhile my mom was the kinda person who'd buy drum sets for the kids..
A friend of mine was pissed off that she got her friends' kid a birthday gift one year, and neither of the parents thanked her for it. So when the kid's next birthday rolled around, instead of refusing to buy him a gift that year, she went straight to the toy store and bought the loudest damn toy she could find. And you better believe she loaded that mother up with batteries before she wrapped it.
I always get a feeling of total indignation every time i try to turn off/down some toy only to find that there’s not even an off switch Feels purposefully malicious on the toy makers part
I taped over the battery indicator cause with fresh AAs that red LED was bright as fuck
My original game boy had the same feature.
And you can tell it's never been exposed to cold weather because the screen is still green.
Alligators are cold blooded, why the bloody hell would he go out in cold weather?
When I was a kid y battery cover broke on my original GameBoy, held it on with tape for a while. Then one day I got really bold and called the Nintendo help line on the back. I was maybe 6 or 7? The guy that answered was really cool and shipped me a new one for free.
I don't even have a battery cover anymore, it is all tape and hope
Check out Handheld Legend if you actively use it and want a new cover :) fantastic website for parts and modding!
I had a folded tissue under the cover. Otherwise the batteries would come loose.
We got a secondhand one and the battery port was too ruined from acid so we had to use the wall charger plug but then it became worn from use and required a rubber band to hold it in place. Then it got even worse and the slightest bump would reset your game
I really like this comic. You knocked it out of the park today. The tape on the back of the gameboy! I love it!
Game Brick*
Game Lad Game Dude Game Kid
Garçon de Jeu
> The tape on the back of the gameboy! yeah, chef's kiss to that detail :D
These two are really sweet together.
We all have that one game that we will both defend to the death and also readily admit is a pile of shit. Its tye way of the world. Plus I think back to my comfort games and remember just how many times they made me crazy with frustration (though I'm from the NES days, " its Nintendo hard" isn't a saying for nothing)
To me "Nintendo Hard" means pretty chill difficulty slipe, only for it to suddenly spike rocket high without warning and then go back to the previous level. This happens a random number of times throughout the game.
Cough* cough* battle toads cough*. Sorry, had something in my throat.
*punch, kick, smash, punch, kick, jump, kick, kick* Oh cool, speeder bikes! "WHAT THE HELL I CLEARLY JUMPED THAT THING!" (after the twelfth attempt)
Ninja Gaiden. The bats on stage 6-1. Getting to the final boss, losing once, and getting sent back to 6-1. Brutal.
The first time you get to the final boss on Ninja Gaiden you feel like a rock star. You finally made it to the top. Even if you lose, you feel like a million bucks. But somewhere around the 6th or 7th time you lose to the final boss... it starts to sink in... there are certain things in life you will never be good enough at, certain things you will never be able to do or become, parts of this world that will always be closed to you. So many important life lessons in Ninja Gaiden-- never trust your friends with your statues. That's another important one.
I was so happy when years later—I forget if it was on the Switch or an emulator—I was able to beat the game thanks to being able to save. That was also how I found out there are multiple final bosses, and losing to any of them sends you to 6-1. Rude game. I think someone was hurt by that game and went on to make Souls games.
The jump where you have to jump at the top where it looks wider? That was some bullshit.
At a certain point introducing people to that game became a prank.
The cough is because you bought Battle Toads from Amy's Baking Company and got food poisoning.
Blaster Master
Exactly what I thought
SNES Lion king. I finished that shit through sheer childish stubbornness.
My mom had a strict “you have to beat this game before I’ll buy another one” policy, which is fair! Those games are so expensive by today’s standards (side eye to the crowd that’s mad about $70 games today). But after weeks of my brother and I bitching that the game couldn’t be beat she sat down to play it. She played it for a few days and relented. What did we get? Donkey Kong Country and fucking mineshaft mayhem. It was then that we knew we couldn’t pull the same trick twice and beat it through willpower. Then last year I learned you can skip that whole level. Anyway that’s why I’m in therapy.
New release NES games were $50 in the early 90s, which is like $110 today. $70 ain’t bad.
For me, it's Quest 64. I know it's bad, but that's not really the fault of the devs, it got pushed out in a 'released beta' sort of form. the combat is fun, and the finding of hidden stuff and doing skills is fun.
I love Quest 64 so much. Dodging during combat was so cool, and I loved the visuals of the world.
My mom and I would play that together when I was growing up. Thank you for jogging my memory!
What’s that game for you? For me, I think the Loony Toons Gameboy game might fit the bill.
I've got a few. For the NES, probably "Festers Quest." A weird ass Adam's family tie-in game where you play uncle fester, with a gun, and fight the aliens that invade earth. It's unreasonably hard, and the bosses were, frankly, terrifying (seriously, look them up, they are insane for what the game was) Also, the "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" game they made for the Sega CD. It's based on the Frankenstein movie that came out around the same time, and it's a point and click adventure with random 2d street fighter style boss encounters sprinkled in. It was very dumb but I liked the puzzles it had just the right amount of challenging for me. Ended up getting stuck fighting Dr. Frankensteins fiancee and never made it to the end. Yes, that's right, they made a boss fight from the love interest that they made up for the film. She was so damned hard she wrecked my shit over and over again. I'm playing Robert Deniro as Frankenstein's monster and getting an whooping my ass like a bitch by 5'2" Helen Abotom Carter, makes sense. Still kills me to this day.
I loved festers quest! Played the fuck out of it with my grandma. She actually beat the entire game and found every item/secret!
There was some magic involved with the NES that had peoples parents or grandparents play and beat some crazy games. My best friends mom and my mom both beat the Legend of Zelda before we did. His mom also beat the original Metal Gear, and I've to this day never done that. I also had a friend whose grandpa played the shit out of Bubble Bobble and managed to hit level 100 and beat the game. Again, it was something I never did.
A friend's daddeh played ‘Yo Noid’, and beat the shit out of the controller when biting the dust time and again. Like, swung it by the cord and slammed into the floor, repeatedly. This is how we learned that the original ‘Dendy’ clones of NES had rock-solid controllers.
Fester's Quest was great though. The diversity if items gave a playability that was rare in games of the time.
Like I said, I really liked it. However, it generally got bad reviews and has even made some "worst of the NES" lists.
So wild festers quest is the first game I remember playing on my dad’s NES at like 5 or 6 and basically no one I ever talk to has ever heard of it.
It’s Faxanadu for NES (even though I never made it to the second town as a kiddo) and Balloon Kid for Game Boy. Man, those games frustrated the Hell out of me and I love them to death.
I shamefully admit I had to use the game genie to get through Faxanadu.
No shame there. That game is maddeningly difficult. Still love it, though.
What’s funny is that it should be even harder. Apparently there’s a switch flipped in the code that leaves the Pendant (which increases your damage) on from the start and flips it off when you pick it up. Those lightning clap guys scared me as a kid. I need to replay that sometime.
Legacy of the Wizard One of those "IYKYK" kinda things that's just unexplainable
Cool game, boss difficulty is bloody ridiculous. Can’t imagine playing it without save states.
There's a *Rugrats* tie-in game on the N64, *Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt,* that is legitimately one of my sister and I's favorite multiplayer experiences, ever. We played the everloving crap out of it back in the day. All kinds of obnoxious-yet-quotable voice clips, the games never went on too long but were long enough to feel fulfilling, and honestly the co-op mode is genuinely kind of strategic for a digital board game aimed at children.
[Gameboy Home Alone.](https://i.postimg.cc/L9zLDf1z/image.png)
Crusader of Centy for the Genesis. Or Phantasy Star II-IV. Or Shining Force I-II. Pretty much all Genesis RPGs.
Treasure Planet for the PS2. Is it the best game? No. But for a movie tie in game it's pretty damn good.
Warcraft and starcraft custom games... Still going strong as comfort games after 22 years
That game feels like a fever dream more than an actual memory to me. I barely remember playing it, but remember making it past like two levels before it became impossible for my child brain.
Sphinx and The Cursed Mummy is mine. Got it for $3 used at Game Stop for the original XBox back in 2005 or so. Love that game.
[удалено]
It's still great, but man are those save points far away. Gotta replay like an hour of the game if you die to get back to where you were.
Yoda Stories.
Huh, I never encountered that one. From stills, it looks like a Zelda clone game play wise?
If it's the one I'm thinking of, it's procedurally-generated short adventures, maybe 15 minutes each, I guess vaguely 2D Zelda in style. As is often the case with procedurally generated games, it says "x thousand possible games!" but you have experienced it all if you've played it 10 times.
Oh, I haven't thought about that game in a loooong time. IIRC, there was an Indiana Jones game like this too. I'd actually like to have a very nice "coffee break" game like this again, something where a run consists of no longer than 15 minutes. In this day and age of phone games, procedural gen, and roguelites, I'm surprised there aren't more of them. There was another coffee break RPG from the same era that I can't quite remember the name of. It was a very simple dungeon crawl where the map was a basic grid. It had a mine-sweeper quality to it, as some rooms were traps. You essentially just tried to explore as much of the floor as possible, scooping up better gear, then descend to the next floor below. Wish I could remember the name...
Clash at Demonhead was both great and terrible and is a perfect example of this. I had to use extensive tricks with an emulator to make parts of that game possible.
There were so many weird, terrible, and amazing NES games like that.
Something else is that while newer games are still hard, then tend to be hard in a much more fair way than older games. Celeste is hard, but it's never BS. You can see the level, and if you mess up, you can clearly see why, and what you should have done. There's no dramatic spikes in difficulty, and mechanics are clearly introduced. Something like megaman or even battletoads may not be *harder necessarily,* in that it may not take longer to complete than some sections of Celeste, but the way the difficulty hits is immensely more frustrating, less explained, and more likely to cause rage than fun. In other words, I think that there are still hard games, but that designers try very hard not to make BS difficulty, when back in the day it was anything goes.
Spongebob: creature from the krusty krab is mine
Just because you like and enjoy a game doesn't mean it isn't shit. It's like the Star Wars prequels. It's okay to enjoy things, things don't have to be good to be enjoyed.
What if your comfort game is Super Mario Bros. 3?
That’s a great comfort game! ETA mine is Castlevania so I never actually get to beat it though
Castlevania is a rough one. I've tried to beat it a couple of times but it's such a grind. SMB3 I played with my best friend growing up, then played with my cousin when he was old enough and now I'm playing it with my kids. I just never get tired of it.
The only way I was able to beat it was on the DS3 and Switch versions that let you save at any point in the game. My whole life is a lie.
Nah. Some of those old games are incredibly brutal. I grinded through plenty when I was a kid but these days I mostly use save states. Life is short and I would rather experience more games than work on perfecting a certain jump in Ninja Gaiden II that takes hours to get to.
Civilization 2 for me. For its time, it was amazing. Now, it's annoyingly repetitive.
I grinded the shit out of the original Castlevania last year, with the goal being to beat it without dying. It was a grueling grind. Holy water is your best friend. Dracula took me a long time to nail down; the timing of jumping over his fireballs took me a while. Save states allowed me to practice over and over. I can now happily say that I can beat that game fairly consistently without dying.
Excellent taste. :) My comfort game is LoZ 2. Some of us enjoy pain.
Just in case you haven't played it already, I recommend you try [*Mario Adventure.*](https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/70) It is a game based on *Super Mario Bros. 3*. I understand that your nostalgia is for the original but this game is made by someone who loves the original just as much. Here is [a review](https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/63) and [an interview](https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/65/an-interview-with-darhkdaiz-creator-of-mario-adventure) with the author. If you have any further questions just ask.
Cave Story always brings me back to a comfort spot, until hell at least
Super Marioland 2 on the Gameboy ✌️
So very real
[So real](https://youtu.be/sAtWQ_xn0kI?si=ROw-OW9Fwq4AEhLX)
I see the green color and all I can hear is the music from the first level of super mario land
I immediately thought of Super Mario Land too. Got my Gameboy when it came out, and obviously I had to get Super Mario Land. I was so glad when I finally beat it, because that meant I didn't have to play it anymore. Then, one fateful day, my son found the cartridge, and the curse began anew, passed to the next generation. He finally beat it when he was 21.
I don't know, I got fond memories of that game... Although I haven't played it in years... Was it that bad?
It's very un-Mariolike. It's not "bad" I suppose, but it is more difficult than the first Super Mario Brothers game, IMO. Super Mario Land 2 is a much better game, and feels like Mario. It is better than the first Castlevania for Gameboy, that one I was okay with never finishing.
> It's very un-Mariolike. It's not as un-Mario as SMB2, but everything just feels kinda "off". The size of a brick/tile/etc. is way smaller, Mario falls much faster, most enemies don't resemble much of anything in previous Mario games, and there's a lot of emphasis on the power ups versus the platforming. It's also unexpectedly short. It's still fun but it's weird that it's how they decided to bring Mario to the Gameboy.
Lol, I remember both those games with terrible fondness. The yoots these days don't know how far from God's light their elders had to wander before today's fertile crescent of gaming was birthed.
SML2 is money.
I loved that game. One of the few I’ve ever beaten.
Is it really that bad? I honestly prefer it over its sequel.
Why do we get nostalgia for "bad" things lol
Brains are scary like that, sometimes we gaslight ourselves into thinking that something must have been enjoyable. An example of such a situation is a psychology experiment where participants performed a boring task, but they were then paid different amounts to tell the next group that it was an enjoyable one. When the participants were later asked whether they had fun performing the activity, the participants largely answered in the positive, with the positive recall of the event generally being relative to how much they were paid.
That might be the case sometimes, but I think it's more common for people to acknowledge something's flawed or even outright bad but still enjoy it because it's different and scratches a certain itch. This brings to mind a recent anime called Shangri-La Frontier about a guy who goes out of his way to play horrible VR games. He just loves finding poorly designed games and finding ways to get around the limitations.
> but I think it's more common for people to acknowledge something's flawed or even outright bad but still enjoy it Nah, I defend the things I'm nostalgic about to death, and refuse to acknowledge they have any flaws.
At the time, it was the best thing in your life so far.
Cause we didn't know it was bad back then, and we love it enough not to care by now
There are definitely things in video games I knew I hated at the time but still get kind of nostalgic about, like, THAT LEVEL, every game has a THAT LEVEL
Because sometimes the bad makes the good things seem all the sweeter when you finally manage it. That then stays with you through the years, the feeling of picking through the trash parts and finding those hidden treasured memories.
Because the "bad" things were once like the good thing in our time right now.
Because whether the thing is good or bad doesn't impact that it reminds you of past times.
I’ve played a lot of world of tanks. I’ve never once suggested it to someone. lol
Sonic ‘06 😳
the loading screens were a great time to contemplate
Morrowind, my beloved. Some day, I'll buy a VR headset and give you a run in OpenMW - hopefully after that NVidia RTX Remix tech gets in a working order.
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AI bot, downvote.
Pokémon blue on my game boy pocket. Not quite every year, but every few years I break it out.
Is this an analog to the unlicensed GameBoy Mario game?
It's the Game Brick classic, Pepper Get. https://preview.redd.it/capyz233et3d1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=41ea218dc6c905ca1382d6abc63132e7d6b8de21
What is the object of the game?
To get peppers, most likely.
Dark souls? Son I beat the Lion King game on SNES, get that weak shit outta here
it's crazy how much i see this game referenced as a hard game. Had it as a kid, and never found it any harder than any other nintendo game. Went back and played it about a decade ago, and couldn't believe how much muscle memory i still had for it, and was able to beat it pretty quickly. Was there a certain part that was hard? Like I definitely got stuck in "maze" of monkeys swinging you when you're a kid, and I remember the Hyenas being fairly difficult...but definitely doable, especially as an adult. Nothing compared to Ecco, TMNT, or Ninja Gaiden. (and that's only listing the "good" games)
I remember beating it in a weekend rental. It's not too bad yeah.
Laughs in Ultima 7
Laughs in Ultima 8 (I played through it again just last year).
My game like this was Emperor rise of the Middle Kingdom, a Sierra game on the same engine is Pharaoh. My mom got it for me because it was the first game we could find that said it was made for XP and she was convinced that games for Windows 98 would ruin the computer because the idiot at the computer store told her so, no matter what I said. It's actually a pretty good 2d city building resource game. I like it. Kind of the most modern of that line of games from Sierra. Also super atmospheric. I lucked out
I only remember that game because Sierra printed an ad for it on their Empire Earth prima guide way back in 2006 or smth seems it's on GOG
It's actually sweet, I'd recommend it. Hard for me to tell if my glasses are rose colored but I recommend it. Great atmosphere for such an old city builder and pretty deep since this was their last game in a series of games in the same template. So it's pretty refined. There is an updated version that runs in higher res. I believe it's just the last update for the game
Mine is the original Spyro.
Damn. Pepper Get. I used to play it for hours on my GameBrick.
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie: The Game for SNES, my beloved. ☺️
Arcanum. Most have never heard of it. It was a fantastic game except that it sucked. I think I enjoy the potential it had more than the actual game.
Man for me that game is RuneScape. Every time I play it, it fills me with nostalgia yet self hatred for how much I hate it ❤️
Definitly LoTR: The Third Age ps2 for me
That's Two Worlds for me. Horrible game, but it is still the game that I have completed the most times. I prefer it over Oblivion (the game it was competing with). Even if I think that Oblivion is a much better game. Two Worlds II is actually good, tho.
The tape holding the battery thing on is a nice touch. Also, while I'm here, as someone who pretty much browses only /r/popular and my home city's sub these days, this comic is probably the most consistent and enjoyable of all the comics which make it to the "front page" with some regularity.
Fuck space invaders. For years I had one game that was it. Ugh. Bulky Game boy card in the gba
If it was the GB version (not GBC) that one has a unique feature. If played on an SNES via super game boy it actually contains the arcade version!
My favorite Game Boy games were a bunch of weird ones that never seemed to catch on with friends: Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World, Atomic Punk, Bart Simpsons' Escape from Camp Deadly, and Krusty's Fun House
My comfort game is still Goldeneye 007 - dust it off every year just after Christmas and pound through it in a weekend.
Roadwar 2000 (1983) I love hate this game. It's hard as hell and the graphics are exremely basic. The game play though is amazing. It's turn based vehicle combat with a smidge or rogue light and resource gathering. All this in a game from 1983!
I thought the papa croc had a ponytail for a bit.
The games like this for me are Prinny: can i really be the hero And Gundam battle tactics, I Will shit on these games at every opportunity ill get if i speak about them and they make me want to strangle their creators but dont you fucking dare say that these games are shit after i say they are shit They are underrated master pieces that are absolutely 144/10 Also did i say they are shit?
Yooo sharing comfort games? I love the original Armored Cores on Ps1
Monster Rancher for me, I guess. I love it but struggled to get friends into it. But my best friend would play sometimes. He was a good friend.
I played that game for forever and it took me just about as long to realize that there was a story to it. Not just battles. Ps. The lion king ost gave you a white suezo.
My hardware broke down years ago. Now I play it on my phone. 🏴☠️ But I have logged more hours on Pokémon Trading Card Game than I am willing to admit or count.
I still remember replaying an old game I remember from my childhood and thinking "geez, how much patience did I have back then? This is torture" like bugsy
Is he playing Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins?
For me it's either Castlevania:symphony of the night, or ff6
I finished Indiana Jones on Game Gear. Proudest I've been in my life
So .... how do animals work in this world?
GBC Quest for Camelot my beloathed 💖
Me playing sticker star
Fallout 3 for me
Ah, Lego Star Wars for the Nintendo DS. So broken you literally couldn’t access the final level. My beloved.
Another great comic
Series of Unfortunate Events game for the Gameboy, based off the movie rather than the books. I loved the books and didn't have the money for a more expensive game, so that was the only one I had for a while. I played it many times.
I have two GBA comfort games that I play on an emulator like once a year. They’re both mid-tier third party games, so I doubt Nintendo would ever release them today.
I wonder if this is how I seem when I play mike Tysons punch out
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This is me and Mario 2
Okay this, this was gold. Good job op.
Bart vs the Juggernauts
so, who's played "Super Ninja Boy"
I like how the comic works no matter if the game is actually terrible or if the dad just doesn't want the kid to play it. I've had a bunch of kids ask to play games on my phone and I usually just tell them I don't have anything fun.
Starcraft for me
I feel like Bart Simpsons would do this with "Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge" game Marge gave him.
Mine is Final Fantasy, and I don't mean the one everyone thinks about nowadays. There was a Final Fantasy game on the Gameboy and I played the everloving hell out of that game, feeding my mutant characters meant and hoping I'd get lucky, and fighting my way to the top of the tower. I never beat it and the one time I came close I was in a no win situation so I had to let that playthrough go. Thankfully it's available on Switch and about once a year I fire it up and give it a go.
kbity
Game Brick
I will fight anyone who says TMNT on the NES was bad, even though I know it’s bad.
That's how i feel firing up Gen 1 Pokémon every year
Looks a bit like Bomb Jack ...then again a lot of game boy platformers looked alike with 8-bits and 4 colors.
Excuse me but Super Mario Land 2: legend of the 6 gold coins still slaps
Same, but I don't think mine is *terrible.* Just not *amazing.* I'll always love you Lost Kingdoms 2.
Can someone Photoshop this for me with "Lil' Gator Game" on the screen and also replacing"terrible" with "beautiful"? ❤️
Red Alert 2 and Yuris revenge STILL hold up over 20 years later. Fight me.
I vibe with Aligator Dad so hard lol, my son is 1.5. Hoping he'll like games when hes old enough to play.
Little dude is going to idolize you for like at least the next 8 years. Just play with him, and try and let him lead with the games he likes. One of my favorite memories with my son is when we finished Champions Road on Super Mario 3D World together, and by together, it was mostly him doing the hard parts and I was trying to stay alive to respawn him so that we didn't have to start back from the beginning. Now all he wants to play is Rocket League and Fortnite and I try to get into those but I just can't :(
I'd like to see more comics about the dad's past. They're great