Last Retro game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts (sometimes old things are bad)

I thought there should be one of these to complete the {{Topic Matrix}}

Tir Na Nòg

This game fascinated me as a kid. It looks like confusing shit to anyone younger than me, but had that spooky opacity; if the game is hard, it must be more fun to get through and puzzle barriers right? In all fairness, it had 3 things that were ahead of its time:

1. Originally on the ZX Spectrum, where more than 2 colours in one area of the screen were a no-no, it stylised the graphics to make them look like drawings, rather than incomprehensible splodges - your man's got loads of frames of animation
   
2. They got rid of the idea of lives; whereas most games of that era made you start the whole campaign again if you snuffed it, here you drop your items and respawn at the centre of the world (in all fairness this is the afterlife, I 'spose it makes sense)
   
3. The world's in 3D - you can walk in a direction, and rotate the camera independently.
   

The power of the 8-bit home computers wasn't ready for that last bit though, and therefore the game is absolutely impenetrable. You can only walk left and right, and "rotating" the camera flicks the screen 90°. Anyone who complains about inverting axes, that's noting - you never really get the hang of whether you've turned the world clockwise or anti-clockwise, and so are immediately lost as soon as you turn; even with a map of the game in front of you it's impossible to know what to do.
Also before in-game tutorials, most of the items in the game will mean nothing unless you read the manual carefully. Except I got it on the tape of a cover of Amstrad Action and they didn't bother copying any of that shit. Not that this helps for most things anyway, we've got the "puzzles made by and for the game designer and not the consumer" curse. The manual insists you should go to your local library and read about ancient Celtic mythology; but one magically locked door has a letter B on the front, and you're supposed to carry honeycomb and walk into it, because Bs love honeycomb.
Here's the archive of someone else walking through it. Note how often they stop and look at their notes behind the scenes.

Never mind not knowing where you're going; I don't even know what I'm watching! "Impenetrable confusing shit" isn't a recommendation then, no?

~

Jings, I could make new posts in this thread nearly every day. Most of the games I try on Evercade and Antstream fall into this category, where I just kind of get bored of them after fifteen minutes. Here’s the last substantial thing I didn’t finish:



I admire Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble for it's technical creativity. It’s ambitious use of the DS’s touchscreen as it’s key feature is pretty admirable in a way. It’s totally integral to the gameplay, letting you do loads of stuff with it. A few examples include Scratching the screen to stun enemies, Sliding the screen so you can move objects around and solve puzzles, and Splitting the screen in half so you can create new pathways through the level, and drop things onto your enemies too. Theoretically, there’s tons that the developer could have done with these mechanics.

It’s just very overdesigned in practice. All this multifunctionality is too elaborate, and it makes Double Trouble much more complicated than the Viewtiful Joe games on GameCube and PS2. Without them though, it’s not very deep or interesting, with the combat in particular being pretty slow and basic. Essentially, Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble is a confusingly unbalanced game that I ultimately didn’t feel was worth carrying on with.

Jimbob wrote:

The manual insists you should go to your local library and read about ancient Celtic mythology; but one magically locked door has a letter B on the front, and you're supposed to carry honeycomb and walk into it, because Bs love honeycomb.

Excellent. Not to play, obviously. To read somebody else get frustrated about.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

Jings, I could make new posts in this thread nearly every day. Most of the games I try on Evercade and Antstream fall into this category, where I just kind of get bored of them after fifteen minutes.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Roast away good sir.