Favorite "Guilty Pleasure" Video Game

[scotland]

It also helps if you've played a lot of 1980s computer games. I think console gamers often flip out if they don't feel godlike when they fire up a game, but 8-bit computer games were often all about slow, measured play and tricky learning curves.

Plus one to this. Some computer games could condition you to all these things Goldenband mentions. Infocom text adventures were infamously brutal, for instance. I played a game called Telengard where you spent more time generating a character than survivng in the dungeon. Games often ended in a few moves, making first contact with an adversary that severely overmatched you, and dying...please roll up a new character. When you did make progress, you savored it. There are no godlike adventurers, just temporary survivors.

I don't necessarily agree with the social signalling part. In my experience, the gaming community was different, and it was totally okay for everyone to like and dislike games at will, as readily as friends have different favorite sports teams. I dislike Activision Dragster for instance, my good buddy loved it - no big deal, although I never understood his support for the Houston Astros.

I do remember very disappointing reactions to games like Atari 2600 Pac Man - no social signaling involved. Quite the opposite, as I was in a social situation with some social pressure to voice enjoyment and admiration. I wanted to like it too, but I measured it against expectations of Pac Man in the arcade, and its relative simplicity.Those pale purple flickering ghosts were not the Inky Blinky and Company I knew. Blech! Now I can go back, ignore that, and play the game. Now, I like it - then, it was a disappointment. It can be both.

If my harsh opinion on Pac Man seems in contrast to my soft one on Telengard, its from expectations. Pac Man is a simple twitch maze game, while Telengard is trying to bring paper and pencil role playing to a computer.

[Stalvern]

Very interesting defense, goldenband, even if I can't really agree. Thanks for taking the time for it.

If the game used giant mechs no one would bat an eye at the weird controls

If the game used giant mechs, it would be Heavy Nova, which is even more disliked.

It also helps if you've played a lot of 1980s computer games. I think console gamers often flip out if they don't feel godlike when they fire up a game, but 8-bit computer games were often all about slow, measured play and tricky learning curves.

I love '80s computer games and know exactly what you're talking about (Thanatos on the Spectrum comes to mind), and Sword of Sodan was originally developed for the Amiga. But even in that context, I can't see anything that it does well; in my own experience, it's less deliberate than simply stiff, clunky, and plodding (compounded by the scrolling's ridiculous inability to keep pace with the player), and the combat feels like cardboard, crotch-stabbing or not. I say this as someone who made it to the graveyard stage before throwing in the towel, so it's not like I haven't given it my good faith. I get that a lot of people haven't, but I think that the game itself is more responsible for this than "social signaling" - if its most basic elements are a hassle, few people are going to invest themselves further to learn the deeper ones. All the same, I'm happy for you if you're happy with it. Heck, I'm happy for the game that someone's sticking up for it.

There are many games on the Genesis that are much worse than Sword of Sodan, like Onslaught

I'm curious about this. That's another Amiga original with a very "European computer game" character to it, and a lot of your points about Sword of Sodan apply to it too. What makes it so much worse?

[goldenband]

To be clear, I think anyone has the right to dislike any game they want, and there are always going to be unpopular games (regardless of their quality) whose appeal is very narrow or limited to a small audience. That's beyond argument on both counts.

My comments about "social signaling", though, are more about the way in which people pile on to specific games, and especially the way it seems to anger certain people (fortunately not in this thread) if you like a game that "everybody knows" is terrible, like E.T. Some of that is childhood disappointment transformed into adult bitterness, no doubt, but I really do think some of it is just the human drive towards conformity -- and, unfortunately, our instinctive hostility towards difference (and fear of being singled out as different).

Again, I've seen people get genuinely angry when someone said they enjoy E.T., or Hydlide, or another game held in wide contempt. And it's not just that they think they're being trolled, or even that they think the other person is being some sort of obnoxious ironic hipster, but something deeper, as if their core values are being challenged. It's the kind of response you get if you don't agree that $NATIVE_COUNTRY is "the best country in the world", or that you might have gotten in 1950 if you argued that certain groups of people should have the same rights as others. Conventional wisdom has it that people get mad if you don't like what they like, but I think they often get far angrier if you don't hate what they hate. Sometimes it's not what they have in common that seems to unite people, but a shared enemy.

@scotland, to your point, I think the gaming community used to be different. If anything we used to put up with games that had no business being tolerated, and gaming magazines were too generous toward them, most famously Rise of the Robots and the hype I remember it getting. But in the 2000s the lackluster or unpopular games of the 1980s and 1990s became a common object of mockery, and the tone of the community changed: contempt became the first response to something different.

@Stalvern, my impression is that Heavy Nova has far more defenders than Sword of Sodan. I know several people who think it's not just a defensible game, but an excellent one. (I personally haven't played it enough to say one way or the other.)

I look at Sword of Sodan as being like a medieval painting come to life, with all the stiffness and weird geometry that implies. To be sure, when I first played it, I thought it was terrible!

The thing is, though, that the game rewarded my effort: the more I played it, the better I got at it, and my growing skill opened up the gameplay. There was something fundamentally addictive -- and I've noticed this a lot in "bad" games -- about learning to master a game that didn't want to hold my hand, but whose challenges were also straightforward enough to be grasped without requiring tons of memorization, perfect execution, or a commitment of an hour or more.

There are so many games I slog through just for the sake of beating them. But Sword of Sodan I actually looked forward to, because it was satisfying to master it. And it can be mastered in a meaningful sense, which many other games can't.

I haven't played the Amiga version of Onslaught but the Genesis port, at least, is utter garbage for one very simple reason: there's basically no game there. It pretends to be a complex RPG/strategy/action-platformer hybrid, but the amount of actual content is miniscule, and basically all the RPG/strategy stuff is meaningless window dressing. The game looks nice, controls OK, sounds reasonable (though you can't have both music and SFX), and if you play it for five minutes it might seem decent. But the reality is, it's so obscenely and unnecessarily repetitive that it boggles the mind: to beat the game, you have to play the exact same levels and fight the same battles hundreds of times. It's a scam.

[scotland]

Sorry to be derailing things. I mostly agree with you, Goldenband. I think we just disagree on the edges.

People do pile on games considered bad, or jump on bandwagons of games considered good. However, if they were the target audience, the game is bad or good in that respect at least, all other qualities aside. ET is bad in the respect it was a commercial failure and disappointed kids of tbe day who expected a very different game. However, people piling on decades later is different from people disliking it at the time.

[goldenband]

ET is bad in the respect it was a commercial failure and disappointed kids of tbe day who expected a very different game.

I must say, this has always mystified me because I was a kid at the time and enjoyed E.T. quite a bit! I had zero problem making sense of it.

But then, I've always been more interested in games that offered a sense of exploration and adventure -- no matter how small in scale -- vs. games where the point is just chasing high scores (which is & has always been of little interest to me, outside of the occasional high score competition on sites like AtariAge, or the mild pleasure of taking high score on a real arcade machine).

Either way, to me E.T. was a specifically good game, considerably better than the average VCS game.

[scotland]

I must say, this has always mystified me because I was a kid at the time and enjoyed E.T. quite a bit! I had zero problem making sense of it. But then, I've always been more interested in games that offered a sense of exploration and adventure -- no matter how small in scale -- vs. games where the point is just chasing high scores (which is & has always been of little interest to me, outside of the occasional high score competition on sites like AtariAge, or the mild pleasure of taking high score on a real arcade machine)..

And thats fine. Its like chess - its not for everyone and is often maligned, but those that enjoy it see its worth. E.T. was released in the goldem age of the arcade, and the 2600 made its bones bringing arcade twitching fun home from the arcades. That was the general expectation, although games like Adventure show other genres could thrive there.

How about a challenge - can anyone find some reviews, opinions and discussion of the game from 1982 or 1983? Can we go through the magazine scanned in on the internet and find the reviews? Or would that not help much? How do you find out what the kids were saying in school about it?