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@wave

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wave
@wave

the kids are kinda harsh

last night i wanted to read some critical opinions on the SFC game i'm playing, Front Mission Gun Hazard, and thought, i bet one of those "backlog" sites has some decent reviews schema. googling brought up backloggd.com, and it does have the letterboxd-but-games vibe i was hoping for (it had like six reviews of Gun Hazard).

aside from the backlog concept the site seems fine. i was a little surprised to see how low scores were for some classic Nintendo-made NES games, though! 2.6 for Zelda II? 2.7 for the charming, innovative Kid Icarus? is og Metroid really that offputting? gosh.

bonus screenshot of Simon's Quest getting expectedly reamed.

looking around a bit more the site does seem to have a letterboxd-esque scoring balance in which 5s are rare, so that explains it some. i actually do like that. but it is a little strange to remember some of these games as universally beloved when we were kids and find people who were born 20 years later having a very different experience.

i know, the nature of generations, my childhood naiveté imagining consensus, etc. just feels surprising, and it's odd how someone discovering Zelda II's existence through this could have a much different impression than me of how it was received in 1988.

looking at the NES platform page, i seem to be noticing that Nintendo's NES releases often fare worse than third parties'. my guess is that there are a greater number of new players going back to investigate Nintendo's releases than, say, your typical quality but third-party Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers (3.5, 36 reviews) type game.

anyway not to get too hung up on opinions on the internet. just interesting to notice. would be neat if someone ran stats on all this sometime to try and draw out trends.

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in reply to @wave's post:

reccanti
@reccanti

I grew up a bit after the NES (PS1 was my first console), but I still find the low scores kinda surprising. Maybe because I read a lot of gaming magazines when I was younger and there was a lot of institutional reverence for some of these games. Maybe the fact that things are more fragmented now means there’s less of that?

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Aware-Wolf
@Aware-Wolf

Looking through some of the posts on the site the trend I notice is that if it was a decently popular game there's a lot of weird takes of how it could've been better or the game doesn't hold up versus it's sequels. If it was a more niche game, like Gun Hazard, it's people leaving their genuine thoughts. It's a weird contrast.

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Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

OK, so it sounds like either Backloggd is preternaturally good at encouraging critical engagement with video games in general, it's mainly the retro game community who do have some understanding of how to read and engage with older works that's engaging with the site, or some combination of these. Either way, I am definitely here for it.

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wave
@wave

yeah, that sounds like what i was noticing. i suspect the lesser known games are more likely to be appraised only by aficionados / specialists who know they exist and seek them out, whereas the more known / mainstream games attract a more wide-ranging crowd.

speaking of "weird takes," the top-sorted TLoZ review i happened to see bemoaned its lack of 8-way movement. sorry, i side-eyed.

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venuczar
@venuczar

I am a huge Metroid 1 and 2 defender (and Zelda 1 and 2, but Metroid is a bit more dear to me), though as someone who didn't grow up with an NES, the first time I played Metroid 1 I hated it. I went in expecting it to be a miserable slog that was impossible to navigate (as that's basically all I'd ever heard it described as), and because of that expectation, it absolutely was. I went room by room with a guide and used save states to constantly manage the damage I took. It was so slow and miserable and totally removed the sense of exploration and atmosphere that makes a Metroid game. And I don't have much of a frame of reference beyond my own experiences, but it feels like people often go into those games with weird expectations that set them up for a bad experience. NES games seem to be built up as these neat time capsules only relevant for their place in history, and not like, as actual fun games? And they're so often like, entrenched in this language of how games are better now that it can be really hard to break through and actually appreciate them for what they are instead of fixating on what they aren't.

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wave
@wave

thanks, this is super interesting!

it's hard to fully recall / appreciate how much time i and other contemporary players were willing to sit there and hack away at 8-bit games like Metroid, but it's safe to say that we were willing to put in a substantial amount.

i also don't remember how often i died in the process or how difficult it seemed. these days i think of NES Metroid as an easy game, at least in terms of combat and survival. so it's kind of wild to hear that save-scumming felt necessary. but again maybe i found it more of a challenge to stay alive before i knew all the ins and outs.

i think trying to "appreciate them for what they are" was the spirit in which i wrote my earlier comment disagreeing that Metroid was "the worst" in the series or that that is an interested frame to view it through.

since you self-describe as a Metroid defender, i'm curious what your take on the game is these days. what it offers and where it stands, iyo.

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venuczar
@venuczar

My take on it is that its difficulty is kind of overblown, and that it's incredibly clever/creative with how it works within its limitations. To the first point, it's a Metroid game; if something is too hard, you can get more health/missiles/upgrades. It being hard is usually more to encourage you to keep exploring and seeing what you can find, and that actually works really well. And to the second point: it feels really aware of what they can't do. Metroid 1 can't have the wild/diverse power ups you get in the current games, and it's fair that most players wouldn't just assume you could do a number of things (like walk through certain walls, fall through some lava into another room, etc.) in part because it lacks the visual fidelity to telegraph those. And those two aspects could be off-putting on their own, but they come together in a really smart way. The knowledge you gain by finding the first instance of one of those things functions as a power up of its own, reframing the whole map in the same way that the gravity suit or grapple beam might in future entries in the series. I actually prefer it to zero mission, in part because I think that's the coolest and most charming part of the game, and it isn't replicated in the remake.

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wave
@wave

word. def. prefer it to Zero Mission.

i will say the one thing i like, worry about when it comes to a new player trying the game is if they can manage to find the first ice beam (super necessary but in a weird place), and also the (technically unnecessary, but extremely helpful) varia.

come to think of it, survival is a good bit harder before you get the varia.

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