Great ideas, poor implementation?

[StarMist]

The problems with Sonic 3D are the loose controls, the maps that don't favor speed, the boring special stages, the birds, the lack of more playable characters and the lack of a permanent homing attack (which the game really needed).
The idea of an isometric Sonic is actually pretty cool.

The controls are adequate unless the MD's are inferior to the Saturn's (I don't recall well enough to compare); that being said this would be a difficult game to no-hit whereas 1 and 2 are easy whilst 3 and SK are still doable, granted antisoporifics for 3. Nothing about the old Sonic games favoured speed; Sonic 2 could be played quickly if one knew it well, but then so could Mario 2. I don't know about the MD game's special stages, you may be right. The flickies and all their mechanics are fine except that it would've been better with a potpourri of animals such as usually issues from a broken lab chamber (which don't exist in 3D Blast and I always felt were under exhibited in all Sonic games--that goes for Generations too). Yes there should have been more characters. No a homing attack wasn't needed at all, I don't even think it needed in Generations; conversely enemies could put up a better fight rather than milling about.
I assent the implementation is on the poor side but nowhere near gamebreaking.

The shadow would not have cost 8 more megs

...surely you didn't miss my MGF allusion?

[Kamahl]

Wow, you really knock a lot of greats in your list. Beyond Oasis, Ranger X, Kid Chameleon, Alisia Dragoon, Flink, and Sub Terrania are really awesome games. Sub Terrania is admittably hard at first because you have to acquire a feel for the controls and level layouts but once that learning curve is conquered, it's really an amazing game.

Even if they're still great games (like I said, Ranger-X is one of my Top-10 games, Beyond Oasis and Flink are also favorites of mine...), the implementation of their GREAT IDEA leaves a lot to be desired.

[QuickSciFi]

At OP:

Traysia.

[eddiespruce]

At OP:

Traysia.

Is Traysia really any good? I've tried the game a few times as a kid, but always turned it off after 5-10 minutes because the battles were so slow I almost fell asleep. Does it get any better once you get farther through?

[Hidden_Darkness]

I think sonic spinball kinda falls under this category, it was a unique idea but a bit too repetitive in terms of level design and the controls could have been a bit better.

what's sad about it is the early prototype build of the game looked way better then the finished product and has more cutscenes in it then the final that only had a small intro.

[QuickSciFi]

Is Traysia really any good? I've tried the game a few times as a kid, but always turned it off after 5-10 minutes because the battles were so slow I almost fell asleep. Does it get any better once you get farther through?

For me, it's the 'blocky' movement that kills it for me. I will play to beat it one day, but for now it just feels too buggy. It's, in my opinion, the buggiest RPG I've ever played. That's too bad, though, because it does have very good graphics.

[Bones Justice]

Battletech is awesome! I didn't have any problems with controls. They should have made more games like this. Only the two player mode is awkward, mainly because you spend more time arguing than playing!

Eternal Champions is also great. It seems like the real complaint people have with it is that it doesn't play like a Street Fighter clone. Other than the Eternal Champion, none of the characters are that hard to beat but each takes a different strategy.

I'm not sure what's wrong with Cyborg Justice, either. It's a solid two-player beat 'em up with a twist.

I think Mutant League Hockey matches what the original poster was talking about. Neat idea, violent mutants playing hockey but the implementation is terrible. The gameplay is too slow. The controls are too slow. Worst of all, the fights are awful. The fights should have been absolutely brutal! Even the humor is dull. Compare it to Mutant League Football, which is fast, violent, controls great, and has a sharp sense of humor. You have to wonder if the other Mutant League games based upon other EA sports titles like basketball and road racing (based upon Road Rash, which would be awesome!) were cancelled because Mutant League Hockey was such a turkey.

Hard Drivin' is another game that is a good idea but fails. The controls are just too darn slow. If they couldn't make this an SVP game to speed it up then they should have simplified the graphics. Or at least have an option to reduce detail to speed it up like in PC games.

[sheath]

Ah, now I finally have a couple. Final Zone and Heavy Nova. I wanted both to be awesome and they just weren't. Final Zone felt too generic, and the weapons ended up being unsatisfying. I actually bought the game because one of the screenshots on the box made me think there were Pseudo 3D segments. Sadly, that wasn't the case and the rest of the game failed to impress me. Heavy Nova had everything to be great, except it was just too hard to navigate the side scrolling levels and the special moves were too hard to pull off. If they had polished the gameplay up and expanded on it for Black Hole Assault things would have been great.

[Thenewguy]

I've had Sub-Terrania for years now, but have only played it here and there with no long, concerted effort to complete it (usually got wiped out on level three working out what I supposed to be doing), the past couple of days I've sat down in an effort to finish the game and at the moment I have to say that I don't think the game is actually too hard.

I think Zyrinx were probably in a difficult situation with this game, because it has to appeal to genre fans as well as the average joe who picks it up out of curiosity, I don't know about the rest of you guys, but where it comes to the controls there was no learning curve for me at all, I just picked it up and started controlling it perfectly, this is because I'm familiar with the genre, having played a lot of Thrust years previously.

Being that genre fans are going to be picking this game up and playing it very easily, I think adding more fuel and health pick-ups would be a problem, if there were higher numbers of these I could see genre fans blazing through this game in no time, as its not actually very long (10 stages I believe)

At the moment I'm getting up to the level 7 pretty easily, and each subsequent attempt I get there with more lives than the last (I think I may be able to get there with more lives than I start with soon), the book "1001 videogames you must play before you die" indicates that level 8 may be extremely difficult, but to be honest I'm actually hoping this to be the case as at the moment the game feels a little too short to be honest, and one or two bastard-hard levels would be for the best.

[Curryman123]

I'll throw Knuckles Chaotixx in there.

[Benjamin]

The Adventures of Batman & Robin has to be the poster child for this thread. Awesome boss design and graphics marred by repetitive level design and difficulty stemming from the botched weapon upgrade system.

[Antony]

Nope. LJN = Acclaim.

Back in the late 80s, Nintendo tried to actively prevent video game companies from flooding the market with shitty games (like they did with Atari's VCS 2600) so they came up with a system where each licensed publisher had a limit of something like four titles a year IIRC. If Nintendo liked those games, this number could be doubled, but if Nintendo wasn't too fond of the game's quality the publisher could not release another NES game until the following year. (If the game did not meet a certain level of quality at all it wouldn't get Nintendo's approval for a release)

Either way, to circumvent this limit, Acclaim came up with a couple of labels so that they could release more crap.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LJN#Acclaim_era

This had me laughing for a minute. How true! Akklaim, synonymous with quality software...

Anyway, 100% agreed about Separation Anxiety - even the awesome music from the original Maximum Carnage was gone! The game looks and feels like a bad unlicenced title.

[tbp]

There are many Genesis games with a unique touch. I give you a few exemples.
Mystical Fighter/Kabuki Mau Renjitsu : has a great background but gameplay is average, slow motion,
swap color monotonous enemies and boss, awful sound effect and irregular difficulty.
Bio Hazard Battle/Crying : an organic shoot'em up for 2 players, weird music, ridiculous weapons
missing variety, too high difficulty, slow animation, beautiful enemies and awesome environment design.
Gynoug/Wings of Wor : I love the universe and the concept, strange art, but this game is too difficult.
Living soundtracks. So why there isn't a 2 players mode to balance the overall difficulty ? It is a shame.
Chakan : getting pleasure when you try to play this game is a miracle, a dark hero with black magic in a dark world.
Player is in hell for sure with crappy controls, jumping always where you don't want and persecuted by mobs. Technically poor.
Phantasy Star III : awesome scenario, hundred of adventure hours but minimalist graphics, very very very frequent fights.

[TheFace]

I'll throw Knuckles Chaotixx in there.

Chaotix's only issue was being on the 32x.

[Olls]

Many of Nintendo's hype games are amongst the worst of the SNES along with Square's games (I do like later and earlier Square but everything they made on SNES and SFam is awful) and Killer Instinct. F-Zero, Mario Kart, and Zelda LttP would be the exceptions, but all the Marios are terrible. I don't know whether you're counting Rare but the DKCs are impaired by progressively uglier sprites, both the playable characters' and the foes'. Sega handily outproduced them in the 16 bit era; rather the SNES's advantage lies in 3rd party games, such as those from Enix, Konami, Capcom, and a bunch of smaller teams, whereas Sega pretty much just had Taito and EA.

Ah, you love to overexaggerate solely for the sake of being controversial and probing for comments. What's the correct term for that? A "troll'? Admittedly, I'm guilty of it sometimes, but you make it look way too obvious.
Come on, you cannot seriously believe the stuff you just wrote down here and I refuse to believe you're delusional. You seem smarter than that.