9. Double Dragon 3: The Arcade Game
The Double Dragon arcade trilogy is interesting to look back at from the perspective of how different and iconic the NES versions ended up being. The NES version of Double Dragon 3 gets some criticism for its difficulty level, especially how each character gets one life, but it must be said that it is head and shoulders above the source material. The arcade version of Double Dragon 3 is a stiff, ugly mess of a release. The fact that it had microtransactions in 1990 is but the cherry on top.
Naturally, the Genesis game was based on that very version. To its credit, the microtransaction bullshit works better here, as you have a set amount of credits and can cash some of them in for extra moves, extra characters, and weapons. Too bad the weapons are absolutely useless. It’s an incredibly short game that suffers from bad animation (that leaping headbutt, man…) and the worst hit detection. You can flip your nunchakus right through a standing opponent and nothing will happen. By limiting this version of the game to two players, we were also cheated out of getting to see the lesser-known third brother, Sonny Lee.
8. Fantasia
If Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse was Highlander, then Fantasia was Highlander 2. Actually, scratch that. Highlander 2 at least had a kickass theme song. Fantasia, despite being based on a movie about beautiful music, butchers the soundtrack and that’s the least of its problems. Looking at pictures or general footage, you might wonder what the problem is. It seems like a regular platformer and while the visuals aren’t as good as Castle of Illusion, they’re alright.
The thing about this game is that it was put together by a scant team of inexperienced developers who were rushing it out the door because 1) the holidays were coming up, and 2) Sega just introduced a new animal mascot platformer whose game was going to blow Fantasia’s efforts out the water. The otherwise basic-as-hell game (No bosses! Not even Chernabog!) is plagued with some of the most unwieldy controls and arguably the worst hit detection in any mainstream video game. Jumping on an enemy’s head is a gamble because it just might hurt you anyway. Enemies can even hurt you without getting close enough to physically touch you, like Mickey’s selling pro wrestling punches. Thank God for World of Illusion for washing away this game’s stink a year later.
7. Back to the Future Part III
In gaming’s early days, it was a regular practice to increase a title’s difficulty level for the sake of padding the gameplay. Especially in the days of rentals, developers wanted people to really spend time on their games and sometimes the content was just too limited to do anything but set the screws to the player. That’s all well and good, but Probe Software went too far on this one.
Back to the Future Part 3 is split up into four levels that each offer a different style of gameplay. There’s a chase sequence where you dodge obstacles, a shooting gallery, an isometric target stage, and a below-average platformer. Maybe they could have looped the four stages with gradually ramping difficulty to pad things out, but they specifically map out an abridged version of the movie’s story, so I guess that’s out of the question. What they ended up doing was making it all intensely difficult to the point that even getting past the first level is a Herculean task. Yet, if you know what you’re doing, you could complete this game in literal minutes. That’s unacceptable.
