It’s hard to overstate our love for Kurt Kalata’s Hardcore Gaming 101. Every time HG101 runs a new series retrospective, it makes me punch myself directly in the forehead while wondering either a) why didn’t I think of this or b) why have I never heard of this game before? Option b was the dominant thought while I was checking out the most recent update. HG101 contributor Jave has a look at the unlicensed Genesis and NES monstrosities known as Action 52. I’ve never heard of Active Enterprises’ Frankenstein Monsters before reading the piece, but now it’s a moral imperative I seek them out. Unlike the myriad bootleg NES and Genny game cartridges that jammed variable numbers of existing games into a single package, Action 52 is a collection of fifty-two originals, all of them apparently awful.
The retrospective is a great read on its own but particularly interesting is the theory Jave floats in his introduction: terrible games lead to good games. After reading the piece, I immediately thought of kill.switch. kill.switch was a middling shooter with bland visuals and muddy control but its duck-and-cover gameplay has literally defined action games over the past three years. But while kill.switch was a bad game that led to good games like Gears of War, it led to even more mediocre games like Dark Sector.
Then there’s games that are just bad and they lead to other bad games. I’m looking at you Mario Party.
What do you say, dear reader? Do bad games lead to good games?
Related links:
Up All Night: Dark Sector
OST: Soul Blazer
World WTF Federation: Wrestling Games?