We’ve seen the best that 1987 had to offer, now let’s look at the worst.
SMS 5. Great Golf – D+ (1.3)
Oh look, a Great Sports title. Golf was kind of competent, but didn’t do enough to earn any real accolades.
NES 5. Super Pitfall – D- (0.7)
What were they thinking? Take a beloved property from the Atari and make it a terrible platforming mess.
SMS 4. Great Volleyball – D+ (1.2)
Take NES Volleyball, mess up the ball physics, tone down the air humping, and you have Great Volleyball on SMS.
NES 4. Lode Runner – D- (0.6)
Hudson Soft developed this stinker of a puzzle game. The commando controls like garbage and looks and sounds like it too.
SMS 3. Great Baseball – D (1.1)
Do you like actually controlling your players? Well Great Baseball isn’t for you, then, as the AI does that for you, poorly.
NES 3. Ikari Warriors – E (0.4)
If I had hair, Ikari Warriors would have had me tearing it out! This game moved at a snails pace with levels that took nearly a half hour to complete. It looks like vomit and the shrill sound made me want to puke myself.
SMS 2. Great Basketball – D- (0.7)
The only thing I can come up with about Great Basketball is that it was produced by a team of Japanese developers who had never really watched a game before, but just read a poorly translated technical manual.
NES 2. Star Voyager – E (0.3)
In what should have been a really neat space flight simulation game, we got a nearly unplayable mess. Even after reading walkthroughs, I had no clue how to proceed in Star Voyager.
SMS 1. Great Football – D- (0.5)
Taking the top… errr… bottom spot for the Sega Master System is Great Football. I thought 10-Yard Fight didn’t understand American football, then this came along and made me think 10-Yard Fight was a masterpiece.
NES 1. Winter Games – E (0.3)
And we come to the worst game of 1987, Winter Games. None of the events worked correctly. The graphics were terrible, and the sound was even worse. This is an example of how not to port a computer game to the console. I know we’ll see more of those examples, but this shall stand as a shining monument to awfulness.
The Sega Master System games look like a broken record with all the Great Sports games (except Great Soccer, that one was fine), but they all deserve the low scores they received. However, the NES had some major stinkers that were worse than even the worst Sega games. Now that the library is expanding, there are bound to be some more terrible toilet games as we move into 1988.