Your 3 favorite developers and your 3 biggest disappointments by them

[kingoffighters]

Treasure:

Bangai-O (alot of people like it, but it never clicked with me)

Stretch Panic

Mischief Maker

[Johnny Undaunted]

Just for the hell of it.

Technos:

1) Double Dragon III (Arcade): After having enjoyed the NES version, I've expected a bit more from this. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was not only crap, but a very blantant ploy to get people to insert tokes with a ridiculous shopping system.

2) Super Dodge Ball (Arcade): Not a bad game by any mean, but just shallow. I expected it to be just like the HuCard version, but with better graphics. Your teammates are a bunch of sissies that don't even get any powershots, while your competitors are a bunch of steroid-pumped bastards with reinforcements to boot. At least this started Technos' tradition of making their NES ports better than their Arcade originals.

3) Combatribes: I know Lucas' gonna flame for this, but I thought Combatribes was kinda shallow compared to Technos' other beat-em-ups.

Konami:

1) Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions: Playing as the Ninja was fun and I loved the photograph mode with Mei-Ling and Naomi, but why didn't Konami just bring the whole Integral set here? Did they seriously expected everyone to shell out $40 for what was basically an expansion disc?

2) Metal Gear Solid 2: Actually it wasn't that bad, but not as good as the original. The cut-scenes are longer than they should've been and the bosses were not as good as those in MGS1 (Psycho Mantis would've made Vamp his bitch). Oh yeah, I didn't like Raiden that much and Rose was an annoying bitch. Did anyone else felt left out that we didn't get to see more of Arsenal Gear?

3) Castlevania Dracula X (SNES): No Maria? Sucks! I'm hoping Konami will let Igarashi rerelease the REAL Dracula X eventually, because I'm sure as hell not shelling out $150 for the PC Engine version.

Nintendo:
1) Donkey Kong Country: Okay, so this is really Rare's doing, but still. Once you're over the pretty graphics, it's evident how shallow this game really is.

2) Animal Crossing: All I wanted is fucking Punch-Out dammit! I was addicted to this game at some point, until I got tired of speaking to dumb animals and realized this was a cheap ploy to get people to shell out on all their add-ons. Videogame-equalivent of crack indeed.

3) Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords (GBA): Hey! Let's port over that Zelda game everyone and their brother played ten years ago on the SNES and then include a mini-game using an entirely new engine that could be used for a full game instead.

[Ragnarok the Red]

I'll try my hand at it, even though their will be rehashes:

Konami:

Castlevania 64 & pseudo-expansion Legacy of Darkness (N64) - Castlevania's first foray into 3D was a disaster of such colossal proportions it's taken 4 years for another to be released when Lament of Innocence comes out later this year and hopefully doesn't embarass the series again.

Contra: Legacy of War & C: The Contra Adventure (PSX) - We'll just pretend they went from Hard Corps straight to Shattered Soldier and deny these two 32-bit abominations ever existed, mmkay?

MGS: VR Missions: Should've been released with the upgraded MGS Integral instead of on it's own here in the U.S.

Sega:

Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 (DC & GC) - Sega has still to convince me Sonic can be done well in 3D. Were it not for the two spectacular GBA games, the series would be dead to me right now. Extra red-hot poker up their arses for re-releasing the original SA on the upcoming DX pack without apparently fixing any of the problems the DC version had and possibly making some even worse, if the reviews are all correct.

House of the Dead (Saturn) - One of Sega's famed Final Four releases for the Saturn, and the only one that wasn't a great game (PDS, SF3, and Burning Rangers). In fact, it was a terrible-as-hell port and ranked among the worst Saturn games ever made, and that's saying something. Thankfully the other three along with WD's MKR gave the Saturn a dignified death domestically, but that crap HotD port was just so bad, especially since Sega could've just used the money developing/distributing the US version towards giving us...

Shining Force 3 Scenarios 2 & 3 (Saturn): Yes, the Saturn was all but dead when we got Scenario 1 over here and we should be thankful to get even that. But this is the equivalent of Peter Jackson giving us the Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 and after all the praise, awards, and adulation it gets, gives us the middle finger and burns the only existing negatives of The Two Towers and Return of the King on live television. It's the truth!

SquareEnix: (since as Johnpv so eloquently put it, their essentially 1 company now)

Final Fantasy VIII (PSX): It would be hard to top FF3/6j as it was the greatest console RPG of all-time for me, but they did as well as they could with 7 which is still a good enough game. But everything just came crashing down with 8, completely destroying my faith in the series and earning Gamefan my honest and eternal respect for being the only magazine honest enough to give it mediocre reviews while everyone else was content sucking Square and Sony's cock about it. Despite a respectable rebound with IX, VIII killed off most of my enthusiasm for the series and X almost finished it off. For the first time ever, with X-2, I will not be picking up a domestically released FF game at launch. Never thought I'd see the day.

The 7th Saga (SNES): Mode 7 was all the rage back in the day, but even it couldn't save this game from my already-becoming-jaded 13-year old eyes when it was released. One of Enix's worse efforts, and their only really bad game released domestically for SNES. Which leads me to...

Enix closing down the 1st time and all the great games we lost. If I'm remembering correctly, when Enix shut down the first time they were in the midst of translating Tactics Ogre, Creation of Heaven & Earth, Dragon Warrior 5 & 6 for release domestically. While we EVENTUALLY got Tactics Ogre from Atlus for PSX, and Creation came out in English in Europe as Terranigma and needed a really expensive converter to playon a U.S. system, we probably lost our one and only shot at getting domestically released DW5 & 6 unless a compilation or GBA remakes are done and get localized. I guess there are always fan translations on emulators, tho... *sigh*

[NachoHat]

Sega
1)Space Channel 5-What a load of crap. Maybe I'm missing something but it just seemed boring as hell to me. I'll stick to Samba De Amigo for my Dreamcast rhythm games, thank you very much.
2)Phantasy Star III-Ugh. Someone appeared to have taken Phantasy Star 2 and shit all over the fun parts of it.
3)PSO Ver.2-I love PSO. It's easily one of my ten favorite games of all time. This, though, really wasn't worth the months of delay and $50. Fortunately, Sega got around to releasing Episodes 1 and 2 which is exactly what Ver.2 should have been.

Capcom
1)Megaman X5-There are two things that Megaman never needs: A time limit and lots of text. This game had both of them.
2)Breath of Fire 4-Just boring, plain and simple. The game was pretty but nothing really seemed too interesting about it. It even performed the rare feat in RPGs of having a god awful camera. Walking through cities was a pain in the ass.
3)Resident Evil 3-Nemesis seemed like a cool idea at first but just began doing nothing but pissing me off after a while.

Square
1)FF8-You know, this game really had some neat ideas. Too bad they were horribly executed and brought down by a craptacular plot.
2)SaGa Frontier 2-I actually really liked the first one. This one just seemed dull. Sure was pretty, though.
3)The point that they didn't release Seiken Densetsu 3 here-Self explanatory.

[Johnny Undaunted]

Originally posted by NachoHat
The point that they didn't release Seiken Densetsu 2 here-Self explanatory.

You mean Seiken Densetsu 3. Uhh, whatever.

[NachoHat]

You mean Seiken Densetsu 3. Uhh, whatever.

DOH! Oh well, it's fixed now.