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You remember a game from your childhood that makes you go "Aww yeah, that game was AWESOME!" when you think about it, but if you went back and played it today, you'd realize it's not as awesome as you remember? You talk about it here.

For me, it's Jill of the Jungle.

I can't tell you how many times I've played through this game. It was one of my very first games, alongside Wolfenstein 3D and some early Windows games like Comet Busters. It's a very simple sidescroller. For the time, I imagine the 256-color graphics and Soundblaster sounds were probably a pretty impressive feat for a small team like Epic (yes, THAT Epic) to pull off. The soundtrack by Dan Froelich is fucking amazing too.

Unfortunately, that's all the praise I can think to give it. Beyond that, the sprites and enemies are dull and uninteresting, everything that can be killed dies in one hit, making combat rather trivial, the sounds seem very random (a pan flute note for picking up a healing apple, disembodied laughter if you die from a stage hazard [there's no main antagonist], and such, and all the sounds change between episodes for some reason), and all throughout, it shows that the small team led by Tim Sweeney back in 1992 was inexperienced, undisciplined, and didn't really know how to polish a game.

Is it bad? No. But looking at it objectively, I'd say it's decidedly average, with its only interesting features at the time being the aforementioned 256-color graphics (big deal in the early 90s!) and the fact that you have a female main character.

EDIT: Deleted the hotlinked image AND FUCK AUTOSUBSCRIBE!!!

Your hotlink is fucked, MIMU.

Also, I loved playing Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. I could play it for hours on end, just replaying on higher and higher difficulties. Day after day chugging along on my gamecube, playing it over and over again. It never got old, and it was always fun for me.

As I look back on it though, the story was pretty lackluster, the sound design was overly trying to be "Kawaii as fuck", and the gameplay was substandard. Apparently critics don't agree with me there, but whatever.

Thrillville, more specifically its sequel, Off the Rails. The actual game wasn't really good compared to Roller Coaster Tycoon, but the minigames were awesome. Some of my favorites were Saucer Sumo (knock enemy saucers out of the ring), Bandito Chinchilla (Mexican-themed beat 'em up), and the Luftwaffe 101 (WWII top-down shoot 'em up) games.

Simtown. It's like Sim City, but minus the infrastructure building, city management, and basically anything else that makes Sim City great, but damn does it being back memories of my family's old Compaq and Juno dial up internet. Biggest of all:

>dose midi songs

It was the first game I got with my Gamecube, and I loved it since I only was able to get a glimpse of Spyro games by playing a demo of Ripto's Rage at my cousin's house. I didn't mind the long loading screens, and I thought the glitches were only something wrong with my certain disk. It was only not long ago that I learned that people hated the game.

Surf's Up on the PS2. I still play the shit out of it.
From a critical standpoint, it is a very lackluster game with very little replay value. The environments have a lot more to offer and overall the character roster is oddly limited save for the boards.
But dammit, multiplayer is incredible, and it had a downright bitching soundtrack. It even had a Nirvana song.

I'm actually kinda nostalgic about the Shrek 2 video game. It may be a pretty average to mediocre four player beat-em-up, but there's just something about it that I like that I can't really say.

Shit game, Great memories.

I don't know why I liked this game so much when I was younger.

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Future Tactics: The Uprising. Wasted my childhood hours with this game alongside Gran Turismo and Tokyo Xtreme Racer. Turns out it was a Worms clone with some light RPG elements. Good enough for me.

I loved this game. Mostly for the name of one of the parts of the game

Halo 2 was an unfinished, unbalanced, buggy mess

but that ended up being part of it's charm

This right here. My mom rented this for me at least three different times and I never got around to buying it until six or seven years later when I was in high school and GameStop was clearing out the last of their GameCube inventory. The problems with it are more noticeable since I'm older, but I still love it; I love the music and how diverse the worlds are. And the thieves that you help out in the second-to-last world will always have a place in my heart. ♥

Other games that fit in this category are Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, as well as Prisoner of Azkaban. Those are nice to go back to every once in a while. Again, great music; just listen to it!

Edit for formatting.

I still have a lot of crappy licensed GB games that I used to enjoy.
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2, Taz-mania which has the exact same boxart as the SNES game shown above, and the Smurfs come to mind.

Actually, I should play the Smurfs again some time, I think it was pretty decent.

The Adventures of Cookie and Cream (A.K.A. Kuri Kuri Mix in Europe)
My favorite game from my pre-school years. Looking at LPs of it on YT, It now looks slow and repetitive.
Has a nice soundtrack though.

Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2 was one of the first Game Boy games I ever played. I don't think it's all that bad, but it can be very confusing. Still, I did play all the way through it as a young lad.

@xTSGx

Hah, Sim Town. (Interesting fact: got an SNES port in Japan under the name Sim City Jr.) I played that game a ton; had a box set with a bunch of the old Maxis games, and this was one of them. It was a blast trying to find all the interactive spots on all the buildings. The graphics were pretty detailed for the time, even if they were only in 16-color.

I find most of Maxis's older games were mediocre. Sim Ant was the first one I played, but it's just not all that fun, and it gave me my minor fear of spiders. Sim Life was just fucking confusing. Sim Earth could cause your brain to enter the real Earth's orbit with its sheer complexity. But there were a few diamonds in the rough outside of the Sim City games.

Sim Copter, despite being an ugly, buggy mess, had a certain charm to it. Good music too, and the ability to fly around cities you created in Sim City 2000 was really cool. And then there was Widget Workshop, which I find difficult to describe, as calling it "A watered-down clone of Incredible Machine" isn't accurate at all.

I guess that's the thing. There aren't that many games that I've played as a kid, liked, and where able to keep (My SNES, Windows 97, and N64 games collection are either sold off or incompatible now). So I can't exactly give a critical analysis of most of them.

Though if I had to pick one, it would be Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone for PC. It's not that I think it's relatively bad, per say. It's got the quality that most Movie tie-ins had at the time, which is better than most movie tie-ins would be like today, but still not that great.

An old game can stand on its merits, however. For instance, Super Mario Bros. 3 is fun whether you were a kid in 1990 or 2006. I was blessed to have tons of the old Lucasarts PC games available to me as a child. I just picked up TIE Fighter again, and oh my lord, it's sublime. It's on GOG now, so if you like flight sims or Star Wars, you owe it to yourself, man.

That said, I probably wouldn't enjoy Full Throttle as much as I did back then.

I STILL love this game. I don't care about all the fanboys not accepting this

Just pick any license game that you've played. At best, they're just average. At worst, it was horrible. We played it because when we were kids, all we care is it's a game based on a popular show.

I love the hell out of this game, but its plagued by glitches and bad A.I

It's not the best thing ever, but I love it.

This. It brings back such good memories for my brother and I, but when we really looked at it, we realized it wasn't that good at all. Chao garden is the only decent thing out of this.

calling this one "not really that great"?

Now, for me, I would say the "Felix The Cat" for the nes. It's a well made platformer with a fun power up mechanic, but besides that it has nothing special. Even so, I still play it from time to time as a I find it pleasant and fun (and if you are good enough you can complete it in around 1 and half hour)

This game was one of my first 3D platformers. It was nothing special and is just like your average everyday platformer. It sometimes had bad controls, not much of a satisfying ending and isn't really a memorable game. I like it because the visuals are pretty impressive for a PS1 game, the music is great, the gameplay is simple but fun, and even though the controls can sometimes screw up puzzle segments and make them difficult, I really liked those too.