I had The Lion King for Genesis as a kid. You know, the game where they literally made it extra hard at the last minute to stop people from beating it during a rental. It also stopped me from ever beating it. I think I only ever got past those stupid monkeys a handful of times, and then never beat the level after that. So I hated that game long before the internet popularized hating on old games.
I could also list a bunch of other games I had that I think are terrible, like The Adventures of Batman and Robin for Genesis (seriously, fuck this game), or Gumshoe for NES, that I've thought are trash since the 90s despite what people might tell you nowadays.
It's not quite as a simple as hard game = hate it I guess. I also had the US version of Dynamite Headdy, which was also stupid hard, but at least the first few levels that you could actually clear were a lot of fun.
But those are actually great games! Gumshoe is just ok, actually. Points for originality.
I beat the Lion King (on SNES, though, largely the same game with stretched graphics) the first day I ever played it in the span of one afternoon during one of those boring adult parties you get dragged to where you end up trapped with a much younger family member who luckily had a game system. I thought the game was a lot of fun to play.
Adventures of Batman and Robin and Dynamite Headdy are both games that I couldn't finish as a kid but then beat as an adult. Both are great! You can watch Timu's no death run of B&R, something I haven't done yet myself, which is really impressive. I'd say it's one of the best original games for the Genesis. These games are pretty far from terrible!
I always wonder how much ability comes into play when people judge games. It's like if I wrote a review about basketball based on my personal ability. Dribbling is hard to constantly maintain and the basket is built too high. What a terrible game. While people have a right to an opinion, that opinion needs to be weighed against their experience with the game and their ability to a degree. Chris Kohler giving Ducktales: Remastered a negative review because he was unable to complete even a single level in one sitting is a great example of questioning a source.
Batman and Robin is legit challenging and good, not just hard for the sake of it or bad design.
Yes, there is a big gulf of difference between a game that is fair but demanding and a game that is poorly made and will cause you to fail due to circumstances outside your control. I feel that too often these days people's frustrations at even small obstacles that require effort to overcome lead to hasty and incorrect judgments. Opinions can be wrong if they come from a place of ignorance and misinformation. They're not these weird sacred ideas that are above reproach as so many millenials will have you believe.
I like to think that the vast majority of games can be overcome with just a small amount of practice, and that the skills learned in controlling an object in 2D space tend to carry over pretty well from game to game. I guess the most important skill is patience and the most important resource time, two things I had plenty of as a child when I broke past whatever initial wall people face in learning the language of games. It's just been refinement from that point on.
I still can't believe he couldn't beat the 1st level of The Adventures of Bayou Billy...I did it on my 1st time playing it!!!
Right? The driving stages are hard, yes, but most videos of this game that I can remember (Spoony, etc.) make the same mistake over and over again in the first level. People tend to think a game type should have a standard set of rules and set controls, and if any game resembling that type dares to change any of those rules or asks you to do something different then it's immediately bad design or a bad game. Not to say Bayou Billy is a good game, lol, but it's far from impossible. The trick is that enemies can recover from their damage stun at about the same time you recover from your attack stun, making combos impossible. As a normal person, you try it once and quickly realize it doesn't work. Hmm. Time to try something else, right? Yet these guys made entire videos showing them doing it over and over again with the same negative outcome. You have to take advantage of the fact that your attacks have a good number of active frames and a wider vertical range than theirs do. Stick out your leg above them, watch them run into it and take damage, move up, repeat. I'm not saying it's more fun than a combo (it's definitely not) or that BB is a good game (it's definitely not) but it's not impossible.
Sorry for the rant lol.
