>>12003756
In retrospect I can see how the PS1 Tenchu games seem janky as fuck but you have to remember this was sort of the developmental stage for stealth games. MGS1 came out around the same time and while it was revolutionary its controls were stiff, too and it didn't exactly have super advanced AI either.

At the time, the game being kid of clunky was less important than the fact that it was a 3D ninja game where you did real ninja shit. You grappled to rooftops, you shot people with blowguns, you lurked around corners to stab unsuspecting fools, you poisoned people, you threw shirukens at people, and while it had the usual cheesy voice acting and dialogue for games of that era that actually worked perfectly because the cutscenes played out like all the terrible ninja movies we knew and loved. All its flaws were very forgivable because there was really nothing else to compare it to unfavorably. The graling hook mechanic in particular made it feel really unique. There just weren't a lot of games where you got to move like that. It was like the rough draft for Batman's grappling hook in the Arkham games.

>>213656256
>Space travel on an interstellar scale is impractical

I mean, don't we already know this to more or less be the case? Accelerating something non-photon size to anything approaching the speed of light is a huge logistical hurdle in itself, and even if you could reach actual light speed the nearest star is most likely years away and the nearest galaxy might be a million years away.

>>150102356
Ricky Watters

>>11833080
If you grew up with the chronological progression of playing 1-3 and then moving on to IV you usually liked it because it was a natural evolution from the first 3 games. No one thought having more responsive controls and a difficulty level somewhere below "assrape" was a problem. If anything, those were improvements

But as edgy contrarianism and stockholm syndrome regarding difficulty began to take root amongst zoomers who played the games out of sequence IV became a particular target because it's the only classicvania not to have the rigid control scheme and it has the couple gimmicky "look what the SNES can do" levels so there's multiple things for self-anointed purists to get butthurt about.

Basically, it was about the time when people stopped actually enjoying things and started trying to win online merit badges for liking older or harder shit just because it was older or harder.

>>11808648
The rumor about Sheng Long in Street Fighter II was persistent in the pre-internet era because despite EGM openly acknowledging it was a prank the whole time most kids heard about it from other kids who were convinced it was real. The rumor spread faster than the truth did, and there were multiple versions, which just added to the confusion.

The kid who told me about it insisted that not only could you not lose a match before M. Bison, you had to get a perfect in every round. And despite this seeming literally impossible he claimed to have done it with Zangief once. Furthermore, he claimed Zangief was the ONLY character you could realistically do it with because of the 360 pile driver grab, which you could abuse against the CPU. I kinda suspected he was full of shit but he *was* really fucking good with Zangief so it didn't seem completely implausible.