I remember thinking, as a 6-year-old, that all games (and products) were created equal. If you have to pay money for it, people must have put in a lot of effort, right?
Anyway, playing through Psygnosis' Baal swiftly put a stop to that. Why isn't this fun? I asked myself. How can I possibly be playing a game and not enjoying myself?
I had a resoundingly disappointing epiphany, right there and then. Not every diskette I slot into this Machine of Wonder will give me the same pleasure. WHY NOT? Cue preenaged existential crisis; the Blakeian loss of innocence; my first foray into manhood.
Not all games are fun.
That memory, that dawning realisation, still plagues me to this day. Sometimes people make things, and sell them to you, and they don't have your best interests in mind. Sometimes they just want to make money, and don't care enough about the product you have purchased, with your moneys, from them.
To be honest, Baal wasn't that bad a game. It was just hard, and you died too easily. I hate 1-touch deaths, particularly when the enemy is not a goomba, but a 'floor-demon' of some kind that pops out of the scenery and kills you before you can react.
Wordtris on the Super NES was a particularly bad game. My sister and I were around the house of a friend of my mom's, and we needed to pass the time with her elder son. Despite me generally liking word games, I found the entire game uninspiring. The music was stupid, and there appeared to be random highly-pixellated scanned images that took up the entire right side of the screen. Clowns or donkeys or some stupid thing.
I probably would enjoy it now, but back then, it was ridiculously craptacular.