Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, but sometimes the yearning to relive your childhood can be so strong that it becomes deceptive. Case in point: all of the games you thought were so greatꦏ back in the day, but which turned out to be big, hot puddles of garbage juice in retrospect.

To be clear, I’m not calling you out for liking games that have lost their luster over the years. Time marches over uꦉs all, our video games included, and no amount of affection or critical success can protect a game from becoming a nigh-unplayable mess some 10, 20, or 30 years later. As hardware and software improve, gamers get used t🍸o playing with new, assistive technologies that simply did not exist when their childhood favorites first hit store shelves. That can turn any trip down memory lane into a slog through the mud, trust me.

I’ll be the first to admit how awful it feels to realize that a game you always thought highly of isn’t nearly as enjoyable to play today. Having substantial flaws in retrospect doesn’t make a video game objectively bad, but there’s still that knee-jerk reaction against criticism of gaming’s most-lauded titles. You can deride Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest as much as you like, but to come for The Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy VII? Blasphemy.

Folks, if you can’t criticize a video game you love, th🍬en you don’t really love iꦕt, OK? Video games aren’t meant to be kept in shadowboxes, protected from the elements. They’re made to be experienced until they’re threadbare, and that’s what we’ve done with all of the games below.

15 The Legend Of Zelda 🍒

It’s easy to forget that games were ever so difficult that we were willing to pay money for someone to teach us how to play them. Enter The Legend of Zelda, a Nintendo exclusive that launched a franchise destined to thrive for more than three decades, and one of the most difficult video games ever made. The Legend of Zelda was so difficult that series producer Eiji Aonuma — who began working with the Zelda franchise during Ocarina of Time’s development — has never beaten ♕it, and considers it to be the hardest game of all time.

What makes The Legend of Zelda so difficult? Back in 1986, in-game world maps and clear directives were difficult to come by, and death lurked around every corner. The Legend of Zelda didn’t revolutionize anything in those departments, and although it offered a genuinely rewarding experience, its difficulty is more than a little 🎃off-putting today.

14 Cras🌼h Bandicoot

As many times as Sony has tried to revive it over the years, the Crash Bandicoot IP has never seemed to perform quite as well as its developers and publisher hoped. Later offerings have been mediocre at best, but even the original Crash Bandicoot hasn’t aged well. The PlayStation 1 title featured the same poor controls and wonky camera angles that plagued other early 3D video games, but it lacked the charm of Super Mario 64, or even Spyro the Dragon.

Thus far, Crash Bandicoot remasters have only made improvements to the game’s graphics and audio, leaving the control and camera problems sadly intact. More recent Crash games have tightened the controls and modernized the camera, but even they haven’t been able to live up to the original Crash Bandicoot’s hype, whicꦏh leaves nostalgic fans in a real bind.

13 🦩 GoldenEye 007

Sometime after we all put down our controllers and stopped playing Paintball Mode, GoldenEye 007 went bad. When it came out in 1997, the Brosnan-Bond FPS quickly became the stuff of legends. Who were you, after all, if you didn’t have GoldenEye in your gaming arsenal?

But in retrospect, GoldenEye 007 was never really that amazing of a game to begin with. Compared to other FPS games from the time, GoldenEye is clunky-looking and -controlling. Its single-player campaign leaves much to be desired, a fact that could be easily overlooked, given the title's excellent multiplayer game modes, were it not for the fact🐼 that we’ve long since grown accustomed to playing video games that are excellent both on- and offline.

In spite of your fond memories, GoldenEye 007 hasn’t li⭕ved up to its own hype, much less aged gracefully in the 4K age.

12 𓆉 Sonꩲic Adventure

Sonic Adventure functions as a cautionary tale. Here we have a great title that swiftly descended into the realm of crap when it was ported from the Sega Dreamcast to the Nintendo GameCube, next to PC, and then to Xbox Live Arcade. In addition to the quality lost on being — eventually — a port of a port of a port, Sonic Adventure also failed to hold up to the march of time as its formula was rehashed and reskinned to make the myriad 3D Sonic titles that have come out over the intervening years. For some reason, Sega execs clung to the taste of Sonic Adventure 2 at the expense of real innovation, leaving Sonic to stagnate until more recent titles returned the blue hedgehog to his roots in 2.5D style. If you have a problem with a 3D Sonic game, blame Sonic Adventure.

11 🍰 The Elder﷽ Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was everywhere, even on Toonami, when it first made waves in 2002, and its legacy lives on today in the Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind expansion. When the third Elder Scrolls game hit store shelves, creative spots were honest about the game’s flaws, including the lack of in-game instruction and difficult combat. The combat element has not improved over the years, and even gamers who loved Morrowind must be able to accept that the game’s battle system received a dramatic upgrade in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which itself was not a perfect game, by any means. Morrowind may have marked the beginning of Bethesda𓂃’s Western-RPG dominance, but 💧there’s a reason it hasn’t been remade in the decade-and-a-half since.

10 🌳 Jet Force Gemin💜i

An early third-person shooter on the N64, Jet Force Gemini was released in 1999 to rave reviews. Critics praised the game’s multiplayer aspects and “beautiful 3D environments,” but those elements weren’t enough to save Jet Force Gemini from ruin when it was ported to the Xbox One as part of the Rare Replay collection in 2015.

Adapting the original game’s 1-joystick control scheme for a 2-joystick controller proved to be easier said than done, and the port process rendered Jet Force Gemini nearly unplayable for today’s gamers. Rare was later forced to release a patch for Rare Replay that would allow players to use a more modern control scheme while playing the game, which improved the experience greatly, by all accounts. Still, the differences between Jet Force Gemini on the two consoles serve as a harsh reminder of just how much our opinions of games may 𒈔change♏ with time.

9 Mass Effect 🐭 ൩

Back in the 2000s, BioWare had a reputation for making great science-fiction RPGs, and the Canadian developer rocketed onto a new generation of consoles with Mass Effect in late 2007. At the time, the game’s complex charact💝er development and interactive setting helped it to stand out among a sea of mediocre action titles and a dearth of role-playing games.

A decade later, Mass Effect’s controls have aged a little worse than other ’07 releases, but not terribly, and the same can be said for its visuals. But one huge component of Mass Effect’s gameplay hangs over today’s replays like a thick funk: the Mak🧸o.

The tank used by the Normandy crew to go planetside was ostensibly intended to bring a greater depth to Commander Shepard’s expansive universe. Unfortunately, the Mako's clunky controls and the absolute necessity of the vehicle make Mass Effect replays feel like a chore.

8 Ogre Battle: March Of The Black Queen 🍨

Another in a class of games that is only enjoyable if you know what you’re getting into well beforehand, the Super NES tactical RPG Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen works hard to earn its high difficulty rating and l🍬ow replay value♛ score.

Combat alone is complicated enough to dissuade some gamers from completing Ogre Battle. The game doesn’t allow players to control their battlers directly, instead opting to allow you to change your team’s tactical style. Asid𒉰e from ordering a retreat, those general controls are all the power the player has t꧅o dictate the flow of combat. There’s also a tarot card system and a morality factor that can alter battle and gameplay.

Putting up with Ogre Battle’s drawbacks may be worth the trade-off for a det🔴ailed story of political intrigue, but it’s hard to imagine many first-timers will enjoy such a blast 𒊎from the past.

7 Contra

Many gamers can tell you the Konami code, but far fewer know why it was so necessary to implement it back in the late 1980s. Contra players know that just one bullet or instance of enemy contact was enough to lose one of the three precious lives they began with. The Konami 🎉code allowed gamers to increase their life pool to 30, but that was hardly enough to make it through a sizable portion of the game without serious grinding and pattern memorization.

Nowadays, AAA video games are made with adult players in mind, by developers who realize that their target audience doesn’t have hours to devote to learning the particular paths that enemies and bullets take. That’s why bullet hell-titles now have their own special subgenre: because we decided that games like Contra had no broad place in the modern gami꧃ng industry.

6 🐠 ไ Final Fantasy X

When Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster came out in 2013, it reminded us of just how beautiful the original games were. They remain two of the most gorgeous titles ever made. Even if certain plot holes still yearn to be filled after all these years, Final Fantasy X🌜 ranks among the bes🐼t Final Fantasy titles to date.

There’s one element to Final Fantasy X that isn’t all fayth and pyreflies. The 2001 title was the first in the franchise to feature voice acting, and it went about as well as you’d expect. There’s a reason Tidus’s laughter became a meme, or why you can’t quite get some of Final Fantasy X’s lines out of your hಌead. The voice acting was that bad.

If you want to play through Final Fantasy X again, then do so, by all means. But mute the game if you want it to not feel dat🍸ed.