Nostalgic gamers might rip me a new one for this, but since Sega’s classic beat-em-up comic book adventure Comix Zone is hitting the PlayStation Network, it’s time to address something we all need to accept: it wasn’t a very good game. If you have PSN Plus, you’ll be able to play the game for free this Tuesday and realize it yourself, but for now let’s dig into the nostalgia fostered by decades of Genesis love and Sega’s habit of including it in every anthology it releases to every console.

The biggest complaint with Comix Zone is its infamous difficulty. It’s a Nintendo Hard game, with few lives or continues and almost no health power-ups through the lengthy levels. The enemies take a lot of punishment, and there are plenty of pits that will simply drop you if you try to run through an area without paying enough attention. Any of these factors would be enough to make it a Nintendo Hard game in the frustrating but satisfying vein of Battletoads, but all of them together adds up to a churn that you just can’t beat without cheat codes or days of practice.

Challenge alone doesn’t make a game bad, though. This is where we need to look into Comix Zone’s mechanics, and how it shaped up compared to what it wanted to be. The game’s a beat-em-up with puzzle elements, so let’s look at it as a beat-em-up. This is a shitty beat-em-up. Seriously, look at Double Dragon, Final Fight, Streets of Rage, and even Battletoads, then look at Comix Zone. Those other games have enemies you can actually hit and take down in less than five minutes. They have levels that take less than half an hour to finish, and actually have a decent number of food drops. When you die, they drop you right back where you were, with full health. Also, they give you enough room to actually move around the screen while fighting. Meanwhile, Comix Zone stuffs you in a panel to fight enemies with insane amounts of health, occasionally breaking up the game by giving you a cluster of easy to defeat enemies… that are impossible to actually hit. Face it: the game isn’t a good beat-em-up, and that’s the main thing it tries to be.

As an adventure game with puzzles, it’s even worse. A clunky inventory system and puzzles that are both hard to identify and irritatingly difficult to solve without getting hurt keeps this game from being a comic book King’s Quest, even if there wasn’t the tedious combat. The worst thing is the repeated use of your rat to solve puzzles every page. If you get stuck, you probably have to use your rat. If that doesn’t work, you probably have to push things around, then use your rat again. Then remember to pick up your rat every time, because you’re going to use him later, too. It’s tedious and frustrating.

This doesn’t mean Comix Zone is a piece of shovelware, though. Even though it’s a bad game, it was clearly made with effort and ambition, and you can see a lot of ideas that could have been used a lot better. With the right tweaks and changes, Comix Zone might have been revolutionary. If the fighting was better and the puzzles were more varied, it could have been the start of a new franchise and an entirely new sub-genre: the beat-em-up adventure. It looked amazing, but it just didn’t play well, so instead of making video game history it’s just become that one Genesis game everyone looks back at fondly but realizes that it simply wasn’t really good.