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Top Ten Shameful Games
Ant writes "Not necessarily the worst, but the most wrong -- here are 10 of the most seriously flawed titles of all time according to GameSpy."
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I know it's new years, so people are apt to make lists and such. But why all the "worst games" lists? I know I've seen 3 or 4 in the past week.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This has already been done here.
The two lists seem to be very similar...
I still haven't found the "any" key.
They didn't mention the "Lunar Lander" game on a HP-65 pocket calculator??? There was a lame game if there ever was one...
...i've only played one or two from the list, this sense of the past is anything but nostalgic
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
... otherwise they'd be the number one most shameful game. Taking bets at which community they will buy out and kill next.
Hate me!
You can tell its the xmas / new year break as 'news' becomes 'reporters top ten ...'
There must be *something* going on somewhere?
Wow, you just listed my top shelf. Cool!
| - | - |
50% of the games which have been created for PC
Something Awful has:
Game reviews
and
The ROM Pit
Don't say I didn't warn you.
It was Donkey Kong for the Intellivision. Yeah, I'm sure it was worse than the other versions, but hey, I didn't know any better. I played the hell out of that thing. Play control was fine enough for me.
As for Action 52, as the story hints at, there is a pretty funny and interesting story that goes along with the game. Here's a link to the Something Awful Rompit Review of Action 52, and go here
for the Gamefaqs.com reviews page for Action 52. I've rarely laughed as hard as I did reading this stuff.
On a side-note, if you are at all into video games, browsing Gamefaqs for the reviews of really bad games can be a laugh riot sometimes. There are a few people who seem to make it their mission to completely eviscerate the worst offenders of the old cartridge console games. Some of the crappy PSX games get some hilarious reviews, too. For when you've got some surfing time, at least.
They should have called this article "Top Ten Shameful Games on Consoles No One Under 20 Has Ever Heard Of".
Any shameful game list just HAS to include the disaster called Outpost that was released for the PC in the early 90's. It had a great guide (sold separately) that made the game look great. Too bad most of those features didn't actually make it into the game. What a stinker.
Atari 2600? NES? Coleco? Seems like most of these games are ancient by industry standards. I think that it's kind of beating a dead horse. The industry was in it's infancy, people really were still defining what a video game was - of course there would be some spectacular duds. Goes with the territory.
What about recent titles that were 'shameful'? Would someone from Jerry Falwell's congregation like to chime in?
This list is simply hillarious. For the worst of the worst games (i.e. Custer's Revenge) I was thinking that the screenshot shows a cowboy shooting to the left an Indian to the right. But... the explanation is about pr0n. LOL....
Go straight to this game's explanation.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
If I submit my geek snowboarding game with Tux and Ellen Feiss to one of these "shame" lists, will it get /.ed?
/." level will it get even more traffic!?
If I replace the ENIAC boss with a "beat the living hell out of whoever submits top 10 lists to
If I make my own top 10 list, will it get on slashdot? Will anyone bother to RTFA?
Too bad that TRS-80 dungeon game that tried to be realtime but couldn't keep up with my typing as a 10 year old isn't on the list. These lists are made to "suck up" to the average reader, not the average supergeek.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
9. Mutant League Hockey: following the glorious Mutant League Football.
8. DreamWeb (the first R18 game?). Birds eye view shooting, sex, and gameplay.
7. Second Samarai. Boringly competant.
6. Snaparazzi (game sponsored by a newspaper)
5. Microcosm by Psygnosis.
4. Humans (lemmings ripoff)
3. Epic by Ocean
2. James Pond/Robocod's Aquatic Games
1. Dangerous Streets CD32 edition.
In modern games, I would class Tribes 2 as one of the most shamefull game. Its my favorite game and I play it often, but it is shamefull because it crashes so often (Unexecpected Exception occur too often). Sierra released many patches, but did not seam to have been able to correct the problem...
Great game, great design, bad implementation. Any other games out which crash often?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Does anyone remember this digital trainwreck? Your character is 2 pixels worth of ghostbusting hero and the climax of the game involves you repeatedly pressing a "climb" button to go up 30+ floors to the top of a building to fight StayPuff Marshellow Man. I actually beat the game once, and the win screen was a simple typed message thanking you for playing "this truly awesome game!!!"
After playing this piece of shit I no longer wanted my eyes.
This article skirted entirely over the world of PCs.. so post your 'worst PC game' nomination below, and make the subject the name of the game. I'd just love to see what people think sucks. I can imagine that Daikatana will be a popular choice.
My nomination is Street Fighter 2 from the early 90s. SF2 was excellent on the arcades and good on the SNES, but the PC port was dire. It was unresponsive, the graphics blew, and it was riddled with bugs. I also nominate any of those 'ultra realistic graphics, but extremely crappy physics/gameplay/sound/handling' driving games of the mid 90s too.
(P.S. That Custer's Revenge game is hilarious.)
mogorific carpentry experiments
Does anyone really care what Gamespy thinks? I can't help but laugh when I see these articles. Their website has become nothing more than a playground for hive-minded children looking to find this weeks new "cool" words and get fed advertisement driven "content" on the game industry. Their webmasters have a collective gaming experience on par with what you could find at and local Wal-Mart's nintendo kiosks. Check the insightful gameplay guides/tips of any planet site. PlanetQuake and PlanetWarcraft are prime examples; they're both full of laughable advice.
Furthermore, their bullying and underhanded tactics towards the entire industry is damaging everyone (try to use a game finding tool other than Gamespy -- the alternatives don't support as many games, thanks to "exclusive content"). Their entire site, as defined by virtually every hardcore gamer I know, is a complete joke. There are many interesting websites out there dealing with games. Please quit linking to the worst one.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Many of their lists, while nostalgic, is always the "Top 10 Games Released Before the Invention of the Light Bulb".
There's plenty of miserable games in recent years - Daikatana, anyone?
How about Code Name Viper? This game was absolutely unplayable, due to difficulty. Imagine Contra, except every time you get shot, you have to start the level over. And you can't do the trick with 30 lives.
I could never even get past the first few screens, and i'm pretty good at stuff. Even after i used the Game Genie to become invincible, it was still an extremely difficult game.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Are we going to have a new story every time Gamespy comes out with a new top 10 list? They have one every week. Let's give it a rest.
I thought this article was going to be about shameful "names" of video games. That's what the description led me to believe. I immediately thought of "Pucman". "Pucman" was "Pacman"s original title. Some clever American exec's figured out that it would be too easy for vandal's to scribble out part of the "P" for hilarious results. That would'a been the most shameful video game title of all time.
Sex - Find It
Every kid I knew in the 7th and 8th grade was excited about the prospect of playing Pac Man at home. No more trips to the arcade. No more standing in line. No more scrounging for quarters. Everything was going to be right with the world.
On the day of the game's release, there were lines at the electronics stores, lines at Sears, lines at K-Mart, lines everywhere that sold 2600 stuff. Some places had given out lottery bracelets (like they do at ticketmasters). But there were lines anyway. All these people were waiting to bring the magic of Pac Man home with them.
Then the game came home. What a horrible, horrible dissapointment it was. Ugh. I think that was the beginning of the end for Atari. They pissed off a lot of kids (and parents) with that piece of crap.
This was also about the time that the TRaSh 80 was out, along with the Commodore and Vic machines (I think). Anyway, some of us started getting interested in computer based games after the Pac man debacle. Shortly after that, a number of us left our 2600's behind for the promise of real computers.
Personally, I haven't had a new game console since the 2600. Not because of the Pac Man mess though. I don't see the point of having a dedicated, fixed hardware game platform. A PC does so much more, and the games are generally better than those available on a console.
Huh?
It was this Robotech type FPS for PSX, where you play the role of Ivan. All I remember are barren hills with occasional enemies. What makes Ivan so crazy, you ask? Well, every now and then, he (you) goes "crazy," and all the controls are reversed!
I am not trying to flame here, but I used to work for a video game publisher, European produced games were the buggiest POS's ever. This is not because the programmers sucked, but rather the will put any game on to the shelf without the most cursory QA.
I asked the QA lead for one such title how long it would be for release, because the game looked pretty cool and I wanted to play it. He told me 4 months, it took 6 months before the game was bug free enough to release. This is after it had been on the shelf in the UK.
Of course Sony Europe is not much better. Sony USA will not let you release any PS2 title unless you are a Squaresoft, EA, or your new game is better than the previous best game out there. We had a great racing title finnished (4 months after Sony Europe had approved it with it's myriad of bugs) and Sony USA wold not let us publish it because it was not as good as GT3. All was not lost however Microsoft will let anything out for XBox.
Oh yeah.
And he even threw in a microsoft program.
You know. slashdot. crap. microsoft. get it?
my
The list was interesting.
Though I am wondering why they could not have a special mention slot for "Extreme PaintBrawl". The damn thing just didn't work, the printed cover was pretty though.
I had a Apple II version of that Pitfall game, it was called "Montazuma's Revenge" but the graphics were the same. We loved the levels and my dad thought the title was just hilarious. (Slang term for having "the runs".)
No, it was actually an awful game. Download an emulator and the ROM if you want to check it out. If you don't, you're not missing much. You just move custer right, making sure not to get hit with arrows. Then you rape the woman. Repeat.
It really was that bad, and that's not even counting the shamefulness of the Indian-raping.
The problem is, some of the most shameful and horrible games ever made were never released widely, much less heard of by the unwashed masses. In the days when shareware was common and copying was the best available method of distribution, and when programming was a hobby and not strictly a profession for most gamemakers, countless horrors and abominations were spawned which have since been deleted and/or forgotten completely, save for in that special, wonderful, (actually is) floppy disk which they no longer have a drive to read it with underneath the creator's paper stack somewhere near his computer, which he stares at nostalgically when he's depressed. That is where the real shameful games come in.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
If the game's called Impossible Mission, it better damn well be impossible! It's like the gag game of pong I made a few years ago and sent to my relitives. The computer ALWAYS can move faster than the ball, and it accelerates, so it seems like you can beat it, but it's rigged so you can't. I thought it was funny.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
That is all.
Really, just because a game sucked or was a bad idea didn't make it flawed. Now, the Elder Scrolls games (not the most recent one, it was only slightly buggy, and then only in the "usual" ways) were *seriously* flawed. I decided not to buy ES2 when I fired up the Elder Scrolls II demo, and immediately fell through the floor into a dark place where I could not move.
Custer's Revenge might have been a very bad idea, but it played exactly how its creators intended.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Did DoD let the computer keep swinging at your over and over while the letters you typed 30 seconds ago appear one by one on the screen?
k
(several animations of you getting hit)
ki
(several animations of you getting hit)
kil
(several animations of you getting hit)
kill
(several animations of you getting hit)
you swing (several animations of you getting hit)
you miss
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
gameplay consisted mainly of E.T. falling into an endless series of pits, and the game was much too frustrating for the young kids for whom it was intended
Really, this game wasn't so bad! Honestly, this isn't sarcasm here. I actually enjoyed this game. With Difficulty setting B it was bastardly hard to grab all 3 pieces, find the call zone and get the hell outta there before the FBI showed up.
So exactly what's so hard about looking inside every hole for a piece of the puzzle?
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Quake would run on a 486.
Yeah, at about the same framerate that Doom3 will run on my celeron 433. Hint: it's at the low end of the single digits.
I had virtually the high end 486 (dx4-100, 32mb ram), and I never could get anything remotely close to viewable, let alone playable. I think I maxed it out at 5 fps once, by sitting in a corner.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The Donkey Kong and Pacman games weren't flawed in any meaningful sense of the word, they just weren't precise clones of the arcade originals. What in God's name was the reviewer expecting? Does he think that the 2600 and Intellivision had some secret chip that the developers could invoke when the world was in peril from dodgy arcade conversions? Considering the disparity between arcade and console hardware, I thought both titles were "good enough".
Seanbaby.com - EGM's Crapstravaganza: The 20 Worst Games of All Time He has a few of the same titles (ET, Superman 64, and Custer's revenge), and, in my opinion, has much funnier reviews. I really enjoyed it, this is just for if anybody else cares for a second list like this.
I noticed that the NES version of Super Pitfall is on the list way up at number two. Yet a worse version exists, sadly....
And that would be the version that was released for the Tandy Color Computer 3. I never played the NES version but I do own still the CoCo version. I imagine it has all the bad gameplay of the NES version. But I can't imagine the NES version playing as sluggishly as the CoCo version. I mean this game runs slooooooooooow.
(I liked 2600 PacMan)
Games produced in Europe have about the same violence as American games. One example: Serious Sam - it has *MORE* violence than the average shooter.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
My dad brought me back Pac-man for the 2600 when he went on a business trip back in the 80's.
I admit I was a bit disappointed because it didn't look exactly like the arcade game, but you know what? I still liked that game a lot. I was like 10, but even then I knew that the 2600 wasn't supposed to be exactly like the arcade, and it was good enough for me. I mean, come on... I played games like Combat and Starship, and that was fun enough back then. There are plenty of other games that were much worse than that.
ET (as was mentioned) and Raiders of the Lost Ark was much much worse.
The worse game of all time: Swordquest Earthworld. From the advertisements in the comic books, it looked awesome! The graphics looked great. Only, once I got it, I had no friggin' idea of how to play the game. The original cartridge came with a comic book that was more interesting than the game.
I never figured out what the point of the game was, and it was so annoying. Being a kid, I kept trying to figure it out, burning hours and hours on that thing. Once, only once did I ever get to level 2, and I had no idea what I did to get to level 2. It sure as hell wasn't from completing all those "tasks" in those rooms.
Plus, how can anyone leave Trespasser off the list of worst gaming travesties? Not only was the game monumentally awful, but it was also accompanied by such stomach churningly over-the-top hype from Seamus "Media Whore" Blackley, that the resulting derision meant that he later felt compelled to 'redeem' himself by attempting to take credit for the Xbox.
But to answer your question, yes.
C'mon, back in those days, what else were you going to do, play more pitt fall or missle command?
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
My friends and I used to joke around that it was a Bonker (remember Bonkers candy? "Bonker's Bonks you Out!" was kind of like that, two concentric candy flavors).
make world, not war
I can't believe they didn't include any slot machine "simulators." In a real casino, the only joy you get from slot machines is the chance to actually win money. Yet the computerized version gets rid of that, so you are stuck hitting the "spin reels" button over and over again, while occassionally "winning" credits. What a pointless waste of time!
I found this article the dumbest thing ever written to create web content. The people who came up with the article should be beaten with canes. Sure the games they complained about were bad, but damn their arguments for the thing sounded like they came from a 13 year old. By placing a controller into the list of worst games made any merit to the article null and void. I believe that I am now a dumber human being by reading this.
There were too many unknown weirdness factors with this game that luckily I didn't spend TOO much time with it...
make world, not war
It was alright. Not the best game ever, but decent. The biggest flaw of the game for me was that after your colony got big and stable turns took forever to process.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Thes rest, as they say, is history...
It's a parody.....
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Hey, does anyone have a walkthrough for Swordquest: Earthworld? Basically you had to experiment by carrying different items into different coloured rooms and hope you stumbled onto the right combination (there were about 100,000 possible combinations IIRC). Thinking back to that game, it would be cool to finally finish it almost 20 years later - the most clues I ever found was 2 out of (I believe) 12.
Yes this was a brutal game, but I kind of liked the challenege that was like Frogger where you had to jump on logs to get to the top of the screen
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
I never managed to install this game (not cracked, the original CD) on any of my PCs (3 so far), and I have heard of people running it who told me it was the buggiest thing ever done, though the game was (supposed to be) really nice.
Ultima IX really ought to figure on the list.
theefer
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=11047&item=1947212605
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Actually, they've started making Bonkers again. It's not nearly as good as I remember, though. ;)
I think called Jungle Lad where he gets captured by 8 bit block jungle natives who are, to give no offence to anyone, GREEN.
I remember thinking 'He's been captured by the Booger Tribe..."
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
It's not just offensive, it's unplayably bad.
The entire gameplay is on that one screen, moving toward the woman while dodging arrows. The arrows fall in a random, unpredictable, unlearnable pattern. They often appear in volleys that cover too much area for it to be possible to avoid them.
All in all, the perfect choice for the worst game ever.
Breakthru. Seriously sucks. Play it and see.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This might be off topic, but man, spyhunter was the coolest game ever. It had sucky graphics, but damn was it so much fun.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Anybody remember F-15 Strike Eagle for the Atari 800 series? Not only did it have an embarrasingly slow frame-rate, but you could land your plane upside-down!
Some 2600 Roms have been hacked by people who I suppose wanted to expunge some bad memories. Ms. Pacman for the 2600 wasn't at all bad and somebody hacked it into a fairly arcade-faithful Pacman. Since Ms. Pacman was decent to start with, the hacker limited it to one maze that is a good approximation of arcade Pacman's maze. The prizes were fixed in place below the ghosthouse and edited to match arcade Pacman's prizes. Go to Atari Age and check it out.
Several credible jobs were done on reforming space invaders. There is no reason why 2600 Space Invaders couldn't have been more accurate as this proves.
Oh well, anyone who played games in the early eighties knew that crap was rushed out the door. Most of us bought it anyway. Me too. Suckers....
He only hates niggers, kikes, wops and greasers!
With apoligys to R.Lee Ermey.
Hello?
Haven't you tried the wonderful flipper that was bundled with Windows 95? Space Cadet, a game devoid of all similarities compared to a regular pinball game.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That tank game was great. The variation in levels, the obstacles... I particularly dug bouncing tank shells off the walls.
However, I have to say the funniest thing was when you could occasionally take advantage of a game bug, and teleport yourself to the opposite side of the screen. This was accomplished by running your tank into a wall or corner enough that the game got confused, and "wrapped" you to the opposite corner or wall.
My brother never mastered that trick, which I often used to great effect against him. Yeah, it was a cheat/hack... but when you're a kid in my house, winning was way more important than playing fair.
And honestly, it's not that winning was so freaking important... it's that losing was so incredibly painful. Really... having to hear your brother brag about it and rub your nose in it for days and days... Yeah, OK... so I'm a cheating rat... At least I didn't stuff it in his face when I won.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Not a PC game on there but surely there have been some real foul ones released on the PC. Outpost sucked up almost a week of my time in a search for something that resembled fun. I finally gave up and suckered someone into buying it from me. Diakatana - I borrowed this from the sucker that bought Outpost. It should have been renamed 'Slap your head as your computer allies go get killed again'
I like the All-Seeing Eye too, and use it quite frequently. But it doesn't support all the games Gamespy does. And it takes time to support newer games, where Gamespy and their "parteners" get a jump on it. Electronic Arts is now going to use Gamespy for their games. Press release here: http://www.gamespyindustries.com/press/releases/20 02-november-eamla.shtml.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Gamespy end up being the only way to play EA games in the near future. The All-Seeing Eye developers have managed to keep up this far with most of the big-name titles, but with their program growing in popularity I think this is a recognition of a threat.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Original Battlezone, nothing but green lines of polygons. Great game.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
One of the worst travesties of the Atari 2600 Pac-Man is that it turned the monsters into ghosts!
;-)
The enemies in the original Pac-Man are monsters... but they flickered so much in the Atari 2600 version that Atari decided to call them 'ghosts' instead. And then the Pac-Man cartoon TV show decided to call them ghost-monsters, and so the pathetic 2600 cartridge caused an entire generation to be confused about exactly what's chasing poor Pac.
Well, after playing this game and meet your friend saying "36? In a row?"...
ROFL... Oh God... The developers of this game must have been in the confession chamber now after seeing their game being publicized in Slashdot....
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Error 500: Internal sig error
They didn't mention Frogger and Flight Simulator for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 / Sinclair ZX81! Unngh! Man oh man did I hate loading in those games from cassette, hoping the input level wasn't too low or too high, otherwise I wasted 15 minutes attempting to load the programs. Then there was that aweful monocolor BLACK and WHITE ONLY graphics, the membrane keyboard that was SMALLER than my hand, the 4 Megehurts Zilog Z80A. And you couldn't pound on the keyboard too hard during game play, you'd dislodge the 16K RAM Pack from the back expansion port, killing your game, and wasting another 15 minutes loading it back in from cassette. Ah...the good'ol glory days of computing I will tell to my grandchildren.
I don't know, I guess I buy in to the hype and buy the known winner (GTA3, VC, MGS2, FFX, etc) instead of taking the shot on that Mosquito game or some of the other lesser known titles. I know there are really crappy games being made right now. List those so I can avoid them.
It was particularly sad that the game was so awful since they had "promised" that there would be more Swordquest "action" to be had. By the time I put that game away for the last time, I was praying they wouldn't release another...mainly because I would probably have still gotten it and tried to enjoy it. I was such a sucker.
Dude, you are completely in denial.
If measured by the fact that, "Hey, it's 198x and I'm sitting in my HOUSE playing Pac-Man!", then yeah, it was cool.
But face the reality: It was a blocky, flickery, badly-done piece of shit. I mean, come on! No matter what direction he's traveling in, Pac Man's mouth always points in the SAME direction? What kind of cheesy shit is that?
Atari put the absolute minimum of effort into producing it, because they knew that the game would be a huge seller just because of the name. I have Pac Man in my collection of 2600 carts, but only for reasons of nostalgia. When I want to play a fun game on my 2600, I pull out the titles Activision produced.
If you want to play a quality home version of Pac Man, hunt down a copy of the ColecoVision version. I bought one at a classic game convention last year. I'm not sure if it was an unreleased prototype, a bootleg copy of a finished game that was just never released, or an 'original' recently programmed by a classic game fan who just wanted to play Pac Man on the ColecoVision. Anyway, it's great-- plays and sounds like the arcade game, and even has intermissions IIRC.
~Philly
Efficient code doesn't mean that you can code anything to run at 72fps on last years hardware - it means that what you program performs it's task by consuming the least number of resources! And that's certainly what Quake did!
Simply because an engine which featured true, arbitrary 6 DOF 3D together with perspective correct texture mapping and shadow map lighting (unprecedented as far as I recall) didn't run fast on a 486 doesn't mean it is inefficient.
But then I do remember my Pentium 100 (substantially less than $4000) running qtest the full game brilliantly - not at 640x480 admittedly, but then again, like most games at the time, you ran it in a lower resolution - but once you got a Voodoo card and GLQuake...well 640x480 was super smooth.
PS. Do you also have no tolerance for correct spelling? Efficiant lol!
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
"I scoured the Internet to see which title most frequently appeared next to the phrase "worst game ever."
So these aren't actually Gamespy's top ten worst games, they're everybody elses based on a search engine hit. A lot of thought went into this one, yep uh-huh.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
But why all the "worst games" lists?
The usual hype. But I was surprised by the lack of one hugely important game:
Hunt the Wumpus.
Hunt the Wumpus was apparently an old Unix text-based RPG, which Texas Instruments brought to life on their under-rated but massively overbuilt TI-99/4A home computer in 1980 or so.
The TI-99/4A (and its rare older brother, the TI-99/4) had a 16 bit TMS9900 processor chip (in 1979 and 1981, boys and girls!), a kick-butt video chip (the TMS9918) which had 32 sprites and a video overlay feature. But Texas Instruments, a company which is/was making more chips than Frito-Lay, hobbled the machine by using the video chip's RAM as the console's main memory, bottlenecking the expanded memory down to 8 bits, and creating the single slowest BASIC interpreter ever designed by having it interpreted TWICE (from BASIC to GPL - "Graphics Programming Language" - then to machine language).
With this nasty kludge, they released a graphical version of Hunt The Wumpus. Horrible sound effects, and game play which made you feel like you were drunk and on LSD. Oh, and attempting to add graphics to an old text-only game is doomed to fail, don't even attempt it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Sure, the graphics and sound sucked. But who cares? It was a fun game to play. I still play it on my computer.
Gameplay is just as important -- more so -- than sound or graphics.
I have yet to see anything in the same genre come out that is anywhere near as good as Descent 1-3, and the graphics on those games are dated now. I'd rather play D1 (with its blocky graphics) than anything that exists today.
I have yet to see an "explore the ancient world" type game that even comes anywhere close to Tomb Raider 1, and that's the oldest of the TRs.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
How can any list of most shameful games not include Michael Jackson's Moonwalker for the Genesis? Having Michael save little boys by performing dance moves was a bad idea at the time and just seems horrid now with all the pedophilia lawsuits and bad jokes. Definitely in my top 5...
Nah text-mode net-hack is much much worse. :)
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
*RUNS AWAY*
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I was an owner of the Atari 5200 when it came out and loved it, mainly for the reason that most of the arcade titles were so much more accurately represented (Pac-Man, etc.)
However, the joysticks kept breaking on me. It wasn't so much that they weren't self-centering, but that the primary red buttons on the sides failed to always respond when pressed.
My fondest memory was of the baseball game that came out for it. It had a 3D physics model that seemed pretty realistic. Long drives bounced off the outfield walls, curve balls dipped down which affected the grounder/flyball outcomes. Playing the game on hard difficultly often yielded 2-1 games where runs had to be manufactured by bunting/stealing. It was great, but I couldn't play it do to the joysticks always breaking. Much sadness ensued.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
It has all the enjoyment of a computer football game, but without having to play defense. I view that as a strength, because sometimes you just want to pass, rush, and try to score, and to hell with playing D. (Don't get me wrong, I was also hopelessly addicted to NES Tecmo Super Bowl for a while.)
I never played 10 Yard Fight it when it was in the arcades-- I never knew it existed. I only discovered it when I discovered MAME and was looking for games I wasn't familiar with. Now I play it all the time when I'm bored. I'll probably keep playing it until I manage to run back a kickoff for a touchdown-- I haven't done that yet, but I've come pretty close.
~Philly
I actually finished Swordquest Earthworld, through painstakingly walking around and charting every item I carried anywhere. What an incredible waste of time. I gave it to my sister as a birthday present (so I could play it -- smart, right?). Oh, but karma works in mysterious and horrifically tortuous ways.
Oh man, don't like the show, but even if I did? I could never watch Babylon 5. Because every time one of those damn ship's doors opens, it IS the sound of your ship refueling in "River Raid". I'm talking directly sampled here. Drives me batty!
It seemed to have promise (an intelligent sword! Woohoo!), but once you started playing it, it was *awful*.
The English translation was *awful*. It's like they used Bablefish to translate from German to Spanish, then back to German, then to English.
Bad translations in games are certainly nothing new -- but this was exceptionally bad.
I heard that `Dune' before it was an adventure game. May have to try and find it sometime ...
Dune 2000 was mediocre -- Red Alert in the desert.
Emperor of Dune was reasonably good -- not great, but not bad either.
I guess Dune just lends itself really well to RTS games :)
Everyone else that wants to comment on it but not make it any better, get on board...
I'm glad this post was followed by some actual site suggestions.
But what's this?
A premonition?
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Ok, so it looked far worse than the original, but personally I was amazed they managed it at all, given the miserable hardware the 2600 had! The machine was designed to display 2 player sprites, 2 missile sprites, a ball and a playfield which was basically a vertical line, unless the video chip was preloaded each X scanlines. Remember, the machine had 128 BYTES of work RAM and NO graphics RAM, so the entire background and sprites had to be redrawn by the program every frame.
It's no wonder the ghosts flickered, it must have been impossible for the little 8 bit CPU to manage to keep everything on screen all the time at 25pfs...
There's an old article about programming the 2600 here which may open a few eyes!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I have heard rumors, but I don't know for sure.
I have heard that Atari management only wanted Pac Man to be a 2KB game, and that's why it sucked so bad. According to this story, the guy writing the code pleaded for more room and was denied.
The problem with this theory is that, with Google, I found an emulator site with a ROM image, and that ROM image is exactly 4096 bytes. A hex dump reveals that the second half isn't all zeroes, either.
On the other hand, the Ms. Pac Man game (much better than the original Pac Man) is an 8K image. Maybe the story was true, but it was 4K he was stuck with.
I've searched the web for an interview with the guy who wrote the original Pac Man, but didn't find it. (There are so many sites that mention Pac Man, it's hard to find wheat in all the chaff.)
But I'll bet someone on Slashdot knows the answer. Heck, the guy who wrote Pac Man might read Slashdot for all I know.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I know several of the games I enjoyed on my C64 were completely impossible. Try "Dynamite dan", I barely survived on the last life when using an emulator saving every damn step of the way. Or "Ikari warriors", with it's endless supply of opponents. Or "Thing on a spring (2?)" where we never got close to solving the puzzle.
Of course the best are the almost impossible games - like "Bubble Bobble". When we first came to the boss on lvl 100, didn't figure him out and lost... We just had to play it all over again,
and that RIGHT THEN AND THERE.
And never-mind all the open-ended games where there was no way to "win", only bigger, better, faster, stronger opponents all the way. That goes for any new games as well, but as this seems to focus on games from the Good Old Days(tm), I thought I should focus on those.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What was the name of this fine display of Engrish? If you can include games that have bugs and crappy joysticks on these lists, then a game that was translated by Eddy the Dyslexic Chimp has to weigh in somewhere.
I found this one pretty interesting. How many people were up until 1:00am playing through addiction just trying to get to the end of this game?
Better yet, can anyone else mention any games that were unbeatable due to programmer error, etc. Seems to me that some arcade machines were made to be close enough, just to keep poor fools pounding in the quarters. For example, fighting games where the computer suddenly starts getting away with things that are not really supposed to be possible... or when it conveniently ignores input or hits, etc.
Sega's 32X.
3DO's game console(with an ungrounded headphone jack built into the control that would trash the system if you came into contact with it), much of 3DO's games in general.
AND last but not least, Colecovision Adam, and it's tendacy to commit "data suicide" thanks to the power supply releasing a small EMP that would erase data tapes while powering off.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Otherwise I agree, but I don't think the survival and development of OpenGL has depended on games (or even the PC platform in general) at any time. After all, it still goes on in the Unix workstation world where it spread from (whether SGI is a doomed company or not). I admit I don't know how to factor in Microsoft's membership in the OGL Architecture Review Board... Regardless, of course Carmack has done a major contribution to evangelising OGL for PC games!
As an aside, what's going on with Mesa GL? Anything?
uhmm, Solitaire?
| - | - |
I bought a helicopter gunship "simulator" game back around maybe '92-3, going by the name of Thunder Hawk.
I had an i486DX-33 then, which I bought in 1991 so I think the games performance was inexcusable...
It would basically run ridiculously fast on my 33MHz 486DX, even with turbo switched off. So fast that the heli was impossible to fly and firing hellfire missles at distant targets would reach them within fractions of a second. Assuming of course, that you could survive long enough to actually fire something before a Russian Hind came in at Mach 80 to blow you away.
Thats the point where I stopped buying games and basically started just copying and swapping with friends. Boy was I glad I did that! Try any game at random and you'll usually find that it isn't worth the asking price, delete it and be glad you didn't pay for it!
Now I copy and then buy if the game is good, which I've done for many good games.
Back in '92 I bought Falcon3 which was an excellent game. Even MODEM play at 2400 was fun. Anyone remember loading Falcon3 with loadhi (?) to get the extra details? With that game I think I got lucky.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
But it is certainly not PC, I'll grant you that.
The odd part is, there's plenty of very un-PC porn. There's more rape porn out there than the mind can comfortably conceive, and I'm sure that there exists rape porn that has racial characteristics, and I don't doubt for a moment that it existed at that time.
But the author in this article alluded to why it was so controversial--people thought of gaming systems as for kids, and this game/these games went over some social norm-border.
On the other hand, the VCR has always been, from the start, your at home porn machine. Make a rape fantasy with native american girls for VHS and it doesn't raise an eyebrow; make a game cartridge with the same theme for a game system and everyone gets pissed.
Actually, as I consider it, that's happening today with Vice City. There's nothing in there that hasn't been in a million different Hollywood movies, but I suspect Vice City cheeses off people because it adds an extra element of interactivity; in one situation you're a passive participant, possibly or possibly not enjoying all the violence, and in the other situation you're an active participatn causing the "violence."
I personally feel that there aren't enough games out there that deal with rape. I think *every* game should involve some raping of the indigenous people in order to win it.
I am quite certain that the series of Indiana Jones games on the PC could have been amazing had there been more rape.
And the current Spider Man series would really take well to a nice rape scene or two towards the end making full use of his web slinging prowess and that tight fitting costume.
The only game that I can think of that wouldn't be made 200% better with some nice rape scenes would be Grand Theft Auto - that wholesome game would just be ruined if rape were entered into that equation of love and affection.
Unless it was prison rape and really graphic. In that case, sign me up for two please.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I actually had a PC version of it that was supposed to run in VGA color. Sadley a bug wouldn't allow it to run unless I told it I had a 4 color Hercules adapter, which after selecting made everything four shades of pink.
Anyone else have that problem?
The Anti-Blog
wow, they have other hacks too!
check out the Battlezone hack- it's such a vast improvement!!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I would much rather have played an impossible to win Impossible Mission than the hours I suffered trying to make sense of ET.
I have a confession to make. Many of you will be shocked by this, but it's time to come out of the closet. I actually *enjoyed* the 2600 E.T. game.
There, I said it! Ahh, I feel like a great burden has been lifted from my shoulders.
I guess you don't read old books either? After all, language has evolved so far lately that e.g. Agatha Christie or J.R.R. Tolkien must be "old hat".
(There is a point there, just look for it.)
"There is no reason why 2600 Space Invaders couldn't have been more accurate..."
There was a reason, and I knew it at the time:
Arcades were making more money than home games. Even though "they" could have made the home games as good as the arcade version, they weren't inclined to do so. They were making large fortunes, a quarter (or two) at a time.
So today every mall has an arcade and every pizza shop has a few games, but in the early 80's the arcades were like pubs during prohibition, or dance halls in the first days of disco, something like that. They were a big deal, but the phenomenon just kind-of ended.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Nope.
"Paku Paku" is Japanese onomatopoeia(of which they have a huge variety) for the sound of somebody munching on snacks.
(Like the "munch, munch, crunch crunch" you see in cartoons)
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Postal had a great premise, lousy execution. Imagine something with all the notoriety of GTA, but without the graphics, the plot, or the gameplay. *shudder*
Hellbender and Fury were the MS rip-offs of Descent. Or at least they were in my opinion; alot of people will call them rip-offs of Tie Fighter. In any case, they really sucked bad.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Wow, how long were you playing the game for, or was it just using a lot of NES CPU power? Nowadays there are probably a lot of solutions to overheating... but I guess nobody was using "liquid cooled" NES's. :-)
Of course, nowadays I wouldn't be surprised to hear of some vidiot trying to overclock a console like a PS2 or X-box either
Six of the games on the list were released before 1985.
Of the remaining four, three were Super Nintendo games (one of which was also released for the Genesis).
The one remaining game was for the Nintendo 64.
Nothing for the PC or a console released in the last five years? Or even the PlayStation? It's one thing to make fun of an old Atari 2600 game written by one person in three months, but projects with multi-million dollar budgets and teams of 10-30 tend to be much more spectacular when they crash and burn. I'm sure everyone is thinking "Daikatana," but that's just a popular scapegoat. There have been some huge failures and truly awful games made in the last ten years.
How about "Loadstar," for example? It had a large budget, endless hype behind the company (Rocket Science), and was designed by one of the most well-respected game designers out there, Brian Moriarty. The game ended up being little more than an FMV rail shooter. On that note, there are at least a dozen FMV games from the mid-1990s that are worse than Atari 2600 Pac-Man (which sure looked lame, but it was kinda fun).
Who reads the @#$#@$ing manual!?
It was only 6 years ago, but the manual had been long seperated from the rest of the unit. "Attack Right" is coming back to my nightmares.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.