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Videogames You Love To Hate
Thanks to FiringSquad for their editorial discussing why sheer wretchedness is (allegedly) a good thing in gaming. The author rhapsodizes: "Bad experiences define this hobby. As much as we all enjoy sharing love stories about great moments in gaming, we tend to play up the bad stuff even more. Even though I'll always have fond memories about racking up 400,000 points in Donkey Kong... while a crowd cheered me on... the time that Daikatana taught me the true meaning of sorrow will somehow always be more powerful." Which legendarily bad games have given you fondly hateful memories?
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Is it Slashdotted or MSBlastered?
"Derp de derp."
On a more serious note, the one game I've had serious expectations for that turned out to be a waste of money was the original Outpost; it had a wonderful premise and lots of interesting concepts, but was awfully buggy and had a user-hostile UI. Sadly, the sequel was fairly good but was saddled by the "Outpost" name and tanked. Still, I was able to get my space-colony sim fix five years later with Alpha Centauri, which I still play to this day. That's a game worth getting out of the bargain bin.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
After Nintendo hyjacked the project and added the Starfox characters in there, I lost all interest in the game (Starfox in a Zelda game? Pfft).
Upon seeing the results of the game being transferred to the GameCube and having the characters so wonderfully modelled (with fur!), I was once again excited about the game.
What followed my short stint in the game was cries of frustration and a solid opinion that Rare had lost the plot. Truely the most disappointing game I've come across.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I noticed immediately that the graphics were atrocious. Again, it wasn't that I was expecting an arcade game but the COLORS! They were simply awful. I was prepared to accept the hideous colors because, well, it was still Pac-Man, darn it! It HAD to at least play well! As I started the game and clutched my joystick...upside down - one of my little quirks was that I always held Atari-style joysticks upside down because I felt like I should be hitting the button with my right thumb, a belief vindicated later by virtually every other game console...but I digress. So, I'm holding my joystick as I start the game and I move the stick to the left and...well...Pac-Man...moved...so...slowly. I started working myself into a rage. Atari was ruining Pac-Man, a gaming classic. As I continued to move about the maze, I of course noticed that the ghosts looked horrible, the dots weren't even dots anymore (little rectangles) and my frustration boiled to a point I had never reached before while playing a video game.
Even then, I was a pretty calm, "good" kid. I put my joystick down, got up, turned the console off, removed Pac-Man and put it into one of the game cases (big, beautiful plastic things that held 20 cartridges a piece). I placed the instruction manual carefully in the provided slot in the case and took out another game - ANY other game (don't remember specifically as we had many) - and tried to calm myself down. I didn't even tell my grandparents how angry I was since I didn't want to seem ungrateful for the gift.
For the remainder of my time playing the Atari 2600, whenever I played any game that I thought was bad I always compared it to the miserable abortion that was Pac-Man and so I managed to stay fairly satisfied. To put it into even more perspective, that attitude even helped me find enjoyment in E.T. and M.A.S.H.!
Pac-Man for the Atari 2600:
Worst...gaming...experience...ever.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I've played lots of bad games, more than I care
to remember.
My most recent torment was caused by Masters of Orion 3. I loved 1 and 2 and anxiously awaited the release of the third. In my opinion all they had to do was update the graphics and add a couple of bells and whistles to get another truly outstanding title.
Instead I got the biggest load of crap I've ever played. The interface was torturous the mechanics beyond tedious. The AI is a moron when it works for you and genius when it's against you. I quickly found myself just clicking next turn repeatedly waiting for something, anything, interesting to happen.
MOO3 is my most recent and still most painful bad game memory but there are a few others that can stir up the desire to kill such as Outpost or Anarchy Online (initial release). AO is still my defining benchmark for bad mmorpg's and though I hear repeatedly how they have gotten much better the pain of that initial experience will forever prevent me from buying any FunCom game again, much less AO.
I think THE one game i absolutly hate is quake3... I was an avid q2 player, and for some reason (call me crazy, or anything else you'd like), it just didnt have the expected feel that i had hoped... but then in q3's defense, i didnt really give it a shot (pun intended) when i saw how horribly far away from the atmosphere of q2 it was...
If you've ever played or even seen 'Battle Monsters' on the sega saturn, you'll know its up there amongst the highest level of 'bad gaming'.
But, for this reason, for me it's one of the most memorable games i've ever owned. For those of you that have never seen 'Battle Monsters', it's basically a 2D fighter. Probably designed to cash in on the mortal combat series, but failed miserablly. Remember how mortal combat had terrible backgrounds? Well times that by about a thousand and you'll get the backgrounds that featured in Battle Monsters.
Although, the worst thing had to be the characters. I can see the designers were trying to be inventive (or even obscure), but they just came out so terribly poor. One of the characters you could choose was a pair of twins that would act as one character. Jesus. It was bad.
Unfortunately I got rid of battle monsters, but thank-fully I did record some footage of it onto vhs. Amongst friends if a game is bad, or if indeed we need to pop back into our nostalgic past of 'bad games', battle monsters will always be the first game brought to conversation.
I have one too: Loom: I loved Monkey Island, and that pirate said the game was good, so I got it... Loom sucked
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some of the old games from the 8-bit era were updated and brought out again, but not all were really much better, and some were definately worse.
I spent a fair amount of time playing Frontier: First Encounters, which was nearly a really good game. The idea (based on Elite if you don't know it) was good, but the implementation was pretty poor. After the 5th or 6th patch came out, it didn't crash too often, but there were still a number of bugs, which made some missions impossible.
Speaking of which, I always liked the old C64 games Mission Impossible (or was it Impossible Mission?) The graphics were much smoother than other platform games of the time. Elite (the SW house) produced some good games too. I liked Kokotoni Wilf (or whatever ot was called).
Despite much improved graphics and sound, it seems that modern games often lack the simple playablility that the old games had. I don't want to learn loads of button combinations - I just want to play. That said, plenty of the old games were utter pants too.
These days, I'm still playing TFC. It's not the latest and greatest (well, not the latest at least), but I like the gameplay. What is new is NeoTF (no download necessary!). That really rocks.
-- Steve
There are certain projects with little real substance but well crafted gloss that cruise the games industry waiting for gullible publishers to snap them up believing them to be "the next (insert name of gaming fad of the time here, Lemmings, Tomb Raider, Quake etc)". Such was Banzai Bug, a 3d game where you had to fly an insect through a series of adventures to escape an exterminator. It could probably have been made quite good with the right publisher, but sadly with a publishing company run by marketeers with little game playing experience that wasnt going to happen.
They signed it in the first place on the basis of an intro video, they were very proud of the fact that they'd had some input on the gameplay despite their games testers telling them it was very poor, and to cap it all when it was finally released they tried to market it as a flight simulator because you were flying the insect character. Naturally this went down well with the flight sim crowd:)
So dont necessarily blame the developers if a game turns out to be a turkey. They will almost certainly know it's a turkey and won't be able to do much about it. Responsibility rests squarely on the publishing company who, blinded by marketeer's self-belief, almost certainly made it that way all by themselves.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Worst game?
Thats tough but Ephemeral Fantasia on the PS2 has to be one of the worse RPGs in existence. I can't even begin with how bad it was, if you really want to know: just pick it up in a discount bin (should be about $1 by now) then take the disc and without bending or breaking it, shove it up your nose. Thats what it feels like.
Now the main feature:
I remember back when the X-box had just launched, and good titles were hard to come by, you had HALO, and then you had a lot of other stuff that sucked so bad, it forces me to use the word "suck". A friend of mine who had been to E3 that year was trying to get a few of us hyped up for the release of Azurik. It was to feature a complex fighting and magic system, open ended game play and killer grpahics, and the letter X and all those other things that the kids are into these days.
The thing is, that MS had kept the lid on this game, most of the previews that were available were nuetral or positive (since no media people actually seemed to be allowed to play the game) THis friend managed to convince a few other friends of mine that they should reserve it and so they did. I had my doubts though, "blue skinned people fighting it out on a far away world" sounded a bit to much like something that was going to suck.
For a month I kept having to hear about how much everyone was psyched up for this game. I would say it looked like ass, they would say I didn't know what I was talking about. Finally it was released, and when I came home from work and asked my roomate how it was, he just handed me his copy and said try it.
I laughed so hard as i tried to play it, beer shot out of my nose. From that day on when ever somebody tried to disagree with me on a matter related to gaming, I would just bring up Azurik and my point was proven.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
I'm surprised that ET for the 2600 hasn't been mentioned yet. Jeeze, what a piece of crap that was. Crappy enough for Atari to dump 5 million copies down Mexico way.
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Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
Forgot the Nuevo in front of Mexico there.
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Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
The one I love to hate, however, is the Atari 2600 E.T.. It has nothing to do with the movie, it isn't all that fun any more...but, damn, I loved it as a kid. I really enjoyed that game - and I still have it. And haven't forgotten how to play it.
Unlike ETM, which I'm already blocking from my memory.
The worst game I've played in years is Square's infamous Unlimited SaGa. Generally, I have the good sense to avoid things like this, but I've always had a weakness for Square games, and I thoroughly enjoyed its predecessor, SaGa Frontier 2.
Sure, every publication in the world slammed this game. But none of them managed to adequately portray how miserable it is. The game looks gorgeous, but beauty can be severely misleading. I've never had a worse gameplay experience. It's so bad that it defies description.
If anyone is considering buying this steaming pile of refuse, take the advice of an admitted Square fanboy who usually likes the RPG's that the reviewers pan:
PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. PLAYING IT IS AKIN TO HAVING YOUR BRAIN RIPPED OUT OF YOUR HEAD WHILE MIKE TYSON DOES UNSPEAKABLE THINGS TO YOUR BEHIND.
You have been warned.
My "worst game ever" experience. It was about hmmmm.. 10 years ago.
.arj file. I decompress it with my .arj decompressor program, and game installs in five minutes. Obviously they didn't want to pay royalties on a commercial program, and tried to write their own installer.
.gif with the games final screen. Seems like the guy who's been giving you missions the whole time was actually one of the aliens you've been fighting, and he gloats about how he used you etc etc etc. Damn, what a shocking surprise.
1. Box has a little piece of paper with manual errata. Stuff like "though the manual says you can blow walls up, you really can't". Game was hurried out the door, maybe?
2. Installation process runs for HALF AN HOUR and is only 10% done. This is off of a floppy disk. I quit in disgust, take a look at the game file in a hex editor, and find it's an
3. Time for some gameplay! Listed specs: 286/8, 2 meg of ram. My computer: 386/25, 16 meg. Game crawwwwwwwwls. Character AI is non-existent. Controls are buggy and unresponsive. It's real-time, but order and character information screens cover up the gameplay screen. My characters get slaughtered because I can't control them and they're too stupid to save themselves.
4. I finally give up and check out some of the other files in the game. I find a
5. I came across the game a few years later sitting in the back of my floppy disk bin. Thought I'd try it with my new system, a 486/33. Maybe it would be okay with that much raw processing power. Nope. Still buggy, still slow, still sucked.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Enter the matrix was the worst stack of coasters i have to date. Games like Beach Head, Raid over moscow, Day of the Tentacle, Sam N Max, captain goodnight, the metal slug series, all have graphics today's gamer feel inferior, but gameplay that goes way beyond that. To go from 20 games on a hole punched double-sided floppy to 1 game on 4 cd's or a dvd and move backwards, i think the developers spent more time watching the matrix than making this log.... i don't even know where to go with this.. worst game experience ever, well next to hearing Bill Gates was making a console system
I rember a game called Tomb Raider (angel of darkness). It was a sequel of a sequel that shouldn't have appeared of a sequel that shouldn't have appeared of a sequel that shouldn't have appeared, etc.
I want my karma, and I want it now!
3D0 - any game that had more FMV than actual gameplay (which pretty much kills 75% of the 3D0's back catalogue) PSOne - Formula One 99 - The first 2 games rocked, then somehow the same development studio managed to kill off the franchise by taking every single element of what made the game so good and flush it down the shitter PS2 - Every game up until GTAIII, it took me that long to be convinced that it was worth buying a PS2 as nothing had impressed me at all up until then - even GranTurismo3 sucked GameCube - SuperMarioSunshine was marketed as the best platformer since Mario64, but it wasn't even close. Only very brief flashes of that former Nintendo glory throughout. Mainly it was just derivative and disappointing. XoBox - Nightcaster....the horror, the horror.
Brother bought game for N64....
Made fun of brother for buying Iggy's Wrecking Balls....
Felt bad for picking on younger brother for buying a game called Iggy's Wrecking Balls....
Tried playing a game that can only be described as a game that you race Bionic Commando (their wrecking ball chains were able to pull you up to the next level in the race) type balls with faces (some happy, some sad, some mean looking) up a pattern with obstacles.....
Gave little brother a pounding for making me feel bad about making fun of him over buying such a horrible game....
I did enjoy, however, the $3 that Funcoland gave me on the trade-in..
http://www.tomandemily.com
I remember Myst being advertised as a 7th Guest killer, with better graphics and such. I got it home and low and behold, it was a slide show! And ever since then, everyone else figured slide show games were the way to go.
If anything were to kill adventure games, it would be the "slide show game" genre.
As a huge Deep Space Nine nerd, I went out and bought the game Dominon Wars for like $50 right when it came out. I had already read some bad reviews of it, but I figured the coolness of the setting might make up for its shortcomings. Wrong. Terrible interface both in-game (nothing you would click seemed to affect the ships' movements) and out (seems to be impossible to save). Plus the game mechanics were out of whack, and the "all-new starfleet ships" were pretty lame, especially since there were plenty of choices they could have used instead. It's too bad really, because the game had a pretty good looking engine, and the epic Dominion War had a lot of potential as a game. Maybe some day we will be vidicated - I always thought a Dominion War expansion for Armada or Armada 2 would be good, but I doubt that is in the cards anymore with Activision's dumping of the trek license.
I remember not having instructions to any of my Commodore 64 games when I was little. So most games I just mashed keys till I found a way to play it. This one I didn't figure out till I met some other kid who had it in Texas, at a Hilton, that had Yie-Ar-Kung-Fu in the lobby to play. My program had only one LCP running around with his dog but this kid had two. By then I didn't have the program anymore because I chucked it out the window on a cold winter day since I was fed up on figuring it out. I wish I still had it to play now. Since I figured out how to do things by pressing Ctrl+(Letter)
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've played so many stinkers I can't count how many. One of the most recent horrible experiences was with the Men In Black 2 game. I got a free rental at Blockbuster, and I figured that it would be good for 30 minutes of fun. I was wrong. Aside from the generic heroes, the uninspired gameplay, horrible AI and PS1 type graphics, I had enough after 30 seconds. I immediately returned the game, and talked them into letting me rent something better.
Don't buy WoW Gold! Make it yourself!
Any MegaMan after III (NES) ..Hands on... bad, bad controls, and come on... cars with eyes????!!!? What happened Miyamoto? .. Hey.. it looks like more than 64 on-screen colors to me... ... nope
Hmmmm... it's getting boring... find out who to kill first (with your power shots), then figure out the right order, go to the castle, kill the guy with the white scrub riding that crane and voila!.. you've got a sequel!
Mortal Kombat I (SNES)
4 Words: What was Nintendo thinking?
Stunt Race FX (SNES)
After Starfox, SRFX looked like a winner, it looked like the Virtua Racing Killer....(Long live FX Chip)
No Axelay II??? (SNES)
After beating the 2nd quest of Axelay and seeing the "See you in Axelay II" screen, the almost-10-year-old wait continues.
Face reality... Street Fighter II (Various) [Insert name here]
What about when you came back to reality (for me was in Super SF II) and realize that you have been playing the same game (or other iterations of fighting games) for over 2 years!!!!
Gunstar Heroes Kills Contra [GEN/SNES]
Scaling and rotation on the Genesis?
Time to Acknowledge [32 bit era]
SNES CD Rom..nope
Sony Add-on... nope
Phillips Add-on..nope
Nope.. we don't need 32 bit.. we have ACM.. Donkey Kong proves we can have "32bit-looking" games on 16bit.
Ultra64...Yeah!!!
N64... great!! Cartridges are good..they give no load times!!!....
Who the hell are we kidding?
Marketing & PR 101: If your competitor announces something, make up things yourself so you can keep your products fresh in the minds of consumers, and to buy time to come up with the next thing.
Lost in Time. Just terrible. Bad, bad, bad, with a terrible story, technically wrong (ie a strange and ugly mix of pictures and rendered scenes made by a 3-year old boy), and with an unusable UI.
My website
Let's see, for pure bile-producing rage, nothing has yet to match up with Ruins of Myth Drannor for me. I was all pumped and excited about playing a game that used the new 3rd Edition D & D rules, plus the screenshots looked awesome. It turned out to be an unplayable suckfest on my machine due to controls that went randomly wild and redraw problems that made it hard to figure out what the heck was going on. Not only that, but I couldn't even get one of the patches to install properly. I probably would have traded the game back in, if not for the fact that I smashed the box under my foot to vent my frustration.
For most disappointing game, I have to go with Frontier: First Encounters. It was almost so much fun! I loved everything about it, except for its tendency to freeze the machine everytime I entered certain regions of space, or had a character live for more than a couple of game years. Blamed that one on alien intervention and moved on. Too bad, that's the sort of game I love. The open-ended thing, not the malicious freezing thing.
Sewer Shark on the 3DO console
Jurassic Park Interactive on the 3DO console
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Ataris problem was it wasn't the blockbuster they thought it would be, it did nothing new for the system, it was just a game.
Now what I recently played thats horrable compaired to the arcade version was Ataris version of Star Wars, The Arcade Game for the 2600 (big hint, DONT DO VECTOR GRAPHIC GAMES IF THE SYSTEM CANT REALLY PRODUCE VECTOR GRAPHICS!!!!)
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
The playstation (ps1) was probably the best console of its time, but if you've heard 90% of the games for it were crap. you've better believe it! for each good game it had they were like 20 honest-to-god-awful games to keep the balance, all the resident evil clones (except silent hill) all the tomb raider clones, all the "rythim" DDR clone games, the entire dragon ball collection of crap, the 3d versions of contra and other classics severed to raw 3d, the unstopable tsunami of unstranslated and unfun "rpg" "party" and plain "weird" 2d and 3d japanese games and above all the entire onslaught of cartoon and movie games including "south park" the FPS (if you havent seen it, you are lucky!) yuck! guacala de pollo!
Im still surprised earth is standing still after that, that collection sucked harder than a black hole!
OH and for classic crap, "Raiders of the lost ark" for Atari 2600 is even worst than "ET" at least in "ET" you had 2 seconds of fun by pressing a button and seing ET long neck stretch accompanied by some kind of sound. In raiders you had Indiana in 8 bit glory (I think) a button with no purpose whatsoever and a collection of pixels in random that killed you as soon as you stepped in any direction! CRAP! Ive seen video card tests more fun than that!
This was one of the worst games I've ever played. The control was toally chopped up. If a defensive player evern grazed you, you were tackled. The only reward was to hear "Whoa Nellie. Touchdown." after every touchdown. What a waste of a rental!!!
What, me Tweet?
Great, I just bought it two weeks ago and havent played it yet really (Still working on .hack infection cause I only play it with my girlfriend around, and xenosaga when Im alone) but if thats all the game is, fucking forget it, Extream RPG playing my ass (That was the advertising slogan on playonline.com)
I thought something was strange when I saw it was already marked down to 40 bucks, but now Im just pissed as hell.
Hopefully I can get some money back from EB!!!!!!!
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Number one would have to be Outpost, by Sierra. I'd been playing Civilization, and one of the ways to beat Civ was by colonizing Alpha Centauri. So when Outpost came out, which looked like Civ in Space, I thought it'd rock!
It sucked rocks. I got the rock part right, at least.
Another huge disappointment, and one I'm glad I didn't buy, was The Tick for the SNES. Sure enough, instead of a game needing a theme, it was a theme needing a game. The gameplay was boring even for a sidescroller, and the most interesting parts were when the game locked up. And it's not like they can release a patch for a console cartridge.
A relatively recent disappointment was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. I loved the old SSI Gold Box games, this one touted itself as being a modern version of one of those. Pain... suffering. Fortunately, Neverwinter wasn't too far around the corner...
I remember back in the 80's playing tetris on my old gameboy. Excellent game. So, when I saw Tetris Worlds fo the PS2 on the shelf, I figured it might have the same level of fun as the old gameboy version.
I couldn't have been more wrong. With the addition of a storyline (something idiotic about rescuing tetrimo aliens, or some garbage) and the two minute play time limit, it completely destroyed everything good about Tetris. No more careful planning, trying to build up a good score, just mad cramming in an attempt to get as many lines in two minutes as possible.
It would have been okay if the timer could be disabled, but I never figured out how or if it could be done. Definitely belongs in the Hall of Shame.
I was bitterly disappointed by Fallout Tactics, the squad-based RTS/TBS version.
One of the hallmarks of the Fallout RPG was that you could do what you wanted; multiple solutions to puzzles, multiple paths, blah blah blah.
Well, in FT, my crack squad of spec-ops guys were thwarted by a waist-high pile of sandbags. They could not climb over them, move them, blow them up with C4, cut them open with knives to spill out the sand, nothing. Why not? Because each level isn't a map with an objective, it's a path on rails that you must follow.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I think I was around 8 or so when E.T. came out. We didn't have an atari (we had Intellivision) but our friends down the street did. Even then, I wasn't quite sure of the point of the game. I wonder if there's some marker pointing out where the cartridges are buried? Nobody should have ported the Star Wars Arcade game. That game was too perfect. Gotta love the cockpit edition.
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Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
MAX (the original) is almost a good game; a RTS game that also could be a turn based game. Cool. FGood strategy.. limited ammunition, buildings needing suplies from each other.. overall, a pretty good single player game. The box said multiplayer, and the company promised multiplayer, and then promised it in patches.. which never came. Annoying, but fine.. they promised multiplayer for MAX2.
:/
So MAX2 came out, and I was very excited about it, since MAX1 I managed to really enjoy despite its flaws. Turns out thatInterplay rushed it out before it had even gone to beta testing.. the programmers weren't even informed! Interplay needed launch titles for their new stocks....
MAX2 had multiplayer; but it didnt' work at all. They patched a few times.. but it didn't work.
The game is either RTS, or turn based, or a mix of oth; but turns out in the first few missions you couldn't beat them.. in RTS moide, you didn't have time to get to the right places to compelte the mission, and in turn based mode other bugs prevented you from doing them. Heres where the testing phase woudl've fixed it up. So nice artwork, features missing from the packaging verbiage, and a game that you cvould not even play past the first 3 levels...
Brutal.
For shame on Interplay. A great potential... destroyed
jeff
The worst game i have owned, was The Movie Monster Game to C64. I had the tape version of the game, and it would load for 20-30 minutes before the game started, and it could be over in 2 minutes. And you had to reload it to play it again.
Is the song "Superfly's Johnson (Suck it Down)" by the Laziest Men on Mars. If you can find a copy, it's well worth a listen.
Without you I'm one step closer to happiness without violence.
In Seaside NJ there is a retro arcade that has it and I play it all the time. (and if you wondering, some games like asteroids have a WAIT!!!, and the arcade has plenty of new games, the older stuff is THAT popular.)
Its my second favoirite vector game, Tempest is my all time favorite with asteroids being a third.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
With that thought, here are some of my biggest disappointments (in no particular order):
1. Unreal Tournament 2003 : I played the original UT from the day it came out, up to the day the UT2003 demo (actually the leaked alpha) was released. I actually bought a new computer to play UT2003. I can't even tell you how disapointed I was by UT2003. The biggest reason is it seemed like Quake2003 and didn't have the feel of Unreal or Unreal Tournament. On top of that, the weapons were weaker than the ones in UT. The great thing in UT was all the weapons were useful, and most of them were top tier. Lastly, the characters seemed to be so much smaller than the original UT (no, it's not my monitor resolution either).
2. Ultima 8 , "pagan". After playing Ultima 1-5 and loving them I took some time off (ie the time between me having an Apple II and an a PC) and came back to playing computer games. The first PC based RPG I bought was "Pagan". It came on 8 disks ( I guess to match the sequel number...), and didn't run on my PC even though my PC fit the specs. After a few calls to Origin didn't help I gave up. A few days later I took it to a friends house and played on her PC. Then I realized the game sucked anyway and I wasn't missing much. It's funny how game companies can turns classics into crap after a few too many sequels.
3. Super Mario Brothers 2 - Way too easy, and too different in a craptacular way than the first one. Nintendo hit a home run with SMB3 though.
4. Wargods - From Midway, one of my favorite gaming companies came this crap. Sure, it looked really cool but trying to get off a 15 button fatality in 2 seconds was no fun. Never mind the complexity/sillyness of the combos. Ugg.
5. Mortal Kombat 3, 4, 5 - While I'm on the midway kick, Mortal Kombat has sucked for a long time now. It's downfall was trying to emulate the killer instinct dial-a-combos and putting in a run button in MK3 (which was correctly colored yellow...the CHEESE button). 4 was pretty bad, and 5 was aweful. This is a shame because 1 and 2 were both very good IMO.
6. Street Fighter Alpha 1 - chain combos..Ugg. Capcom much like Nintendo followed this up with a great game in SFA2. Maybe the mark of a good game company is to fix their own crap when they screw up a sequel.
Har. I have an NES with a four-player adapter, so I have made a hobby of grabbing any NES games that support it. This can be great (take a bow, Gauntlet II), very good (thank you, Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road), or pretty stinky (sucks to you, Play Action Football)
But the worst four-player game I have, and the worst NES cart I own, is Monster Truck Rally. The premise (monster trucks, racing against each other, multiple events) is fine, but the gameplay is DEEP HURTING! If the trucks touch anything, they spin wildly (you know, just like in real life). This is funny for a few seconds, then you realize the game is nearly unplayable. Then we all stick Super Off-Road in and thank our lucky stars.
Other tragic games in my collection of badness:
Journey Escape for the 2600
Most non-Activision 2600 carts
And for a good game destroyed by annoying load times:
Oni, for the PS2.
I don't know. Maybe the Mac/PC version was spared the indignity. But Oni has great game mechanics and adequate (though unimpressive) graphics. Unfortunately, you tend to die a lot. And every time you die, the game reloads the level you're on from scratch. And that takes...too...long...Argh!
Why, Bungie why? I loved you! I thought we had something real!
Anyone here ever play the ill-fated Superman 64? If anything qualifies for the worst game ever, this game does. Purple fog EVERYWHERE... and really, really, really bad gameplay. You couldn't pay me to play that game.
This game punishes your sense of self-worth more than any game I have ever experienced. It bites you off, chews you up and spits you out. You leave a session feeling like you're not good enough to do anything.
Then you play it again. What the hell is that!?!
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Thankfully I also got some money for my birthday so I could go to the arcade and play the real thing some more.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
A scientifically accurate game that put you as the leader of one of two colonies on a hostile world, that combined the best parts of SimCity with a bit of Civilization and the inherent coolness of space and Saving Humanity Itself, would have flown off store shelves. The original Outpost did, of course, but only for a couple of days as news of its crappiness dissiminated. If Sierra hadn't bungled Outpost so badly, gamers might still be playing it today. As it is, Outpost remains an exercise in tedium until you try to skip 10 or 15 turns, at which point your colony immediately dies out. Sigh... To think what could have been.
As for Outpost 2, it was a good effort. While the RTS aspect did sometimes feel at odds with the colonization scenario (would two colonies struggling to survive really attack each other?), for the most part it combined the "build a colony" and "crush the other guy" elements well; it had decent systems for both colony management and battles, one that would reward not only good tacticians but also good governors. At its core, it was a solid game that deserved more than it got. I don't think it ever could have been a true sequel to Outpost, or what Outpost should have been. At that point, Sierra wouldn't sink massive amounts of money into a franchise that had floundered on its maiden voyage. Frankly, I'm surprised Outpost 2 ever got past the idea stage - the name practically guaranteed dismal sales. Still, the developers turned out a surprisingly good game, considering the burden of its name.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
When I was very little, I was unable to tell the difference between a really good game and a really bad one. They were all equal but also different. It was only later that I started to compare them with each other, and that still continues today.
:P
I used to play a lot of crap
So, to conclude, bad translation != bad game. It can make a crappy story, though- imagine if Metal Gear Solid was written in Zero Wing-ese.
Having played some really bad games (hey, I just played Home Alone II on the SNES just the other day) I figured something horrible would just come to mind, yet the one I find rising to the top in my memory is Karateka on the C64, a game I really liked.
I loved Karateka, yet I hated it. It drew me in like an addiction, fighting repetetive bad guy after bad guy, running and running towards the beautiful pixilated princess who needed me to save her. And that stupid eagle. I practiced and practiced just to be able to take it out when needed. I came back after the gate slaughtered me the first time I arrived that far. I came back again after the first time I ran headlong into the eagle and found myself lying dead. I came back again and again until finally I reached the princess.
Then the princess felled me with one quick kick to my mid-section and I could never bring myself to play it again, not even once to finish it off. Curse you Karateka.
You know, people are always knocking the Atari Pac-Man version because it was not the arcade port they were looking for. I don't agree with that. I never expected it to be just like the arcade. It was simply the pac man I played when I was at home. I mean, its not as if other games on the 2600 were a whole lot better than Pac Man in terms of graphics (combat, circus atari, basketball). OK there were good games that did look pretty good, but not like the arcade.
My 2c
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I've probably played worse games that I've since blocked out to avoid the pain, but reading through this thread reminded me of three:
... Uh... Okay, gotta go now. Play on, playas!
BALLZ: I think this was the name of that horrible attempt at a 3D fighter for Genesis, in which each character was literally made of balls. One small step for 3D graphics (very small), one GIANT LEAP backwards for gameplay on that system.
Sonic Pinball: What's with games that have "ball" in the title? Curse you, Sega, for forever tarnishing Sonic the Hedgehog's good name with this idiotic piece of shit on burnt toast. It was PINBALL, people -- just PINBALL. And I was stupid enough to trust the Sonic name and buy it, expecting some kind of decent side-scroll action.
MYST: Sorry, millions of fans, but if I want to point and click still images for hours at a time while listening to new age music, I'll put on an Enya CD and surf a porno site.
As far as disappointments go, Knights of the Old Republic was my big-time number one.
I heard so much good stuff about this game "Best Star Wars Game Ever". Everyone said it was great.
Nobody warned me about the stupid combat system! When I play games, I like to have a little bit of skill involved. Like, when I kill people, it is fun to run around, aim, and shoot. Not just select the dumb 'engage' option and hope for the best.
I also like to choose who I shoot. Everyone who plays first person shooters knows the joy of shooting at your allies, to see them run, cower, die, or whatever. It's good to have a choice of who to kill, which guards to attack, etc. You know, if I want to take on a bunch of Sith guards out in broad daylight, let me do it!
After trying it out for a week (boy oh boy...lets get involved in one of those STUPID duels!) I figured I needed to rush back to the store so I could sell it for a decent amount. The clerk at the store assumed I had beat the game, but when I told him I hated it, he was dumbfounded. He said that he bought an XBox specifically for that game (ahh...the hype I was talking about).
If you like action in your games, avoid this one like the plague. If you like to dress up as a Jedi, and try to translate wookie (or Klingon, or whatever you are into) then you might dig it.
The one saving grace was that they gave me $28 bucks for it at the store. They clerk said this was the highest he has ever seen for a game...
No reason to lie.
I believe it's a great game and definitely one of the best CRPGs ever made. Clearly blows away every other action-oriented CRPG ever made. Monster bashing just isn't the same anywhere else.
But it's also so damn hard that it turns easily frustrating. It's possible to die in million gruesome ways just by sneezing to the general direction of the Dungeon. I need certain kind of equipment, which are hard to get, to get anywhere near the end (which I have so far only managed to see by cheating...)
Every time I play the game, I have a great game and the death is so epic that I have to take a break of weeks before playing again. =/
But on the other hand, while deaths are annoying and stupid, when the game goes well it's incredibly rewarding and interesting.
Outpost was my favorite turkey, because I was duped by it. I was a younger PC gamer, then. My previous experience with PC games consisted of: Pool of Radiance, Wing Commander, Out of This World, Eye of the Beholder and Ultima Underwold -- all, in my opinion, excellent titles.
Then, I saw Outpost on the shelves. Nothing held me back; I just bought it. Why not? t was previewed in Computer Gaming World with positive remarks. Thus, the stage was set and I was duped into buying a bad game.
Outpost was SimCity in space, but with pre-rendered graphics. Pre-rendering was new and eye candy galore for the industry to "ooh" and "aah" at. At release, the game was practically unwinnable unless you followed a step-by-step, a walk-through found on the 'Net.
The experience taught me a lot. Magazines taking advertising money are beholden to their sponsors. There is a difference between a preview and a review, albeit a subtle one (sadly). And, most importantly, great graphics alone do not make a good game.
A few months later, a friend talked me into playing Civilization (a game with awful graphics) and I never looked back.
Do lengthy loading screens really need to click?
Ever get a chance to see the parody of the game?
Mine was on an apple II, you even had to flip the disk mid way. You sound like you would really appreciate it (at least the 'yet i hated it part')... The starting screen all looks normal then it goes into attract mode... hehehe. The bird gets it with a shotgun (I think), round house kicks knocking off bosses heads, and the ultimate ending (damn, the memory is vivid now) he runs up to the end princess, she tries her kick, he grabs it, and then beats the pixels out of her against the wall. then leaves saying something like take that you b$%^%$
Ahhhh... the good old days.
Enter the Matix sucked. (this isn't my sig)
this is my sig.
Did the beer really come out of your nose, or was that an attempt to sound cool?
Why do you go on?