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?

Comments

One game springs to mind.

[Yorrike]

And that game is Starfox Adventures. Of all the games I've played on my GameCube, SFA (heh), was the one I originally had extremely high hopes for (when it was revealed as Dinosaur Planet on the N64).

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.

My Defining Video Game Disappointment

[Babbster]

Mine is probably the same as many: Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. I can't even describe the disappointment I felt as a little tyke when my grandparents and I got to their house and plugged that game in. Even then (elementary school), I knew that there was no way it would be an arcade-perfect translation but I had played so many really fun games for the 2600 that I felt it was a "can't miss" proposition. Boy, was I wrong.

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.

Re:My Defining Video Game Disappointment

[Babbster]

A short postscript:

Many early 2600 adopters might not remember it as well, having moved on to other Atari systems, Commodore 64 (my vice), Colecovision, Nintendo, etc., but Atari did redeem themselves [somewhat] very late in the life of the 2600 by releasing a pretty darned good version of Ms. Pac-Man - considering, of course, the great limitations of the console. It was, literally, the last game I played on that system and it at least ensured I left on a positive Pac note.

Q3 anyone?

[sevenofnine]

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...

Battle Monsters

[Prof_Falken]

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 blame the marketeers

[carndearg]

If I were asked to name the worst game I ever played it would have to be Banzai Bug. I have a special reason to comment on the awfulness of this game because running the helpdesk for the publisher I not only had to play it rather a lot but I saw some of the management decisions that led to the awful state of the released product.

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.

Big Disappointments come from big expectations..

[JavaLord]

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.

Re:Extreme Paintbrawl

[dead sun]

Funny you should mention Outpost, it's one of the games I was considering for worst game I've played. I'm certain I've played worse games, but I can't think of another that let me down in the same way that the original Outpost did.

I think I still have the manual around; I should go and dig it out for a laugh. If I remember correctly, there were a whole ton of things that got cut from the game as it ran behind, like creating a second colony and all the stuff that went along with that. Oh goody... Also the CD version needing a disk to launch the install from the CD was a nice touch. Way to go Sierra. Nothing says rushed out the door like a game that's half complete and can't install itself without helper media.

Geez, I was all of 13 when I bought the game. Being 13 I didn't have much income and I felt really abused by Sierra. Still, I played the game for a little while, but it wasn't anywhere near the expectations I had. If I remember right, the fun thing to do was to get the colony big enough and kill it off, because after a while there seemed to be no point.

Also, does anybody remember picking a planet to colonize in Outpost to have the conditions be wrong and you would lose before you even started the game? What the hell was that?

I got the opportunity to play Outpost 2 and didn't care much for the RTS aspect of it. I wanted to build and create, not destroy and defend. They should have finished Outpost before creating a sequel if you ask me.