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

sheer wretchedness

[patch-rustem]

From the editorial:

Computer and video gaming is probably the only pastime on the planet where sheer wretchedness is one of the main drawing cards.

He obviously hasn't watched alot of US television.

Extreme Paintbrawl

[PurpleFloyd]

A few years ago, a friend handed me a CD that'd seen its share of abuse; it was called "Extreme Paintbrawl." Quite simply, it was the worst game I've ever played. It's a credit to the creators to call the piece of trash a game. It was done in the Build engine (same as Duke Nukem 3D), at a time when Quake III was just out. Although it's certainly possible to make a good game with older technology, the game was full of errors: half the sprites weren't done correctly: some models, you'd only ever see the back (even if they were facing you). The AI was miserable: your own "teammates" would jump around like they were having a seizure, while the enemy would manage to both look like idiots and land every single shot. Not only that, but the damned thing was absolutely chock-full of bugs. I would have been seriously pissed if I had paid money for it; I've seen it still languishing in bargain bins here and there for $5 or so. On the positive side, though, it provided a great joke among friends. Any buggy, crappy, or half-finished game immediately draws comparisons to the Great Evil Game, Extreme Paintbrawl.

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.

Re:Extreme Paintbrawl

[Bazouel]

This game earned one of the lowest PC Gamer score ever. I think it was 6 % but I'm not sure. Reading the review was quite entertaining :)

Re:Extreme Paintbrawl

[PurpleFloyd]

How do you figure that? No matter what, the game had to have certain costs: pressing CDs, printing a manual (even if it's just a single sheet describing how to install Acrobat Reader), printing the box, shipping to retailers, and of course paying employees. While it's certainly possible to make a profit making bargain-bin games (look at Serious Sam), costs like pressing the first run of CDs and paying developers, marketroids, and managers are constant no matter how many copies you sell. While corners weren't as much cut as bombarded with tactical nuclear devices, I still can't see HeadGames making more than $5 per copy sold, or maybe $2.50 on the bare jewel case versions released after a while.

It seems to me that HeadGames went after the less PC-savvy market with the "Extreme" series of games; people who play paintball would probably, on average, have less computer knowledge than the general population (although I do know a few sysadmins, programmers and the like who play paintball, most of the people I know who like paintball aren't the computer-savvy type). Thus, it's possible to rip them off once or twice before they're turned off to HeadGames or gaming in general.

Another possiblity is a Producers-style scam; for some reason, the upper management wanted the company to fail. After all, word does get around about software, especially something as outstandingly awful as Extreme Paintbrawl. To ignore this fact is rather naive, and I am surprised that whoever was providing HeadGames with financial backing would continue supporting them after they saw a product as awful as Extreme Paintbrawl. Perhaps someone needed to lose money fast for some reason (taxes, laundering?) and decided to sink it into a POS company and run it into the ground.

Re:Extreme Paintbrawl

[nelsonal]

I think they kept the games development time to a bare minimum, and got distribution thought walmart at a budget price, since the game was less than $20 and there was excellent foot traffic at walmart, it sold well enough to cover all their costs and make a ton of cash. HeadGames probably didn't need cash support after their first game was released.

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.

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.

Re:One game springs to mind.

[tiled_rainbows]

Mac Casino. I played it ten years ago, but it's probably significantly older than that. Not that being ancient makes it a bad game per se; it could have been reasonably cool; you had slots, roulette, blackjack (I think), and you could go from table to table, trying to increase your funds.

The only problem with it was that they forgot to reseed the randomiser function when you loaded the game, rendering the whole thing utterly useless.

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

[eht]

I always hated later video game controllers for putting buttons under my right hand, I want my good coordinated hand to be the one controlling where I went with preciseness and control, I can then use my weak left hand to stab at the button with all the accuracy I could ever muster with it.

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.

So many to choose from ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

ET? Nobody's mentioned ET?

[HomeGroove]

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.

Tegals Mercenaries

[anon*127.0.0.1]

My "worst game ever" experience. It was about hmmmm.. 10 years ago.

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 .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.

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 .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.

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.

Myst

[DavidLeblond]

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.

Monday Night Football - SNES

[Rudy Rodarte]

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!!!

Re:NEW Mexico

[Mike Hawk]

There's a NEW Mexico?

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:I have a whole list of dissappointments:

[ForemastJack]

Hm...

...look at eBay and see the outrageous prices it goes for, because nobody wants to part with their copy.

Wouldn't just not listing the game on eBay be a better solution?

Ikaruga

[Palshife]

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!?!

Re:Ikaruga

[n0wak]

Exactly! Most people here seem to be just blindly responding with their lists of disappointments, which seems off topic, but the parent is absolutely correct.

I love Ikaruga. My favourite game of the year. Yet it pisses me off something fierce, and it frustrates me the likes of which I haven't seen since the 16-bit era. I toss my controller in frustration; I shout obscenities at it; and I scream out loud: "I HATE THIS DAMNED GAME!!" -- but I return everytime, and I love it.

Outpost was a tragedy

[PurpleFloyd]

The sad thing about Outpost was that it had such incredible potential. I remember that Sierra was very proud of the fact they had NASA doing science consultation on the game; if they had put half the effort used in marketing towards designing a good UI and doing a decent beta launch, Outpost would have had the potential to be a true classic. Hell, they would've had gamers lining up around the block three deep to get a chance to beta-test Outpost. It wasn't just the hype: people saw the potential in the concept.

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.

Re:So many to choose from

[prawntoast]

But of course what an oversight - between that and Heroes of Might and Magic the 3D0 software team should be thoroughly ashamed, possibly two of the key reasons Trip Hawkins and his 3D0 buddies are now begging for change outside a Subway station near you. Oh, sweet Karma.(I wonder if he cries himself to sleep at night wondering why he ever left EA?) Fuck you Hawkins, for Army Men 3D you owe me and the rest of the human race at least a decade of poverty and humilitation.