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

[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.

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.

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.

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?