Slashdot Mirror
Big Rigs Makes Play For Worst Game Of All Time
Thanks to GameSpot for its review of Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing for the PC, which it awards its worst score ever, 1.0/10, rhapsodizing: "Big Rigs is a game so astoundingly bad that it manages to transcend nearly every boundary put forth by some of gaming's absolute worst of the worst and easily makes it into that dubiously extraordinary category of being one of the most atrocious games ever published." The review goes on to explain some of that atrociousness, noting: "You can clip your truck right through every object on a race course in Big Rigs, from the biggest of houses and walls, right down to the smallest of lampposts. Furthermore, bridges evidently don't actually exist, despite the fact that you can see them - driving over any of them results in you sinking right through them." Although Big Rigs makes a valiant attempt, what videogame would you rate as the worst of all time?
the titles that are really the shittiest titles are titles that seem OK on the surface but only after playing for few hours(and hoping there will be some twist or the gameplay will get much more intresting soon) you realise that the game is just full of it and you've been totally wasting your time(like a certain pirating game from last year, fabulous on the outside but so shallow on the inside with a so small world that you can hardly believe it). it's the games that could have been so great with tiny changes(be it multiplayer coop or better configurability).
with titles like thsi 'big rigs' you'll know instantly that they suck. sure it sucks if you bought it blindly, but at least it's possible to spot games like these beforehand.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
'nuff said
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
"The Great Waldo Search" for the Sega Genesis.
You know those books? (a.k.a "Where's Wally" in the UK)
They made a game of it. There were five levels. FIVE. The location of waldo was NOT randomised.
It took about 5 minutes to play through the thing, and that was it.
ZERO replay value, and a wad of wasted cash. Even the books had more "levels" than this, and cost about a tenth of the price.
Starts with Dai ... Come on, you can do it ...
Robert Anton Wilson
Snailus.
A lightcycles clone.
For the Apple II.
In basic.
By my dad.
Framerate (and general game speed) was about one frame per minute. Graphics: monochrome ASCII.
We took one look then went straight back to playing "Don't press the letter Q" on the Oric.
It has potential for a linux game port!
COMPANY
Stellar Stone Group is a full-service game development outsourcing company that manages the creative pool of designers, artists, programmers and Internet technologies specialists. Our company was founded in late 2000 to provide development services and technology licensing to interactive entertainment industry.
Since that date we not only completed number of projects for clients such as BMG Records, Sony Pictures, Heineken/Amstel, Microsoft but also developed massive game engine technology that allow us to cut expenses associated with game development up to 5 times.
MISSION
We strive is to provide our clients with best of gaming technologies and cut their development expenses, allowing them to concentrate on product rather than on technology hustles of development. We are capable of doing large scale sophisticated technological projects, utilizing the best technologies and guarantee customer satisfaction.
We combine stong management ( with our Santa Monica, CA based headquarters ) with superb creative, yet non expensive development teams in Russia. This allows our clients to cut development expenses 3-5 times comparing to cost of local European or US development team or employees. At same time we provide instant feedback to our clients, thanks to our management offices in Los Angeles and London.
Please check our Services to get more information on our offerings, standarts (sic) and procedures.
ADVANTAGE
The highest technical caliber of Stellar Stone developers coupled with low offshore Russia-based engineering costs gives us sustainable competitive edge to employ more and higher quality engineers than a typical US company can afford, staff up projects faster, put more developers on a project for a better gameplay value and graphics visuals. For our customers that transfers into richier product feature set at the same price point.
...it does make you wonder about how people actually get the funding doesn't it...
The only Good System is a Sound System
Game Players Magazine already rated Cosmic Race as the worst game of all time.
It was so bad, in fact, that I seem to remember their review scales changing to rate games on a scale of 10 down to Cosmic Race. =)
It's a good thing for this game that it is bad enough to be called 'worst' only scoring a 1/10, because if it had been only sort of bad, say 3/10 then nobody would have ever heard of it. Hell, I even almost feel like playing it.
I read the reviews last week.
The user comments are even better than the main review. Well worth the read.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Ultra low visibilty drek pales in comparison to Ultra High Visibilty Drek like Daikatana and Battlecruiser 3000 AD.
Daikatana had a gestation period of 5 years; Battlecruiser 3000AD, seven years. I am still befuddled as to how something could take so long and yet be so poorly done as those two examples were.
With Daikatana, we had John Romero (I AM JOHN ROMERO LOOK AT MY HAIR LOOK AT MY BUTT LOOK AT...)promising to make us his bitch for the better part of 5 years. What we got instead was a lukewarm game that was 5 years out of date, and many good jokes about John, and the excess of Ion Storm.
Derek Smart gets the award for the crappiest game ever that had the longest gestation period. SEVEN years he worked on it, and in the end it was a buggy, unplayable mess and a laughing stock.
It doesn't surprise me when games like Big Rigs come out and are unplayably bad, as their gestation periods are quite small. They hardly register in the minds of many before they vanish into oblivion where they belong.
Games such as Daikatana and Battlecruiser 3000AD continue to amaze me to this day, for it isn't everyday in the PC games industry that so little has been done with so much.
So... I read the review. I watched the videos... all I can say is... WOW.
Dunno if it is the worst ever, but it shure puts up a good fight for the title!
And for all those Dikatana fans at least it had clipping!
Awful. Take off, fly over some "mountains" for 5 minutes, land. Sometimes youd have an engine fire while over the mountains, and have to hit the extinguishers. Which then put the fire out. That was it.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
"Although Big Rigs makes a valiant attempt, what videogame would you rate as the worst of all time?"
Well, to be worst, there has to be an expectation that the game will be good. Big Rigs, obviously, did not have great expectations. Games that were supposed to be great, but ended up being mediocre or bad are much more interesting.
Black and White was supposed to change gaming as we knew it and instead was just a crappy game. Gamespot ranking: 9.3. Looks like the reviewer bought into the hype.
Dungeon Siege was also supposed to be a great game! And it was, for the 20 minutes it took to exhaust 100% of the gameplay. Gamespot Ranking: 8.4. At least it was more interesting than B&W.
It is easy to complain about the Aquamans and Big Rigs of the world, but did anyone really expect them to be great games?
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
The worst game I have ever played was a footy game with Ryan Giggs' face plastered all over it called 'Ryan Giggs' Super Soccer' or some such shite. It was clearly coded by a bunch of drunken stoats and never even approached a state of completion.
The game was hideous graphically (they couldn't even get the Welsh flag correct), totally inaccurate, and incredibly easy. The worst bit was the AI though; the ball was just followed around the pitch by all 20 players, and at free kicks the defenders formed a wall ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ATTACKING PLAYER including the goalkeeper.
The game was released for the Sega Megadrive in the mid 90s. I never saw a review of it, and can only assume that they expected to get all their income from clueless relatives buying the game as a gift (which is what happened in my case).
You'd think some companies would have more self respect...
For me Ultima IX was the biggest disappointment in recent years. Here was a game that not only promised to be a great game, it probably was a great game as well. It was just the complete foulup of the engine (AFAIK 3Dfx were already dying when they published the game) that made it such a senseless waste of my money. Not only was it unplayable, I really, really wanted to play it, because the other games had kept me entertained so well. I still weep at the thought.
Trainee BOFH -- Just give me your username & password
I don't know what the worst game out there is, but I'm willing to give Gamespot the worst layout award. Multiple reloads and still the content is way outside the browser window. You'd think they'd test that out...
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
Atari 2600 E.T. and Atari 2600 Pac-Man. Even as bad as "truckers" is, it can't compare to getting fucking stuck in pit and being unable to get out. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was so rushed, it barely resembled the game it was based on. The worst part about 2600 Pac-Man, was the COLORS; blue became yellow/orange and dots became rectangular wafers. Later on when Atari released Ms.Pac-Man, it proved that they could have done at good job in the first place, given the time.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Yep, it was so bad, so awful, so shocking (mainly because it featured Dana Plato of Diff'rent Strokes fame) that Joe Liebermann & Co. was about to enact legislation to prohibit depraved games from getting into kids hands. Sound familiar? In response, the video game industry came up with the ESRB rating system that you see on today's games.
You can throw out all the game suggestions you want, but only one game was so bad that it forced the industry to go to a ratings system. Top that.
Damn!!
I was wondering where my 4th semester graphics' project that earned me an F grade had gone
Stunts / 4D racing.
That game was actually playable, and was somewhat good, but the thing that made it remarkable was the stupid physics engine that it included. My friends and I wasted hours and hours trying to set up the most amazing disasters, so we could see what happened. Some of the crazy stuff that the game allowed was:
-The main atraction: I guess some programmes remembered that things launehed through the air follow a parabolic trayectory. However they sliopped a sign somewhere, because things went flying in a parabole of positive A (Ax^2 + Bx + C), like an U, rather than one of a negative A (like an n)
-When the AI car crashed, if you touched, slowly,the AI car which was burning (and stopped), sometimes you would be sent flying away (where did all that momentum came from?).
-If you reached max speed, the grass would stop resisting you.
-If you were fast enough, and with a little of luck, you could pass through small walls.
-From time to time, you were sent flying away for no apparent reason.
This game had poor programming, and delivered hundreds of hours of laughs. If Broderbund had made their work right, I doubt I would ever played it twice.
Come on, there have always been turkeys.
- "Sam Fox Strip Poker" for the C-64 has to feature somewhere
- All ports of Outrun
- Any US Gold film tie-in title in the 80s
Grab.
Consider this one
Is it just me, or is anyone else worried that YOU'RE WINNER going to become this year's ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US?
This may have actually been a good game. The problem with it was we had the good ol' C64 tape deck. So you'd hit play on the deck, go have dinner, go outside to play a bit, and then come back to the computer to play the game. Seeing as though I was likely between 5-7, I would last about 2 minutes before getting taken out by some spider or that dragon flying in the sky. I thought it's name was chimera but googing around proved me wrong. I seem to remember though when you started the game a voice would say "Chimera" with a lust for murder in it's computerized voice. I seem to remember that Forbidden Forest was the only game we had for the tape deck. You can imagine my excitement when we made the move to floppies.
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
Man, if you think gamespot gave them a low score you should read PC gamer magazine. In every issue at least one game gets completely trashed score-wise. Not to mention half the PC games never get released into the market anyways.
After Doom III and halflife2 I predict a long and boring period for PC games.
E.T. (1982) - The game that sank Atari? 5,000,000 unsold copies?
How many other games have been so bad that 14 trucks worth of it were buried in a landfill?
Even when I was 10, playing it for 30 seconds at a dept store, I knew it sucked ass.
free online diet tracking.
Gamespot's "Worst of 2003" included Gods and Generals...the "See it in action" video on that page is worth checking out.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
That said, I actually want to play this now. Go figure. Maybe I can find it for $10 somewhere.
Also, Gamespot's little "review-at-a-glance" or whatever says: Stability: Minor Problems. Wtf?
A WINNER IS YOU!
I suppose I should be flattered in a way that the worst game uses a font I made when I was 16 (scroll down to "Prefix") for its badly made you're winner screen...
Back to the Future for the NES gets an honorable mention for worst game. In an era where movie licensed games sucked, LJN was renown for their crappy license games. BttF had a 7 second audio clip that played over and over until you turned the game off. Torturous for the player and anyone else in the room.
But the winner(s) would have to be Link: Faces of Evil and it's sister game Zelda: Wand of Gamelon. The CDi had more than it's share of failures *cough* Alien Gate *cough*, but aquiring the rights to a well known and respected franchise and releasing this upon the world deserves a stupidity award. Gameplay is rudimentory and very choppy, and when your reward for completing objectives is another bouncy cartoon that makes you want to jab pointy things into your eyes, you will understand why this earns the title.
There have been quite a few games that haven't been bad, per se, they've just been disappointing. These games are what really makes me sad. Notable titles include:
Sonic Adventure/Heroes series - You would think that by the third game that problems like the camera being the biggest enemy in the game and players die by being "clipped" through the solid floor would be fixed. Nope.
Kingdom Hearts - Yet another license snafu. It has wonderful graphics, cinemas, music, and humor. Everything that an Epic Disney/Final Fantasy game should have but it falls flat on playability. Gameplay consists of pressing the X button lots of times while battling the evil camera system. Platforming elements are boiled down to a chore. Computer controlled allies try to waste as much magic/items as possible. It's simply not fun, and with so many things going for the game, it's a real shame.
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence - Igarashi saying that Castlevania should not be in 3D is fine but why does he have to prove his point by making this forgettable game? Someone should tell all of those developers working on "Devil May Cry" clones that DMC wasn't really that great. C:LoI has players haphazardly fighting recurring monsters in rooms that, while finely detailed, tend to look all the same. To quote from Zork: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike".
These games and more aren't really terrible, they just could be better if more thought/time was put into them. As Shigeru Miyamoto said: "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever".
To paraphrase one of the Gamespot editors, buying this game will only encourage this company to make more bad games. While you won't buy another crappy game from them after the first instance of screwing you over (Big Rigs), other people will...and it will only encourage them to keep this cycle of producing shit games as many times as possible to see how many suckers they can bring in.
Yes, it looks hilarious...but you'll get over that quick.
this review praises the game.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)