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On The Most Boring Videogames Of All Time
Thanks to 1UP.com for its feature documenting what the writers consider to be the most boring videogames ever. The intro explains the criteria: "These ten games weren't necessarily bad or good -- they were just really, really dull", before pointing to titles like Donkey Kong 64 ("a mediocre platformer bogged down by forty hours of useless doodad-hunting"), King's Field ("It's kind of like an RPG, and it's kind of like an FPS, but mostly it's like falling asleep"), and Aquanaut's Holiday ("...doesn't really have a point -- it's a blocky, dithered simulation of what it's presumably like to go deep sea diving.") What would your pick be?
The Great Escape for the C64, a mostly monochromatic (except for the little border around the tiny game screen) simulation of escape from a German concentration camp. During the day, you had to go through the routine of a prisoner or risk being put in solitary. Solitary involved looking at your character in a locked room until the guards let you out. If you didn't touch the joystick for 5 mins, the game took over for you.
I never had the patience to collect all the items and info needed for escape; I think my character just died from boredom.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
I'm not a big fan of 3D beat-em-ups. No matter how much I try to like them, I can't. They just don't hold the same ground as 2D fighters like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Samurai Spirits, Killer Instinct, and more recently SVC Chaos. Of all the 3D beat-em-ups, the Tekken games have to be the worst/most boring. I've beaten seasoned Tekken players by just button bashing. I played Soul Calibur 2 for the first time the other day with some friends and won the majority of games and they didn't want to believe that I had never played it before. Not my idea of fun.
I have Aquanaut's Holiday and I recall it being an enjoyable, soothing game. There was a vast array of creatures to see, an interesting evironment to explore and an artificial reef to build. Any game with leafy sea dragons scores highly in my book.
Japanese console RPGs. Nothing like a one-hour game that's extended to 40+ hours by including tons and tons of irritating, unavoidable random encounters.
There's little more tedious than having to trudge through endless maze dungeons where you can take at most five steps before having to waste another couple of minutes fighting some stupid creature that popped out of nowhere. Add to that mechanics that were outdated twenty years ago (seriously, compare the early Ultimas and the latest and greatest out of Japan, and after you've scraped away the candy-coating you're left with a far less enjoyable game) and you're forced to draw the conclusion that they're designed for lobotomy victims
Seriously. In fact, I think Satan created this game--which had no random encounters but huge completely empty areas one was required to wander through until you met a mysterious set of conditions, as a "be careful what you wish for!" joke on everyone who hates random encounters.
Not played all of the games mentioned in the article, although I agree with the author on those that I have. A few further suggestions:
Halo (single-player): sure, the multiplayer's fun, but single-player Halo seemed to basically amount to killing vast numbers of identical monsters over and over again with a couple of samey weapons, while moving between identical rooms. Fun for the first 30 minutes, then unadulterated tedium.
Unlimited Saga: Normally, I love Squaresoft's games, but god only knows what they were thinking with this one. Hideous interface, soul-destroying combat system a plot it's hard to care about and dismal visuals.
Resident Evil: sure, it may have pretty much single-handedly created the Survival Horror genre, but when I finally got around to playing this, I was struck by just how tedious it was and how much backtracking it involved. The Silent Hill games and Forbidden Siren are far superior.
Gran Turismo 4: Prologue: I'm sure the final product will rock, but why anybody would want to spend more than 15 minutes playing this is beyond me (yes, I am just bitter because I spent 20 quid on it).
UFO Aftermath: I bought this expecting an update of the old X-com formula. Instead, I find they've gutted out everything that made the X-com games enjoyable and not even updated the graphics significantly.
All of these would have to be in my top 10 most boring games. Other dishonourable mentions - bad, but not quite bad enough to make it into the top list - would include: Aliens vs Predator Extinction, Zelda: Wind Walker, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Unreal 2 and all of the Tomb Raider sequels.
Unfortunately, when some nincompoop license holder thinks it is a good idea to create an adventure game based on his license, he invariably seems to give the assignment to a game developers that know squat-all about adventures. And thus, we see "Star Trek DS9: Harbinger". Not only a terribly boring and unattractive game, but also the game with the biggest, saddest, slowest, and most irritating 3D maze it has ever been my misfortune to wade through.
I stopped playing "Myst" when I got in the underground maze, came to a dead end, and realised I had to track back for at least 10 minutes to get to the right path again. Can't say Myst is a boring game on the whole, but in the maze it sank to the pits.
Strangely, some games that were fun to play 15-20 years ago are terribly boring nowadays. Who remembers "The Bard's Tale"? Who enjoyed it? And who would loathe to play it today?
I really really really REALLY like driving around a track for an hour or two and get the same car prize as I got the last two times I played it.
GAH!
For years, I've wanted something with a deep plot, decent graphics, meaningful characters, and a good music score.
I've had to live with Final Fantasy et al to be the best I could get in this regard. Yes, what I wanted was a TV show on my playstation. If you ever look at what it takes to make a TV show and make it work, you'll see you can't just blow millions on it and make it, the competition is too fierce, especially in the japanese animated market. But there is a great niche market in video games for this type of thing.
Yeah, if you go into XS thinking you are going to be doing more than playing an interactive philosophical book, you will be bored out of your mind. But how could you NOT know that this would happen, considering every review out there pastes this fact all over the place.
No, XS isn't boring, it's a book, and a pretty decent one at that. Treat it any different, and you'll be disappointed.
IIRC, you had to return home on the hour to proceed to the next step. It's one of the more obscure things that I might recall from the game (don't ask). If you return too early, you get the change in plans (but the game might eventually give up with early returns and let you finish anyway), and if you return too late, the game ends.
I haven't played that game in 15 years (and that's a good thing). Thus, details are naturally very sketchy.
Well, it is a perfect emulation of a standard Barbie doll - frequent changes in clothing done very rapidly, along with the Ken doll appearing after the final change...
Then again, Barbie dolls aren't that interesting anyway.
I remember seeing full grown adults playing it for an hour at a time, trying to beat their old juggling highscores.
Back before the PSX became the de facto standard for 'traditional' RPGs, all you really had was King's Field to sate any RPG desire. Then came...Beyond the Beyond! I know a ton of people that bought it (including my roommates and I back in our dorm) solely because it was the first traditional console RPG out for the PSX in the US.
Big mistake.
The story was incredibly uninteresting, the characters bland, the dialogue pure tripe, and the dungeons were huge, but every room looked the same. The graphics were listed as "3D!!!!" but in reality, battles were done by 2D sprites on a 3D plane - as the camera "moved around" the 3D plane, the sprite would of course not move until the camera moved 90 degrees, when a different sprite would be loaded and placed there for that character instead.
But the worst was the battles. The encounter rate was higher than I've ever seen in an RPG. In the giant mazelike dungeons, it wasn't uncommon for there to be battles every 3-4 steps you took. And in the battles, they had this system they called "Active Battling". In the instructions, it said something like, hit the button right when you're attacking, and you'll do more damage...or hit it when they're attacking you, and you might defend. At least, that's what it said. In reality, it seemed like mad (and tiring, if you didn't have a turbo controller) button mashing was the only thing that triggered it, and even then, it did so randomly, making the battles not only boring, but tiring, too!
Ugh. What a letdown. Whomever at Sony greenlighted that one should have been shot.
T.
To each his own, of course. The purpose of this point is not to convince you that you really do like backtracking (you don't), but to explain why I do.
The reason I like this aspect of Metroid is how non-linear it can make a linear game feel. Whenever you get a new ability in Metroid Prime, three or four missile packs as well as the next big powerup become accessible. What's great is the obsticles were right out in the open... the game teases you with spider tracks for the first hour until you get a spider ball, for example. Get the spider ball and the world opens up all over the map (though to a very small degree near most of the tracks). Backtracking (to me) doesn't feel so tedious when you're trying to get to five points on the map at once, and you don't know which one is the "important" one.
All of the new GBA Metroid games (and Metroid Prime if you don't explicitly go into the options and turn it off) have an annoying hint system, which highlight a portion of the map and tell you to "go here next". This completely ruins the otherwise open-world feel that all previous Metroid games enjoyed. Playing Metroid Prime with help turned off is a must, and certainly you should pass up any of the new GBA offerings.
I've actually got a copy of "Tail of the Sun" in my entertainment case just a couple feet from where I'm sitting.
I don't think it deserves to be called the worst game ever. It wasn't great, but it wasn't completely without merit either.
Theoretically, the idea of the game is to collect food, build up your civilization, invent weapons, etc. Eventually, you are supposed to hunt down hundreds of Mammoths and collect their tusks. The only way to win the game is to build a tower of them tall enough to reach the sun.
In actuality, the game was more about exploring and discovering Easter eggs. The world is HUGE, and without a map or compass, it can be a bit hard to find things, but there are giant stone monoliths, caves, creatures, lakes, oceans, hidden islands, things to hunt, aliens, monstrous fossils, Stonehenge.. The list goes on. You can literally spend hours exploring, always finding something new.
It gets boring after awhile, but it can still give a good 10-15 hours of play without running out of things to do.
-Calmiche,
Truly.
I liked the original Xenogears, even in spite of the text... that... read... like... this. The storyline was cool and there were lots of evil characters from the outset, only to be bested by one of them, and then we're left to question whether or not said character was really evil in the first place. And I liked how the intro cinematic was just this disconnected, looming scene until about three-quarters in the game when it finally begins to come together.
But Xenosaga was a pithy, monumental mess of a game. It lacked any of the interesting characters from the first game. It bastardized the battle system from the first game. It recited its storyline like it was some demented gospel. And it took itself so damn seriously, I honestly laughed. The best part is getting e-mail from this futuristic world, talking about nonsense like AGWS converters, that the game takes for granted I'm supposed to instantly understand. I guess that's what the huge built-in encyclopedia is for. Lame.
The Bass Fishing games..
I guess to me "real" fishing is more about being out with friends and drinking beer than it is trying to outwit a fish.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
G4/TechTV had a poll for the worst video games ever, and Shenmue was near the top. Personally, I love the game, but I can understand the reason a lot of people don't. They're expecting a greater action/story ratio.
I like to think of Shenmue as a good mystery novel, whereas most video games are like an action movie. It's easy to enjoy an action movie, as there is (usually) not a complex plot to follow, and there are enough action sequences to keep you interested. A good novel is harder to get into than an action movie, but can be a lot more rewarding in the end.
I feel your pain brother.
My cthonic wifette is nothing short of a "Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life" farming scientist. She has tracked everything in the game. The only people with better notes on the lifecycles, productivity cycles, and farming mechanics are the development guys from Natsume's Japan offices...I think even they would be surprised at the "otaku" level to which my wife has plumbed the highs and lows of the game. Her biggest complaint is that you can't hug/kiss/anything with your wife, while you can talk to and and nuzzle your cows/horse/sheep/goat/chickens. That's kinda messed up. The only thing guys can hope for is that there's a "Sex-rated" version of the game somewhere where you can bed any of your three potential wives (Nami would probably shag the farmboy rotten and leave before he wakes up, Muffy would look like death warmed over and sneak away, and Celia would would be so cute you'd automatically push the A button labeled "Sex" again and again--forget the crops we're working on "sister"!). If the game featured even some highly edited sex, or the ability to hug your wife, it might be less of a downer. You get more love from your livestock.
Expect to shell out another $40+ when they come out with a "female protagonist" series of Harvest Moon games.
I find the damn thing to be the digital equivalent of ether...puts me right out. Even two litres of Diet Coke are worthless against a farming sim for me. I'm an adrenaline junky (RTS/FPS/SSXn/Combat Flightsim) gamer, so anything that doesn't have me shaking the windows with subwoofer amplified battlecries and storm-god channeling which has the neighbors peering into the windows to see if I'm killing everyone or breaking stuff has a sedative-effect.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
I kinda liked the game right up until that forklift part. You could ignore all the myriad sidequests for the most part, although I was raising the kitten because it was on my way to and from everywhere.
But the forklift work scene? Gahh. If you quit when you get there, the game's not half-bad. I pity the fool who spent hours "working" in that warehouse just to get to the end.
Actually, even though I hated the gameplay of xenosaga and eventually sold the game halfway through (too much running down empty hallways), I kind of liked those stupid cutesy future emails and pseudoscience. The one I remember the best was how there was a bug in the nanotechnology that produced buildings, and therefore there were locked "Secret Rooms" throughout the entire game. Like they needed a stupid sci-fi explanation for every convention and cliche of the RPG genre.