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?

Comments

a c64 classic

[Lu Xun]

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.

Aquanaut's Holiday

[Kris_J]

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.

My vote goes to..

[antime]

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 Add to that mechanics that were outdated twenty years ago (seriously, compare the early Ultimas and the latest and greatest out of Japan, and after you've scraped away the candy-coating you're left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

Mazes

[Flyboy Connor]

Old text adventures had mazes. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the maze, the more boring the adventure. Later on adventure makers caught on, and either delivered games without a maze, or put in "a maze with a twist".

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?

Re:Mazes

[Sigma 7]

Old text adventures had mazes. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the maze, the more boring the adventure. Later on adventure makers caught on, and either delivered games without a maze, or put in "a maze with a twist".

While I can tolerate mazes within text adventures (technically, the entire map is a maze), pushing things to the extreme will get annoying, such as the infamous "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."

Not only that, but some of those text adventure games (such as Adventure) also had a time limit on how long you could play, by either having a limited amount of battery power for your lamp, or by some other limitiation.

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.

There is a solution for a maze - when you enter a node for the maze, you hear an audio sound that gives a hint on the direction you are supposed to go. It's possible to learn the sounds from the world with gears, but can be learned through "trial and error" within the maze.

However, this maze is still annoying due to the long transition times, especially since there is no indication on whether or not you are on the right track at any point. (The audio alert that I mentioned doesn't count, since it incorrectly assumes that the player is always capable of hearing such information.)

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 wouldn't exactly loathe that particular game, but I tend to prefer other game genres over RPGs because of the amount of time spent levelling up your characters to ensure that they can defeat the end-game boss. The only issue would be the lack of map and the encounters that pop-up randonly, but that is not too much of an issue considering the maximum complexity of the engine at the time.

(BTW, I heard that one player managed to get an unlimited number of songs from his bard. Don't know how it happened or how to reproduce it, but the infinite healing songs basically made his party invulnerable.)

I wouldn't loathe other old games, provided that there aren't any annoying puzzles or mazes. As long as the game is designed properly, there is no problem playing it at all.

Tail of the Sun

[Calmiche]

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,

Re:Gotta be...

[Kyouryuu]

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.