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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?
Don't think this is flamebait because I know a shitload of people love this game series, but for the life of me, I can't see the appeal of the game.
To me it's nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet.
(not giving one iota about soccer is also a factor I think)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
In fact, we're at a loss to remember any of this game's specifics.
But yet, its apparently one of the boringest games of all times. Now that's journalism.
Having played this game, I must say that I didn't consider the dungeons to be especially boring, although it might be that my expectations were just really low :p
Anyway, whereas Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (SNES) is definitely one of the best RPGs, the mind-numbing music (not like any GB games ever had 'good' music), among other factors, of this GBC-sequel eventually turned me off.
So, in retrospect, I don't disagree with calling Lufia: TLR a 'boring' game, although I would like to blame this partially on the platform it was made for, and the limitations this imposed.
Something like the PSX version (Lufia III, cancelled) might (should) have kicked much ass.
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ok, I don't mean to get nintendo fans mad at me, but I always found the Metroid games very boring. Sure, when you get to explore and fight bosses they're a total blast! But it suffers from something that I believe to be the biggest drag in any video games, backtracking. Even with a pretty face like Metriod Prime, backtracking is still backtracking, and doing things like trudging from one point to get an item or flip a switch, only to have to go back through the same area a dozen times or so doing fetch quests, it get's very old and repetitive.
Theory of flight?! I'll teach you the theory of fist!!
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.
Some of the later (especially superhero-oriented) beat-em-ups on the Sega Genesis were awfully boring.
I eagerly purchased Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety, expecting it to be as enjoyable as the original Maximum Carnage, but it was drudgery.
The Tick is quite possibly the most boring game ever, with hours and hours of monotonous fighting. "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas," indeed. Falling into pits and being forced to play the same miniboss/cutscene challenges over and over was worst of all.
Most of the Batman games for Genesis were horrid. Batman Returns had mundane combat, mixed with some absurdly difficult timed jumping. The Adventures of Batman and Robin had extremely boring combat, except that the occasional tit-for-tat enemy who gave as good as he got and required a bit of movement in the vertical plane. Batman Forever had great motion-capture graphics, but frustratingly repetitive combat.
Other bad Genesis beat-em-up games include Captain America and the Avengers, the second X-Men game, and the last 2 16-bit Shinobi games.
You couldn't pay me to play Superman or The Incredible Hulk. I actually used the latter cartridge, along with a broken copy of Sub-Terrania, to prop up my desk hutch during my freshman year of college.
Early Genesis beat-em-ups could be quite fun. I loved the Golden Axe and Streets of Rage series, Altered Beast, and the original Maximum Carnage. I find most of the "good" games to still be playable today.
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
What? No Shenmue on the list?
I never really understood why people actually liked this game. It was boring as hell, as most of the "gameplay" was dialogue and wandering around, and the only real moments of interactivity were mini-games (the two classic Sega arcade games were more fun than the rest of the game!), a poorly executed battle system, and Dragon's Lair-style sequences that while being very nostalgic, aren't very fun.
I stopped playing the game when I reached that point where you get a job carrying crates with a forklift. That was completely uninteresting, and a complete waste of my time. I don't play videogames to do fake work. I have enough work in real life, and in RL I actually get real money. What the hell is wrong with the people who made this game ??
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.
Too much damn collecting, but DK64 had some excellent boss fights...maybe Rare realized the dichotomy, because once you beat a boss you could select the fight from a menu off of the title screen. So I give them some kudos for that.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
sega
bass
fishing
Well I know that it is not always true that "worst = most boring".
But, Barbie for the C64 can definitely qualify for both! Get this:
Ken calls Barbie, asks, "Would you like to go to dinner?". She says "sure", and he replies, "Great! Pick you up in an hour." So she drives around and goes shopping for clothes for dinner, gets her hair done, etc.
Ken calls back, "Barbie, plans have changed! Would you like to go to the prom? Pick you up in an hour." She drives, shops, Barbisizes some more.
However, when she gets home, Ken is again indecisive: "Barbie plans have changed! Want to go to the movies? Pick you up in an hour"
Finally Ken makes up his f*ckin mind and they goto whatever final destination he chose after Barbie has spent several hours answering to his every whim!
Not only is this the worst game, but what does this teach our children? To be ready for whatever demands Ken makes, not having any input for the decision, and making unreallistic demands like getting ready for "a Prom" in an hour?!?
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?
This was one of the most boring games I've played in a long, long, long time.
Sure, it looks pretty. But the gameplay consisted of me basically holding down the 'A' button to shoot.
I got through the first level, and to the first bossfight. Basically I circled some big ship for about 10 minutes until it finally blew up.
Then the next level I was flying up some river, and went past some butterflies- then the butterflies started to attack me in some way, so I held down the A button there. Then finally two giant caterpillars started attacking me.
I didn't have the patience to hold down A long enough to see what was next.
No reason to lie.
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.
I always thought Peasant's Quest sucked even worse than Rabbit Algebra. It only featured 16 colors and 2 bit mono internal PC Speaker sound.
Peasant's Quest
Also, Strongbad reviewed the games he would make if he could. They all sucked too.
SB Emails
Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
I remember seeing full grown adults playing it for an hour at a time, trying to beat their old juggling highscores.
Where the myst option? There was..... well I don't know whatthere was, I got sick of it after five minutes and gave up. Donkey kong on the other hand I played throughfor quite a few levels (damn loyalty to the old country games!)
I like muppets.
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.
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.
Maybe not as boring as some of the games listed here, but am I the only one who thought Halo was completely over-rated? Seemingly endless sequences of room after room that looked the same?
Am I crazy?
Ever wanted to pick up trash in exchange for points to play mundane minigames?
Of course, if you really wanted, you could also just wander around the park in a dazed attempt to figure out where you're going or how to get somewhere else. Humanity has yet to accept this ultimate challenge.
Glog!
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.
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Windows 95 Hardware Detection is scanning your system...
on the XBox. I could never find anyone on Live to play. I think I was the only one stupid enough to buy it.
Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.
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
No one has mentioned ET yet? Or were boring games only invented in the last decade?
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.