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

Metroid

[Korgrath]

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.

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.

Genesis Beat-em-ups

[dstillz]

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.

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.

Shenmue ??

[IntergalacticWalrus]

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 ??

Worst videogame of all time

[veganjay]

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?!?

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,

Halo

[BigBadaboom]

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?

Universal Studios: Theme Park Adventure

[Mirkon]

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.