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There Are No Games So Bad They're Funny
Clive Thompson examines an artifact unique to the medium of videogames: the hatred of 'B' games. Unlike in television, movies, or even books, there doesn't seem to be room in gaming for appreciation of offerings so bad they're good. "Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad. I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. Or think of it this way: A bad game is like being stuck in traffic. You've got goals, you've got places you're trying to get to, but the system won't let you. So you just sit there grinding your teeth. Lousy art can sometimes cause joy; lousy games can only cause stress."
I guess they never went to videlectrix before.
This "Company" Spoofs all the B-Games of the 80s and 90s. Games with horible (even at the time)
Graphics and Sound, Pointless Game Play. Poor direction or goals... But they are fun to play just
because they are so bad.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The Deep Scan mini-game included in the Sega Saturn version of Die Hard Arcade was so bad it was good. And strangely addictive...
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2006/02/28/penn_tel.sh tml
"Years ago, I'd heard about a mythical unreleased videogame developed by Penn & Teller for the Sega CD and 3DO. The game was supposed to be an oddball adventure game, with some cruel magic tricks and minigames thrown in for good measure. This Absolute Entertainment press release from March 1995 sums it up nicely.
The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point."
'nuff said
i think the premise of this story is wrong.
there aren't many "b" games, because "b" games are often buggy and unplayable. bugs are not fun or funny or tolerable. I don't crash out of a game and go "haha that was so bad it was fun". no.
even with the worst movies, they still "work" because all you are doing is watching them. there's no technological requirement. it's not like the movie film breaks while watching or anything.
it would require an unusual development house to create a game with no programming bugs and reasonable graphics engine to support a totally shoddy gameplay that allowed for humour and enjoyment.
The AI in some games really is funny. Scorched3d for instancs, when you play the "easy" mode, has bots so dumb, they often shoot themselves. However, this isn't really a "bad game" as the higher modes are more challenging.
How about the Street Fighter II series? Certainly, at some point, if not from the beginning, it was so bad -- it became a joke. I have recently started up a game of this, not because it was fun, but it was a great laugh -- its infamous.
Of course, no discussion of B games is complete without talk of Cluster's Revenge...
The reason for this is pretty simple. You still watch a bad movie in the exact same way you would watch a great movie. A bad game, however, has gameplay and controls so awkward or downright frustrating that you are immediately sick of the game.
A great example of a b-game is Time Killers.
Just because the author never sits around and laughs at really bad games, or plays them with friends in social settings, they shouldn't assume no one does.
Ironically enough, this story gets posted just days after I ordered the dreamcast "classic" Illbleed, for the express purpose of having some friends over and mocking it roundly as I force them to play the first level or so. (I have some very fond memories of when it was inflicted on me, so I figure it's time to pass it on.)
Another good example is "detective" from the interactive fiction scene, which was actually bad enough that someone made an MST3K version of it, where as you play, Tom Servo, Crow, etc, mock it along with you. (Ahh, the joys of a text based interface.)
There are definitely game equivalents to Manos: The Hands of Fate. I submit that the author just hasn't looked hard enough.
Yet. The thing is... most of what you're talking about that makes a bad game is bugs. Things crashing, things not working the way they're supposed to. The thing about B movies (or at least the "cult" hits) are that they are functional as movies. The bad games that you are probably thinking of don't even function properly as games. As the games industry matures, I'm sure more and more games will be less "broken" and actually function as games. At which point I'm sure we'll see tons of playable, crappy, cult hits. In fact, IMO Myst is the first of those BAD cult hit games. The game sucked - sorry to everyone that likes it, it was an interactive photoCD that destroyed the point and click adventure genre. The only reason it was successful at all was because it was the CD-ROM killer app. But at least it worked. (Also, the original version was done in HyperCard - does anyone even know what that is? It came free with System 7 on Macintosh).
I disagree with this assertion. As a counterexample, I offer the game simply titled "Stealth" for the NES. This is a game where your stealth fighter attacked a group of enemy fighters whose numbers increased by 2 per mission. It started at 4 and went, as far as I can tell, into infinity. The so-bad-it's-good-ness came from the mechanics of flight. Your fighter managed to fly just as effectively straight up into the air, straight down, upside down, etc as it did in any other position. But the best part was the combat; all you had to do to avoid enemy fire was turn around. Much like actual dogfighting, your enemies could only damage you if you could see them.
Sewer Shark was NOT fun. I remember playing that game for so long, getting everything perfect, until I took ONE wrong turn and exploded on a wall because of it. Then I was treated to a full motion video (it was Sega CD after all...) of some guy telling me I'm a loser and a screw-up, then it's game over. No save game, no continue password, NOTHING.
OH! How could anyone forget Night Trap? That game is so awesomely bad, I could play it over and over. In fact, I'm going to see if I can fish my copy out of my collection... ugh... and a system to play it on.
"Are you a bad enough dude to save the president?"
"This guy are sick!"
"All your base are belong to us."
Cases of B-Gameplay being funny are harder to think up (partially because we don't have a strong vocabulary to talk about gameplay) but I have fond memories of watching my friend play Super Mario Bros 2, float behind Wart's head, then proceed to throw vegetables at him from that location where Wart couldn't hit back. Or watching a big fearsome undead boss in a Final Fantasy get killed by a Phoenix Down.
Though yes: "bad in a good way" only happens with certain kinds of bad. When the controls are painfully bad, that sucks. Though similarly if the lighting is terrible on a TV show, that doesn't make it campy, that just makes it an eyesore.
are belong to us?
Bad gameplay will never be fun but there are plenty of games which are renowned for having parts which are so terrible as to be amazingly great.
There are *numerous* games my brother and I have played over the years that are so bad they're hilarious. "Awesomely bad," I believe is the term.
:-(
.. "her" health.
Sure, games can't hope to achieve the level of greatness in this regard that films like Commando and Showdown in Little Tokyo or American Ninja 4: The Annihilation have reached, but there's definitely some gems that stood out over the years.
Exhibit 1: Captain America and the Avengers for SNES
This game has some of the most horrible dialogue and "voices" I've ever had to endure, but it's so bad it's memorable. The combat, and some boss fights (Juggernaut for example), is an atrocity because of the poor collision detection and lazy animations. And, it's impossible to beat. But hey you get to play as Captain America and Iron Man!!!
But really this game crossed from "bad" to "awesome" when I showed it to a friend, touting it as "one of the worst games I own." That day, it glitched like never again -- all the normal enemies had 10x the hit points they usually do, and all the bosses had only 1 hit point. But just as the 3rd boss arrived, "chopping" a tree down with his arm-scythe even though it was just a sprite temporarily hovering over a tree stump and the trunk/stump were different colors, the game froze
Exhibit 2: Rise of the Robots for SNES
AMAZING graphics, AMAZING music. And the sort of gameplay that you can make jokes about to this day. It's a fighting game, but Player 1 can only use 1 character! This lame cyborg who has awesome moves like "punch," "crouch and punch," "kick," and "jump kick." I swear the Turtles from TMNT III: The Manhattan Project (awesome game) had more moves. Player 2, on the other hand, could use any of the "evil" robots from the single-player mode. They also had like 5 moves, but at least they looked cool and.. there was more than one of them. Player 1 *could* use any of those robots, but only if one entered a cheat code. Yes you had to cheat to use more than 1 character in a fighting game!! That game was awesome... we'd have matches where we'd say "ok you can only use 2 moves this time to fight" and so we'd use jump-kicks and crouch-kicks only or something. Oh yes, and the final boss had a move that took off 1/2 your life, and a move that recovered 100% of
Exhibit 3: Amagon for NES
Nobody has actually beaten this game except for a friend of mine and I on emulator. It is right up there with The Adventures of Bayou Billy when it comes to ATROCIOUS game design. There's a million cheap deaths, the lamest enemies (and main character) I have EVER seen in a game by a huge margin, and typos in level descriptions because nobody has gotten to most of those levels anyway. The music is pure arse, and the ending? You get a big black cock in your hand. Or is it the handle of a ship steering wheel... hard to tell with the way they cropped the image. Given the rest of the game, it's probably a cock.
So yes, those games are so bad they're funny, and when I think of them I don't think "omg worst experience ever" I think "hahahhahaha." And that somewhat redeems them.
I like basketball!!1!
The single-player of that game may as well have been a "B" kung-fu movie. (It included one in the cutscreens, complete with beer, pot, and shrooms.) All in all, I think it's probably the most unique game I have ever played. The only real problem I (or anyone else I know) had with it was the complete lack of dedicated server support. You could host your own dojo, but it had to be a listen server, which is ubergay (even gayer than writing "uber").
This guy obviously never heard of Wisdom Tree.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
When you think about a bad movie thats so bad its good, usually its the plot or the acting thats bad. Now if you want to compare this to a game, don't compare it to the game play mechanics; instead you should compare it to the plot (and perhaps character animations).
What about Seanbaby's NES page? Old Man Murray? Something Awful? Not to mention countless other sites I'm forgetting or don't know about.
I can't believe nobody has brought this one up. It made me laugh so hard I could barely breathe.
v iew.html
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/driving/bigrigsotrr/re
definitely not safe for work. but brilliant. http://cinemassacre.com/Movies/Nes_Nerd_videos.htm l
my sig is an honor student
Have you ever played it... It's horrible. Disgustingly horrible. But when you start playing multiplayer, it's a riot to play because you get to watch other people humiliate themselves in order to not lose. A good example of a horrible game being fun. Watching other people submit themselves to misery.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
anyone else love this piece of crap? gets me in the same way as a b-movie anyway.
I remember HyperCard! I used to write bad games in it all the time! It was how I taught myself to code!
Hypercard is an excellent engine for doing a game like Myst. Myst was basically a 3D rendered slideshow presentation with a story. Hypercard is just that...it was marketed as a presentation software, not a development environment. But it was presentation software that had an entire programming language to drive it...it was a wildly popular cult software development program for Mac. I honestly wish that Apple would resurrect it...it was simple enough that I (as a 10 year old child with no software development experience at all) could learn and write pretty complex stuff with nothing but the software, a 200 page manual that listed commands, and a couple of programs I downloaded from other people to see "how they did things".
Clearly the person who wrote this has never played this gem...I suggest it strongly
Because of the Internet and the ...questionable... use of advertising, it's not about the games per se but the stories of how those games came into being. Exhibit A: Daikatana, the story of which has been recounted in depth many times as the overreaching hubris of John Romero ("JR is going to make you his b**ch" is still probably the most extreme use of advertising *ever*). Exhibit B: Duke Nukem which is a story told in a million blog and Slashdot posts, the real story will probably be a very interesting read (and maybe Amazon will do a package deal of the book and the game).
If anything, companies should embrace this more, as GFPS (generic first person shooter) of the month comes and goes with maybe a weekend rental from Blockbuster, there's years of blood sweat and tears from the developers only to have their game disappear into the mist of time, not memory.
Though I would argue that Atari's E.T. probably walks away with everything; it was so bad it's funny (for about 1 second), and the story of its creation also makes a good story (6 weeks to write, millions of carts ordered, Arizona landfill, fall of Atari, etc.)
Definitive Contrary Arguement: "Sword of the Bezerk" Dreamcast...
:P
The game shipped with a bug which made the models rotate randomly (Speed as well as direction) during cut sequences, horses, carts, people, arms, legs etc. Imagine a guy talking about the incoming monster hoard while windmilling his arms and having his head repeatedly fall INTO his chest.
We were all rolling on the floor dying with laughter during each cut sequence, the plot of the game was terrible the gameplay trite and boring. But that bug made it an amazingly fun (and funny) game...
I recommend the dreamcast just for that game... Admittedly I had a pirated version but the bug occured in the retail release as well.
Now THAT was a B game
Maybe it's not as "bad" as Zero Wing in terms of insufficient development, but considering more recent events concerning the main character, the premise(rescuing little girls) is hilariously wrong! I figured that it deserves amention here.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think they're looking at the wrong things when deciding what makes a "B-game". You can't consider the "mechanical" aspects of the game (e.g. gameplay). A B-movie still plays in a projector, what makes it a B movie is the content not how well it "runs". The same should apply to games, the mechanical aspects of the gameplay should not be considered; rather the game's content, the plot, the characters, the locations, the graphics, etc.
To that end I think the original Resident Evil fully qualifies as a B-Game. The play was innovative and well done for the period, but the voice acting was so bad it was laughable, as were some of the numerous horror movie clichés.
I'd consider Need for Speed: Most Wanted a B-game as well. Obviously the racing element of the game doesn't apply; but the cutscenes, with their silly faux-urban actors, are so bad you can't help but enjoy how preposterous they are.
What about DX2:The Invisible War?
The programming is great and it doesn't crash, yet you never stop laughing, beginning with the loading screen ["The Future War on Terror"]
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Marky Mark, INXS, and Kris Kross.
Terrible games, but funny in a "I remember what FMV looked like in 1992!" way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Spa ce_(computer_game)
You got the video with it and everything. :)
Although I've never played it, from what I've read, this game was quite bad (especially the traslation). Yet it is very well known amongst gamers as being such.
For shame, slashdot, for shame. Clearly, all your base are belong to me!!
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
Honestly, we were dying laughing as my friend piloted Superman through hoops, ran up to a villain and blew on him, then flew threw _yet more hoops_. Even today referring to flying through hoops cracks us up. It was probably funnier since he had only rented it, instead of blowing $50 on that pile of crap. The blockbuster employee even tried to talk him out of it.
... it's just that they are not "B games" because they're "so bad that they're good", they are "B games" because they were some publisher's second-string lineup that no one *expected* to be any good.
Consider:
Katamari Damashii was a low-budget, barely translated, non-marketed, import that Nameco dumped straight into the $20 bargain bin when they released it to the US. They probably figured that since there was so very little work to do to localize it for the US (No voice acting... just translate some text.), that if even a handful of copies sold to the extreme Japan-o-nerds for $20, they'd make a few extra free bucks. The release of Katamari Damashii very much followed the pattern of a B movie... in the olden days it would be the first movie shown on the drive-in before the frature attraction, and now it'd go direct to DVD without ever seeing a theatre screen.
Katamari was a "B game" in pretty much every sense except being bad... It turned out to be so uniquely, spectacularly, and unexpectedly great that people forget, now, that in the US it was intended only as a second-string and second-rate release.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
From Lucasfilm.....worst game *ever*. Took about 70 minutes to finish, and it was a full price game. Bad story line, hokey graphics, and wayyyy to easy puzzles...
discussion. I found it barely playable when I first got it, due to a horrible controller layout and mediocre graphics (for a 360 game), but the mindless slaughter of zombies has definitely grown on me. Nothing is dumber and funnier than smashing undead skull with a weight set. It's also interesting because this game is actually trying to be a B movie.
People in bamboo houses shouldn't throw pandas...Jesus said that! -Ninja
Sorry - I trump everything with the above (and I had the misfortune to be working for Alligata when they released it). Fishing for the C64 ... you sit...and wait...and wait...and wait...then the rod wiggles, you hit a key and catch a fish. Then wait... Truly truly awful - the best bit was the box cover, with the photo of the happy nuclear family sitting excitedly around the C64.
PONG
Dave 2 - by John Carmack (I think)
Scorched Earth
Think
There was a $5 bin game called Think, great puzzle game for early gaming. Decent graphics, decent level of complexity in puzzles. I wouldn't call it a B-Game, but I've never met anyone else who's heard of it.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
But the ZX Spectrum had many 'B' games, simply because it was so easy to write and publish at the time.
"Gulpman", anyone?
How about "Pedro"?
I once bought an adventure game only to find that it was text only and quite boring. I didn't laugh. I can't even remember the name (but side B wouldn't load... disgraceful).
I don't know whether you'd class Kingdom of Loathing as a "bad" game that's good, but it's basically a web-based MMORPG that is drawn with stick figures. It's pretty funny and addictive, but it's intentionally low-quality and funny, so does it count?
I mean... For just one example, this was so bad it was good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
http://nerdcartoons.com/
Fairly self-explanatory.
Redneck rampage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck_rampage
How about the Street Fighter II series? Certainly, at some point, if not from the beginning, it was so bad -- it became a joke. I have recently started up a game of this, not because it was fun, but it was a great laugh -- its infamous.
You're kidding, right? The game that largely launched the 2D fighter genre in America? There were similar games before SF II, but it was the first of its kind to reach the kind of popularity it has when it was out.
You could make the argument that someone along the way its sequels became derivative and boring compared to games like the Tekken series, but the original SF II was a classic.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Check the wikipedia entry , it lists several modern alternatives to Hypercard.
Circumcision is child abuse.
...watch out for bad apples masquerading as oranges. Damn that ING Direct guy....
God Hand is a pretty badly made game that seems to have found some degree of a cult following since it found its way to the $20 bin.
Sosumi Corp for YOU!
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY
Watching my wife play "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider".
It may or may not be a bad game -- but she never got ANYWHERE with it. Renamed it to "Kill Lara", and played it for laughs (how many ways can Lara die?)
A PC game called "Baby". Babies being thrown out of a burning building - catch them or they go "splot" on the ground. Disgusting, but strangely, fun. (vintage, CGA, early 80's). The silly banana game packaged with MS BASIC -- not funny.
Sims. This one I get a laugh over. You get to have a "life" in a computer. Modeling life outside the computer. Why? It may not be a bad game, or maybe it is. Who's to know? Anyway, I laugh whenever I see someone playing it. Of course, I have the urge to see someone playing Sims inside of Sims...
Same deal for "Second Life".
I guess if its "bad", its "good". So the problem is one of definition.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I'm gonna go with Last Battle for the Genesis on this one. Beefy guys with huge bodies and puny, puny heads standing at the end of monotonous levels whining about "I want to be a hero" and other such comedy gems. It's almost worth playing just to see what stupid thing the characters will say next.
See also the review at Something Awful.
Hakai Oh: King of Crusher.
It's an obscure Japan-only PS1 release. It is also HILARIOUSLY bad. From what I can tell, the story line revolves around your John Q Public character being bitten by some alien fly as a child. Then later in life, the fly returns. Said character then relapses, goes into a rage, and starts breaking everything, while his wife and child flee the house. And then, you break stuff. Seriously, that's it. But it gets worse (or better, depending on your point of view). Your character corners about as well as a city bus, desks and furniture explode into flat polygons as you "attack" them, trees tip over like cardboard stand-ups, and the "growl" that your character emits upon completing a stage is the icing on the cake.
Seriously, if you have the means to obtain and play Japanese PS1 games, you need to try this one to marvel at its awfulness.
Bad game - Mocks your intelligence.
The XBox360 game Crackdown is a B-rated as they come.
Fun as hell sometimes, but so over the top and bad I felt like I was playing a white Midwestern teen boy's idea of the "Ultimate Justice" after he watched too many lone cop movies.
So the programming of the game, and the art may not be "B", but the content sure the hell was.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
For the snes was released...Super Noah's Arc 3D, yet another doom engine clone. And it was amazing for how hokey it was. The premise was running around levels throwing fruit at goats, cows, and other barnyard animals. When you hit them, they "fell asleep"
"All your base" isn't so bad it's funny?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Their site is a joke -- literally a giant Flash page.
(I'm assuming it's Flash -- on Konqueror, I just see "start plugin", so maybe it's Java...)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Custer's Revenge
You play a naked General Custer with a huge erection, running across the desert avoiding arrows so you can 'molest' an Indian woman tied to a pole.
Technoli
dude.
Night Trap
Kriss Kross: Make My Video
Custer's Revenge
Stroker
I could go on...
I may have heard this wrong (and things may have changed since I heard it), but I seem to recall that there are two pricepoints for games in Japan. Something like $20 for "minor" games (Katamari, for instance), and the usual $60 or so for, say, MGS, FFXII or Pro Evolution.
Anybody know?
ceci n'est pas un sig.
There was a game for Intellevision where you were Dracula and you had to walk down the street and knock on their doors. When they came out you chased them around the block trying to bite them. Hilarious.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Whenever I think of a game so bad that it's funny, I think of Life's Battle. Since I can't do justice in saying how horribly funny this game is, I'll just provide a link to SomethingAwful's stellar game review.. Enjoy!
Both tech and story can be bad without a game actually crashing or being unplayable.
The tech was actually just a bit above Doom at the time, I suppose, and the engine was (is) rock solid. But the gameplay was oddly unbalanced -- just enough to be ludicrously funny. For example, the Pistol is laughably weak (surprise, surprise), the chaingun and such are actually reasonably balanced, but there are also just downright weird weapons (like the shrink ray -- shrink your enemies and then step on them), and ludicrously overpowered weapons (like the RPG -- boom -- and the Devastator -- four rockets per second).
It was playable as a deathmatch game. The weaponry was horribly unbalanced, yet just enough thought was put into it that you could usually figure out how to kill someone even if they did have a stupidly huge advantage for the moment.
It also had bots, for a fake multiplayer deathmatch. These bots had the flaw of being entirely too accurate -- the pistol, weak as it is, does fire pretty quickly, and it only takes something like four or five shots to kill an unarmored player. So, you could get all the weapons you want, but a bot is probably going to kick your ass with a pistol -- like fighting against a player with an aimbot, only worse.
The plot was just as bad -- it openly admits to being a parody of sorts, in that it's pretty much just an alien invasion like any other. But it also has hilariously bad off-color jokes and one-liners. Duke's one-liners are, in fact, so bad they're funny. For example:
When the player blows up several enemies at once:
"Ooh! That had to hurt!"
"Come get some!"
When picking up the RPG for the first time:
"Hail to the king, baby!"
When walking up to a pinball machine with a Duke Nukem theme (called "Balls of Steel"):
"Don't have time to play with myself!"
When walking up to a stripper and pressing the "use" key:
(handing her a bill) "Shake it, baby!"
(She does show him something, but it's also maybe three pixels. Remember, this is barely better than Doom.)
At the beginning of one random level:
"It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all outta gum!"
Upon seeing the boss of the second episode:
"I'm gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!"
And he follows through. After finally killing the guy, there is a cinematic, kind of decently rendered 3D for a Doom-ish game, in which Duke walks up to the alien corpse, rips off its head, tosses it aside...
Then drops his jeans (camera angle saves you here), sits down, opens up a newspaper, and starts whistling the theme song.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While the Nobunaga's Ambition series certainly was groundbreaking, and introduced a generation of gamers to the "Warring States" period of Japanese history, it had some problems. When you raised the tax rate REALLY REALLY high, your popularity would go so low that it would "wrap-around" going from near-revolt to ecstatically happy in a short period. And if you left the tax rate up that high, it would do it again. And again...
The AI wasn't too great either. The game compensated for this by turning up what we referred to the "dick factor". Playing at difficulty level 5 was a exercise in masochism that normally didn't take that long. It was routine to have computer armies with lower training levels route armies 10 times their size. Good times. Good times...
I think the problem here is that the author's definition of a B game is a little off. I think what the author refers to as B games are more like D games, in that they just plain don't work. The programming is buggy, the game play is quirky and frustrating and overall just not fun to play at all. When I think of a B movie, I think about awesomely bad or totally strang and bizarre story lines, bad acting, poor production quality (like grainy film quality, boom-mic or other objects/people in the frame). This is all what makes the movie funny. A game can be perfectly playable (little to no bugs, non-frustrating game play) and still have all of the B movie qualities. I think "Zero Wing's" "All your base are belong to us" comes to mind for most of us. How about really corny cut scenes. The storyline of the game could be something so stupid and pointless that it's hilarious (think something like "Dude, Where's My Car" or "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" as a video game). A D-Game is something that was poorly implemented and should never have made it to the store shelves. A B-Game is implemented relatively well, but the designers were smoking some really good shit.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
You play Custer of the US Cavalry. You're goal is to screw a native American woman who is bound to a stake. Meanwhile other native Americans shoot arrows at you.
Given the actual history of Custer it would certainly seem like such an event would be considered rape. Sure the box didn't use the word but even the imagery there is of a scared native American girl and a leering perverted looking Custer.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
In my head, I file Just Cause under this category. The absolutely anemic "content" of the game is outweighed by insane character personalities and a complete disregard for any and all laws of physics. The overuse of motion blur, and the hilarious nature of the glitches I've run into strike me as the video game equivalent of zippers and strings in monster movies.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
I sought out the infamous penn and teller game too. And I have driven a bus to Las Vegas, but crashed on the way home. I got one point for that.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
They do have something in common, though: BAD ACTING. And when you think about it, there are games that contain such bad acting that it rivals even the worst(meaning best) B movies. The FMV cutscenes were so terribly bad, it almost became an extra incentive to complete the levels and advance the "story". And then there's Resident Evil:Now that's priceless...
For "just so freakin' bad" I nominate Daikatana.
OTOH, for "kind of cheap but it knows it's bad and has fun with it," I nominate Duke Nukem.
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I've never played them, but I laugh my ass off watching videos of all those "nintendo" games for the cd-i. Maybe the player (and certainly the developers) had to suffer for it, but the result is very entertaining.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Leisure Suit Larry is the definition of a B-game and still has enough of a cult following to spawn new content every few years. It had limited support from Sierra and quickly had a purely underground cult following push it into the forefront.n _the_Land_of_the_Lounge_Lizards#Origin
Even Sierra management was unsure about how the game might be received and released the game without any publicity or advertising budget. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_i
Anytime my friends and I sit down to play World of Warcraft, it is definatly a "B-game" experience. On its own, the game is rather boring, but when you have friends together to make fun of everything in the game while you play(mystery science theater style) the game becomes entertaining.
I can't believe no one mentioned BattleCruiser 3000 yet. of course, the funny part came in reading the authors usenet posts and the flame wars they generated, but still. If you consider the whole experience part of the game, then it was so bad, it was great.
I really hope Derek Smart replies to this. It would be just like the old days!
Gotta go, some kids are on my lawn!
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
stupidest game ever, it was for the original nes. I think it was not even an "authorized" game or whatever. It was really bad.
Perhaps he means the original Street Fighter game, where you can only choose Ryu or Ken? That game is the first thing that comes to mind when I think "so bad it's good" actually. Even it was ahead of its time, but with the incredibly muffled voice samples, the awkward controls, and choppy animation it's quite a stretch to think it was ever a good game.
I picked it up, a Doom clone - awesome, on my 486-33, it was about 15fps - ugh, I couldn't play it.
About 6 months later I got a DX4-100, effectively 3 times faster (and back then, 3D cards didn't exist) - guess what.
About 15 fps, terrible terrible code - some of my pals still laugh about that game to this day.
The game has aweful graphics and sound, and somewhat monotonous gameplay (level grind until you can reach final level of the dungeon, slay Werdna, win).
Still, it spawned 7+ sequels and it has some level of infamy as an insanely difficult game. Consoles almost never have very hard games... they're marketed to and designed for kids, so a lot of development effort is made to ensure that all the puzzles are easily beaten by someone in elementary school. Combination locks that you're supposed to figure out can easily be wardialed instead. Orb-and-slot locks will be color-coded. And so on.
Not wizardry. Wizardry was happy to kill you and not give you an easy way to recover those dead characters. You lose the whole party? That's nice, make up another party, go down to the area where the others died, and pick up their corpses. Oh, and only bring 5 people in this party... the dead people take up a slot! No mid-adventure resurrection, of course... gotta go back to town for that.
Playing the game and losing characters was an enormous kick in the balls. And it wasn't like it was hard to lose a character, either. You died at 0 HP -- and you didn't get very much to start with). You died when your characters got hit with a death effect -- and death effects worked a very high percentage of the time and lots of enemies had them. You only felt like dying when hit with a level drain effect, which, again, was very common. Since it might take an hour or so to level, dropping two levels due to being STRUCK by an undead was kinda crazy.. and the game was loaded with them.
At the same time... the game had a bit of a following. You can easily find it on ROM sites, etc.. So it's at least one "B" game that gets/got enjoyed.
I agree that the game was influential in popularizing the genre, but my point was more towards your latter assessment. The many derivatives of the game were so tactless that I consider them to fall into the "B" camp. Surely, at some point, with all the variations it must've seemed campy even to many of its most die-hard fans!
While it's true that something really really bad is hard to play, there are plenty of games appreciated for how bad they are.
Check out Crapterpiece Theatre on the 1UP show (a video podcast), which is an MST3K style show for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs
Enough said
Awesome! I'd forgotten that one.
Except I believe the actual quote is: "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?"
Another one with awesomely poor dialogue is House of the Dead 2:
"No-one's gonna get away with this!!!"
Read Pynchon.
'nuff said. But: I'll add more:
Exact same game as Mortal Combat and Primal Instinct, but with different character skins and level graphics.
Leprechaun, and maybe Tattoo Assassins.
Agreed. Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting would fall into this category.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
I can think of one game that is both Bad and funny.
You can't have a 'game so bad it's funny' really unless parts of the game are actually 'funny' (as in well made), and most likely cutscenes or certain animations.
Games are more like rollercoaster or amusement themepark rides then movies, in my estimation, once you've experienced a game you don't usually want to go back to it unless there is a compelling reason (multiplayer, etc).
I am error.
If all else fails use fire.
I hear that Takeshi's Challenge was so bad that it was funny.
Although to be fair, I was sitting around watching my roommate play that awful, awful RPG rather than playing it myself.
Jesus, that game was hilarious. It was a God awful first gen Sega Saturn Fighting game. One of the characters had a move where he tossed his opponent over his shoulder, and since one ring out won the match you could beat the entire game by stepping backwards until you're at the edge, and then doing a throw. Then there was the girl who's sliding low kick animation was just her jump animation turned 90 Degrees. Jesus that game was awful.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This site has bunch of "bad" games. Maybe they aren't true B games, because they're bad on purpose. They're parodies of simple stupid flash games. You may think you recognize any given game on there, but the rules are tweaked to purposely slip you up, to poke fun at you. Once you catch on, they can be hilarious. But if you don't 'get' it, they just suck.
Personal favorites aside from Don't Shoot the Puppy: Don't Make Mommy Cry, Get a Life, The Road Less Taken.
Rebecca: It's so bad it's good.
Enid: It's so bad it's gone way past good and back to bad again.
- God Hand ...
- Any THQ or Bandai game for the SNES or Gameboy
- Some Mortal Kombat games
- Stubbs the Zombie
- Redneck Rampage
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Has anyone ever heard of crap game competitions? That's where you find such games.
You just got troll'd!
Never, ever underestimate the power of Big Rigs. I've never played it myself, but I can't help laughing at the Wikipedia article every time I read it.
Meta will eat itself
I think there are plenty of playable games, with bad storylines or graphics that are awesome, I think Jumping Flash makes a good example. The article however is about games with bad gameplay or bugs. And ofcourse nobody wants to play those. I don't want to watch a movie that gets stuck halfway either!
2005 or so, as I recall was an excercise in frustration it was almost funny.
Anyone who played NFS, just had the odd invisible wall to deal with, but you could mess
with the AI/Players (rearend them, PITT, T-bone).
Try that in TD and it was like a nitemare: every car but yours ran on rails and every
car but yours was made out of solid granite (a la Carmageddon).
Time trials was fun, but got old fast. W/o Ai, boring, with AI frustrating.
Tbone another car, you go flying, try to PITT a car and you go flying, rearend a car
and...you guessed it...you go flying.
Dunno if TD Unlimited fixes this, I'm afraid to try after the same crap across 3 to 5
versions that supposedly fixed these horrible gameplay flaws.
Besides, FlatOut kicked ass (IMO/E) and FO2 came close to the original (bungie AI sucks,
why they used that cheap trick/cheat I'll never know. Wasn't in the first one).
Interesting topic, but games I've never heard of kind of loses a bit of meaning, but
games I have heard of and maybe played (and almost pounded the kbd in frustration)
makes for a more interesting topic.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
coding is fast but...feels too loose (variables arent typed at all) and as such preformance is terrible. TERRIBLE
Bottles.
I received this game for the NES one Christmas and it was so bad that it was funny. From the helicopter scenes to the base action to the poison gas. I tried to play this game every six months or so but it never really improved. The thing that makes it funny is that it was so damn serious. This was life or death stuff, just impossible to play. I may have to get an emulator to play it just thinking about it.
We willna be fooled again!
Codename Eagle multiplayer was so bad it was great, great fun. From that, came BF1942. Q.E.D.
What about Line-Kill Spirits? The idea that you have to take panty shots of your foe to keep her from regenerating is just...bad. Cheesy bad. Yet somehow fun to think about in a it's so ridiculous it's funny sort of way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-Kill_Spirits
Rybread Celsius. Can't find a decent link, but he's author of several IF games that may be counterexamples.
Play Command HQ online