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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."
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."
"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.
I assume you meant Custer's Revenge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer's_Revenge , for those who haven't had the displeasure of seeing it)
It really is a classic bad game. But I wouldn't say that its "so bad it's funny", nor "so bad it's good"... Its just a bad, bad, game. Maybe if the premise wasn't rape it could have come closer - but it seems like without the rape it would be "shit", instead of "disgusting shit"
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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
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.)
"detective" alone is a counterexample to this article. Link - plays in frotz and other Infocom game interpreters.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It was only the translation that was bad in Zero Wing. The game itself was OK, though not great by any means. This is what you're after.
Are you insane?
Loom was one of the all-time great games!
Technoli
It's abandonware now: http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=4973