Difficulty-wise, The Lion King on SNES. This game shattered my childhood.
Made at a time where video game rentals were popular so they had to make games impossible to beat in 2 or 3 days.
I can say it wasn't any easier in the Megadrive/Genesis.
The game was fun to some degree, just required an unfair time investment. The final fight was a memorably bad experience though. I was like eleven years old when I made it to the end and swear I spent almost a full hour clawing at Scar before I figured out that I wasn't actually doing damage.
Also very difficult, but fun on the game gear!
I could never get through the 2nd ostrich riding sequence in the 2nd level as a kid. The rest of the game was fine, though, once I used the level select to skip ahead. Turns out, it was because my eyesight was shit and I couldn't even see the correct obstacles on screen (I was trying to avoid the branches, but no it was pink hippos and bird nests the whole time, so my timing on the double jumps was always off). Replaying the game a couple years back when Disney re-released it alongside Aladdin, I found it still tricky, but doable.
Battletoads.
same tbh
I forgot how many times my siblings and I tried to beat that
Superman 64 was a hell of a mess
Seconding this one. I was like 11 years old and it's the first time I can remember being disappointed when getting a game. Went from like Mario 64 to OOT to Banjo to Superman 64 and hoo boy what a drop off.
Same for me. It was my first flop I played and boy was it bad.
You didn't like flying through 150 rings?
There are way more rings than that, and they're actually the best parts of the game. It gets so much worse in the levels without rings. Awful combat, terrible puzzles, inconsistent framerate, and thoroughly unclear objectives.
Oh, and everyone's favorite: escort missions!
escort missions
Clark Kent must really have not made much money as a reporter if he had to walk the streets at night too
Hard disagree. You just need to play it long enough for the Stockholm syndrome to kick in. Once it has its claws in you, you can’t stop playing it. Trying to figure out what makes this garbage puzzle box tick.
Custer's revenge would have been an acceptable answer as well.
It had misogyny and racism to push it over the top for worst game. ET was just an unplayable mess that disappointed kids my age. Custer's Revenge is a borderline hate crime that should have gotten everyone involved fired.
PacMan on the 2600 was pretty disappointing to say the least.
That shitty mobile version of SimCity.
Took a beloved childhood classic (the original SimCity) and took a giant free-to-pay shit all over it.
The app store is a massive pool of free-to-play shit.
If you haven't given pocket city 2 a try yet I highly recommend it
Ooh, neat. TY!
There are probably worst games I've played that I don't recall, but there was a Roller Coaster Tycoon knockoff for the Playstation once. First impressions were "I bet this is going to be as customizable a sandbox game as the computer version". Nope. It's like the actual Roller Coaster Tycoon, except the parks are tiny, so much of the land is unusable, everything costs a bajillion dollars to make, the parks get demolished every time you "succeed" (since it was level-based), and you get absolutely no warning before a game over screen just drops in on you because you took out the wrong loans. Even being a real park owner probably has less checks and balances than it.
oh shit you just reminded me Theme Park World for the PS2. I think I both loved and hated that game
That was the one.
Mostly any modern mobile game. Piles of shit with p2w and gambling addictive mechanics that aren't fun but stressful...
ROTFL
A bunch of early access survival crafting games on steam in the early days of early access. One was trying to be like starship troopers and it got like one update
Starforge?
Yup that sounds correct. That game taught me a good lesson about early access.
Oh god, survival crafting games were a dime a dozen back then. Though I am eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of Satisfactory next month so clearly I never got my fill :p
The factory must grow, whether in 2d or 3d
I'm going to say Battletoads. The game was mostly pretty fun, until you got the jetski section where it was biologically impossible for a human to react in time. The only way to get past this level was to perfectly memorize the sequence of buttons to push.
Sonic 06. This is coming from someone who eagerly wanted to be optimistic about the game, especially given how, on paper, it seemed very reminiscent of the Adventure games. I purchased an Xbox 360 and the game to try it out, to see if it really was as bad as people say it is.
It was...very sloppy. There are glitches everywhere, to the point where a significant amount of deaths will occur due to them, such as wall running physics just randomly breaking, causing you to fall into pits of lava, having to hit the jump button 10 times just so Knuckles jumps off of a wall every time, and even when not considering the glitches, the controls just feel awkward and clunky, Sonic himself is slow and the physics leave a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the story much more than what the gameplay had to offer.
I've always maintained it would have been an amazing game without the glitches. In a way I can appreciate it for what it nearly was.
Back to the Future on NES. All I remember is a series of pain in the ass mini games having little to nothing to do with the plot. One of them was called "That Sinking Feeling", where Marty apparently had to platform his way out of his own stomach.
And E.T. of course, fuck that game.
Desert Bus.
This game is pain on purpose.
Yeah, can a game even be bad if it's excellent at what it intends to be?
This reminds me of a method of trying to evaluate art in an objective way. Basically you ask yourself 3 questions:
What is this trying to do?
Does it succeed in what it's trying to do?
Is what it's trying to do worth doing?
If the answers to 2 and 3 are "yes", then it's probably a good work of art. This helps remove the subjectivity of "do I enjoy it?" when evaluating a work.
I would say the answers for Desert Bus indicate that it is indeed a good work of art. It succeeds in being a monotonous parody of a video game which makes a political statement about what games would be if they lacked any fictional elements or conflict. And I think the statement P&T were trying to make with this game was definitely worth making. Plus, we know from the amount of people who play it as a streamed challenge game that there is some desire for a game like that to exist.
I agree with you completely, and I'm glad the game exists. It's just objectively the worst video game I've ever played.
The fact that it is talked about and marathoned decades after release mean it's good art
I tried to play it but it was just a bus lol. never found out what that was about
Mario is missing. Imagine being a young kid thinking this is Mario 3/4 (can’t remember where it fit in) and it’s a platformer not realizing it’s an educational game when you got it. What a pos, greatest let down of my life.
Same with Mario's Time Machine. Such a waste of an interesting concept.
I loved both of these games as a kid.
I wouldn't say worst, but maybe greatest difference in expectation vs reality - "My Time at Portia".
Cutscenes and voice acting were janky. The UI felt like it was originally an MMO and feels odd for a single player game. The gameplay loop felt tedious and seemed to disrespect the player's time.
Maybe I needed to give it more time, but for a game that I thought had generally good/great reviews, it wasn't clicking for me.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES. Ghostbusters was more disappointing, but I've at least kinda figured out how to play it over my lifetime. WFRR I'm clueless on. I think it's some kind of point and click, but I'm not really sure. There's a part where you have to call a real life telephone number to progress.
😄 The phone call was just to get some simple bonus tips, nothing really necessary.
What killed me was, to swap items, you hold Select and use the arrow keys. It's soooo unintuitive!
Finally, I know what the phone call does!
Maybe I've been too hard on Roger Rabbit NES....
By the time I got around to playing it, the number was deprecated and I definitely wasn't figuring out how to actually beat it! I guess I just assumed it gated me from the end, when it was probably some other esoteric thing.
Does ET count?
I think it's like the canonical answer to this question so yes
Growing up, my neighbor had that on Atari. We could never figure out how the hell to play that game.
Top Gun for the nes. I never actually finished the first mission. I could beat Mike Tyson but that aircraft carrier kicked my ass.
Superman 64.
Weeks and months of hype (the era of print gaming journalism), Blockbuster stocking 100 copies on launch day for "guaranteed availability" etc.
Then I finally popped the cart in, and this thing was so bad it just defied all logic. Horrific controls, shitty graphics, unclear user interface and objectives, terrible draw distance. Timed level segments and insane difficulty.
There might be "worse" games but I have never been more disappointed in a release than Superman 64.
And don’t forget the oddly weird multiplayer.
Resident Evil 6, on PC.
I normally try to play a game for a minimum of 10 hours just to give it a chance in case it grows on me, but this was just such a piece of shit I couldn't even reach half that...
Aw man, I recently bought RE5 and 6 from Humble Bundle just to see how bad the games are.
RE5 is bad, but in a somewhat enjoyable way. It helps that Chris Redfield's biceps are as big as his head, which adds to the accidental funniness.
I agree with everything. I hated RE5 at first but it grew on me after a while. With mods of course. It has too many small annoyances for me to fully enjoy it vanilla. Just hell to the no.
RE6 is just a badly designed game:
horrible pacing and balancing, such as with wave-based combat and outright spamming the player with enemies at that, causing high ammo usage whilst also simultaneously making ammo scarce;
enemies being invincible until they attack you. (Seriously, that pissed me off; even if I knew an enemy was actually an enemy and not just a dead body, my bullets would go straight through them. Literally. No hit detection until they initiated combat, whether in the next couple seconds or later when you double-back in the following scene.)
The stupid UI. Way too much form, not even close to enough function.
On the other hand, it was rather amusing seeing Leon fucking wrestle-slam a zombie like he's in the WWE. Lol.
Edit: Added to a clause to make the follow-up point clear(er).
Looking through the lens of relativity, I'd have to say Witcher I. The fact that the fucking masterpiece that is Witcher III and not-amazing-but-definitely-worth-a-playthrough that is Witcher II both stemmed from the comically bad dumpster fire that was #1 is nothing short of a miracle.
The franchise *should* have died at #1, but I'm sure glad it didn't.
I think that's maybe a bit harsh compared to a lot of the games mentioned here. Witcher 1 definitely has a lot of problems compared to 2 and 3 but it had a lot going for it as well. Sure the combat was broken as hell once you got all the spinning moves and it was super sexist with the women as trading cards thing. But the story and world building were still fun and Geralt was well characterised.
It's not a great game but it did well enough to get them the sequels. Definitely nowhere near the worst game I've played.
I think that's maybe a bit harsh compared to a lot of the games mentioned here.
For sure - by "looking at it through the lens of relativity" I guess I failed to specify what I was holding it relative to - where my brain's at W1 as a starting point, and the quality of W2 and W3... Relative to other trilogies that actually did well, Witcher's starting point is hot trash. Like, a game that bad doesn't generally go on to have good sequels, but the degree of improvement in both W2 and W3 is fucking astounding.
W1 still has probably the best writing and script of any of the three games. I definitely prefer the third for gameplay but W1 is just an artifact of the awkward time it came out, when there was a lot less consensus on how 3rd person action games controlled.
I remember playing Witcher 1 and being thoroughly underwhelmed by it, so I'm glad to feel validated here instead of just having to label myself as a game troglodyte
Christmas Day, we just got a PS1 years after everyone else. My brother and I are ecstatic to play. My mum and sister are smiling at our reaction, since they went to the game store and asked the guy what a good game would be to play.
Formula One '98. We played a lap each, and then turned off the console. I can still recall the commentary "it looks like he's stuck in the kitty litter!"
*hands shake*
I looked up some gameplay on YouTube and it doesn't look that bad. A bit slow but that's all
What was so bad about it to counterweigh the "wowwwww it's 3d !!!11!" effect ?
just a super boring game for two 9 year olds to play. It would be like if she got us a golf game.
Adult me would probably really enjoy both games
They can't all be Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge.
As a former 9yo I would have liked a Formula One game
Different strokes for different folks
Different strokes for different folks
That's doubly true for the golf game.
Worst that I can recall playing was Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero. You had to hit the B button to turn around. It was frustrating as hell.
I remember buying Duke Nukem Forever in a Humble Bundle, a bundle that I had virtually every other game for the price. I remember only paying $1 and I gave *all* that money to charity.
I played DNF. I still felt robbed. To this day I haven't completed it due to how terrible it is (if my memory serves me, I've been minaturised and I'm driving around in a tiny car? But the controls are awful and Duke now seems like a Trump like character whose charm is entirely devoid in modern times. It was already wearing thin back when it was released, too).
Hah, i played full price for that game.
I pre-ordered it for Playstation.....
Did you learn your lesson?
That's pretty early in the game.
Fucking Randy "greaseball" Pitchford fucking up another game. If I see Gearbox touch anything, I'll presume it dead and buried. They haven't done anything decent since 2015 (Homeworld Remastered Collection).
The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.
It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.
This is not what you are talking about, but reading this reminded me of the "Super Noah's Ark" rom I downloaded in high school which was a reskin of the original Wolfenstein where all the animals were restless meaning that you (Noah) would need to shoot feed at them so they could take their naps.
Super Noah's Ark is on my rg35xx. It's amazing.
My cousin had a couple Bible themed NES games. Spiritual Warfare seemed decent.
There used to be a store called Heaven & Earth that sold all kinds of Christian stuff for Sunday school teachers or whatever plus books, cheap Bible toys, etc. She bought it there.
I don't even remember all the trash games i tried to played just to delete them after few minutes.
But the ones being remembered are instead the biggest disappointments, games which were supposed to be great or were supposed to be improved sequels of great games.
In this cathegory trashcan lid medal goes definitely to REBEL GALAXY 2. I played first part like 10 times and only ever wanted more of it, but 2nd problem was not that it was bad or not (it was though), but that it was entirely different game.
Dishonorable mentions for few more:
Dragon Age Inquisition for being a solo player simulator of a boring MMO instead of a awaited resurrection of series and even sub-genre
Marvel Midnight Suns, again for being supposed to be next X-Com but in reality being poorly optimised card game
Pandora: First Contact, supposed spiritual successor to Sid Meier Alpha Centuari. Well it was spiritual in sense i wanted to get drunk on spirits because no chance to play this turd while sober.
Starfield, i don't think i have to comment on this
Less specific but every Dune game since Emperor: Battle for Dune and probably every Dune game in the future as long as the unFuncom have the licence
Gladius: Relics of War: for a game that had so much development and DLC's it's still shallow as puddle. Which, along with Pandora above leds me to:
Everything published by Sltherine i played maybe except Armageddon in good way and Pandora in bad way. Somehow nearly every good idea for a game that this company make into reality turns out to be the mediocriest of mediocrest game ever.
EDIT: oh and the one i tried to forget so hard but other poster made me remember it: "X-Com" Chimera Squad. No, just fucking no, the pathetic death of series after glorious predecessor is just too much.
I really liked Midnight Suns :(
I got to play video games with spider man and be in a book club with Captain marvel.
The deck building was pretty good. I wanted more cards and more excuses to use more heroes.
The fact that there's no miss chance on attacks is subtle but a real improvement over the genre standard. And using the environment was a lot of fun, and very genre appropriate.
I tried to play is earnestly after Epic gave it out for free, but while gameplay indeed is actually quite good, three factors are still bad:
Disappointment, this is the game from X-Com developers, while there is no next X-com game for years after the last one was not only a commercial hit but genuinly best game in genre, the only thing they did is the Chimera Squad which was extreme disappointment. It's really no way around that.
Optimisation really sucks, comparable games are working smooth for me and this crap does not and never was no matter what i tried
Marvel banter, i HATE it, capital letters. I don't hate Marvel universe but holy shit they should shut the fuck up sometimes. Even the pompous style of original comics was better because at least it was unintentionally funny unlike this pathetic crap served nowadays.
Pandora: First Contact, supposed spiritual successor to Sid Meier Alpha Centuari
Seconded. I repressed all memories of this game until now.
I wrote that essay back in 2021, and three years later time proved all of it correct. This game straight up killed the series.
As somebody who likes Tetris but essentially had no idea about PuyoPuyo until I came across that comment, that was a brilliant yet depressing read. I'm currently busy with life but wishlisted some PuyoPuyo games for this winter, just because that article outlined such an interesting game. It's kind of hard to find something for current platforms in Europe though...
If you want functional online, the Switch version of Puyo Puyo Champions is the only title worth bothering with. Specifically Switch, other platforms are ghost towns.
If you want singleplayer content, 15th Anniversary, 20th Anniversary, and Chronicle are all peak. None of these games were released outside of Japan and they're older titles you'll have to emulate, hence all my salt about the state of things today, but at least they do have fantranslation patches.
So there's a sale now and I got champions on steam for like 2,50 euros. Let's see what kind of ride I'm in for, thank you again for the input :)
What a great article!!
So, I'm a huge Game Boy fan. I'd heard about how good Puyo Puyo is, so I got a Japanese copy of Puyo Puyo Tsu. From what I can tell it's a great port. But I struggled so much getting into it! And then I read your comment...
Puyo Puyo Tsu is hard. It’s really damn hard. I’ve witnessed many new players struggle with even basic 3- and 4-chains, nevermind making the real big chains the game mode demands of you. And unlike Tetris where casual players do not need to know fancy T-Spin setups just to get started and play, you really can’t get far at all in Puyo Puyo Tsu without at least some understanding of chaining fundamentals.
...and I feel justified. 😅 What do you recommend is a good way for a new player to get into the game? Something to read, a video, or something else?
At one point I was working on a video where I'd build a chain step-by-step and overexplain my thought process on each piece. But that sits on a large mountain of unfinished projects and ideas. I'm retired from the game now because, well, I can't continue justifying my competitive energy towards a game that just has no future as long as its publisher hates it, so it's never going to get finished.
Omikron the Nomad Soul.
It's david cage's worst game and I have no idea how he tricked David Bowie into collaborating on it. Also, listen to the music.
edit: whoops, got silvagunner'd. Here's the real track.
I liked that game.
The controls were horrible, but the story was okay and it featured a lot of new game mechanics for the time. They tried too much really. It was more of an experience than a game.
Im sure there are games that wouldnt even work so i technically didnt even play them but ill list a couple of games that i tried playing, hated, and uninstalled almost immediately
They both had the same problem.
Days gone and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I tried to force myself into enjoying rdr2 because it was supposedly that good. For the first few hours i kept asking myself when does the game start? When do i actually get to play?
Days gone i only made it maybe an hour before i quit and uninstalled.
I want to play a game not watch an interactive movie
RDR2 is very much not for everybody. It is intentionally tedious. It's the kind of game you sit down and play for at least 2-3 hours every time you play it because that's just how long it takes to get anything done. You aren't fast traveling. You aren't doing things instantaneously in a menu. Your time as a human being is an in-game resource. If you're in the middle of nowhere and your horse dies, a ton of your shit was being carried in the saddle; you need to walk your ass to the nearest town lugging that saddle, vulnerable to wild animals and robbers. It's a game about getting things done with your own two hands at the turn of the century when that was becoming much less valued. It's a game about subsistence. You could have an easier, more prosperous life, but at what cost? At whose cost? It's a game about nature and living in a natural world as a natural being, criticizing the transition into industrial exploitation of our fellow natural world and natural animals, including natural humans. It's not a rootin' tootin' spaghetti western adventure; it's an interactive classic American novel that can occasionally have funny or fun moments depending on your tastes. I fully understand that it's wasn't a game that you or millions of other people enjoyed, but I think it's wholly unjust to label it a "bad" game for that. It did exactly what it set out to do, and evoked impactful emotion in sharing its message as intended for the people who wanted to be open to it. It's successful art, but not all art is for you and not all art is for me. You may have gone in with the wrong expectations for it. I think it really sucks that every rockstar game since the early 2000s seems to be marketed as "GTA but ___" because the Red Dead games and LA Noire are very much not GTA. They're 3rd person open worlds with similar engines, but that's where the similarities end.
If you ever try it again, come in with a similar mindset to wanting to sit down and watch The Godfather, not The Avengers. There's a lot to get out of it if you just focus on the story and the characters and the beautiful setting. Enjoy the honest work, and lament the shootouts and heists.
There were parts of RDR2 that I adored and parts I loathed. Riding around exploring, hunting, and discovering the environment was a joy. I put a ton of hours into the game just doing that.
The quests were a nightmare to me. Ride to location A to get the quest. Ride to location B to start the quest. Ride to location C as part of the quest and if you dare to wander off the exact route or try an innovative solution and you FAIL
All that work spent making you feel like you’re living the character makes the ending so much more poignant. What a beautiful game.
I'd recommend trying RDR1 before RDR2, but then again that might make you hate the tutorial section RDR2 had even more lol
RDR2 is excellent, but it almost feels like it's trying too hard. RDR1 was just a classic IMO, literally revolutionary for its time. I thought it would be just GTA with horses but honestly it felt so much more than that, they completely nailed the atmosphere and everything else about it. I still play RDR1 sometimes these days.
Paper Mario Sticker Star. Moreso disappointed rather than hate, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole RPG genre (when I played it for the first time, I was 6, and thought all RPGs were like that) until I played the TTYD remake a few months ago
I used to play it just because I was so confused by it I thought there was something I was missing.
No. It's just a horrible game.
My uncle gave me an Atari 800 when I was a kid. Came with a stack of old carts and games.
One of them was E.T. Which was one of my fave movies at the time.
Wrestslemania x8 on the gamecube. Didn't even have a frigging campaign mode...
myself and everyone I knew were massive fans of the N64 WCW and WWF games, but I had played the PS2 Yukes! games at friends houses and always kinda hated them. Ended up getting Wrestlemania X8 because I somehow got to actually go to the event at Skydome, and even with that huge bias still thought the game was shit and barely ever played it.
Wrestlemania was fucking wild though, it fell on the same day as St. Patricks and everyone there was drunk as shit, tons of fan scuffles and rowdiness, as a high schooler was a total blast.
..It has to be Drakengard. What a thing. I literally couldn't finish it, and I'm close to finishing Final Fantasy XIII. I have a high tolerance, but good LORD is it a slog.
Probably Call of Juarez: The Cartel. I wanted to play the entire franchise back to back, but it wasn't being sold on Steam, so I had to hunt down a copy on some key reseller. Boy, do I see why it's not on sale anymore. runs like absolute shit, incredibly buggy, cheesy as hell and with some pretty questionable game design choices. Still, it was somewhat entertaining in a "so bad it's good" sense, and it ties into the previous games in a fairly interesting way, so I don't regret playing it. It was certainly an experience, but it's a very bad game by pretty much all metrics.
I turned that shit off after 30 minutes, it was so bad. :D Most regrettable purchase of my life.
Now, I am not going to count games that I knew were bad beforehand but still deliberately played to see how bad they were, I am going to assume the spirit of the question implies starting a game and the realization of how bad it is slowly kicking in.
One game that came to my mind was "Conspiracy: Weapons of Mass Destruction" on the OG Xbox, but there's probably worse games I played but have forgotten about.
Master of Orion III. A 4X game for PC that had had all the fun carefully eliminated during development. It was like playing a spreadsheet.
My greatest shame is that I actually bought it twice because years later I couldn't believe it had been that bad and risked a bargain bin copy. It was exactly that bad.
I was happy that the next release was pretty good.
Moo2 forever, though.
Agreed.
I bought Haze for PS3 the day it came out even after reading a lot of mid to negative reviews, both because I really love all three TimeSplitters games and wanted to support the devs, and also out of a feeling of 'how bad could it really be?'. It was incredibly boring, graphically underwhelming, and I ended up beating it the same day I bought it. Tried to trade it in and even on release week EB offered me an incredibly insulting amount, like $7 or something, and I still took it.
There's a lot of bad games that I've played, but I'm going to go with any Simpsons game pre GameCube era (except for the arcade game). So many janky controls and games that didn't utilize the Simpsons IP well.
I used to love Simpsons Wrestling, because I didn’t know any better. I think I was too young to really grasp the concept of a “bad game” yet.
Its still fun to spin up in a nostalgic sort of way.
Disregarding the absolutely unplayable and broken, I think it's a toss up between the 2008 Alone in the Dark or Final Fantasy 15. I'm more inclined towards the latter because I haven't played the former since release. It's just a godawful RPG, if you can even call it that, the game basically plays itself, has no depth whatsoever, the open-world is meaningless and empty of anything interesting. Not to mention the story is both dogshit and a confusing mess nonsensically split between different DLCs, movies and god knows what else. Definitely the worst big budget RPG (again, if you can even call it that) I've played so far, it's borderline insulting. The worst of it all? It was my first Final Fantasy and it was so bad it killed any interest I had in the series.
Oh man, that Alone in the Dark was a huge pile of shit. Probably the worst I've played.
Pile of shit is putting it lightly. At least it had some cool fire effects for its time.
I also didn't like AitD. The tank controls, static "3D" screens where you overlooked something if you didn't walk into every corner and a new screen presented itself...
Oh wait, you're talking about a remaster? I'm talking about the original...
I haven't played the newer ones, but the series appears to have been going through an identity crisis since like, after FF10. If you are able and willing to try again, go for the classics.
Quest 64. It wasn't even funny bad, it was just boring.
Since 1985. it's the same answer, this shit on the zx spectrum. Can't believe it got published.
Edit: won "Best Original Game" at the Computer and Video Games 1983 Golden Joystick Awards, fuck me sideways
Imagine Software had made a name for itself, too. It was reasonable to see that name and expect some quality.
Also, it worked markedly shittier on an unemulated speccy. This was the same year that saw the arcadey pinnacle of Jetpac and this glitchy creepy grindfest that challenges only patience and tolerance to noise gets itself a golden joystick for originality because of using lolrandom toy sprites.
Edit: I'm actually still mad 39 years later they made me fiddle with a screwdriver to load that shit
Cauldron 2 for C64 you start playing and find out you have no clue how to progress the game.
Bubsy 3D. The controls were awkward, the platforming was horrendous, and the levels were nonsensical.
Flatout 3. I just checked on steam, and it's tagged as "psychological horror". Being a fan of the first one, and still having spent lots of hours playing the second one, I was totally not prepared for the utter monstrosity of the third one
Never played 1, but I really liked 2. I didn't know 3 existed until now, and I'm having a blast reading the reviews. I think I might have to buy it (with the intention of refunding) just so I can experience the horror firsthand.
probably that Tom Sawyer game on the NES. like, wtf even was that?
The Lion King.
Was that game bad? I just remembered it being hard as hell
It taught me about failing even when you try your best. Which kind of sucks when you don't have any other games.
Hard as hell, and unfair. Plenty of jumps powered by seemingly inconsistent mechanics that need to be done perfectly, otherwise instant death.
Played it recently as an adult after beating some other retro games from my childhood for the first time. In Lion King, I made it one level further and put the game down again...to level 3.
Well, I had gotten to Level 3 as a kid, but I was able to clear the Ostrich Run in Level 2 much more consistently after some practice. It was a fluke as a kid.
The game has 10 levels.
For the Sega Master System?
"Worst" by technicality - I actually had a lot of fun with it for several minutes:
At the time I tried it, it worked "perfectly" in Wine (as well as on Windows that is)
Big Rigs
The player controls a semi-trailer truck (a "big rig") and races a stationary opponent through checkpoints on US truck routes.
I still don't understand what a stationary opponent means in this context
it doesn't drive. It stays parked at the start. You're not really racing it.
Simply put, the game was unfinished, it didn't actually have any gameplay.
And it had a sequel, somehow, that was maybe 2% less fucked.
The opponent never moves.
My first thought is The Fortress of Doctor Radiaki for DOS.
A game I never played but is still memorable is early 2000s there was a game in Babbages in my local mall called "Prison Tycoon" that had a cop beating a black man on the box.
RUSH’N ATTACK for NES. I remember buying it as a child and being devastated that it sucked so bad.
The name and the intro really put in the work to get you excited for some high-octane action.
There are a couple console games and one in my steam library that absolutely
come to mind. As for which I think is worse is definitely up for debate because I think I dislike these 3 equally, even if I can only remember why I dislike two of them.
Don't remember the exact entry, but I borrowed a Dynasty Warrior game from my brother (who didn't like it as far as I'm aware) for xbox360 and something about it I just didn't like at all. Then there's Worms Blast. For a spin-off of worms, that from what I remember just feels like a worse bubble bobble style game, I was absolutely disappointed.
The Steam game is Macbat 64. By no means is it unplayable, add riddled, or full of annoyances preventing me from playing, but I beat it in less than 50 minutes. It's a 3D platformer whose relatively small levels pay homage to other games, but it just wasn't fun for me due to lack of content I was interested in (longer levels with more going on) when it comes to 3D platformers.
C&C4, hands down. Single handedly murdered the whole franchise.
Edit: to be specific, I took this to mean “worst game by a major publisher”
Disney's Aladdin for game boy. Beat it in under a day and returned it. Just awful.
Evergrace. Half-baked and outdated in every way. Life is too short to play bad games just because they're cheap.
The OST is a nightmare too, that game is a purgatorial experience
I must've played a ton of trash games that I purged from my memory, but one notable one that comes to mind is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. The game was super highly anticipated and hyped and I was a massive C&C fan before, only to be completely disappointed by this massive turd that they shat on this genre defining franchise. The revolutionary "physics" did nothing to the game play, the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours and it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors or the main other RTSs of the time.
the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours
You must have been amazing at it, because it was certainly more like 20 for me, not counting branching missions. (The internet says it's around 25ish)
it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors
I think you're wearing some rose tinted goggles about Red Alert (and some solid black ones for the first game). Pathfinding in Tiberium Dawn was so terrible that it was part of the balance of the game: when they tried to fix it for the remaster, they found it horribly unbalanced the game in favor of GDI, so they decided not to fix it. Pathfinding was pretty shit in Tiberian Sun, but it was much worse before.
or the main other RTSs of the time.
Yeah, StarCraft was better but Total annihilation was much worse than Tiberian Sun in places where there was any terrain.
TA is much better now, but it has 25 years of mods going for it.
Over the years I've played a bunch of awful games. But the one that always sticks with me is ET. I spent hours stuck in pits in that game.
Mega Traveller 2. Buggy janky story. Bad combat. Character creation that includes all the skills from the pen and paper game but only about 10% of them actually do anything in game.
Its a mobile game where you have to find 4 "hidden" painted eggs. It was supposed to respawn the eggs in different spots, but i dont think i ever tested the game so i didnt know it didnt work.
There is also a score that doesnt work and a high score that cant go past 40
This is the game i spent the least time or effort making, copying everything from the last game i made, but changing the textures and modifying the part of the spawner of the collectables where they spawn randomly on the screen to appear at one out of a set of positions
Sea of Thieves.
That game is too buggy over the years it exists to be as popular as it is, and not in a "haha smol glitch" buggy, but "lets disconnect at the WORSE possible moments" (like you having a ton of loot).
Not worth it. A waste of 30 bucks.
Shadow Madness on PS1. Unlikable characters, incoherent story, bad graphics, and boring gameplay. It was like someone drew a better JRPG from memory.
I came for the graphics and because I liked adventuers. Was disappointed by the static graphics and I didn't understand what to do at all.
Filtered
Myst is certainly a bit of an odd one. There are more modern versions with full 3d graphics, and some of the puzzles are all time classics, but Riven was always the better game. There's a remake of that one which just came out, though it also doesn't hold your hand as far as figuring out what to do.
While people who know me would think that it is Bioshock 2 for a ton of issues, but that is mostly because it is automatically compared to Bioshock, ARK: Survival Evolved for its issues but I have 9k hours in it and growing so I can't say that, or the horribly disappointing Baldur's Gate after I finally got to play it years after and it kept giving me migraines. No. The worst game I ever played was also one of the most beautiful and beautifully animated arcade games, Dragons Quest. You had to match your movements to certain flashes on the TV and between input lag, multiple inputs reading as rejections, and frequently flaky controls the game was impossible for all but the most rich to get past the first 2 or three prompts. I on occasion saw a player who had pumped a couple of hundred of dollars into the machine to figure out its quirks and know when it was broken and they actually got somewhere. I never did. The same happened for the less successful Space Quest which was the same machine with a new cabinet, broadly speaking.
Root Letter. They said it was like Ace Attorney. It was not like Ace Attorney at all! 🤬
Ooh, I'm torn. They're both NES "games" - Rocky & Bullwinkle had sluggish controls, awful hitboxes, and I can only describe its graphics AND sound design as offensive. That said, at least it technically played like a game. Where's Waldo didn't even have that. I think Where's Waldo is the worst, but it's close.
I got recommended Suikoden 4 by a guy at GameStop when I was younger saying that Suikoden 2 & 3 were pretty good so this would be worth a try. I played & beat it since I didn’t have many games & already paid for it, but it sure wasn’t very good.
Ni No Kuni 2. Looking for a new RPG, missing that anime aesthetic so I searched up "best JRPGs" (yes, yes I know now that it's supposed to be perjorative); kept seeing this recommended, including by randos on Reddit (so not just paid review sites).
After 45 minutes of the most cliche-filled cutscenes and a prolonged tutorial for basic gameplay, I finally can just try it out and... It's the most boring, generic gameplay ever. Dull story, bland characters, bland gameplay, too long of intro. 2/10
The only other game that comes close is Assassin's Creed 3. Finished the tutorial mission, made it to Boston, started chasing collectibles and trying to 100% the first map. Sunk in about 5 hours and can't find the rest of the collectibles, so I decide to move on and come back later.
That's when it hits you with "PSYCH! That was just the Prologue, and all that time and effort invested in this character is MEANINGLESS. Here's a brand new character to build up."
I hate that. I don't mind when the game begins with an OP character to show you the ropes only to take all of it away, but please make it short. I loved Metroid Prime, for example. Investing 5 hours to have all of it mean nothing to your character, and next to nothing for the story fucking sucks. 4/10, would probably still finish just because I loved 1+2.
'Home improvement' on the Super Nintendo
Tales of Arise. The most bland plain characters ever, uninteresting exploration, plot was SO predictable, and the combat felt stiff. Kinda wrote off the entire series mostly, except I do like Berseria even though it's combat also sucks.
Lula 3D. Though, I never played with it eventually as it froze up the computer so bad we had to pull the plug, the experience as a kid was probably my worst gaming moment.
Hydlide, probably. A deeply mediocre action RPG that came out on NES waaay after everyone else had one-upped it, or ten-upped it.
And I played it circa 1997.
No, hang on - I at least progressed in Hydlide. To this day I have no goddamn idea how to get out of the first room in Batman Forever. I had the Game Boy version. I did not buy this game. Some kid just gave it to me, which should have been a warning. As I understand it, all versions of the game are quite similar, which would be admirable if they were not, to a one, total dogshit. I think it's the Mortal Kombat engine used as a platformer... made by aliens.
Turok Evolution on GameCube.
It doesn’t look that bad on reviews, but it’s pretty awful.
Recently... Deadlock
Aw yeah bring on the downvotes
I think Valve has the capacity to make some truly excellent stuff, but they only seem to care if it increases their wallets in a significant way.
After Architect, I'm very cautious about any Valve multiplayer game as it is bound to become infected with ways to extract money (or "value", as Gabe Newell puts it) from the customer.
I mean by all accounts Artifact was actually a great game if you wanted a digital CCG. Deadlock is going the Dota route of making all gameplay content free, I'm sure there will be a skin market but that's irrelevant to me, and the game is already very fun. I trust the Valve/Dota balance team far more than any other similar game's, so I really don't see what could derail it from at least moderate success at this point.
Maybe you just don't like MOBAs, to me it's one of the most promising upcoming pvp games, but I am someone who likes MOBAs and shooters
It's still fairly rough around the edges, but at this point I prefer Predecessor. Mostly because even at lowest settings, Deadlock feels unresponsive. But some heroes just have very unfun mechanics, like the lightning storm that covers a quarter of the map and lasts 20 seconds, or the ultimate that swaps your HP.
Difficulty-wise, The Lion King on SNES. This game shattered my childhood.
Made at a time where video game rentals were popular so they had to make games impossible to beat in 2 or 3 days.
I can say it wasn't any easier in the Megadrive/Genesis.
The game was fun to some degree, just required an unfair time investment. The final fight was a memorably bad experience though. I was like eleven years old when I made it to the end and swear I spent almost a full hour clawing at Scar before I figured out that I wasn't actually doing damage.
Also very difficult, but fun on the game gear!
I could never get through the 2nd ostrich riding sequence in the 2nd level as a kid. The rest of the game was fine, though, once I used the level select to skip ahead. Turns out, it was because my eyesight was shit and I couldn't even see the correct obstacles on screen (I was trying to avoid the branches, but no it was pink hippos and bird nests the whole time, so my timing on the double jumps was always off). Replaying the game a couple years back when Disney re-released it alongside Aladdin, I found it still tricky, but doable.
Battletoads.
same tbh
I forgot how many times my siblings and I tried to beat that
Superman 64 was a hell of a mess
Seconding this one. I was like 11 years old and it's the first time I can remember being disappointed when getting a game. Went from like Mario 64 to OOT to Banjo to Superman 64 and hoo boy what a drop off.
Same for me. It was my first flop I played and boy was it bad.
You didn't like flying through 150 rings?
There are way more rings than that, and they're actually the best parts of the game. It gets so much worse in the levels without rings. Awful combat, terrible puzzles, inconsistent framerate, and thoroughly unclear objectives.
Oh, and everyone's favorite: escort missions!
Clark Kent must really have not made much money as a reporter if he had to walk the streets at night too
Hard disagree. You just need to play it long enough for the Stockholm syndrome to kick in. Once it has its claws in you, you can’t stop playing it. Trying to figure out what makes this garbage puzzle box tick.
Same as a lot of other gen-xers: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
It's a classic answer, E.T. on the Atari 2600.
Custer's revenge would have been an acceptable answer as well.
It had misogyny and racism to push it over the top for worst game. ET was just an unplayable mess that disappointed kids my age. Custer's Revenge is a borderline hate crime that should have gotten everyone involved fired.
PacMan on the 2600 was pretty disappointing to say the least.
That shitty mobile version of SimCity.
Took a beloved childhood classic (the original SimCity) and took a giant free-to-pay shit all over it.
The app store is a massive pool of free-to-play shit.
If you haven't given pocket city 2 a try yet I highly recommend it
Ooh, neat. TY!
There are probably worst games I've played that I don't recall, but there was a Roller Coaster Tycoon knockoff for the Playstation once. First impressions were "I bet this is going to be as customizable a sandbox game as the computer version". Nope. It's like the actual Roller Coaster Tycoon, except the parks are tiny, so much of the land is unusable, everything costs a bajillion dollars to make, the parks get demolished every time you "succeed" (since it was level-based), and you get absolutely no warning before a game over screen just drops in on you because you took out the wrong loans. Even being a real park owner probably has less checks and balances than it.
oh shit you just reminded me Theme Park World for the PS2. I think I both loved and hated that game
That was the one.
Mostly any modern mobile game. Piles of shit with p2w and gambling addictive mechanics that aren't fun but stressful...
ROTFL
A bunch of early access survival crafting games on steam in the early days of early access. One was trying to be like starship troopers and it got like one update
Starforge?
Yup that sounds correct. That game taught me a good lesson about early access.
Oh god, survival crafting games were a dime a dozen back then. Though I am eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of Satisfactory next month so clearly I never got my fill :p
The factory must grow, whether in 2d or 3d
I'm going to say Battletoads. The game was mostly pretty fun, until you got the jetski section where it was biologically impossible for a human to react in time. The only way to get past this level was to perfectly memorize the sequence of buttons to push.
Sonic 06. This is coming from someone who eagerly wanted to be optimistic about the game, especially given how, on paper, it seemed very reminiscent of the Adventure games. I purchased an Xbox 360 and the game to try it out, to see if it really was as bad as people say it is.
It was...very sloppy. There are glitches everywhere, to the point where a significant amount of deaths will occur due to them, such as wall running physics just randomly breaking, causing you to fall into pits of lava, having to hit the jump button 10 times just so Knuckles jumps off of a wall every time, and even when not considering the glitches, the controls just feel awkward and clunky, Sonic himself is slow and the physics leave a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the story much more than what the gameplay had to offer.
I've always maintained it would have been an amazing game without the glitches. In a way I can appreciate it for what it nearly was.
Back to the Future on NES. All I remember is a series of pain in the ass mini games having little to nothing to do with the plot. One of them was called "That Sinking Feeling", where Marty apparently had to platform his way out of his own stomach.
And E.T. of course, fuck that game.
Desert Bus.
This game is pain on purpose.
Yeah, can a game even be bad if it's excellent at what it intends to be?
This reminds me of a method of trying to evaluate art in an objective way. Basically you ask yourself 3 questions:
If the answers to 2 and 3 are "yes", then it's probably a good work of art. This helps remove the subjectivity of "do I enjoy it?" when evaluating a work.
I would say the answers for Desert Bus indicate that it is indeed a good work of art. It succeeds in being a monotonous parody of a video game which makes a political statement about what games would be if they lacked any fictional elements or conflict. And I think the statement P&T were trying to make with this game was definitely worth making. Plus, we know from the amount of people who play it as a streamed challenge game that there is some desire for a game like that to exist.
I agree with you completely, and I'm glad the game exists. It's just objectively the worst video game I've ever played.
The fact that it is talked about and marathoned decades after release mean it's good art
I tried to play it but it was just a bus lol. never found out what that was about
Mario is missing. Imagine being a young kid thinking this is Mario 3/4 (can’t remember where it fit in) and it’s a platformer not realizing it’s an educational game when you got it. What a pos, greatest let down of my life.
Same with Mario's Time Machine. Such a waste of an interesting concept.
I loved both of these games as a kid.
I wouldn't say worst, but maybe greatest difference in expectation vs reality - "My Time at Portia".
Cutscenes and voice acting were janky. The UI felt like it was originally an MMO and feels odd for a single player game. The gameplay loop felt tedious and seemed to disrespect the player's time.
Maybe I needed to give it more time, but for a game that I thought had generally good/great reviews, it wasn't clicking for me.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES. Ghostbusters was more disappointing, but I've at least kinda figured out how to play it over my lifetime. WFRR I'm clueless on. I think it's some kind of point and click, but I'm not really sure. There's a part where you have to call a real life telephone number to progress.
Pretty accurate depictions of what it feels like to play these games.
😄 The phone call was just to get some simple bonus tips, nothing really necessary.
What killed me was, to swap items, you hold Select and use the arrow keys. It's soooo unintuitive!
Finally, I know what the phone call does! Maybe I've been too hard on Roger Rabbit NES....
By the time I got around to playing it, the number was deprecated and I definitely wasn't figuring out how to actually beat it! I guess I just assumed it gated me from the end, when it was probably some other esoteric thing.
Does ET count?
I think it's like the canonical answer to this question so yes
Growing up, my neighbor had that on Atari. We could never figure out how the hell to play that game.
Top Gun for the nes. I never actually finished the first mission. I could beat Mike Tyson but that aircraft carrier kicked my ass.
Superman 64.
Weeks and months of hype (the era of print gaming journalism), Blockbuster stocking 100 copies on launch day for "guaranteed availability" etc.
Then I finally popped the cart in, and this thing was so bad it just defied all logic. Horrific controls, shitty graphics, unclear user interface and objectives, terrible draw distance. Timed level segments and insane difficulty.
There might be "worse" games but I have never been more disappointed in a release than Superman 64.
And don’t forget the oddly weird multiplayer.
Resident Evil 6, on PC.
I normally try to play a game for a minimum of 10 hours just to give it a chance in case it grows on me, but this was just such a piece of shit I couldn't even reach half that...
Aw man, I recently bought RE5 and 6 from Humble Bundle just to see how bad the games are.
RE5 is bad, but in a somewhat enjoyable way. It helps that Chris Redfield's biceps are as big as his head, which adds to the accidental funniness.
I agree with everything. I hated RE5 at first but it grew on me after a while. With mods of course. It has too many small annoyances for me to fully enjoy it vanilla. Just hell to the no.
RE6 is just a badly designed game:
horrible pacing and balancing, such as with wave-based combat and outright spamming the player with enemies at that, causing high ammo usage whilst also simultaneously making ammo scarce;
enemies being invincible until they attack you. (Seriously, that pissed me off; even if I knew an enemy was actually an enemy and not just a dead body, my bullets would go straight through them. Literally. No hit detection until they initiated combat, whether in the next couple seconds or later when you double-back in the following scene.)
The stupid UI. Way too much form, not even close to enough function.
On the other hand, it was rather amusing seeing Leon fucking wrestle-slam a zombie like he's in the WWE. Lol.
Edit: Added to a clause to make the follow-up point clear(er).
Looking through the lens of relativity, I'd have to say Witcher I. The fact that the fucking masterpiece that is Witcher III and not-amazing-but-definitely-worth-a-playthrough that is Witcher II both stemmed from the comically bad dumpster fire that was #1 is nothing short of a miracle.
The franchise *should* have died at #1, but I'm sure glad it didn't.
I think that's maybe a bit harsh compared to a lot of the games mentioned here. Witcher 1 definitely has a lot of problems compared to 2 and 3 but it had a lot going for it as well. Sure the combat was broken as hell once you got all the spinning moves and it was super sexist with the women as trading cards thing. But the story and world building were still fun and Geralt was well characterised. It's not a great game but it did well enough to get them the sequels. Definitely nowhere near the worst game I've played.
For sure - by "looking at it through the lens of relativity" I guess I failed to specify what I was holding it relative to - where my brain's at W1 as a starting point, and the quality of W2 and W3... Relative to other trilogies that actually did well, Witcher's starting point is hot trash. Like, a game that bad doesn't generally go on to have good sequels, but the degree of improvement in both W2 and W3 is fucking astounding.
W1 still has probably the best writing and script of any of the three games. I definitely prefer the third for gameplay but W1 is just an artifact of the awkward time it came out, when there was a lot less consensus on how 3rd person action games controlled.
I remember playing Witcher 1 and being thoroughly underwhelmed by it, so I'm glad to feel validated here instead of just having to label myself as a game troglodyte
Christmas Day, we just got a PS1 years after everyone else. My brother and I are ecstatic to play. My mum and sister are smiling at our reaction, since they went to the game store and asked the guy what a good game would be to play.
Formula One '98. We played a lap each, and then turned off the console. I can still recall the commentary "it looks like he's stuck in the kitty litter!"
*hands shake*
I looked up some gameplay on YouTube and it doesn't look that bad. A bit slow but that's all
What was so bad about it to counterweigh the "wowwwww it's 3d !!!11!" effect ?
just a super boring game for two 9 year olds to play. It would be like if she got us a golf game.
Adult me would probably really enjoy both games
They can't all be Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge.
As a former 9yo I would have liked a Formula One game
Different strokes for different folks
That's doubly true for the golf game.
Worst that I can recall playing was Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero. You had to hit the B button to turn around. It was frustrating as hell.
I remember buying Duke Nukem Forever in a Humble Bundle, a bundle that I had virtually every other game for the price. I remember only paying $1 and I gave *all* that money to charity.
I played DNF. I still felt robbed. To this day I haven't completed it due to how terrible it is (if my memory serves me, I've been minaturised and I'm driving around in a tiny car? But the controls are awful and Duke now seems like a Trump like character whose charm is entirely devoid in modern times. It was already wearing thin back when it was released, too).
Hah, i played full price for that game.
I pre-ordered it for Playstation.....
Did you learn your lesson?
That's pretty early in the game.
Fucking Randy "greaseball" Pitchford fucking up another game. If I see Gearbox touch anything, I'll presume it dead and buried. They haven't done anything decent since 2015 (Homeworld Remastered Collection).
The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.
It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.
This is not what you are talking about, but reading this reminded me of the "Super Noah's Ark" rom I downloaded in high school which was a reskin of the original Wolfenstein where all the animals were restless meaning that you (Noah) would need to shoot feed at them so they could take their naps.
Super Noah's Ark is on my rg35xx. It's amazing.
My cousin had a couple Bible themed NES games. Spiritual Warfare seemed decent.
There used to be a store called Heaven & Earth that sold all kinds of Christian stuff for Sunday school teachers or whatever plus books, cheap Bible toys, etc. She bought it there.
I don't even remember all the trash games i tried to played just to delete them after few minutes.
But the ones being remembered are instead the biggest disappointments, games which were supposed to be great or were supposed to be improved sequels of great games.
In this cathegory trashcan lid medal goes definitely to REBEL GALAXY 2. I played first part like 10 times and only ever wanted more of it, but 2nd problem was not that it was bad or not (it was though), but that it was entirely different game.
Dishonorable mentions for few more:
EDIT: oh and the one i tried to forget so hard but other poster made me remember it: "X-Com" Chimera Squad. No, just fucking no, the pathetic death of series after glorious predecessor is just too much.
I really liked Midnight Suns :(
I got to play video games with spider man and be in a book club with Captain marvel.
The deck building was pretty good. I wanted more cards and more excuses to use more heroes.
The fact that there's no miss chance on attacks is subtle but a real improvement over the genre standard. And using the environment was a lot of fun, and very genre appropriate.
I tried to play is earnestly after Epic gave it out for free, but while gameplay indeed is actually quite good, three factors are still bad:
Seconded. I repressed all memories of this game until now.
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2
I wrote that essay back in 2021, and three years later time proved all of it correct. This game straight up killed the series.
As somebody who likes Tetris but essentially had no idea about PuyoPuyo until I came across that comment, that was a brilliant yet depressing read. I'm currently busy with life but wishlisted some PuyoPuyo games for this winter, just because that article outlined such an interesting game. It's kind of hard to find something for current platforms in Europe though...
If you want functional online, the Switch version of Puyo Puyo Champions is the only title worth bothering with. Specifically Switch, other platforms are ghost towns.
If you want singleplayer content, 15th Anniversary, 20th Anniversary, and Chronicle are all peak. None of these games were released outside of Japan and they're older titles you'll have to emulate, hence all my salt about the state of things today, but at least they do have fantranslation patches.
So there's a sale now and I got champions on steam for like 2,50 euros. Let's see what kind of ride I'm in for, thank you again for the input :)
What a great article!!
So, I'm a huge Game Boy fan. I'd heard about how good Puyo Puyo is, so I got a Japanese copy of Puyo Puyo Tsu. From what I can tell it's a great port. But I struggled so much getting into it! And then I read your comment...
...and I feel justified. 😅 What do you recommend is a good way for a new player to get into the game? Something to read, a video, or something else?
There are some old English-language resources available on the wiki. But I've never quite liked the way we try to teach the game by just showing pictures of an idealized chain built in a frictionless vacuum, it's a very "draw the rest of the owl" approach. Nor do I know what a better approach looks like for a game this abstract.
At one point I was working on a video where I'd build a chain step-by-step and overexplain my thought process on each piece. But that sits on a large mountain of unfinished projects and ideas. I'm retired from the game now because, well, I can't continue justifying my competitive energy towards a game that just has no future as long as its publisher hates it, so it's never going to get finished.
Omikron the Nomad Soul.
It's david cage's worst game and I have no idea how he tricked David Bowie into collaborating on it. Also, listen to the music.
edit: whoops, got silvagunner'd. Here's the real track.
I liked that game. The controls were horrible, but the story was okay and it featured a lot of new game mechanics for the time. They tried too much really. It was more of an experience than a game.
Im sure there are games that wouldnt even work so i technically didnt even play them but ill list a couple of games that i tried playing, hated, and uninstalled almost immediately
They both had the same problem.
Days gone and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I tried to force myself into enjoying rdr2 because it was supposedly that good. For the first few hours i kept asking myself when does the game start? When do i actually get to play?
Days gone i only made it maybe an hour before i quit and uninstalled.
I want to play a game not watch an interactive movie
RDR2 is very much not for everybody. It is intentionally tedious. It's the kind of game you sit down and play for at least 2-3 hours every time you play it because that's just how long it takes to get anything done. You aren't fast traveling. You aren't doing things instantaneously in a menu. Your time as a human being is an in-game resource. If you're in the middle of nowhere and your horse dies, a ton of your shit was being carried in the saddle; you need to walk your ass to the nearest town lugging that saddle, vulnerable to wild animals and robbers. It's a game about getting things done with your own two hands at the turn of the century when that was becoming much less valued. It's a game about subsistence. You could have an easier, more prosperous life, but at what cost? At whose cost? It's a game about nature and living in a natural world as a natural being, criticizing the transition into industrial exploitation of our fellow natural world and natural animals, including natural humans. It's not a rootin' tootin' spaghetti western adventure; it's an interactive classic American novel that can occasionally have funny or fun moments depending on your tastes. I fully understand that it's wasn't a game that you or millions of other people enjoyed, but I think it's wholly unjust to label it a "bad" game for that. It did exactly what it set out to do, and evoked impactful emotion in sharing its message as intended for the people who wanted to be open to it. It's successful art, but not all art is for you and not all art is for me. You may have gone in with the wrong expectations for it. I think it really sucks that every rockstar game since the early 2000s seems to be marketed as "GTA but ___" because the Red Dead games and LA Noire are very much not GTA. They're 3rd person open worlds with similar engines, but that's where the similarities end.
If you ever try it again, come in with a similar mindset to wanting to sit down and watch The Godfather, not The Avengers. There's a lot to get out of it if you just focus on the story and the characters and the beautiful setting. Enjoy the honest work, and lament the shootouts and heists.
There were parts of RDR2 that I adored and parts I loathed. Riding around exploring, hunting, and discovering the environment was a joy. I put a ton of hours into the game just doing that.
The quests were a nightmare to me. Ride to location A to get the quest. Ride to location B to start the quest. Ride to location C as part of the quest and if you dare to wander off the exact route or try an innovative solution and you FAIL
All that work spent making you feel like you’re living the character makes the ending so much more poignant. What a beautiful game.
I'd recommend trying RDR1 before RDR2, but then again that might make you hate the tutorial section RDR2 had even more lol
RDR2 is excellent, but it almost feels like it's trying too hard. RDR1 was just a classic IMO, literally revolutionary for its time. I thought it would be just GTA with horses but honestly it felt so much more than that, they completely nailed the atmosphere and everything else about it. I still play RDR1 sometimes these days.
Paper Mario Sticker Star. Moreso disappointed rather than hate, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole RPG genre (when I played it for the first time, I was 6, and thought all RPGs were like that) until I played the TTYD remake a few months ago
Deadly Towers.
This game is awful
I used to play it just because I was so confused by it I thought there was something I was missing.
No. It's just a horrible game.
My uncle gave me an Atari 800 when I was a kid. Came with a stack of old carts and games.
One of them was E.T. Which was one of my fave movies at the time.
Wrestslemania x8 on the gamecube. Didn't even have a frigging campaign mode...
myself and everyone I knew were massive fans of the N64 WCW and WWF games, but I had played the PS2 Yukes! games at friends houses and always kinda hated them. Ended up getting Wrestlemania X8 because I somehow got to actually go to the event at Skydome, and even with that huge bias still thought the game was shit and barely ever played it.
Wrestlemania was fucking wild though, it fell on the same day as St. Patricks and everyone there was drunk as shit, tons of fan scuffles and rowdiness, as a high schooler was a total blast.
..It has to be Drakengard. What a thing. I literally couldn't finish it, and I'm close to finishing Final Fantasy XIII. I have a high tolerance, but good LORD is it a slog.
Probably Call of Juarez: The Cartel. I wanted to play the entire franchise back to back, but it wasn't being sold on Steam, so I had to hunt down a copy on some key reseller. Boy, do I see why it's not on sale anymore. runs like absolute shit, incredibly buggy, cheesy as hell and with some pretty questionable game design choices. Still, it was somewhat entertaining in a "so bad it's good" sense, and it ties into the previous games in a fairly interesting way, so I don't regret playing it. It was certainly an experience, but it's a very bad game by pretty much all metrics.
I turned that shit off after 30 minutes, it was so bad. :D Most regrettable purchase of my life.
Now, I am not going to count games that I knew were bad beforehand but still deliberately played to see how bad they were, I am going to assume the spirit of the question implies starting a game and the realization of how bad it is slowly kicking in.
One game that came to my mind was "Conspiracy: Weapons of Mass Destruction" on the OG Xbox, but there's probably worse games I played but have forgotten about.
Master of Orion III. A 4X game for PC that had had all the fun carefully eliminated during development. It was like playing a spreadsheet.
My greatest shame is that I actually bought it twice because years later I couldn't believe it had been that bad and risked a bargain bin copy. It was exactly that bad.
I was happy that the next release was pretty good.
Moo2 forever, though.
Agreed.
I bought Haze for PS3 the day it came out even after reading a lot of mid to negative reviews, both because I really love all three TimeSplitters games and wanted to support the devs, and also out of a feeling of 'how bad could it really be?'. It was incredibly boring, graphically underwhelming, and I ended up beating it the same day I bought it. Tried to trade it in and even on release week EB offered me an incredibly insulting amount, like $7 or something, and I still took it.
There's a lot of bad games that I've played, but I'm going to go with any Simpsons game pre GameCube era (except for the arcade game). So many janky controls and games that didn't utilize the Simpsons IP well.
I used to love Simpsons Wrestling, because I didn’t know any better. I think I was too young to really grasp the concept of a “bad game” yet.
Its still fun to spin up in a nostalgic sort of way.
Disregarding the absolutely unplayable and broken, I think it's a toss up between the 2008 Alone in the Dark or Final Fantasy 15. I'm more inclined towards the latter because I haven't played the former since release. It's just a godawful RPG, if you can even call it that, the game basically plays itself, has no depth whatsoever, the open-world is meaningless and empty of anything interesting. Not to mention the story is both dogshit and a confusing mess nonsensically split between different DLCs, movies and god knows what else. Definitely the worst big budget RPG (again, if you can even call it that) I've played so far, it's borderline insulting. The worst of it all? It was my first Final Fantasy and it was so bad it killed any interest I had in the series.
Oh man, that Alone in the Dark was a huge pile of shit. Probably the worst I've played.
Pile of shit is putting it lightly. At least it had some cool fire effects for its time.
I also didn't like AitD. The tank controls, static "3D" screens where you overlooked something if you didn't walk into every corner and a new screen presented itself... Oh wait, you're talking about a remaster? I'm talking about the original...
I haven't played the newer ones, but the series appears to have been going through an identity crisis since like, after FF10. If you are able and willing to try again, go for the classics.
Quest 64. It wasn't even funny bad, it was just boring.
Since 1985. it's the same answer, this shit on the zx spectrum. Can't believe it got published.
Edit: won "Best Original Game" at the Computer and Video Games 1983 Golden Joystick Awards, fuck me sideways
Imagine Software had made a name for itself, too. It was reasonable to see that name and expect some quality.
I mean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX-jNPasffc
Also, it worked markedly shittier on an unemulated speccy. This was the same year that saw the arcadey pinnacle of Jetpac and this glitchy creepy grindfest that challenges only patience and tolerance to noise gets itself a golden joystick for originality because of using lolrandom toy sprites.
Edit: I'm actually still mad 39 years later they made me fiddle with a screwdriver to load that shit
Cauldron 2 for C64 you start playing and find out you have no clue how to progress the game.
Bubsy 3D. The controls were awkward, the platforming was horrendous, and the levels were nonsensical.
Flatout 3. I just checked on steam, and it's tagged as "psychological horror". Being a fan of the first one, and still having spent lots of hours playing the second one, I was totally not prepared for the utter monstrosity of the third one
Never played 1, but I really liked 2. I didn't know 3 existed until now, and I'm having a blast reading the reviews. I think I might have to buy it (with the intention of refunding) just so I can experience the horror firsthand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF6QaE69Dus Rerez did a video about it that just about covers everything there is to the game, I found it amusing
probably that Tom Sawyer game on the NES. like, wtf even was that?
The Lion King.
Was that game bad? I just remembered it being hard as hell
It taught me about failing even when you try your best. Which kind of sucks when you don't have any other games.
Hard as hell, and unfair. Plenty of jumps powered by seemingly inconsistent mechanics that need to be done perfectly, otherwise instant death.
Played it recently as an adult after beating some other retro games from my childhood for the first time. In Lion King, I made it one level further and put the game down again...to level 3.
Well, I had gotten to Level 3 as a kid, but I was able to clear the Ostrich Run in Level 2 much more consistently after some practice. It was a fluke as a kid.
The game has 10 levels.
For the Sega Master System?
"Worst" by technicality - I actually had a lot of fun with it for several minutes:
This famous piece of internet lore.
At the time I tried it, it worked "perfectly" in Wine (as well as on Windows that is)
Big Rigs
I still don't understand what a stationary opponent means in this context
it doesn't drive. It stays parked at the start. You're not really racing it.
Simply put, the game was unfinished, it didn't actually have any gameplay.
And it had a sequel, somehow, that was maybe 2% less fucked.
The opponent never moves.
My first thought is The Fortress of Doctor Radiaki for DOS.
A game I never played but is still memorable is early 2000s there was a game in Babbages in my local mall called "Prison Tycoon" that had a cop beating a black man on the box.
RUSH’N ATTACK for NES. I remember buying it as a child and being devastated that it sucked so bad.
The name and the intro really put in the work to get you excited for some high-octane action.
There are a couple console games and one in my steam library that absolutely come to mind. As for which I think is worse is definitely up for debate because I think I dislike these 3 equally, even if I can only remember why I dislike two of them.
Don't remember the exact entry, but I borrowed a Dynasty Warrior game from my brother (who didn't like it as far as I'm aware) for xbox360 and something about it I just didn't like at all. Then there's Worms Blast. For a spin-off of worms, that from what I remember just feels like a worse bubble bobble style game, I was absolutely disappointed.
The Steam game is Macbat 64. By no means is it unplayable, add riddled, or full of annoyances preventing me from playing, but I beat it in less than 50 minutes. It's a 3D platformer whose relatively small levels pay homage to other games, but it just wasn't fun for me due to lack of content I was interested in (longer levels with more going on) when it comes to 3D platformers.
C&C4, hands down. Single handedly murdered the whole franchise.
Edit: to be specific, I took this to mean “worst game by a major publisher”
Disney's Aladdin for game boy. Beat it in under a day and returned it. Just awful.
Evergrace. Half-baked and outdated in every way. Life is too short to play bad games just because they're cheap.
The OST is a nightmare too, that game is a purgatorial experience
I must've played a ton of trash games that I purged from my memory, but one notable one that comes to mind is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. The game was super highly anticipated and hyped and I was a massive C&C fan before, only to be completely disappointed by this massive turd that they shat on this genre defining franchise. The revolutionary "physics" did nothing to the game play, the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours and it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors or the main other RTSs of the time.
You must have been amazing at it, because it was certainly more like 20 for me, not counting branching missions. (The internet says it's around 25ish)
I think you're wearing some rose tinted goggles about Red Alert (and some solid black ones for the first game). Pathfinding in Tiberium Dawn was so terrible that it was part of the balance of the game: when they tried to fix it for the remaster, they found it horribly unbalanced the game in favor of GDI, so they decided not to fix it. Pathfinding was pretty shit in Tiberian Sun, but it was much worse before.
Yeah, StarCraft was better but Total annihilation was much worse than Tiberian Sun in places where there was any terrain.
TA is much better now, but it has 25 years of mods going for it.
Over the years I've played a bunch of awful games. But the one that always sticks with me is ET. I spent hours stuck in pits in that game.
Mega Traveller 2. Buggy janky story. Bad combat. Character creation that includes all the skills from the pen and paper game but only about 10% of them actually do anything in game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTraveller_2:_Quest_for_the_Ancients
The 4th game i made public
Its a mobile game where you have to find 4 "hidden" painted eggs. It was supposed to respawn the eggs in different spots, but i dont think i ever tested the game so i didnt know it didnt work.
There is also a score that doesnt work and a high score that cant go past 40
This is the game i spent the least time or effort making, copying everything from the last game i made, but changing the textures and modifying the part of the spawner of the collectables where they spawn randomly on the screen to appear at one out of a set of positions
Sea of Thieves.
That game is too buggy over the years it exists to be as popular as it is, and not in a "haha smol glitch" buggy, but "lets disconnect at the WORSE possible moments" (like you having a ton of loot).
Not worth it. A waste of 30 bucks.
Shadow Madness on PS1. Unlikable characters, incoherent story, bad graphics, and boring gameplay. It was like someone drew a better JRPG from memory.
Gotta be Seven Samurai 20xx
https://youtu.be/MKA5Xvrm9WQ?si=krSoMAv58hSycsur
Myst.
I came for the graphics and because I liked adventuers. Was disappointed by the static graphics and I didn't understand what to do at all.
Filtered
Myst is certainly a bit of an odd one. There are more modern versions with full 3d graphics, and some of the puzzles are all time classics, but Riven was always the better game. There's a remake of that one which just came out, though it also doesn't hold your hand as far as figuring out what to do.
While people who know me would think that it is Bioshock 2 for a ton of issues, but that is mostly because it is automatically compared to Bioshock, ARK: Survival Evolved for its issues but I have 9k hours in it and growing so I can't say that, or the horribly disappointing Baldur's Gate after I finally got to play it years after and it kept giving me migraines. No. The worst game I ever played was also one of the most beautiful and beautifully animated arcade games, Dragons Quest. You had to match your movements to certain flashes on the TV and between input lag, multiple inputs reading as rejections, and frequently flaky controls the game was impossible for all but the most rich to get past the first 2 or three prompts. I on occasion saw a player who had pumped a couple of hundred of dollars into the machine to figure out its quirks and know when it was broken and they actually got somewhere. I never did. The same happened for the less successful Space Quest which was the same machine with a new cabinet, broadly speaking.
Root Letter. They said it was like Ace Attorney. It was not like Ace Attorney at all! 🤬
Ooh, I'm torn. They're both NES "games" - Rocky & Bullwinkle had sluggish controls, awful hitboxes, and I can only describe its graphics AND sound design as offensive. That said, at least it technically played like a game. Where's Waldo didn't even have that. I think Where's Waldo is the worst, but it's close.
I got recommended Suikoden 4 by a guy at GameStop when I was younger saying that Suikoden 2 & 3 were pretty good so this would be worth a try. I played & beat it since I didn’t have many games & already paid for it, but it sure wasn’t very good.
Ni No Kuni 2. Looking for a new RPG, missing that anime aesthetic so I searched up "best JRPGs" (yes, yes I know now that it's supposed to be perjorative); kept seeing this recommended, including by randos on Reddit (so not just paid review sites).
After 45 minutes of the most cliche-filled cutscenes and a prolonged tutorial for basic gameplay, I finally can just try it out and... It's the most boring, generic gameplay ever. Dull story, bland characters, bland gameplay, too long of intro. 2/10
The only other game that comes close is Assassin's Creed 3. Finished the tutorial mission, made it to Boston, started chasing collectibles and trying to 100% the first map. Sunk in about 5 hours and can't find the rest of the collectibles, so I decide to move on and come back later.
That's when it hits you with "PSYCH! That was just the Prologue, and all that time and effort invested in this character is MEANINGLESS. Here's a brand new character to build up."
I hate that. I don't mind when the game begins with an OP character to show you the ropes only to take all of it away, but please make it short. I loved Metroid Prime, for example. Investing 5 hours to have all of it mean nothing to your character, and next to nothing for the story fucking sucks. 4/10, would probably still finish just because I loved 1+2.
'Home improvement' on the Super Nintendo
Tales of Arise. The most bland plain characters ever, uninteresting exploration, plot was SO predictable, and the combat felt stiff. Kinda wrote off the entire series mostly, except I do like Berseria even though it's combat also sucks.
Lula 3D. Though, I never played with it eventually as it froze up the computer so bad we had to pull the plug, the experience as a kid was probably my worst gaming moment.
Hydlide, probably. A deeply mediocre action RPG that came out on NES waaay after everyone else had one-upped it, or ten-upped it.
And I played it circa 1997.
No, hang on - I at least progressed in Hydlide. To this day I have no goddamn idea how to get out of the first room in Batman Forever. I had the Game Boy version. I did not buy this game. Some kid just gave it to me, which should have been a warning. As I understand it, all versions of the game are quite similar, which would be admirable if they were not, to a one, total dogshit. I think it's the Mortal Kombat engine used as a platformer... made by aliens.
Turok Evolution on GameCube.
It doesn’t look that bad on reviews, but it’s pretty awful.
Recently... Deadlock
Aw yeah bring on the downvotes
I think Valve has the capacity to make some truly excellent stuff, but they only seem to care if it increases their wallets in a significant way.
After Architect, I'm very cautious about any Valve multiplayer game as it is bound to become infected with ways to extract money (or "value", as Gabe Newell puts it) from the customer.
I mean by all accounts Artifact was actually a great game if you wanted a digital CCG. Deadlock is going the Dota route of making all gameplay content free, I'm sure there will be a skin market but that's irrelevant to me, and the game is already very fun. I trust the Valve/Dota balance team far more than any other similar game's, so I really don't see what could derail it from at least moderate success at this point.
Maybe you just don't like MOBAs, to me it's one of the most promising upcoming pvp games, but I am someone who likes MOBAs and shooters
It's still fairly rough around the edges, but at this point I prefer Predecessor. Mostly because even at lowest settings, Deadlock feels unresponsive. But some heroes just have very unfun mechanics, like the lightning storm that covers a quarter of the map and lasts 20 seconds, or the ultimate that swaps your HP.
Fortnite