A few weeks ago I would have said Oaken Tower, one of those shop item autobattler type games, but RNG has been slightly better to me more recently in my runs.
So my next pick would probably have to be, from the bad games I can recall, Worms Blast. Basically just A Worms take on Puzzle Bobble and I didn’t like it enough to keep the ROM on my hard drive. Don’t remember too many specifics, but wasn’t one for me in the slightest, similarly to Worms 3D, but that wasn’t as bad of an experience.
Dragon’s Lair. Every once in a while some idiot on FB will talk about how great of a game it was. My thought in that situation: “How nice for you Mr. Moneybags!” There was no skill or strat to the game, it was just an expensive version of Simon: memorize left or right, up or down. To a poor kid like me, it was anathema to going to the arcade if I could burn through $5 in 5 minutes.
Dig-Dug gets an honorable mention: it was a slower, shittier version of Mr. Do! in my opinion. I thought I read an article that game owners could program the game to have slower reaction time which makes sense for my experience. I later found out that that was a feature in a lot of games, like in Gauntlet, they could set health pots to give more or less health, and Mortal Combat could literally cheat by cutting out frames of animation to perform certain attacks “faster”.
Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.
I’m currently playing Ark for the first time with a couple of friends who’ve played the game 1k and 3k hours. I’m 150 hours deep but I would have been in your shoes if I had nobody to show me the ropes. It is an amazing game but a huge mess at the same time
Just don’t play with devs, or they’ll ban you the moment you raid their base.
We’re playing pve on a private server
Same. Several friends raved about this game and wanted me to get into it and I hated it. Same with Grounded to be honest. It just felt like the game was entirely made for the devs to giggle about kicking the players’ asses over and over again with very little apparent payoff (unless you spend more hours in the game than any other game you’ve ever played apparently).
Heavy Rain, also known as: How to make mechanics that are even more annoying than the characters of this dumpster fire?
X to Shaun
SHAAAAUN!!!
Live chickens in the supermarket!
Oh man, so sorry. Did not play that far or completely forgot about that.
I didn’t play it, but I did watch a Two Best Friends let’s play back in the day. David Cage is such a hack. The scene in question.
Man, this is so great! Thank you for that.
Mario Party.
I. Fucking. HATE. Mario Party.
This is how I feel about the Overcooked (and similar) games.
Overcooked is great the key is actually playing through the singlepkayer with a fried before hoping into competitive matches. My daughter and I love it
Its like monopoly. Always ends in a fight.
yea
Monopoly. Tragically boring.
Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.
Ha, nice, I didn’t know that! This was a couple decades ago and the 3 ppl I played with seemed to enjoy it. I was very confused as to why 😂
Always ended with someone flipping the board at my house.
Haahaha
Most bad games aren’t really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize “wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into”.
I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.
The game has 3 main phases. The main “gameplay” is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.
The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But… No, he doesn’t. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.
I think this might be a puzzle game getting too niche for its own good with a wider audience, in your case. I only played through to the one ending, but it had enough trappings of a VN for me to guess that you get most of your character growth or punishment after redoing the common route (basically the prologue leading up to where you get locked into one ending or another), once you get set on course for a particular ending and play it out. It’s common enough in visual novels for me to expect it and not be bothered or caught off-guard by those faults, but that’s obviously not going to play out with a wider audience if they’re not made aware of those conventions.
Maybe not the worst game, but notable for being somewhat misleading - Mario Is Missing for the SNES.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s is an educational game where you play as Luigi and walk around random cities asking questions, which is very different from other Mario games of the time.
It’s hard to narrow it down to a single game, but all of the worst games I can think of were licensed games on earlier consoles. E.T. on the Atari 2600 is an obvious example, but the NES was chock full of garbage tier licensed games like Jaws, Ghostbusters, Last Action Hero, Dark Man, Superman, Robocop, Mad Max, Wayne’s World, Hook, Back to the Future… it just goes on and on (Weirdly I don’t think Friday the 13th belongs on this list, I actually like that game). All that being said, Superman 64 for the N64 is probably the absolute worst. The game is bad at every level. Ugly, buggy, and unfun. It’s not even fun to try it on an emulator to see how bad it is. Consider it toxic waste.
I actually really enjoyed Ghostbusters. Beat it a few times.
If you liked it, that’s all that matters, but I was very glad I got it super cheap and I really, really did not like it.
Shadow Madness was an amazingly bad PS1 RPG. The details have faded with time, but I remember it was an incoherent hodgepodge of every RPG trope, every party member was a bad cliche, the random encounter system was this terrible “red light, green light” thing. It was insultingly easy, and Harv-5 was like someone’s shitty Shadow the Hedgehog OC of Bender from Futurama.
I have had a grudge against this terrible game for 25 years.
Deponia. I was so disgusted by the main character, I barely got out of the first room before I quit, uninstalled, and thought seriously about deleting it from my account. Not refunding it, just deleting it. I can’t believe they made an entire series of those games.
What’s your issue with the main character?
RoboCop for the NES. Just terrible.
It was bad, but not even close to the worst NES game I owned. I actually nearly beat that game.
Diablo Immortal was and still is a dumpster fire. Diablo 4 sucked too.
I’m not that much of a gamer, but I remember many years ago I bought a Spawn game for the PSOne because I wanted to buy something and Spawn was still somewhat cool (don’t know if it still is, really). It was slow, ugly, with awkward controls and whenever you confronted an enemy the game play changed into something like Tekken or Bloody Roar, but with much worse controls. After you defeated the enemy it changed back to a 3rd person perspective. I didn’t even make it to the first boss, I simply put it away and went to play Syphon Filter for the 30th time.
Big Bass Fishing on PS1. Most boring game in existence.
