Worst Games
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@Ganymede said in Worst Games:
As a company, they have put out a lot of popular games.
I don't particularly care about this metric.
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@SabotKick72 I mean, ET really has to win. That's the only game that's ever managed to destroy the Western gaming industry single-handedly.
Worst I ever played... Superman 64 is up there. And after all these years, I hold out some bitterness at the SNES Rocketeer.
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I have played Big Rigs. It was only because someone showed it to me at the time as a purposeful 'lol this is so bad try it,' but I did technically play it.
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Mistmare
It had an interesting setting in which the Dark Ages never ended; the church figured out how to end the Black Plague using sorcery, but that ended up sealing Europe off from the rest of the world for almost a thousand years. And... that was it. Graphics looked like what's left in the toilet after a night of binging Taco Bell. Controls were point and click only, and the how fast you walked was based on how far away from your current position you clicked - and default speed was glacial, not to mention that the mouse pointer was inaccurate (it was either laggy, or the hitbox isn't where it's pointing). It was dialogue heavy, which was good; but dialogue was presented in walls of text in some weird wanna-be old-timey script that, even in the resolutions of the day, was tiny. It was on a time clock; in that things happened at certain times, and every action you took had a certain amount of time used associated with it; meaning you had to micromanage your schedule. And this is on top of the amount of bugs that tended to freeze or crash the game, wipe saves, et cetera. Stuff that they never got around to fixing, mind.
Oh, and it was an action RPG game; not a point and click adventure or turn-based thingy. You were expected to be able to fight things, too. Even the worst games have their champions; people who find something to like among all the muck. For this one, though... no. Gamespot said it best in their review 'You might want to play Mistmare only if you're exploring the benefits of primal scream therapy.' -
@SabotKick72 said in Worst Games:
ET. Yes, I played it on the Atari 2600. My mom bought it for me as Birthday Present.
I never got past the first level, I'd fall into a pit and my counter would run out as I tried to head copter my way out.
That's the trick, supposed to fall in the pits, just it was hard to get out.
Its one of the old Atari games we used to try and glitch by flicking the on/off switch. Sometimes you could get the character out of sequence enough to just walk around regardless of background.
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Battlecruiser 3000AD. I think I spent a total of thirty minutes trying to figure out what on Earth there was to do in the game before giving up completely and never playing it again.
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Holy crap what a topic. As a ghost writer I have had to play a lot of games to write reviews for. So here's some of the worst that I have on my review Steam account:
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Of those, only Homefront is below 'Mostly Positive' in the reviews.
What do you think made your experience different from others for the other three?Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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Two Worlds is pretty horrible. There's actually a trick or glitch that you can beat the end game villain right in like first half hour of the game. Once you do, the game rolls to credits, which is actually kind of hilarious.
Personally, I'm going to say Elex. It suckered me in with a cool concept, and depressed me with horrible controls and really really bad voice acting.
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@Testament said in Worst Games:
Two Worlds is pretty horrible. There's actually a trick or glitch that you can beat the end game villain right in like first half hour of the game. Once you do, the game rolls to credits, which is actually kind of hilarious.
Personally, I'm going to say Elex. It suckered me in with a cool concept, and depressed me with horrible controls and really really bad voice acting.
Oh good, I wasn't the only one suckered into that one.
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@Auspice
That's a good question.With Venetica, the story was actually pretty decent and the whole premise of the game was interesting. The problem actually came in combat - the hit boxes for the creatures when in combat were not consistent. It required you to practically stand on top of the creatures and clip into them to be able to hit them at times. There was more than one location where the starting of combat would crash the game to desktop or lock up the computer requiring a soft-reboot. Animations were always off from the dialogue and sometimes the cut scene animations were not complete showing blank faces or just a mouth and pair of eyeballs. Character movement was jilted and stiff which often required a lot of repositioning to access interactable objects.
As you progressed further into the game the "difficulty" increase made enemies spongier in terms of hit points and armor while the character scaling for damage on weapons or protection by armor, or the usefulness of skills, did not scale equally. So you ended up with a game with a ramping difficulty that created longer combats and more frequent deaths until you got through the combat more by luck than skill or character build.
Two Worlds, when it came out was just a buggy hot mess. The game would crash when doing setting transitions. Combat was bugged to such a point that there were enemies with ranged attacks that could see you from the other side of a mountain and clip their attacks through terrain to hit you. The movement controls for the character were terrible, were even standing directly in front of interactable objects would not detect you actually standing there - and requiring you to get on top of the object or position your camera so the character would clip into it to get the interaction command to appear. That's not all the problems but those are some of the worst.
Mars: War Logs was a game that also had a great premise and story idea. This game also had huge issues with hitbox detection for combat and since the early game locked you into melee combat this was a huge issue. It required the character to be practically on top of the monster to hit it, whereas the player had a wider hitbox the creatures could hit in their own melee without entering your melee range. The game also had crashing issues with zone transitions and at one point I encountered a game-breaking bug that would not let the game progress during dialogue in a cut-scene and would crash the game to desktop or lock the computer up altogether requiring a soft reboot. Playing the game through on another save file to see if it was a localization issue in that particular save game file, still presented the same problem.
It would be fair to note that some of these issues could have been patched out since then but I have not revisited the games since their initial releases.
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Again, not the worst game I ever played, but it was so dull though it had no reason to be. It was disappointing in the Mirror’s Edge sense, but with worse writing and the kind of uncreative villain escalation where there are just more of them with more and more hit points.
It could've been a good game. It wasn’t.
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@Jaded said in Worst Games:
It would be fair to note that some of these issues could have been patched out since then but I have not revisited the games since their initial releases.
You know...
It's a good thing, on balance, that devs can release patches. It is. The sprawling work on a modern AAA game is akways gonna have some issues, and the fact that they can reach into my console and fix things is proof that we live in the future.
But goddamn if it doesn't annoy me that companies are using that to ship out unplayable games and then making the suckers who shelled out for the Ultimate Deluxe Big Spender edition into their second round of beta, so that by the time people are scraping it out of the bargain bin they might find a good game in there. So now scoping out reviews, they all have to end with "...as of time of writing; if you buy it now, maybe it's a cooking simulator for all I can say."
There's a happy medium, y'know?
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Unfortunately, some of that blame is on us gamers, too. (Maybe not us here, but the community at large) Look at the utter backlash some companies have gotten when they delay a release.
I'm fine with a delay for the reasons you stated. I'd rather they release a game that works and that they're happy with. But holy god do some people rage, cancel pre-orders, etc. etc.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Auspice Preorders shouldn't be a thing.
That said, you bet your ass I preordered Cyberpunk 2077...
He/Him
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@Tinuviel said in Worst Games:
@Auspice Preorders shouldn't be a thing.
That said, you bet your ass I preordered Cyberpunk 2077...
Pre-orders serve a purpose. They indicate interest in the game (important for funding!) and they help manage sales (instead of shipping ### to every single store, they know: ok we got only 2 pre-orders at Store A, but 50 at Store B... Store B needs way more stock than Store A). I can totally understand them. I understand the dislike for some aspects of them (the 'pre-order bonus' stuff is stupid), but I understand them in general.
...I still need to pre-order Cyberpunk 2077. I can afford to now!
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Auspice Oh I understand their purpose. I just heavily dislike the idea. Preorder bonuses and eleventy thousand editions of a game can go jump off a cliff, though.
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@Auspice
I often find people getting upset at delays confusing. I encourage delays if it will make the game better. I do not think the pre-order culture in the gaming industry is consistent in that it actually helps make better games, though. It usually seems like just a way for the game publisher to dig as deep into the pockets of the player as possible.Pre-order culture also seems to create some sense of entitlement too. I've known people who were just absolute in that, "I bought my game and you said it would come out on this date. You lied, time to cancel my pre-order and tell everyone I know to cancel theirs too."
But I am guilty of indulging in this culture. There are only two companies that I would find myself willing to preorder from, and of the two only one of them without actually playing in a beta test. That first one is CD Project Red. I pre-ordered The Witcher 3 with no regrets, and it is the way that the company presents itself and their philosophy towards game-design that gives me confidence in my pre-order for Cyberpunk.
The other, oddly enough, is Ubisoft, but I think it's because of the availability of betas they offer. I have pre-ordered Ghost Recon: Breakpoint because I got to play it and that helped finalized my decision on if it was worth the price point of sale or not.
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@Jaded Most of my pre-orders have come from beta, yes.
As for CDPR: they have a specific philosophy based around 'we will not release until we are satisfied' and they also don't overwork their employees (supposedly, at least). I am glad to support them.
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@Jaded said in Worst Games:
I often find people getting upset at delays confusing.
I think this is less to do with preorders specifically, but the sheer level of hype built around many larger games. Like, I get being disappointed when a game is delayed because you were excited to be playing it soon. I totally get that. But typing rage-filled diatribes and sending death threats to level designers on twitter because your game was delayed a few months? Ugh.
He/Him
