Ask Lemmy

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.

When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.

I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the 'Spy' piece could kill the 'General' (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the 'Spy' could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a 'Spy' is called that because it's obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.

Nobody agreed and just played the game with the 'Spy' as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.

I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.

Nobody should answer "Monopoly" because it's intended to be un-fun, as an object lesson in why monopolies are bad.

I rented Superman 64 at Blockbuster once.

Don't reccomend.

Much broken.

Such bugs.

Wow.

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".

7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.

Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was 'defective'. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn't work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.

I can't really remember what I didn't like about the game...probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.

Capitalism

Mario Party 9 was so bad I think I only played it one time.

The moment I saw the car thing and read that there was no way to get around it, we quit and went back to the older games.

10-player game of munchkin. Could feel my soul trying to crawl out of my mouth after the 3rd hour.

Heavy Rain, also known as: How to make mechanics that are even more annoying than the characters of this dumpster fire?

Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.

Monopoly. Tragically boring.

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.

Played an old LoTR game for the SNES that was so full of bugs, it actually held my interest longer than it should have because I was curious whether the game could even be completed.

Mario Party.

I. Fucking. HATE. Mario Party.

Space Station 13 is simulteanously the worst and best game I have played depending on the station you choose. I've been one a shift where we fought back every monstrosity thrown at us with ease. I've also been on a shift where I am the only medical crew and the capitan is a traitor and why is the ship already on fire its been 10 minutes?

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

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.

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.

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.

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.

Snakes and Ladders is the only game bad enough to avoid that I've nevertheless been obliged to play repeatedly.

Monopoly. Literally designed to be frustratingly unplayable to represent the frustratingly unplayable user experience of capitalism, but people insist on playing it anyway.

AD&D 2e. Insists it's a game about exciting fantasy adventuring, then all the rules are about painfully slow tactical minutiae. The combat mechanics are taken from a game about modern naval warfare, hence bigger Armor Class means easy to hit. It's unclear why anyone thought ships with guns was a good model for medieval sword fighting. Entire sections of rules have to be ignored - hello encumberance - and gameplay regularly has to stop to look up charts, tables or niche rules like grappling.

Screamball. Like ping pong, except the point goes to whoever screams the loudest during a volley. We made it up as teenagers. It was awful.

Master of Orion III, a 4X game from around the turn of the century. The two previous instalments were fun strategy games. This one was like playing the world's prettiest spreadsheet.

Diablo Immortal was and still is a dumpster fire. Diablo 4 sucked too.