That sucky game that you love

[GolemsVoice]

Norton Mapes is one of the WORST characters in ANY game, and I'm not sure why they deliberately sabotaged their game to such an extend (because as soon as Mapes was around, all horror faded into nothingness), but aside from that, FEAR is a solid shooter and a good horror game. Even 2 is ok, I liked it.

[Muz]

I enjoyed Star Control 3.

Go ahead, stone me if you must. I'd never played SC2 at that point (though I had played a bit of 1 at a friend's place), and, darn it, I had fun! I liked the Daktaklakpak! I still quote the Doog now and again when playing Civ with a friend who also played SC3.

Granted, I haven't played SC3 in years, but I do remember liking it. And for that, I realize I am in the tiny minority.

(Curiously, I also liked Alien 3 when I saw it, and it was the first Alien movie I'd seen at the time.)

[IthilanorStPete]

Backyard Football and Backyard Baseball (some of the older ones). They're kids games, they're simple and easy, the AI is pathetic...but gods help me I like them. There's something great about having Larry Walker be your #8 hitter.
Also, the Treasure Planet game Battle at Procyon. Surprisingly good ship-to-ship combat.

Command & Conquer: Renegade.

Technically it looks like a game made by people who have never made a shooter. The characters were facepalm-worthy, had some weird balance issues that made you pistol a tank for money, it looked awful, had features cut for the release.


But it combined so well. It had something that really hasn't been done again in a shooter, the bad characters transcend into parody letting you play as GI Joe characters, and there it just played well in multiplayer as a team game.

And I thought I was alone out there!

First the singleplayer: It had the most horrible escort mission in history, a wierd story only loved by people who liked the whole NOD/GDI situation and more LARGE HAM situations then you can shake a stick at, but it was still enjoyable.


The multiplayer. Unique. I still play it today and I love it. No flags, no caps, no checkpoints. Just two bases and whoever has the last building standing wins.

Also it was a game more about tactic then about "skill" (the ability to hit half pixel halfway across the map after a split second)

You're a world class sniper? I have tank. And guess what my tank is less expensive than your sniper.

You bought a 1000 credit ramboesque character? My 0 credit shotgunner reduced you to 20% health before dying to one bullet from you. So what do you do now?

I loved Renegade, and it does have a great multiplayer. The tactics and strategy gave it a surprising amount of depth, and the base vs. base combat made it feel much more intense. I can remember some great times defending a base, desperately repairing the last building to try and keep it alive as the timer clicked down with us ahead in the score...

Minesweeper.

I got so addicted to it once that I trained until I could bring my Expert record down to 73 seconds.

Hah, mine is 68 seconds!

...And I thought my ~140 seconds time was good.

[MlleRouge]

Haven't posted in a while, but this topic brought up so many memories that I just had to!

My beloved 'bad' game? Dragon Rage for PS2.

Graphics that would have looked good on PS1? Check.
Half-baked storyline? Check
Bad voice acting? Check
Power ups based on the collection of cow souls? Double check.

I vaguely recall this game getting a promising preview in 'Official Playstation Magazine' back when I was a teenager. Being somewhat obsessed with dragons (I still have a large collection of statuettes, figurines, etc that I've accumulated since age 10 or so), I was all excited. I get to fly around as a dragon and blow stuff up? Sweet.

I somehow missed the release, but found the game in a bargain bin for 10 bucks. Boy, was it bad. I loved it anyhow. I beat it over and over, and even had a save right before the dramatic conflict with the orc armies on an open plain. I didn't care that it was awful; after getting my adolescent rump kicked by MGS2 a few times, blowing up an army of orcs with a dragon made of polygons and voiced by Wargreymon really cheered me up.


Speaking of Wargreymon, I feel similarly about Digimon: Digital Card Battle, but I'm not sure if it's sucky enough to qualify for this conversation.

[Leecros]

Norton Mapes is one of the WORST characters in ANY game, and I'm not sure why they deliberately sabotaged their game to such an extend (because as soon as Mapes was around, all horror faded into nothingness),

what are you talking about? I wanted to murder him. As one who was actually gullible enough to not realize that he totally planned on turning on you, when he turned that first awful, annoying, frustrating, tanky, most annoying thing in the game turret on you. I had a few special words that....i can't say here. I don't really get raged up over a video game...unless it's with another human player(which is why i don't play multiplayer). Finding feelings like those for a simple artificial character was rather horrifying.


as far as a sucky game that i love?


.....i liked Elemental: War of Magic. I bought the game on-release for $60(or was it $80? i don't remember). Despite all the bugs(the game was practically unplayable on-release), a crappy campaign that i will never go through, frequent crashes, disappointing visuals, a poor interface, bad AI and other silly things(i still don't think your children can actually succeed you if you die, leading to a game over and your children being practically useless except for combat...why even have a family tree?). Other than that, i really enjoy the gameplay. It feels like the horribly mutated lovechild of Civilization and Lords of Magic. Both of which i play to this day and both of which have elements in Elemental that i really enjoy. I also like the concept of the game world itself, yeah it could have been improved upon and embellished a little, but i still liked it.

[Rake21]

The game that that is very interesting is "World of Warcraft" because it is very interesting an also having great features and also quality sound effects. Playing this game will improve your educational skills and also gives us lot of entertainment and fun.

Yeah, but would you consider it sucky?

[Nerd-o-rama]

Yeah, but would you consider it sucky?

He or she might if he or she wasn't an advertising bot.

[Rake21]

He or she might if he or she wasn't an advertising bot.

That's some ****ty advertising then. Though I guess I should have figured that, considering it was such a roaring endorsement... and well written...

[Leecros]

Yeah, but would you consider it sucky?

I do, but....well yeah i don't play it because i don't want to spend money monthly on games i consider "Sucky".

[LordofDragons24]

Beloved awful game?

For all it's weird sense of historical timeline, characters that weren't half believable and a story so inane that it was worth laughing at half the time,

The Saboteur is still in my collection for the stupid good fun. Pretending to fight Nazis in Paris as a foul-mouthed irishman is just too much joy not to give up. The game has graphics that feel out of place, and although it came out after the first Assassin's Creed (EA also did the Sabot.) it's wall-climbing mechanic was a poor rehash of Altair's fluidity.

But it's just too darn addicting to throw away. The entire city has more free-roaming targets in it to count, and you can spend hours away locked in blowing up Nazi fuel depots, sniper towers, propaganda speakers, etc... The choice of weapons and vehicles is pretty slick (although the driving system is a little, should I say, 'sluggish') while combat itself is too darn fun. I can't get rid of it, so I guess I'm taking it with me. :)

[Wardog]

I can't think offhand of any games that I like despite them being obviously sucky (but I know I have played several such games).

A game I like that everyone else seems to think sucks (but I think is a good game) would be Unreal Tournament 2003.

Apparently the Unreal community thinks it's rubbish, and UT2004 is the way to go, but I think it was(is) fun to play and looks good.

[GolemsVoice]

Well, UT 2003 wasn'T bad, but from my experience, Ut 2004 did everything Ut 2003 did, and MORE.

[chainer1216]

I have two.

Chaos legion: it had terribad graphics, the game play was stiff and had a paper thin "story" but God damn it was fun.

Devil may cry 2: a complete downgrade in gameplay from the first, but I felt the story was much more compelling.

[MLai]

DEADLY TOWERS


Yes the fabled candidate for "Worst Game Ever" on the NES, seen in many retro blogs. I was exposed to this game as a child, back when I used to buy games from seedy flea market stalls by looking at the front of the box.

Terrible graphics, 10-secs-loop music, difficulty curve shaped like the Cliffs of Moher, randomly-hidden dungeons that defied graph paper mapping and from which you could never escape (you might as well have fallen into a spiked pit rather than the invisible entrance, the suffering would be shorter), and a chubby hero who shoots swords out of his penis (or his penis is a sword which he shoots).

Before this game, I've been spoiled by games made by Shigeru Miyamoto, who understood how to design games for human children. This is the first game that ever taught me that if a game is laid out with alien geometry logic, then you'll beat it only by gaming the system. You ignore 90% of the game which is unbeatable, exploit the Ultimate Treasure rooms in a certain order, and then just skip to the end portion of the game and breeze through that. Done. And then EPIC ENDING (by NES standards).

Addendum: You see that faint cloud of pixels in the picture? That's either an enemy dying to your penis, or it's an enemy. Because this game recycles the enemy death explosion animation as an enemy.

[Zevox]

Devil may cry 2: a complete downgrade in gameplay from the first, but I felt the story was much more compelling.

But the story was completely incoherent. It was a small handful of cutscenes strewn throughout the game, without context or exposition to give you any idea what was really going on, nor anything connecting them in between. Story has never been Devil May Cry's strong suit, but I'd call that one the worst in that regard, simply because it's so poorly told.

Zevox

[Seerow]

I have one game that it took me a while to think of simply because I hardly even consider it a game. It's just that uninspiring. The game? Cyber Nations.

I've been playing this game for 6 years come August. I mean, that's a really long time to be playing a game you don't even really like. The game itself is really simple. It's a browser based nation building game. You can collect your taxes daily, pay your bills, and spend your leftover money on Land/Infrastructure/Technology or military stuff. You can declare war on other nations and fight them, destroying/stealing their stuff, and getting your own destroyed in turn. The game has been stagnant in terms of mechanics for years. There's been maybe 3 meaningful updates in the last 5 years I can remember. Scaling and Inflation are terrible, to the point where anyone joining the game today would have to play for literally a year before having a nation that was even considered worthwhile in a war.

And yet despite all this, I still play the game. The game's community evolved very early on based on a migration of players from the game Nationstates (which is kind of like Cybernations but really even worse because there wasn't even a way to go to war), so a lot of players came into the game with a fairly political mindset. Alliances were formed, and today alliances and player interraction make up the majority of the game. While there are a good number of bloated innactive alliances, there are also a number of really good ones with active distinct communities that help bring the game to life.

And of course, any place where you have distinct communities, you have friction between people leading those communities, which is generally the main cause for going to war. Mainly because the game itself hasn't provided any real reason to do so. Basically the game consists of 6 months of sitting around, chatting, and watching as interactions result in lines being drawn and sides line up until someone comes up with some excuse for a war, at which point we get 1-2 months of beating each other up until everyone gets bored, the losing side surrenders, and we go back to peace for 6 months while it all builds up again.

It's very slow paced, not particularly active, and objectively terrible, but for a patient person who's been there since the beginning, it's very hard to leave, and every time I try I find myself drawn back in.

[Zanfib]

Ah Aidyn Chronicles. I got to the end of that game with only two characters left alive (three if you count the hero). And one of them was level four.