Worst Games You have ever played (in your opinion)

[danzibr]

Do you mean... "I mean more like... people play a game for the first few minutes and say they, well, played it. Makes it sound like they actually played it (to completion)."

Because that would explain it - I'm not really much of a gamer (I might play a couple hours of videogames once a month, if that). I could, if I felt bothered, list all the games I've ever actually completed, and it would take me, like, a minute. Maybe two. Your belief that I am able to finish things warms my heart, though.

Haha, glad that warms your heart :)

And... the more I think about it, yeah, I guess that is what I mean. Or well, maybe at least half of the game. And not just games, books/movies/food/whatever.

"I did X" = "I completed at least 50% of X"

Still sounds funny to me, but more on the right track. If someone were to ask me, "Hey, did you see such-and-such movie?" If I started it but got distracted/didn't like it, I'd respond with, "Yeah, but..." rather than a flat, "Yeah."

[Brother Oni]

I never said that it was the worst game I've ever played. I've played much worse (mostly garbage small-studio games), but I've never bounced off a "really good" game like that before, other than the time where I was hyped to play Shadow of the Colossus for literal years... and then couldn't actually handle the controls.

Reminds me of the time I was hyped to finally play the first Half Life after scrimping and saving to get sufficient parts to build a non-potato PC... only to discover that I suffer from simulation sickness after 10 minutes playing and had to go lie down for a couple of hours with a bucket within arm's reach.

[tyckspoon]

Reminds me of the time I was hyped to finally play the first Half Life after scrimping and saving to get sufficient parts to build a non-potato PC... only to discover that I suffer from simulation sickness after 10 minutes playing and had to go lie down for a couple of hours with a bucket within arm's reach.

I have pretty bad motion-sickness issues from most first-person cameras; can relate. Doesn't matter how good the game is, I will be physically unable to play it for any extended period of time (and let's not even get into the issues of watching *somebody else* play one where I'm not in direct control of the camera!)

[Hunter Noventa]

I have pretty bad motion-sickness issues from most first-person cameras; can relate. Doesn't matter how good the game is, I will be physically unable to play it for any extended period of time (and let's not even get into the issues of watching *somebody else* play one where I'm not in direct control of the camera!)

I have the same problem, last game first-person game I tried was Deus Ex...the more recent version that wasn't a sequel. Made me feel ill relatively fast. It's why I'm so disappointed that Cyberpunk 2077 is all first-person.

Oddly I can watch the games being played with little issue, as long as I don't put it full-screen. but trying to play one just slays me.

[The Patterner]

Conan exiles, so frikking bad.

It looks nice, I really, really liked the nature and choices in character design. and I kind of liked the beginning when you wander around in the desert.

But the crafting system is just so clunky and bothersome, and the combat system is just weird and lacking.

It's like someone took a good idea, and wondered how they best could ruin it while still having it look good on paper.

[Brother Oni]

I have pretty bad motion-sickness issues from most first-person cameras; can relate. Doesn't matter how good the game is, I will be physically unable to play it for any extended period of time (and let's not even get into the issues of watching *somebody else* play one where I'm not in direct control of the camera!)

I have the same problem, last game first-person game I tried was Deus Ex...the more recent version that wasn't a sequel. Made me feel ill relatively fast. It's why I'm so disappointed that Cyberpunk 2077 is all first-person.

Oddly I can watch the games being played with little issue, as long as I don't put it full-screen. but trying to play one just slays me.

I still can't watch a first person camera game being played for long, but I have discovered this neat little trick that helps me stand playing a FP camera game for longer - crank down the mouse sensitivity as low as is playable.

I discovered this when I got the Halo Reach XBox 360 bundle as it was cheaper to buy that and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood than a standard XBox 360 package and AC:B. Curiosity eventually got the better of me and I tried to play Halo Reach on a controller and to my vast surprise, I didn't get motion sick throughout the whole game, except for a single city section map which involves running around inside an office block.

After some experimentation back on my PC, it was the head bob followed by the mouse sensitivity that most affected my sickness, so disabling the option and lowering the mouse sensitivity helped. Certain games still seem to be worse for triggering it (the FP version of the Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu mythos game was terrible for it even with limiting the frame rate and the mouse sensitivity), but if you get an opportunity, give it a try.

[factotum]

After some experimentation back on my PC, it was the head bob followed by the mouse sensitivity that most affected my sickness, so disabling the option and lowering the mouse sensitivity helped.

Couldn't you just get a controller for your PC and play it that way?

[noob]

I still can't watch a first person camera game being played for long, but I have discovered this neat little trick that helps me stand playing a FP camera game for longer - crank down the mouse sensitivity as low as is playable.

I discovered this when I got the Halo Reach XBox 360 bundle as it was cheaper to buy that and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood than a standard XBox 360 package and AC:B. Curiosity eventually got the better of me and I tried to play Halo Reach on a controller and to my vast surprise, I didn't get motion sick throughout the whole game, except for a single city section map which involves running around inside an office block.

After some experimentation back on my PC, it was the head bob followed by the mouse sensitivity that most affected my sickness, so disabling the option and lowering the mouse sensitivity helped. Certain games still seem to be worse for triggering it (the FP version of the Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu mythos game was terrible for it even with limiting the frame rate and the mouse sensitivity), but if you get an opportunity, give it a try.

Regardless of the first person game I always disable all the head shaking stuff that can be disabled in general.
I never felt sick from playing first person games(except with an oculus rift) but I always have the feeling that camera shaking lower my accuracy and response time (with a computer screen I do the weird thing of usually pushing sensibility above 100 percent(of the bar in the menu) often reaching things like 200% sensibility and many people say I move too nervously the camera so I am not going to add random headshaking to that)
I also usually get a fov as high as possible.
I wonder if fov influence nausea since the higher the fov is the less things appear and disappear for the same angle to watch(so you need less to watch quickly right and left for seeing a lot of things) but at the same time it increase the deformation so whenever increasing fov helps or hampers with nausea is hard to guess.

Did you try experimenting with the field of view and compare the field of view of the varied games relatively to the nausea they induce(maybe there is an optimum field of view that induce less nausea for you)?

[Brother Oni]

Couldn't you just get a controller for your PC and play it that way?

It's the speed of the camera movement that's the issue, since that triggers the 'eye thinks I'm moving, but the inner ear says I'm not' nausea of my form of motion sickness.

Camera speeds on consoles are significantly slower than that on PC, so playing with a controller with PC camera speeds doesn't alleviate the problem and introduces a new problem of me being completely unable to aim with a controller.

I wonder if fov influence nausea since the higher the fov is the less things appear and disappear for the same angle to watch(so you need less to watch quickly right and left for seeing a lot of things) but at the same time it increase the deformation so whenever increasing fov helps or hampers with nausea is hard to guess.

Did you try experimenting with the field of view and compare the field of view of the varied games relatively to the nausea they induce(maybe there is an optimum field of view that induce less nausea for you)?

Unfortunately I don't have very many FPS games with a FOV option, but the next time I get an opportunity, I'll give it a shot.

[Tvtyrant]

I never said that it was the worst game I've ever played. I've played much worse (mostly garbage small-studio games), but I've never bounced off a "really good" game like that before, other than the time where I was hyped to play Shadow of the Colossus for literal years... and then couldn't actually handle the controls. I'm sorry if my mild disappointment and joking exaggeration came off as "worst game evar".



I asked a few of my friends who were crazy into the game after it came out. Apparently they gave me faulty information or whatever. Eh.



It isn't? Apparently Wikipedia is also lying to me. Maybe someone should fix that? (I'm actually being serious here - if that's faulty information, it probably should be fixed.)

I also rather dislike internet-style humor. Quite literally the only reason why I was intrigued by "there's a pacifist run" is because I was curious to see how that'd be handled in an RPG.



Nothing is showing up on the Google. Hopefully you dreamed it up, and you didn't actually play something that poor?

I'm reminded of all of the RPG Maker Ume Nikki clones that I've... experienced ("played" is too strong a word). There's this weird idea that "but it's art" excuses terrible game design, and that making your star a poor, sad, abused child suffices to make it deep and emotionally resonant. Again, I sometimes doubt that they actually exist.

My versions of this were Evolve and Fortnite. Evolve was so cool, but the implementation just felt off. Setting it in a city would have been better for feeling like a rampaging monster or a hero, everything moves at lightning speed so the huge map feels really small.

Fortnite never released the mine-craft style mode I wanted. I went in thinking there would eventually be an escalating wave mode until you get overrun and a large persistent world mode, it never gave me either.

[Lord Torath]

Fortnite never released the mine-craft style mode I wanted. I went in thinking there would eventually be an escalating wave mode until you get overrun and a large persistent world mode, it never gave me either.

As my kids tell me, "You can play Fortnight in Minecraft, but you can't play Minecraft in Fortnight."

[Varen_Tai]

Minecraft I made it ten minutes. Before me stretched an eternity of punching stuff to get blocks to build stuff so I could craft stuff so I could punch higher level stuff so I could repeat the whole cycle. The ennui broke me on the spot.

Oh man, you put this so well. Amen on so many levels. I hated Minecraft immediately and never had the words until I read this.

Ironically, this is the general route for most RPGs, albeit in a much more funnerest (a real word that I made up) way, and I love those. Just the building dynamic was not for me. Give me a good story, and I'm all in, but building without a story just for the sake of building. Ugh.

[Chalkarts]

Worst gaming experience I've ever endured was WoW.

[Tvtyrant]

As my kids tell me, "You can play Fortnight in Minecraft, but you can't play Minecraft in Fortnight."

I could if they would tweak like three things. :/

Just the brick or stone floor overlays and make them layer the depth of the map and let me keep my map permanently.

[Toric]

I watch a lot of Let'sPlays (shout out to LaZodiac) so I can split this into worst game I've played and worst game I've seen.

The worst game I've played was Go Go Tank! for the original Game Boy. You play - you guessed it - a helicopter. A helicopter whose job is to get the perpetually trundling tank from the start to the end of the stage. The tank that takes damage and about-faces when it hits a wall. The tank that will merrily drive into a pit if you don't hit it with a nonlethal bomb to force it to about-face without depleting its health pool. Your helicopter has a crane you can use to pick up platforms and drop them to make blocky inclines and bridges for your tank buddy. With floaty controls, no ability to hover (like some kind of blimp) or even completely arrest your up/down movement, and momentum that gets transferred to the blocks you drop, the game has a nasty learning curve that doesn't pay off for the limited number of lives you have.

Now the worst game I've ever seen is probably Bloodnet for the PC. It's Shadowrun in video game form, only 1. You're a freshly turned vampire with a time limit until you lose your humanity and 2. The mandatory combat is so weighted toward offense the best strategy is to give everyone the strongest guns you can get your hands on and hope one of your guys wins initiative. The LPer started his series to show this game was an unfairly maligned hidden gem... and ended with an essay on nostalgia and what makes a video game truly bad.

[Eldan]

Well, that's a shame... I mean, "Shadowrun, but you're a vampire", and "You have limited time to achieve your goals before your humanity runs out" sound like a good concept for a game. My mind immediately goes to the idea of a sandbox RPG, where you have, like, three nights to finish unfinished business from your previous life before you turn into a monster. And the player could choose which business to focus on. Like, you went on a run with your gang, but were betrayed and turned into a vampire. Do you save your friends, or finish the job, or take vengeance on the one who cheated you, or try to kill the vampire who created you...

Sorry, went a bit off on a tangent here, but now I really want this game. Which probably has nothing in common with the game you mentioned.

[Zalabim]

I couldn't tell you anything about the mechanical balance, other than one anecdote I'll add at the end, but the story/setting of Bloodnet always entertained me when I experienced it. You can meet a hacker who goes by the name Elvis online, who is strongly implied to be Elvis trapped in cyberspace sometime after faking his original death. You can gather up cyborg body parts and make a fully robotic body to get him out cyberspace and recruit him for your party. The resulting robot is an ace hacker and a combat monster, having strength, speed, and armor that vastly surpasses my poorly made budding-vampire PC, considering I'd spent most of my earnings so far on buying his body. Elvis was killed in the first round of the first combat I brought him to by enemies using a previously-joke-weapon, an EMP gun.

[Deadline]

E.T. the extraterrestrial for the Atari. So, so bad. But given that the library of video games available was really small at the time (compared to the nigh un-countable library of games we have available today), I played it. Often, unfortunately.

It really puts current "worst games ever" items in perspective for me.

For a more current game that I played to completion and found to be a net loss in the fun department, Underrail. As a long-time fan of the original isometric Fallout games, I thought this would be a great nostalgia button to push. The only reason I finished it (once I sat back and said to myself, this really isn't very fun) was that I knew I'd come back to it later and convince myself "it wasn't that bad, was it? I should really finish that." Now I don't have to worry.

[Kesnit]

E.T. the extraterrestrial for the Atari. So, so bad.

I was waiting for someone to mention this one...

I also played E.T. Maybe it was my age (I was rather young.) Maybe I was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's because I played on the easiest setting. But I liked the game. When I read many years later about how the cartridges were buried in the desert, I thought it was a joke.

[Rockphed]

I was waiting for someone to mention this one...

I also played E.T. Maybe it was my age (I was rather young.) Maybe I was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's because I played on the easiest setting. But I liked the game. When I read many years later about how the cartridges were buried in the desert, I thought it was a joke.

There are at least two different et games for Atari systems. The most commonly derided one is a side scrolling platformer. The one I grew up with is a top down search game where you have to avoid the cops and such while hunting down the parts to build et's phone. Which one did you play?

[factotum]

I don't think even the famously bad ET game is actually all that terrible by the standards of its day. The most silly thing about it was how Atari thought the game would be so popular that they actually created more cartridges than there existed Atari 2600 consoles at the time, assuming it would be a big console seller...alas, they were rather wrong on that front.

[Kesnit]

There are at least two different et games for Atari systems. The most commonly derided one is a side scrolling platformer. The one I grew up with is a top down search game where you have to avoid the cops and such while hunting down the parts to build et's phone. Which one did you play?

I didn't know there were two games. I played the top-down where you have to avoid the cops.

I don't think even the famously bad ET game is actually all that terrible by the standards of its day. The most silly thing about it was how Atari thought the game would be so popular that they actually created more cartridges than there existed Atari 2600 consoles at the time, assuming it would be a big console seller...alas, they were rather wrong on that front.

That explanation makes a lot of sense. Every time I've read about it, it was framed as "the game sold so badly that they had to bury the cartridges." Which is sort-of what you said, but puts it in better context.

[TaRix]

I thought the overproduced one was their much-heard-on-TV Pac-Man game.(One which I played way back when I had no idea games could be any better in a cartridge. Yes, Atari's Pac-Man is painful to watch and play.)

[The Glyphstone]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._t...l_(video_game)


Looks like Pac-Man was the game they made too many of expecting it to be a console seller. ET just never sold its copies or had them all returned.

[Rockphed]

I didn't know there were two games. I played the top-down where you have to avoid the cops.

I played that one too. It was fun, after its fashion. I never really understood how to play, so I never got very good at it.

[factotum]

Looks like Pac-Man was the game they made too many of expecting it to be a console seller. ET just never sold its copies or had them all returned.

Oops, sorry, I must have misremembered. Still, ET did apparently sell a good million and a bit units, it's just they expected it to sell four million, so the same sort of idea applies!

[Toric]

I seem to remember hearing about an interview with one of the developers of the top-down ET. It may have been part of a Radiolab episode. The crazy thing about ET in hindsight is the developers had very solid ideas about what would make a fun game that sounded good on paper, it was just way too ambitious for the console's limitations. So the game wasn't shovelware like I thought if you believe this take, it was more of a Peter Molyneux project.

I played this game too. It was sorta fun in an exploratory sense. I could never figure out who the people were who were chasing ET but I was able to learn a fair bit about the game's internal logic through trial and error.

[russdm]

There's this weird idea that "but it's art" excuses terrible game design, and that making your star a poor, sad, abused child suffices to make it deep and emotionally resonant.

Sounds to me like the design philosophy beyond every game made by Peter Molyneux. Just include the warped up moral ideals, and you are good to go

[Spore]

Sounds to me like the design philosophy beyond every game made by Peter Molyneux. Just include the warped up moral ideals, and you are good to go

Fable was fun to be perfectly honest. Its story was not great but the DLCs greatly improved upon it.

But yeah divorcing your wife is more evil than killing a town guard? Uh, mate I don't know.

[Neptunas123]

It's far from being the worst game. Grand Theft Auto III was a revolutionary open-world sandbox for its time but for me personally it was extremely irritating and annoying. Missions were made difficult through timers, it was impossible to use the minimap, had to use the one on google. There was this one really annoying mission. You had to steal three cars. You don't know how they look like, only their names and districts they can usually be found in. You steal them and then you have to get them into a particular garage without damaging them. You can't activate the map in-game (I had to use google) AND it had a time limits. It was a discusting mission and I'm glad the devs learned from their mistakes when they developed Vice City, even though we kept seeing stupid RC plane missions and timers even in future GTA's.