Games you love despite huge flaws

[Jennacide]

Out of morbid curiosity, plus my personal revelation that two games I thoroughly enjoy are flawed out the yin-yang, what games do you guys and gals love despite being a buggy or badly designed mess?

Mine: Oblivion and Just Cause 2.

Oblivion- Widely regarded as possibly the worst coded game engine ever, the Gamebryo engine Oblivion runs on is notorious for memory leaks, crashes, save corruption, and an almost complete lack of optimization. And yet, I still put up with it all because I enjoy the game and (mostly) the mod community behind it. Thankfully a lot of these issues were resolved in FO3, hoping New Vegas fixes the rest.

Just Cause 2- Visually impressive and tons of fun to rampage through the world. The downside? The godawful acting, story, enemy AI and enemy systems in general. The Panau army soaks up so many bullets while on Normal difficulty Rico gets wrecked by a few shots, and the army has near perfect accuracy at any distance. Combined with horrible ammo capacities starting out, and you are switching guns every minute or so and constantly having to run from a gunfight. Personal annoyance note: getting 100% on some locations is MADDENING.

Anyway, don't take this as me bashing on either of these games, as I obviously enjoy them a lot. I'm just willingly to admit there are so major issues that would of made them more acceptable to a wider audience.

 

[TheAmazingTGIF]

Star Wars: The Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
The reason I have hope. [http://www.team-gizka.org/index.html]

 

[AnAngryMoose]

Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death. Epic game.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

Earth Defense Force 2017.

Technically a mess, ugly as hell. Fun...It's got it.

 

[Rednog]

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
Such a good game, but so many glitches, a shoddy stealth/combat system and repetitive enemies. But still such a fun game overall. The scenarios and general cast is worthy of the World of Darkness and some of the text options are just hilarious. And the haunted hotel level was incredibly scary despite so little happening.

 

[super_smash_jesus]

tetris. Why would completing a row erase it? Madness I say.

 

[Henrik Persson]

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The atmosphere is amazing, the story is great, the characters are interesting, awesome humor, you have several options to solve quests without the run and gun method being the most profitable.

The bad? Riddled with bugs, the combat system is severely lacking and the end of the game turns into a slugfest, which with this poor combat system isn't fun.

 

[SimuLord]

Oblivion for all the reasons you stated---I still get framerate hitches on it even though I've upgraded my computer past what was even available when the game first came out and have no such problems with Fallout 3.

Despite being buggy as a cheap motel bathroom and with an interface that is Byzantine at best and completely impenetrable at worst, Victoria: Revolutions is nonetheless one of my all-time favorite games.

 

[Cornish]

Mirror's Edge - Terrible choice regarding cut-scenes (didn't fit the overall style and feel of the game), hazy and unclear story and badly explained, too few levels in the story mode... but I completely adore the game.

 

[Lee Black]

X3 Terran Conflict, at release it could charitably be called "beta" they rely on players modding around most of the major issues and the interface is clunky as hell.

BUT

It's made by a company that has roughly 12 employees, it's addictive as crack and is one of the few games that really does let you play it ANY WAY YOU LIKE.
Also, the company CEO often makes an appearance on the forums (and not in a condecending way), a lot of player mod features and ship models made it into the current version including the entire frigate class of ships.

 

[TheDuckbunny]

Arcanum's one. Awesome setting, music, characters and overall atmosphere.
The game was awfully buggy though and the combat mechanics were pretty clumsy.

 

[Teze]

Left 4 Dead 2, NPCs...

 

[Necromancer1991]

Red Faction was an awesome game despite the menagerie of problems it had:
crappy story, wonky physics, horrible driving controls, and puny ammo reserves

 

[reg42]

Clive Barker's Jericho. Yeah, technically it sucks, but it's just so fun IMO.

 

[DoctorNick]

Fallout 3.

Good, solid, entertaining gameplay, beautiful visuals, barrels of fun to be had all around.

Unfortunately, all of the characters look like they were bused in straight out of the god damned uncanny valley. Furthermore the story was written by dung-hurling howler monkeys. [http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2010]

 

[saintchristopher]

I love the Blood Omen/Soul Reaver games in spite of their glitches and shortcomings. Christ, the original Soul Reaver was published as a 75% finished game! The story, and more importantly the voice acting, more than make up for the technical flaws.

 

[loudmouth]

Morrowind, The game play and glitches call for high endurance just to play the damn thing, but it just was a beautiful game and had so much detail that was just lost in oblivion ( and later games).

I love this game so much i'm on my tenth play through, or maybe even more.

 

[Cake-Pie]

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
Such a good game, but so many glitches, a shoddy stealth/combat system and repetitive enemies. But still such a fun game overall. The scenarios and general cast is worthy of the World of Darkness and some of the text options are just hilarious. And the haunted hotel level was incredibly scary despite so little happening.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The atmosphere is amazing, the story is great, the characters are interesting, awesome humor, you have several options to solve quests without the run and gun method being the most profitable.

The bad? Riddled with bugs, the combat system is severely lacking and the end of the game turns into a slugfest, which with this poor combat system isn't fun.

Here, here! I also loved Bloodlines despite it being a broken piece of shit with quests that didn't work. My thing about the game was the variety of gameplay. Haunted house level, FPS level, zombeez are eat mah brainz level, etc.

A great game that suffered from a similar pattern was Arcanum, an old PC rpg made by the same dev (troika). It was this wicked awesome steampunk game where you could make fantasy characters with magic or steam (lol) or whatever you wanted.

 

[Cake-Pie]

Arcanum's one. Awesome setting, music, characters and overall atmosphere.
The game was awfully buggy though and the combat mechanics were pretty clumsy.

Lol, you posted as I was writing my post.

<3 Arcanum

 

[cuddly_tomato]

X3 Terran Conflict, at release it could charitably be called "beta" they rely on players modding around most of the major issues and the interface is clunky as hell.

BUT

It's made by a company that has roughly 12 employees, it's addictive as crack and is one of the few games that really does let you play it ANY WAY YOU LIKE.
Also, the company CEO often makes an appearance on the forums (and not in a condecending way), a lot of player mod features and ship models made it into the current version including the entire frigate class of ships.

Ditto. I love that game to.

Or I would, if I could play it for more than 7 hours without the saves corrupting.

I am awaiting a new patch. If that fails to fix it then I might well give up on it.