What's the most broken game you have had the misfortune of buying?

[Hollywood koal]

Homefront. Xbox 360. I bought it release from Gamestop. Put in the codes and the game was stuck at load screen with no fix. after a week i gave up and got a refund.
i can't imagine how you can mess up a console game so bad.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

Hmm probably anything made using Bethesda's game engine:

Oblivion
Fallout 3
Fallout New Vegas
Skyrim

They are the only games I have ever played where glitches have actually affected the gameplay and stopped me from completing certain objectives. I consider that to be the definition of broken. They are also the most expansive and engrossing games I have ever played. Go figure.

I'll also say Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS, mostly because they expect you to use the stylus and touchscreen to control flight whilst looking at the top screen. I have found that damn game near unplayable and can barely get past the first few levels. Why no option to use the normal directional keys? It would make the game much more enjoyable using the analog stick on my 3DS.

 

[Brown Cap]

This game is by no means broken - it's fantastic, but I completely regret buying.
Assassin's Creed 2. As soon as I beat it, I had no interest of playing it again or any further.
Very Low Replay Value. I'm not going to pour a handful of more hours finding feathers for my brother just to get an achievement...

 

[Shinclone]

Boiling Point & Alpha Protocol. How those games got released in that state is mind boggling.

 

[RubyT]

Drakan. Ages ago. Crashed every 5 minutes or so and had the habit killing save games in the process which made the game unusable, since I had to quick save AND real save every 2 minutes to maintain progress. Sad, because the little I played of the game was awesome for 1999.
No patch fixed it for me, but I was on dial-up then and don't know if any real fix ever was released.

Gothic 3 was almost impossible buggy as well. Bought it reviews unseen because I'm a fan of the series. It was horribly unbalanced. The attack rate of puny boars was higher than the stun time inflicted by the attack, which means that once a boar got to you, it slowly grinded you to death, even if you were a Level 50 and could defeat armies by yourself.

 

[SoetSout]

i believe someone said this already... but battlefield 3 is hands down the worst. origin... AGGHHH geting nightmares again!!!

that was just horrible, bf3 without origin could have been a whole other thing, and honestly it would have been more of a success.

 

[ZombieGenesis]

Oh god, Neverwinter Nights II, definately.
Had to restart the game three times because of three DIFFERENT fatal glitches that made it impossible to progress.

Got to turn three and realised the game wasn't worth it.

 

[Capt. Crankypants]

Saints Row 2. Unplayable piece of...

I just don't think about it anymore.

this...

Stalker

this...

...and Alone in the Dark.
Saints Row 2 probably wins, because it's so goddamn good on xbox, and so goddamn unplayable on PC -.-

 

[GonzoGamer]

Though, I did buy a copy of Fallout 3 which just plain crashed everytime I tried to play it for more than 10 minuites on my PC.
Moral of the story: Only buy Bethesda games for consoles.

That's funny. I would only buy a Bethesda game on the PC.
With a couple of mods, Fallout 3 ran beautifully on my PC; the trick was installing the mods correctly.

I'm still waiting for Bethesda to patch Fallout 3 & New Vegas into working order on my ps3 and I'm getting the feeling that that's never going to happen.

On the PC you have options; on the consoles, you're at the mercy of the publisher and the sad thing is that more and more publishers are releasing a couple of lame patches than writing off the game. It's not just Bethesda, EA does it all the time too.

I suppose that's valid, however, I have had no problems with Bethesda games on my console (Xbox360), and on my computer I had unsolvable (Seriously, no mod I could find helped) crashes.

What I mean to say, is that they test for all of the consoles, but they can't test for all of the computers, so it's more likely to be fucked up on a PC than a computer, whist a PC is more likely to have a fix than a console.

On the 360 they're probably okay but I have a ps3, so I end up playing on the PC a lot.
Do you mean all games crash on your PC or just Bethesda games? If it's all games, there might be something wrong with your video card or something.
If it's just Bethesda games, there could be a few things. Have you ever done the .ini file tweaks. The guy who made the FWE mod made a great video for installing mods and after I followed it, the game ran beautifully. I'll see if I can find that for you.
We shouldn't have to do do all that for the pc, and on the console you shouldn't have to turn off autosave and rush through the main quest.

Just Fallout 3 crashes. But it's alright, I got the GOTY edition on Xbox360 and gave my PC copy to my cousin for Christmas.
I did try numerous fixes including the quad core fix, all the .ini file tweaks I could find, anything.
But after (If I was lucky) 10 minutes, it would crash.

This further confirms my suspicions: considering the difference in performance from before I installed mods. I think it's the mods that might be holding it together.
But I want to go back to what you said about there being different builds for the PC and the software can't adjust to all of them. It's occured to me that the consoles have many different builds as well. That's probably why some ps3 owners are saying they have no problems and others are saying that it's unplayable.

 

[JToyunda]

I am very surprised that Daikatana has not made it onto this list. Except that we're talking about the worst game that you ever BOUGHT...right-o, nevermind.

 

[Otaku World Order]

The Wii version of Alone In The Dark. If you thought the driving was broken in the other versions, you haven't seen anything yet.

 

[josemlopes]

Brink probably.

Paid $60 for it day one and in the month I owned it never once played in a match that wasn't A)laggy as fuck, and B)a full room full of actual people.

This, oh so much this, its like it doesnt even try to find a game with more then 3 people. And how the fuck it still lags?

 

[Aurora Firestorm]

I'm interpreting "broken" as "buggy," rather than as "unbalanced."

The computer port of Prototype was *atrocious.* It wasn't even buggy so much as completely unable to run, not because of computer "this is incompatible" issues but because the program went into horrible convulsions and crashed every time I tried to do something interesting. I actually wrangled Steam/Valve into a refund, and Valve really hates giving refunds. I had to keep repeating that no, no matter what I did, this thing was never going to work. And I can play Portal 2 and Skyrim and other high-graphics games without a hitch.

Skyrim is second up on the list. The graphics are flaky as hell; you can't jump when you're standing on a slope regardless of the fact that *your horse can run straight up a 60-degree incline*; oh yeah, did I mention that your horse can climb towers, run straight up mountains, and get stuck 40 feet on top of an obstacle and not be able to get down without dying? You get stuck in crevices and vertices in the terrain, also.

 

[MrGseff]

Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. I wanted to enjoy it, I love the Sonic games but this was awful.

 

[Reeves88]

for me oddly enough it was universe at war, at the time i bought it it cost me 70$ and 2 months later it was reduced to 10$ but to make matters worse was that the idea of the teams was really cool but the ai was horrible written, if you where the stealth team the ai would some how know where you where and kill your invisable units with out detectors or would give up and not build anything while for some unknown reason to me my copy of the game would keep unregistering itself and delete all my saves and it also had the uncanny ability to magically crash when ever i was wining a game, it was the first game i found that made my computer rage quit if it was losing

 

[kasperbbs]

Saints Row 2. Unplayable piece of...

I just don't think about it anymore.

This, the PC port was horrible. Loved the 3rd one tho..

 

[Freechoice]

Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines

Not only did it somehow manage to have awful FPS worse on my laptop than RE4, (a much better game from a later date) but it was also buggy, ugly and now it refuses to work.

I kissed my 5 dollars goodbai.

 

[Gorilla Gunk]

Brink probably.

Paid $60 for it day one and in the month I owned it never once played in a match that wasn't A)laggy as fuck, and B)a full room full of actual people.

This, oh so much this, its like it doesnt even try to find a game with more then 3 people. And how the fuck it still lags?

I never understood how I was able to get a perfect connection on MAG where I'm sharing the room with upwards of 100 other players, yet I'd be lucky to get 2 bars in Brink when I'm in a game with ONE other person.