Worst game you ever played that wasn't full of bugs/glitches?

[someguy1231]

Whenever the subject of "What's the worst game ever?" comes up, the most popular choices are almost always games with huge amounts of bugs/glitches that make the game practically unplayable. Examples include Big Rigs, Superman 64, Sonic 2006, and Daikatana. All of these games were obviously put together very poorly from a technical point of view, and their reputations clearly suffered for it.

However, when we think about bad games, let's put that idea aside for a moment. "Lots of bugs/glitches" is hardly the only criteria for what makes a bad game. Maybe the subject matter just seems too niche/esoteric, or just plain boring. Maybe it's too short for its asking price. Maybe the gameplay is too shallow (see the recent backlash against "walking simulators") or quickly gets repetitive. Maybe the game's artstyle is just too bizarre or grating for you, especially if it seems to clash with the tone of the game. In other words, these games do what they're supposed to do, but "what they're supposed to do" just isn't very fun or interesting to you.

So, what are your picks for such games? Mine is Final Fantasy XIII. I don't remember seeing any outright bugs or glitches in the game, but the game's shallow, cliched characters, obvious linearity, confusing story (even by FF standards) , and mediocre-at-best combat made it completely forgettable for me. (I also bought it at full price, which makes it particularly bitter for me)

 

[Redd the Sock]

Lord of the Rings part 1 (SNES): Well before Peter Jackson did his thing, a SNES RPG made an attempt to make the trek across middle earth. It really sounds like you'd have to work to screw it up: an overhead action RPG like Zelda in the LotR world, yet they really did. Shallow and slow combat, poor graphics, and just the repetitive nature of it all might have been overlooked but for one thing: everything looks the same. You spend most of the game in caves, or in the Mines of Moria which are identical dark maze areas with torches / basin fires only appearing at forks in the road. For the small caves at the start it wasn't bad, but most of the game was spent navigating the mines with no map, or other sense you were heading in the right direction looking at the same backgrounds, fighting the same rats and bats. After hours of this, I did get through to face the final boss fight with the balrog: a basic walk up to it and mash attack and hope you live fight.

 

[s0denone]

I find a label "worst game you ever played" is wildly subjective. There are games who have objective faults like bugs and glitches, which you mentioned - but if they are disqualified, I think it is a matter of expectation vs reality and what game was the bigger disappointment.
If I also eliminate the idea of older games, simply because today I they would win out in terms of being worse, by being objectively mechanically inferior, I am looking at relatively recent releases - and then the answer is clear as day for me.

Dragon Age 2.
Massively oversimplified controls, dialogue, story, characters, general plot and narrative. Adding to that absolutely incredibly lazy world design, encounter design and pretty much everything in the game being massively disappointing aside from the "chapter" implementation in which a sizeable portion of time passes in between segments, being an interesting and rather refreshing addition.

If Bioshock: Infinites narrative wasn't so strong, or their world so beautiful, that game would probably be mentioned instead, for the atrocious steps taken backwards in terms of gameplay. Dragon Age: Inquisition could be mentioned aswell, for being a single-player MMO instead of an actual Dragon Age game. I am saddened.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The SNES Beauty & the Beast game. Hard as fuck, at least for me at the time.

 

[NeutralDrow]

Does Rapelay count if I could only get through 15 minutes of it? If I limit it to games I played to completion, then Xchange. Dear god, was that game horrendous.

For something that's not a visual novel...hard to say, since I tend to not think about games I didn't enjoy, so I forget them. I guess I was really, really unimpressed with Out of This World, but that might be because I couldn't get past the first two or three screens.

 

[FalloutJack]

And boom goes the dynamite. Time to talk about Final Fantasy 8 again. But instead of my usual rant about everything that's done wrong, let's make this more funny. Let me go over what it might be like if it were a tabletop game. GM, players, system, plot, blah. Begin.

Well, the first thing is obvious. All of the players are newbs with really hokey backstories. Half the cast declare "I have amnesia!", out of character, but they also don't tell anyone in the world this fact, nor apparently do they notice in-character and nobody tells THEM that something's wrong with them until way later. Irvine's build-up for this must've been "Oh man, I haven't seen these people in forever. They're so gonna rag on me because I still have this cowboy getup. Maybe if I pretended I never knew them...". Hell, Edea doesn't even use the fact that she took care of these people as kids against them. DO YOU REALIZE how much dramatic potential is wasted by not telling them "I was your matron at the orphanage you grew up in." at the start of battle? ANY BATTLE? Screw the heroes up, big time. Never happened. It's almost like Luke and Darth Vader, even though Squall's player is less emotive than Keanu Reeves. When Neo from the Matrix can do better than you, you KNOW you're a shitty character!

The GM is also a newbish monstrosity who is trying out his homebrew system that he thinks is SO NEATO! "Yes, by scaling the monsters up with you, and forcing you to learn these GF, Junctioning, Item Crafting, and whatever else systems pretty much at gun-point, I am forcing you to THINK." To which the players then look at the book and find invincibility potions, and a Guardian Force accessable early in the game who can learn to make you encounter NOTHING at random. So, not only has the GM defeated the fun and purpose of leveling, but he's also shot himself in the foot twice by making them invincible and unapproachable, except by bosses. Oh, but don't worry, because he has put in really stupid confrontations you MUST go through all the time, forced a ditzy love interest on the leader, and don't forget that final dungeon boss rush if you want to ever finish this game!

But hey, let's listen to his storytelling for a minute. 'You are an elite group of teenagers trained from childhood to fight in wars and assassinate people who are naturally gifted in magic, but you can't remember certain parts of your childhood because your mind has been tampered with by the creatures you let into your brains, giving you basically brain damage to use their special powers, and indeed most of YOURS. And so, everyone you know is emotionally damaged and can't remember shit about their past. Also, the main character has this supposedly GREAT weapon, a sword attached to a gun handle, but it doesn't shoot swords or anything. It CAUSES backfires that somehow light up the blade instead of harming the face and/or hands of the user, amazingly.' This is so terrible that I would only play it ironically for laughs, to make fun of it. And I STILL wouldn't have fun...

Even then, I would have a seizure at finding out how much of this shit seems thrown against the wall to see what sticks, following the convoluted time-loop that the FIRST Final Fantasy did better, in that YOU created Chaos by shoving your first enemy into the past to create the future you are in. That was good storytelling for FF1. That is TERRIBLE storytelling for the eighth goddamn game that was so overly-hyped. How bad would it be if, in Shadowrun, the epic world-changing Renraku Archology Shutdown plot turned out to be not Deus in control and doing all the weird shit, but the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain. Wouldn't that suck? Isn't that as bad as the 'greatest sorceress EVAR' Ultimecia with her pet lion-monster from nowhere being the main villain, and from the FUTURE without realizing with ANY intelligence that a hoist-by-your-own-petard moment is going on?

Screw FF8. It's terribad. It's agroanizing. It's BADONG.

 

[Eddie the head]

Borderlands 2. Between the boring weapons, stupid enemies, god awful dialog I could never finish it. Also not a fan of the art style, but maybe that's just because I hate everything else about it. My friend told me that best thing you can do in that game is shut off the sound. He was right but it didn't help that much. That antagonist calling every 5 min to just be a dick didn't' make me hate him more than anyone else. Frankly he wanted to kill everyone around, and although I wanted him to die as well, it's a net positive overall to have him win. Or better yet just turn off the fucking game. Fuck that game. Don't think I've every played a game with just such unlikable characters.

 

[Lufia Erim]

Why don't people just make a " games you absolutely hate" thread. That what these things boils down to. I mean seriously is Final fantasy 13, dragon age 2 and final fantasy 8 are the absokute worst games you have ever played then either you haven't been playing games long, you haven't played many games or lady luck is your ***** ( meaning you are very lucky).

OT: street fighter: the movie: the game. It was a terrible. Ps1 game.

 

[Kae]

Max Payne 3, worst sequel ever, it gets everything wrong, I mean sure it's polished and it plays well enough but the tone of the story and character development is all wrong and so is the game design, I don't have time to elaborate right now because I have to run but I might have to edit it in later because I hate that piece of garbage that much and it's obvious that Rockstar had absolutely no idea what made Max Payne good in the first place, I really wish Remedy had done the MP3 that they left on Alan Wake as an easter egg instead, but you know Rockstar had the rights and they wanted to do it themselves even though it's obvious they weren't up to the task.

So what exactly is wrong with Max Payne 3:

Game-play/Design:

So let's start off by talking about the bullet dodge crash, since that is something terrible in Max Payne 3, why is it even here? It makes the game more realistic, sure but Max Payne wasn't supposed to be realistic it was styled as graphic novel and it's main influence was the movie Hard-Boiled neither of which are realistic things and is exactly what made you not care about your blatant defiance of the laws of physics, anyway besides it not fitting what is wrong with this? Well it breaks the flow of the combat greatly and severely decreases the usefulness of the bullet-dodge as now you have to be extra careful as to where to use it and good luck in not crashing with something that's outside your field of view, the way it was done before still required careful planning and strategic use while also punishing you for ineffective use but all without breaking the flow of the game or being excessively frustrating.

The weapon carry limit, again some odd change that was probably made for the sake of realism, so how does this this hurt the game? Simple by only allowing you to carry 2 weapons the challenge of the game shifts from finding the way to optimally clear the room while taking the less damage possible to figuring out how you were supposed to clear the room with the weapons that are laying around since even if you save your favourite it'll probably run out of bullets, in any case this completely changes the dynamic of the game in a way that is in my opinion way more frustrating and annoying, plus the fact that you cannot holster 2 single handed weapons as your alt is pretty stupid, if you want to use a machine-gun or a shotgun for a bit you're going to have to drop one of your weapons if you were dual wielding something.

The extremely directed design, where Max Payne 1 & 2 were all about dropping you into an action scene and letting you do it however you wanted with the available resources Max Payne 3 is more about dropping you into an action scene and letting you figure out how it was supposed to play, this is easily Max Payne 3's worst mistake and probably the main reason why the previous 2 were made, in any case how is this bad? Simple it simply is not a Max Payne game when you do this, this isn't what the game was about, it's also more frustrating and leads to another of MP3's offenses which is the cut-scenes, despite it's great style and being one the franchises most recognizable things Max Payne 1&2 let you skip them almost entirely with some scenes being completely optional, what else is bad about this? Well like I said much of Max Payne was the adrenaline rush of the non-stop action sequence and trying to do it perfectly but much of that is lost if you are constantly being interrupted by cut-scenes but not only that those scenes require you to do something very specific like shooting some guy in the head while you slide mid cut-scene, there just is no flow to any of it at all and it feels terrible when compared to the previous games.

Narrative Possible Spoilers Ahead

Let's Start with the obvious, Max Payne 1 & were self aware satires, while 3 is not, and this is pretty obvious and feels very off, while yes both 1 & 2 were played straight it's hard to argue that they were meant as satires when Max Payne 1 includes lines like "The truth was like a green crack through my brain. Weapon statistics floating in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. the repetitious act of shooting, time slowing down to show off my moves. The paranoid feeling of someone controlling my every step. I was in a computer game. Funny as Hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of", "After Y2K, the end of the world had become a cliché. But who was I to talk, a brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil out to right a grave injustice. Everything was subjective. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you." and who can forget when he thanks you for turning off the alarm? Or you know the entire level on 2 that is an abandoned theme park about Max's whole psyche or that most of what is on TV is either Max's story or his inner demons and doubts, except Lords and Ladies I don't know what's up with that but it was funny, in any case all of that charm and cleverness is lost on 3.

Max's Character, at this point he really should be past drowning himself in alcohol, painkillers and wallowing in self-pity, it's pretty much the complete opposite of his arc on the second game and it's stupid, they pretty much rested him to how he was at the beginning of 2 and made him even worse, I'm not against making him pathetic and neither was 2 but this is just inconsistent and an insult to how great 2 was.

The style, why does this look like a Tony Scott movie? I mean even the story is ripped straight off Man on Fire except done worse and with really unlikeable characters which really are only caricatures, which is par for the course in Max Payne (More of a MP2 thing than a MP1 thing though) but if you're going to rip off Man on Fire at least do it well.

I could probably think of more things but I think I'll leave it at that.

 

[McElroy]

I believe it's highly subjective but holy shit was Killer7 completely and utterly impossible to get into. Controls, sound, graphics, gameplay mechanics all yelled at me to get the fuck out and so I did.

Another that really tells more about me than about the game was OSU! After playing it for an hour or so I realized that no matter how much I played or how good I'd get playing it, I would never have a moment filled with anything else but frustration (and regret of all the wasted time).

But something I simply thought was bad instead of hitting some hidden rage buttons inside me? Well, Worms Armageddon and World Party were crocks of shit on PS1 after playing them on the PC. Tekken 4 was terrible compared to Tekken 5 which I'd played a lot before trying the former.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Home Alone 2 on the SNES. I can't say with certainty that it's not full of bugs and glitches since I never got past the first level. The rest of the game could be filled with bugs and glitches, since the developers could be justified in assuming people would never get to see it. If you've ever seen the Game Grumps play of Dennis the Menace it's kind of like that, except less fun.

Funny thing is, I played Home Alone 1 on the NES and it was more entertaining despite having Castlevania-style controls around stairs. Not a keeper of course, but at least it had a simple, visible objective (don't get caught for 20 minutes), a map, and strategic choice of how/where to survive the night.

 

[FalloutJack]

Why don't people just make a " games you absolutely hate" thread. That what these things boils down to. I mean seriously is Final fantasy 13, dragon age 2 and final fantasy 8 are the absokute worst games you have ever played then either you haven't been playing games long, you haven't played many games or lady luck is your ***** ( meaning you are very lucky).

OT: street fighter: the movie: the game. It was a terrible. Ps1 game.

That's exactly my point, exactly. All of my other purchases have been better than this, bar none. I can't count short games if they have an appeal and I can't count retro games because I'm 34 and lived through those times. I didn't buy games that I cannot find pleasure in, except the one. It's not even that I'm being particularly forgiving. They were entertaining. The perspective wasn't 'worst game EVAR', but worst game from my repertoire. Well, the worst game I have is the one I make legendary rants about, the cautionary tale of an overly-hyped, badly-written, badly designed, game whose best quality is its music and almost nothing else.

So, are we good or what?

 

[Mister K]

snip

I'll cast another vote for FF8. Granted, I did not finish it (I dropped it right after the evil magician woman teleported somewhere with the guy in gray coat), but even so, even before that moment everything was... Of not high quality. I mean, most of the cast up to this point were annoying, especially Sqeel, sorry, Squall: Arrogant, self-centered, even though he accomplished nothing, etc., etc. I liked Quistis though.
Can you believe that I met a guy IRL that told me Squall qas cool EXACTLY because he told Quistis to shut the fuck up when she told him she was worried about her future? Yeap.

As for my own choice... Well, I did not play any game (FF VIII aside) that was outright bad. I've played servisable JRPG's that I've dropped because I didn't like them but that maybe were good enough for the genre's die hard fans (for example Mind Zero).
But I have one that had so much wasted potential it hurts. I am talking about Divinity: Dragon Commander. If only Larian dropped RTS mode, which I did not know existed before buying the game (I that it was all about cards) and which is laughable compared to other RTS games and focused on other part. If only they've developed the political half of the game better. They could allow us to find the middle ground between all decisions, they could've made certain generals (I am talking about the former queen) so that they could be reasoned with (gender quota? Way to show that you are here because ofyour talent, not because you have different dinglie-doo), they could make battles completely card based. I'd even completely forgive the overall story. But nooo, let's make undercooked versions of both RTS and politcal sim. Screw it all.

Wait, hold it! I forgot about Final Fantasy XIII. That piece of crap... I've ranted about it for so many times that I am tired of doing it, so I'll just say that Sazh and his son freaking DESERVED to be in a better game.

 

[Fox12]

Dragon Age 1. Oh my god, it was so uninspired. Just a list of the worst fantasy cliches imaginable, done in the laziest way possible. It was such a slog. The DLC was flat out insulting.

Half Life 2. I don't get it. It was even more linear then COD and FF13, the gameplay was archaic, and there was almost no plot. I just don't get this game.

 

[maninahat]

I would say many Japanese VNs qualify for the title of the Worst. Someone usually jumps in at this point to tells me that a visual novel is not a game because it has the word "novel" in the name and tends to lack some of the conventional qualities of other games. Even if I agreed with this, then fine, VNs are not terrible games they are terrible novels. But I don't agree, and generally they are treated as games, so for the sake of argument I am counting them.

In fairness, a lot of them are poorly translated, so perhaps I am not getting the real deal...so to take the title of worse game, it would have to go to the Western made Katawa Shoujo, for being a mawkish, tedious, poorly designed game who's primary means of player engagement is to promise eventual pictures of naked (most likely) underage girls.

Also, Velvet Assassin: for cringeworthy writing, lazy gameplay and utterly atrocious design. I had to replay one bit of an early level about forty times because it required me to run from an exploding underground facility (there was a time limit), but not too fast otherwise I would get insta-killed by a scripted explosion or enemy, and not too slow because I would randomly die from another big invisible explosion that was apparently chasing me, that is apparently not the big explosion shown on the time limit. The only way to know whether you had gone to fast or too slow would be to get insta-killed without warning, and to keep replaying until you've brute forced a solution.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

In fairness, a lot of them are poorly translated, so perhaps I am not getting the real deal...so to take the title of worse game, it would have to go to the Western made Katawa Shoujo, for being a mawkish, tedious, poorly designed game who's primary means of player engagement is to promise eventual pictures of naked (most likely) underage girls.

The big problem I had with Katawa Shoujo is that, unlike other visual novels, my control over events was nonexistant. I haven't played many VN, but the few I have played I had more control over events than I did in Katawa Shoujo. It didn't help that I liked all the love interests, but I hated the protagonist.

 

[GabeZhul]

I would say many Japanese VNs qualify for the title of the Worst. Someone usually jumps in at this point to tells me that a visual novel is not a game because it has the word "novel" in the name and tends to lack some of the conventional qualities of other games. Even if I agreed with this, then fine, VNs are not terrible games they are terrible novels. But I don't agree, and generally they are treated as games, so for the sake of argument I am counting them.

I could say that practically every single sentence in this quote of yours is empirically wrong, and it makes me question just what visual novels you have read to get such a skewed view of the medium.

No, visual novels are not games. They are their own thing, and any gameplay elements they might have are a form of hybridization. I would know, visual novel classification is kind of my thing as a VNDB mod.

No, they are not "terrible novels" much like how comics are not "terrible novels" or movies are not "terrible video games". As for individual visual novels being terrible, you have to realize that Sturgeon's law applies to VNs just as well as any other medium and that currently there are about only ten really good translated VNs are out there compared to the dozens upon dozens of trash porn titles commercial companies are throwing out to stay afloat.

No, they are not treated by games "generally", they are treated as games by people who don't actually read them or who only know of them through the more popular hybrids, like the Ace Attorney series or 999. Visual novels are the most misunderstood medium in the history of entertainment. At first everyone mistook them for adventure games, then everyone mistook them for dating sims, then everyone mistook them for porn and now everyone wants to make them out to be a game genre when they are their own little niche. It's highly aggravating.

In fairness, a lot of them are poorly translated, so perhaps I am not getting the real deal...

This is probably the only line in your entire post I can agree with. Yes, most visual novels have translations that range from passable to downright bad, but that is nothing new, as the same is true for 90% of all commercially translated JRPGs and other Japanese games in general (for example, people who hate FF8 because of the confusing plot should really look into the translation to realize just how hard the english release got screwed). The reason why VNs have it even worse is exactly the reason you so casually dismissed early on: they are like novels. Translating them properly (especially the really long, really complex ones) requires literary level translators to get anything resembling the original writing quality across. The problem is, there are two, maybe three such Japanese-English translators out there currently in the visual novel scene, and only one of them is working with commercial titles. The vast majority is translated by eager but usually inexperienced fans, with varying results.

As for western visual novels... the less said is the better. Currently even the best such title (which would be arguably Katawa Shoujo) would be at best on the level of dime-a-dozen romance moeges, most of which will never even get translated because there are thousands of them and they are generally considered to be the B-movies of the visual novel medium no one really cares about (not to mention, all genre-defining and thus important ones, like the Key-games, have already been translated).

 

[Azure23]

Duke Nukem Forever. It just kinda turned my stomach and made me pity the people who had made it. It was like, "really? This is what is funny and sexy to you people? You guys are fucked."

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

-snip-

The game tells you early on that junctioning a GF can cause memory loss. Edea never used her knowledge against them because she was possessed by a sorceress from the future.

Beyond the opening cinematic, we never find out what sort of training or conditioning they are put through when they are taken is as kids. The people in charge are more concerned about profits than the well being of their soldiers.

It's a Final Fantasy game, the weapons don't have to make sense. Ultimecia's GF has the same name as Squall's ring, didn't you get that she is a descendant of Rinoa and Squall?

 

[maninahat]

I would say many Japanese VNs qualify for the title of the Worst. Someone usually jumps in at this point to tells me that a visual novel is not a game because it has the word "novel" in the name and tends to lack some of the conventional qualities of other games. Even if I agreed with this, then fine, VNs are not terrible games they are terrible novels. But I don't agree, and generally they are treated as games, so for the sake of argument I am counting them.

I could say that practically every single sentence in this quote of yours is empirically wrong, and it makes me question just what visual novels you have read to get such a skewed view of the medium.

No, visual novels are not games. They are their own thing, and any gameplay elements they might have are a form of hybridization. I would know, visual novel classification is kind of my thing as a VNDB mod.

No, they are not "terrible novels" much like how comics are not "terrible novels" or movies are not "terrible video games". As for individual visual novels being terrible, you have to realize that Sturgeon's law applies to VNs just as well as any other medium and that currently there are about only ten really good translated VNs are out there compared to the dozens upon dozens of trash porn titles commercial companies are throwing out to stay afloat.

No, they are not treated by games "generally", they are treated as games by people who don't actually read them or who only know of them through the more popular hybrids, like the Ace Attorney series or 999. Visual novels are the most misunderstood medium in the history of entertainment. At first everyone mistook them for adventure games, then everyone mistook them for dating sims, then everyone mistook them for porn and now everyone wants to make them out to be a game genre when they are their own little niche. It's highly aggravating.

Fine, they are not terrible games or terrible novels; visual novels are often terrible visual novels. I think the effort to classify what counts and what doesn't count as a game often boils down to an exercise in pedantry that can never come to a conclusive answer. In your response, you yourself interchangeably refer to the medium as "novels", "hybrids" and "Key-games", so it can't be that specific anyway. I and plenty of people do count them as games - so what?