I just saw a review on Superman 64 and it was hilarious

Superman 64 was one of the games I rented for free back when I worked at Blockbuster and felt I was ripped off. I'm not sure if I've ever played a game that bad before.

This is saying a lot, as I own E.T. for the Atari 2600, and I work at a company that tests mostly bad games.

superman 64 here too. I dont think I had read the reviews (or taken them seriously enough, though they were only magazine reviews, so they may not have given the full story a video review does).

I hardly every buy games that don't have a somewhat decent rating in the media, but I do remember playing Superman 64 at someone's house and thinking even back when I was a wee child about how awful the game was.

The Phantom Menace PSX game wasn't too hot either

AVGN?

There's a funny video of review of Big Rigs: Off Road Racing but I forget who did it. If it starts out with him trying to run to escape having to review it it's probably the right one.

Earthworm Jim 3d.

I love the franchise, but this game buried it forever.

Daikatana. The multi-player was the only redeeming value & that's only because of how fun it was to get sword kills.

Batman Arkham Asylum.

I keed!

For as long as I can remember I've only really played games that had good reviews so I can't say I remember stumbling upon a terrible game.

When I played NES, SNES, Genesis, I was too young to really be bothered with the concept of TERRIBLE, and didn't own a console afterwards until the Dreamcast, which I adored.

/me punches Jep.

Batman is awesome, and you're clearly drunk

I accidentally deleted the line where I said I was kidding. XD

Haha!

But seriously, I know you didn't get on with it but I loved it. When I completed it, the first thing I did was start it again. Immediately.

When I got the Joker on Hard I beat him first time though. When I first played it on Normal it took me about 8 goes

Yeah, I didn't really enjoy it all that much, but its definately far, far from being the worst game I ever played.

Some N64 fighting game that nobody had ever heard of.

Or Morrowind. I hate that game with a ****ing passion.

Probably Clay Fighter 63 1/3rd.

OT:

Rise of the Robots

E. T. (and yes, I could probably find the cart if I looked around hard enough in my parents' house)

/thread

Oh wait...

TOP GUN

That's pure blasphemy.

Against Scientology? *chuckles*

I find that to be a terrible way to get games. Many times I find the highly rated games crap and a lot of underrated games to be the real diamonds in the rough.
I shudder to think of all the greatness I would've missed out on if I took some reviewers words for it

Negatory.

I define a game as 'bad' if I literally cannot bring myself to continue to play the game. Most of the empirically bad games I've played I ended up having a lot of fun with - like Trespasser, Ultima 9 and Sonic 2006. Empirically bad games are usually so poorly-made and buggy that at least a slight amount of entertainment can be obtained from the spectacle; or at least from the schadenfreude of knowing that someone's career came to a crashing halt because of it.

Generally the games that I find truly bad are, on paper, extremely good: well-polished, well-designed, executed flawlessly and ultimately represent an excellent business decision for the producer. The quality of the game is the problem: they're so polished they seem mechanical rather than artistic, so well-designed you can't even count the number of people on the design committee, and such a good business decision that it appeals to the broadest audience possible, reducing the entire affair to an inoffensive and tepid ordeal. They have no soul. There is no intellectual dialog between the consumer and the author.

When something is a labor of love there are always going to be issues; sometimes serious, crippling technical issues. But the cure is worse than the disease.

Modern examples:
EA's entire library.
Heavenly Sword.
Resistance 1
Halo 2, 3.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
Every WoW clone
God of War 2
Gears of War 2
Fable 2

Enter The Matrix for PS2, or The Force Unleashed on Wii. Only two games I ever returned for a refund.

There we go. I knew I was forgetting a stinker, and it was Enter the Matrix. Truly an awful, awful, awful game.

I enjoyed Enter The Matrix to an extent. Trying to beat endless copies of Smith by kicking them off rooftops was pretty fun.

Jon`C shall be hung for including Smash Bros in that list.

I'm not sure how SSBB and NSMB (DS) are soulless games. Also, while I was only able to play the first level, I found TFU for the Wii to be a lot more fun with better camera angles than the 360 version, though that game did suffer from what looked like N64 graphics (which is inexcusable). I did play through most of the 360 version (played both over a friend's and he decided to continue with the 360 version).

On a tangent thought, I do think a lot of modern "hardcore" games suffer from appealing to the crowd who feel the SNES was the pinnacle of gaming and just want the same in HD (I'm looking at you, Lost Odyssey -- I swear it's selling point is exactly this). I'm also really wishing some developers (and consumers) out there would stop thinking that video games should set their ideals to be interactive movies. Video games are a medium of their own, and I think it is detrimental to the medium to try and be another medium.

That recent game, Rogue Warrior. It was just.. just god-awful.

I hate SSBB because of the people that play them - there is really no skill to the game - its only a butter masher. But for games I couldn't even bring to completing the DEMO goes to Superman Returns on the XBox 360. Goddamn, that was awful.

You mean hanged, he isn't an object.

And I don't know; Brawl isn't terrible but it isn't terrific either.

Brawl is basically Super Smahs Bros. ver. 1.2

Nothing special, but I enjoy it.

Oh yea... E.T. for Atari. Horrible.

Nagano winter olympics 64 is probably the worst game ever made.

Rise of the Robots was pretty bad, true. Kane & Lynch sucked almost half-way through.

Worst use of the Unreal Engine-



Conflict: Denied Ops

ick.

I consider a bad game to be one that I actually purchase and then play for a total of less than one hour and never touch it again.

These games include:

Soldier of Fortune: Payback
Assassins Creed

Saywhat @ it being a button masher?

Yes, you can beat single player on easy by just mashing buttons. You will get absolutely slaughtered, even by the CPU, if you mash buttons on hard.

Star Trek Elite Force 2 - WHAT THE ****?

Yeah I think it was expecting it to be stellar thanks to all the hype, then I just got the same game that we'd had for 7 years before that only tweaked a bit.

[Note: To be fair this is pretty much every Nintendo game ever, and CM is a closet fanboy. :P]

Why? What I said describes SSBB to a tee: well-polished, well-designed, executed flawlessly and ultimately representing an excellent business decision for Nintendo. It's also very obviously designed-by-committee, and they were so terrified of alienating people that it supports four totally different control schemes and has made no significant changes to the characters it inherited, to gameplay or to game balance.

It also has no soul.

But the real reason I can say it is awful is because I'm the one who decides the criteria for an awful game. In particular, the fact that I can't view playing SSBB as anything other than a barely-tolerable waste of time even though (or possibly because) my in-game player timer for SSBM was like 1000 hours or something.

Stellar 7. The only First Person Polygonal Shooter.

Also: I also nominate for SSBB not having a soul. It was EXACTLY the same game as SSB:M, just with a few new characters/items. Gameplay was identical, so the first time I played I felt like I'd been playing for 8 years.