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

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

translators

Never occurred to me that the game suffered from being badly translated. Should have expected it though, East to West translations don't have the best track record.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

{1} No offense, but everyone behaved like that wasn't relevant until much later, which indicates the PLAYER knows, not the people. Also, if you're in somebody else's brain, you have their knowledge.

{2} There is no other possibility other than some kind of soldier training if you send these people off to fight in a battle with the intent to pit them against hardened soldiers. The first mission is a battle against men with swords, guns, bombs, spells, support devices, and - oh yes - a giant spider robot. This is only marginally different from Cloud's first mission to the Mako Reactor in FF7, and he's older, stronger, and has more experience. Plus, there's Berret with a machine gun on his hand.

{3} Actually, overall, alot of the game weapons DO. I've played alot of them. There's a long succession of basic weapons and special weapons that are just basic ones with special powers, enchantments. Even a Buster Sword makes a kind of sense. It's a huge hunk of steel that only someone who's ridiculously-strong can wield. Gunblade? Gimme a break. The only other person in the whole game using one of those is the rival asshole. Not a good weapon. As for who Ulti actually was, thje possibility occurred LATER, but it's still out of nowhere and not proven. She is out of nowhere. Oh, and let's not forget that if that were in any way clued in, we missed the "Luke, I am your father" moment AGAIN.

My comment on their training was more along the lines of psychological conditioning. That kind of conditioning has been shown to have an impact of memories. Someone else pointed out that the games don't have the best translation, and it seems that some vital information was lost.

Personally, I find Cloud's weapon to be more impractical than a gunblade. It's center of balance is too far off to be an effective sword type weapon. Cloud's less than impressive biceps, or even his wrists, meant that he would be expending more energy holding the weapon than what it'd be worth to use in combat. Squall too, to an extent. The gunblades look as if most of the weapon is centered in the grip. Still would make it unwieldy. Maybe the FF universe has weight negating tech?

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I'm sure there are some old-school games that were just atrocious that I've forgotten about, but off the top of my head...

Dragon Age Inquisition: I loved Origins, and didn't play through 2 after all the negative press I heard, so I didn't have too many expectations for Inquisition. What I got seemed boring and uninspired, with sidequests largely being incredibly boring fetch quests over environments that felt more like something pulled from an MMO, combined with combat that couldn't seem to figure out what it wanted to do and characters that felt second-rate compared to most Bioware characters. I put 40 hours into this game continuously thinking that it was going to turn a corner and become much better and more like "Origins", but it just continued to disappoint. Once "Witcher 3" came out, I truly lost interest.

Sydnicate (reboot): This game had SOOOOO much potential: the weapons were awesome, it had a great setting that I really wanted to explore and learn about, and the shooting action just felt right, the perfect balance between brutal, fluid and fast-paced. Unfortunately, it was wrapped up in a game with the world's dumbest unadjustable setting (the horrid bloom effects), a terrible story that forced your character into moral decisions you didn't want to make, and zero support from the developers. A shame.

Heroes of Might and Magic 6: I'll admit being pretty bad at turn-based strategy games, but I don't, for the life of me, understand how anyone can get anywhere in the single player part of this game (or HOMM 5, for that matter). No matter which strategy I used or how hard I tried, on any difficulty setting, the AI seemed to have armies 5x the size of mine with heroes 4 levels above my heroes, and even if I pulled out an amazing strategic victory and actually defeated their enormous army, within 2 turns they seemed fully reinforced.

 

[sagitel]

really guys? these games are the worst you played? so either you really havent played bad games or your rage for these is too much its clouding your judgement.
the worst game i ever played was the legend of barbie and the twelve princesses (or something like that) my cousin (she is 10 years younger than me) had gotten it and wanted to play but she couldnt. so my mom made me play FOR her. 12 times. in the course of two days. i finished the game again and again and again. the first three times wer that i were the hardest but after that i went in to a trance like state where i didnt understand what was happening. its been about 4 years after that and i still buy every one disk of that game i find and burn it.

 

[GabeZhul]

To elaborate, as you don't seem to understand my point; a lot of VNs suck, however you want to classify them. I don't give two hoots about the particulars of categorising them. I'm not running a database, I'm telling people about a game that sucks. You think that what I'm referring to shouldn't be referred to as a game. But seeing as how many people, VN developers included, refer to them as games, I'm going to keep doing that for the sake of convenience. You did actually refer to them as Novels in your original post when you were explaining why good translation is important...so in that case, you referred to them as novels, despite it being inconsistent with your argument that visual novels shouldn't be called novels. It doesn't matter that you did. Unless I go to your database and start screwing with the labels, it doesn't do any harm.

*sigh* Okay, let's go through this again:

-"A lot of VNs suck" is a true statement. Saying "all VNs suck" or "VNs are terrible games" (let alone "VNs are terrible VNS") is not. Don't shift your goalpost.

-What VN developers refer to the VNs as games? And what kind of "games" they are referring to? Because if you mean hybrids like the Rance series or Aselia (or the Loren series if you want to pick an OELVN) then yes, they are correct, but what you are doing is just quote-mining then, taking whatever they might have said out of context to suit your argument.
Also note that the Japanese don't categorize things the same way we do. This is true for other medium as well, but VNs are especially prone to be swept under the "eroge" or "galge" title, both of which are actually just genres within the medium.

-When I said "they are like novels", I was explicitly referring to the difference between translating a JRPG which mostly consists of dialog, and a VN which also has descriptive narration and stylistic prose that has to be preserved as much as possible. This means they require different approaches and in the case of the latter you really have to do literary-level translation to get it properly across.
As I said before, you might want to read things over a few more times before you reply because I don't think this exchange is going to be very fruitful if I have to keep correcting your reading comprehension mistakes.

-No, it doesn't do "harm" the same way calling a rabbit a "smeerph" doesn't do harm. It is still mistaken, confusing to the people you are talking to and silly, but doesn't do any "harm" per se...

I don't think that a creationist's tendency to deny evolution is at all similar to people categorising VNs differently to the enthusiasts.

You are deflecting the issue. My statement was not about similarities between VN-categorization and creationism but pointing out how your point was a classic case of the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy; just because a lot of people believe something doesn't make that belief accurate or its subject true. I could have used any number of other such popular beliefs, from urban legends to UFOs, but it wouldn't have changed my ultimate point: popularity and "common sense" has no effect on a topic's veracity.

On the other hand though the ccomparison is actually quite fitting on a superficial level. It both involves people categorizing things based on their preconceived notions and claiming that their version is equal or superior of that of the experts (well, as far as "expertise" can me considered in case of a hobby like visual novel reading).

@Phoenixmgs

Maninahat finds most of the visual novels he/she has read to be shit because they are just terrible, I'm guessing the writing is mainly terrible.

Probably, but I don't see how that is related to the issue.

How is telling them that visual novels are X instead of Y going to make someone that hates them magically enjoy them? Reclassifying something isn't going to make someone like something they already hate.

Once again, I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't try to convince them of liking something, I am trying to correct their misconceptions. Also whether they like or hate a VN they read is their own business, but passing judgment upon an entire medium with tens of thousands of entries based on that is something that needs pointing out. I would have done the same if they came in saying "I watched Fant4stic, and I concluded that all movies ever made are crap."

I'm sure the writing is terrible in most of them because 90% of any medium is shit, same for visual novels. Visual novels most likely have a higher % of shit (probably well over 90%) because I doubt there's many good writers in the visual novel medium (much like how the video game industry has very few competent writers let alone good ones).

These are entirely baseless assertions on your part and you should feel bad for making them this authoritatively. Yes, Sturgeon's law applies to visual novels. It applies to every media. This paragraph of yours however feels more like using is dishonestly to take a jab at a medium you apparently know little about just for the sake of it. Please don't do that, it only leads to needless arguments.

As for the writing quality in particular, you are also mistaken. Sort of. It really all depends on the genre and the actual production values of the visual novel in question. If it's a cheap nukige (aka. a stereotypical porn-game) then the writing quality is usually pretty poor the same way as porn movies don't tend to have riveting plots. On the other end of the spectrum however you have VNs that sell on the name of the scenario writer alone. Gen Urobuchi, Jun Maeda, Ryukishi, Kinoko Nasu, SCA-Ji, Naotaka Hayashi and Kinoko Nasu (among others) are like the best-selling novel authors on the west, as in people interested in the medium probably know them and view their names as a stamp of quality, but people outside of that circle rarely ever hear about them.

Oh, and Phoenix Wright has pretty much no common element to RPGs so why would it be commonly referred to as a VN-RPG when they are fucking adventure games?

Okay, I am partially to blame for this, as I keep forgetting that I am talking to people who have no experience with visual novels (also the sentence in which said statement appeared might have been a little obscure). The important part is the one before the brackets: I was referring hybrids in general. Then I namedropped the PW games as those are probably the most well-known examples on the west, however the rest of the sentence after the brackets still referred to hybrids in general.

Here's the quickest way to show it:
"Everything that fulfills all or most of these criteria but also has gameplay elements is considered a hybrid, a VN-adventure-game or more commonly a VN-RPG."

You see, suddenly makes more sense once the part in the brackets is removed. As for the "more commonly" part, there are actually three common types of hybrids: VN-Adventure-Games (which were originally the most common, as visual novels as a medium grew out of early 90s point-and-click adventure games by dropping all the gameplay elements and expanding on the textual storytelling and the narration), VN-RPGs (the most common nowadays, as it is fairly easy to get the best of both worlds by using the visual novel format to tell an extensive story and have JRPG/TRPG gameplay between the story-segments) and VN-Sims (mostly Dating- and Raising-sims, which were the most popular on the west for a while because they were easy to translate and not too strange for western tastes).

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

I have honestly bashed this game over the head many times and I find great pleasure in doing so again.

Mod Racers for he PSP is one of the worst games I've ever played and one of the few that caused me to rage quit.

It comes off as a humble racing game with an emphasis in customization, but really it is a test in infuriating mundane crap.

To put it simply, it is nearly impossible to get 1st place on the very first track. This is usually the track in all racing games that is meant to ease you into the game and get familiar with all its controls and features; getting lower than 1st place might stem from needing to practice the controls further, but overtime it is completely doable.

NOPE!

I've replayed the level several times in my initial run and could only finish in 4th place (which was required to advance the story). After a few tracks, I came back to this stage and managed to barely get 3rd. After playing the game for an hour and upgrading my vehicle, I was able to get 2nd place by the skin of my teeth.

I was not going any further with this game if it was this difficult to get 1st place on THE VERY FIRST TRACK!!

 

[GabeZhul]

{1} No offense, but everyone behaved like that wasn't relevant until much later, which indicates the PLAYER knows, not the people. Also, if you're in somebody else's brain, you have their knowledge.

To put it bluntly, they lost their memory of losing their memory. That's kind of the dramatic hook of the game; the main characters losing parts of their memories and not being able to recognize that they lost them. This is the reason why Squall is a depressed loner (he remembers that he lost someone important, but he cannot remember who that was or how it happened so he cannot get over it), Quistis' obsession with Squall (she tried to take over for Ellone after she was gone as a big sister for the other kids in the orphanage, but then she lost her memory about it and all she can recall is that she really wants to be this dependable over-achiever and to take care of Squall and the others, which she later mistakes for love), et cetera. Them not being able to recognize they have holes in their memories is actually a plot-point and the source of all the minor and major mental instabilities they suffer from.

{2} There is no other possibility other than some kind of soldier training if you send these people off to fight in a battle with the intent to pit them against hardened soldiers. The first mission is a battle against men with swords, guns, bombs, spells, support devices, and - oh yes - a giant spider robot. This is only marginally different from Cloud's first mission to the Mako Reactor in FF7, and he's older, stronger, and has more experience. Plus, there's Berret with a machine gun on his hand.

They are child soldiers equipped with magic and power-enhancing GFs that only SeeD has access to (which, according to the fluff, is all because of Edea's contribution to the creation of the Gardens). Everyone in the Galbadian army were vanilla humans, and the SeeD trainees' were not sent to the front-lines either but into the city to clear out stragglers while the main force was doing battle elsewhere. Also note that the only reason they even got into real danger (read: spider-robot) was because they disobeyed orders and moved to an area they weren't supposed to enter.
All in all it was a classic trial-by-fire scenario that wasn't even particularly dangerous to the ones involved.

{3} Actually, overall, alot of the game weapons DO. I've played alot of them. There's a long succession of basic weapons and special weapons that are just basic ones with special powers, enchantments. Even a Buster Sword makes a kind of sense. It's a huge hunk of steel that only someone who's ridiculously-strong can wield. Gunblade? Gimme a break. The only other person in the whole game using one of those is the rival asshole. Not a good weapon. As for who Ulti actually was, thje possibility occurred LATER, but it's still out of nowhere and not proven. She is out of nowhere. Oh, and let's not forget that if that were in any way clued in, we missed the "Luke, I am your father" moment AGAIN.

I've stated it above, but it bears repeating: The gunblade is a rare and atypical design even in-universe because it's a plot-point and part of the stable time loop. It serves as an identification of Squall as the SeeD that appeared in front of Edea in the past along with Ultimecia and who told her about SeeD and Gardens and all that jazz. It is also the reason why Cid hands over leadership to him and this authority is what ultimately allows him to complete the time loop. If he was just using a sword (even if it was a big sword) or a spear, it would lose its purpose.

As for Ultimecia, her schtick was manipulating things from the future from the very beginning. Squall and co. has been fighting against her ever since Edea first appears in the game. She might not be physically present until the very end, but she and her plans shape the entire plot. Also note that her motivations were really screwed up by translation (her speech as Edea in Disk 1 was already foreshadowing her time-compression plan, which was completely removed in favor of a boring megalomaniac world-domination speech).

As for her being Rinoa's descendant; that's not how the Sorceress Power works. It's not hereditary. In fact there is literally no connection between Rinoa and Ultimecia aside of some epileptic trees (mostly centered around how they both have wings, which is pretty silly).

 

[Kae]

While what you said about Dan Houser is true I disagree that a game like Max Payne should be about fun and cheesy dialogue, despite their silliness and how over-the-top they were both Max Payne 1 and 2 had some great themes and stories, they dealt with loss, depression, guilt and well pretty much everything that Dalisclock mentioned, they were cheesy, silly and fun but they were also smart, dark and more importantly managed to combine all the fun with the tragedy and action almost flawlessly, to be honest just thinking that he had the capacity to write a good Max Payne story shows just how much Dan Houser overestimates his writing abilities.

I didn't mean to say that being fun (cheesy, corny, self-aware, whatnot) and being smart/having important themes or messages are mutually exclusive. Hell, the MP3 storyline might've actually worked if Max was constantly commenting on how stupid the whole thing was instead of being so serious constantly saying how he doesn't expect to make it through the next 5 minutes every 5 minutes. The last thing I actually enjoyed from Houser was Vice City because all it wanted to be was an 80s movie.

I guess, sorry for jumping on you, if I'm honest I wouldn't know much about the writing of MP3 I made that analysis after about an hour and a half of game-play and looked up a plot summary and watched a few videos, because I hate it so much I couldn't stomach playing it any longer than that, and yeah, GTA Vice City is the only GTA I can stomach, the writing was not pretentious and Tommy wasn't pretending he had any moral justification to do what he did, it was just what it was and it was fun.

 

[maninahat]

snip

*sigh* Okay, let's go through this again:

-"A lot of VNs suck" is a true statement. Saying "all VNs suck" or "VNs are terrible games" (let alone "VNs are terrible VNS") is not. Don't shift your goalpost.

What I originally said in my first post was "I would say many Japanese VNs qualify for the title of the Worst." This does not preclude the possibility that there might be good VNs (or even good Japanese VNs). That's the beauty of qualifiers. No goalposts have been shifted.

-What VN developers refer to the VNs as games?....Also note that the Japanese don't categorize things the same way we do.

Christine Love for one. Also, are the Japanese wrong for not using your terminology for categorizing stuff? Westerners like me are apparently wrong for not using it.

-When I said "they are like novels", I was explicitly referring to the difference between translating a JRPG which mostly consists of dialog, and a VN which also has descriptive narration and stylistic prose that has to be preserved as much as possible. This means they require different approaches and in the case of the latter you really have to do literary-level translation to get it properly across.

As I said before, you might want to read things over a few more times before you reply because I don't think this exchange is going to be very fruitful if I have to keep correcting your reading comprehension mistakes.

My comprehension is that you referred to a VN as a novel. The original quote (before you edited the post) was "The reason why VNs have it even worse is exactly the reason you so casually dismissed early on: they are novels." Don't accuse me of misunderstanding if you are going to go back and change the text to hide your mistake.

-No, it doesn't do "harm" the same way calling a rabbit a "smeerph" doesn't do harm. It is still mistaken, confusing to the people you are talking to and silly, but doesn't do any "harm" per se...

No one has been confused. People don't get confused when I call a VN a game because people normally call VNs games.

I don't think that a creationist's tendency to deny evolution is at all similar to people categorising VNs differently to the enthusiasts.

You are deflecting the issue. My statement was not about similarities between VN-categorization and creationism but pointing out how your point was a classic case of the argumentum ad populum logical fallacy; just because a lot of people believe something doesn't make that belief accurate or its subject true. I could have used any number of other such popular beliefs, from urban legends to UFOs, but it wouldn't have changed my ultimate point: popularity and "common sense" has no effect on a topic's veracity.

It's not an argumentum ad populum logical fallacy, because language does not work in the same way as a scientific theory. Whether or not a lot of people believe in a theory doesn't affect whether the theory is true or false. Language, on the other hand, depends on words having a popular meaning, not whether they have an intrinsic quality that exists beyond popularity. If I want to get something across in a way that other people will understand, I should use the words that other people commonly use, in the way that is commonly understood. If a lot of people define VNs as a type of game, it is quite reasonable of me to refer to them as such.

You like analogies so try this one: If I go to a crowded beach and see that the water is full of Portuguese-Man-O-Wars, and I start yelling "don't go in the water, it is full of jellyfish!" It would not at all be helpful for the lifeguard to stop me and say "you mustn't refer to them as jellyfish, they're Siphonophorae...Also, make sure you call them Physalia physalis, otherwise beach goers might get confused and think you are warning them about a European battleship from the age of sail. You should adjust your warning shouts immediately to include the correct terminology." The point is that there are dangerous things in the water, and I am letting people know in a way they will understand. No one cares if my choice of words irks those with an esoteric understanding of the subject.

 

[FalloutJack]

My comment on their training was more along the lines of psychological conditioning. That kind of conditioning has been shown to have an impact of memories. Someone else pointed out that the games don't have the best translation, and it seems that some vital information was lost.

Personally, I find Cloud's weapon to be more impractical than a gunblade. It's center of balance is too far off to be an effective sword type weapon. Cloud's less than impressive biceps, or even his wrists, meant that he would be expending more energy holding the weapon than what it'd be worth to use in combat. Squall too, to an extent. The gunblades look as if most of the weapon is centered in the grip. Still would make it unwieldy. Maybe the FF universe has weight negating tech?

Well, I can't go blaming translation errors for everything. If your conditioning is deleting memories, you're still doing harm, and it shows because they're really all unstable. As for Cloud, the Buster Sword is definitely a solid piece of metal with a handle, and there's no Float materia or anything else to offset it. My guess? It's the Jenova in his system, and later being just too fucking strong at the end of the game for it to matter. In a normal universe, that makes sense, including the Gunblade, but it's less the balancing than the effect of these things that worries me. Squall's dad used a machine gun. What was wrong with that?

Snip

I have to snip yours. It's a bit big.

{1} The more people talk to me about the complexities of these memories losses, the more I think these are really brain-damaged people. I don't think of it as highly-dramatic, though. I think of it as the plot of convenience, where the attempt to even do it right wasn't even attempted. You know what amnesia is? The overused plot device of soap operas. Is that what we were promised? A conga-line of memory loss? I seem to recall this being advertised as an epic love story. It was not. Even ignoring everything wrong with this system, the answer is still no.

{2} I do remember now that they were meant as a back-up force, but it was still too soon, clearly. You send people into battle you can trust to follow orders, or SHOULD. Maybe not if the orders are stupid, but literally the problem was that Captain Dumbass wanted to go looking for trouble. I would've let him get his ass shot by the enemy, and that would've solved a brilliant succession of problems down the line. Speaking of the enemy, I assume you mean the soldiers of Galbadia? You mean, the soldiers who had pretty normal weapons AND access to magic, plus support weapons in any normal setting, but also had robots, tanks, missles, bred-for-war creatures, their own Garden, and actual mech-suits? Who's really vanilla here? Those guys had better personalities than the hero cast and our main villain. Biggs and Wedge become breakout characters who seem to recognize on a meta-level that they're doomed to die if they keep on fighting and leave their post.

{3} It really doesn't matter what significance the gunblade has in-story or what Ulti's real origins are or not. The gunblade is terrible and Ulti may as well not exist for most of the game. If you're saying the lack of proper foreshadowing is the fault of re-writes, then it's still in effect 'This game is written poorly'. Really, unless she actually said in Japan "Hey, I'm totally possessing this body from the future, yo", it still says that the face and identity you see - which was still never revealed to be anyone we care about when it clearly could have been - is all there is to see. If you're gonna have foreshadowing, have foreshadowing. This was just a monologue, regardless of translation, and does nothing. In fact, I think the crowd was out of its mind. She killed the president and nobody was even shocked. Even if literally everyone hated him, the response is "Holy Shit" before anything else. It just wasn't done right.

 

[MetalDooley]

I can't even remember most of the shite I've played over the last 30 or so years of gaming but 1 always sticks out for me

The Simpsons:Road Rage

Got this as part of a bundle when I bought my Gamecube.Got home,played it for about an hour and then took it to a shop and traded it in the same day.It's a Simpsons themed knock off of Crazy Taxi except they removed all the fun and replaced it with crap controls,slow vehicles and annoyingly frequent "funny catchphrases" from the characters.It's the only time in my life I've gotten rid of a game on the same day I bought it

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Tic Tac Toe.

It's highly repetitive and has very few strategies that don't involve relying on opponents making mistakes.

Or did we mean video games? Dead Island comes to mind.

Poor combat, terrible animations, terrible difficulty balancing, cringe worthy voice acting. Frankly I wanted to like it but it was just too shoddy for me to look past it's problems. I didn't notice any bugs or glitches either, so I'd say it fits the bill.

 

[Silvershock]

I'm probably going to get some shit for this, but I have two that I just can't hold in. First up...

I fucking hate Ico.

Before you start, I loved Shadow of the Colossus....mostly, but its predecessor is a dreadful game that somehow got lauded and praised beyond all belief. What's wrong with it? Hell, where do I start?

The controls are terrible. Stiff fighting controls with long recovery times after attacks make defending yourself a chore, and some utter moron decided to combine camera-relative movement controls with an auto-tracking camera, making some necessary jumps nigh-on impossible. To say that it controls poorly is to underestimate it.

The art style, also, is questionable. While some of the architectural design is good for the PS1 it was intended for, their method of making it look "next-gen" when they moved it to PS2 was to ramp up the bloom on everything in sight, and the result is literally painful to look at. Staring at endless blocky bloom-drenched walls gave me eyestrain and a headache. Yes, the atmosphere is quite impressive in parts, and the sound design is terrific for the time, but it's a really ugly game.

The worst part, though, has to be Yorda. Dear sweet mercy, I loathe Yorda. She's the worst female character in video gaming, bar none. Not only is she the damsel stereotype all over, she's imbecilic to the point of being functionally brain dead. She can't obey simple commands without them being repeated multiple times, she has no defensive instincts whatsoever - hell, I've watched her walk directly towards the monsters on multiple occasions. The most enjoyable part of the game is right at the end, when you're without her for a while and the over-saturated walls also temporarily fuck off. You literally spend some time in a dark cave without her, like you're recovering from a trauma, and it was actually quite pleasant. Of course, even that's ruined by a post-credits kick in the nuts that makes no sense whatsoever.

If I said "constant forced escort quest to save a brain-dead AI with dreadful controls where you can't leave your escort alone for more than 2 seconds or they will actively get themselves killed", you might think I was talking about Amy. YES. I AM COMPARING ICO TO AMY. One is called an artistic masterpiece and the other one a turdbowl, and I can't figure out why Ico gets away with being dreadful.

I'm trimming this rant for brevity but SWEET MITHRAS I have no idea why Ico is so praised. Still, it's not quite as bad a game as....



Beyond Good and Evil.

Oh yeah, I'm going there. Why the hell do people like this game? Is it the cartoonishly insincere and predictable storyline? The irritating side characters? The janky physics? The worst camera I have ever used in a video game, which actively fights your attempts to even look in the right direction? The pathetic combat? The mediocre platforming? The near-constant annoying buddy characters getting themselves killed and failing the section for you?

Yeah, it looked really interesting when the game started. The setting seemed original and interestingly designed, and some levels are gorgeous (if the camera would let you see them properly), but by the end of the very first cutscene most of the setup is obvious. The "bad guys" are so transparent that it cannot possibly count as a twist. The world's history and narrative is never fleshed out particularly well, nor is it very interesting. The game doesn't play it serious enough to be engaging, nor silly enough to be comedic.

Where the hell is the moral ambiguity put forward by a title like "Beyond Good and Evil". No, no! Good and evil are pretty well defined in this game. Hillys good, DomZ bad, Alpha Sections arseholes. One is a haven for rasta rhinos and cute orphaned bunny children (because we couldn't make Jade more of a saint), and the other turns people into Soylent Green.

Pey'J can drown in a bucket of dildos. He's all annoyance, all the time. When it looked like he might get turned into mincemeat, I was looking for the options where I could leave him to it. Jade was OK, but of course she had to turn out to be Space Jesus. Ugh.

By the end of the game, I'd seen so many elements of bad game design; the random and titanic difficulty spikes in side missions, the dreadful camera, the really awful voice acting, the final boss consisting of a game designer laughing and shouting "guess what I'm thinking!"...... I played this game to 100%, trying to find the legendary enjoyment, and all I found was a game that seemed to deliberately piss the player off every chance it got. I'd be interested to play around with the game before it had its pre-release butchering (look it up), to see what was lost in the attempt to make it more "mainstream." What we got was just...awful. I have no idea why people love this game so universally, or why it appears on so many "underrated classics" lists.

 

[FalloutJack]

really guys? these games are the worst you played? so either you really havent played bad games or your rage for these is too much its clouding your judgement.
the worst game i ever played was the legend of barbie and the twelve princesses (or something like that) my cousin (she is 10 years younger than me) had gotten it and wanted to play but she couldnt. so my mom made me play FOR her. 12 times. in the course of two days. i finished the game again and again and again. the first three times wer that i were the hardest but after that i went in to a trance like state where i didnt understand what was happening. its been about 4 years after that and i still buy every one disk of that game i find and burn it.

Oh hey, I just noticed your post. Lemme say a couple relevent things.

First, as I said to another guy, I'm just so good at judgement that I rarely have games ever that I consider bad, and hold FF8 as my trophy bad game because it's my only real big mistake to have purchased, plus it's so easy to ream 'cause so many things are just wrong with it. Once again, the OP asked for this, the worst we'd played. If you have a problem with our answering the question honestly, according to the lives we've led, don't take it out on us. We're not guilty or wrong. We've just lived different lives. There was no wrong answer here, just perspective.

Speaking of which, I am SOOO sorry you had to play a Barbie game. You have my sympathies, seriously. You were put in the shit and I don't envy you that position. If this were a thread about 'worst gaming experience evar', you'd be in the top ten, easy, maybe in the top five if other people aren't so bad. But the burning thing? You're still giving the developer money. Burned or not, don't do that. It's the wrong message.

 

[Orga777]

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.

This. Is. Perfect. Lol. That was the best breakdown for this game of all time.You are my hero. XD

But, my vote will probably go to Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy VIII might be a bad game, but it is still game at heart. Final Fantasy XIII has an even worse story than VIII, even worse characters than VIII, and the game play is so on-rails that it is even worse than VIII's overly complicated monstrosity. The game is nothing more than a chore to get through with all the bad characters, horrible story, and boring gameplay. At least VIII had some cool moments and can be laughed at for its complete ineptitude. XIII just........ sucks.

 

[Fox12]

Ha! Yeah, I'm not surprised you mentioned this. After I mentioned Half Life you probably care even less what I think.

Lord, I hope I don't seem like that much of an asshole : P

Everybody has different taste. I just went into HL2 expecting the greatest game ever, and what I got was a competent FPS. I assume it's the same reason people hate FF7. No game can live up to that hype.

To be fair, I didn't find actively offensive, like some titles. The worst offender is probably Duke Nukem. It had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, other then to remind me how much games, and gamers, have grown.

 

[Fox12]

snip

To be fair, every VN I've looked at has had pretty sub-par writing. I even tried Gen Urobuchi's work, Song of Saya, and... well, the less said the better.

Out of curiosity, what would you consider a positive example of a quality VN?