7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.
Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was ‘defective’. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn’t work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.
I can’t really remember what I didn’t like about the game…probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.
I played some kind of sex-themed bullet hell game where you were a disembodied penis flying around shooting things with little sperms. And if you got shot, instead of dying you would go limp and you could somehow slowly get erect again. Maybe it was popping pills or catching porn or maybe it was time based.
Anyway, that’s not the worst game I’ve ever played, but it was one of the more memorable ones that popped into mind.
The worst would probably be some free or dirt cheap PlayStation game. It was not an indie gem. They had one mechanic: stand in the middle of an arena, spin/move around, and shoot the charging enemies until you killed enough and went to the next completely identical level.
I have played many, many games. I remember some of the best. I forget the others. Why would I remember the worst?
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
10-player game of munchkin. Could feel my soul trying to crawl out of my mouth after the 3rd hour.
If you enjoy going in depth, there’s a podcast called How Did This Get Played that is now called “Get Played” because they couldn’t bear subjecting themselves to these misfortunately made games for too long. But the early many episodes were chock-full of titles.
I enjoyed the Custer’s Revenge episode where the hosts get lectured about tokenism and how it was fucked up of them to ask their Native American friend to play a racist game for podcast content. I genuinely respect them for posting the episode and admitting their mistakes.
I rented Superman 64 at Blockbuster once.
Don’t reccomend.
Much broken.
Such bugs.
Wow.
I owned it. Still do. I was a foolish child who liked Superman. Still do!
The most insulting part was using GameShark to level skip and realizing the rest of the game wasn’t much fun (or finished) either.
They could have done so much better by removing the timed rings thing and just let you fly around a mostly empty city, blowing up Lex’s robots or something. It would at least have felt Superman-esque lol.
Master of Orion III, a 4X game from around the turn of the century. The two previous instalments were fun strategy games. This one was like playing the world’s prettiest spreadsheet.
from around the turn of the century
Oof, that makes me feel old
Played an old LoTR game for the SNES that was so full of bugs, it actually held my interest longer than it should have because I was curious whether the game could even be completed.
Capitalism
Which edition?
When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.
I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the ‘Spy’ piece could kill the ‘General’ (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the ‘Spy’ could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a ‘Spy’ is called that because it’s obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.
Nobody agreed and just played the game with the ‘Spy’ as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.
Stratego is a great game I’d completely forgotten about. Using your sappers to defuse bombs
I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.
Custer’s Revenge is bad, but it’s not really the kind of bad like when you think of ET. Cuz it’s not so much how it runs or plays, but how it’s a game about raping native american women and is in extremely bad taste.
I feel like if it was just anybody doing it, that would actually be somewhat better. The title implies Custer earned it, which is messed up in multiple ways.
You might be interested in the work of this hobbyist who updated Atari’s ET game to fix many of its biggest faults by decompiling the game and patching it.
When I was a kid I bought an Atari with the cartridge holder stand for it and a ton of games for $5. ET was fucking awful, but there were a few gems in the collection.
The ET game cartridge graphics made you not want to buy it.
Rocket League.
I have sank so many hours into this game, it is in triple digits. People have their opinion on shitty game studios today, but I find Psyonix practically irredeemable. Where do I begin? The community is very, very toxic and elitist that playing a casual match is a challenge of itself. You’ll be wanting to leave a match so badly, not because your team is down by goals, but because of how said team of yours got down by goals. You’ll be team-rammed, griefed and other bullshit and it’ll all somehow be your fault in their eyes.
The worst part of all of this, is Psyonix is dogshit about enabling this behavior. You are penalized for leaving casual games early, leave enough of them, then it’s 5 minute time-out and it escalates the more times you leave matches. It’s funny how the text in the banned prompt says “leaving a match creates an unfair balance for your teammates” or some bullshit garbage. No, I disagree, because people don’t need to stomach a bad experience when their teammates decide to go rogue or the other team is busy fucking you up with deliberate demolitions. THAT is what is called being “unfair”, Psyonix, you stupid fucks!
And Psyonix has a very absurd way with banning words. You can’t use “rammed” for some reason, that’s a bad word in their dictionary. Yeah they censor the hell out of many words, a lot of them obvious, but a lot of them very questionable and trivial. Psyonix only listens to the elitists and nobody else, if not, money because they’ve really been gutting out any enjoyment Rocket League once had with earning things and even having optional DLCs that were valuable.
I still, to this day, hope that Psyonix goes belly up. Not because of backstabbing the thousands of players that were there for them since Day 1 and then slapping them all in the face by going Free-To-Play and then scurrying off to Epic Games. But also because of the hours I’ve had to endure filled with lots of bittersweet experiences, most of them teetering towards negative ones, because Psyonix endorses the bullshit behavior.
Fuck you, Psyonix.
Hot damn, spicy!
I don’t recommend you play DotA. You can be kept hostage for over two hours there by griefers! Though I think it’s a lot less hardcore now the way it’s balanced, and there’s behavior score.
It’s a hard thing to balance game ruining behavior in public games, especially when there is ranking/ELO.
I had over 10k hours in DotA. But pubs just became psychological torture at some point. A pro actually said, the way he reaches the top in the public ladder is to be psychologically on top of your game. And basically babysitting the psyche of your entire team, as they are similar rank to you skill wise, but might lose their shit after one mistake, or whatever, which happens on both teams.
My conclusion was that these games are great, but best enjoyed with pre-set teams or private leagues.
Rocket league was kinda leisure for me, as the games are so short. Also lots of fun to just practice flip resets, air dribbles, and so on in the freeplay training mode. But it’s still frustrating and mundane, when you’re forced into a certain playstyle in order to win no matter how your teammates play, rather than playing off of each other more.
It took Rocket League and another multiplayer game called Super Animal Royale, to cease playing multiplayer online with randoms. Friends only.
Oh and I’m permanently banned from both of those games too. At least with Rocket League, my Steam account is banned which contained a handful of DLCs I wanted and a couple of lucky trades I got when the rocket league garage was available, a site players could use to trade items with. All down the drain. All because of putting up with countless assholes on there.
So no, I will never touch games like DotA, LoL and whatever else because I’m just going to remember the tail-end time with Rocket League where it was just back-to-back miserable experiences, even when trying to be spacious in how much I play it. When things go right in Rocket League and nobody is being a prick, it is an absolute blast of a time, win or lose.
Nobody should answer “Monopoly” because it’s intended to be un-fun, as an object lesson in why monopolies are bad.
Also, no one actually plays it by the rules in the rulebook, which would dramatically shorten the game.
I used to play it that way on an old Mac that came with monopoly, and it was really fun. I loved the auctions.
It’s pretty fun IMO, but I enjoy the chaos whether I win or lose!
Mario Party 9 was so bad I think I only played it one time.
The moment I saw the car thing and read that there was no way to get around it, we quit and went back to the older games.
My roommate and I bought it, booted it up, played like 4 rolls in, boxed it up, and returned it. Whoever thought that removing one of the fundamental mechanics of Mario party was a good idea should be forced to work in Nintendo’s legal department, where fun is banned.
