Same as a lot of other gen-xers: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
There are probably worst games I've played that I don't recall, but there was a Roller Coaster Tycoon knockoff for the Playstation once. First impressions were "I bet this is going to be as customizable a sandbox game as the computer version". Nope. It's like the actual Roller Coaster Tycoon, except the parks are tiny, so much of the land is unusable, everything costs a bajillion dollars to make, the parks get demolished every time you "succeed" (since it was level-based), and you get absolutely no warning before a game over screen just drops in on you because you took out the wrong loans. Even being a real park owner probably has less checks and balances than it.
Mostly any modern mobile game. Piles of shit with p2w and gambling addictive mechanics that aren't fun but stressful...
ROTFL
I'm going to say Battletoads. The game was mostly pretty fun, until you got the jetski section where it was biologically impossible for a human to react in time. The only way to get past this level was to perfectly memorize the sequence of buttons to push.
Sonic 06. This is coming from someone who eagerly wanted to be optimistic about the game, especially given how, on paper, it seemed very reminiscent of the Adventure games. I purchased an Xbox 360 and the game to try it out, to see if it really was as bad as people say it is.
It was...very sloppy. There are glitches everywhere, to the point where a significant amount of deaths will occur due to them, such as wall running physics just randomly breaking, causing you to fall into pits of lava, having to hit the jump button 10 times just so Knuckles jumps off of a wall every time, and even when not considering the glitches, the controls just feel awkward and clunky, Sonic himself is slow and the physics leave a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the story much more than what the gameplay had to offer.
Looking through the lens of relativity, I'd have to say Witcher I. The fact that the fucking masterpiece that is Witcher III and not-amazing-but-definitely-worth-a-playthrough that is Witcher II both stemmed from the comically bad dumpster fire that was #1 is nothing short of a miracle.
The franchise *should* have died at #1, but I'm sure glad it didn't.
I wouldn't say worst, but maybe greatest difference in expectation vs reality - "My Time at Portia".
Cutscenes and voice acting were janky. The UI felt like it was originally an MMO and feels odd for a single player game. The gameplay loop felt tedious and seemed to disrespect the player's time.
Maybe I needed to give it more time, but for a game that I thought had generally good/great reviews, it wasn't clicking for me.
Back to the Future on NES. All I remember is a series of pain in the ass mini games having little to nothing to do with the plot. One of them was called "That Sinking Feeling", where Marty apparently had to platform his way out of his own stomach.
And E.T. of course, fuck that game.
Superman 64.
Weeks and months of hype (the era of print gaming journalism), Blockbuster stocking 100 copies on launch day for "guaranteed availability" etc.
Then I finally popped the cart in, and this thing was so bad it just defied all logic. Horrific controls, shitty graphics, unclear user interface and objectives, terrible draw distance. Timed level segments and insane difficulty.
There might be "worse" games but I have never been more disappointed in a release than Superman 64.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES. Ghostbusters was more disappointing, but I've at least kinda figured out how to play it over my lifetime. WFRR I'm clueless on. I think it's some kind of point and click, but I'm not really sure. There's a part where you have to call a real life telephone number to progress.
Pretty accurate depictions of what it feels like to play these games.
I remember buying Duke Nukem Forever in a Humble Bundle, a bundle that I had virtually every other game for the price. I remember only paying $1 and I gave *all* that money to charity.
I played DNF. I still felt robbed. To this day I haven't completed it due to how terrible it is (if my memory serves me, I've been minaturised and I'm driving around in a tiny car? But the controls are awful and Duke now seems like a Trump like character whose charm is entirely devoid in modern times. It was already wearing thin back when it was released, too).
Christmas Day, we just got a PS1 years after everyone else. My brother and I are ecstatic to play. My mum and sister are smiling at our reaction, since they went to the game store and asked the guy what a good game would be to play.
Formula One '98. We played a lap each, and then turned off the console. I can still recall the commentary "it looks like he's stuck in the kitty litter!"
*hands shake*
Im sure there are games that wouldnt even work so i technically didnt even play them but ill list a couple of games that i tried playing, hated, and uninstalled almost immediately
They both had the same problem.
Days gone and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I tried to force myself into enjoying rdr2 because it was supposedly that good. For the first few hours i kept asking myself when does the game start? When do i actually get to play?
Days gone i only made it maybe an hour before i quit and uninstalled.
I want to play a game not watch an interactive movie
Top Gun for the nes. I never actually finished the first mission. I could beat Mike Tyson but that aircraft carrier kicked my ass.
The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.
It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.
Worst that I can recall playing was Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero. You had to hit the B button to turn around. It was frustrating as hell.
Paper Mario Sticker Star. Moreso disappointed rather than hate, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole RPG genre (when I played it for the first time, I was 6, and thought all RPGs were like that) until I played the TTYD remake a few months ago
I don't even remember all the trash games i tried to played just to delete them after few minutes.
But the ones being remembered are instead the biggest disappointments, games which were supposed to be great or were supposed to be improved sequels of great games.
In this cathegory trashcan lid medal goes definitely to REBEL GALAXY 2. I played first part like 10 times and only ever wanted more of it, but 2nd problem was not that it was bad or not (it was though), but that it was entirely different game.
Dishonorable mentions for few more:
- Dragon Age Inquisition for being a solo player simulator of a boring MMO instead of a awaited resurrection of series and even sub-genre
- Marvel Midnight Suns, again for being supposed to be next X-Com but in reality being poorly optimised card game
- Pandora: First Contact, supposed spiritual successor to Sid Meier Alpha Centuari. Well it was spiritual in sense i wanted to get drunk on spirits because no chance to play this turd while sober.
- Starfield, i don't think i have to comment on this
- Less specific but every Dune game since Emperor: Battle for Dune and probably every Dune game in the future as long as the unFuncom have the licence
- Gladius: Relics of War: for a game that had so much development and DLC's it's still shallow as puddle. Which, along with Pandora above leds me to:
- Everything published by Sltherine i played maybe except Armageddon in good way and Pandora in bad way. Somehow nearly every good idea for a game that this company make into reality turns out to be the mediocriest of mediocrest game ever.
EDIT: oh and the one i tried to forget so hard but other poster made me remember it: "X-Com" Chimera Squad. No, just fucking no, the pathetic death of series after glorious predecessor is just too much.
I wrote that essay back in 2021, and three years later time proved all of it correct. This game straight up killed the series.
This game is awful
Probably Call of Juarez: The Cartel. I wanted to play the entire franchise back to back, but it wasn't being sold on Steam, so I had to hunt down a copy on some key reseller. Boy, do I see why it's not on sale anymore. runs like absolute shit, incredibly buggy, cheesy as hell and with some pretty questionable game design choices. Still, it was somewhat entertaining in a "so bad it's good" sense, and it ties into the previous games in a fairly interesting way, so I don't regret playing it. It was certainly an experience, but it's a very bad game by pretty much all metrics.
..It has to be Drakengard. What a thing. I literally couldn't finish it, and I'm close to finishing Final Fantasy XIII. I have a high tolerance, but good LORD is it a slog.
Master of Orion III. A 4X game for PC that had had all the fun carefully eliminated during development. It was like playing a spreadsheet.
My greatest shame is that I actually bought it twice because years later I couldn't believe it had been that bad and risked a bargain bin copy. It was exactly that bad.
Disregarding the absolutely unplayable and broken, I think it's a toss up between the 2008 Alone in the Dark or Final Fantasy 15. I'm more inclined towards the latter because I haven't played the former since release. It's just a godawful RPG, if you can even call it that, the game basically plays itself, has no depth whatsoever, the open-world is meaningless and empty of anything interesting. Not to mention the story is both dogshit and a confusing mess nonsensically split between different DLCs, movies and god knows what else. Definitely the worst big budget RPG (again, if you can even call it that) I've played so far, it's borderline insulting. The worst of it all? It was my first Final Fantasy and it was so bad it killed any interest I had in the series.
My uncle gave me an Atari 800 when I was a kid. Came with a stack of old carts and games.
One of them was E.T. Which was one of my fave movies at the time.
Now, I am not going to count games that I knew were bad beforehand but still deliberately played to see how bad they were, I am going to assume the spirit of the question implies starting a game and the realization of how bad it is slowly kicking in.
One game that came to my mind was "Conspiracy: Weapons of Mass Destruction" on the OG Xbox, but there's probably worse games I played but have forgotten about.
Cauldron 2 for C64 you start playing and find out you have no clue how to progress the game.
Bubsy 3D. The controls were awkward, the platforming was horrendous, and the levels were nonsensical.
Quest 64. It wasn't even funny bad, it was just boring.
Wrestslemania x8 on the gamecube. Didn't even have a frigging campaign mode...
"Worst" by technicality - I actually had a lot of fun with it for several minutes:
This famous piece of internet lore.
At the time I tried it, it worked "perfectly" in Wine (as well as on Windows that is)
There are a couple console games and one in my steam library that absolutely come to mind. As for which I think is worse is definitely up for debate because I think I dislike these 3 equally, even if I can only remember why I dislike two of them.
Don't remember the exact entry, but I borrowed a Dynasty Warrior game from my brother (who didn't like it as far as I'm aware) for xbox360 and something about it I just didn't like at all. Then there's Worms Blast. For a spin-off of worms, that from what I remember just feels like a worse bubble bobble style game, I was absolutely disappointed.
The Steam game is Macbat 64. By no means is it unplayable, add riddled, or full of annoyances preventing me from playing, but I beat it in less than 50 minutes. It's a 3D platformer whose relatively small levels pay homage to other games, but it just wasn't fun for me due to lack of content I was interested in (longer levels with more going on) when it comes to 3D platformers.
Flatout 3. I just checked on steam, and it's tagged as "psychological horror". Being a fan of the first one, and still having spent lots of hours playing the second one, I was totally not prepared for the utter monstrosity of the third one
The 4th game i made public
Its a mobile game where you have to find 4 "hidden" painted eggs. It was supposed to respawn the eggs in different spots, but i dont think i ever tested the game so i didnt know it didnt work.
There is also a score that doesnt work and a high score that cant go past 40
This is the game i spent the least time or effort making, copying everything from the last game i made, but changing the textures and modifying the part of the spawner of the collectables where they spawn randomly on the screen to appear at one out of a set of positions
My first thought is The Fortress of Doctor Radiaki for DOS.
A game I never played but is still memorable is early 2000s there was a game in Babbages in my local mall called "Prison Tycoon" that had a cop beating a black man on the box.
I must've played a ton of trash games that I purged from my memory, but one notable one that comes to mind is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. The game was super highly anticipated and hyped and I was a massive C&C fan before, only to be completely disappointed by this massive turd that they shat on this genre defining franchise. The revolutionary "physics" did nothing to the game play, the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours and it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors or the main other RTSs of the time.
probably that Tom Sawyer game on the NES. like, wtf even was that?
C&C4, hands down. Single handedly murdered the whole franchise.
Edit: to be specific, I took this to mean “worst game by a major publisher”
Fortnite
Mega Traveller 2. Buggy janky story. Bad combat. Character creation that includes all the skills from the pen and paper game but only about 10% of them actually do anything in game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTraveller_2:_Quest_for_the_Ancients
Shadow Madness on PS1. Unlikable characters, incoherent story, bad graphics, and boring gameplay. It was like someone drew a better JRPG from memory.
Over the years I've played a bunch of awful games. But the one that always sticks with me is ET. I spent hours stuck in pits in that game.
While people who know me would think that it is Bioshock 2 for a ton of issues, but that is mostly because it is automatically compared to Bioshock, ARK: Survival Evolved for its issues but I have 9k hours in it and growing so I can't say that, or the horribly disappointing Baldur's Gate after I finally got to play it years after and it kept giving me migraines. No. The worst game I ever played was also one of the most beautiful and beautifully animated arcade games, Dragons Quest. You had to match your movements to certain flashes on the TV and between input lag, multiple inputs reading as rejections, and frequently flaky controls the game was impossible for all but the most rich to get past the first 2 or three prompts. I on occasion saw a player who had pumped a couple of hundred of dollars into the machine to figure out its quirks and know when it was broken and they actually got somewhere. I never did. The same happened for the less successful Space Quest which was the same machine with a new cabinet, broadly speaking.
Gotta be Seven Samurai 20xx
Sea of Thieves.
That game is too buggy over the years it exists to be as popular as it is, and not in a "haha smol glitch" buggy, but "lets disconnect at the WORSE possible moments" (like you having a ton of loot).
Not worth it. A waste of 30 bucks.
Disney's Aladdin for game boy. Beat it in under a day and returned it. Just awful.
Ni No Kuni 2. Looking for a new RPG, missing that anime aesthetic so I searched up "best JRPGs" (yes, yes I know now that it's supposed to be perjorative); kept seeing this recommended, including by randos on Reddit (so not just paid review sites).
After 45 minutes of the most cliche-filled cutscenes and a prolonged tutorial for basic gameplay, I finally can just try it out and... It's the most boring, generic gameplay ever. Dull story, bland characters, bland gameplay, too long of intro. 2/10
The only other game that comes close is Assassin's Creed 3. Finished the tutorial mission, made it to Boston, started chasing collectibles and trying to 100% the first map. Sunk in about 5 hours and can't find the rest of the collectibles, so I decide to move on and come back later.
That's when it hits you with "PSYCH! That was just the Prologue, and all that time and effort invested in this character is MEANINGLESS. Here's a brand new character to build up."
I hate that. I don't mind when the game begins with an OP character to show you the ropes only to take all of it away, but please make it short. I loved Metroid Prime, for example. Investing 5 hours to have all of it mean nothing to your character, and next to nothing for the story fucking sucks. 4/10, would probably still finish just because I loved 1+2.
Tales of Arise. The most bland plain characters ever, uninteresting exploration, plot was SO predictable, and the combat felt stiff. Kinda wrote off the entire series mostly, except I do like Berseria even though it's combat also sucks.
I got recommended Suikoden 4 by a guy at GameStop when I was younger saying that Suikoden 2 & 3 were pretty good so this would be worth a try. I played & beat it since I didn’t have many games & already paid for it, but it sure wasn’t very good.
Root Letter. They said it was like Ace Attorney. It was not like Ace Attorney at all! 🤬
Ooh, I'm torn. They're both NES "games" - Rocky & Bullwinkle had sluggish controls, awful hitboxes, and I can only describe its graphics AND sound design as offensive. That said, at least it technically played like a game. Where's Waldo didn't even have that. I think Where's Waldo is the worst, but it's close.
Turok Evolution on GameCube.
It doesn’t look that bad on reviews, but it’s pretty awful.
Lula 3D. Though, I never played with it eventually as it froze up the computer so bad we had to pull the plug, the experience as a kid was probably my worst gaming moment.
'Home improvement' on the Super Nintendo
Hydlide, probably. A deeply mediocre action RPG that came out on NES waaay after everyone else had one-upped it, or ten-upped it.
And I played it circa 1997.
No, hang on - I at least progressed in Hydlide. To this day I have no goddamn idea how to get out of the first room in Batman Forever. I had the Game Boy version. I did not buy this game. Some kid just gave it to me, which should have been a warning. As I understand it, all versions of the game are quite similar, which would be admirable if they were not, to a one, total dogshit. I think it's the Mortal Kombat engine used as a platformer... made by aliens.
