Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Lists of "worst video games ever" are quite a bit different from equivalent lists of books, movies etc., because before you can even begin to analyse whether a game is good or bad from an aesthetic perspective, it has to meet a certain floor of being functional from a technical, mechanical perspective. Hence, these lists often tend to boil down to a list of games which are hideously broken from a technical perspective (Big Rigs, E.T. for the Atari 2600), as opposed to games which are "so bad it's good/horrible" in the sense of aesthetics, tone, quality of acting, poor writing etc.. Of course a game which is so badly designed as to be functionally unplayable is very embarrassing for the studio that designed it, but it doesn't induce the same sensation of discomfort and cringe that a so-bad-it's-good film does. Broken video games, to my mind, are only interesting if you're a game designer or software developer who wants to learn what not to do; to everyone else it's just "they tried to make a game which was mechanically sound, and they failed". These games aren't interesting to discuss the way bad films can be. Probably the closest analogue is in film, in which bad films are often criticised in part for being technically incompetent. But The Room didn't become a classic of the so-bad-it's-good genre because of its primitive green screen, amateurish post-production dubbing and slapdash continuity: those elements were just the icing on the cake of its nonsensical plot, illogical characters, bizarre dialogue and its creator's misogynistic, narcissistic worldview. Even a version of The Room directed by a halfway competent production team (but using the same screenplay and actors) would probably still have been an embarrassment. (And conversely, a film with a passable screenplay and decent actors, but with clumsy post-production dubbing, would never become a classic of so-bad-it's-good cinema on the level of The Room.)
With all of that preamble out of the way, I'm curious what you consider the worst video games ever from an aesthetic perspective. In particular, I'm interested in video games which are technically functional and not completely broken, but which make so many bad aesthetic choices that playing them induces a feeling of vicarious embarrassment comparable to what one might experience watching an Ed Wood or Neil Breen film.
(I'm sure someone's going to mention Deadly Premonition but I'm not sure if it really counts: looking at the cutscenes I get the distinct impression that the developers were in on the joke and deliberately aiming for a cheesy kind of B-movie humour.)
Has anybody played Dustborn? Does it live up to the hype (of how bad it is)?
More options
Context Copy link
The first game that came to my mind from reading this was DmC: Devil May Cry, the attempted reboot of the Devil May Cry franchise after 4 which shifted the aesthetics from something akin to medieval/gothic fantasy with shades of Lovecraftian horror to modern punk with grotesque fantasy.
Thing is, I'd never consider it to be one of the worst games ever made; it's actually a good game in terms of combat, such that if you just reskinned it and gave the characters different names while keeping literally everything else the same, I'd think it was a solid action game that was a viable alternative for people who were into the DMC, Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising style of games. But the absolutely terrible visual art and cringey tone severely harmed the game, and the fact that it was an attempted reboot that pretty overtly shit on the original franchise was the kill shot.
Funnily enough, if just considering gameplay, DMC2 probably fits, where the combat was so incredibly bad, not just by DMC standards but by any sort of game standard, that I'd probably consider it one of the worst games ever made, at least among games that are functional and released by a professional studio. Definitely creates second-hand embarrassment that such a game was released by Capcom, and it seems that the actual devs feel similarly, because the name of the original director (who was replaced by Hideaki Itsuno late into development - Itsuno would go on to direct DMC3 which is, to this day, considered one of the greatest games in the genre) has never been revealed publicly, for his own protection.
What, for real? That's insane.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I see this crop up every now and then in discussions about the film, and this evaluation of The Room isn't particularly coherent unless you consider virtually all movies that depict women behaving badly and doing things like "lying to hurt people" as misogynistic. Yes, Lisa is obviously the antagonist and is portrayed in a bad light, having an irredeemable female villain isn't enough to declare a film as advocating hatred of women. Is Gone Girl misogynistic? In addition, many films involve a female protagonist taking revenge on the man/men who victimised her (The Invisible Man, I Spit On Your Grave, etc, to name a few); people seem to have zero problems with those despite these films having far more negative portrayals of men than any kind of "problematic" female portrayal.
It's a terrible film, but its "misogyny" is not one of the reasons why.
I don't think any film which portrays women behaving badly is necessarily misogynistic (e.g. Tár's protagonist is a monster, and I don't think that film is misogynistic - in fact it's the best film I've seen so far this decade).
With regards to The Room itself: Lisa is such a uniquely selfish, manipulative and conniving character with no redeeming traits to speak of, who is pointlessly cruel and vicious to everyone around her just for her own amusement. Coupled with Tommy Wiseau's self-insert character laughing uproariously when his friend tells him a story about an unfaithful woman he knew who got beaten up by her boyfriend so badly that she was hospitalised, and banger quotes like:
which I get the impression the audience is meant to enthusiastically agree with - yeah, I do actually think Tommy Wiseau hates women as a group, or did at the time of writing/filming.
In general this is true of the majority of badly written films with badly written antagonists. I'm less convinced Lisa in specific is meant to be a stand-in for women and more an aggressive subtweet of an ex-girlfriend. "According to Sestero, the character of Lisa is based on a former lover of Wiseau's to whom he intended to propose marriage with a US$1,500 diamond engagement ring, but because she "betray[ed] him multiple times", their relationship ended in a break-up."
See above; this is not surprising given the context of who Lisa is meant to represent. Yes, the movie is self-pitying and half-autobiographical, but I'm not so sure it's supposed to be an expression of hatred for all women.
The other quote you linked seems to be a... not abnormal thing to think after being screwed over during dating and relationships, so I'm not surprised one would put it in a script. In a similar vein many films have "I'm done with men, they're rapacious bastards"-style quotes by female characters who you are supposed to sympathise with, so I suppose I can say that if you contextualise those as making the films inherently anti-male, I suppose you're consistent.
That's pretty much my attitude, yeah. The key difference being that a lot of these #girlboss movies include lines like that essentially as fanservice for the audience and the creators don't really mean it (although that being said, we've been debating since last week as to whether or not the "purpose of a system is what it does", and I suppose movies are "systems", broadly defined). Whereas The Room is such a painfully honest, unvarnished expression of its creator's worldview and wish-fulfilment fantasy - it seems reasonable to conclude that the worldview the movie espouses is literally that of its creator. I'm not even sure if Wiseau has the empathy and imaginative capacity necessary to model a character with a worldview other than his own. (I feel like he'd struggle mightily with the breakfast question.)
Not entirely sure that's the case, really. In general, I think the percentage of ideologues in Hollywood is higher than people think it is, and that these pieces of "fanservice" for the audience are actually the stated beliefs of many of those involved (see: the clip of the Disney executive producer effectively stating she had a not-so secret gay agenda which she inserted into films wherever she could). The ratio of true believers to cynical grifters is probably much higher than is usually acknowledged, especially once taking into account the fact that truly believing something is a great way to gain the corresponding benefits of that belief system without bearing the costs of deception. Even when they conduct fanservice, they are basing it on what they would personally want to see.
That's odd because I view The Room as a bit of a nonsensical Rorschach test of a film where you could pick out any number of statements to prove any number of things. There are a number of scenes which try to model differing worldviews, I think, and there are even some hackneyed attempts to try and deepen Lisa's character a bit (e.g. introducing her mother Claudette, who pressures Lisa to stay in a relationship for money against her stated wishes, causing the affair in the first place). Wiseau is not very good at trying to represent these other perspectives, but the point he wanted to convey is also incoherent enough that it's difficult to tease out exactly what it is. Pretty much the only larger-scale point I can glean from the entire thing is that Tommy Wiseau is amazing and he should never have been betrayed, and if he had killed himself that would have truly shown Lisa/the actual real-life girlfriend she represents.
It feels a little voyeuristic, honestly. Like watching someone have a low-level mental breakdown over the deterioration of their relationship.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As mentioned very recently, Homeworld 3.
It's a space game no wait it's a woke manifesto no wait it's one writer's crusade to normalize foot and giantess fetishes no wait it's a gooddamn cash crop and nobody cares what's inside because everyone bought it for the name only.
It's playable, by all means, but the gameplay is so bitch basic it might as well not be there and the writing is so damn bad it's bad just bad.
Not sure if that fits your criteria, but man, do I hate HW3.
The strange thing is that Blackbird had some generally competent releases before hw3, like Shipbreakers. Although maybe that was one guy's core gameplay demo with a crapload of garbage writing added later in production, with the story being the final turd dropped on release.
It really does seem like most issues with modern games come from the writing committee taking over, suffocating the "a decent gameplay concept one guy hammered out over a weekend" that's at the core of most good games.
More options
Context Copy link
Fucking sold!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oblivion. Might be strange to mention one of the highest rated games of all time, but nothing else captures that bizarre terrible film feeling. The incredibly ugly characters, litany of bugs, weird system choices, and of course the Radiant AI system form a perfect storm.
I have little hope that a future Oblivion remake would be anywhere near as good because they will simply sand away all the interesting parts
STOP RIGHT THERE YOU CRIMINAL SCUM!
Them’s fighting words!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude ... it took everything that was good about the larry games and just removed it.
Not having played any of the old Larry games when I played Magna Cum Laude, I could only view it on its own terms, and as the video game equivalent of Animal House/American Pie/every other silly teen sex comedy, I thought it was decent. The first joke in the game (wherein the big titty blonde Southern girl who wears a cowboy hat and loves country music refuses to have sex with Larry because he... isn't Jewish, and as a Khazar queen she can't sleep with a Gentile) was pretty clever and made me laugh a lot.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’d argue Steel Battalion (2002) probably counts. It is maximally, offensively realistic. It requires a $200 (in 2002 dollars) custom controller with dozens and dozens of buttons and a throttle. Just starting your tank requires a 10 button startup checklist sequence. The area of the screen showing the actual gameplay is the size of a postcard, because you are looking out the viewing slit of a tank. If you don’t successfully punch out of your burning tank (that has its own molly-guarded button), you die. And enjoy the digital afterlife buddy, because the game is automatically wiping your save file if you do. It all combines to make a game that’s borderline unplayable not because it’s broken but because it’s so uncompromisingly committed to the experience.
The first Steel Battalion was a cult hit. The actual disaster was the sequel from 2012 that tried to do the same thing with Kinect motion controls instead of a custom controller.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What's interesting about ET is that it's biggest problem was from a design point of view. It was programmed as a top down game, but visually it was a 3/4 view game. So it had a big problem where people fell in pits because their head hid the bottom of the pit on screen.
I don't know if it's quite on the same scale, but have a look at "Robot Alchemic Drive" (R.A.D.) for the PS2.
It took the perspective that piloting a giant mecha would be hard, so it should feel hard to the player.
You walk the mech by controlling each leg with the paddle buttons. You're controlling the mech and the guy sitting on his shoulder at the same time and he jumps off it you hit the wrong button.
Of course the ridiculous controls were the main selling point of the game, so it doesn't really qualify.
In general I think it will be difficult to find good examples. Movies end up with more interesting results because there are hard limits to what an editor can do once the shooting has finished. Releasing a bad movie is the only way to recover costs.
Video games have the advantage where once you have assets and a working engine you can tweak the mechanics until you get something at least mediocre. Fortnight was famously saved in beta by introducing all of the construction mechanics to an unimpressive pubg clone.
Reminds me of that mecha game where you have no joystick, no mouse, just the keyboard. It’s command-line only.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hmm, if this would be the thread of "mediocre games that you enjoy" I could list a bunch, heck, here's recent one: Evil West it's a AA title with very shallow story but quite fun gameplay when you get some upgrades and start playing it like a god hand clone.
But getting to the topic, I simply refuse to play through deadly premonition to the end, it's torture for nothing. The gameplay is super bad, I tried 3 times and when the fighting starts I just want to murder whoever worked on the animations. It was no in-game joke, I truly believe it was created on a floor from scraps with a team consisting of interns. You can't tell me it was done otherwise.
For any other bad games from the past I highly recommend Ross Game dungeon series, there is a lot of hidden gems for your liking, here's his recent one - Sabotain
More options
Context Copy link
I've got something that might fit.
Hardspace: shipbreaker
Mechanically an amazing game and very fun.
Story wise atrocious, and heavily panned in many reviews.
It's a story of workers doing a miserable and dangerous job for shit pay, so they rise up to fight their bosses by destroying a bunch of property as a form of strike. It would probably be a fine story as a movie.
The problem is it creates a total mood disconnect with the player. Not only do I enjoy the main characters' supposedly "miserable" job, I actually payed money to the developers to do this "miserable" job.
I think other games solve this sometimes mood disconnect by just having dishonest characters tell the player that what they are doing is fun and good. Like Glados in portal.
I ended up trying to make as little progress as possible in the Hardspace campaign, until I was done with the game and wanted to see for myself just how bad the story was. It's just cringe. And one of those things that you don't realize is an unwritten rule of video games storytelling: never directly trash your own video game within the video game. If you need to do so for storytelling reasons, get an obviously dishonest character to say nice things.
In between HW3 and Shipbreaker, we have two Blackbird Interactive games as answers here. A gold mine of cringe. Wonder what they'll do next.
An extraction shooter marketed to fans of boomer shooters.
Wait, Bungie has that covered…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It also has the main antagonist (the company) alternate between being doing things that are moronically evil (killing you to obtain a genetic sample that they could get with a cotton swab ) and moronically nice but still presented as evil (apparently I get to keep the entire value of the things I disassemble? What?).
The other big problem is the total inability to see outside their own perspective. So of course the union representative is a brave, butch young woman with curly pink hair, who signs you up to the union without asking, and the corpo is a fat, lazy middle aged man who thinks that training and safety is a waste of time and brags about how he rose to the top and you can too if you work hard like him.
Ya I forgot how much I hated the union rep lady. For a while I just pretended the story ended with me ratting her out to the boss and her being fired.
I've met real people like her and they drive me absolutely insane. A self righteousness mixed with a self centeredness that turns every interaction with them into a lecture where you can't get a single word in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The worst game that I've personally enjoyed probably is PS3 launch title Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (called Target in Sight in Europe). In this game, the player participates in various engagements of the ground theater of the One-Year War—not as an ace pilot, but as a grunt who starts with a GM or a Zaku and doesn't get a Gundam or a Gelgoog until late in the campaign.
When it works, it's a reasonably fun game. The mobile-suit models are gorgeously detailed, with multiple paint schemes based on what stat boosts you give to them ("heavy" for better attack and defense, "water" for better wading speed, etc.), unlockable weapons, and even part-specific damage (e. g., if your MS gets its right arm knocked off by too much damage, it will also lose any weapon that it's holding in its right hand, but it still can wield other weapons in its left hand). The music, both in menus and in battles, also is exquisite. However:
Battles generally run at approximately 15 frames per second (on original hardware; IIRC, emulation is a lot better when it doesn't crash).
When you've locked onto an enemy MS, your MS will shoot directly at the enemy—without leading the target! There's an alternative aim-down-sights shooting mode, but it's pretty awkward to use, since (1) you can't really move around while aiming in this fashion, and you want to be moving in order to dodge enemy shots, and (2) all your projectiles, whether bullet or beam, are quite slow. Just resign yourself to missing half of your shots. (And, of course, the enemy Guntanks are pretty good at sniping you from their stationary positions at the far side of the map.)
There are a few GM Sniper variants available for the player to use, but their sniper rifles carry so little ammunition (literally a single magazine), and are so hard to hit anything with, that they are essentially worthless. Why are they in the game if you can't even finish a mission with them?
During battles, you often can refill your ammunition at supply bases. This is effectively mandatory on longer missions. However, supply bases quite often will glitch out and stop working! This happened to me so consistently on the extra-hard version of the Zeon campaign's final mission on "very hard" difficulty that I never was able to beat it.
More options
Context Copy link
With digital distribution, there are countless games that are clearly asset flips made with minimal efforts, that have terrible aesthetic. And drawing the line to exclude those is difficult because sometimes the game will have one aspect the dev actually cared about and then everything else is bought assets and minimal effort.
That said... Though the reason I was made aware of it (culture war/Gamergate) likely primed me to have a negative reaction to it, Revolution 60 does have an aesthetic that cause me to cringe. Though I can certainly imagine others having the opposite reaction to it.
Another candidate, I have not actually played it for myself, but watched the excellent MandaloreGaming video on it, Anonymous Agony is pure teenage cringe with voice actors that are way too good and trying way too hard. I think there are parallels to draw with The Room in the "weirdo surrounded himself with some pretty talented people and his weirdo vision ended up on full display" sense.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link