Maybe not the BUGGIEST, but Age of Conan was pretty damn bad at release.
Centipede.
I’m going to go way back and say Quest for Glory IV. I always play a thief, and you literally couldn’t finish the game out of the box as a thief. I don’t remember exactly what the bug was, but it was such that the thief’s way of getting to a particular item/location simply did not work, so you couldn’t move forward past that point in the plot. As it was an adventure game, there was no other way to get to the damn thing besides the one broken-ass way they wrote it.
I’m sure it was fixed with a patch later, but by then I’d already lost interest. Sucks, though, because I missed a good chunk of story between IV and V.
Which one?
Oh, all of them. Especially the turret digging trick. Never knew the mouse one!
How about Battletoads? Could, literally, not be finished on two player mode, due to a wall issue.
Naively, I once bought Extreme Paintbrawl with a gift certificate somebody had given me for Christmas. It was in the bargain bin, and I thought it looked pretty cool. Despite having a computer that was above and beyond the specs, I could not get it to play out of the box. I went to the company’s website and found a patch that supposedly got it to work, but in reality only got it to work about half the time, provided you had sacrificed a goat in just the right way.
And then when you actually COULD play it the mentioned AI issues made the game ridiculous to play.
World War 2 Online, a massively multiplayer FPS released around 2001. First of all, it had one of the worst launches in history. The game servers couldn’t handle the load and went down for about three days to a week. The website went down as well, so players were left in the dark.
The game itself was buggy beyond belief, Big Rigs style. The first patch was almost as big as the game itself, and addressed an issue that caused the game to crash when you FIRED YOUR GUN. The one time I managed to play without crashing, I hopped in a troop transport with a few other comrades and drove around aimlessly through a featureless barren field for 45 minutes, with no compass or anything to show us where to go. Then the vehicle got stuck on the lip of a small hill and flipped over, stranding us inside a capsized vehicle in the middle of no where. The exit vehicle key was either bugged or not implemented yet, so the only option was to quit the game. After that I uninstalled and never looked back.
And it looks like the game is still going strong. Go figure.
Though I’ve never played it this is undoubtedly the correct answer. Six years after it’s release Big Rigs is still legendary for it’s horribleness.
The guy who was credited as Lead Programmer on the project claims to have had no input into the game. He licensed the engine to a budget gaming company called ‘Stellar Stone’ and it was developed in the Ukraine over the course of a couple of months. It was blatantly unfinished.
The AI is nonexistent. Your opponents don’t move at all. The level geometry and collision detection is nearly so as you can drive through anything like it wasn’t there. Buildings, trees, walls, it didn’t matter. And if you saw a bridge and tried to drive across it you’d fall completely out the level. And one of the ‘tracks’ wasn’t even implemented. If you clicked on it in the menu the game just crashed completely.
At least it, (presumably), didn’t erase your hard drive when you went to uninstall it.
No, but that’s said to be one of the many exciting upgrades in the upcoming Big Rigs 2: Fool Me Twice.
Big Rigs 2: We want more money and we programmed this in an afternoon.
Yeah, they’ve managed to squash all those bugs, but it is still running on an outdated engine. Combine that with the glacial pace of addons (still no new theatres, just the Western Front, navies are still an afterthought), and it’s a no-sale for me.
It makes me wonder why their players haven’t switched to one of the Battlefield variants yet. It seems like a natural progression.
I would have to go digging out in the barn, I dont have anything from floppies in the house any longer … Stonekeep is about the only PC game I have that I never actually finished.
I know what it isnt off your list - never played any bards tale, legacy or dragon wars =)
It isnt any of the eye of the beholder trilogy, perhaps dungeon master 2?
I remember getting the 500 meg HDD for my amiga and being able to load all of eye of the beholder 1 on it and being able to play without flipping discs=) I had that and 2 other RPGs for the amiga when I was stuck in bed post op for 3 months in 1995/1996 and I got good enough at EOB1 that I could literally give someone a walkthrough over the phone starting at a pretty random place inside if they told me roughly how long they had been playing. I played it on my PC a few years ago and finished it with no issues [though I do notice the graphis are worse on the PC than on the amiga]
It wasn’t a bug. Sierra just realized that “thiefty gaming” was much less manly (and womanly) than playing as fighter or a mage, and so they sought to punish thiefty gamers as well as to get them to switch classes. Sadly, in many cases it failed and there are still thiefty gamers to this very day.
…what?
I heard Jack Thompson threatened to sue unless they stopped inciting unlawful activities.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Big Rigs isn’t that bad, when you factor in expectations. Big Rigs was an unknown budget game from an unknown developer starring big rigs. Did anyone expect it to be anything more than a half aborted fetus of a game? Good retail budget games are so rare that we could start a thread for them alone. (PopCap games don’t count since casual games are practically an industry for them).
Games like Daggerfall and World War 2 Online are much worse because they had massive hype and presumably a healthy budget with dozens of production staff. The latter even required a subscription fee, which they had to waive for the first month or so until the product was halfway playable.
Fallout 2 was pretty buggy on release, especially the car. The trunk would regularly eat the gear put inside for safekeeping, and traveling would quite consistently boot you back to the desktop. Fortunately, it got patched.
Daggerfall on release day was… Oh. My. God. Corrupted savegames as far as the eye can see. Spells that cost either 666999 mana to cast, or -10. Dungeons with a section not connected to the others (with the key item in it, of course, otherwise it just wouldn’t be fun :] ). And that’s just in your first 3 hours of play 
Oblivion/Fallout 3 are pretty crash-happy on my machine, forcing me to quicksave everytime I find something nifty, and the NPC routines can often get them killed off by mobs or, worse, by the terrain. I remember chuckling at an NPC who told me that some trader had “fallen off the grid”, because I had literaly seen it happen : the merchant walked right through the topsoil and into the void below.
Wooah, blast from the past. I remember, back in high school, copying by hand all entries on the Sim City antipiracy booklet during history class. Printed purple on burgundy paper, smallest font. Population numbers of something like 800 real world cities, plus some kind of Rosicrucian drawing for each. Good times 
Expectations? Not that bad? Carnick, I agree with you in theory. Budget games can’t be held to the same standards as normal games. But there are actually budget games out there that will give you your money’s worth. Like Earth Defense Force 2017. It was a light action for the 360 that was actually decent, and quite a bit of fun for what it was. And it WORKED!
Trust us, Big Rigs deserves it’s reputation. 
(The publisher actually offered a deal where people who purchased the game could, with proof thereof, download another “Activision Value” title free of charge.)