We’re used to talking about the best and why they rock, but for a change let’s do the worst and why they suck. Not just bad, but the absolute opposite of best. The one game you actually regret even playing, the one with no redeeming features. This is purely personal, you’re allowed to hate a game that others loved or are considered good generally.
The game play in this title is the least intuitive I’ve ever experienced - I found learning to think in binary easier (no, seriously, I really did). You have to manufacture buildings on worlds you already have and then fly them to other planets to make use of the resources that exist there. The raw material produced is ore but that has to be turned into concrete for it to be useful as building material. What? And don’t expect the game’s interface or information screens to make any of this clearer, I’ve had more success with tarot cards. And that’s just for starters of course, that’s before you’ve even created a single ship or trained any crew/officers for your ships. Send Princess Leia to another planet to help sway it to your cause, but don’t expect her to do anything for about 20 turns. Oh no, C3PO just informs me she’s been captured. Oh well, she wasn’t exactly doing anything that I could ascertain so no big deal.
I love strategy games (especially space-based 4x type strategy games), and this is one of the worst examples of it I’ve ever encountered. The terrible basic gameplay aside you don’t get any sense that you’re actually managing an empire or even achieving anything. The presentation of the galaxy into sectors which you have to conquer using task forces isn’t presented graphically in a way that is particularly understandable, even when you do figure out how to actually go about it in the first place (cue much referring to the manual). Then when your fleet meets the enemies in space you’re graced with an isometric representation of 3D space where shapes lurch at each other and fire weapons randomly. If there’s any strategy in that, I didn’t discover it.
The worst part? The crushing disappoint between installing the game and finally giving up because it’s Just. Not. Fun. This was the first empire builder strategy type game set in the Star Wars universe and thus had so much potential to be brilliant, but instead it was an ugly, convoluted mess that was quickly exorcised from my hard drive with a flourish of scorn and bitterness.
My first computer experience was with the Commodore Vic 20, so there’s a wealth of bad ones to choose from, but I’m going to go with (for sheer ridiculousness of the concept):
Tooth Invaders. I can’t find any real good screen shots or descriptions of this game anywhere, but it was bad. Real bad.
You basically had to brush some teeth, and by doing so, you earned points.
I’ve played a lot of really bad games…but the one that stands out the most was one called Battle Cruiser 3000 (released in the late 90’s IIRC). I had been reading about this game for years before it was released…and it REALLY sounded like it would be the coolest game evah. Unfortunately when they ACTUALLY released it the game was a disaster. I never did get it working on my own system to the point you could actually play it (I understand that later releases and bug fixes at least made the game semi-playable)…all it would do is play for a bit then crash hard.
High Command - It was a WW2 grand strategy game. I fired it up, and by the end of September, I had conquered Poland, France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and had eliminated the R.A.F. Ooooookkkkkaaaayyyy…
So I restart as the Allies, and run the Germans out of the Rhineland as Poland is stonewalling the Wehrmacht on the border. Needless to say, I uninstalled and moved on to other games.
That’s actually the more advanced (and snooty) Commodore 64 version. I played the Vic 20 version, which was even more pathetic in its appearance and gameplay.
If we’re going by “biggest disappointment” I’m going to contribute Fable. The game wasn’t bad, but it was so misrepresented during the production that you felt cheated when you finally got to play it.
The worst game ever (that actually retailed on mainstream store shelves) is a different story, though. Rebellion is pretty bad, but I actually played through more than one campaign game. There was a pretty awful computer RPG called “Septerra Core” that I played for like 18 minutes before wishing I hadn’t wasted my money.
The worst console game ever is a ww2 navy strategy game for the DS called “Steel Horizon”. I wrote a pretty nasty review for it on gamefaqs. To give an example of how awful this game is, during tactical battles, whenever you used an ability with one of your ships an animation sequence showed that ship firing its special gun. During this animation sequence of 5-6 seconds, your controls were completely locked out, but your ships continued to fight using the last orders you gave them. You spent the tactical battles cycling between your ships taking turns firing special weapons one at a time, meaning your buttons only worked for about 5% of the battle because of these animation sequences. Tactical battles had a time limit of 60 seconds, and it was typical for you to only have control over your buttons for 3-4 seconds total.
Another real stinker I can think of off the top of my head was a D&D games called something like Myth Drannor. Gods was it bad. It was one that I also regretted buying almost as soon as it was loaded.
Another bad game was Age of Sail…it absolutely wouldn’t run on my computer despite numerous patches and calls to technical support. The game would load fine but when you attempted to run it you’d get a splash screen, a waiting icon (in the form of a ships wheel spinning about) and then it would crash to a blue screen.
Of course no discussion of the worst game ever made would be complete without a link to Gamespot’s review of Big Rigs . “Do not play this game, we cannot stress this enough.”
I’d forgotten MOO3! I was one of the people who hung about in its forum for about two years discussing it and eagerly awaiting its release, and I even took the day off so I could buy it and enjoy the sweet MOO-ey goodness straight away.
The final product? I could have cried. There’s a special place in Hell waiting for Rantz Hosely.
At least MOO3 worked …though I admit I was pretty disappointed in the final result as well. I ended up getting another turn based game though (I can’t think of what it was called) that, while the graphics were nothing to write home about was everything I was looking for in a 4X game at the time. Even had tactical fleet combat (again, turned based) and a great tech tree. And then the Gal Civ games came out and things were good again. And now…Sins is giving me my 4X fix.
They tried to patch it…and it did get a little better…but it still sucked.
The problem was not the game itself…which was cool. It just didn’t have any.AI.whatsoever. It wasn’t even like playing against a low-grade moron. It was like playing against a retarded ant.
Another vote for Master of Orion 3. You try to build a big empire, and get bogged down with the “heavy foot of government”, which penalizes expansion and large populations. You built a little empire, and you get taken out by your bigger rivals. Either way you get torn apart by foreign spies. Upkeep costs for terraforming are so prohibitively high that you regret colonizing any planet that wasn’t super-habitable in the first place. Sure you don’t have to micromanage, but you can’t micromanage even if you want to. It was like a bad clone of Pax Imperia, and Pax Imperia isn’t very good. Plus the letdown was so much worse on account of the Master of Orion pedigree.
How about Outpost? The game so bad it was pushed out the door half-finished and never patched to fix the holes. Bizarre things happen for no good reason and half the stuff in the online help isn’t actually in the game.
You could only build a 4-person party, but could add NPC’s you met. In the very first dungeon, right around the corner from the start, I met one. He was to start 4 levels higher and had better thats than any of my guys, better than they could have. He had an annoying voice. This pissed me off right there. He was virtually required to defeat the wave of enemies who started coming, because he had Fireball. WTF? Why do I even have my starting team?
The dungeons were both hideously ugly and gigantic, with frequent, risky resting because you didn’t have any healing. Enemies were ridiculously tough, and often came in huge swarms. The enemies could take Attacks of Opportunity on you, and did so often. You couldn’t take any AoE’s on them. I confirmed this through extensive practical testing. They could dance around the group for all the game noticed.
There apparently were puzzles, but the developers were so erratic about naming things that you could never tell if something was a puzzle or just a random object.
The controls were soft and just clicking a damn button might mean trying 4-5 times before getting it right. The radial menus came up slowly and erratically. Because of this, the general slow pacing, and the huge numbers of enemies, combat was awesomely painful and it might take less time to get some friends together and play the battles out in Pen-n-Paper.
*It deleted your harddrive * if you uninstalled it without the patch. I am not making this up.
I played it a bit for 3 days… then I uninstalled it. Somehow I avoided the bug, because if I had not, I would not have stopped before massacring the entire game development crew.
The character AI was useless; they couldn’t walk anywhere and frequently became stuck.
The game cheated. Good God, they didn’t even have to write the damn rulesset and they cheated. The dice rolls were weighted towards the enemies. That is, the bad guys automatically averaged something like 13 (from 1 - 20), where the averaged 8 (again 1- 20). In addition, it gave out crippled experience points, so you had to butcher an army to level up. It was vastly slower leveling than in 2nd edition DnD. Nuff said.
No scouting. In a genre where the Rogue/Ranger/Whatever is absolutely ital to knowing what was ahead, you couldn’t detach party members and explore with them. This made stealth useless, because the guys who couldn’t sneak (most of them) would be noticed and wreck things. I believe Sneak Attack didn’t actually work, either.
This is always the first game that comes to mind for me. When I tried it, it absolutely blew my mind how horrible it was. The UI must be one of the worst ever, and the graphics were amazingly primitive for the time.
MOO3 is certainly my #2, especially after months (years?) of reading about how the authors of the MOO strategy guide wanted to bring back the magic of the original, etc. etc.
…though I admit I was pretty disappointed in the final result as well. I ended up getting another turn based game though (I can’t think of what it was called) that, while the graphics were nothing to write home about was everything I was looking for in a 4X game at the time. Even had tactical fleet combat (again, turned based) and a great tech tree. And then the Gal Civ games came out and things were good again. And now…Sins is giving me my 4X fix.