Well it does follow in the long Elder Scrolls tradition of being dull, repetitive, over long with a poorly scaling difficulty.
You didn’t even mention two of the major reasons it’s MY all time worst game:
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The interface (not just the game play) was appalling, easily the least intuitive I have ever seen in a modern, mouse-controlled game. Sometimes you had to left click, sometimes you had to right click, sometimes a combination of the two; there was no rhyme or reason to it. It was like figuring out secret moves in “Mortal Kombat.” And,
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The “Star Wars” name was a total lie. The game had nothing at all to do with Star Wars; they bought the character licensing rights and slapped some images onto a bad 4X game. The game didn’t even make sense as Star Wars; it featured an unexplored galaxy where the Empire started off as weak as the Alliance. There was no sense of one being big and scary but slow, and the other being small but mobile, which is the entire POINT of the backstory.
Other nominees:
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Master of Orion 3. Yeah, I know it’s been mentioned already, but it bears repeating. I always wonder if the folks who make these things think to have a tester at the end of the project who’s not yet been involved; they must not, because surely anyone would have said “Guys, it took me half an hour to figure out the nine-step process for building a ship and making it go somewhere. In the last version of this game I didn’t even have to read the manual to do that. This isn’t fun. Are you trying to make a bad game on purpose?”
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PATRIOT. The land-based sequel to Harpoon. At least an order of magnitude more difficult to understand than any other game I’ve played; the interface was just baffling. It was frankly impossible to tell if any of your actions even had any effect on what was happening. It was impossible to tell what was happening anyway. Three-Sixty, one of the great game houses of the 80s and early 90s, went belly up shortly thereafter because of this disaster.
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Strike Commander. A Chris Roberts attempt to make Wing Commander on the ground. The graphics were fuzzy and the air combat ludicrously arcadesque. The backstory was just plainly stupid. A massive commercial failure, and deserved to be.
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SimGolf. Marketed as a Sim game for running your own golf course. They charged full price, but it was a child’s game; you could master it in two minutes. It was impossible to lose unless you were trying to lose. Amazingly featureless; appeared to have been programmed over a weekend. A great concept; it’s too bad nobody else has tried it.
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Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. Actually not a bad game. The problem is that it was the same game as Rollercoaster Tycoon, just with new scenarios, and they charged full price. Fuck you.
The worst computer game I have ever played was one in which the goal of the game was to elaborate on the worst computer game I have ever played.
This was the game I anticipated second most in my life (just behind Diablo 2), so I bought it the day it came out, and it was hugely buggy. There were bugs in it that would corrupt the game files, requiring a reinstall. Although my system well exceeded the published specifications, Oblivion ate my video card. (That was sort of a good thing, though, because I learned how to replace it.) The graphics were magnificant as predicted, but I don’t think Bill Gates himself had a system powerful enough at release to run the game with optimized graphics. The voice acting, which could have been incredible given Bethesda’s resources, was limited by the very small pool of actors. The leveling system is **still **impossible to work with (from what I’ve read–I uninstalled the game long ago). Sure, there are mods that solve a lot of problems, but I don’t think games of this level should be dependent on user-created content just to function properly.
(Now, the “no cutscenes” thing would not be a shortcoming in my eyes. I hate cutscenes.)
Morrowind, which was one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played, was a phenomenal game for its time (though also fairly buggy), and I expected an awful lot from Bethesda on the followup. Oblivion fell short, and I suppose my low opinion of it reflects my disappointment.
If you thought Oblivion and Morrowind were buggy, Daggerfall will blow your mind.
I’m almost tempted to dig out my CD (purchased on the day of release! There were five of us in my office who want out and got it that day) and post the list of known bugs from the README. It’s phenomenally long and that was just the known ones.
They had to patch in a “teleport me back to the dungeon” hot key to deal with the vast number of geometry issues…
Upon release yes. The horrid adventure map AI is what wrecked it for me. However there were more than a few really good ideas lurking in there, but it lacked polish and balance.
My nomination, absent a “most disappointing” qualifier, was something which came out for the Atari ST in the early 90’s called “Superstar Ice Hockey”. Horrible VGA graphics, ridiculous gameplay-if a player was checked to the ice he’d just spin around there for a minute or two. Commit a penalty and the ref would appear on screen with a rolling-eyes expression.
Oh, and “Derek Smart”, “Derek Smart”, and, “Derek Smart”. 
We got a winner.
My worst, due to its hype and reputation and complete failure at achieving what it set out to do…
Wing Commander Armada. This was the WC genre’s attempt at a 4x strategy game…except is was lacking about 3 of the ‘x’ required. Basically, you moved from planet system to planet system, and engaged in a dogfight when you arrived. You had a small ability to upgrade your fighter to more powerful ones, but that’s it. When you’d conquered 5 or 6 systems, you “won” and started over.
Not enough? It was buggy as all hell. If you had a modem installed, you had to disable or uninstall it in order to use a joystick. Then, when the joystick did work, it could only turn left or right, pitch and roll still had to be controlled by the keyboard. The AI was crap, enemies simply flew straight at you, and your wingmen did nothing but chase them and miss with their shots.
I went through chains of emails to tech support trying to sort out the joystick and control conflicts, and never encountered a more hostile snarky tech response. They absolutely refused to acknowledge their game had any problems, even though my hardware met every spec they listed.
I’m still bitter about that one.
I’ll stick up for Septerra Core. It had problems, the chief of which were the tedious and nearly identical mazes that most of the fighting took place in, and the hoops you had to jump through to advance the plot. Not only were the mazes nearly identical, but you were going down them just to get to a switch at the end which opened up another part of the maze that held another switch that needed to be pulled. It’s also fiendishly tedious to figure out which items you have to find and to whom you must bring them to advance the plot. Eventually, I started doing that aspect of the game right from the walkthrough.
The story, however, was impressive. You have first of all a main character in an unusual role – big sister. Being a big sister is importantly different from being a mother or an aunt or even just one of the kids. This dynamic doesn’t get dealt with much in fiction. It changes the nature of the typical heroic journey. As the story advances Maya ends up trouncing bullies and wiping noses for the whole world – she becomes in effect everyone’s big sister.
**Dirty Harry ** for SNES. Lots of sewers & ladder climbing to nowhere. Enemies respawned; ammo didn’t. It was so bad that cheat codes just proved it was broken. Obviously, some pointy-haired bastard took their release-date bonus, cashed in their stock options & ran.
Also, Gemstone Warrior. Sure, after 8 boot attemts on an ATARI 800 it would run once. If you were lucky. And if you were lucky, you could get to the final crypt after 90 minutes of mistake-free play. Then the door sealed behind you and you were literally run down by the boss monsters with your most powerful weapons barely slowing them down. But you had to do all this while running down a huge maze of hallways were there was only one correct course and no signs or clues as to which way was the exit. But then, if you had an ATARI800, you were used to doing the impossible with virtually nothing.
There was also **‘Star Trek’ ** for the TI99, where the suicidal klingon ships were so fast they couldn’t turn sharply enough to hit you. It became a challenge to see how many enemy ships you could get to ‘achieve orbit’ around the Enterprise. I called it ‘Federation Diplomacy’.
Enemy Nations. It was some RTS battle game from the mid 1990’s which posited you against 2-4 alien races in a war to colonize a planet and beat up everyone else on it. Typical resource gathering, building structures, researching tech, etc.
Minor Issue: Each alien race had the exact same units, buildings, research trees, etc. Basically, the only thing the races were good for was getting a slight mod in food production or research or manufacturing, etc. A bit disappointing but not a game breaker.
Larger Issue: The game’s AI would randomly switch races throughout the game for no apparent reason. You’d be fighting the Research guys and suddenly they’d be the Farmer guys. Setting aside the silliness of becoming a completely different alien race, the shifts weren’t even logical or helpful. Sometimes they’d switch to the gimp race which only existed so players could handicap themselves.
Major Issue: The AI would just give up partway through the game. The existing units would putter about and defend themselves if fired upon but the game would cease all resource collection, production, unit production, offensive attacks and exploration. It was as thought the game AI realized that it sucked and left halfway through to go do something else.
Back when the game was released, the manual bragged about how no computer could yet run the game as maximum settings so the game would be ‘fresh’ for years to come. I actually tried to run it a few months ago just to test this theory but the game wouldn’t run on my computer. Now that I type this, I wonder if I could start it in Win95 emulation.
Fine games, all three. But in reverse order. Oblivion is more action game than rpg but I’m still playing it. The leveling system isn’t a game breaker and there are plenty of mods to keep it fresh.
Computer as opposed to console games right? I’m surprised there is no mention of Elite: Frontiers.
I’ve played other bad PC games, but the premise of Elite made it even more of a let down. Before I’d seen anything on TV like Firefly or read anything like it, the thoughts of space faring, blasting pirates, trading and becoming wealthy, took me in completely.
The reality, such as it was, was rather different. To get across the reality of flying through a solar system for days was alleviated by a sleep system that fast forwarded time. It stopped when pirates attacked, but then refused to kick in again. So having dispatched the pirates, you are then asked to fly for a few days through space in real time. Oh and the pirates, regardless of where you are, three jumps later and you get attacked with the aforementioned flaw kicking in. Even without a pirate attack, the autopilot will do its best to do you in. If your port’s dock is on the other side of a station or the other side of a planet, the autopilot takes you directly there, via the core of said planet or station. The last few seconds, when the planet’s surface looms large, are actually quite funny, till it happens for the tenth time.
I gave up after a short while, thoroughly disappointed. I spent the last few games coming out of a station, manoeuvring a few metres down from the space dock doors then opening fire on the station with my laser. The police, in hot pursuit, will happily fly right through the station to get you, destroying themselves while still in space dock :rolleyes:
Pushkin - the autopilot thing sounds like a bug because I never had that issue with the game. That said I was thoroughly underwhelmed by Frontier, so I won’t argue it’s case that strongly.
I would have to add yet another vote for MOO3. I really wanted to like this game. I was hoping for something like Space Empires IV but with better, more fun space battles. I didn’t get it.
What about Deus Ex 2? It’s more a case of shattering hopes and expectations than really being a bad game though. I didn’t play it long enough to call it a bad game in it’s own right.
I can’t remember many more. I have an amazing talent for forgetting things I don’t like…
I have to defend this game a little. On the high difficulty setting, playing as the Rebel Alliance, The Empire starts off in control of most of the core sectors, leaving the Rebels to concentrate mainly on exploring and capturing outlying sectors. That did make you feel like you’re fighting against a superior force.
My main complaint with Rebellion is that it’s so much easier to play as the Rebels. 12 Sullustan (?) troops protected you from any enemy mission for only only 12 maintenance points. The Empire’ troops with equivalent detection rating cost about 8 maintenance points each, 96 for a dozen. That huge difference allows the Rebels to easily secure their planets while building a huge fleet. Coruscant doesn’t stand a chance.
I… actually like Rebellion (called Supremacy over here). I can’t defend it though, it’s a terrible game, just one that I still play occasionally.
Deus Ex 2 was a decent enough game. It just couldn’t fill the shoes left by its predecessor, which is on my all-time favorites list.
Turok, though, stunk.
RR
Are you referring to the original SimGolf or the later version with Sid Meier’s name on it?
You’d probably have liked the original Elite and its VGA update better. Then there’s Bang! Gunship Elite, which tried to capitilize on the name but was mission-based and lacked little semblance of Elite. I never could complete the second mission.
I used to know one of the people who playtested that game.
He apologized profusely for it.