Interesting note on that wiki page, Elite 4 might actually be a little bit less likely to be complete and utter vapourware!
Civilization: Call to Power. When it was released my coworker at the time and i were big Civ fans. We both went to the PX together to get a copy. what a load of crap that game was. Buggy as hell and when you did get it to work, it…well sucked.
Well, more fool us, then. 18 months later Activision released Call to Power II, which was basically the same game only with the crap they should have fixed the first time somewhat repaired. It still sucked. Activision has been on my shit list ever since then.
I don’t remember the name of it. It was a text-based game. You dicked around endlessly getting a ship loaded with supplies, then you went out to sea to deep sea dive a wreck for some treasure. There were some bunks blocking your path on the wreck. If you moved them upright, they’d fall on you and trap you and you’d die. There was a halberd or something in the wreck as well, but neither I nor my brother ever figured out how to use it properly on the bunks. Oh…and we also never figured out how to get back up to our own ship.
Many of the text-based games sucked because the real game was figuring out the exact way to phrase the command, rather than figuring out the situation.
The original Elite was a terrific game. I never played Frontiers.
RR
I probably just didn’t give this one a fair chance, but I uninstalled Hearts of Iron about an hour after I installed it. It just seemed so ridiculously complicated and not worth the time. Like I said, maybe if I had made myself give it a fair go I would’ve liked it, but I just got too bored and overwhelmed by the game to really care.
The worst game on earth would have to be one of the 5 or 6 I never got to work at all. I don’t remember any of their names. But I know there were several that looked sweet, and I bought, but the damn things would not work. Hours of configing IRQs, Highmem, lowmem, EMM, videosettings, and creating or killing TSRs in Autoexec and config.sys went no where. (Damn you Bill Gates and your hellborn 640K :mad: )
Man alive how can I forget those! “Murder at the Manor” was a game I had for the our Spectrum 48k+. The cassette cover had lots of wonderful spiel about “lighting the butler with a match” and other such great things.
Play it though and you end up, inexplicably dying of either hunger or thirst, right in the middle of a little village in England :dubious:
My brother plays that one again. And again. And again. And… you get the idea.
But heck, when he was little he would play soccer against himself using Playmobil Clicks and actually not cheat. Normal, he ain’t.
I bought a game last night that really made me wish games came with a tryout period. Can’t remember its name now (Dawn of Magic?) but the engine is so bad I’ll probably uninstall it tonight. The figures are weird too, they were so intent on making “curvy” backs that everybody looks like they have the worst case of scoliosis ever.
The game I hated playing was one I volunteered to test play for my ex BF after he had spent the better part of his thirty ninth year on this planet “creating” it with RPG Maker for the PS One. It was called “MAROONED.”
He wanted to create a very realistic game, I will give him that. Maybe too realistic, despite the lack of sophisticated graphics. In the opening sequence, you met several characters flying on a plane in a rough thunderstorm. The characters all had unique names, and differing stats…like the strong athletic sports star was called “Jaques Strap,” or something funny like that. My BF even had a baby that had INCREDIBLY high luck. He also had a priest, a scientist, you get the idea.
Well, sounds great, right? As the plane is crashing…you have to pick your character…you character is the only one to survive.
From there, it went downhill. He wanted to make it so realistic, that he offered no clues for the gamer about where to start (you are on a beach…what next, right? Look for fresh water.) He built in modifiers…like thirst and hunger, which led to starvation. What had the potential to be like “Cast Away,” just turned into “beat the clock” ala NBC’s “Survivor.”
Can you believe the baby died of thirst? Ewww. Every character I tried, I couldn’t find fresh water, only a glass bottle on the shore. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt…but in the end, I only grew frustrated…hating the game and hating the fact that he wasted his life on something so…ODD. He deleted it.
So, I have spared the world from “Marooned.” Just my little contribution to the preservation of human kind. 
I tried Europa Universalis I, from the same company. Now I grok the basic idea behind pausable real-time strategy, but when I played my first game it was like it was playing itself. I didn’t grok what it was that I, the game player, was supposed to do, other than sit there and watch armies march across the globe and kill each other.
I got a game called Arthur (king arthur? knights of king arthur?) years ago… it was bad.
There was another game I had that was so bad I’ve rejected it from memory. The only thing I remember is it had to do with a crashed spaceship and some paths you took to get to another ship or building or something.
Surely you don’t mean Pikmin?
Doesnt sound familiar… I bought the game sometime in 2001-2002 BEFORE I figured out there were places to get game reviews.
Pikmin was released in 2001 for the Nintendo Gamecube.
Ah, the hours I spent on C=64 Elite. I could take out bands of pirate when they were still single pixels on the screen and dock at full throttle. No Blue Danube for me!
But as to the OP. Games that have most recently made me want to stomp on some small defenseless animal.
Maelstrom: Cut scene character dialogs were generated using the game engine in real time. Randomized player and npc movements during the conversation looked like what you might expect from epileptic break dancers. Talking to a friendly character while repeatedly bashing him in the head with an oversized gun as he kicks you in the crotch. Add that to the lame dialog and mediocre AI, gah! I’m NOT enjoying this flashback thank you very much.
Genesis Rising: Space exploration/combat. Humans trying to reestablish their dominance in the galaxy via xenophobic crusades against aliens. Once you spend five minutes getting past the neato ability to place the camera anywhere above or below the game ecliptic, it’s still a 2D game field in what should be a 3D deep space arena.
DOSBox is the greatest thing that ever happened to DOS games. I remember lots of work with memory management and boot disks to play games like Wing Commander Privateer and now I just boot up DOSBox and have the game going as fast as I can mount the drives.
And I don’t get the dislike for Wing Commander Armada. Then again, I never had any problems running it. And I wouldn’t know about joystick issues, because I’ve always played all the Wing Commander games with a mouse.
I’ll second Ultima IX.
I reviewed it on Gamefaqs back when it was new.
Read it here:
I’m not even sure where the hell to begin with this, but here are some that, for some reason, really stick out (like a rusty nail):
Ultima 3 has the distinction of being the only game that I completely gave up on four times. The first time because I didn’t know how the hell anything at all worked and kept dying. The second time because I kept running into one freakin’ impossible battle after another and died all the time (I actually destroyed the original disk in rage and had to make due with a cumbersome Dos-dependent replacement). The third time due to unbelievable disasters…whirlpool knocking out all my ships, flippin’ gang of dragons appearing out of nowhere, etc. The fourth time when I finally reached the very end…and got killed because I didn’t remember the order the cards were supposed to go in. Second disk destroyed in the process. Not to mention all the times I deliberately rubbed the disk surface, also in rage.
My god, this game sucked. Its effort-to-satisfaction ratio was unfavorable to Puzzle Bobble’s. Went a long way toward my current extremely dim view toward RPGs.
I covered Riven in another thread. In a nutshell, it was too everything. Too difficult, too confusing, too complicated, too nonlinear, too counterintuitive, too obtuse, too frustrating, too unsatisfying. I expected an enhanced version of Myst and got this unplayable bloated abomination.
No list of horrible comptuer games is complete without a mention of the unholy nightmare that was Defender of the Crown, which had the rare distinction of being grossly oversimplictic and absolutely impossible. How? By ratcheting the BS up to eleven thousand. A disaster happening to you, and only you (“Raided, lose half your gold!” “Sheriff ambushed, lose half your taxes!” “Seeds of dissent thing, lose half your castle troops!” “Huge soccer riot, lose a territory!” ), and a better than 50/50 chance of losing a territory…EVERY. DAMN. TURN. And money issues. Did I mention money issues? As in, constantly running out of, mainly due to getting robbed all the time? My question to anyone who spent however many years it took to win this: 1. How? 2. And more importantly, why?
In a similar vein, Strike Commander. No, I don’t give a damn about the unlikely story or the less-than-picturesque graphics. I do care about constantly changing battle conditions, and extremely difficult mission requirements (pretty much anything involving antiaircraft guns is instant death). Oh yeah, and getting deceived, misdirected, and plain 'ol BSed pretty much constantly got old in a hurry. (“It’s a simple airshow! Easy half mil! You’d be a fool not to go for it!”) Seriously, it reached the point where not a single statement made by anyone could be trusted. That plus almost never being able to afford any of the fun weapons because I was under a constant, looming budget crunch, which also meant that the tiniest failure in any mission, any time, ever, meant game over. Exactly who the bloody hell thought this would be fun???
Prince of Persia 2 was a clunky, overcomplicated morass, made all the worse by the inexplicably screwed-up control for running jumps. News flash - there is no reason to make a running jump a step or two before the edge. There is absolutely no use for this whatsoever. Know how in the original game, if you jumped while running toward an edge, the Prince would always wait until reaching it before jumping? This was a good thing. Taking it out, all bad, no good. And unbelievably frustrating for the many, many times where an accurate running jump is required.
And while I’m at it, what’s the deal with the collapsing bridge with the unbeatable skeleton? I mean, if you had just the bridge, that’d be fine, but how the hell is anyone supposed to figure out to get in juuust the right spot, then immediately after the bridge collapses, not attempt to put the sword away, and grab the bridge while turning around? Sheesh, why not toss in a slippery board and some falling boulders while you’re at it?
Gah.
The Space Quest series promised “The most fun you can have in zero gravity!” The reality was one incredibly frustrating puzzle after another, never knowing for sure what the hell I was supposed to get, and extremely counterintuitive actions that were absolutely required to not get stuck further down the road. Did I mention incredibly deadly threats every-frickin’-where? Completed 1 with a ton of help; played 2 and 3 about 10 minutes each and said the hell with it. (And I successfully completed Kings Quest 1 and 2 and the first Leisure Suit Larry with little help, so it’s not like I’m a newbie to this.)
Pirates! was just a colossal pain in the butt. Repressive, reprehensible trade restrictions, super-powered enemy forces, my own crew fighting like comatose sheep, never knowing what the hell’s going on in sword fights, towns hiding 80% of their gold and then never seeing it again, crushing promotion requirements, and etnerally being one inch from the mutiny, defeat, or shipwreck that sends days of effort down the crapper. And that was the first incarnation, which was exponentially more fun than everything that followed, which seemed to follow the Prince of Persia 2 rule that exponentially more complex + no compensation = better.
Simcity, i.e. Defender of the Crown with power plants. If you’re not constantly running out of cash (which you are a vast majority of the time), you’re fighting ever-escalating traffic. Or pollution. Or economic stagnation. Or too-high property values. Or too-low property values. Or Judge Dredd-levels of crime. (Seriously, you have crime around telephone poles, by god.) You constantly have to cut corners, revenues are incredibly paltry regardless of how damn high you set taxes, the demands are endless, and it’s impossible to please anybody. Let’s not even mention disasters, the only BS part of this game you can turn off. Ye gods, how in blazes you were supposed to get anything at all accomplished was beyond me. And that’s the whole game, make a city that’s on the barest edge of viability, then struggle mightily year after year to avoid turning into another Boatmurdered. This is as much a city simulation as the Titanic an accurate reflection of the cruise ship industry or Iraq an example of a modern industrialized democracy.
Sigh…give me simple, understandable, and beatable any day.
I didn’t hate Rebellion, although I do have a theory about its creation. Not so long after the movie Star Wars came out, the strategic wargame company SPI created a game called “Freedom in the Galaxy” (later marketed by Avalon Hill), which was a total Star Wars ripoff. They changed enough to avoid a lawsuit, but the game was about a rebellion against an evil star empire that was headed by an insane emperor and his assistant, who had been a member of an order of galactic knights that protected the galaxy, until the assistant betrayed the order and wiped them out.
To win the game, the rebels had to send their characters to various star systems and carry out secret missions with the ultimate goal of winning the star systems over to their side and starting rebellions there, while the empire had to use their characters and armies to capture or kill the rebels and stop the rebellion.
So, skip ahead to when Star Wars Rebellion comes out, and gameplay seems to be very similar to Freedom in the Galaxy. So, maybe I just appreciated things coming full circle.
That game rocks. I don’t know why it’s so funny when the kid falls down, but it is.
Also, #3 score of the day. W00t!