I’m not a computer gamer, so I can’t really appreciate the other thread. I figured I’d start this one for the console gamers amongst us.
The original Metal Gear for 8-Bit Nintendo was abhorrent. I have no idea how a game that shitty spawned so many sequels. Here, let me summarize gameplay. You start. You walk forward. A blip shoots at you. You die. You restart. You walk forward. A blip shoots at you. You figure out how to get past it. You make it to the next screen. A blip at the other end says “I feel asleep.” You wonder if he means “feel sleepy” or “fell asleep,” because that makes a difference in what you do with him. You decide to wait, thinking he feels sleepy and you can sneak past him. You sit there for about five minutes waiting for this blip to do something else. He doesn’t. You sneak. He shoots you. You die. You restart. You walk forward. You don’t get past the first blip this time. You die. You quit. Apparently this game was full of Engrish, but I never made it far enough to figure that out.
Then there was Drakkhen, an RPG with poor translation, the requirement that you circle around leveling up for hours just to continue with the plot, and a random enemy that would pretty much destroy any party at any level.
Sim-Earth for SNES. If I got called out of my room and forgot to pause, I’d come back to a planet that was a huge barren desert wasteland, EVERY TIME. If the point of this game was to prove that only God could create a sustainable planet, all it did was prove to me that God is evil and capricious for putting in place the unique set of circumstances that caused this game to be created.
I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting, especially on PlayStation.
I dunno. I’ve played some crappy ones, but don’t remember them that well. I remember that Willow frustrated me. Also the same with Kabuki Quantum Fighter. fusoya might be able to answer this question best.
For the record, I thought Metal Gear was a masterpiece.
I think it was called Hylide or something as such. It was an RPG for the Nintendo. I literally had zero idea what I was supposed to do. None of the buttons did anything, I couldn’t really move around, it was like the anti video game.
Oh, and Simon’s Quest. How you were supposed to figure out to activate the orb and kneel down next to the cliff to teleport to the second half of the game is beyond me. Luckily someone at school had read that in Nintendo Power magazine so I could go on to beat it, otherwise it would have been a total waste.
Unlimited SaGa for the PS2. I saw it for 20 bucks, and figured, “Hey, it’s an RPG. I like RPGs. How bad can it be, really, for only twenty bucks?”
Apparently, really really bad. The battle system was done via a reel/roulette system, which I could have lived with. However, when you get into a battle, you cannot run. At all. And then I couldn’t figure out how to recover hit points, if at all. AFAIK, there was no way to heal. And I just didn’t get the setup they were going for.
Overall, they should have paid ME twenty bucks to take it off of their hands. It was just…awful.
Although it might not be the worst console game ever created, my initial reaction to the thread was “Overblood” for Playstation. I think it was released to capitalize on the success of Resident Evil. It accomplished that goal by basing the game heavily on a science-fiction story. It didn’t succeed because there was no action. Like, ever.
IIRC, at one point my friend and I were excited to have been attacked by a zombie-like monster, feeling that we’d finally be able to actually shoot something. Unfortunately, the game then went to a cut-scene, in which we were shown our character shooting the villain.
It was brutally boring, which angered me especially because the game seemed to have been advertised as a sci-fi action game (even the title, “Overblood,” seemed to suggest we’d be doing a lot of killing).
(PS Having looked at some reviews online, the game wasn’t bashed per se, but it wasn’t too well-liked, either.)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I believe it was for the NES. That game gave me nightmares just from teh sheer amount of bad in the game. I think it actually sucked up a good amount of the universe’s alotted “suck” points.
Eternal Ring for the PS2. My PSX was getting flaky, so I wanted a PS2 for Xmas (this was after the first price drop). My husband and daughter decided I needed a new game for the new console. Eternal Ring LOOKED like something that I’d like, and if I’d picked up the box, I’d have thought I’d like it too. What a piece of crap. The first person perspective included bobbing up and down with every step. The storyline was completely predictable. The controls were unfathomable. And it was boring.
“E.T.” and “Swordquest: EarthWorld” for the Atari 2600. “E.T.” was just endless repetition across the exact same landscape over and over and over and over and over. Swordquest in general, no matter the world, appeared to have no ultimate goal whatsoever, so you just wandered around doing room after room after room after room for no obvious reason.
Dude, Drakkhen was an awesome game. Well, I was probably eight when I played it. But, hell, I beat it, so that’s all that counts. And I sent evidence of that to Nintendo Power, but alas I was not one of the chosen. Or maybe that was my brother… my memories are hazy.
Oh, do sports games count, too? Because I can simply list just about every NBA Live game that has ever come out. And yet, each year I continue to buy them, thinking eventually EA will realize that if they put in an effort similar to that of Madden, they’ll probably make even more money.
Wow do I disagree with your list…Anyway Xenophobe for the NES was the worst game I ever bought. You played a bounty hunter that looked like a duck that had awful controls killing like two different types of aliens. I got to the point where the levels just repeated themselves after about 45 mins of playing and quit never bothering to play it again.
Whoops on my wife’s computer this is Darkhold not The Why Bird
Perhaps EA has realized they don’t have to put in that much effort because people keep buying them and they’ve already maximized their profits.
So console game… console game… the X-Men game for the NES was one that particularly hurt me. I was into X-Men at the time so I saved my money and got that… thing. For those who have never seen it you have a top down view of a gauntlet style stage that scrolls vertically. You can select one of several characters but using someone who doesn’t shoot like Wolverine is a major disadvantage. Eventually you complete some of the stages and you’re told to do something but there’s nothing in the instructions or on screen to tell you how to do this. It’s a mess, plain and simple.
Transformers for the NES was so terrible it was never released outside of Japan. There’s sucky games, but Transformers drops to a whole new unforseen minus world of suck.
Ha! Hydlide was pretty terrible. I remember getting stuck in a river or something and no combination of buttons could get me out. I had just wandered into the river by accident, too.
Back to the Future and its sequel, Back to the Future 2 & 3 were also terrible. Impossible to beat, anti-fun, and not even close to anything from the movies. I was so utterly disappointed in both these games.
All these games were for NES, by the way. Seems like there was shit for quality control in that era.
Once, I rented Otogi for the Xbox 'cause I’d heard good things about it.
About the third level or NONE SHALL PASS so, when I realized that NONE SHALL PASS my incredibly acrobatic character NONE SHALL PASS couldn’t walk over a six-inch high NONE SHALL PASS piece of rubble as I stumbled NONE SHALL PASS around the level NONE SHALL PASS trying to figure out how NONE SHALL PASS to actually get to the boss NONE SHALL PASS monster that I couldn’t see but NONE SHALL PASS who nevertheless wouldn’t stop NONE SHALL PASS shouting that stupid NONE SHALL PASS phrase every three NONE SHALL PASS frickin’ seconds NONE SHALL PASS SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP NONE SHALL PASS…
The keyword system for advancing the plot was silly and pointless - extra button presses for no reason. You couldn’t, at least as far as I got before giving up, mess it up, or change the path of a conversation with your choices, so it ended up being the same ‘talk to A then talk to B’ sort of thing the other games have…but with extra button pressing.
But it was the character advancement system that killed me. Several of the games end up rewarding sub-optimal battle strategies in advancement - VIII and X-2 (both of which I like a lot) for instance - but only II goes so far with it that your growth is actively stunted in most aspects by using optimum strategies. Keep your party from taking damage? No HP improvement! Don’t use a spell because it’s too weak? It’ll never get stronger!
Etc. Etc.
The PS and GBA versions are actually worse…the system tweak removed an exploit that actually made the system tolerable.
Harsh on the Metal Gear much, OP? The NES version was deeply flawed as compared to the original Japanese version, to be sure, but it wasn’t nearly that bad.
Hands-down worst would be Athena from the NES. There really is nothing to do justice to how bad that game was–the controls were abysmal, the levels were confusing, the hero wasn’t particularly durable (especially troubling when the controls make it impossible to avoid damage), and a timer that made it nearly impossible to advance even when you managed to survive.
NES Baseball was bad too, but it was sort of charmingly bad. The outfielders especially were extremely sluggish and prone to missing the ball entirely–for all that you could tell (given the lousy graphics) it’d just roll between their legs or something. For all that, I have a soft spot for it 'cause I used to play it a lot with my dad.
There were some other stinkers as well–I’m trying to remember a few from the Sega Genesis, but I’m drawing a blank and a quick Google search does little to refresh my memory, offering only an annoying video top ten of bad Sega games I was lucky enough to’ve missed. Maybe someone else will chime in…
I’ll second the original Metal Gear. I got exactly as far as the OP got before I gave up the game. There’s no reason to subject yourself to punishment like that, it’s simply masochism.
What might be a little more interesting (sorry for the hijack), is to say which console game we thought was the worst, among those we actually expected to be really good It’s easy to bash on a four year old, $5 bargain bin game. For me, it was Resident Evil 4. The disgustingly bad controls ruined this game for me. Tank controls? Really? That’s the best you can do? I hate when a game artificially limits the difficulty by not letting me control my character.