I can’t believe no one has mentioned Superman 64 yet. My friend bought it used, against my advice, for $5. His reasoning was that, even if it is bad, it has to be worth $5, right? The play control was SO, horrible, the stages repetive, and the concept was just unimaginitive. Seriously, the first level, you’re forced to try to navigate flying, through floating rings for no reason (why would superman fly through floating rings), with a poorly conceived 3-D movement system?
I have to second the E.T. nomination too. I don’t remember it very well, I was way too young, but I remember hating it.
Also, Bible Adventures. I remember they were selling it in the bookstore at church. Maybe I should have known better by the fact that it wasn’t even the same shape as a regular NES game. All it really is is repetitive game play with a vaguely Biblical background. I’d have expected they’d at least try to teach us something. Instead, I learned the Noah got the Bull on the ark by hitting it over the head with another animal, then picking it up and carrying it there.
Wow, thanks for reminding me of that one. That game was horribly evil. Even the random battles would go from easy to kick your ass before you even realized it.
As for the worst game I’ve ever played, The Simpsons: Bart Vs. The Juggernauts for the original Gameboy. I remember buying it simply because it had the Simpsons name. Played it for 5 minutes and never played it again. I might actually still have it around here somewhere. . .
Swordquest wasn’t helped by the fact that the franchise went belly-up before they completed the promised fourth or fifth games. As I remember, they were some of the first Atari games to come with feelies (a comic book, IIRC), and it was all supposed to be building towards some big puzzle/conclusion. Instead…fizzzzzzzzzz.
I always had mixed feelings about Seventh Saga. I never considered it a bad game, but it’s way too hard for its own good. Still, it had enough positive and unique features to balance things out. I never beat it either…always got stuck at ambushes from other characters which I was NEVER able to beat, which meant I had to give up.
I played this for about half an hour once, then gave up. To borrow slightly from the SA rompit review: You start on a street, and you can go down into a subway. The only way to get anywhere else is to make your blob turn into a hole in the floor. You do that by feeding him one of each jellybean you have until you get to the jellybean that makes him turn into a hole. Then you fall through the hole and die.
Yep, you can beat the game in 4 minutes if you fly right to the Blob’s planet, land the rocket in just the right way that you can slide off the left side of the screen, and then you throw the coconut to the right, and it will scroll through the entire second half of the game…let it go to the last room with the final boss, and then drop a ketchup bean, and then run for the next 3 minutes and you’ve won. So far this was the fastest win out of any of my NES-A-Day-Challenges.
And it wasn’t a bad game. It’s a puzzle-action game, so you’re supposed to figure out how to get underground without dying (hint - the second screen from the right in the subway has an underground surface which is close enough to land on. Use an umbrella to softly fall down the next cliff).