Inspired by this thread about Silent Hill 2.
What is the absolutely, positively worst video-game ever?
I’ve never played E.T., which had a few votes over in the Pit, but I defy anyone to best Life’s Battle, a insipid Christian values question game (Hah! Bet you didn’t even know about that genre, didja?) cleverly disguised as a loopy and monotonous 2-bit sprite maze game! Fuckin’ terrible!
I have a recent game as nominee: Tetris Worlds (specifically for the PS2, but I suspect it is horrible on all systems).
I purchased the game because the girlfriend likes Tetris, she was in town for a few days, and it was $20. After trying to figure out why the hell a Tetris game had a “plot” we tried to find a game that was actually playable - ie fun. We failed.
These people managed to take the most addictive, simple game on the planet and completely screw it up. An utter, disastrous failure.
Tetris Worlds = Jaws 3
Something great transformed into something hideous.
Bebe’s Kids for SNES. Horrible control, grating music, and boring levels. Awful, awful, awful.
Worst is hard to rate. There’s a lot of stinkers, and will continue to be. So I’ll nominate something whose hideousness was correlated to market rage when everyone who’d bought the damn thing on hype and hope and expectations to its false promises. It was one of the best demonstrations of why all reviews need to be taken with multiple grains of salt. The “game” was released in the early '90’s, when the cdrom format was just beginning to widely take off and drive the floppy into the grave.
The culprit: Sierra. The crime: Outpost.
Resources and mines didn’t work the way they were supposed to. Roads didn’t work. Computer control didn’t work. The opposing outpost would surrender to you at the same point in every game–and when you found it, it was hopeless, because the computer didn’t follow the building rules the player had to. It was promised to be a hard-science Simcity in space; it was a half-finished pile of crap.
It was on CDROM, but to install it, you needed some additional files on a floppy.
Reading the manual was a trip, because over half of it didn’t apply to the “game” as packaged. As a note included in the packaging, this was “explained”–Outpost had been lovingly worked on and raised like a baby bird, you see, and as much as it pained Sierra, they just had to let it go.
That was Outpost.
I dug up some reviews so those of us who haven’t played them can weigh their crimes: 
Review of Tetris World!
Review of Bebe’s Kids
Kool-Aid Man – yes, as bad as the concept is, the game is even worse. If you could even call it a game…all it is is KoolAid Man bouncing off a wall. I always feel like I am really missing something when I play this game
a notable mention would be Heroes of the Lance for the NES. This one tries to be a game, but the slow moving characters and horrible play control (you press B to attack…and your character attacks…2 seconds later) make it unplayable. The music sucks too.
There is a game called Custer’s Revenge which always turns up on the various “Worst game of all time” lists. I’ve never seen it, I think it was for one of the old Atari systems.
The worst game I ever played was, IIRC, Mission Impossible, for one of the Atari systems. We could not, for the life of us, figure out how we were supposed to play it or what we were supposed to be doing. The instructions seemed to have been written for an entirely different game.
You know, I had that game. I enjoyed that game and didn’t have any of those problems that I can remember.
I haven’t ever come across a game that I actually hated. Not yet.
How about Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600?
Well, I actually enjoyed playing it, but it was so confusing, and bore no resmblance to the movie, that my overall frustration level was pretty high.
In similar veins, Fester’s Quest and Double Dragon 3 for the NES were way too hard for a regular gamer.
On the other end of the spectrum, I give you Ultima 8. If you purchase Bikini Babes Volleyball or the “erotic” Atari 2600 game “Custer’s Revenge” you have no one to blame but yourself.
However, Ultima 8 is a travesty of enormous proportions. Turn back you mind to the days of yesteryear. Ultima 7 has been blowing peoples minds. With a gripping plot, wonderful graphics, and extremely detailed world (you can make cloth! you can bake bread!) - okay, so the combat was iffy, but it’s not about the combat. It was amazing. Then, Ultima 7 part 2 comes out, and it’s even better! This series, always pretty good, is just stellar now!
And then comes Ultima 8. The graphics? Well, we decided that we wanted more ‘realistic’ graphics, so we went with these washed-out animated things. Since they’re so ‘detailed’ we can’t have more than 4 or 5 different types of enemies, however. The world? Sorry, you can no longer really interact with as many elements on the screen. The combat? A lot more fluid and motion dependent, but unless you’re on the absolute cutting edge of technology, you won’t have the response time to do much of anything.
The plot? Oh dear god the plot. Crushingly linear, and requires you to act in a way completely opposite to how the rest of the series has been established, even though it’s supposed to be in the same continuity.
The gameplay? Oh lord. There are moving platforms to jump on. Yes, in the middle of this “realistic” world, there are floating platforms moving from side to side that require you to time your jumps just right. There are now a total of four different magic systems, but rest assured they’re ALL slow and cumbersome.
There were howls of outrage. Ultima 9 was delayed because they started from scratch after hearing the complaints about 8. (And many longtime fans of the series - myself included - didn’t even buy ultima 9 when it finally did come out).
To go from so high to so low. It was tragic.
ET for the 2600 was pretty bad, but Pac-Man wasn’t much better and their Robotron: 2084 was so laughable you have to wonder why they even bothered to begin that project.
Outpost was bad, but it wasn’t the worst PC game ever. Not even in the bottom ten.
The worst ever was “Patriot,” a land warfare game by 360, the same company that did “Harpoon.”
“Patriot,” as near as I could tell, did not actually respond to anything the user did. It had some preset scenarios based on the Gulf War. You started a scenario, and then you tried to do something, but the controls, game structure and interface defied comprehension. Even if you did things at random the game engine would grunt away unaffected and produce the same result no matter what, which was… well, it was hard to tell what actually happened. There was no feedback of any kind understandable by a human being. The game literally killed Three-Sixty.
Another horror was “Star Wars: Rebellion.” “Star Wars: Rebellion” was touted as a sort of Masters of Orion game in the Star Wars universe. The game had, absolutely and without question, the worst interface of any PC game since the invention of the mouse, a bizarre spaghetti-logic algorithm of right and left clicks that only a schizophrenic could master. The game itself, despite the branding, had absolutely nothing to do with Star Wars. The “characters” were just cards - I’m not making this up - that you assigned to “missions” There was no feedback or anything for the missions; you just learned after a few turns whether it was successful or not. All the cool characters just did “diplomatic missions” would caused a planet to swing about 10% towards your side. That’s how you got to use DARTH VADER. That’s it. No animations, nothing. The game started with the Empire and the Rebels starting out with tiny little empires, too, which totally defies the entire point to a Star Wars strategy game (big, lumbering Empire, little, quick Alliance.) It was a fourth-rate strategy game that had just plastered solme Star Wars stuff on top to try to sell it. It was an absolute disgrace. It came out just before the latest round of dreadful “prequel” films so maybe would should have seen Jar-Jar coming.
Another one was “Earl Weaver Baseball 2.” The FIRST Earl Weaver games, 1.0 and 1.5, were terrific games. EWB2 was not. For some reason it had never been playtested and so they had not noticed that the score of almost every game was 1-0. It was like soccer. The average player hit about .170 with no homers. It was dreadful and never supported.
Still another one: “Postal.” “Postal” was advertised as a game of hideous violence, and it certainly was violent, in that it made you want to throw your computer out the window. The game was a pathetic side-scroller that was graphically hiccuppy on any system up to a Cray. Even the “pointless murder” aspect turns out to be a cop-out.
Yet another “Braveheart.” A clone of “Shogun” set in clan-war-era Scotland. Utterly dreadful.
Probably the biggest disappointment of all time was Donkey Kong for Intellivision.
Coleco licensed them a horrible product that was supposed to save Mattel Electronics Division, then came out with Colecovision and a full feature well done Donkey Kong.
Pretty much destroyed lives.
‘Postal’ wasn’t all that bad- the things the characters said were pretty funny but the controls were a little wierd because it used controls you’d see in a FPS but it was an overhead view game.
Deadly Towers is bad. My friend had it and swore it was a good, challenging game, but I believe its more like a bad, impossible-to-beat-without-cheating game.
The problem was the game was the bosses were annoyingly hard to beat considering how ass-tastic your character’s weapon and agility were. And there were these damn dungeons you could get whisked off to sometimes by total randomness which were annoying maze-like ordeals which took ages to get out of.
The kicker was the final boss, whom you get to fight after you beat ALL THE PREVIOUS BOSSES in a row. As hard/annoying as they were one on one, I just don’t see how anyone could get through all that and beat the game.
It seems like games during the NES era were often nigh-impossible because the NES library is chock full of frustrating, nigh-impossible-to-beat games with abysmal or no endings :mad:
Postal?! I remember an overhead view ultra-violent shooter made by Running With Scissors with that name, for the Mac. It must have been a different game – gameplay wasn’t bad, and it really was disgustingly violent. You’d shoot the policemen and they’d go down with a chest wound and take ages to die crying all the time.
There was a mode, as I recall, where you could “test” your sound system by playing your keyboard as a “pain and suffering” pipe organ – each key was mapped to a different cry of pain.
I think Pong is pretty lame.
Atari’s Impossible Mission was quite literally impossible to finish due to a programming bug. Hard to believe they could release a game without testing that it could actually be finished.
Atari wins the prize for developing hardware that doesn’t last or is never supported by software. The 5200 system had some truly great games but the joysticks were impossibly flimsy and the fire buttons went out very early in them.
The 7800 never had a ton of titles and was a decent system. But the Lynx takes the cake- very good graphics and should have kicked the snot out of Gameboy- but Atari stopped making games and the Lynx withered on the vine.
C’mon, the title of the game was Impossible Mission. You wanted a possible mission? That’s why we have truth in advertising laws in good ol’ USA.