A friend of mine who was a game tester for Nintendo claims the worst game ever is the french version of Pokemon for the Gameboy. That game was the major factor in his motive to resign.
irkenDoom, yes it was in the Swordquest series. And Fireworld was released but the other two were not. Don’t recall the Zodiac being involved but as I recall the “solution” to Earthworld didn’t require playing it, it was all in the manual! Something about certain words in different colors leading to a prime number.
For arcades, I’d like to nominate Dragon’s Lair. Remember how we’d line up to plop 50 cents in that turkey? And all you had to do was memorize the sequence of what to do for each screen you encountered.
Oh, come now. Who could forget the magnificent graphics, the “Press right-then attack” gameplay, and the mystical “Did you remember to get the optional golden apple” impassable conundrums. Many a day was spent pondering which of the possible moves the game wanted you to make, followed by giving up and watching someone who had that stage memorized. That was the best part of the game, I think, watching some other sucker advance the taped graphics!
It spewed out a sequel and two imitators – which if we’re paying attention to the odds of a bad game being followed by the son of bad game, means zip.
But the title of the thread says All Time.
And Pong LITERALLY damaged your TV’s picture tube. How can you get any worse that that?
Yeah, but Pong was the first home arcade game IIRC. It gets cred for that. Criiticizing Pong for having flaws is like criticizing the first land animal for being slow and clumsy at getting around. That it manages it at all is the thing.
'Course it does. And the same way you adjust ERA’s for era, I think ya gotta cut PONG some slack based on the times, that’s why Maris had the asterix, y’know?
I’m sure at the time of PONG, folks would have willingly sacrificed their TV tubes – so, you won’t have a TV. But you’ll be sooo cool until then!
Does anyone remember a 3D PONG game in the 90s where you could curl the shots? Or play cooperative against the aliens in the middle? THAT was fun…
Another potentially great game that was doomed due to a terrible interface was this game I can’t remember. It was one of the 1st if not the 1st multi CD game (4 CD’s IIRC), beutiful graphics that encouraged you to upgrade to 16 mb ram, sort of a private eye theme as seen 1st person. The one fatal flaw was the interface. To move forward you would move the mouse forward a little and hold it there, you would continue moving forward till you move the mouse back.
I think this was a Tex Murphy game from Access Software, the good people who brought us the Links golf series. I think it was called “Under A Killing Moon”, started some B-list actors, and actually spawned a sequel.
How about Battlecruiser 3000AD as the worst game ever? It’s certainly a good candidate for buggiest game ever.
RoboWarrior. I’m surprised this game didn’t make that bottom of the ladder NES list. You played this robot that had to plant bombs in this labyrynthian planet to clear away the bushes in stuff that were in your way. The same bushes that in no way hindered your opponents. You had to be carefull because your bombs would also damage you if you got too close, but you couldn’t be too carefull because your health would pretty rapidly tick down just from standing around, and the only way to replenish it was to kill enemies or find energy hidden in the scenery. Also firing your weapon or planting bombs made your energy deplete even faster, so you were damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Whoever designed this game was truly evil.
Has anyone else run across Dragon Valor? We did, then we took it back (2 hours later). I don’t know if it improves futher in, but its certainly the worst game I’ve ever played.
I do realize, by the way, that this whole Pong thing is a silly argument. I guess I’ve just got too much time on my hands…
But just to give you an interesting historical perspective on this:
I can tell you for a fact that people did not willingly sacrifice their picture tubes. People were royally pissed when they found that the image had burned into their tube. Keep in mind that the owners of the TV (the parents) and the individuals who did most of the playing (the kids) weren’t the same group so the “cool” factor wasn’t too relevant. In those days families typically had ONE television, a large major investment console model in the living room. IIRC, sales of Pong dropped dramatically after people realized the problem.
Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and say it. I would vote for Final Fantasy: Tactics. I can not express how much I hate this game. I hate it so much that I cannot break the CD or stop playing because that would be giving in and letting it win and there is no way in hell that I am letting this game have any satisfaction. I am going to get each and every freaking penny’s worth out of this game. In a fit of self-abuse I am going to beat this fucking game every which way from sunday so that when it’s over I can take out the disc, jump on it, laugh at it, pee on it, stick it in my cat’s litter box for a week before running outside naked and ripping the hair out of my head and chest as I scream in absolute satisfaction of humiliating this game so badly that it will go back to Japan and hide under the butt of one of those hot spring monkeys. And I hope that monkey is very, very sick.
- In the 40 some odd hours that I have played so far I have made not a single decision to the plot. Granted that’s not what this game is about though. You see, really what you have is a movie, a bad movie with the graphics of the SNES Final Fantasies, and you play the game to watch this movie. That’s the point, to see this movie. This crappy movie.
- So the only active part you have in the game, so far that I’ve seen, are these little role playing fights. Some are key, some are random monsters. Now you can see the battle field at either 30° or 45°, you’ve got two distances and you can view it from the 4 directions. Which is sort of allright except for those battlefields where there are places which you can’t see the battleground. Hmm, there’s a tree blocking my view I’ll switch the angle. Hmm, another tree. And a 3rd! 4 freaking trees! Why’d they do that?!?! And there’s no cool actions at all. Not even the summonings are cool, man Shiva for FFVIII was so much fun to watch come out because damn she was hot. But here it all looks like it’s one step up from South Park! Oh and death. You see, when people fall there’s a little count down 3, 2, 1 and they disappear. But the faster your speed, the faster it goes. Which means when you collapse at high levels you better be prepared to move like greased lightning or game over. This can often lead to very amusing death merry-go-rounds. Yeah I saved him, oops now she’s dead. Yeah, he saved her, and now he’s dead. Repeat.
- In the movie parts the text moves so freaking slowly it’ll give you an ulcer waiting for one sentance. Except when some special text comes out, then it slows down even more, to about 1 second per letter. And you can’t speed it up. You could on the SNES but not here. So you sit there sounding like a three year old learning to read. B. Bo. Boo. Book.
- Be very careful when you save because it will allow you to save just before entering a level which is impossible for you to win at your current level. So you better have multiple save spots for differing situations. This almost happened to me, if I didn’t have a summoner with Odin I would have had to kiss my 20 hours I had put into the game away and admit defeat.
- Missions. They sound so tempting. You can’t go though. You can send your subordinates, but you can’t go. And you can’t see the action either, they just disappear and tell you how things went when they get back. Sometimes they bring treasure, or news of some newly explored region. Can you do anything with the treasure? Well of the 30 something that I’ve collected only 1 plays a part in the story, whoop-dee-doo I can read! How about the regions they discover, can you visit them? Nope, You do get a little picture and a note saying how cool the place is but you wont see it or do anything with it ever again.
6)I want to like people, or at the very least feel like this is a world worth saving. But not this world. Here every single person who isn’t me is corrupt, evil. Well except for a couple women but every one else is evil. And not the fun kind of evil, the boring kind. The midless drone type of evil. No, not the Borg type with the inexorability. The I am a bad guy and I do bad things type. No morals turn on everybody at every opportunity, especially the main character. I was going to nominate this entire world several days ago as the fictional people most in need of slapping. - And my greatest pet peeve, which actually pops up a whole hell of annoying lot in all FF projects, the ‘your character is absolutely dominating this match so the bad guy inches from death invokes his magic disappearing trick to come back and fight you again.’ Ooooh! I hate that. One character doing it once, maybe I can take it. Heck, it might even fit in the plot in such a way to be interesting. But when several characters do it several times I just want to put a fist through my TV.
So that’s my argument. This game is bad. Not the so bad it’s worthless and forgettable type but the so bad you hate it and hate the guts of everyone that worked on. And their mothers. Never has a game incited such violent feelings in me.
flips my playstation the bird with gusto
Oh, and one more thing. Sometimes your goal in a battle is to save somebody. Only you have no control over their actions and sometimes they go ahead and run towards the enemy. Currently I’m on a level which requires you to save a woman on the rooftops and it goes like this.
- Main bad guy attacks her
- She attacks the main bad guy
- Ninja one stops (means she can’t move) her
- Ninja 2 hits her twice killing her
game over. Well gee whiz, I lost without even getting a chance to play. So you gotta do something which guarantees you go first so you canforce her AI to run away. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
I stand by my criticism of Dragon’s Lair. True, the graphics were magnificient. But the gameplay was too mechanical and there was no room for creativity. You HAD to do certain moves or else death. Unlike say Pac-Man where you could get a little creative and work the mazes a little different each time. To me a good videogame requires some manual dexterity, allows some creativity, has some randomness in the bad guys, and allows you to progress to ever more difficult levels. Dragon’s Lair fell short in all of these, plus it was quite an expensive game to learn at the time.