For me it was an early-90’s title called “Superstar Ice Hockey.” Scrolling L-R game with some of the oddest physics imaginable; funniest part was when you body-
checked a player, he would spin around on the ice for half-a-minute or so…
Back in the days of the old Atari 2600, my brother and I had a copy of E.T. The game required players to systematically fall down a series of about 100 wells to find pieces of a phone. You had to levitate out of the wells again, but it used up a lot of life energy. I often killed E.T. in attempting to get him on solid ground again.
Worst. Game. Ever.
Some PC RPG that I cannot remember the name of but had been in development for at least three years, apparently none of which was devoted to finding a better UI.
We did one of these last month, didn’t we?
Outpost by Sierra was pushed out half-finished and thus pretty much unplayable. I mean, you could play it, but half the stuff that was in the help file wasn’t in the actual game. MOO3 is just an awful game. Birth of the Federation (Star Trek 4X game by Microprose) had a neat idea, but was hampered by memory leaks and slowdowns in the late game, too much micromanagement, and a lack of Star Trek rights except for TNG. Crash Bandicoot IV has incredibly long load times and bad physics. There was a game called Ring (loosely based on the Wagner operas), which I actually own, that is just bad.
Wost game I’ve ever played would be… Dang, I can’t think of one. The upside to being a thrifty nintendo fanboy 
I did come very close to renting Superman 64, which usualy takes the first or second spot on worst-games-ever lists. Right up there with ET. (Anyone play Custers Revenge?)
I’ll say Mario Party I, just for the palm-blistering, analong-stick-destroying games. You remeber those ones.
“Star Wars Galaxies” is the first that comes to mind…
It should be a case study in how to fuck up a MMORPG
There’s this one:
One of the worst I’ve played was a NASCAR racing game for the original Nintendo Game Boy. I think it might have had Bill Elliot’s name on it. It was supposed to be realistic, with car adjustments and all that. The problem was, the Game Boy was much too primitive. You’ve got the track which I think was a dark part of the screen, one color as opposed to the one color of the sky. I think there might have been the wall on the right also. The BIG problem was the frame rate. It was literally about one, maybe two or three frames a second. I found it utterly unplayable and I lost every race.
It looked sort of like this but in four grays, and worse.
The other thing was pit stops. It switched to an overhead view, so you could only see ahead two or three stalls. This meant I had to always go ridiculously slow or else I would miss mine.
Superman 64 probably isn’t the worst game ever, objectively speaking, but it is certainly a terrible game. A friend of mine plunked down $60 when it was first released and he was so pissed off that the game sucked so bad. Seriously, the game was just about unplayable. I tried playing it for about 5 minutes of sheer frustration before putting the controller down to console my friend.
Marc
I recall that MOO2 had so much micromanagement, I could easily take a half hour per turn once the game got going. And in counterpoint, the early game involved a LOT of waiting for things to build. How did MOO3 make matters worse?
I vaguely remember playing a prototype of Archon III. At least, I hope it was a prototype – the game had neither instructions nor playability. I recall the game being highly unresponsive. There’s probably a reason I only vaguely remember it.
Hijack: What does “4X” mean in this context?
eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.
The GUI was terrible and the game had no depth, IMO.
Star Wars: Rebellion is one of the worst games I’ve played in recent memory. Just terrible.
Atari Pac Man.
It was incredibly difficult to play. MOO2 had no more micromanagement than most games of its sort, and the interface was simple enough to figure out. MOO3 had an astoundingly difficult interface.
In MOO2, if you wanted to build a ship, you clicked on a planet, clicked on the “Build” button, and chose a ship. You didn’t have to read the directions to figure this out because it just made sense and led you to it pretty easily. Then when the ship was built it appeared in space, ready to go. In MOO3 it was, if I recall correctly, a five or six step process to get the ship built and then of course it did not appear in space, but in a special box and then you assigned it to a fleet, and then you could blah blah blah. They designed it so you never did anything in three steps when ten would do. And forget trying to figure it out intuitively.
It was a fascinating train wreck of a game because the vast majority of buyers, who of course loved MOO2, hated it, so it’s not just a few people on SDMB; it was the general consensus of the marketplace that the game was a catastrophic lemon. What I find really interesting about this is that I don’t quite understand how it’s possible to spend more than a year designing a large-scale, A-list game and not realize it’s not fun to play. Don’t big video game producers hire play testers? I know if I’d been on the play testing team I would have said “Guys, this is just awful.”
The SNES had a ‘Dirty Harry’ game that I got for a birthday long ago. Lots of ladders & dead ends and darn near Nothing to do with any of the movies. The developers deserved the “Left Turn, Clyde” award for really bad gaming.
Agreed that MOO3 is about the worst game I’m using as a coaster these days, especially after two years of hype. It could have been so much better…
My guess, though, is that somebody (or most likely, many somebodies) did muster the courage to tell their bosses that the game was a disaster. In a perfect world, these folks would be thanked for the candor, a couple of producers might get sacked, and the developers would be told, “Sorry, guys, but we’re back to the drawing board on this… do we have a prayer of getting this out only a quarter late?” WAG: instead, management decided to cut their losses, had a meeting about what bandages they could slap on the thing, and released anyway because they needed to claim x amount of revenue for the quarter.
Lots and lots of games were buggy, uninstallable, or just plan never worked.
Apache Longbow never loaded a mission when I clicked on any of the options.
Balance of Power I understand was a fantastic game, but the copyright protection meant that installing it once disabled the disk until you uninstalled it…when I installed it with incorrect parameters, I couldn’t make it work from the HD to uninstall it back to the floppy, so it was money lost.
In some version of Pacific air combat I had, the planes all rolled slowly to the right and nosed down…regardless of the stick or rudder, joystick or keyboard commands. Splash, splash, splash, off the carriers into the water.
And so on. A rare fully-functioning game like Diablo or Master of Orion or XCom was a joy to behold. I learned to try-before-buying.
But to me, a really truly bad game is one that works. It does what it’s designed to do – it’s just that said design is, well, bad.
And for that, I nominate Ascendancy. Yet another build-up-an-empire “4X” game, Ascendancy featured an innovative, rotating, 3-dimensional star map to colonize, and a hideously detailed system of micromanagement to running your colonies and combats.
I spent an entire weekend playing part of one game of Ascendancy at the house of a friend and game geek, who had recommended it. To play, you decide what to build each turn on each planet and what square on the planet to place it on. As my empire grew and grew, this turned into scores of “where do I stick this factory” decisions each turn. Since some squares give a factory bonus, I’d choose those squares, duh. So much “duh” that it could have been automated, eh? Manually doing it was a chore and a half though.
Finally, somewhere beyond turn 3,000, I met my first opponent. That’s right – three thousand turns, the last thousand of which took scores, verging on hundreds, of tedious, repetitive mouse movements and clicks.
So my navy of a dozen ships encouters the enemy navy. I find out about combat! Take first ship – open menu. Take first gun – click on gun. Now find enemy ship to shoot, click on ship. Now click on second gun. Now click again on target ship. Now third gun. Now on enemy again. And so on until ONE ship is done. Now on to second ship!
Sigh.
I went home and took a long shower and never opened Ascendancy again.
Sailboat
I never had a problem with those mini-games, but apparently, a lot of people did- so much so that Nintendo made a special glove to make sure players’ skin didn’t get stuck in the controller.