Well, once a game has an announced ship date, the pressure to shove it out the door is tremendous. If you slip your ship date you have to reimburse retailers, your advertising is wasted, you’ve put your game into an automatic financial black hole.
So that’s why games with terrible bugs get shoved out the door and get fixed a month or two later.
As to why games with horrible gameplay get released I have no idea.
Sorry about the duplicate thread (Controvert’s also discusses the good along with the
bad-I usually scan 2-3 pages back to check for duplicate themes but I failed to be thorough in
this case. Admins-you can kill the thread if you like.
It truly doesn’t get any worse than that game. I would put Pac-Man for the 2600 at a close second, because it was such an amazingly disappointing, crappy facsimile of the arcade version, and because I paid FIFTY DOLLARS for the cartridge the day it came out.
I’ll be surprised if anyone else has actually played it, but reading this hilarious review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing inspired me to seek out a copy— and it is every bit as bad as the reviewer laments. It seems to be about halfway finished, and is quite literally unplayable. (You can drive your “big rig,” but your race opponent never follows you, and it doesn’t matter whether you try to stay on the road; all the buildings, trees, and other scenery can be plowed right through, and sometimes vanish completely.) Definitely the worst “game” of the modern era I have ever encountered.
MoO3. I bought it the day it came out. It was on eBay that night. I got it sold before the word was out to everyone on its suckitude.
Text-based game “Button” on a dumb terminal back in the day. A typical game is described at the wikpedia page describing it. You see numbers 1 through 7 on the screen and you enter a number to guess “who has the button” - after your guess the “button” can move to another number of stay put. Dorky to the max!
Thank god the school computer lab also had Colossal Cave.
The problem is that it can be hard to tell if a games going to fun or not until it’s significantly far into its development. By the time you can see what it’s going to be like when it’s done, there’s been so much money spent on it that the company can’t afford to make radical changes. Not if they want to turn any sort of profit on the game. Often, when they know the game isn’t going to earn them money, it becomes a case of minimizing your loses. If you’ve spent ten million dollars on a game you know is going to suck, if you don’t release it at all, that whole ten million is wasted. If you do release it, maybe you can sell a million dollars worth of copies, and only be nine mil in the hole. Plus, publishers who have a highly-anticipated turkey on their hands like MoO3 are screwed no matter what they do. If they release it, they get shit for releasing a crappy game. If they don’t release it, they get shit for canceling a high-profile project that lots of people are waiting for.
I often hear people and even the gaming press asking, “Aren’t the testers paying attention? This game sucks!” I guarantee you that the testers fully grok the inner depths of suckitude, and are quite vocal about it; however, attempts to convey this wisdom to the people making the business decisions don’t always work. Sometimes the execs just want to cut their losses, sometimes they think the customer is stupid and won’t notice, and sometimes they themselves are stupid.
I actually liked this game quite a bit at the time. The music was amazing, and there were a lot of neat things about it. Star lanes, good tech tree, racial abilities, etc. I liked the graphical representation of the planet’s stats, also. Prosperity was a tree that grew bigger as your number went up, Production was a factory complex that grew more complicated, Research was a crystal that got shinier with more facets.
It certainly was severely flawed due to the horrible AI, lack of build queues, bad in-system movement controls, bad race balance, etc. I think that a sequel could have been a very good game.
Other issues with MOO3:
First off, the diplomacy was terrible. It wasn’t that you had the options, it was just that the AI got to commit war crimes at will against you… but if you did them back, all the AI’s, including your allies, decided you were evil incarnate and tried to kill you all at once. You might still win, since they were dumb, but it turned the game into one long, dull slog.
Secondly, nothing mattered except production. Production equals planets equals research equals new technology equals power. And productions equals more warships directly, which you needed because the AI thought nothing of casually annihlating your planets.
Last, they took out the coolest part of the game: the ability the define your own ethical/moral belief system. It didn’t happen all at once, and it was slow, but it would improved the game immensely. Their stated reason for removing it was “it took 100+ turns to get it anywhere.” This was probably a code word for “we’re idiots who couldn’t make it work at all,” since in MOO3, 100 turns was nothing. Even an average galaxy might have 4-5 hundred turns before victory, or more.
I have to disagree about Ascendency. Placing buildings was a mild nuisance, but you could just automate combat. And it had some of the neatest and most balanced victory conditions and pathways to rulership I’ve ever seen. As an interesting aside, some of the many aliens were deliberately more powerful than others. Trying to play the less overpowering ones was a cool experience, trying to use their special abilities just right.
I will put in another vote for MOO3. I remember anticipating it coming out and being pretty syched about it and got it within a few days of the release. It was pretty bad. I won’t buy games until a month or more after their release now so that I can hear the buzz and find out if the game is any good or not. Game review sites are not very useful as they always say games are good. There was some starwars game that I was disappointed in a MOO type game that was not all that good maybe galaxies but I don’t remember.
We had that game, too. :smack: In my defense, I was 8 years old and my parents handled all of the video game purchases.
That would be Star Wars: Rebellion. Possibly the only example I can think of where a Star Trek game was better than a Star Wars game (Birth of the Federation vs. Rebellion.)
Wish I could pass the buck, but I was 12— actually gave my mom the money and implored her to go to the game store first thing in the morning, while I was at school, so as to one-up the ravenous mob I was sure would throng the entrance and buy out every copy. Spent the whole school day ignoring my work, watching the clock, and fantasizing about the hours and hours of fun I was going to have playing my VERY OWN PAC-MAN GAME. The mischievous, multicolored ghosts! The whimsical theme music! The pulse-pounding acceleration of the police siren! The various bonus fruits! No more pumping quarters into the machine at the arcade! $50 was a lot of money to me, but surely it would be worth it…
I sprang out of the bus and raced up the hill to my house, burst through the door, ran to the family room… and saw my father wearing a decidedly non-reassuring expression. “It’s terrible,” he muttered, and pointed to the flickering screen, where instead of this, I saw… this.
No music. No colored ghosts. No background siren. No DOTS! (Dashes? WTF?) For the love of god, the “Pac-Man” faced the same way all the time! Always facing right! Move to the left and he seems to be consuming the do… dashes with the back of his head! “Wakka-wakka” was replaced with an irritating “BONG BONG BONG BONG” noise. A blue-and-brown color scheme? No fruits? The familiar intro riff gone, and in its place an obnoxious blast of four notes? And the “ghosts” indeed seemed ethereal, because they flickered so constantly they were difficult to even see.
It’s taken me decades to recuperate, and I still think some Atari exec should’ve lost his balls for that abortion of a game.
I loved Star Wars: Rebellion.
I can’t figure out the name of the worst game I played. It was a Commodore 64 game where you had to escape an outdoor prison by finding useful items among the hundreds strewn about the grounds. You could only hold three at a time. You had to find two halves of most items and combine them, eventually getting three parts of a helicopter. I was the only one of my brothers who had the patience to play long enough to get the helicopter (once) only to fly around everywhere on the map to find no available landing spot outside the walls. :mad: (All while listening to the same 15 second loop of MIDI music)
Infiltrator, maybe?
I remember kinda liking that game.
Impossible Mission for the Atari 7800 lived up to its name. Due to a bug, it was, literally, impossible to win, and was therefore pointless.
Well, the whole company went downhill after that- the CEO of Warner Bros. sold his stock in the company before the yearly gross announcements, hundreds of Pac-Man and E.T. games were bulldozed into a landfill*, and video games made a super decline which lasted until a then-unknown Japanese company called Nintendo made it big, so I guess Atari Pac-Man got what it deserved.
*Although this is believed to be true, Howard Scott Warshaw, the man who programmed the E.T. game, doesn’t believe it to be so.
There were actually more copies of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 manufacturered than there were consoles. Even accounting for knock off systems like the Sears one there just weren’t enough potential buyers. Atari got incredibly stupid in those last few years of initial console wave and got what they deserved.
As for the worst game I’ve played… I couldn’t even begin to narrow it down. I’ve just played too many games in my life. The worst game in my line of sight would have to be Circus Maximus for the XBox. I got it for a couple of dollars and figured that even if it sucked having a chariot racing game might be nice. I can’t get through the first turn in the training section. The horses don’t respond, there’s no assistance in game for the controls, and nothing that I’ve done has helped me get around the first corner. It’s unplayable.
FWIW, someone did track down the mythical E.T. landfill. See this Snopes page and this investigation of the location.
I can’t judge the worst game because I probably put it down after 5 minutes and forgot about it as quickly. So for most disappointing I would probably have to put in another vote for MOO3. I really wanted to love that game. Age of Empires 3 was a complete letdown for me too considering how much time I’d wasted on AoE 2.
I still love Star Wars: Rebellion/Supremacy though, so bah! I like micromanagement. Space Empires IV is the best space based 4x game though IMHO.
