An online game called Archlord. Online play is free, which is what enticed me to buy it. Soon I realized why they offer it for free - because no one would pay for it. There are very few players as it is and gameplay is just terribly boring and repetitive.
[Steve Martin from My Blue Heaven] But maybe they wanted to play it more than once?[/Steve Martin from My Blue Heaven]
While not the best game ever, ET was far from the worst. It was playable, winnable, had decent enough graphics and sound for its period, and so forth and so on. I enjoyed several hours of playing it as a teen (young teen, I’m sure), with the goofy neck action on ET, cheery Hollywood music bits over and over, killing off the little dork for fun, and so forth. Of course it didn’t have much replay value, but there were plenty of games that had no play value to begin with. I think it being named as worst of is just simply due to it’s high profile failure, backlash against the movie/company, and that many people were exposed to it who weren’t exposed to far worse games.
I’m having trouble remembering specific examples of ones that were worse, just because they tended to get tossed out quick. One I remember was some dungeon crawl style game for the old Tandy Color Computer bought on cassette from some company in a magazine. All you did was wander around, and when you ran into a monster you were forced to fight to the death, and the only choice in how to fight was to pick which weapon from your inventory to use each round. Normally it was like stick, dagger, long sword or something like that, so obviously there was no real choice. Boring as hell, completely pointless, and something I could have thrown together myself in maybe a few hours of programming.
And I’m sure there were worse than that I just don’t recall right now.
Daggerfall is both one of the best and the worst. Cool system, completely open-ended. But there were bugs that prevented you from getting to game end- even though there were several ways of “winning”. And, on occassion you’d walk into a wall and get stuck.
The real problem with Daggerfall is that it may be huge but it’s a lot of nothing. Since all the towns and dungeons (except for certain key ones) are randomly generated you quickly reach the point where you’re saying “Why am I doing the same crap over and over again?” It was the game that convinced me that asking for huge games wasn’t really that good of an idea.
From the Snopes page:
Looted? Who in their right mind would loot those pieces of crap?
Atari actually thought that two million people would buy a 2600 just so they could play Pac-Man at home- which might have been true if the game had not been so poorly programmed. But indeed, it was one of Atari under Warner Bros.'s many dumb decisions. (My personal favorite is the story of the Rubik’s Cube game. One of the Atari people’s argument against it was “Explain to me why this $50 game is an improvement over a $3 cube I can take with me anywhere I go.” Of course, the game was made anyway and didn’t sell.)
I’d love to have a cartridge just to have one.
I’ve got a regular retail one around here somewhere. They were still cluttering up shelves years later even with the mass dumping. They’re really easy to find copies of; odds are any thrift store or junk shop that took in Atari 2600 components still has one somewhere…
I wouldn’t object to having one of the crushed one just to say I have one of the dumped E.T.'s…
I have one!
Urgh.