What is your personal dumpster fire game? What is your critical-zero game? What is the bottom of the barrel for you personally? I ask because I can't think of the worst game I ever played. I think I should play more bad games on purpose and wanted to ask.
To start the thread I guess my personal worst is Crazy Frog Racer for the GBA. This game is so bad it taught me a little bit about what makes a kart racing game work, mechanically. You reach top speed instantly and can maneuver around the track without having to brake, and there's no power sliding, so every track is just a boring wait for it to be over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnAAQPV52BY
Also try not to get too negative in the thread. IDK. This isn't a hater's thread.
the absolute low point for me is collecting the tad-tones in skyward sword. A singularity of a totally irritating game + huge franchise + bad controls + swimming level + pointless but difficult filler task + the word “tad-tones” = rock bottom for me. I don't think I will experience anything worse than skyward sword and specifically the tad-tones
My lowest dumpster fire experience was forcing myself to beat Kinect Star Wars until the game crashed halfway through the campaign and the Kinect literally stopped working after that crash.
Had to mail the Kinect to Microsoft to claim the warranty and they send a brand new Kinect along with another copy of Kinect adventures. That means I've had to live knowing there has been an extra sealed copy of Kinect adventures in my house since 2012.
I consider all of that part of the Kinect Star Wars experience.
@穴 i knew someone who worked on that, and apparently the production was incredibly massive with dozens of full minigames getting cut and an entire studio farmed out just to make 3D models of every possible Star Wars prop. Star Wars
I hesitate to say that this is the dumpiest of the dumpster fires but it‘s certainly one that springs to mind. I don’t know how this was acquired but we had Packman on our DOS PC in the early 90s. I imagine it would've been around 1992ish / 5 years old that I actually played it. I knew at the time that it was pretty trash having been exposed to NES and SNES games by then but in lieu of other games I made my own fun out of it. I certainly have played worse games on various compilations but this is the most memorably and retrospectively bad for me.
https://youtu.be/hlOBZ754Irw
In terms of more contemporary games, I'd like to think that I had a much more discerning taste once I had my own consoles but I distinctly remember a friend of mine buying Cel Damage on GameCube either on, or near enough, release and I picture him, me, and two other friends trying to squeeze any sort of enjoyment out of the game in the brief time that we could tolerate it. I say that in the sense that the game's owner was clearly forcing themselves to like it whilst the rest of us were playing with disdain. I've had less enjoyable experiences in isolation with other games but in terms of all round bad, or perhaps not even bad, just morbidly dull then Cel Damage is up there.
My final contribution for now is Battle Chasers: Nightwar. I thankfully paid less than £1 as part of a bundle for this heap of shit but it was one of the most painfully paced, horribly unbalanced and woefully unenjoyable games that I've played in recent years, even more than Mighty No. 9. It is frankly, and comfortably the worst JRPG I have ever played and I would rather wipe my arse with a rusty razor blade than entertain the thought of playing it again.
I feel like that question is first game you played that you couldn't deny was bad vs this being game that is so ontologically bad it helps you understand what the word “good” means.
I feel like Superman 64 is an almost too obvious answer, and I actually have a soft spot for it, but it fails in really informative ways:
1. It has an incredible difficulty wall that you cannot (intuitively) skip
2. That part of the game has nothing to do with the core gameplay loop, or with the stated theme of the game (since when does Superman fly through rings)
The lessons it taught me by counterexample, that difficulty should be dynamic, and that gameplay should be nonmodal, are still the two primary things that I look for in games. I think Batrider is the greatest game ever made in part _because_ I think Superman 64 is the worst one.
It also told me how to put my I'm going to have fun with this hat on and cheat and cheese my way through the parts of a game I don't like to get to the parts that I do but that's probably outside the scope of this thread.
@TracyDMcGrath Yeah I think that‘s it. I brought up Crazy Frog Racer as my example because it was so bad I learned what makes a kart racer good. Whereas in the other thread my given example was Crash Test Dummies on the SNES, which was bad in a way I didn’t understand.
I think the intent with that was always to simulate the idea of Superman flying through the city on the lookout for incidents he can help with, but the game compromises its own narrative far too much for that reading to stick and gamers in general aren't too big on implication anyway (better to explicitly state what you mean than to ask them to put a little work into figuring it out themselves).
As for dumpster fire games, unfortunately no particularly strong examples come to mind: I played Cyborg Justice way too long ago for it to count as a fresh enough experience (although it still sucks; don‘t get me wrong on that), Alone in the Dark feels exceedingly obvious, and while BioShock Infinite and Catherine feel like they should count given how unabashedly awful their core thematic statements are, I’m really just depressed at the realization that they possess too much surface-level polish for the culture as a whole to ever regard them as the dumpster fire games they are.
@Video_Game_King yeah Catherine is a weird one being a singularly good game from a gameplay standpoint and a singularly bad one from a story standpoint.
Elderborn is a game that tries to copy both Dark Souls and Dark Messiah of might and magic without understanding any of them (like the game restores your healing quite often after a kill, so i used healing to keep one empty slot), game also has no stamina and a counter attack, you can stun lock anyone quite easily.
There is also no magic, physical objects, good rewards for exploration and boring 3 stats leveling system, the ending is also a arena fight.
Ghostbusters on the NES is the dumpster fire game for me. It‘s the first game I can recall that featured multiple, distinct gameplay-styles that all stunk. Whenever I hung out with my cousins, who owned Ghostbusters NES and liked the movies, they would play it fairly regularly despite everyone acknowledging it was a grating game. I can’t remember many specifics about it other than I was always mystified as to what exactly I was doing or where to go as a kid - and I think the game had just one song, a dinky interpretation of the Ghostbusters theme song. It‘s the only game, off the top of my head, that I’ve never found any redeeming qualities in. Every ten years or so I fire it up for a refresher on why I dislike it; I'd be okay with that urge never striking again.
Admittedly I stopped playing before finishing Catherine because of my distaste for its plot so some of this stuff might be adressed later on, but other stuff I‘ve heard from friends that have played suggests otherwise. Firstly, as is par for the course with Atlus, their treatment of queer characters leaves a lot to be desired. Rin and Erica are both the target of a lot of “not a real woman” or “tr*p” trope nonsense and the new ending added in Full Body erasing Erica’s transition is pretty gross. The cis women in the game are also pretty darn tropey, with Katherine as the overbearing sexless librarian wife and Catherine as the sexy free spirited homewrecking succubus, and polyamory is presented as a “demonic” or morally questionable outcome, even though it seems pretty darn clear that Vincent isn't cut out for monogamy.
if someone hasn‘t played a “dumpster fire” game then i guess they’re too young to have taken a chance on a random loose n64 cart that didn't have a mario or star war or zelda on it.
@yeso Lock it down, this is the premier Dumpster Fire experience in video games. A true masterclass in terrible design.
The only reason 95% of the audience has given this game a long enough leash to get to this point is because of the word Zelda. You're some 20-30 hours in, you figure you might as well see it out. You've intermittently been fed crumbs of the traditional Zelda hooks, at least enough to keep you going. The motion controls were bad from the start and are beginning to wear even thinner but you can't stop now. You've already fought the toe monster thing several times, after all. Your corner is ready to throw in the towel. But you swear you have one more round in you. If you're going out, you're going out on your feet.
The bell rings and Aonuma immediately hits you with the most Banjo Kazooie-ass nonsense you‘ve ever seen. It’s all over. You never stood a chance. You‘ve gained nobody’s respect. But at least you are now free from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
That's what I wish would have happened. Instead I collected all the tad-tones while flailing my arm around the living room like an absolute moron, and fought the toe monster at least two or three more times. God, that game sucks.
god i hate to say it, but burning rangers is burning because it‘s a dumpster that’s on fire.
that's all i have heart for.
actually, _mortal kombat_ sucks. it's like, "let's make smash hit _street fighter 2_ but make everything worse and embarrassing."
actually, ignore me. everything that comes to mind actually belongs in the contrarian corner thread, (is that what it's called, the thread for well-regarded games you don't like?)
other's on my list:
- _assassin's creed 2_, (or whichever one i played)
@Jax yeah and then you‘re all pissed off at the game, but then you get even madder and feel like more of an asshole because you realize you’re angry at “tad-tones” - but it gets even worse when someone asks you why you‘re in a bad mood, and you know it’s because of the tad tones
