Worst Game

Opalescence · Post by **Opalescence** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 1:58 am

It's me again!

Banking on the success of my previous thread, I thought this one might be even more fun! While there are relatively few games that can qualify for "Best Storyline", since so few games have a DECENT storyline to begin with, I thought this discussion would be far more interesting. Sad isn't it, that there are so many bad games and so few good ones?

Everything goes here. You can go as old-school as you want (well, maybe not so far back as the first Pong, but I'll leave it to your good judgement as to where to draw the line). Any platform, too. Try to follow my format, but you may change it as you see fit. PLEASE tell us WHY you think your choice is the worst game you've had the (mis)fortune of experiencing. Please do not just post a title. To start things off, I'll give my vote to (DUMDUMDUM!):

Game name: Spellforce, the Order of Dawn
Platform(s): PC
Type of game: "Hero-Based Real Time Strategy" (that's what it says on the box)
Description:
Play as a "Rune Warrior", or a warrior summoned through the power of magical runes. However, you're different; unlike the runewarriors you yourself can summon, you possess your own rune and are therefore not a slave of someone else. Summon and lead massive armies against your foes as you unfold the story of Spellforce, the Order of Dawn.
Why this game sucks:
One of the "praises" this game recieved was that it was apparently "a splendid mix of Warcraft and Dungeon Siege". I don't agree. It's got an extremely boring, linear, and oftentimes confusing storyline, and no NPC's to speak of. For a game that claims to be "30% RPG", I challenge it. I say that it's about 10%, if that much. For me, RPG is:
1) decent storyline
2) interesting NPC's
3) a world that knows I'm in it
Spellforce simply didn't deliver. There are two kinds of quests: those that are part of the (extremely poorly done) storyline and those that have nothing to do with anything. Although there are a total of 6 (admittedly well-done, diverse) races, that's where the similarity to Warcraft ends. The "Hero-Based" part of the story was not completely fleshed out - firstly your hero can ONLY be human, and the game acts like it can't make up its mind whether it wants to be an RPG or a RTS.
Final Conclusion: I claim Spellforce to be the worst game in my experience because it failed to deliver on what it promised me. If I wanted to lead armies against other armies, I could have played Starcraft. For prospective buyers, remember the old saying about something being better than the sum of its parts? That's not true here. If you want RPG, get Planescape: Torment. If you want RTS, get Civilization I II or III, Age of Empires/Kings/Mythology, or Command & Conquer. Phenomic simply hasn't yet nailed the RPG+RTS formula down yet.

p.s.
You know guys, if this thread really takes off, we could even sticky it as a kinda "blackball list" for those who want to buy a game but don't know how good it is. God knows how many times I've bought a game, only to discover it was absolutely horrendous. This list could prevent such things from happening to other unfortunates. It would also give you a chance to vent, and probably be fun to contribute to as well! Here's to this thread taking off!

Oh and, I just KNOW that I'll someday post a game I thought sucked and someone will say, "How DARE you blackball that game?! It's the best game EVER." So to that, I say this:

<<<<<<<<<<NOTE!>>>>>>>>>>>>>
EVERY WORD I TYPE ABOUT ANY GAME
IS MY OPINION AND MY OPINION ALONE.
I GIVE REASONS FOR MY OPINIONS, BUT
OF COURSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO
THEIR OWN OPINIONS. IF YOU TRULY
BELIEVE SOMEBODY'S OPINION HERE TO
BE WRONG, RESPOND TO THEIR LINK WITH
A POLITE REBUTTLE. LET'S KEEP
THINGS CIVIL, EH?
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Noober · Post by **Noober** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 2:59 am

[Name] Hiest
[Platform] PC
[Type of game] Cut-down RPG
[Description] You have a team, and you steal things.
[Why this game sucks]
- Ugly
- Awful sound and vioce acting
- Boring (really) game mechanics
- Practical non-existance of meaningful interaction
- Inability to progress pass first level due to bugs
- Crashing every 2-3 minutes
- Unable to entertain for more than 5 minutes
[Final conculsion] Don't play this game.

Vicsun · Post by **Vicsun** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 10:09 am

Allow me to be the first to say this:

Black And White

So many reviewers loved that game; it's amazing. Interesting concept, awful implementation. Also, provides about 5 hours of gaming time, which I guess can be considered redeeming.

fable · Post by **fable** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 10:28 am

LOL! My editors at one magazine I wrote for didn't give me the game to review because I considered it a complete misfire, and that disgusted them. So they praised it to the skies. Needless to say, when it turned out to be bad, I was to blame.

I've seen some truly awful games. Perhaps the worst was a little-known Italian title, Where's Fat Lou?, which was briefly released in the US and then withdrawn. It was a succession of miniature games in a rigid hierarchy with poor graphics and no imagination. But The Ring, a French title of about 5 years ago, might be considered still worse, since it was more pretentious. It contained almost an hour of orchestral material drawn from a recording of Wagner's Ring cycle of operas, and had a trailer with great graphics--who cares? The game itself was an impoverished graphical adventure, with perfectly logical choices leading to your death--open a door like any other, and you'd get a black screen stating you'd died, start over. Yeah, right.

However, for sheer popularity and horrific content, I give the plum to Ultima IX. Garriott could get away with claiming Ultima VIII was bad because of his lack of involvement, but he had no excuse, here: awful AI, rigid storyline, an action game rather than an RPG (as claimed in the press releases) with a truly awful graphics engine and a ton of bugs, it deserved the death it received. I did review it, and I panned it. The distance between Ultima VII and Ultima IX was the distance walked by a stubborn developer who knew better than all his fans and everyone working around him about what made a good game.

Robnark · Post by **Robnark** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 3:16 pm

that Pool of Radience: Ruins of Wossname. damn that was rubbish. It was just a towering heap of toss. the interface was horrible. the plot (what little I saw of it) was on about the same level as, say, minesweeper. the graphics were dull, often confusing, lacking in detail, and generally bad. there are few games so bad that I will refuse to play them ever again. this is one of those few.

Volk · Post by **Volk** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 5:58 pm

Black and White, most definatly, had such a cool concept then it was blown up by the way it was made, hugely dissapointing.

POR:ROMD, wasnt that bad but i didnt like it much either, gets a good second place from me.

BGII and TOB come in at a close third, because i was completely outraged at how crappy the story and things in it where as opposed to the first one.

Stilgar · Post by **Stilgar** » Wed Aug 18, 2004 6:51 pm

[QUOTE=Volk]Black and White, most definatly, had such a cool concept then it was blown up by the way it was made, hugely dissapointing.

POR:ROMD, wasnt that bad but i didnt like it much either, gets a good second place from me.

BGII and TOB come in at a close third, because i was completely outraged at how crappy the story and things in it where as opposed to the first one.[/QUOTE]
I think whe already discussed biggest disspointments a few times before.
Worst game is something else.

I have to agree on Spellforce, that game was just plain boring.
Will come up with another later

Volk · Post by **Volk** » Thu Aug 19, 2004 8:41 am

Well IMO a game is a lot worse to me if it promises good things and delivers crap rather then just beeing crap from the start.

If we look at lionheart for example, the game didnt promise much had no good games in the series before it so i didnt get dissapointed much when i bought it and found out it wasnt up to my expecations.

Black and White was just so amazing in concept, having a creature and basicaly not having a RTS Age of Empires style, something different, the spell casting was good, as was the creature features, but the game was just......BAD, i didnt enjoy it and a lot of others didnt find it was worth the time to finish.

POR:ROMD was just.... i dont know where to start the game was nowhere near as good as it was suposed to be, and its just....not good even to me and im a die hard RPG fan, also the fact that it costed about $60 when it came out was downright outragous considering you can buy it for around 5 now, if your lucky enough to find it.

Now BGII this is basicaly a case of the previous game beeing 10 times better then the second one, in pretty much all aspects, and to me that puts it at an instant downfall.

I did finish all of the above and many others, but i finished the above strictly to get them done and i havent touched them since.

Robnark · Post by **Robnark** » Thu Aug 19, 2004 1:42 pm

[QUOTE=Volk]POR:ROMD was just.... i dont know where to start the game was nowhere near as good as it was suposed to be, and its just....not good even to me and im a die hard RPG fan, also the fact that it costed about $60 when it came out was downright outragous considering you can buy it for around 5 now, if your lucky enough to find it.[/QUOTE]
hehe, £1.99 for the collector's edition. I got a free mouse mat and little metal wizard dude, as well as the game CDs - which make very nice shiny coasters, incidentally

giles337 · Post by **giles337** » Thu Aug 19, 2004 2:22 pm

hehe you get a shiny wizard toy a mousemat and a coaster set for 1.99!!!! where from man?!!?

Robnark · Post by **Robnark** » Thu Aug 19, 2004 4:26 pm

for some reason, a games shop in town was unable to shift a large number of copies. which, I suppose, is understandable. they also really wanted to get rid of them. which, after playing it, is even more understandable. if I hadn't actually played it, it would have been a bargain.

Opalescence · Post by **Opalescence** » Thu Aug 19, 2004 11:36 pm

While this discussion on the availability and rather ridiculous price of POR:ROMD is interesting, let's try to stay on topic, shall we? Speaking of which, I think "worst game" is too narrow for much discussion. Let's just say "among the worst", since the words "worst" and "best" are FAR too subjective to who's saying it to make a statement like "Game X is the worst".

In that spirit, I offer up yet another game to submit to the community:

Game Name: The Crystal Key
Platform: PC
Genre: adventure (Myst series spinoff)
Premise: Myst spinoff.
Why this game sucks:
You're on an alien planet and is expected to, Myst-style, solve puzzles to "figure out" the storyline. This would be interesting if the storyline were good, but this was far too stale a storyline for anyone that's not an iguana to be interested in. Basically, big bad aliens nearly wipe out goody two-shoes aliens that build a bunch of portals that have to be activated by, ta-da! A Crystal Key. Who knew? Not terribly deep. There are a grand total of NO characters you give a damn about (I happened to really care about Atrus in the Myst series, he was a great character), and several of the damned puzzles were fairly contrieved (not to mention damn hard, but that I could deal with).
Final Conclusion:
A game like this is supposed to have an engaging and interesting storyline, superior graphics, and puzzles that blend in as seamlessly as possible to the general atmosphere of the location. This game has a storyline comparable to a bad B-rated space flick, graphics that were decent but nothing spectacular, and puzzles that oftentimes seem completely detached from the atmosphere and storyline, there just to be a puzzle and nothing more.

Anonononomous · Post by **Anonononomous** » Fri Aug 20, 2004 11:29 am

Spiderman 2
PC
Action
You are Spiderman and you loosely follow the plot of the movie
It sucks because the I beat it in one day, and on that day I got out of bed at 4, installed it, and beat it before 8. (Both times PM) During this time I had also helped cook and eat a BBQ dinner. So yeah, waaaaaay to short a game. And it had such a simple interface. Mouse 1 to attack, mouse 2 for anything else, or something like that. It was insanely easy. Horrible graphics. Just an all around piece of crap.
The versions for the consoles were supposed to be really good too. That knocks this down even farther.

Luis Antonio · Post by **Luis Antonio** » Fri Aug 20, 2004 1:50 pm

[QUOTE=fable]
However, for sheer popularity and horrific content, I give the plum to Ultima IX. Garriott could get away with claiming Ultima VIII was bad because of his lack of involvement, but he had no excuse, here: awful AI, rigid storyline, an action game rather than an RPG (as claimed in the press releases) with a truly awful graphics engine and a ton of bugs, it deserved the death it received. I did review it, and I panned it. The distance between Ultima VII and Ultima IX was the distance walked by a stubborn developer who knew better than all his fans and everyone working around him about what made a good game.[/QUOTE]

Agreed. But it is not the worst.

My list comes with:

MDK2

Bad storyline, bad first person shooter, jump and do game ( I hate jumping games after Sonic) and it is a jumping game. I bought it for 9 bucks, and it means it costed 3 dollars. If you deduce taxes, it goes to 1.50 (yeah, we pay the highest taxes around the world).

Daikatana

The game is easy as pie. I played it on hard, and the only way I died is when my dumb sidekicks fallen or got themselves killed. Not to mention the bugs and the jumping part of the game. I hate jumping games after Sonic. I quit this game before finishing it cause my daikatana was not working anymore after the sixth bug on the SAME JUMPING STAGE.

Aegis · Post by **Aegis** » Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:29 pm

Well, my choice, suprise, suprise, is Neverwinter Nights!

'Lo and behold my hatred for this game, in which the flaws are so numerous, I would have to collect everyone of my previous posts on the subject to adequetly describe such hatred for the game*.

*Note: Though I did the review for Gamebanshee, take note that it got two inadvertant mark raises, beyond my control. Once when my first review was rejected, and once again when the review scoring system was changed, and it received another 1.5 on the scale. My initial scoring was around 6.

Anyway, I'll keep it brief. To start, the engine. The Aurora engine is by far one of the ugliest, worst engines I have had the misfortune of playing on. The amount of hard coded base DnD house rules that were included made it a hybrid form of 3rd edition, in that Bioware decided which rules should be the same as in the book, and where others should be changed. I think a quater of the rules actually made it in as actual rules, the rest weren't. NExt came the poor visual displays. For an RPG that was released in the same year as titles such as Morrowind and Dungeon Siege, this game was horrible to look at. The affects in these two other titles were far more pleasant to look at.

Next, it promised ease of use tool set, capable of letting almost anyone create their own modules and settings. Well, this is sort of true. I say sort of, simply because to produce anything you'd like to even move around the community, you needed a minor degree in C++ and other scripting languages. Not to mention, the limitations put in place by Bioware and the Aurora engine made any real immersion almost impossible until the core community was able to get their hands on the game, and spend almost a full year modifying it in such ways where tools were created ingame to help.

The Original Campaign, plus expansions. ENough said there, I suppose.

The buggy nature of the game. Oh how Xandax heard me gripe about this. I preordered the game for a system I owned that was far beyond pre-reqs. I install. 30 seconds into the game, it crashes. I wait for a patch, in the meantime I attempt to tweak the game and my system so it will run. I get 45 seconds this time. Patch comes out, I get 30 seconds again. Now, perhaps I'm an isolated case. Nope, turns out, a third of the community is having the same problem. Apparently Bioware designs games that only work, initially on 2/3's of the system configurations out there. Thumbs up for Beta testing there, boys.

Anyway, I could continue, but Xandax is probably sick of hearing me ***** about this game, so I'll stop.

Yeltsu · Post by **Yeltsu** » Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:38 pm

I agree with Aegis

But the game i found even more dissapointing was the BG Dark Alliance, I was expecting like BGII on ps2, and instead i got Diablo 2, simply horrible.

EDIT: the only thing good about the game was the possibility to undress the elven female sorceress

Robnark · Post by **Robnark** » Fri Aug 20, 2004 3:50 pm

[QUOTE=Asriel]I agree with Aegis

But the game i found even more dissapointing was the BG Dark Alliance, I was expecting like BGII on ps2, and instead i got Diablo 2, simply horrible.

EDIT: the only thing good about the game was the possibility to undress the elven female sorceress[/QUOTE]
I think you'll find that som people like diablo 2, so watch it.

er... pretty much. although I think someone worked the semi-naked elf trick out a long time ago. examples: everquest box art and every fantasy book cover, ever.

Yeltsu · Post by **Yeltsu** » Sat Aug 21, 2004 6:05 am

[QUOTE=Robnark]I think you'll find that som people like diablo 2, so watch it.[/QUOTE]

I have nothing against Diablo II, in fact I have played it quite alot, however, when I was hoping for a multilinear RPG, I instead got the most linear hack and slash game ever. I personally think of it as fraud.

Locke Da'averan · Post by **Locke Da'averan** » Sat Aug 21, 2004 6:52 am

well there could be a worse game in my list but this comes in mind first: Ice wind dale. I expected a BG1 in a snowy environment and was at first intrigued by the fact that the monsters all look as they should(or close) then when i realised that you can't walk 5ft without running into an epic proportions fight and after that one, comes another one and another one.. there were so many places where i had to use the bad AI to my advantage to even survive.. i never finished it, i'd like to, so i could get it out of my system, but i can't get myself to install it again.. ARGH!!!

werebeargoddess · Post by **werebeargoddess** » Sat Aug 21, 2004 7:50 am

[QUOTE=Locke Da'averan]well there could be a worse game in my list but this comes in mind first: Ice wind dale. I expected a BG1 in a snowy environment and was at first intrigued by the fact that the monsters all look as they should(or close) then when i realised that you can't walk 5ft without running into an epic proportions fight and after that one, comes another one and another one.. there were so many places where i had to use the bad AI to my advantage to even survive.. i never finished it, i'd like to, so i could get it out of my system, but i can't get myself to install it again.. ARGH!!![/QUOTE]

I agree. The battles were amazingly common, and astoundingly hard. But I think the thing that got me the most about Icewind Dale is the npc's. You have to create your entire party, not just one character. If you make a small party in the hopes of finding other npc's who'll join on whith your group, well, too bad. That's the group you'll have for the entire game. But I have to say, though, I rather liked the voice acting.