Worst game ever? You tell me.

[Lisra]

"Chaser"

Not because it is broken, cliched, offensive or anything but because it is bland. Being bland is something that many games supposedly are, but this game really takes the cake. Anything from plot to the models of the guns is something you have somehow seen before and while it never falls into terrible it also never gets good. Its a bit like eating a slice of bread for desert.


The worst game on the "broken" front for me is Pool of Radiance 2. It could wipe your hard-drive, had terrible execution, ws overly long and really, really hard.

[empath]

You mean Ruins of Myth Drannor or Pools of Darkness? The latter was Nintendo-hard (better get initiative so you can one-shot the enemy, or they'll just one-shot you), but yeah, the only good thing to come from the former, that 'Diablo-wannabe' pile of buggy code was this.

[Lisra]

I indeed meant Ruins of Myth Drannor.

[Slack Mesa]

The worst game of all time is Minecraft

Early in the 21st century, Earth faced an environmental crisis. The polar ice caps were melting, the oceans were rising, and the rainforests had been turned into an exotic hardwood floor for an oil executive's summer home.

At first, people adapted. They traded their SUVs for hybrid cars. They recycled. They brought their own reusable shopping bags to Whole Foods. For a few years, it looked like the planet could be saved.

But then came Minecraft.

It was lauded at the time for being the most successful educational software in history. But oh, the lessons it taught! Chop down a tree. Dig up the countryside to get the minerals hidden below. Hollow out a mountain. Slay the local fauna. And build a monument to your own ambition.

A few years later, university admissions officers noticed a surprising trend: 85% of incoming students wanted to study mining, civil engineering, or fauna-slaying.

By 2040, "Generation M" were in the prime of their careers. As titans of industry, they funded the largest construction project ever attempted: a 5,000 kilometer tall granite statue of a pig standing over Australia. Ships sailed around the clock to transport raw materials from around the globe. At its peak, the project employed over half the world's population.

After ten years of frantic building, the project was at last finished. People around the world joined in celebrating The Pig.

The next day, they noticed The Wobbling.

With so much of its mass relocated to one spot, the Earth entered an unstable orbit. Five dizzy centuries later, it crashed into the Sun.

As I stand at the window of the spaceship and gaze into the void between Venus and Mars, I curse our ancestors who capsized the Earth. I curse the scientists who "saved" us by building the space fleet. But most of all, I curse Minecraft.

[empath]

♫Still trollin' after all these posts♫

[aeric90]

I'm going to take it old, old, old incredibly old school and dig up a game that dissapointed the hell out of me (memory triggered because of mentioning Myth Drannor), Eye of the Beholder 3 - Assualt of Myth Drannor.

I was a huge fan of Eye of the Beholder 2 and played the hell out of it. That and Dune 2 made me a forever fan of Westwood Studios. I also ran out and bought Lands of Lore on release and had to wait to upgrade my hard drive to accomodate it's whopping 20 meg install. So when Eye of the Beholder 3 came out I was stoked to see what neat stuff would be added in the wake of LoL. In short... nothing. Westwood Studios had nothing to do with it (I didn't quite understand this at the time). There was no real graphical update. The areas weren't designed well at all and the whole game became a tedious slog. I couldn't believe the two games came out the same year, let alone the 3rd being so inferior to the 2nd.

[Drinnik]

Yeah, I played that. Got it in a huge boxset with EotB 1 and 2, Menzoberrenzan, Pools of Radiance and another FR game.

It sucked.

Not as much, though, as Lost Planet. That is the worst game I've played in the last 5 years.

[It's My Delorean]

aeric, were you just making a Futurama reference? If so, I take it "Hell is Other Robots" was on recently?

[aeric90]

aeric, were you just making a Futurama reference? If so, I take it "Hell is Other Robots" was on recently?

Yes I was and no it wasn't. It just popped into my head when I wrote 'old school' and added the quote.

[Slack Mesa]

The worst game of all time is Super Mario Brothers

Nintendo's first attempt to cash in on the popularity of "sandbox" games like Grand Theft Auto was an unmitigated disaster.

The original plan was to let players freely explore the mushroom kingdom, a picturesque 3-D world powered by the Crysis engine. At the last minute, Shigeru Miyamoto decided to hire his nephew to develop a brand new engine. Because Nintendo's marketing department had already committed to having the game on store shelves by Christmas, the ambitious young programmer had to take some shortcuts.

The game that was finally released, just days before the deadline, was but a shadow of the original concept. Players could freely explore only that portion of the kingdom that was to their right. This led to massive frustration, as the player could often finish a mission only to have the game pop up an error dialog: "Princess not found. Press X to retry or Y to choose another castle." The upgrade system was similarly broken. Due to a coding error, the "star man" armor upgrade stopped working mere seconds after being acquired.

Nowhere was the rushed development more obvious than in the escort missions. At certain points in the game, Mario was supposed to escort a local mob kingpin to a safe house. A week before the deadline, however, testers discovered that the mob man would die upon contact with any sprite-including Mario. With the clock running down, Miyamoto's nephew replaced the kingpin with a clip-art mushroom and recast the mission as "avoid the mushroom." He wanted to depict Mario dying of dysentery upon touching the mushroom (by the end of the project, he hated the red-hatted protagonist just as much as players soon would), but upper management rejected that idea because Nintendo's previous game, "Cholera Combat," had tested poorly with focus groups. With no time left to change the artwork, the bitter programmer compromised by making Mario balloon up to double size when the mushroom touched him.

The critical and commercial failure of Super Mario Brothers nearly put Nintendo out of business. Fortunately for gamers everywhere, the company rebounded the following year with "MMetroid: the other M is for Murder, Mofo!" and the rest is history.

[madrak_the_red]

What?! Cholera combat was awesome!

Oh, what could have been...

[Slack Mesa]

The worst game of all time is Halo

Halo starts off promisingly enough: you play Gerald Moynihan, a young priest summoned to deliver last rites to a kindly old lady in a poor neighborhood in Belfast. In the opening scene, you arrive at a bus stop just as the last bus of the day is leaving, and you must find your way to the lady's house on foot. With a timer ticking down at the top of the screen, the city turns into a parkour course. The five minutes of gameplay that follow are among the most entertaining in modern gaming. The townspeople you pass look puzzled, but most of them can't help but smile at the sight of a priest leaping over hedges.

Just as you reach the house, however, you are run over by the Loch Ness Monster. Given your character's profession, a deus ex machina plot twist is perhaps tolerable, but it is somewhat disconcerting that the game designer has confused Ireland with Scotland-and water with land.

The screen fades to black, and after a lengthy loading delay you find yourself playing the poor old lady, Maureen O'Kelly. The doctor standing next to your bed explains that your impending demise is in fact a mixup in the lab results. "Get a good night's sleep and you should feel fine in the morning," the doctor says before departing. When you obligingly complete a quick-time event, your character turns on the holo-screen (yes, holo-screen, despite the 1960s setting outside) and sees a news report about the priest's death. After one more quick-time event-"press X to fall asleep"-you fall asleep.

In the dream sequence that follows, you are visited by Father Moynihan. He explains that he's an Acting Assistant Angel now, but he can't earn his halo and get promoted to full Angel until you commission a statue in his honor.

When your character awakens, the game presents a new objective: open a lemonade stand and raise enough money to pay a local sculptor to make a status of the priest. Thus begins the turn-based lemonade stand simulation part of the game.

You have to play though approximately 500 days of the lemonade stand simulation, one at a time, but finally the game rewards your patience with an upgrade: now you can buy sugar to put in your lemonade. If applied in the right proportion, this new ingredient can double your sales, cutting the remaining 5,000 days of the simulation down to 2,500.

When you finally raise enough money for the statue, the game puts you in the role of the sculptor for an epic boss battle against... a small block of marble. The marble doesn't attack much, but to win you have to carve it into an exact replica of the statue depicted on the game box. And the sculptor has a bit of a drinking problem, so the game randomly reverses the controls while you're carving. And if you make a mistake, it erases all your save files.

When you finally beat the marble boss, you are rewarded with the ending cutscene in which the Regional Director of Angelic Services places a halo on Father Moynihan's head. Immediately, Cthulhu runs in, steals the halo, and runs out of the room, cackling madly. "To be continued..." says the text at the bottom of the screen.

[JustAName]

Yeah, but at least the days at the lemonade stand aren't in real time. I mean, it's not the best game ever, but it's not bad. I think you're being a little harsh.

[Slack Mesa]

Yeah, but at least the days at the lemonade stand aren't in real time. I mean, it's not the best game ever, but it's not bad. I think you're being a little harsh.

Wait, the days weren't in real time for you?

I guess I shouldn't have played it on Expert Mode.

[Metcarfre]

Slack, have you considered submitting these to sirfragsalot.com?

Because, awesome.

[Lisra]

Looking into my shelf I saw another candidate: Dragonshard.

Nice idea, good license, but the DnD themed RTS was just terrible in pretty much every aspect you'd care to name. Pretty cover though.

[Slack Mesa]

The worst game of all time is Portal 2

The original Portal distinguished itself by having a definitive ending. At the end of Test Chamber 19, you rode the victory conveyor into the pit of fire and died. No "to be continued" nonsense in this game! Like Grim Fandango a decade before it, Portal had the courage to tell a self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an unequivocal end.

The other great thing about Portal was that you never got to see the villain. Like one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods, GLaDOS was more terrifying by virtue of being a distant, vague evil that you could never encounter face-to-face.

Portal 2, though, just retcons Portal's perfect ending into oblivion. Your silent, orange-jumpsuited protagonist, despite having died triumphantly in a victory candescence, is suddenly alive and well at the start of the new game. And GLaDOS, the evil too horrifying to be viewed by human eyes? Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you walk right up to her and exchange greetings.

[Slack Mesa]

The worst game of all time is Portal 2

The original Portal distinguished itself by having a definitive ending. At the end of Test Chamber 19, you rode the victory conveyor into the pit of fire and died. No "to be continued" nonsense in this game! Like Grim Fandango a decade before it, Portal had the courage to tell a self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an unequivocal end.

The other great thing about Portal was that you never got to see the villain. Like one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods, GLaDOS was more terrifying by virtue of being a distant, vague evil that you could never encounter face-to-face.

Portal 2, though, just retcons Portal's perfect ending into oblivion. Your silent, orange-jumpsuited protagonist, despite having died triumphantly in a victory candescence, is suddenly alive and well at the start of the new game. And GLaDOS, the evil too horrifying to be viewed by human eyes? Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you walk right up to her and exchange greetings.

[Arius]

The worst game of all time is Portal 2

The original Portal distinguished itself by having a definitive ending. At the end of Test Chamber 19, you rode the victory conveyor into the pit of fire and died. No "to be continued" nonsense in this game! Like Grim Fandango a decade before it, Portal had the courage to tell a self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an unequivocal end.

The other great thing about Portal was that you never got to see the villain. Like one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods, GLaDOS was more terrifying by virtue of being a distant, vague evil that you could never encounter face-to-face.

Portal 2, though, just retcons Portal's perfect ending into oblivion. Your silent, orange-jumpsuited protagonist, despite having died triumphantly in a victory candescence, is suddenly alive and well at the start of the new game. And GLaDOS, the evil too horrifying to be viewed by human eyes? Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you walk right up to her and exchange greetings.

I really hope you just have a good sense of humour and aren't serious.

[JustAName]

Dude. Look through the whole thread. He's fantastic at this.

[Arius]

But that would require reading.

[Wraith]

I'll be stereotypical and say ET for the Atari 2600, not just because of all the legends about it, but more because I have a copy, have played it, and know first hand how bad it is. I'm not even sure if falling into invisible holes and dying should count as a game.

For something more modern, I'd go with Cross Edge for the PS3. It somehow manages to turn fan service into pure fan spite.

Am I the only person who ever lived that LIKED ET as a child? I was good at it. I think it might have been the first game I really beat.

[King Kool]

I'll be stereotypical and say ET for the Atari 2600, not just because of all the legends about it, but more because I have a copy, have played it, and know first hand how bad it is. I'm not even sure if falling into invisible holes and dying should count as a game.

For something more modern, I'd go with Cross Edge for the PS3. It somehow manages to turn fan service into pure fan spite.

Am I the only person who ever lived that LIKED ET as a child? I was good at it. I think it might have been the first game I really beat.

Dang. If you beat it, give yourself a medal.

[Wraith]

The original Postal comes to mind. It was the only game I’ve ever played that I actually destroyed. I’ve never given a crap about violent content, but for me it all comes down to context. Duke Nukem ripped the head off the head alien and shat down its neck in Duke 3D; and then shoved a pipe bomb up the vagina of the head alien in the game’s official Expansion pack. But this didn’t bother me, because they were blood-thirsty monsters intent on killing or enslaving the entire human race. Give ‘em hell, Duke! Postal, on the other hand, puts in you the roll of a delusional psychotic who goes around indiscriminately killing or maiming innocent men, women, children and animals. They crawl away slowly from you, begging for mercy, talking about how they can’t feel their legs, or how they’re cold, or any number of other things. It was absolutely monstrous.

P.S., fuck you, Yaris! I WILL get that last achievement, and then I will rip off your head and shit down your neck! I don’t know how, as you’re a game about a car, but so help me I’m going to find a way!

Half-life - Released November 19, 1998.
Bioshock - Released August 21, 2007

Dude. Look through the whole thread. He's fantastic at this.

This. Seriously, new guy. Fan. Freaking. Tastic.

[Metcarfre]

I wouldn't call Slack a 'new guy', but yeah, this stuff is awesome. Can't wait for the Duke Nukem review!