Dragon’s Lair. Every once in a while some idiot on FB will talk about how great of a game it was. My thought in that situation: “How nice for you Mr. Moneybags!” There was no skill or strat to the game, it was just an expensive version of Simon: memorize left or right, up or down. To a poor kid like me, it was anathema to going to the arcade if I could burn through $5 in 5 minutes.
Dig-Dug gets an honorable mention: it was a slower, shittier version of Mr. Do! in my opinion. I thought I read an article that game owners could program the game to have slower reaction time which makes sense for my experience. I later found out that that was a feature in a lot of games, like in Gauntlet, they could set health pots to give more or less health, and Mortal Combat could literally cheat by cutting out frames of animation to perform certain attacks “faster”.
When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.
I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the ‘Spy’ piece could kill the ‘General’ (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the ‘Spy’ could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a ‘Spy’ is called that because it’s obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.
Nobody agreed and just played the game with the ‘Spy’ as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.
Stratego is a great game I’d completely forgotten about. Using your sappers to defuse bombs
Also an infuriating game
We like to play it with random piece setup so everyone doesnt just stick the flag in the corner surrounded by bombs. Its way funnier when its random.
I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.
Custer’s Revenge is bad, but it’s not really the kind of bad like when you think of ET. Cuz it’s not so much how it runs or plays, but how it’s a game about raping native american women and is in extremely bad taste.
I feel like if it was just anybody doing it, that would actually be somewhat better. The title implies Custer earned it, which is messed up in multiple ways.
No… the game play was shit as well.
You might be interested in the work of this hobbyist who updated Atari’s ET game to fix many of its biggest faults by decompiling the game and patching it.
When I was a kid I bought an Atari with the cartridge holder stand for it and a ton of games for $5. ET was fucking awful, but there were a few gems in the collection.
NES Where’s Waldo was pretty bad too especially for fans of the books.
There was a helicopter shooting game that somehow didn’t really work with the light gun too, but I forget the name.
deleted by creator
Deponia. I was so disgusted by the main character, I barely got out of the first room before I quit, uninstalled, and thought seriously about deleting it from my account. Not refunding it, just deleting it. I can’t believe they made an entire series of those games.
Nobody should answer “Monopoly” because it’s intended to be un-fun, as an object lesson in why monopolies are bad.
Also, no one actually plays it by the rules in the rulebook, which would dramatically shorten the game.
Appropriately, the “house rules” that keep the game going longer and make it “more fair” is actually just socialism
I used to play it that way on an old Mac that came with monopoly, and it was really fun. I loved the auctions.
Monopoly is not intended to be un-fun, it’s intended to be unfair, which is different. People find it un-fun because they changed the rules to make it less unfair, but if you play the game by the rules it’s not bad, but the winner gets picked at random very early in the game, and there’s nothing you can do about it, which would be bad for a long game, but Monopoly is meant to be very short if you play by the rules.
It was originally that, when it was called The Landlord’s Game. But I don’t think that’s what modern Monopoly is supposed to convey. It has pretty much become the opposite of what it originally was.
It’s pretty fun IMO, but I enjoy the chaos whether I win or lose!
I rented Superman 64 at Blockbuster once.
Don’t reccomend.
Much broken.
Such bugs.
Wow.
I owned it. Still do. I was a foolish child who liked Superman. Still do!
The most insulting part was using GameShark to level skip and realizing the rest of the game wasn’t much fun (or finished) either.
They could have done so much better by removing the timed rings thing and just let you fly around a mostly empty city, blowing up Lex’s robots or something. It would at least have felt Superman-esque lol.
I was gonna say, I purchased a game shark over this lol.
Also to get all coins on Mario 64.
Superman 64 is one of the rare games that I hate more than E.T. for the Atari. It’s just so bad. It’s a buggy mess, yes, but even if those were fixed, it is just such a bad and unfun game. It has zero redeeming qualities.
Heavy Rain, also known as: How to make mechanics that are even more annoying than the characters of this dumpster fire?
X to Shaun
SHAAAAUN!!!
Live chickens in the supermarket!
Oh man, so sorry. Did not play that far or completely forgot about that.
I didn’t pay it, but I did watch a Two Best Friends let’s play back in the day. David Cage is such a hack. The scene in question.
Man, this is so great! Thank you for that.
7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.
Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was ‘defective’. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn’t work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.
I can’t really remember what I didn’t like about the game…probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.
Ghostbusters for the NES was really bad, it wasn’t just you.
Aww, I actually liked that game. That and back to the future
you should check out the 2009 ghostbusters game, many consider it to be the true ‘ghostbusters 3’
Thanks, I believe I will!
I’ve done similar tricks with returns.
I stole a CD once that had no CD! Then I bought a dvd that had two lmao. Fast production, shit happens.
When I worked retail, someone came in, complaint there was there no disk in the case (PlayStation 3 or something), exchanged that thing with no further questions.
Capitalism
Which edition?
Core game is the same, they just keep reskinning it. I’m on Latest Age fwiw
2001 Extended
Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.
I’m currently playing Ark for the first time with a couple of friends who’ve played the game 1k and 3k hours. I’m 150 hours deep but I would have been in your shoes if I had nobody to show me the ropes. It is an amazing game but a huge mess at the same time
Just don’t play with devs, or they’ll ban you the moment you raid their base.
We’re playing pve on a private server
Same. Several friends raved about this game and wanted me to get into it and I hated it. Same with Grounded to be honest. It just felt like the game was entirely made for the devs to giggle about kicking the players’ asses over and over again with very little apparent payoff (unless you spend more hours in the game than any other game you’ve ever played apparently).
Maybe not the worst game, but notable for being somewhat misleading - Mario Is Missing for the SNES.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s is an educational game where you play as Luigi and walk around random cities asking questions, which is very different from other Mario games of the time.
10-player game of munchkin. Could feel my soul trying to crawl out of my mouth after the 3rd hour.
The problem with Munchkin is it is fine as a short game. Unfortunately to only strategy is to make the game longer by preventing someone else from winning. If it lasted a set number of rounds and then whomever was the highest level won it would be a better game.
Our game group imposed a 4 player max with that game after several 5 player games ran for way too long.
I played Munchkin once and hated it. The barrier to entry on that game is way too high.
Oof yeah, this one should have been called “Crabs in a Pot”
It’s hard to narrow it down to a single game, but all of the worst games I can think of were licensed games on earlier consoles. E.T. on the Atari 2600 is an obvious example, but the NES was chock full of garbage tier licensed games like Jaws, Ghostbusters, Last Action Hero, Dark Man, Superman, Robocop, Mad Max, Wayne’s World, Hook, Back to the Future… it just goes on and on (Weirdly I don’t think Friday the 13th belongs on this list, I actually like that game). All that being said, Superman 64 for the N64 is probably the absolute worst. The game is bad at every level. Ugly, buggy, and unfun. It’s not even fun to try it on an emulator to see how bad it is. Consider it toxic waste.
I actually really enjoyed Ghostbusters. Beat it a few times.
If you liked it, that’s all that matters, but I was very glad I got it super cheap and I really, really did not like it.
Mario Party 9 was so bad I think I only played it one time.
The moment I saw the car thing and read that there was no way to get around it, we quit and went back to the older games.
My roommate and I bought it, booted it up, played like 4 rolls in, boxed it up, and returned it. Whoever thought that removing one of the fundamental mechanics of Mario party was a good idea should be forced to work in Nintendo’s legal department, where fun is banned.
Monopoly. Tragically boring.
Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.
Ha, nice, I didn’t know that! This was a couple decades ago and the 3 ppl I played with seemed to enjoy it. I was very confused as to why 😂
Always ended with someone flipping the board at my house.
Haahaha
