The original release of No Man's Sky, and Starfield.
I myself don't see them as bad games, but acknowledge the false promises, shortcomings, bugs, etc.
Personally I'd classify Starfield as solidly mediocre. Not anywhere near the revolution that Bethesda promised, but not awful as some people say either.
5/6 out of 10 is still good enough to play, just not worth AAA prices.
I prefer launch no man sky to what it is now. Sometimes you donβt need a hundred features and multiplayer in a game. Sometimes you just want to calmly explore the universe and feel alone for a bit. Not have a million things to do and pop ups . I have enough of that in my life and other games
Yes the feeling of being alone in a whole solar system was / is awesome. And launching into space for the first time.
Iβve always wanted a game that I could pilot from the planet to space and weβre here
Speaking of No Man's Sky, I got it for VR and never played it flatscreen, but I have over 100 hours in it even though the VR mode is ridiculously terrible and mods go only so far to fix some of the annoyances.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It comes with a laughable 11 modules which you tire of after a couple weeks of playing. It's badly coded and its modding support is flimsy and haphazard. The developers are unreachable and uncooperative.
Without mods, you'd put down the game after a week and forget about it completely. With mods (created for free by the community) you now get a wealth of thousands of modules, but you also need multiple extra mods to get simple basic functionality that should be in the base game. Wanna play more than 100 modules? Game crashes on startup unless you install the Tweaks mod. Wanna play just the modules that your friends enjoy? Gotta mess around with Steam workshop subscriptions for hours unless you install the Mod Selector mod. Wanna play a specific set of modules you like? Good luck getting the right RNG, unless you install the DMG mod. Wanna play more than one bomb? Needs the Multiple Bombs mod. Some modules are genuinely unplayable unless you get the Boss Module Manager mod, which in turn relies on a volunteer-run external website to be running and to be constantly updated by volunteers. Even Camera Zoom is a separate mod!!
99% of the game is made for free by volunteers, and yet it's the garbage 1% that everyone has to pay for. It's a travesty.
Cool, didn't know the modding community was the way to go. I would always break it out at a party, it would be fun for a bit, but yeah, eventually it's just the same thing but faster. I'll have to take a look at the mods.
Dwarf Fortress. It's always broken, and historically has an interface style that most people don't get. It's also the masterpiece of a reclusive genius, and is a simulation so deep it has to be explained in parables, like the drunken cats one.
That's such a fun story.
Drinking Dwarfs spill beer on the floor.
Liquid behavior on floors is modelled.
Cats might walk through the puddles.
Cats clean their paws by licking them.
Animals inherent the ability to get drunk from some class.
QED: cats get drunk.
And, because every drink of alcohol was assumed to be one cup worth in some throwaway bit of code, and cats are small, they got massive alcohol poisoning and almost instantly puked themselves to death.
So, bug. The observed behavior was cat corpses and cat vomit accumulating in bars. The expected behavior was... not. Eventually Tarn managed to figure it out, and it was fixed by better modeling of the volume of just a layer of liquid on a body part. You also can't suck stuff off yourself to quench thirst in adventure mode anymore.
Dwarf Fortress is such a special game. One guy added capitalism to the game and the dwarves ended up doing a communist revolution.
Lol, do you have a link? Off the top of my head I'm not sure how you'd do that, mod-wise, since dwarves only do fairly undirected violence when unhappy right now. (Insurgencies will be in a future version, eventually, just like everything else)
I mean, I enjoy it, but usually games are supposed to just work. Most of the difficulty of DF, at least historically, comes from trying to work around the hard edges and broken bits. Adventure mode is also pretty aimless and depressing, and Legends mode isn't even really a game.
I'd break it down in more detail, but I'm not really a great video game designer either. Most other people certainly agree that it's not very good as a game. Tarn even has said things to that effect.
Simon's Quest doesn't deserve to be called a bad game. The music and graphics are quite good for the NES and the open structure of the game was quite novel and many elements like the leveling system became staples of the series from SotN onward. The thing that really holds it back is the terrible english translation which makes the puzzles way harder than they need to be.
I always thought the game was really good. I played it for days as a kid. I never got far because some puzzles are pretty much impossible to solve without a guide as far as i remember. I loved the day night cycle, even tho they went kinda crazy with it.
The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it's such a mess that I need to clarify which version I'm even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.
The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I'm concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).
Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.
That kept me playing.
Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.
They're slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn't feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.
And yet there's none other like it.
Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn't (or didn't until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.
You got me watching gameplay videos of The Isle. The old version looks so great for emergent gameplay.
I play a really old build of minecraft, and am intimately familiar with how bad of a game that version really is. It has many, many flaws.
Which one? Infdev? Pre-combat update? That update before everything changed in the stages before release?
Here's the thing. Dark Souls 2 is the worst Dark Souls game, but the worst Dark Souls game is still miles ahead of 95% of the other day-one-dlc-riddled, mtx-infested triple-a trash released since.
Dark Souls 2 is great. I've beat it 10+ times.
the worst Dark Souls game is still miles ahead of 95% of the other day-one-dlc-riddled, mtx-infested triple-a trash released since
Looking at you Dragon's Dogma 2, absolute disappointment.
Sonic R. Genuinely the worst racing game I've ever played. But the low poly models and the music are so charming to me. I used to just sit down and 100% it when I was stressed.
Alpha Protocol - rereleased on GOG now! Get it while it's hot with only a slight discount!
Still as buggy as ever! And it will probably work on your modern PC!
Support the revival of old games!
This is not an ad! It's a series of exclamations!
PokΓ©mon Channel may be one of the worst PokΓ©mon games ever released; it's annoying to play, incredibly tedious and teaches kids to watch more TV instead of less.
I really liked playing it as a child. The thing is, I can't for the life of me remember why I even liked it that much.
Kinetica for PS2
But it's a fun fast-paced racing sim and the soundtrack slaps.
Victoria 3 on launch. First game I turned Finland into the richest country on earth by capita is 30 years.
Victoria 3 is the game I keep tabs on the news feed for - it's getting better (mostly - slowing down economic growth is just far less fun) but not there yet... and the potential is amazing.
Never played Vicky but I'm a big fan of CK2 which I imagine ticks most of the same clunky paradox grand strategy that's horrible to learn but will suck up hundreds of wonderful hours of your life boxes?
Victoria 3 still isn't a good game, but I agree with it as my answer to OP's question. It scratches the same itch as Cookie Clicker while being about a million times more convoluted.
Robocraft is pretty awful. The current game is in maintenance mode. The only thing the devs can make is their LEGO-like live service game, but even that is too hard for them. This year they just quit and restarted on yet another attempt of a sequel to the only thing they've had success with. That being said, I still enjoy spending hours in the lab and shooting apart other players' creations.
Robocraft used to be one of my favorite games and slowly watching it become worse was painful.
Raid: Shadow Legends. The commercialization is ridiculous, the constant attempts to grab money are downright pathetic, but hey, it looks good on my tablet.
Unreal 2: The Awakening
I never played the first one as a kid, but my little brother found a used copy of its sequel for the Xbox while in town with mom once. I was like, 9 years old at the time, and the game blew my dang mind! Big over the top first person action with all these cool looking guns, shooting these weird giggly aliens, their bodybuilding handler aliens, buncha dudes in power armor, all while on a big journey across space visiting many different worlds, it was so sick for me at the time!
Much later, I finally checked out the first game on PC and uh. Yeah. Yeeaaah Unreal 2 is kind of an insult to how majestic the first game was.
Unreal 2 is a bad game in comparison, and I will admit it! It's slower, the enemies are mostly boring to fight compared to the Skaarj in the first game, the weapons are bog standard with little that makes them stand out, it very much suffered from "We can do Halo, too!" The story is kinda lame, the levels aren't the most interesting to play in, and most importantly: It lacks that sense of adventure and wonder the first game was loaded with.
But man, when I was a kid? It was god damn cinematic to me.
Anyone remember the Kane & Lynch games? Most people said they were shit, but I actually found them fun
Back 4 Blood. I actually quite enjoyed the game and the characters. Sadly it was doomed from the start and they can blame no one but themselves. It's essentially dead now I gather.
This game has one of gaming most fun moments in itβ¦. If you get the right song on the jukebox.
That mission was so amazing the first time with Black Betty blasting.
I liked that game a lot too, but it's nowhere near the quality of its predecessors in terms of longevity.
Does the game have anything going for it at all?
Played it during the beta and it's not like it's an inherently bad game, but Left 4 Dead did it all better and 10 years before.
It's on sale for 5 bucks all the time but even for that price I never had the desire to play if over Left 4 Dead.
I played during beta and after too. The deck building aspect was one of the best parts. It was nice making different builds for runs, some for pistols only, some for headshot-bonuses and some for melees. :) Also it was nice to carry noobs with my refined builds.
Also the characters had some casually heartwarming dialogue.
But the paid DLCs and high price made me never actually buy the game (lisence). I think it doesn't have support for community servers either, so when they stop supporting it, it's dead.