Worst game ever played?

DaveO

Rear Admiral
Well my Atari 2600 vote is ET, and for the PC it's Descent to Undermountain. Let's open it up to all platforms: so what are the worst stinkers you've had the misfortune to play? Please give a few reasons why the game was so bad other than a generic 'sucks' comment.
 
For the PC i'm going to say a perculiar RTS called 'Thandor' which I can only describe as a hybrid of Command and Conquer and Red Dwarf. Its single player campaign consisted of about 6 missions, combat was laughably slow, as were the units themselves. I had to download a patch and translate a german readme to get it to work on XP, and I uninstalled it with haste soon after.

All that said though for 99p I suppose I got my money's worth.
 
I'm not really into the habit of playing games I don't like, but Guitar Hero takes the cake for me. It isn't really so much the game, but rather that the songlists are almost utterly devoid of anything worth playing.
 
PC= Wargames...it was bugged that you couldn't get past the first mission in either campaign. That's what killed it for me. Then you can add just about an korean mmorpg for obvious reasons.
 
Usually I don't bother with stinker long enough to even remember them.

However one vote for (against):
PS2 - Singstar (any version). I mean the game is okish, but not for days and days...
 
- Rambo part 3.
While it actually looked great for it's age, and the adlib-soundrtack was simpy fantastic. it's actually unplayable because not nly can you not save it, nor are there level codes, it jst takes too long to play through, and i had to reside to some game wizard to create a form of safegames, you would be running through the game world for hours and hours, and after spending about an hour or three in one game, i hae had it.
 
Well my Atari 2600 vote is ET

The problem with making that complaint is that everyone already knows it and agrees with it. Its like the trendy film guy with Buddy Holly glasses telling us that he saw the worst movie ever made - and then says something beyond the obvious like Manos: The Hands Of Fate or Plan Nine From Outer Space.
 
For me it was Might and Magic 9. While that could have been patched it was a buggy game from the beginning but what could not have ever been patched was the storyline. The game totaly departed from the established highfantasy/science fiction setting destroying its most interesting story part (Finding out what ancient machine/starship or whatever to reactivate or interact with).
 
It's rare that I buy a game that truly sucks, thanks to the internet you can find out a game's faults long before you buy it, and even still there are cheat codes to offset difficulty.:) But I guess to choose one, well actually three, would be the whole Swordquest series for the Atari 2600. The games were open world and you could wander around for hours and hours and never get anything done, which was usually the case since the games weren't totally clear on your immediate objective.
By the way DaveO I loved Atari ET. It was one of my favorite games for the system.
 
The whole point with SwordQuest was that whole thing where the game cart wasn't enough to solve it, though, wasn't it? Meaning our modern emulation world makes things difficult.

I have to agree with the vote for E.T. I downloaded it and struggled to play with it for 10 minutes, tops- normally an awful game will last longer with me as I accept that I'm just being awful at it. My hard drive underwent a wipe since then- many things are missed, including every ROM of every arcade/retro game I ever owned, but that one was a special exception.
 
I don't know about worst game ever, but the worst that I personally played is an adventure/puzzle (not sure what you'd call it, really, but think along the general gameplay style of Sierra's "Quest" games) game called "Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch". Three guesses on the general subject of the game and its setting, and the first two don't count. :p

This was before I had access to the internet (~1995), mind you, but the instruction manual also doubled as a hint guide. Which was just as well, insulting as that implication that the player was stupid would otherwise be, as half the puzzles in the game were almost unsolvable, aside from pure random luck, without the "trick" of that particular puzzle being explicitly pointed out. Adding insult to injury, the game was a) short (if you weren't scratching your head about WTF to do, anyway, thanks to reading the manual) and b) boringly linear.
 
Bad Blood (a Chris Roberts classic I believe) because after a bit you can only say where the heck do I go and what the heck do I do now besides walk around some more! Might be different if I had the chance to play it again, as I'm speaking from memory of the distant past.
 
Batman: Dark Tomorrow for the XBox. Inexcusably bad.

Another more modern title was Warhammer 40k: Fire Warrior. I played about 10 minutes of it and then uninstalled it.
 
Hmm... I'll mention 2, not just 1.

Crysis (PC). What was wrong with Crysis? The fact that it was a graphics whore and was designed that way without many levels of optimization, making it a 'standard' or ego-stroking based on how fast you can run the game. Doesn't help that the graphical settings don't actually help matters by barely changing anything. The gameplay is just your generic walk-around-and-get-headshots and you won't have time or ammunition to play with physics. I heard it comes with a Sandbox mode, even in the demo, but I've yet to figure out how to get to that.

Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (DS): This game is just plain bad. Awkward controls combined with bad music (the DS can do far better, see Trauma Center 2), mandatory puzzles which have little to no explanation whatsoever in the game's manual, PS1-level graphics and the like pretty much make this game a disappointment. That's right, I said this game had PS1-looking graphics. There's just no style here, it'd be more at home as a 1st-2nd gen PS1 Star Wars game.
 
Yeah,

I played bad blood to, with about thesame experience. The game is so horrid nobody even ever made a wikipedea page for it. the hostiles you encounter can actually shoot at you from outside your viewscreen, the game was also ugly for it's age, when you compare it to top-down games from thesame era.
 
I remember being highly disappointed in Demon Stone... particularly the part where I fell through a wall in a tower with one of my three characters and couldn't continue to play. Atari was not forthcoming in any patches and so I just shelved it.

Another game that I'm not pleased with is Titan Quest, which when I got it was too demanding for my computer at the time, and now that I have a new computer, has an inconsistent and choppy frame rate that makes it hard to play without disorientation.

A game that I returned as soon as I got it was either LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring or The Hobbit (can't really remember) for the Game Boy Advance several years ago (probably 2002 or close to it). I couldn't see ANYTHING, even with lights at just the right angle. The game was TOO dark.

Otherwise, I've been pretty happy with the games I've purchased over the years. I keep coming back to Wing Commander and X-COM though. Never been so happy with a game as I have been with those.
 
It's not surprising that 90% of the older games I come back to are Origin titles. If not, the remaining 8% are by ex-Origin guys (like Deus Ex.)

As for Titan Quest, I have no trouble running it, and my machine isn't a monster by any means. I enjoy it, despite its sterile story presentation.
 
hehe, i remember the pc-gamer review of descent to undermountain where they called it exclusively by the name "descent to underpants" - brilliant.

Wargames though, whoever it was who slammed that - i managed to get past the last level, but not the final level. amusingly the last level was a maze of concrete walls, with machine gun turrets on each corner and all you were given was 4 infantry. oh and you had to shoot out some of the walls! ludicrously hard and completely pointless.

fun though and it had the "shall we play a game" when you started it, for that alone wargames gets a quality game stamp :D
 
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