Mega Traveller 2. Buggy janky story. Bad combat. Character creation that includes all the skills from the pen and paper game but only about 10% of them actually do anything in game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTraveller_2:_Quest_for_the_Ancients
Lula 3D. Though, I never played with it eventually as it froze up the computer so bad we had to pull the plug, the experience as a kid was probably my worst gaming moment.
Same as a lot of other gen-xers: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
It’s a classic answer, E.T. on the Atari 2600.
Custer’s revenge would have been an acceptable answer as well.
PacMan on the 2600 was pretty disappointing to say the least.
It had misogyny and racism to push it over the top for worst game. ET was just an unplayable mess that disappointed kids my age. Custer’s Revenge is a borderline hate crime that should have gotten everyone involved fired.
Difficulty-wise, The Lion King on SNES. This game shattered my childhood.
Made at a time where video game rentals were popular so they had to make games impossible to beat in 2 or 3 days.
I can say it wasn’t any easier in the Megadrive/Genesis.
The game was fun to some degree, just required an unfair time investment. The final fight was a memorably bad experience though. I was like eleven years old when I made it to the end and swear I spent almost a full hour clawing at Scar before I figured out that I wasn’t actually doing damage.
Also very difficult, but fun on the game gear!
I forgot how many times my siblings and I tried to beat that
Battletoads.
I could never get through the 2nd ostrich riding sequence in the 2nd level as a kid. The rest of the game was fine, though, once I used the level select to skip ahead. Turns out, it was because my eyesight was shit and I couldn’t even see the correct obstacles on screen (I was trying to avoid the branches, but no it was pink hippos and bird nests the whole time, so my timing on the double jumps was always off). Replaying the game a couple years back when Disney re-released it alongside Aladdin, I found it still tricky, but doable.
same tbh
Tales of Arise. The most bland plain characters ever, uninteresting exploration, plot was SO predictable, and the combat felt stiff. Kinda wrote off the entire series mostly, except I do like Berseria even though it’s combat also sucks.
The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.
It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.
This is not what you are talking about, but reading this reminded me of the “Super Noah’s Ark” rom I downloaded in high school which was a reskin of the original Wolfenstein where all the animals were restless meaning that you (Noah) would need to shoot feed at them so they could take their naps.
Super Noah’s Ark is on my rg35xx. It’s amazing.
My cousin had a couple Bible themed NES games. Spiritual Warfare seemed decent.
There used to be a store called Heaven & Earth that sold all kinds of Christian stuff for Sunday school teachers or whatever plus books, cheap Bible toys, etc. She bought it there.
I wouldn’t say worst, but maybe greatest difference in expectation vs reality - “My Time at Portia”.
Cutscenes and voice acting were janky. The UI felt like it was originally an MMO and feels odd for a single player game. The gameplay loop felt tedious and seemed to disrespect the player’s time.
Maybe I needed to give it more time, but for a game that I thought had generally good/great reviews, it wasn’t clicking for me.
Fortnite
I must’ve played a ton of trash games that I purged from my memory, but one notable one that comes to mind is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. The game was super highly anticipated and hyped and I was a massive C&C fan before, only to be completely disappointed by this massive turd that they shat on this genre defining franchise. The revolutionary “physics” did nothing to the game play, the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours and it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors or the main other RTSs of the time.
the main story was maybe a total of 4 hours
You must have been amazing at it, because it was certainly more like 20 for me, not counting branching missions. (The internet says it’s around 25ish)
it was just buggy as fuck with the AI pathfinding being incredibly bad and somehow worse than the predecessors
I think you’re wearing some rose tinted goggles about Red Alert (and some solid black ones for the first game). Pathfinding in Tiberium Dawn was so terrible that it was part of the balance of the game: when they tried to fix it for the remaster, they found it horribly unbalanced the game in favor of GDI, so they decided not to fix it. Pathfinding was pretty shit in Tiberian Sun, but it was much worse before.
or the main other RTSs of the time.
Yeah, StarCraft was better but Total annihilation was much worse than Tiberian Sun in places where there was any terrain.
TA is much better now, but it has 25 years of mods going for it.
…It has to be Drakengard. What a thing. I literally couldn’t finish it, and I’m close to finishing Final Fantasy XIII. I have a high tolerance, but good LORD is it a slog.
Christmas Day, we just got a PS1 years after everyone else. My brother and I are ecstatic to play. My mum and sister are smiling at our reaction, since they went to the game store and asked the guy what a good game would be to play.
Formula One '98. We played a lap each, and then turned off the console. I can still recall the commentary “it looks like he’s stuck in the kitty litter!”
*hands shake*
I looked up some gameplay on YouTube and it doesn’t look that bad. A bit slow but that’s all
What was so bad about it to counterweigh the “wowwwww it’s 3d !!!11!” effect ?
just a super boring game for two 9 year olds to play. It would be like if she got us a golf game.
Adult me would probably really enjoy both games
They can’t all be Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge.
As a former 9yo I would have liked a Formula One game
Different strokes for different folks
Different strokes for different folks
That’s doubly true for the golf game.
Disney’s Aladdin for game boy. Beat it in under a day and returned it. Just awful.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES. Ghostbusters was more disappointing, but I’ve at least kinda figured out how to play it over my lifetime. WFRR I’m clueless on. I think it’s some kind of point and click, but I’m not really sure. There’s a part where you have to call a real life telephone number to progress.
Pretty accurate depictions of what it feels like to play these games.
😄 The phone call was just to get some simple bonus tips, nothing really necessary.
What killed me was, to swap items, you hold Select and use the arrow keys. It’s soooo unintuitive!
Finally, I know what the phone call does! Maybe I’ve been too hard on Roger Rabbit NES…
By the time I got around to playing it, the number was deprecated and I definitely wasn’t figuring out how to actually beat it! I guess I just assumed it gated me from the end, when it was probably some other esoteric thing.
Im sure there are games that wouldnt even work so i technically didnt even play them but ill list a couple of games that i tried playing, hated, and uninstalled almost immediately
They both had the same problem.
Days gone and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I tried to force myself into enjoying rdr2 because it was supposedly that good. For the first few hours i kept asking myself when does the game start? When do i actually get to play?
Days gone i only made it maybe an hour before i quit and uninstalled.
I want to play a game not watch an interactive movie
I’d recommend trying RDR1 before RDR2, but then again that might make you hate the tutorial section RDR2 had even more lol
RDR2 is excellent, but it almost feels like it’s trying too hard. RDR1 was just a classic IMO, literally revolutionary for its time. I thought it would be just GTA with horses but honestly it felt so much more than that, they completely nailed the atmosphere and everything else about it. I still play RDR1 sometimes these days.
RDR2 is very much not for everybody. It is intentionally tedious. It’s the kind of game you sit down and play for at least 2-3 hours every time you play it because that’s just how long it takes to get anything done. You aren’t fast traveling. You aren’t doing things instantaneously in a menu. Your time as a human being is an in-game resource. If you’re in the middle of nowhere and your horse dies, a ton of your shit was being carried in the saddle; you need to walk your ass to the nearest town lugging that saddle, vulnerable to wild animals and robbers. It’s a game about getting things done with your own two hands at the turn of the century when that was becoming much less valued. It’s a game about subsistence. You could have an easier, more prosperous life, but at what cost? At whose cost? It’s a game about nature and living in a natural world as a natural being, criticizing the transition into industrial exploitation of our fellow natural world and natural animals, including natural humans. It’s not a rootin’ tootin’ spaghetti western adventure; it’s an interactive classic American novel that can occasionally have funny or fun moments depending on your tastes. I fully understand that it’s wasn’t a game that you or millions of other people enjoyed, but I think it’s wholly unjust to label it a “bad” game for that. It did exactly what it set out to do, and evoked impactful emotion in sharing its message as intended for the people who wanted to be open to it. It’s successful art, but not all art is for you and not all art is for me. You may have gone in with the wrong expectations for it. I think it really sucks that every rockstar game since the early 2000s seems to be “GTA but ___” because the Red Dead games and LA Noire are very much not GTA. They’re 3rd person open worlds with similar engines, but that’s where the similarities end.
If you ever try it again, come in with a similar mindset to wanting to sit down and watch The Godfather, not The Avengers. There’s a lot to get out of it if you just focus on the story and the characters and the beautiful setting. Enjoy the honest work, and lament the shootouts and heists.
There were parts of RDR2 that I adored and parts I loathed. Riding around exploring, hunting, and discovering the environment was a joy. I put a ton of hours into the game just doing that.
The quests were a nightmare to me. Ride to location A to get the quest. Ride to location B to start the quest. Ride to location C as part of the quest and if you dare to wander off the exact route or try an innovative solution and you FAIL
All that work spent making you feel like you’re living the character makes the ending so much more poignant. What a beautiful game.
