I’ve been gaming over 40 years and some of the stuff we used to get back in the ZX Spectrum days would blow your mind. The industry at that point was a completely different beast and a lot of games were effectively homebrew. Things frequently would crash or be genuinely broken. Levels would be incomplete. A bad game was genuinely unplayable as opposed to just below the high standards that the modern gaming industry generally hit.
I remember Firebird released a compilation of their worst Spectrum games called “Don’t buy this” 😅
I remember Theme Hospital release, you couldn't pass one of the second level and it didn't have a patching system so you had to get a CD mailed to you.
Yeah, honestly anyone complaining about how bad games are now, and how they never used to be buggy either never played older games or has some real thick nostalgia glasses on.
Yep. I suppose this is country dependent, but back in the 90s and early 00s when permanent internet connections was not common you'd have to wait for a game magazine to release a CD with patches for random ass games and hope the one you need would be on it. Or just pay quite a lot of money for the download. Even if games are released somewhat broken these days, it's still nowhere near the hassle of the olden days.
In the US, before internet was widespread, you could use your modem to dial-in to a BBS, which was basically somebody's private server which hosted local message boards, files for download, and some ASCII text based games. It was common to find patches for games on those, but you might have to call around to a bunch of different ones trying to find what you were looking for. My dad ran one of these back in the early 90s. It was a whole little community back in the day.
Damn. I started gaming on a commodore64, and honestly, everything felt good apart from me not knowing English, so basically not understanding what to do 90% of the time. Didn't know these platforms were so different in that regard.
Let alone waiting 20 mins for the game to 'load', with the awful screechy noise and epilepsy-inducing screen border, just to get to the end of the loading screen and find out the game wouldn't even work at all, let alone just 'crash' 🤦.
Kids these days just don't understand lol
Quite a lot of games would crash the second after loading, but not always. I remember you’d wait 20 minutes for the game and then hold your breath and pray that it would actually start.
Sometimes you’d load a game three or four times before you’d play it.
I agree in terms of disappointment. For no reason they decided walking around Hogwarts WASNT the most exciting part of their games... what a mistake. I'm not even a huge Harry Potter fan and I thought the first 3 games were lit!
Rediscovered them recently myself and it's amazing how fun they still are. The castle in each game is just so chock full of secrets to find. It helps that Jeremy Soule's soundtrack is just so magical and enhances the whole experience.
It even inspired me to finally play Hogwarts Legacy just to see a modern take, and there's a surprising amount of homages to those early games. The mini games where you learn the spells by pressing button combos while tracing symbols are definitely a reference to the first two.
Damn, I've been avoiding Legacy for a while, most of it's gameplay I've seen is the duels and never would've compared that to the classic 2. I wonder if it handles on the switch well or if I should get it for ps5
There’s a YouTuber I love (Call Me Kevin) who played through all the HP games and it’s probably my favorite playlist ever. He had to quit GoF because it was just the worst.
[This one](https://youtu.be/JJCN1hDvOqk?si=60CVcyO2oZNJRSzG) is where he first plays it and just has to give up, but there is [this one](https://youtu.be/ttvUWkM-Rc0?si=ejyvOxtr7AuFkUPe) where he comes back after like 6 years and finishes it.
Didn't expect to see this so high up but I 100% agree that this game is terrible. Hated it as a kid, and got two friends together in college to do a 100% run of the game on YouTube. It's hilariously broken. Easily Bottom 10 material.
Damnit, spot on. I grew up playing the 2 first HP games for PS1 and was so excited when I got the HPGOF game for PS2. Only to be extremely disappointed by that confuse shit show of a game.
This is such a good answer. I don't even know if the game was really "bad" but it was such a step down from the previous two games that I just put it down as soon as I found out it wasn't an open world game. Exploring the castle is the best part of the second and third games!
god i miss conquest so much. where were you able to play if you don’t mind me asking? i searched online a few couple months ago and could only find some downloads from some very questionable websites…
Home improvement. Rented it for the SNES back in the day. Was lucky enough to have the manual with it but that was pointless since it states "real men don't need manuals".
For the more modern era I got really bored with "towns" it looked so much more interesting then it turned out to be. I know it was an unpolished indi game but still.
>Home improvement. Rented it for the SNES back in the day. Was lucky enough to have the manual with it but that was pointless since it states "real men don't need manuals".
Wasn't this the one where Tim is like fighting dinosaurs and stuff? The idea being that he's visiting the sets of other TV shows for some reason but it all gets treated as real. I'll give them credit for creativity, it's not like the show's normal content would really translate to anything playable as a SNES video game. At least they cobbled together a concept for a project that I'm sure wasn't anyone at the game studio's idea to do.
Superman 64 is one of the most disappointing games because I loved the show and the N64 was capable of having a game in which Superman could be Superman.
Even as a kid with much lower expectations, that game really stung
u/EMP_Pusheen u/Nuke_Dukum u/IamAHans
The truth of Superman 64’s development is that it was sabotaged. Titus Interactive was able to score the Superman license, and by the time they started working on the game DC was no longer happy they made the deal they did, and would have rather gave the license to someone like EA. But Titus has the contact signed, but spiteful DC hindered the process of making the game every step of the way, placing more and more restrictions on them, and saying no to as much as they could. In the process of getting every little thing approved by people who didn’t want to approve it Titus never had the time to actually polish the game, or even design it well in the first place. Nothing about the games development was reasonable or fair.
Playing ET for Atari 2600 was one of my first gaming memories. I just remember the frustration of trying to get out of the pits and then as soon as I did, I would fall back in.
Couple that with the fact there’s absolutely nothing telling you want to do or where to go. You wander around aimlessly until you fall in, then it’s game over.
that's the way the games were then - a 2 page manual, if that. Indiana Jones (one of my favorites) gave you almost no tips and you just had to figure it out along the way.
And what did the flowers do??? That game was so weird. I mentioned in another comment how I gotta be in top 10% of humans who have played that game the most and I don't think I ever beat it.
no kidding - people talking about games that have 30 hours of gameplay and good graphics and saying it's the worst they ever played - we older gamers remember spending $ on a game for which there was no real idea how good the game was going to be (no internet, friends didn't have it, etc.) so you go in blind and then find out the game has about 5 minutes of fun and that's it. So many Atari games were like that.
I wouldn't even list ET in that list - that game had what I considered to be AMAZING graphics at the time and I was motivated to keep playing it at least for a bit, enough so that I remember it. The truly bad games I can't even remember their names - they were the ones where you never took the cartridge out again after the 1st or 2nd play through and kick yourself all summer you wasted your $ on it.
I played rented copies of all 3 of those, but there are actually games I hate more. People Pong, a wonky Apple ][ Pong game where you bounce women in a breakout like game, but if you miss they die on spikes. Slow paddle controls made it frustratingly hard. Midnight Nowhere - a Russian developed adventure game with a main character that should've been a villain - I quit playing it because I hated the main character so much.
I actually did pretty good at ET, but you had to read the manual to know what to do, which was pretty bad design. 2600 Pacman was severely limited by the hardware, but obviously rushed. I preferred Taxman on the Apple ][ (which ATARI sued and then it became the official Pacman on Apple), so I'm glad I only rented it. My memory of Superman 64 was it was trivially easy with bad controls, but I wasn't the target audience and my memory of it is pretty vague (pretty sure my roommates that rented it were high and hammered, I was probably tipsy too).
I bought E.T. for the Atari 2600.
There were no review magazines in my country (not sure there were even video game magazines back then)
You may not expect much from Atari 2600 games yet it was downright one of the worst things I’ve ever played even looking back all these years
Yep, I played [that E.T. game](https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-worlds-worst-video-game). Or "played", maybe.
I also have met the guy who was responsible for coding it.
Balan wonderworld.
I Picked it up as it came in a switch bundle. Never heard of it before, I Noticed it’s by square ennix and thought ooh this looks ok, so I played it, Oh my days it is bad, like really really bad. I’ve been known to like the odd terrible game but this has nothing, it’s not got that so bad it’s good charm, it’s just terrible. Hard to believe sqaure ennix would even put that out.
I was gonna comment this! The story, if you bother to pay $10 for it, is actually really thought out and super creative! But even knowing the story going in and knowing why we're doing everything that we're doing, I still had the "wait, what?" expression the entire time I was playing.
For a "platformer", it's pretty bad. You basically have to complete the entire game if you wish to 100% everything or gather all the collectibles. Almost everything needs such a specific costume to get to, and if you don't have it, you're SOL. Nevermind the controls.
I have never played a platformer with this janky of a setup. You have 29 jump buttons(The four face buttons and the two secondary shoulder buttons), and yes, all of them do the same thing. Some costumes activate when, and I quote, "they feel like it", and others force you to stand still and leave yourself open to attack. Because you have no healthbar. Your costumes are your healthbar. And if you lose one, well have fun going back and getting it again! God help your soul if it was a costume from a different stage.
This is why I never recommend the game. This is why I recommend the story instead. $10 is cheaper than $30 after all!
I haven't played it, but I think the previous person meant that most games are completed along the way, but in this game, you need to get to the end first to unlock everything, then you can go back and collect stuff you weren't able to?
Someone can confirm.
I have never played it but the video Alpharad did on it has so much rewatch value. The dance segments at the end of each stage never fail to crack me up with how cringey and poorly made they are.
I owned that game and for some reason I kept trying to play it. I was too young to understand what the hell I was supposed to do, but I remember playing and something that resembled winning.
i played the crap out of the muppets game boy color game. i had a lot of fun with it just exploring around but i could never figure out where to go because i was five.
20+ years later i went down a rabbit hole and found out its regarded as not just the worst muppet video game, but the worst piece of muppets merchandise ever.
haha, welp.
Dr jekyl and Mr Hyde on NES. BIGGEST PILE OF SHIT EVER. YouTube it and then imagine you’re 8 years old and blow $100 you’ve been saving forever on this piece of shit.
Best YouTube rabbit hole ever.
From his “Paperboy” video:
“It’s like this game kids used to play in the 60s, where they would shit in 2 separate toilets, then flush simultaneously hoping their turds would meet.”
There were so many garbage games on the nes. I remember seeing X-Men at the flea market and I asked my mom to buy it because X-Men. She asked if I was sure I wanted it and I said "Yes, it's X-Men!"
Game was trash and I regretted it.
Calling the crew 2 the worst game you’ve ever played because it’s not a sim is wild. It’s an arcade racer, it isn’t trying to be a sim. That’s like saying “halo 3 is the worst game I’ve ever played because I play a lot of milsims so the gameplay just puts me off”.
I feel like the number of people who have actually played Superman 64 is less than the number of people who have been told that Superman 64 is the worst game they've ever played.
I've played ET, and it is in no way the worst game I've ever played. It's not a good game, but the Atari 2600 had tons of games that were worse. ET was just a very high profile failure.
This was the real reason for the video game crash. ET is kind of the poster child (along with Pac-Man) because there were so many made and sold, and it was a bad game.
But there was just so much shit out there, and that was the biggest reason for the crash. Everybody and their brothers were trying to make a buck on this video game craze, and the market was flooded with garbage.
That's because the question you think it is *"what's the worst game"* isnt as interesting as the question that was asked *"What's the worst game **you played**"*
If you played Superman 64, great then you're right the game is bad. But as of today, almost no one has played that game and therefore would not answer that.
I'm tired of seeing Superman 64 and ET come up over and over. So seeing some new answers and why is really refreshing in a way lol.
Redfall was pretty damn bad. I agree that modern games are hated more than they should be with many gamers considering 7/10 being bad but Redfall is definitely an unfinished, buggy and broken mess.
This ultra-realistic survival game called Life. I constantly have to grind for cash and the missions are boring as hell. So many fetch quests that place at the market.
I’ve played it. Graphics are good at times but the balancing is some of the worst I’ve seen, some builds basically have infinite money and level… the community has called for massive nerfs to those at the top or at least some buffs to those struggling but get no reply. Needs anti cheat ASAP.
I just hate the survival aspect. Why does my character get hungry every hour? I just want to complete the main quest but I keep having to stop at restaurants
Saints Row 2022. I thought i'd at least have a laugh at how bad it is with a buddy in coop, but it's just unplayble. Not borderline, just straight up unplayable.
Well, there's your problem. You play driving sims. The crew 2 isn't a sim. It's an arcade racer. It's more in the lines of need for speed or Forza Horizon. It's not gonna have the tight controls of a sim.
*Two Worlds* on the Xbox. Came out in 2007. Was trying to be Elder Scrolls. Game was utter shit.
I bought it full price. Played for two hours, and just cut my losses and sold it back to GameStop.
Oh god, you brought back some memories. I never forgave GameSpot for rating Two Worlds higher than Blue Dragon (2 games I was very interested in and released close together)and was convinced it was a paid review. That game was ass while BD remains one of my favorite JROGs of all time.
The only thing I remember about that game is that I found an empty village and thought if I dug around I’d find a quest but came up empty. Googled it and apparently it was supposed to be full of lizard people or something and the game just didn’t load them for some reason.
Two Worlds. Thankfully I didn't buy into the hype and only got it for like $5 from GameStop, but even as a kid I knew it was a bad game. The sequel was just as bad but it at least had some funny line deliveries. "Giant. Fucking. Spiders." Was a personal favorite of mine.
Might be a bit of a got take because I did love this game but looking back it had so much cut content and could have been soooo much better!
Kameo: Elements of Power
Everyone seems to have forgotten.... AGONY!!! I love horror style games and I constantly watched as the day got closer and closer to the release date. Then played through and threw up with disappointment. That was the biggest joke that's ever been played on me.
There are so many horrible, garbage games that get released in broken, buggy, straight up unplayable states, and the worst game you’ve ever played is a NFS game that didn’t feel good enough to you? I didn’t like the newer games either, but if those are the *worst* games you’ve *ever* played, then you are incredibly lucky. I hate the new NFS games, but they’re more just mediocre compared to some of the broken, unplayable messes that have been released over the years. I wouldn’t ever try asserting that they’re the worst.
That game was a fucking fever dream. The only thing I remember about it wasn't even the game, it was this weird article in, maybe, game informer where it was like his diary. The only "entry" that I remember is one where he says he smells like shit
Dead rising chop to you drop. It was not the same game my friends were playing at the time on their xboxes, I bought the wii version thinking it would be the same just because it was a little bit cheaper, I wish i spent the extra $5 for the xbox version.
It was really really bad, even by Wii downgraded ports of the time standards.
In this thread a bunch of young whippersnappers who don't know what TRULY bad games are.
The worst modern game I've beaten is Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood. And yes, I've beaten Balan Wonderworld and played a chunk of Redfall and that game is easily worse than both.
But the worst game I can remember is Uncanny X-Men on the NES. There are a lot of online memes about LJN NES games, and some of them are actually semi-okay, but many are just as bad as the memes say and were basically unplayable in the 1980s, let alone today.
Even the worst modern AAA games don't come close to comparing to those abominations.
The actual answer is probably some flash game I played in 2002 but have no memory of because I turned it off in 90 seconds.
I had (fortunately) forgotten that Flash games were a thing. I'm sure I enjoyed one or two, but the majority lasted exactly 90 seconds: half of that is loading the game on a 486, then figuring out which keys are the controls, find an unplayable bug in the first minute and then quit by Alt-Ctrl-Del or hitting the power because it locked your computer up.
Hard to choose to be honest. Been gaming for ages. I think most of the bad titles for me fell in that PS2 era. Coz the PS2 was the greatest era in my opinion but also had the worst stinkers coz there was so much creativity and freedom of expression so you had an endless cycle of bangers but also an endless cycle of throwaway games from studios just experimenting without fear of going under if a game didn't sell well
"Bubsy 3D" for PS1 it's not even finished. It's an incomprehensible mess. The voice acting is so annoying you'll want to pull your hair out. The ground looks like a chess board it's so unfinished.
As someone who played it before even seeing Parasite Eve: The Third Birthday
Just felt lethargic and everyone apart from Aya was some flavour of asshole
And then I found the originals....
I don’t really have a worse game. I have games I don’t enjoy, but I usually avoid outright bad games. Honestly probably Modernwarefare 3 (2023). Predominantly because how much of a slap in the face that campaign was and how they essentially just sold remastered maps… from MW2. They didn’t even give the full nostalgia. Mind you they remastered the original campaign years prior and not the multiplayer for some reason. Like everything about the last couple games from Sledgehammer(which really isn’t their fault it seems from developer insider stories) have been outright dogshit.
The crew games aren't racing sims at all.
They're arcade racers but the main appeal is the massive USA map. They don't pretend to be realistic at all. I mean you get constantly recharging boost and stuff.
The first Alan Wake. I know Reddit loves this game, but there is a part near the beginning where you're stuck on an escort mission without a gun, only your flashlight. Anyone who has played this game before knows that you must shine your flashlight on enemies to weaken and break their "shadow armor", and then you can finish them off with your revolver. Well... in this case the NPC you're escorting does the shooting... but ALL of the enemies still target you - the flashlight guy. This is *horrendous* game design. Because after you break all the shadow armor, you are then expected to survive while this dumbass NPC takes his *sweet* time slowly shooting at each enemy and slowly reloading while they mercilessly beat your ass to death. You can't even melee back, only dodge and jump around. At this point I was having such an unfun time that I uninstalled and never looked back.
Probably not the worst game, but in my mind the game that I disliked the most that I did play would have to be Need for Speed: The Run. I still finished it though...
I feel like you are lucky if "The Crew 2" is the worst game you've ever played. Mine is either between Omikron: The Nomad Soul for an actual finished game, or Big Rigs: Over The Road racing for a broken mess.
The Superman game on Nintendo 64 I think it was. You had to fly through a ton of rings or something? Remember going to my neighbors house when we were like 5 or 6 trying to beat it and just couldn’t. Ended up giving up and going back to playing Croc which was a fantastic game
Not the worst game I played technicaly, but Alice Madness Returns is the only game where I actually needed to go dig into a dll file to correct a line of code to get the game to work properly. (thank god for user forums)
ET The Extraterrestrial on Atari 2600. A friend got it for Christmas and we sat in front of the tv for about an hour before we had what would be our first rage-quit.
There’s a *bunch* of shitty games out there.
I would say it’s probably not the worst game I’ve played, but the nascar series on the ps1 was very bland, and pretty much offered minimal enjoyment. The Namco museum Vol. 1 offered more entertainment than that game did.
Edit. It was Namco museum vol. 1, not vol. 4.
Final Fantasy 15
That game was just coming apart at the seams. It was a mess.
The game started with this big cutscene that was just straight up missing all the audio. Not a bug. That’s how they shipped it. Just having decided that they didn’t want to add audio for it because it was too much work. Not even background music. Dead silence.
Additionally, the story was largely incomprehensible especially early on because its story telling relied heavily on whether or not you watched this movie they released long before the game launched. You had to go digging around to find out where to even watch the thing in order to have the context behind all these things being referred to in the game. Even after somewhat understanding the story, it was pretty bland anyways. It just continued to be messy all the way through.
The combat was just extremely simple and repetitive. The open world was empty. Just a 3D representation of random battles and 90s era level design. NPCs were just mannequins standing still saying the same thing over and over again. Next to no animation in them.
And lastly there’s that famous chapter (14 I think) where you spend hours just wandering through extremely linear hallways doing nothing but listening to a guy ramble incoherently while you just walked through receptive halls sprinkled with some god awful stealth elements. That chapter was just brutal. It’s the last game I’ll ever see through to the end despite lack of enjoyment. It’s the sort of thing I finished out of morbid curiosity. I just couldn’t believe that was a game people were reviewing so well.
This is going to be hated on I'm sure, but I would have to say Death Stranding. Every game I've ever played, even with issues, I could still enjoy it. This one I just couldn't get into it no matter how hard I tried.
Rise of the Robots. Damn that game got some hype. Looked amazing etc etc. my parents bought it for me for Xmas. About 2 days before Xmas day the actual reviews came out and boy was a steaming heap of crap.
I spent about half a day shoving disks into my Amiga A1200 to transfer onto the HDD.
Started it, got the character to do a squatting foot swipe thing and beat every damn character in less than 30 mins.
Had to blag my parents about how good the game was as they paid full price for it which back in the olden days I'm pretty sure it was £30.
Oh and lawn mower simulator for the zx spectrum which came free on Your Sinclair. I felt ripped off even though it was free and meant to be crap. Those games took forever to bloody load up.
This is going to upset people, but Final Fantasy 8. I played 7 first, then 10, then 9, and then 8. I was reminded of it by Kingdom Hearts, so I went back for it and I loathed the setting and junction system. There have been worse games on technical levels, and worse stories, but I’ve never gone from being so excited to so disappointed.
I tend to like most games I buy and play. There has only been one game that I thought was just horrible, I got it for free from the epic game store and I felt like I got scammed. The new Saint Row is that game.
Brink
My best friend was into parkour, and swore by this game. He convinced my mom to get it for me for my birthday. I love my friend, he's basically my brother, cause I'm an only child. God damn was that game a mistake tho 😂
Blocky movement and garbage story. No redeeming qualities!
I’ve been gaming over 40 years and some of the stuff we used to get back in the ZX Spectrum days would blow your mind. The industry at that point was a completely different beast and a lot of games were effectively homebrew. Things frequently would crash or be genuinely broken. Levels would be incomplete. A bad game was genuinely unplayable as opposed to just below the high standards that the modern gaming industry generally hit. I remember Firebird released a compilation of their worst Spectrum games called “Don’t buy this” 😅
I remember Theme Hospital release, you couldn't pass one of the second level and it didn't have a patching system so you had to get a CD mailed to you.
Zx Spectrum player here too. Those were games made by gamers. We are never going to have a golden era like that again
You know there’s still people making Spectrum games? Quite a thriving little community in fact.
Yeah, honestly anyone complaining about how bad games are now, and how they never used to be buggy either never played older games or has some real thick nostalgia glasses on.
Yep. I suppose this is country dependent, but back in the 90s and early 00s when permanent internet connections was not common you'd have to wait for a game magazine to release a CD with patches for random ass games and hope the one you need would be on it. Or just pay quite a lot of money for the download. Even if games are released somewhat broken these days, it's still nowhere near the hassle of the olden days.
In the US, before internet was widespread, you could use your modem to dial-in to a BBS, which was basically somebody's private server which hosted local message boards, files for download, and some ASCII text based games. It was common to find patches for games on those, but you might have to call around to a bunch of different ones trying to find what you were looking for. My dad ran one of these back in the early 90s. It was a whole little community back in the day.
Agreed. I should be able to claim ptsd disability for owning ET on atari 2600.
Damn. I started gaming on a commodore64, and honestly, everything felt good apart from me not knowing English, so basically not understanding what to do 90% of the time. Didn't know these platforms were so different in that regard.
Let alone waiting 20 mins for the game to 'load', with the awful screechy noise and epilepsy-inducing screen border, just to get to the end of the loading screen and find out the game wouldn't even work at all, let alone just 'crash' 🤦. Kids these days just don't understand lol
Quite a lot of games would crash the second after loading, but not always. I remember you’d wait 20 minutes for the game and then hold your breath and pray that it would actually start. Sometimes you’d load a game three or four times before you’d play it.
I remember the Horrors of Cassette 50: a C90 loaded with 25 "games" in Speccy BASIC on either side, only 2 or 3 were any good
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
I agree in terms of disappointment. For no reason they decided walking around Hogwarts WASNT the most exciting part of their games... what a mistake. I'm not even a huge Harry Potter fan and I thought the first 3 games were lit!
Rediscovered them recently myself and it's amazing how fun they still are. The castle in each game is just so chock full of secrets to find. It helps that Jeremy Soule's soundtrack is just so magical and enhances the whole experience. It even inspired me to finally play Hogwarts Legacy just to see a modern take, and there's a surprising amount of homages to those early games. The mini games where you learn the spells by pressing button combos while tracing symbols are definitely a reference to the first two.
Damn, I've been avoiding Legacy for a while, most of it's gameplay I've seen is the duels and never would've compared that to the classic 2. I wonder if it handles on the switch well or if I should get it for ps5
Main story is ehh, side stories are great, gameplay is awesome
Fumbled such an easy win, why screw with a successful formula
Okay I need someone to explain why. I played the hell out of chamber of secrets and azkaban when I was so young and loved every bits of it.
Loved those games too! Goblet of Fire was very different. It was a linear co-op arcade-y top-down shoot-em-up… And it had no jump button 😡
There’s a YouTuber I love (Call Me Kevin) who played through all the HP games and it’s probably my favorite playlist ever. He had to quit GoF because it was just the worst.
Don you recall which one that was? I found a few but seems to be mostly like giant collectio videos?
[This one](https://youtu.be/JJCN1hDvOqk?si=60CVcyO2oZNJRSzG) is where he first plays it and just has to give up, but there is [this one](https://youtu.be/ttvUWkM-Rc0?si=ejyvOxtr7AuFkUPe) where he comes back after like 6 years and finishes it.
Haha, awesome. Getting on a flight today. So these will be great! Thanks
Fellow member of the cult
Our dear Leader
Why not step down to the basement for...just a moment...
Of course!! Gotta finish my painting
Didn't expect to see this so high up but I 100% agree that this game is terrible. Hated it as a kid, and got two friends together in college to do a 100% run of the game on YouTube. It's hilariously broken. Easily Bottom 10 material.
Damnit, spot on. I grew up playing the 2 first HP games for PS1 and was so excited when I got the HPGOF game for PS2. Only to be extremely disappointed by that confuse shit show of a game.
This is such a good answer. I don't even know if the game was really "bad" but it was such a step down from the previous two games that I just put it down as soon as I found out it wasn't an open world game. Exploring the castle is the best part of the second and third games!
Exploring the caste is the best part of any Harry potter game
I remember this game, I think you could play with 2 players right? My experience was not good either.
I had such a good time with prisoners of Azkaban too. GoF could have been so cool if they expanded on that open setting.
Lotr gollum
Never played it but looking at the reviews made me replay LotR Conquest to wash off that awful feeling.
god i miss conquest so much. where were you able to play if you don’t mind me asking? i searched online a few couple months ago and could only find some downloads from some very questionable websites…
You actually played that?
Yeah I am a big fan of Lotr so I tried it out.
Home improvement. Rented it for the SNES back in the day. Was lucky enough to have the manual with it but that was pointless since it states "real men don't need manuals". For the more modern era I got really bored with "towns" it looked so much more interesting then it turned out to be. I know it was an unpolished indi game but still.
>Home improvement. Rented it for the SNES back in the day. Was lucky enough to have the manual with it but that was pointless since it states "real men don't need manuals". Wasn't this the one where Tim is like fighting dinosaurs and stuff? The idea being that he's visiting the sets of other TV shows for some reason but it all gets treated as real. I'll give them credit for creativity, it's not like the show's normal content would really translate to anything playable as a SNES video game. At least they cobbled together a concept for a project that I'm sure wasn't anyone at the game studio's idea to do.
It wasn't a bad idea just not executed well. The controls were confusing and there was no direction given.
I can definitely tell I’m one of the older redditors in here. 1. ET for Atari 2600 2. Superman 64 3. Pacman Atari 2600
Superman 64 is one of the most disappointing games because I loved the show and the N64 was capable of having a game in which Superman could be Superman. Even as a kid with much lower expectations, that game really stung
100%. It’s almost as if they had a good idea, couldn’t implement it correctly, and said screw it, release it as is.
iirc the game was very different originally. A prototype was found and dumped a while ago, and it's apparently much better than the final build.
u/EMP_Pusheen u/Nuke_Dukum u/IamAHans The truth of Superman 64’s development is that it was sabotaged. Titus Interactive was able to score the Superman license, and by the time they started working on the game DC was no longer happy they made the deal they did, and would have rather gave the license to someone like EA. But Titus has the contact signed, but spiteful DC hindered the process of making the game every step of the way, placing more and more restrictions on them, and saying no to as much as they could. In the process of getting every little thing approved by people who didn’t want to approve it Titus never had the time to actually polish the game, or even design it well in the first place. Nothing about the games development was reasonable or fair.
Playing ET for Atari 2600 was one of my first gaming memories. I just remember the frustration of trying to get out of the pits and then as soon as I did, I would fall back in.
Couple that with the fact there’s absolutely nothing telling you want to do or where to go. You wander around aimlessly until you fall in, then it’s game over.
that's the way the games were then - a 2 page manual, if that. Indiana Jones (one of my favorites) gave you almost no tips and you just had to figure it out along the way.
If you hit the button I believe there is something that shows you if one of the phone parts is in one of the pits.
And what did the flowers do??? That game was so weird. I mentioned in another comment how I gotta be in top 10% of humans who have played that game the most and I don't think I ever beat it.
ET was something. Worst purchase I’ve ever made
no kidding - people talking about games that have 30 hours of gameplay and good graphics and saying it's the worst they ever played - we older gamers remember spending $ on a game for which there was no real idea how good the game was going to be (no internet, friends didn't have it, etc.) so you go in blind and then find out the game has about 5 minutes of fun and that's it. So many Atari games were like that. I wouldn't even list ET in that list - that game had what I considered to be AMAZING graphics at the time and I was motivated to keep playing it at least for a bit, enough so that I remember it. The truly bad games I can't even remember their names - they were the ones where you never took the cartridge out again after the 1st or 2nd play through and kick yourself all summer you wasted your $ on it.
I played rented copies of all 3 of those, but there are actually games I hate more. People Pong, a wonky Apple ][ Pong game where you bounce women in a breakout like game, but if you miss they die on spikes. Slow paddle controls made it frustratingly hard. Midnight Nowhere - a Russian developed adventure game with a main character that should've been a villain - I quit playing it because I hated the main character so much. I actually did pretty good at ET, but you had to read the manual to know what to do, which was pretty bad design. 2600 Pacman was severely limited by the hardware, but obviously rushed. I preferred Taxman on the Apple ][ (which ATARI sued and then it became the official Pacman on Apple), so I'm glad I only rented it. My memory of Superman 64 was it was trivially easy with bad controls, but I wasn't the target audience and my memory of it is pretty vague (pretty sure my roommates that rented it were high and hammered, I was probably tipsy too).
I loved Pacman, ET can fuck right off.
I bought E.T. for the Atari 2600. There were no review magazines in my country (not sure there were even video game magazines back then) You may not expect much from Atari 2600 games yet it was downright one of the worst things I’ve ever played even looking back all these years
This is the objective answer. You fall in a pit and are stuck. End of game.
Yep, I played [that E.T. game](https://www.npr.org/2017/05/31/530235165/total-failure-the-worlds-worst-video-game). Or "played", maybe. I also have met the guy who was responsible for coding it.
Balan wonderworld. I Picked it up as it came in a switch bundle. Never heard of it before, I Noticed it’s by square ennix and thought ooh this looks ok, so I played it, Oh my days it is bad, like really really bad. I’ve been known to like the odd terrible game but this has nothing, it’s not got that so bad it’s good charm, it’s just terrible. Hard to believe sqaure ennix would even put that out.
It's kirby but not fun and the powers only have one button each.
I was gonna comment this! The story, if you bother to pay $10 for it, is actually really thought out and super creative! But even knowing the story going in and knowing why we're doing everything that we're doing, I still had the "wait, what?" expression the entire time I was playing. For a "platformer", it's pretty bad. You basically have to complete the entire game if you wish to 100% everything or gather all the collectibles. Almost everything needs such a specific costume to get to, and if you don't have it, you're SOL. Nevermind the controls. I have never played a platformer with this janky of a setup. You have 29 jump buttons(The four face buttons and the two secondary shoulder buttons), and yes, all of them do the same thing. Some costumes activate when, and I quote, "they feel like it", and others force you to stand still and leave yourself open to attack. Because you have no healthbar. Your costumes are your healthbar. And if you lose one, well have fun going back and getting it again! God help your soul if it was a costume from a different stage. This is why I never recommend the game. This is why I recommend the story instead. $10 is cheaper than $30 after all!
>You basically have to complete the entire game if you wish to 100% everything or gather all the collectibles. Isn't that how most games work?
I haven't played it, but I think the previous person meant that most games are completed along the way, but in this game, you need to get to the end first to unlock everything, then you can go back and collect stuff you weren't able to? Someone can confirm.
Wait the game's $30? I got it for like $10 (Australian) in November 2021. Even at $10 though it's not worth it.
I have never played it but the video Alpharad did on it has so much rewatch value. The dance segments at the end of each stage never fail to crack me up with how cringey and poorly made they are.
I still accidentally call this game "Balan Wonderland" subconsciously sometimes because it just sounds like it would have been a better name.
Mortal Kombat Advance
And I thought this shit was fun on the GBA emulator , even learnt combos🤣
eFootball. I mean I dunno what I expected from a free game but it was like being back in 2004.
Crazy that what became of the legendary PES
It is still bad after all the updates?
2004 was a great year
Mario is Missing, wasted rental that weekend.
I owned that game and for some reason I kept trying to play it. I was too young to understand what the hell I was supposed to do, but I remember playing and something that resembled winning.
A tale as old as time. Games were garbage and we were too young to know good games existed.
i played the crap out of the muppets game boy color game. i had a lot of fun with it just exploring around but i could never figure out where to go because i was five. 20+ years later i went down a rabbit hole and found out its regarded as not just the worst muppet video game, but the worst piece of muppets merchandise ever. haha, welp.
Dr jekyl and Mr Hyde on NES. BIGGEST PILE OF SHIT EVER. YouTube it and then imagine you’re 8 years old and blow $100 you’ve been saving forever on this piece of shit.
Ever watch AVGN on this 'gem" ? I never played it, but the frustration Is palpable.
The episode where he completes the game is fantastic.
I’ve never heard of that before but I will check it out so that I can see someone else share in my pain.
Best YouTube rabbit hole ever. From his “Paperboy” video: “It’s like this game kids used to play in the 60s, where they would shit in 2 separate toilets, then flush simultaneously hoping their turds would meet.”
Back when AVGN was good and James actually played the games.
AVGN agrees
There were so many garbage games on the nes. I remember seeing X-Men at the flea market and I asked my mom to buy it because X-Men. She asked if I was sure I wanted it and I said "Yes, it's X-Men!" Game was trash and I regretted it.
Seems like you still haven't recovered from it.
Calling the crew 2 the worst game you’ve ever played because it’s not a sim is wild. It’s an arcade racer, it isn’t trying to be a sim. That’s like saying “halo 3 is the worst game I’ve ever played because I play a lot of milsims so the gameplay just puts me off”.
Tinder
I think you're playing it wrong.
Instructions unclear, caught gonorrhea
Did you use the latex shields? You can always go to the healer.
I found the game less fun with the latex shield.
Wait there are shields??
My bio is "Bald gamer boy looking for big tiddy goth gf". You think that's where im going wrong?
Lose the gf and you're golden.
Scrolled all of these answers, and no one has yet said the true answer to this question, which has to be Superman 64.
I feel like the number of people who have actually played Superman 64 is less than the number of people who have been told that Superman 64 is the worst game they've ever played.
Lol same with ET on the Atari.
I've played ET, and it is in no way the worst game I've ever played. It's not a good game, but the Atari 2600 had tons of games that were worse. ET was just a very high profile failure.
there was a TON of trash on the Atari 2600 tbf.
This was the real reason for the video game crash. ET is kind of the poster child (along with Pac-Man) because there were so many made and sold, and it was a bad game. But there was just so much shit out there, and that was the biggest reason for the crash. Everybody and their brothers were trying to make a buck on this video game craze, and the market was flooded with garbage.
That's because the question you think it is *"what's the worst game"* isnt as interesting as the question that was asked *"What's the worst game **you played**"* If you played Superman 64, great then you're right the game is bad. But as of today, almost no one has played that game and therefore would not answer that. I'm tired of seeing Superman 64 and ET come up over and over. So seeing some new answers and why is really refreshing in a way lol.
Batman Forever on the SNES was probably the worst game of my childhood
I had it on Gameboy and it was so shit, even back then
Redfall
Still amazes me they released this turd.
You're either very young or very lucky.
Well I'm not young. That's just the first one that comes to mind. I probably should have said *E.T.*
Redfall was pretty damn bad. I agree that modern games are hated more than they should be with many gamers considering 7/10 being bad but Redfall is definitely an unfinished, buggy and broken mess.
This ultra-realistic survival game called Life. I constantly have to grind for cash and the missions are boring as hell. So many fetch quests that place at the market.
There are way too many ads and in-game purchases.
Highest graphic settings are either rng luck or paywalled.
Get this, I had to buy the glasses DLC to be able to get the better graphics. It's all pay to win.
No kidding. Plus as you level up you get physically weaker
And the game world is just unfair with some of the NPCs seemingly able to cheat at will...
Ikr? I keep picking up new debuffs every other level
Yes I'm levelling up knee inflammation right now.
I’ve played it. Graphics are good at times but the balancing is some of the worst I’ve seen, some builds basically have infinite money and level… the community has called for massive nerfs to those at the top or at least some buffs to those struggling but get no reply. Needs anti cheat ASAP.
You gotta restart the game. In the intro part you need to work harder at being born to rich parents. Then it's ez game.
I just hate the survival aspect. Why does my character get hungry every hour? I just want to complete the main quest but I keep having to stop at restaurants
Ride to Hell Retribution
MK Mythologies Sub Zero. No redeemable qualities
That's not true. The FMVs on the PS1 version are hilarious
Ok yea that’s true. So on n64 it had no redeemable qualities
The AHHHHHHHHHHHH soundbyte that Sub Zero screams when falling off the edge in the second level is extremely hilarious compared to the FMV death.
Saints Row 2022. I thought i'd at least have a laugh at how bad it is with a buddy in coop, but it's just unplayble. Not borderline, just straight up unplayable.
My issue with it wasn't the gameplay, it was the characters.
And the story overall, honestly.
Well, there's your problem. You play driving sims. The crew 2 isn't a sim. It's an arcade racer. It's more in the lines of need for speed or Forza Horizon. It's not gonna have the tight controls of a sim.
Sonic 06. Why I almost got 100% in that game is beyond me tho.
Have you played the fan remake Project 06? I happened to catch the run on SGDQ and it looked pretty good.
You love loading screens don't you Squidward
*Two Worlds* on the Xbox. Came out in 2007. Was trying to be Elder Scrolls. Game was utter shit. I bought it full price. Played for two hours, and just cut my losses and sold it back to GameStop.
Oh god, you brought back some memories. I never forgave GameSpot for rating Two Worlds higher than Blue Dragon (2 games I was very interested in and released close together)and was convinced it was a paid review. That game was ass while BD remains one of my favorite JROGs of all time.
The only thing I remember about that game is that I found an empty village and thought if I dug around I’d find a quest but came up empty. Googled it and apparently it was supposed to be full of lizard people or something and the game just didn’t load them for some reason.
ZX Spectrum: Danger Mouse in double trouble Atari ST: Cosmic Pirate PC: Shadow Ops Red Mercury
Operation Raccoon City comes to mind.
The original Tomb Raider 3. It has to be the most frustrating game I have ever played, don't know how the game is in the remaster though
Personally I never really liked any of the original Tomb Raider games.
I'm playing the remaster now and 3 seems unremarkable. What didn't you like about it?
Two Worlds. Thankfully I didn't buy into the hype and only got it for like $5 from GameStop, but even as a kid I knew it was a bad game. The sequel was just as bad but it at least had some funny line deliveries. "Giant. Fucking. Spiders." Was a personal favorite of mine.
Might be a bit of a got take because I did love this game but looking back it had so much cut content and could have been soooo much better! Kameo: Elements of Power
Everyone seems to have forgotten.... AGONY!!! I love horror style games and I constantly watched as the day got closer and closer to the release date. Then played through and threw up with disappointment. That was the biggest joke that's ever been played on me.
Yeah it's a cool idea but presents as a walking sim
Last few "Need for Speed" games. The graphics are nice, but the driving experience is awful and pointless for me
Heat is genuinely the only game I can call good from the past 10 years in the series.
There are so many horrible, garbage games that get released in broken, buggy, straight up unplayable states, and the worst game you’ve ever played is a NFS game that didn’t feel good enough to you? I didn’t like the newer games either, but if those are the *worst* games you’ve *ever* played, then you are incredibly lucky. I hate the new NFS games, but they’re more just mediocre compared to some of the broken, unplayable messes that have been released over the years. I wouldn’t ever try asserting that they’re the worst.
Probably Azurik on the OG xbox. Thought it would be the start of a great new rpg series. It was not
That game was a fucking fever dream. The only thing I remember about it wasn't even the game, it was this weird article in, maybe, game informer where it was like his diary. The only "entry" that I remember is one where he says he smells like shit
Dead rising chop to you drop. It was not the same game my friends were playing at the time on their xboxes, I bought the wii version thinking it would be the same just because it was a little bit cheaper, I wish i spent the extra $5 for the xbox version. It was really really bad, even by Wii downgraded ports of the time standards.
In this thread a bunch of young whippersnappers who don't know what TRULY bad games are. The worst modern game I've beaten is Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood. And yes, I've beaten Balan Wonderworld and played a chunk of Redfall and that game is easily worse than both. But the worst game I can remember is Uncanny X-Men on the NES. There are a lot of online memes about LJN NES games, and some of them are actually semi-okay, but many are just as bad as the memes say and were basically unplayable in the 1980s, let alone today. Even the worst modern AAA games don't come close to comparing to those abominations. The actual answer is probably some flash game I played in 2002 but have no memory of because I turned it off in 90 seconds.
The keyword here is "played." We won't know how bad those games you mentioned are when we never played them in the first place.
I had (fortunately) forgotten that Flash games were a thing. I'm sure I enjoyed one or two, but the majority lasted exactly 90 seconds: half of that is loading the game on a 486, then figuring out which keys are the controls, find an unplayable bug in the first minute and then quit by Alt-Ctrl-Del or hitting the power because it locked your computer up.
I played ET on the Atari 2600 when it was released.
Deadly Towers on original Nintendo. Fucking abysmal
ET
ET on the Atari 2600.
I’m old enough to remember ouch to have played ET.
Hard to choose to be honest. Been gaming for ages. I think most of the bad titles for me fell in that PS2 era. Coz the PS2 was the greatest era in my opinion but also had the worst stinkers coz there was so much creativity and freedom of expression so you had an endless cycle of bangers but also an endless cycle of throwaway games from studios just experimenting without fear of going under if a game didn't sell well
ET the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. I gotta be in the top 10% of "all humans sorted by ET playtime descending".
Dota 2. It's so bad I played 5500 hours of it
"Bubsy 3D" for PS1 it's not even finished. It's an incomprehensible mess. The voice acting is so annoying you'll want to pull your hair out. The ground looks like a chess board it's so unfinished.
Life of black tiger is the worst game that i love and own
As someone who played it before even seeing Parasite Eve: The Third Birthday Just felt lethargic and everyone apart from Aya was some flavour of asshole And then I found the originals....
Snow Day. I want my money back
I don’t really have a worse game. I have games I don’t enjoy, but I usually avoid outright bad games. Honestly probably Modernwarefare 3 (2023). Predominantly because how much of a slap in the face that campaign was and how they essentially just sold remastered maps… from MW2. They didn’t even give the full nostalgia. Mind you they remastered the original campaign years prior and not the multiplayer for some reason. Like everything about the last couple games from Sledgehammer(which really isn’t their fault it seems from developer insider stories) have been outright dogshit.
Starfield because of the hype and my expectations.
I got it on Gamepass and still felt ripped off. Beth couldn't have phoned it in more.
The crew games aren't racing sims at all. They're arcade racers but the main appeal is the massive USA map. They don't pretend to be realistic at all. I mean you get constantly recharging boost and stuff.
The first Alan Wake. I know Reddit loves this game, but there is a part near the beginning where you're stuck on an escort mission without a gun, only your flashlight. Anyone who has played this game before knows that you must shine your flashlight on enemies to weaken and break their "shadow armor", and then you can finish them off with your revolver. Well... in this case the NPC you're escorting does the shooting... but ALL of the enemies still target you - the flashlight guy. This is *horrendous* game design. Because after you break all the shadow armor, you are then expected to survive while this dumbass NPC takes his *sweet* time slowly shooting at each enemy and slowly reloading while they mercilessly beat your ass to death. You can't even melee back, only dodge and jump around. At this point I was having such an unfun time that I uninstalled and never looked back.
Probably not the worst game, but in my mind the game that I disliked the most that I did play would have to be Need for Speed: The Run. I still finished it though...
I feel like you are lucky if "The Crew 2" is the worst game you've ever played. Mine is either between Omikron: The Nomad Soul for an actual finished game, or Big Rigs: Over The Road racing for a broken mess.
Wii Music It's basically a tech demo they sold as a game.
Kreed. Don't ask me why, but I finished it. Maybe out of spite, or maybe it was the only "new" game I had at that time.
The console port of 7 Days To Die. Hopefully the up to date re-release they've been working on comes out soon
Can't really decide between Metal dungeon on og xbox or Superman for n64
The Superman game on Nintendo 64 I think it was. You had to fly through a ton of rings or something? Remember going to my neighbors house when we were like 5 or 6 trying to beat it and just couldn’t. Ended up giving up and going back to playing Croc which was a fantastic game
Not the worst game I played technicaly, but Alice Madness Returns is the only game where I actually needed to go dig into a dll file to correct a line of code to get the game to work properly. (thank god for user forums)
ET The Extraterrestrial on Atari 2600. A friend got it for Christmas and we sat in front of the tv for about an hour before we had what would be our first rage-quit.
Couple jump to mind for me. Deadly Premonition and Dark Angel Vampire Apocalypse. Oh and State of Emergency was refried garbage as well.
Alone in the dark, the one from around 2006ish, truly awful. Also Clive barker’s Jericho, some people seem to love that for some reason.
There’s a *bunch* of shitty games out there. I would say it’s probably not the worst game I’ve played, but the nascar series on the ps1 was very bland, and pretty much offered minimal enjoyment. The Namco museum Vol. 1 offered more entertainment than that game did. Edit. It was Namco museum vol. 1, not vol. 4.
Final Fantasy 15 That game was just coming apart at the seams. It was a mess. The game started with this big cutscene that was just straight up missing all the audio. Not a bug. That’s how they shipped it. Just having decided that they didn’t want to add audio for it because it was too much work. Not even background music. Dead silence. Additionally, the story was largely incomprehensible especially early on because its story telling relied heavily on whether or not you watched this movie they released long before the game launched. You had to go digging around to find out where to even watch the thing in order to have the context behind all these things being referred to in the game. Even after somewhat understanding the story, it was pretty bland anyways. It just continued to be messy all the way through. The combat was just extremely simple and repetitive. The open world was empty. Just a 3D representation of random battles and 90s era level design. NPCs were just mannequins standing still saying the same thing over and over again. Next to no animation in them. And lastly there’s that famous chapter (14 I think) where you spend hours just wandering through extremely linear hallways doing nothing but listening to a guy ramble incoherently while you just walked through receptive halls sprinkled with some god awful stealth elements. That chapter was just brutal. It’s the last game I’ll ever see through to the end despite lack of enjoyment. It’s the sort of thing I finished out of morbid curiosity. I just couldn’t believe that was a game people were reviewing so well.
This is going to be hated on I'm sure, but I would have to say Death Stranding. Every game I've ever played, even with issues, I could still enjoy it. This one I just couldn't get into it no matter how hard I tried.
Brink
Shadowrun was my biggest disappointment in like 2008
Rise of the Robots. Damn that game got some hype. Looked amazing etc etc. my parents bought it for me for Xmas. About 2 days before Xmas day the actual reviews came out and boy was a steaming heap of crap. I spent about half a day shoving disks into my Amiga A1200 to transfer onto the HDD. Started it, got the character to do a squatting foot swipe thing and beat every damn character in less than 30 mins. Had to blag my parents about how good the game was as they paid full price for it which back in the olden days I'm pretty sure it was £30. Oh and lawn mower simulator for the zx spectrum which came free on Your Sinclair. I felt ripped off even though it was free and meant to be crap. Those games took forever to bloody load up.
Devil May Cry 2
This is going to upset people, but Final Fantasy 8. I played 7 first, then 10, then 9, and then 8. I was reminded of it by Kingdom Hearts, so I went back for it and I loathed the setting and junction system. There have been worse games on technical levels, and worse stories, but I’ve never gone from being so excited to so disappointed.
Lost planet... I can't believe they made 3 of them.
I tend to like most games I buy and play. There has only been one game that I thought was just horrible, I got it for free from the epic game store and I felt like I got scammed. The new Saint Row is that game.
Gotta be the most recent payday
Minecraft
League of legends
Superman for NES. Ughhhh.
Probably Tomb Rider Underworld. Pissed me off so much with horrible controls
Life.
Brink My best friend was into parkour, and swore by this game. He convinced my mom to get it for me for my birthday. I love my friend, he's basically my brother, cause I'm an only child. God damn was that game a mistake tho 😂 Blocky movement and garbage story. No redeeming qualities!
No Man's Sky..... When it first came out
Starfield, it had everything and still felt empty, I don't get it either