Heavy Rain, also known as: How to make mechanics that are even more annoying than the characters of this dumpster fire?

monopoly (and capitalism)

I’m not that much of a gamer, but I remember many years ago I bought a Spawn game for the PSOne because I wanted to buy something and Spawn was still somewhat cool (don’t know if it still is, really). It was slow, ugly, with awkward controls and whenever you confronted an enemy the game play changed into something like Tekken or Bloody Roar, but with much worse controls. After you defeated the enemy it changed back to a 3rd person perspective. I didn’t even make it to the first boss, I simply put it away and went to play Syphon Filter for the 30th time.

I’ve got 2 that I didn’t see anyone else mention…

First one I might get hate for, but Escape from Tarkov. Absolutely hated it. I don’t know how to explain it, but the controls didn’t “feel good”. Literally just moving around and aiming felt like the system was fighting me and I uninstalled it after less than 2 hours. I would have refunded it if the game wasn’t bought for me as a gift…

Second one is Global Agenda. The game wouldn’t have been that bad if the devs didn’t seem to hate it. The gameplay loop was fun, I liked the different classes and the customizations. But there was a big pvp “world map” thing that happened on like a 2 week schedule, set times of day for attacking or defending other clans’ territories to earn resources to unlock rewards - it was the primary “end game”. Out of no where, the entire world map was broken, nothing was working right in the middle of the like 2-3 hour time slot where you could do anything with it. Obviously, a TON of support tickets were put in asking for something to be done about it. Devs got salty about all the tickets (I’m sure some of which we not nicely written) and sent a global message to everyone that was online that said “‘Fixing the game’ is not in the cards right now, players should ‘try harder’ to win.” Basically killed the game imo, several big clans just noped out. The devs were already showing signs that they wanted people to stop playing GA and move to their new game (Tribes: Ascend), and that just solidified it.

Maybe not the worst game, but notable for being somewhat misleading - Mario Is Missing for the SNES.

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s is an educational game where you play as Luigi and walk around random cities asking questions, which is very different from other Mario games of the time.

It’s hard to narrow it down to a single game, but all of the worst games I can think of were licensed games on earlier consoles. E.T. on the Atari 2600 is an obvious example, but the NES was chock full of garbage tier licensed games like Jaws, Ghostbusters, Last Action Hero, Dark Man, Superman, Robocop, Mad Max, Wayne’s World, Hook, Back to the Future… it just goes on and on (Weirdly I don’t think Friday the 13th belongs on this list, I actually like that game). All that being said, Superman 64 for the N64 is probably the absolute worst. The game is bad at every level. Ugly, buggy, and unfun. It’s not even fun to try it on an emulator to see how bad it is. Consider it toxic waste.

Mario hoops 3 on 3 for the DS. I was young kid and didn’t enjoy it one bit.

I kind of like bad games, because they can be interesting or have intriguing gameplay designs. I’d go so far as to say I actually enjoy Shadow the Hedgehog 2005, its not good per say, but it has some charm to it, and I enjoy it most the time.

Boring games are far more offensive in my opinion. Like… I’ve tried. I’ve tried over and over to play and enjoy Fallout 4, a game my husband loves but… its so boring. The story is dull, the gameplay is basic, settlement building is so mindnumbing, the characters are bland, except Nick Valentine, mostly cuz of his design, and the atmosphere is so bog standard with this inconsistent cheeriness to it. It is so mindnumbingly boring and dull, I don’t know how people play it, with or without mods. Skyrim’s setting was cool, the gameplay was basic, sure, but the exploration was fun and I still got to do cool and silly things and it felt fine.

Another game is Majin Tensei for the SNES. Im a huge Megami Tensei fan. I like playing all the spinoffs, and i especially like the older first person dungeon crawlers. But Majin Tensei is like if Fire Emblem was drunk and slurred its speech so it had to talk ultra slowly for you to understand. It takes soooooo long to do anything.

Most bad games aren’t really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize “wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into”.

I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.

The game has 3 main phases. The main “gameplay” is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.

The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But… No, he doesn’t. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.

Big Bass Fishing on PS1. Most boring game in existence.

E.T. for the 2600. It was so bad it quickly went on sale. As a result it became a birthday present. I tried to figure it out but it was simply terrible. It quickly went to bottom of the pile.

Shadow Madness was an amazingly bad PS1 RPG. The details have faded with time, but I remember it was an incoherent hodgepodge of every RPG trope, every party member was a bad cliche, the random encounter system was this terrible “red light, green light” thing. It was insultingly easy, and Harv-5 was like someone’s shitty Shadow the Hedgehog OC of Bender from Futurama.

I have had a grudge against this terrible game for 25 years.

Real life.

These might be hot takes, but they’re honest, I just have real specific tastes:

The first big one that stands out to me is Tales of Berseria. This game looked incredible to me, but holy shit do I hate the combat with every fiber of my being. I love action games with strong action combat like a Devil May Cry or a Bayonetta, and I love RPGs like Final Fantasy, Persona, and countless others (it’s ones of my favorite genres), but I basically hate almost any and all hybrid action-RPG systems. I just genuinely cannot understand the appeal, and I couldn’t even make it more than a couple hours into Tales of Berseria before giving it up because I hated every single combat interaction I was in.

My other thought was Civ: Beyond Earth. I’ve heard I might have liked the game more if I had come at from a Civ 5 or prior background, but I game into after spending 500+ hours in Civ 6 and by comparison C:BE felt frustrating and meandering and pointless. I enjoyed exactly zero of my minutes spent on the game.

Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.