When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.
I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the 'Spy' piece could kill the 'General' (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the 'Spy' could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a 'Spy' is called that because it's obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.
Nobody agreed and just played the game with the 'Spy' as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.
I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.
Custer's Revenge is bad, but it's not really the kind of bad like when you think of ET. Cuz it's not so much how it runs or plays, but how it's a game about raping native american women and is in extremely bad taste.
I feel like if it was just anybody doing it, that would actually be somewhat better. The title implies Custer earned it, which is messed up in multiple ways.
You might be interested in the work of this hobbyist who updated Atari’s ET game to fix many of its biggest faults by decompiling the game and patching it.
When I was a kid I bought an Atari with the cartridge holder stand for it and a ton of games for $5. ET was fucking awful, but there were a few gems in the collection.
Monopoly is not intended to be un-fun, it's intended to be unfair, which is different. People find it un-fun because they changed the rules to make it less unfair, but if you play the game by the rules it's not bad, but the winner gets picked at random very early in the game, and there's nothing you can do about it, which would be bad for a long game, but Monopoly is meant to be very short if you play by the rules.
It was originally that, when it was called The Landlord's Game. But I don't think that's what modern Monopoly is supposed to convey. It has pretty much become the opposite of what it originally was.
I owned it. Still do. I was a foolish child who liked Superman. Still do!
The most insulting part was using GameShark to level skip and realizing the rest of the game wasn't much fun (or finished) either.
They could have done so much better by removing the timed rings thing and just let you fly around a mostly empty city, blowing up Lex's robots or something. It would at least have felt Superman-esque lol.
Superman 64 is one of the rare games that I hate more than E.T. for the Atari. It's just so bad. It's a buggy mess, yes, but even if those were fixed, it is just such a bad and unfun game. It has zero redeeming qualities.
7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.
Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was 'defective'. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn't work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.
I can't really remember what I didn't like about the game...probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.
I stole a CD once that had no CD! Then I bought a dvd that had two lmao. Fast production, shit happens.
When I worked retail, someone came in, complaint there was there no disk in the case (PlayStation 3 or something), exchanged that thing with no further questions.
My roommate and I bought it, booted it up, played like 4 rolls in, boxed it up, and returned it. Whoever thought that removing one of the fundamental mechanics of Mario party was a good idea should be forced to work in Nintendo's legal department, where fun is banned.
The problem with Munchkin is it is fine as a short game. Unfortunately to only strategy is to make the game longer by preventing someone else from winning. If it lasted a set number of rounds and then whomever was the highest level won it would be a better game.
Space Station 13 is simulteanously the worst and best game I have played depending on the station you choose. I've been one a shift where we fought back every monstrosity thrown at us with ease. I've also been on a shift where I am the only medical crew and the capitan is a traitor and why is the ship already on fire its been 10 minutes?
It is, in the best and worst ways. 13 is better imo but thats just because its had time to mature. 14 is catching up and is much easier to develop. I love FOSS games.
Played an old LoTR game for the SNES that was so full of bugs, it actually held my interest longer than it should have because I was curious whether the game could even be completed.
I just watched it! Or at least one like it, pretty sure there's more than one. He did it in a month while it usually took 8 months. He was paid $200,000
Ah I remembered it being short production time but a month makes more sense. The stuff in that doc about how the devs smoked cannabis the entire time too was nuts.
Of course, and the chance of two unwinnable decks in a row is astronomical small. But the fact that it's possible puts the game at the top of my least favorite games list. Just above chutes and ladders.
Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.
Monopoly. Literally designed to be frustratingly unplayable to represent the frustratingly unplayable user experience of capitalism, but people insist on playing it anyway.
AD&D 2e. Insists it's a game about exciting fantasy adventuring, then all the rules are about painfully slow tactical minutiae. The combat mechanics are taken from a game about modern naval warfare, hence bigger Armor Class means easy to hit. It's unclear why anyone thought ships with guns was a good model for medieval sword fighting. Entire sections of rules have to be ignored - hello encumberance - and gameplay regularly has to stop to look up charts, tables or niche rules like grappling.
Screamball. Like ping pong, except the point goes to whoever screams the loudest during a volley. We made it up as teenagers. It was awful.
AD&D 2e has, primarily, a presentation problem. The rules are best suited for a gritty game about the minutiae of exploring uncharted wilderness and delving into the dungeons you find there—one where you keep a watchful eye on your dwindling supplies of lamp oil and arrows as you calculate how to bring as much loot out of the dungeon as possible before getting killed by running into a particularly lucky orc. The rules are very similar to AD&D 1e, which is presented this way.
At some point, someone at TSR must have decided that heroic adventure sells better, because all of the 2e fluff and art makes it look like you play as heroic badasses who stare down dragons, which if you start at level 1 and play by the XP rules, will take you many months of weekly play to achieve.
Honestly the problem is that people have a problem with conceding games. Even bigger is that some people don't want to let you concede the game and want to spend another 20 minutes winning. Playing competitive games like chess and Magic: the Gathering have taught me conceding is an acknowledgement of reality, not being a bad sport
Master of Orion III, a 4X game from around the turn of the century. The two previous instalments were fun strategy games. This one was like playing the world's prettiest spreadsheet.
I'm currently playing Ark for the first time with a couple of friends who've played the game 1k and 3k hours. I'm 150 hours deep but I would have been in your shoes if I had nobody to show me the ropes. It is an amazing game but a huge mess at the same time
Same. Several friends raved about this game and wanted me to get into it and I hated it. Same with Grounded to be honest. It just felt like the game was entirely made for the devs to giggle about kicking the players' asses over and over again with very little apparent payoff (unless you spend more hours in the game than any other game you've ever played apparently).
Overcooked is great the key is actually playing through the singlepkayer with a fried before hoping into competitive matches. My daughter and I love it
You say that now, but I’m guessing you’ve never been stuck with a 5-hour game of Fluxx then. (Honestly Fluxx has a similar “random winner” problem as Killer Bunnies, at the best of times)
(Honestly Fluxx has a similar “random winner” problem as Killer Bunnies, at the best of times)
Yes. I dare say usually. Every expansion tries to fix "sudden random winner", but none of the ones I have played have solves it.
Of course, the worst Fluxx games are when one unskilled player lucks into all of the win conditions but manages to mis-play them, dragging the game out indefinitely.
I bought Sonic 2006 when it came out. It was my first experience with a truly terrible, broken game. I'd played things that weren't up my alley or were subpar somehow, but that was the first time I was truly blown away by how bad a game could be.
I don't recommend you play DotA. You can be kept hostage for over two hours there by griefers! Though I think it's a lot less hardcore now the way it's balanced, and there's behavior score.
It's a hard thing to balance game ruining behavior in public games, especially when there is ranking/ELO.
I had over 10k hours in DotA. But pubs just became psychological torture at some point. A pro actually said, the way he reaches the top in the public ladder is to be psychologically on top of your game. And basically babysitting the psyche of your entire team, as they are similar rank to you skill wise, but might lose their shit after one mistake, or whatever, which happens on both teams.
My conclusion was that these games are great, but best enjoyed with pre-set teams or private leagues.
Rocket league was kinda leisure for me, as the games are so short. Also lots of fun to just practice flip resets, air dribbles, and so on in the freeplay training mode. But it's still frustrating and mundane, when you're forced into a certain playstyle in order to win no matter how your teammates play, rather than playing off of each other more.
Played rocket league to de-stress from Dota. Now, none of that. My brain and heart and sanity just can't take it. Mostly a solo game kind of person these days or co-op.
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.
I think this might be a puzzle game getting too niche for its own good with a wider audience, in your case. I only played through to the one ending, but it had enough trappings of a VN for me to guess that you get most of your character growth or punishment after redoing the common route (basically the prologue leading up to where you get locked into one ending or another), once you get set on course for a particular ending and play it out. It's common enough in visual novels for me to expect it and not be bothered or caught off-guard by those faults, but that's obviously not going to play out with a wider audience if they're not made aware of those conventions.
Even as a kid who was a hughe wrestling fan and was long looking forward to getting it, I rarely played that poor game.
The graphics and sound was bad, even for Gameboy standards, and as far as I remember, you could only hurt your opponent with punches or kicks but NOT with wrestling moves. In a freaking wrestling game...
Yeah the game boy had some real stinkers. I remember getting pumped to play mortal Kombat on there but my god the controls. It felt like everyone was moving through molasses
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.
If you enjoy going in depth, there's a podcast called How Did This Get Played that is now called "Get Played" because they couldn't bear subjecting themselves to these misfortunately made games for too long. But the early many episodes were chock-full of titles.
I enjoyed the Custer's Revenge episode where the hosts get lectured about tokenism and how it was fucked up of them to ask their Native American friend to play a racist game for podcast content. I genuinely respect them for posting the episode and admitting their mistakes.
I can think of at least one Commodore 64 game from back in the day that was hard to play, but I only remember the name of one of them: Quake Minus One. It was not a prequel to the 3D shooter Quake.
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.
Red Faction: Armageddon. It was just so very boring and inferior to its 3-year-old predecessor. THQ actually tried to claim that no one was interested in the franchise anymore because of the lacklustre sales of that game. But the franchise is excellent, Armageddon was just a bad game.
I played some kind of sex-themed bullet hell game where you were a disembodied penis flying around shooting things with little sperms. And if you got shot, instead of dying you would go limp and you could somehow slowly get erect again. Maybe it was popping pills or catching porn or maybe it was time based.
Anyway, that's not the worst game I've ever played, but it was one of the more memorable ones that popped into mind.
The worst would probably be some free or dirt cheap PlayStation game. It was not an indie gem. They had one mechanic: stand in the middle of an arena, spin/move around, and shoot the charging enemies until you killed enough and went to the next completely identical level.
Naughty Bear. At the time I expected to be a funny, dark humor game. Unfortunately it was almost unplayable. I remember multiple times being unable to advance because the game just broke. I didn't suffer through it very long
I have a copy still and was thinking of firing up the ps3 to give the full flashback experience
I couldn't find it so I drew myself holding the game in lieu. If I find the game I'll make an update (which now I need to go find it because I know I have it)
Ok, so I was like "I bet it's with the ps3" but I already drew the picture so here's the photo:
Deep-cut but does anyone remember a game called like "the emo game" or something. It was browser based, would've been out around the 2010s. Super dark edgelord humour. I'm certain it was fucking terrible but I played through it all. I think about it from time to time but have never found it again.
Holy shit! I remember that game and playing the hell out of it because I could be Omar Rodriguez-Lopez from At The Drive-In/Mars Volta. I wonder if you can still find that anywhere.
I can't pick between "Bioshock Infinite" and "Borderlands". I did push through Bioshock though, because the worldbuilding was cool, as with previous entries. But Borderlands was so utterly boring I must have played 2hrs tops
Loved system shock 2. Liked BioShock 1 was fine with BioShock 2 and still finished it. Could not do more than 2 hours of BioShock infinite before I could no longer deal with how blatantly on rails everything was and threw up my hands.
ah, see, there's someone who understands. Yea I remember it was super linear and somehow less entrancing than the first two, even gameplay-wise. Vague memories from back in the day
Aaaand I've never played System Shock, 1 or 2, but heard a lot of good. What's your recommended way of playing them ? say, for the modern gamer who's okay with dated graphics ?
I heard they did a whole remake of system shock 1 and a graphical remaster of system shock 2.
I personally haven't played system shock 1 but everything I've read was that system shock 2 was leagues better in every sense. I'd just start with system shock 2. I definitely didn't feel like I missed anything significant story wise just starting with system shock 2!
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.
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.
Lunar Genesis/Dragon Song. It looks like ass, the story is told with the eloquence of a farting butthole, and the gameplay... Mein gott, losing HP for running on the field isn't even the Game Arts' worst design decision in this game. There's nothing to save here.
For me, I was most disappointed in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. The premise was fascinating and I looked forward to it. They put out a demo on PS3 and it seemed okay. The launch game was worse than the demo. Just garbage. I finally actually played the entire game like 15 years later. It was very interesting and worth a lazy play, but not a very good game.
Otherwise, bad games to me are ones that are just endlessly difficult and frustrating.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the NES. Unreasonably difficult first level, vague hit detection boxes, enemies can stunlock you into a cheap death, pathetic reach of your weapons. Still beat it because I was a kid in the 90s and there was shit else to do.
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.
A few weeks ago I would have said Oaken Tower, one of those shop item autobattler type games, but RNG has been slightly better to me more recently in my runs.
So my next pick would probably have to be, from the bad games I can recall, Worms Blast. Basically just A Worms take on Puzzle Bobble and I didn't like it enough to keep the ROM on my hard drive. Don't remember too many specifics, but wasn't one for me in the slightest, similarly to Worms 3D, but that wasn't as bad of an experience.
Dragon's Lair. Every once in a while some idiot on FB will talk about how great of a game it was. My thought in that situation: "How nice for you Mr. Moneybags!" There was no skill or strat to the game, it was just an expensive version of Simon: memorize left or right, up or down. To a poor kid like me, it was anathema to going to the arcade if I could burn through $5 in 5 minutes.
Dig-Dug gets an honorable mention: it was a slower, shittier version of Mr. Do! in my opinion. I thought I read an article that game owners could program the game to have slower reaction time which makes sense for my experience. I later found out that that was a feature in a lot of games, like in Gauntlet, they could set health pots to give more or less health, and Mortal Combat could literally cheat by cutting out frames of animation to perform certain attacks "faster".
Deponia. I was so disgusted by the main character, I barely got out of the first room before I quit, uninstalled, and thought seriously about deleting it from my account. Not refunding it, just deleting it. I can't believe they made an entire series of those games.
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.
Hey, if some small set of people enjoyed it, good for them. I did not. I was especially unhappy with it because I had hoped it would be the spiritual successor to Sig Meier's Alpha Centauri, which I legit like more than any actual Civ game.
That's because that game requires mad skills with the stylus lol. It required ridiculous precision to make your shots, so most of us would resort to spamming dunks.
But I had one friend who was actually good with shooting and could destroy anyone in multiplayer and was the only one who unlocked every character.
The 4 player multiplayer was also fun because it was just item spamming with no hoops so you didn't have to worry about shooting, passing, etc.
Yeah, but that falls under the "make better choices" part. Choose a spouse that you enjoy spending time with and it's a great time. Don't stay with someone you're miserable with "for the kids".
When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.
I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the 'Spy' piece could kill the 'General' (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the 'Spy' could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a 'Spy' is called that because it's obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.
Nobody agreed and just played the game with the 'Spy' as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.
Stratego is a great game I'd completely forgotten about. Using your sappers to defuse bombs
Also an infuriating game
We like to play it with random piece setup so everyone doesnt just stick the flag in the corner surrounded by bombs. Its way funnier when its random.
I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.
Custer's Revenge is bad, but it's not really the kind of bad like when you think of ET. Cuz it's not so much how it runs or plays, but how it's a game about raping native american women and is in extremely bad taste.
I feel like if it was just anybody doing it, that would actually be somewhat better. The title implies Custer earned it, which is messed up in multiple ways.
No.. the game play was shit as well.
You might be interested in the work of this hobbyist who updated Atari’s ET game to fix many of its biggest faults by decompiling the game and patching it.
When I was a kid I bought an Atari with the cartridge holder stand for it and a ton of games for $5. ET was fucking awful, but there were a few gems in the collection.
NES Where’s Waldo was pretty bad too especially for fans of the books.
There was a helicopter shooting game that somehow didn’t really work with the light gun too, but I forget the name.
Nobody should answer "Monopoly" because it's intended to be un-fun, as an object lesson in why monopolies are bad.
Also, no one actually plays it by the rules in the rulebook, which would dramatically shorten the game.
Appropriately, the "house rules" that keep the game going longer and make it "more fair" is actually just socialism
I used to play it that way on an old Mac that came with monopoly, and it was really fun. I loved the auctions.
It's pretty fun IMO, but I enjoy the chaos whether I win or lose!
Monopoly is not intended to be un-fun, it's intended to be unfair, which is different. People find it un-fun because they changed the rules to make it less unfair, but if you play the game by the rules it's not bad, but the winner gets picked at random very early in the game, and there's nothing you can do about it, which would be bad for a long game, but Monopoly is meant to be very short if you play by the rules.
It was originally that, when it was called The Landlord's Game. But I don't think that's what modern Monopoly is supposed to convey. It has pretty much become the opposite of what it originally was.
I rented Superman 64 at Blockbuster once.
Don't reccomend.
Much broken.
Such bugs.
Wow.
I owned it. Still do. I was a foolish child who liked Superman. Still do!
The most insulting part was using GameShark to level skip and realizing the rest of the game wasn't much fun (or finished) either.
They could have done so much better by removing the timed rings thing and just let you fly around a mostly empty city, blowing up Lex's robots or something. It would at least have felt Superman-esque lol.
I was gonna say, I purchased a game shark over this lol.
Also to get all coins on Mario 64.
Superman 64 is one of the rare games that I hate more than E.T. for the Atari. It's just so bad. It's a buggy mess, yes, but even if those were fixed, it is just such a bad and unfun game. It has zero redeeming qualities.
Capitalism
Which edition?
Core game is the same, they just keep reskinning it. I'm on Latest Age fwiw
2001 Extended
7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.
Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was 'defective'. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn't work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.
I can't really remember what I didn't like about the game...probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.
Ghostbusters for the NES was really bad, it wasn't just you.
Aww, I actually liked that game. That and back to the future
I've done similar tricks with returns.
I stole a CD once that had no CD! Then I bought a dvd that had two lmao. Fast production, shit happens.
When I worked retail, someone came in, complaint there was there no disk in the case (PlayStation 3 or something), exchanged that thing with no further questions.
you should check out the 2009 ghostbusters game, many consider it to be the true 'ghostbusters 3'
Thanks, I believe I will!
Mario Party 9 was so bad I think I only played it one time.
The moment I saw the car thing and read that there was no way to get around it, we quit and went back to the older games.
My roommate and I bought it, booted it up, played like 4 rolls in, boxed it up, and returned it. Whoever thought that removing one of the fundamental mechanics of Mario party was a good idea should be forced to work in Nintendo's legal department, where fun is banned.
10-player game of munchkin. Could feel my soul trying to crawl out of my mouth after the 3rd hour.
Oof yeah, this one should have been called “Crabs in a Pot”
Our game group imposed a 4 player max with that game after several 5 player games ran for way too long.
The problem with Munchkin is it is fine as a short game. Unfortunately to only strategy is to make the game longer by preventing someone else from winning. If it lasted a set number of rounds and then whomever was the highest level won it would be a better game.
I played Munchkin once and hated it. The barrier to entry on that game is way too high.
Space Station 13 is simulteanously the worst and best game I have played depending on the station you choose. I've been one a shift where we fought back every monstrosity thrown at us with ease. I've also been on a shift where I am the only medical crew and the capitan is a traitor and why is the ship already on fire its been 10 minutes?
Space Station 13/14 are fun because of that chaos though!
"Please. Make me a pizza."
"Security, help! They're turning her into a Papa John's!"
Everything I've seen about that game makes it seem bonkers
It is, in the best and worst ways. 13 is better imo but thats just because its had time to mature. 14 is catching up and is much easier to develop. I love FOSS games.
Played an old LoTR game for the SNES that was so full of bugs, it actually held my interest longer than it should have because I was curious whether the game could even be completed.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
There's a great making of documentary for this game where it's revealed that this game was essentially all coded by one developer in a weekend
I just watched it! Or at least one like it, pretty sure there's more than one. He did it in a month while it usually took 8 months. He was paid $200,000
Ah I remembered it being short production time but a month makes more sense. The stuff in that doc about how the devs smoked cannabis the entire time too was nuts.
Snakes and Ladders is the only game bad enough to avoid that I've nevertheless been obliged to play repeatedly.
Candy land is worse. There are deck orders that make the game unwinnable.
Pretty sure you're supposed to shuffle the deck before flipping it back over.
Of course, and the chance of two unwinnable decks in a row is astronomical small. But the fact that it's possible puts the game at the top of my least favorite games list. Just above chutes and ladders.
Monopoly. Tragically boring.
Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.
Ha, nice, I didn't know that! This was a couple decades ago and the 3 ppl I played with seemed to enjoy it. I was very confused as to why 😂
Always ended with someone flipping the board at my house.
Haahaha
Monopoly. Literally designed to be frustratingly unplayable to represent the frustratingly unplayable user experience of capitalism, but people insist on playing it anyway.
AD&D 2e. Insists it's a game about exciting fantasy adventuring, then all the rules are about painfully slow tactical minutiae. The combat mechanics are taken from a game about modern naval warfare, hence bigger Armor Class means easy to hit. It's unclear why anyone thought ships with guns was a good model for medieval sword fighting. Entire sections of rules have to be ignored - hello encumberance - and gameplay regularly has to stop to look up charts, tables or niche rules like grappling.
Screamball. Like ping pong, except the point goes to whoever screams the loudest during a volley. We made it up as teenagers. It was awful.
AD&D 2e has, primarily, a presentation problem. The rules are best suited for a gritty game about the minutiae of exploring uncharted wilderness and delving into the dungeons you find there—one where you keep a watchful eye on your dwindling supplies of lamp oil and arrows as you calculate how to bring as much loot out of the dungeon as possible before getting killed by running into a particularly lucky orc. The rules are very similar to AD&D 1e, which is presented this way.
At some point, someone at TSR must have decided that heroic adventure sells better, because all of the 2e fluff and art makes it look like you play as heroic badasses who stare down dragons, which if you start at level 1 and play by the XP rules, will take you many months of weekly play to achieve.
Long format games like monopoly, risk, etc.
The game is dead long before it's over.
You should try Axis and Allies if you think Risk takes too long.
Or Risktego - it's a game of Risk, where each battle is determined by an individual game of Stratego.
That sounds AMAZING
Honestly, it kinda does sound like a fun game to play with friends over the course of a year.
At least axis and allies is fun :o
Honestly the problem is that people have a problem with conceding games. Even bigger is that some people don't want to let you concede the game and want to spend another 20 minutes winning. Playing competitive games like chess and Magic: the Gathering have taught me conceding is an acknowledgement of reality, not being a bad sport
If you dont know when you have lost, you dont know the game well enough to play it seriously.
Conceding when you know you have lost is just respecting other players time. Same goes for letting your opponent to concede.
RISK
The main issue with those two is that players can lose and drop out before the game is over, and then have to sit around alone.
Player elimination seems to be less common in modern boardgame design. Probably because it just isn't fun.
I once played a game of twilight imperium where one player got eliminated within a hour. The game lasted over ten hours...
Risk was great in black and white on the first apple macs.
Same game, nothing changed. But the quick outcomes of each war and troop movement is so easy that the game goes by fairly quickly.
Master of Orion III, a 4X game from around the turn of the century. The two previous instalments were fun strategy games. This one was like playing the world's prettiest spreadsheet.
Oof, that makes me feel old
I saw a hilarious review of it on GOG a few months ago.
Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.
I'm currently playing Ark for the first time with a couple of friends who've played the game 1k and 3k hours. I'm 150 hours deep but I would have been in your shoes if I had nobody to show me the ropes. It is an amazing game but a huge mess at the same time
Just don't play with devs, or they'll ban you the moment you raid their base.
We're playing pve on a private server
Same. Several friends raved about this game and wanted me to get into it and I hated it. Same with Grounded to be honest. It just felt like the game was entirely made for the devs to giggle about kicking the players' asses over and over again with very little apparent payoff (unless you spend more hours in the game than any other game you've ever played apparently).
Mario Party.
I. Fucking. HATE. Mario Party.
This is how I feel about the Overcooked (and similar) games.
Overcooked is great the key is actually playing through the singlepkayer with a fried before hoping into competitive matches. My daughter and I love it
Its like monopoly. Always ends in a fight.
yea
Killer Bunnies.
With an honorable mention to Cthulhu Dice, Fluxx, and Chicken of the Sea (that last one literally, literally unplayable)
Killer bunnies is a lot of faffing around only for the winner to be decided at random in the end. Fluxx is fun though.
You say that now, but I’m guessing you’ve never been stuck with a 5-hour game of Fluxx then. (Honestly Fluxx has a similar “random winner” problem as Killer Bunnies, at the best of times)
Yes. I dare say usually. Every expansion tries to fix "sudden random winner", but none of the ones I have played have solves it.
Of course, the worst Fluxx games are when one unskilled player lucks into all of the win conditions but manages to mis-play them, dragging the game out indefinitely.
Original Fluxx is fun. Mix in too many expansion packs and it's a tedious morass of mechanics.
Playing with 2 decks is ok, but I think that's really about the limit.
I hate Killer Bunnies so much. Weak mechanics, largely luck-based, and land attempts at both humor and art
I actually really enjoy fluxx but only when everyone is drunk and nobody understands wtf is happening.
I'm intrigued by killer bunnies but haven't had a chance to try it yet.
Haha. Don't say we didn't warn you.
It's not so-bad-it-is-interesting. It's just "so bad I'm re-reading the rulebook again, because it can't really be this boring, right?"
I bought Sonic 2006 when it came out. It was my first experience with a truly terrible, broken game. I'd played things that weren't up my alley or were subpar somehow, but that was the first time I was truly blown away by how bad a game could be.
I did that too. Was looking for something to play w my non gamer ex and it was just terrible. I'd barely played any sonic before either.
Come to think of it that was prob the last game I paid full price for
Hot damn, spicy!
I don't recommend you play DotA. You can be kept hostage for over two hours there by griefers! Though I think it's a lot less hardcore now the way it's balanced, and there's behavior score.
It's a hard thing to balance game ruining behavior in public games, especially when there is ranking/ELO.
I had over 10k hours in DotA. But pubs just became psychological torture at some point. A pro actually said, the way he reaches the top in the public ladder is to be psychologically on top of your game. And basically babysitting the psyche of your entire team, as they are similar rank to you skill wise, but might lose their shit after one mistake, or whatever, which happens on both teams.
My conclusion was that these games are great, but best enjoyed with pre-set teams or private leagues.
Rocket league was kinda leisure for me, as the games are so short. Also lots of fun to just practice flip resets, air dribbles, and so on in the freeplay training mode. But it's still frustrating and mundane, when you're forced into a certain playstyle in order to win no matter how your teammates play, rather than playing off of each other more.
Played rocket league to de-stress from Dota. Now, none of that. My brain and heart and sanity just can't take it. Mostly a solo game kind of person these days or co-op.
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.
I think this might be a puzzle game getting too niche for its own good with a wider audience, in your case. I only played through to the one ending, but it had enough trappings of a VN for me to guess that you get most of your character growth or punishment after redoing the common route (basically the prologue leading up to where you get locked into one ending or another), once you get set on course for a particular ending and play it out. It's common enough in visual novels for me to expect it and not be bothered or caught off-guard by those faults, but that's obviously not going to play out with a wider audience if they're not made aware of those conventions.
WWF King of the Ring on Gameboy.
Even as a kid who was a hughe wrestling fan and was long looking forward to getting it, I rarely played that poor game.
The graphics and sound was bad, even for Gameboy standards, and as far as I remember, you could only hurt your opponent with punches or kicks but NOT with wrestling moves. In a freaking wrestling game...
Yeah the game boy had some real stinkers. I remember getting pumped to play mortal Kombat on there but my god the controls. It felt like everyone was moving through molasses
RoboCop for the NES. Just terrible.
It was bad, but not even close to the worst NES game I owned. I actually nearly beat that game.
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.
If you enjoy going in depth, there's a podcast called How Did This Get Played that is now called "Get Played" because they couldn't bear subjecting themselves to these misfortunately made games for too long. But the early many episodes were chock-full of titles.
I enjoyed the Custer's Revenge episode where the hosts get lectured about tokenism and how it was fucked up of them to ask their Native American friend to play a racist game for podcast content. I genuinely respect them for posting the episode and admitting their mistakes.
Yes, I remember that episode vividly! It was a great conversation and I'm glad they chose to air it.
I can think of at least one Commodore 64 game from back in the day that was hard to play, but I only remember the name of one of them: Quake Minus One. It was not a prequel to the 3D shooter Quake.
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.
I actually really enjoyed Ghostbusters. Beat it a few times.
If you liked it, that's all that matters, but I was very glad I got it super cheap and I really, really did not like it.
Maybe a hot take but I stand by it.
Red Faction: Armageddon. It was just so very boring and inferior to its 3-year-old predecessor. THQ actually tried to claim that no one was interested in the franchise anymore because of the lacklustre sales of that game. But the franchise is excellent, Armageddon was just a bad game.
Oh man, yea... After playing Guerilla, Armageddon was a waste of time. It might have been fine if I'd never played Guerilla... Maybe.
Heavy Rain, also known as: How to make mechanics that are even more annoying than the characters of this dumpster fire?
X to Shaun
SHAAAAUN!!!
Live chickens in the supermarket!
Oh man, so sorry. Did not play that far or completely forgot about that.
I didn't play it, but I did watch a Two Best Friends let's play back in the day. David Cage is such a hack. The scene in question.
Man, this is so great! Thank you for that.
I played some kind of sex-themed bullet hell game where you were a disembodied penis flying around shooting things with little sperms. And if you got shot, instead of dying you would go limp and you could somehow slowly get erect again. Maybe it was popping pills or catching porn or maybe it was time based.
Anyway, that's not the worst game I've ever played, but it was one of the more memorable ones that popped into mind.
The worst would probably be some free or dirt cheap PlayStation game. It was not an indie gem. They had one mechanic: stand in the middle of an arena, spin/move around, and shoot the charging enemies until you killed enough and went to the next completely identical level.
I have played many, many games. I remember some of the best. I forget the others. Why would I remember the worst?
To avoid it next time.
Learn from mistakes.
Naughty Bear. At the time I expected to be a funny, dark humor game. Unfortunately it was almost unplayable. I remember multiple times being unable to advance because the game just broke. I didn't suffer through it very long
I have a copy still and was thinking of firing up the ps3 to give the full flashback experience
I couldn't find it so I drew myself holding the game in lieu. If I find the game I'll make an update (which now I need to go find it because I know I have it)
Ok, so I was like "I bet it's with the ps3" but I already drew the picture so here's the photo:
Big Bass Fishing on PS1. Most boring game in existence.
Kane and Lynch 2 was pretty awful.
Deep-cut but does anyone remember a game called like "the emo game" or something. It was browser based, would've been out around the 2010s. Super dark edgelord humour. I'm certain it was fucking terrible but I played through it all. I think about it from time to time but have never found it again.
Holy shit! I remember that game and playing the hell out of it because I could be Omar Rodriguez-Lopez from At The Drive-In/Mars Volta. I wonder if you can still find that anywhere.
I can't pick between "Bioshock Infinite" and "Borderlands". I did push through Bioshock though, because the worldbuilding was cool, as with previous entries. But Borderlands was so utterly boring I must have played 2hrs tops
Jesus christ I forgot how much I hated Borderlands until you said it, I think I blocked it out.
Loved system shock 2. Liked BioShock 1 was fine with BioShock 2 and still finished it. Could not do more than 2 hours of BioShock infinite before I could no longer deal with how blatantly on rails everything was and threw up my hands.
ah, see, there's someone who understands. Yea I remember it was super linear and somehow less entrancing than the first two, even gameplay-wise. Vague memories from back in the day
Aaaand I've never played System Shock, 1 or 2, but heard a lot of good. What's your recommended way of playing them ? say, for the modern gamer who's okay with dated graphics ?
I heard they did a whole remake of system shock 1 and a graphical remaster of system shock 2.
I personally haven't played system shock 1 but everything I've read was that system shock 2 was leagues better in every sense. I'd just start with system shock 2. I definitely didn't feel like I missed anything significant story wise just starting with system shock 2!
Diablo Immortal was and still is a dumpster fire. Diablo 4 sucked too.
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.
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.
I ended up with multiple copies of E.T. because one of my friends left it at my house and no one would fess up and take it.
Lunar Genesis/Dragon Song. It looks like ass, the story is told with the eloquence of a farting butthole, and the gameplay... Mein gott, losing HP for running on the field isn't even the Game Arts' worst design decision in this game. There's nothing to save here.
Recently: avowed 😣
I really wanted to like Avowed, but I did not.
Anything from Illusion. Something something Rapelay.
Real life.
Space Ace on the 3DO.
For me, I was most disappointed in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. The premise was fascinating and I looked forward to it. They put out a demo on PS3 and it seemed okay. The launch game was worse than the demo. Just garbage. I finally actually played the entire game like 15 years later. It was very interesting and worth a lazy play, but not a very good game.
Otherwise, bad games to me are ones that are just endlessly difficult and frustrating.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the NES. Unreasonably difficult first level, vague hit detection boxes, enemies can stunlock you into a cheap death, pathetic reach of your weapons. Still beat it because I was a kid in the 90s and there was shit else to do.
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.
A few weeks ago I would have said Oaken Tower, one of those shop item autobattler type games, but RNG has been slightly better to me more recently in my runs.
So my next pick would probably have to be, from the bad games I can recall, Worms Blast. Basically just A Worms take on Puzzle Bobble and I didn't like it enough to keep the ROM on my hard drive. Don't remember too many specifics, but wasn't one for me in the slightest, similarly to Worms 3D, but that wasn't as bad of an experience.
Dragon's Lair. Every once in a while some idiot on FB will talk about how great of a game it was. My thought in that situation: "How nice for you Mr. Moneybags!" There was no skill or strat to the game, it was just an expensive version of Simon: memorize left or right, up or down. To a poor kid like me, it was anathema to going to the arcade if I could burn through $5 in 5 minutes.
Dig-Dug gets an honorable mention: it was a slower, shittier version of Mr. Do! in my opinion. I thought I read an article that game owners could program the game to have slower reaction time which makes sense for my experience. I later found out that that was a feature in a lot of games, like in Gauntlet, they could set health pots to give more or less health, and Mortal Combat could literally cheat by cutting out frames of animation to perform certain attacks "faster".
Deponia. I was so disgusted by the main character, I barely got out of the first room before I quit, uninstalled, and thought seriously about deleting it from my account. Not refunding it, just deleting it. I can't believe they made an entire series of those games.
What's your issue with the main character?
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.
You'd still likely hate Civ: BE. I didn't even play Civ 6 and I hated it.
That's my impression too, tbh. But when I've said that in Civ spaces before I get the "it's good if you're not a 6 kiddie" pushback
Hey, if some small set of people enjoyed it, good for them. I did not. I was especially unhappy with it because I had hoped it would be the spiritual successor to Sig Meier's Alpha Centauri, which I legit like more than any actual Civ game.
Mario hoops 3 on 3 for the DS. I was young kid and didn't enjoy it one bit.
That's because that game requires mad skills with the stylus lol. It required ridiculous precision to make your shots, so most of us would resort to spamming dunks.
But I had one friend who was actually good with shooting and could destroy anyone in multiplayer and was the only one who unlocked every character.
The 4 player multiplayer was also fun because it was just item spamming with no hoops so you didn't have to worry about shooting, passing, etc.
Maybe I'll try it again 😁
Primal on ps2
Say what you want, Jen will always be cool for me 😌
"Calisto" is literally the only reason i jist replayed it xD and scree even though he's a shithead
It's serious business in my house. We play to the death here.
Okay boomer. Make better choices and then maybe it won't be bad.
Bit harsh
Bad overdone joke with a shitty sentiment. Harshness earned
Maybe this is where he/she vents. 🤷
And we too can vent about overdone jokes with shitty sentiment.
Maybe his/her partner is actually not nice...
Yeah, but that falls under the "make better choices" part. Choose a spouse that you enjoy spending time with and it's a great time. Don't stay with someone you're miserable with "for the kids".