What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)?
Numen: Contest of Heroes is a game that sits at about 50% recommended on steam. I beat it years ago and really enjoyed myself, but I knew it was a unique fit for me. I only say “bad” so that we have common ground, but I value that experience.
What are “bad” games you enjoy?
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Choro-Q High Grade 2 (a.k.a. Road Trip or Road Trip Adventure) for the PS2.
Just one more in a very long line of low-budget tie-in video games for a popular line of toy vehicles for children. Most western reviewers try to play it for the racing (which I admit is buggy and middling at best) and dismiss it as trash.
But it's not about the racing. The racing is incidental; just a bit of action to break up the rest of the game and give you an overall goal to aim for. The real game is exploring a huge open world, meeting hundreds of NPCs, getting involved in their stories, solving mysteries, and digging up every last collectible in the game.
Enter the matrix was fun as hell, at least the first mission with all the bullet time, kung-fu and acrobatics. It wasn't a good game, but it was everything I needed from a Matrix spinoff
Kane and Lynch!
I liked it way more than Gears of War, which was also a 2 player coop cover shooter released around the same time.
I just really liked the banter, the characters, the setting, the way that you could see how one of the characters was crazy because when you play coop as him he sees different things.
Loved every second of it when I played it, even in single player.
The Matrix Online. It was not a very good game mechanically, but the community and the monolith employees that would log on to role play major characters was the most fun I've ever had playing video games in my life.
Hmm, I guess I'll go with Barbie Explorer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Petz Sports. Also arguably Ostrich Runner because it's unfinished/unpolished in some places: particularly I don't know how the final level is meant to be played because it ends on its own without the player really doing anything. I played those as a kid so I was less critical back then.
#game #videogames #gaming
The first Witcher game. I adored it. Janky controls, weird plot holes, subpar graphics. But oh man - the environments, the ambiance, and the dialogue absolutely slap.
Clive Barker's Jericho
It's janky af but it has great atmosphere.
I thought it was great, loved the characters, the atmosphere and all the lore, didn't know it was considered bad until now 😅
Really cool to see this mentioned. It was a mediocre game indeed but had such an amazing premise. I still think about it often.
Far Cry 2.
The game is fundamentally broken in a way that mods apparently can't even fix. The enemy militia checkpoints instantly fully respawn as soon as you trip an invisible trigger. It makes combat with them pointless, which means getting stuck in a firefight with a checkpoint tedious.
The weapon degradation feature is way overtuned to cause some weapons to start visibly rusting from shot to shot.
These two aspects turn the game into a slog. Not even in a way that makes it immersive and survivalist, but immersion breakingly frustrating.
It's a shame because the game was so ambitious. The game having a mechanic where a player at 0 health can get randomly saved if they befriended an NPC which will drag them to safety is really cool. The fire spreading everywhere was visually and tactically great. The malaria bouts were controversial, but I think they were a good way to increase the feeling of survival and desperation. There's a lot good with a bleak, serious, and grounded Far Cry game but it just missed the mark in all the most impossible to ignore ways.
'Far Cry 2 (2)' would be amazing.
Bear with me…
Megaman legends 2
Silly kids game, lots of fun, early dungeon crawling, but they snuck in heavy philosophy.
There is a scene where the protagonist is recalling long forgotten memories. The last living human, in luxury, in extravagance, in exactly what techbros want today but actually achieved here, has a perfect system, a perfect world, serving his every whim. A world without poverty, disease, suffering.
And he is lonely.
He befriends a bot in this system charged with keeping order. Basically a cop in this world. But he gives him special privileges to be able to “think” in ways the others are restricted from. This one is special. He literally creates a friend.
Then he uses the incredible technological prowess to recreate suffering.
He creates a synthetic recreation of humans, designed to be vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to suffering. They are subject to pressures that simply delay their deaths. And through doing so they achieve meaning and happiness. They exist.
The master watches them, like fish in an aquarium, for generations. Eventually, he goes down to earth to fully experience them. Thousands of years of disease free living have basically robbed this last human of an immune system. He is vulnerable there. No force in the universe can take him out. Man has become god. And yet, he goes down there anyway.
To experience the smell of a dinner bearing prepared.
He dies. Before he does, he released the bot that brought him down to earth from the rules of the system that governed him and told him to burn it all down. Perfection was not a remedy, it was a curse. And then he dies as the bot holds him in his hands, watching him fade away.
This was a game for children. And I understood way too much of it.
Starbound is kind of like Terraria in space, but with a worse gameplay loop, worse characters, and worse bosses, but I did like gentrifying the cosmos.
Man, the full release Starbound was such a... I don't want to call it a disappointment but it's definitely a shame what happened with it. It went through so many cool mechanics throughout the development and threw away like half of them (not to mention the near complete rewrite of the lore). Such a weird situation.
I barely touched the 1.0 version but I still play some of the beta builds from time to time - they might lack in content but boy do they grab me in a way the full release never managed to.
I love starbound, it's definitely not a bad game at all.
Not sure if this counts because it's not that bad, but Final Fantasy 15.
I can't even begin to explain how much of a complete mess this game is. The combat consists of mashing buttons and teleporting away when you're low HP, the open world is very big and isn't that interesting, it's a mess of systems that don't work together because this game had a very troubled development, and the story is borderline incomprehensible - the last third of the game felt like I was skipping cutscenes. The few dungeons included were also terrible. Oh and there are parts in the game where you literally have to wait entire minutes in a car waiting to go from point A to B.
And yet, I played through the whole thing, it was weirdly relaxing. Whenever it wasn't trying to be a final fantasy game, it was actually pretty fun. Fishing, doing menial tasks, chocobo racing (and riding chocobos in general) were great. The game also has some of the most beautiful towns I've seen in gaming, and boy is that soundtrack perfect.
I enjoyed it a lot, but by all accounts I'd still call it a bad game.
Agree, it’s a spectacular world to bop about in on your boys road trip. But a pretty junk final fantasy game outside of that
Gonna agree with you for opposite reasons. The combat in the postgame dungeon, Costlemark I think. The one where you can’t use any healing items, it was a worthy challenge.
The other postgame dungeon, the platforming one was, was way better than many final fantasy challenges like jumping rope and dodging lighting.
Special mention for the incredible soundtrack, the Matoya’s Cave remix especially.
But ya everything before the postgame, the umm main game I guess, was ridiculously short. Imagine FFIV ending when you drill into the underworld, or FFVI ending when the the world breaks, that’s what the story in FF15 feels like. As soon as you depart to the next continent you get rug pulled by a time jump that takes you to the final boss 🫠
I too loved the first 85% of FF15, even did all of the sidequests.
I don't know how it ends and I've completed the game.
I played all the 16 bit Phantasy star games when i was a kid. Phantasy star 3 is considered to be the black sheep of the series but it is the one that stuck with me the most, something about the music and atmosphere, and odd take on scifi fantasy it portrays.
Something key to remember is that when a game gets “Mixed” on Steam, eg 50/50, that still means half the people who play it enjoyed it. Half is not nothing.
For instance, Aliens: Colonial Marines. To my knowledge, AI was kinda shit, but could be fixed in a text file, but apparently a lot of people still enjoyed it otherwise.
So there’s probably a lot of these that have niche appeal to people.
No, it means half the people who can be bothered to review it enjoyed it.
For every review theres probably several hundred/thousands of people who play the game and dont review.
Good point. Personally, I basically never review games on Steam (love OR hate).
Same. The people who review are a very very small minority.
Hmm.
eehhh
Yes but there is no reason to think that they wouldn't fall roughly in the same distribution.
Two Worlds and Two Worlds 2 The first one was advertised as the "Oblivion killer". Which is hilarious, because of how janky bug ridden pile of code it is. Yet I love it. I could create such broken OP characters, which could one shot bosses.
The second one got a bit better production quality, but its still a broken mess. Love it.
If I jumped in right now, should I just start with #2?
2nd is the better game, if you want a little more streamlined experience.
I would not worry about the story, the voice acting is so ridiculously bad in a funny way, you will not remember anything, just the presentation.
Came here to say it. I absolutely love Two Worlds games, they are so unique janky, both of them. The dialogues are so awful in a good way.
I am just happy Two Worlds came into being because we got that beautiful speedrun out of it : https://youtu.be/5NeR-bT3uv0?is=F6o9i7-_Dgrm09qP
Always makes me laugh, "what a god" :D It demonstrates the game really good
Yeah, and the audience reactions make this run even better.
I actually enjoyed both Two Worlds, even replayed them like 10 years ago. Tbh though "janky bug ridden pile of code" also applies to Bethesda titles, especially Oblivion.
Yup, except the two words games had like 75 USD budget and 2 voice actors tops :)
Oh yeah! Didn't they give away a physical edgy dagger with 'cool spikes' with the special edition of one of the Two Worlds games?
Ultima 3 Exodus for the NES. Few games incentivize you to wait to level up as much as this one does, not to mention the drudgery.
I forgot about the "not leveling" thing. I thought I was so clever as a kid when I realized it was better.
Stretching the definition of "bad", perhaps, I say Far Cry 4/5.
It's the classic game with a map full of repetitive quests: go there and kill that guy, liberate the outpost, climb the tower, etc. It should have basically 0 replayability value, and yet sometimes I just need to switch off my brain and mindlessly do one quest after the other.
FC4 and FC5 have some structural differences. I think a decent amount of feedback was taken for FC5. It doesn't have tower climbing puzzles and the collectathoning which had gotten way out of hand in FC4 was toned down a lot in FC5. FC5 replaced some of that with the totally optional survivalist bunkers that give rewards per bunker. It's hard to go back to FC4 and it's "collect 300 scraps of paper" nonsense after FC5.
FC5 even has a joke about not making you climb towers in the tutorial island
Worms 3D sits at 70 score on metacritic. I see lots of people mention that this is the worst Worms title.
I still have original double-cd game and it holds a special corner in my nostalgia box.
Yes!!!! This was my first Worms game. I think on Playstation 2. I loved it. I also bought the Xbox copy of Worms 4 Mayhem for the Xbox and played it on my 360. I think those games, even with their faults, were so much fun.
Starfield is great if instead of wanting to play a good RPG with a great story, you wanna just play 1st person Diablo with guns in space and be a loot goblin.
Castlevania 64. Not even Legacy of Darkness, the original one. It gets a lot of hate I think just because the rest of the series has such awesome games and it gets held to a high standard but just as a N64 game I loved it.
Maplestory. I had a ton of fun hanging out with friends and grinding for hours with cute art. I would never recommend anyone play it, absolutely does not respect your time.
By all accounts, Quest 64 ranked somewhere between runny dog shit and aggressive bone cancer, but I was just enthralled with it as a kid. Actually kind of bummed when I got a Switch and it wasn't on the retro games subscription thing.
It's up there with Carmageddon 64
My general rule is that if the game title ends in "64" and doesn't start with "Mario", it probably sucks.
Catmageddon 64 was extra special, though ... not because it was a bad game, but because political decisions made it unplayable
Yeah, that's quite true and it wasn't the only N64 game that was made worse for the same reasons.
That was my Blockbuster rental one weekend. Coming off of final fantasy games it was a little disappointing, but not a disaster.
Earth Defense Force is a terrible looking game with an even worse premise and is fun as hell.
I've heard this a lot! I just searched "Earth Defense Force" and it showed me #6 and that makes me happy. Wasn't the original on 360? I remember thinking it look like a bust and then hearing people pretty much say what you are saying.
Yeah, the first one on the 360 was called Earth Defense Force 2017 (actually the 3rd game in the series). I've played a bunch of EDF 2017 and 2025 and they are so fun. I'm glad they're still making them; those games are so over-the-top. If you don't care about graphics and just want something fun, I highly recommend.
It’s got good steam reviews so everyone else liked it too, but Mad Max. I would describe it to people as just a great bad game. It’s not art. The story is crap. The ending was dumb.
The actual gameplay was amazing. Just really really great. Still love that game.
These might be closer to mediocre than BAD bad but I don't expect too many people to mention them so why not.
Edit: I remembered another one!
Trespasser - physics based action-adventure game from 1998, intended as a sequel to The Lost World: Jurassic Park movie. It has extremely weird and wonky control scheme where you interact with the world by moving your hand - as in, you physically move it with your mouse, no simple "press button to do things".
It's not super intuitive but it does work pretty well once you get the hang of it. Heck, I even managed to throw a 3-pointer at the court in the residential zone! Man, I wish I still had my Twitch account...
The game also went with a "no hud" approach so no ammo count (only vague call-outs by the character like "about 5 shots") and to check your health you had to look at the tattoo on your chest (it changed depending on your HP). Also no gun reloading cause your other arm is broken and your character can't do it one handed, I guess.
It was unfinished, extremely ambitious (both in terms of planned features and implemented technology) and has a bunch of problems. It's an interesting and very unique experience, worth a try even today in my opinion. It's also the only piece of Jurassic Park media I actually care about and I wish it was easily obtainable in official distribution again - come on GOG, you can do it!
Oni was fun, but did not age well. By the time I finished the game I had enough combat moves to make it feel interesting, then the game ended.
Absolutely! It's a very flawed game and a pretty rough experience, even with the Anniversary Edition fixes and mods. I'm still not sure what makes me go back to it but for some reason I end up doing just that every few years. It's one of a few titles I'd like to see in a remastered or (slightly) modernised form. Not that it's going to happen but one can dream, right?
You know, now that I think of it, Mirrors Edge Catalyst kinda scratched that Oni itch a while back. Another underrated game that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Still waiting for Oni 2
Catalyst missed the mark for me. Between locking the moves behind skill tree, larger focus on combat and slightly reworked art style it just didn't grab me the way the original did. It's not all bad and I still want to play it to completion some day but it was kind of a disappointment nonetheless.
Best I can do is the leaked early build of the project attempted by Angel Studios. It's rough, obviously unfinished and Konoko looks a bit different but it has a somewhat working combat system you can play with and a bunch of levels to run around in. It's also prone to crashes but that's to be expected.
Oni - a certified classic/hidden gem. Bungie cooked there. Just not with the level design and plot of the game.
I think the general idea for the plot and world at large is pretty good (there are some interesting and rather grim details in the background), it's just that Bungie missed the mark with how to write and present these things to actually hit the mark. It was also rushed out the door due to business shenanigans which cemented the end result.
Kane and Lynch 2 was an amazing experience with a friend. We talk about it as much as Gears of War for all of its impact. Reflecting now, I still think it has style.
It has great style! I love how much the leaned into the found footage/internet video aesthetic, as well as how they decided to go for a more naturalistic approach in regards to game ambiance (environmental sounds, diegetic music etc). It's such a unique experience in video games, especially bigger published ones.
Yes! Plus there is the ::: naked run ::: level where we squealed our way through it. A hot take to: the online was fun and under appreciated from what I remember.
Edit: I don’t know how spoiler tags work.
They really went all in with setpieces that felt like a serious crime drama. I never got to experience the multiplayer (co-op or otherwise) but what I've seen looked cool. I wonder if they're people playing it these days.
For spoilers it's:
I remember even back then that the amount of people playing was the issue. It had this "fragile alliance" mode where you all would do a heist, collecting money as you went. The players with the most money "won" by the end. You could turn on your allies and try to take theirs and get to the getaway, but you could also not and then split everything 50/50 from all who make it to the getaway. Pretty sure you could even bribe the driver/pilot with a 50/50 offer to leave early and abandon everyone else. Or something like that. It was a lot of fun and certainly unique in its time. I actually got inspired and just found a video. Good times.
My favorite mechanic of the online mode was that if you betrayed everyone, you were marked as a traitor for the next match you played. Teammates were always sus of one another regardless lol
Hocus Pocus
Duke Nukem 2
Rise of the Triad
Raptor: Call of the Shadows
Sim Tower
Shadow the Hedgehog
Star Fox Adventures
Halo Reach
Oookay calling reach a bad game will make me your enemy for life
It's a good game, but bad in terms of reception, which is what this thread is about
Okay fair
Raptor was great.
Uplink
Uplink wasn't bad at all. It just was quite niche.
Yeah its a little old timey maybe.
Old timey? You are making me feel older than Yoda.
I'm from that period as well, I just already own that in old. ;)
I still own the original (mini) CD (80mb capacity?)
I loved Uplink! It's got that great '80s/90s-hacker vibe.
X-Com: The Bureau Declassified. Your "teammates" are fundamentally suicidal, making keeping them alive almost impossible. But the setting, story and challenge made up for it. It was inventive.
The Technomancer: Mid-budget game by Spiders. Was short and straightforward, which most people disliked, but I thought it was a blast. The story still sticks in my head screaming for me to write a novel based on it.
Hard Times by MDickie.
It's crap, but has generated some stupidly fun shit because of it
Friend and I played through Redfall and enjoyed it immensely , specifically because of how broken and half-complete it was. We just could not stop laughing.
Athena for NES. Now THAT'S some jank!
Bad is very subjective ofcourse. Most of the time these days it means that a video game is very polarizing. Elite: Dangerous is a great example of this. I fucking love it and have lived in that game for thousands of hours. But it's not hard to see how it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Some of them born from my period of discovering Castlevania and having to play all of them.
First, the N64 Castlevanias. Ugly, terrible platforming, bad camera, but occasionally trying cool stuff. Oh, of course, bonus point for the second one being technically a sequel with new characters and a continuation of the story and basically the same game with a lot of reused and slightly tweaked levels.
And now for the worst one...Castlevania Judgment (Wii). A fighting game featuring several characters from the Castlevania series fighting in gimmicky arenas with a generic "I gathered you all from all over the timeline to fight the ultimate big bad". I loved to hate that game.
Most characters are unrecognizable. They got Obata of Death Note fame to redesign everyone, and it shows.
Simon Belmont has the usual beefy barbarian body with Light Yagami's head grafted on it. Death is basically Ryuk. Maria has a distinctly Misa Amane gothic lolita style that has nothing to do with any of her apparitions. Grant Danasti is... well it's not as much as he's a Death Note character, he just basically became Voldo from SoulCalibur for some reason. Eric Lecarde was brought into the game as a young boy and doesn't look anything like his two apparitions in the series, he's the token shouta brat in this.
Funnily enough, the game has Cornell, the werewolf from the aforementioned second Castlevania 64, despite those games being basically purged from the Castlevania canon in everything else. Likewise the boss is a very random reference to the Kid Dracula NES game, basically a Castlavania parody game featuring... a young Alucard? maybe? He technically already had a reference in Symphony of the Night, but in this game he's specifically referencing "lore" from the parody game.
Even the characterization is unsufferable. Maria is a teen from somewhere between Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night, and she spends the whole game envying other female characters who have bigger breasts. In fact almost everyone is obsessed with something they have to bring up in almost every line, and it's either a very basic background tidbit or completely out of place.
All in all it's very much bad SoulCalibur with an attempt at CV fanservice completely missing the point. I spent way too much time on that shit.
Sacred 2 for PC. It is a top down action RPG (Diablo-like) that had dated graphics on release (it was still essentially 2D when everyone else had already gone 3D), it had tons of super cringe voice acting, and jankiness for miles. The game itself was just really, really fun, especially in co-op. The different characters and builds were really fun to play in a way that tend to get balanced out by dev in AAA games. My friends and I had a great time playing it, but it was clearly not a good game.
If you've played it, do you think it is worth it to play the first game first? Both are on sale from Steam. These look fun to me.
Sacred 1 is genuinely amazing, go for it
I did play it, but it didn't "do it" for me the same way the sequel did. It could still be worth a shot. If you do end up playing Sacred 2, make sure you do the quest chain involving the "concert". I won't say more so you can experience the wackiness.
'Pirates of the Caribbean' (2003) by Bethesda
Edit: Also 'Age of Pirates' (2006)
I just liked pirates I guess.
Did you know that game was actually Sea Dogs 2 but got rebranded because Disney wanted a game to go with their movie?
Such a great game. I played the hell out of it but could never figure out how it had absolutely nothing to do with the movies.
Does anyone remember Deathtrap Dungeon. The game was so bad and confusing but i loved it.
I watched a portion of a lengthy video about it from Josh Strife Hayes. It seems like one of those games that would frustrate and compel me.
I don't know that anyone will understand, but, Rogue Warrior on the Xbox 360.
A game about Dick Marcinko and is voiced by Mickey Rourke. Its gameplay and movement dynamics were trash, but the storyline, vulgar language, and achievements were fun to work on. Because it was so poorly received, hardly anyone played online, so I'm still missing 1 achievement 😓. But I made some good friends on Xbox live during this days.
Plus, I got to learn about SEAL Team 6 and its history. I've also meet Adm William McRaven who's spoken well of him and his accomplishments.
"April fool motherfucker."
The lines in that game are truly something else. It's really not a good game at all but I think that credits song makes up for a lot of it.
For anyone who doesn't like YT
Rogue Warrior credits song: https://inv.nadeko.net/OVoyGUcXepc
BONUS: Killing Gunther end credits song https://inv.nadeko.net/M3s3oFddWI0
HOLY SHIT yeah I forgot about the credits!! Lmao 😅
Thing thing on Crazymonkeygames
I will likely be crucified for this, but it's true...
Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. (SNES version)
This game was hard as fuck and super satisfying to beat.
We still talking about the game?
Fancy a wank, mate?
I always liked the first Bubsy. Never understood the hate it got. The second one, though, is completely unplayable to me due to the lag between pressing the jump button and Bubsy actually jumping. No review I've ever seen has mentioned this for some reason.
Agreed, every sequel was trash.
Daikatana.
The first map was absolute mince, the colour tones were boring, the opening cinematics were long and tiresome, and even the whole first episode was a bit shit. The sidekicks were poorly coded and the last map was just a challenge map, especially with the game breaking bug at the end.
However...
The rest of the game was actually pretty good. The Greek episode was absolutely beautiful and excellently designed, the Norwegian episode was great fun and the soundtrack was wonderful, and the last episode was... decent, nothing great but nothing poor.
The patch fixed the bullshit sidekick pathfinding, the titular Daikatana made you feel like a fucking badass if you took the time to level it up, and the story was actually okay for the last three quarters of the game.
Moreover, if you like twitch multiplayer games - the multiplayer component is the closest to pure QuakeWorld I have ever experienced. Fast, unforgiving, great movement mechanics. It's got a very high skill ceiling.
Unfortunately, the opening hour or four is massively substandard and sunk the entire game - John Romero's name and the ill fated marketing campaign just made it easy fodder for people to shit on it.
Like Duke Nukem Forever, TimeShift, FEAR 2, or the Half Life expansions... it isn't amazing... but it's a competent FPS and does the job.
DMC devil may cry. I played it and it was fun. The someone showed me "the real dante" and I was like nah that guy looks cringe I like this Dante better. Then I played DMC 3 and I was like yep this game sucks Compared to DMC DMC. But I saw more from the franchise and I can definitely see why dmc dmc is so hated.
Same. Unfortunately, I haven't seen another game like it. Everyone complained that it wasn't like the rest of the franchise, but since I did like DMC DMC, the rest of the franchise doesn't sound like it's worth my time.
Xenogears/xenosaga. I liked them. Xenogears had a bad disc 2. Xenosaga had a bad episode 2. Saga also went overboard with the needlessly sexualized robots. But it was fun, the story was interesting, and by episode 3 the graphics were really good. Music was good, characters were enjoyable.
All I remember liking from episode 2 through was jr charging a religious zealot screaming “you damn bitch” while firing at her. It was such a weird scene I was laughing my ass off. Oh and the American censorship had a scene where a little girl going through a breakdown scooping blood from her mother and trying to put it back in the corpse, except there’s no blood in the US version so WTF are we supposed to think is happening here? Ep 2 was horrible.
When I am in a bad boss fight design competition and my opponent is any XenoSaga game:
How dare you!
Xenogears is a flawed masterpiece. Even disc 2 wasn't "bad" so much as they pushed about three discs of story into it as they were not given the time and resources to do it right. From what I read, It was supposed to be a seven game series/story, but they knew they were only given a shot for one game so they picked one of the better chapter in the middle and got a bit overly ambitious.
As far as Xenosaga is considered, I am really surprised you called out episode 2 as I consider that the best one. If any could be called out, it would be ep 3 because it was supposed to be a longer series and they have to change it up to have it make any sense whatsoever. I really enjoyed episode 2, though the censorship issues you mention were hilariously bad.
Gears was great but the pacing was uneven. The story didn’t flow and progress. It surged uncomfortably. And emeralda never got an omnigear, which I’m still pissed about.
Emeralda was my favorite character, though I preferred fighting with citan. Chu chu is a fucking meme and I hate her. My step brother would just drug her up and beat on shit with her for the lols but I still hated chu chu. Billy had a delightfully dark storyline that was clearly based on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church.
Ep 3 was a different style but wasn’t bad. Ep 1 was a good storytelling and battle style but you could tell they were still finding their way. Ep 2 was just….ugh. The into with asher being deployed was gorgeous though.
Battleborn eventually shut down with a mixed rating on Steam, but I don't accept that. Battleborn was a great game with terrible publicity and if randy had just said "FPS MOBA" instead of trying to compete with overwatch I could still be playing my beloved grenade-chicken.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. It's more of a camp and a meme answer tough.
Oh man, mine is proper raw. The whole gameplay takes place on this map and like, two other locations:
The gameplay is basically just:
Sometimes you also have to click in that second building a few times to craft something, then walk to a third building and click "upgrade" there.
This is a quote from the solo dev:
So, it's unfinished. The dev themselves says that it's kind of terrible. And it's an idle game, which many folks would hardly consider a game to begin with.
But yeah, I had fun. Every time you upgrade a building, it looks different afterwards. And so, just seeing how the map develops over time and what new things would get unlocked by each upgrade, was cool.
I think, in particular that it's such a niche game, where you really don't know what to expect, that kind of made it for me. It doesn't follow "good" game design rules, which make other games all feel quite samey. The rawness was kind of the appeal.
I guess, now I need to link to the game. But yeah, don't complain to me, if it is terrible. You have been warned: https://content.luanti.org/packages/1248/castrum/
It won't download for me ☹️
Hmm, it's been probably a year since I downloaded it, so not sure, downloading it works in general. But how are you downloading it? Directly from the webpage? Or did you install Luanti and are downloading it through the "Content" tab in there?
Might need an older version of Luanti, I'm not sure...
I recently mastered Scooby Doo: Night of a 100 Frights for the Nintendo GameCube as part of a Collectathon event on RetroAchevements and... kinda liked it. Somehow a metroivania platformer with zany hijinx moves and dogshit physics.
But then again, it's intentionally bad sometimes to match the old cartoons Hanna Barbera style. It has a laugh track for crying out loud!
Actually most of these games in the event have some redeeming factors (I even liked Mort the Chicken)... except Mr. Beans Wacky World. That game is actually awful.
Wow I played the hell out of that game when I was like 8. Haven't thought about it in forever but how I'm remembering so much about it. I would love to try it again
The Lost World: Jurassic Park on the Playstation was bad and also quite difficult but I loved it.
Escape From Tarkov is so fun. It's such a shame that the game is a flaming pile of hot garbage. Runs like absolute ass. You can lose tons of progress from the game bugging out. The game is a huge grindfest. It's stupid expensive with predatory tiered pricing and addons. And the devs lie through their teeth about shit constantly.
No game has come close to matching its feel though.
Thank God for SPT. Modding away so many frustration points, no cheaters, improving AI... Makes it a lot more enjoyable, at the cost of running even more like ass than usual.
Should also be mentioned that the devs are Russian nationalists. Their lead developer is in cohoots with some of the most despicable genocidal maniacs that support the war effort to this day. Buying that game means you're actively funding the Russian war effort.
pixel gun 3d, that game was my childhood it was a blatant ip infringing p2w bug ridden mess but damn was it fun and the gun designs were really cool too (although i'm not really sure whether or not they were fully original)
i don't play it anymore tho; it's gotten so bad these past few years that it isn't fun to play anymore, and the old version revival projects are run by a bunch of bigots
Redfall. It was hyped up and delayed, then after all that released unfinished. It deserved the beating it received on launch and was a major flop, but it was still an Arkane game and after trying it I enjoyed it. The Arkane DNA is in there, the gun play is satisfying and killing vampires is fun. The big ones are genuinely scary and as a solo player you learn which ones to tip toe around. It's been updated and improved upon, but despite this still possesses many bugs and flaws. I still play it from time to time.
Life is Feudal. It had the potential to be something great, but ended dying in a hail of bad server coding and poorly implemented monetization.
Every so often I will reinstall it, find one of the free servers and just chill for hours on end.
Populous: The Beginning (1998). I don't think it was actually bad, it's just been forever. But man did we have fun with that.
I think I played it on ps1 lol
That's a blast from the past! I used to play it on the Amiga in like 1990. Loved it too.
Drakkhen
Jesus fuck that was an awful game. Think I got the SNES version out of a bargain basket for like 5 bucks. Spent hours trying to figure out what to do next while getting my party randomly deleted by stars in the sky that randomly attack you and tossed it.
Out of morbid curiosity loaded it up on an emulator about 15 years later and followed a gamefaq and finally beat the game to get probably one of the most disappointing endings ever. The game itself wasn't too bad so long as I had a guide translating the vague clues about where I needed to go. I feel there is almost no way any sane individual under 16 would be able to beat it without some kind of guide.
Okay, as a Sonic fan, I can say with confidence that Sonic the Hedgehog ( Sonic '06 ) was a very rushed game and a lot of fans don't like it, but I love it. Partially nostalgia and partly loving buggy messes you can sometimes break in your favor.
Same could be said for Sonic Lost Worlds, which has my least favorite special stages on the 3DS version specifically.
Low bar to clear, but it answer the question easily.
A lot of people who grew up with it do like it (it does hold a weird nostalgic spot for me too), and you can actually blame either the Wii's specs and/or management at Sega for it being as poorly held together as it is. It along with sonic heroes are arguably sonic adventures 3 & 4 since both follow a similar formula to the adventure titles.
Yeah, its pretty broken, but the ways its broken are consistent and if you know how its broken it can actually be a really fun sandbox to fuck around in.
Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage for N64. By all rights it's not a very good game, but something about it was just compelling to me.
A couple I can remember really enjoying at the time that were not well reviewed and yeah probably are bad.
I don't remember a whole lot about either of these but do remember playing them a lot.
Final Fantasy XIII I don't think it's actually a bad game, and thought so at the time too. There's a lot of revisionist history with this one. I see so many discussions now of people being like yeah it's a great game I love it. Where were all these people at when it came out? XIII-2 is...weird. I think I prefer XIII, but like both. I've never finished Lightning Returns but enjoyed what I played.
For me it would be Dungeon Siege III, specifically in co-op. From what I understand people dislike it for its differences from the previous games in the franchise, and even that aside it is fairly janky and unintuitive. But if you can laugh at the unintuitive jank then there's plenty worse games out there.
This is a great example in the thread. I also really liked DS3, it was very fun despite (or maybe because of?) the jank.
Empire total war on release, the battle AI was absolute garbage to the point where you can just start as the Netherlands, walk over to Paris and take their country.
Before everyone researches fire by rank you could just spread out the infantry and have 2x firepower. Cavalry charges straight into you, pathfinding was so bad that you'd have a single column of men moving through a wide area. Fucking loved it though, it was a grand strategy spectacle and naval battles felt intense.
I had fun unlocking the pirates via config file edit and spamming out general units from a single buccaneer sword infantry and took over all of the Americas.
The Close Combat series up through maybe Close Combat III really wasn't incredibly-well balanced. Like, if you're playing on defense, a lot of the game basically consists of having a badly-outnumbered force, setting up an ambush with as much of your force as possible, opening up all at once when the other side is badly exposed and doing as much damage as possible. Then watch the game, and maybe once things have mostly died down, one moves a few units to reinforce.
In III, retreating as far as possible without losing an operation to get a ton of reinforcements, then pushing back through, is advantageous.
A lot of the game is about sticking heavy tanks on hills with good lines of sight.
I mean, there are just ways to play the game that the AI does not deal with well.
But I still had an absolute blast playing it.
The AI for Wargame: Red Dragon is pretty disappointing, and I generally don't like playing games multiplayer, but I like the game enough that I was willing to just play against the AI. There were major improvements by Eugen in Steel Division 2 --- it's a far better game to play single-player. So...as a single-player game, I'd say that W:RD is a pretty bad game, but...I still really enjoyed playing it single-player.
Those all sound like legit realistic tactics though
Well, to some extent.
For the "fighting on a hill" thing, they didn't implement hull-down, which would be kind of an important factor in the real world. And a lot of the drawbacks to heavy tanks, like logistics issues, didn't really apply. So in practice, just place heavy tanks on hills (since you don't have to do much to maneuver them there, set them to attack, and ignore them for most of the game until the fighting dies down. It's...not super engaging.
For the ambushes, you get to pre-position your forces, knowing pretty exactly where the enemy forces are, and both sides basically transport a substantial mass into place at one time. Kinda like teleporting two sides together into close proximity, and the computer not sending out reconnaissance units to feel out the other side, just starting a rush over open ground.
It's been years since I played it, but Ephemeral Fantasia was this kind of fever dream of a RPG on the PS2 that I remember enjoying that had a time loop thing like Majora's Mask. I think I was actually sick when I played it so that added to the fever dream vibe.
Somehow my brother wound up with a copy of Crash Time: Autobahn Pursuit for Xbox 360. There are many reasons to call it a bad game, and it’s a little odd to release a video game in North America for a German TV show few people in North America have heard of. We each beat the game eventually, but we had a lot more fun not playing the game the way it was intended and just driving around the open world racing each other and crashing into things. I even wrote to them suggesting they add a mode similar to the car soccer games Top Gear tried on their show (this was several years before Rocket League was released).
I dunno if I'd still enjoy it if I went back to replay it today, but I have a childhood soft spot for Final Fantasy II. I loved the absurdity of being able to dual-wield shields and attack myself to level evasion, what a beautifully stupid game.
A Valley Without Wind 1 and 2. Not big. Not well known. But damn I love em!
I had more fun with Jurassic Park: Trespasser and Die By the Sword than I should have just because they had early physics engines.
I actually wonder if Trespasser would make a good VR conversion.
Peek-a-boo
"Bad" is of course subjective, but the games I play most are gacha games - Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. Amazing graphics and music, etc. in a free to play* game, and every few months they release an entire paid game's worth of new content.
*Of course they are designed to inspire spending money, and I do somewhat: The fixed monthly IAPs only, if I would need to spend extra to get a specific character or weapon I wait for a rerun.
But I like anime girls, and these games are full of them.
HSR is a powerhouse when you include the lore, story, graphics, music, etc., that just happens to also be a gacha game.
Theres a fun top down Ice Hockey game called "Tape to Tape"
Its not a GREAT game, its a bit shallow but it is very fun.
I see this all the time on Linus Tech Tips and it looks great.
Hatred. I know it's edgy for the sake of being edgy, and is not top gameplay, but I enjoy it as a fun passtime from time to time.
I played the hell out of Screamer 4x4
It had nothing to do with the Screamer racing games (which were early 3D PC games), it was actually an off road 4x4 trials game. Not very good in terms of game mechanics or graphics, but the physics were satisfying.
I loved Black Survival back in the day. It was early in the Battle Royal wave and it somehow made a visual novel style multiplayer BR fun for me, but any of my friends I convinced to try it absolutely despised it
I live Eurojank. Gotta be my favorite genre. I've finished Of Orcs And Men lately, it's a pretty bad game but I really enjoyed it.
Probably Minecraft, I know its Robloxslop but the gameplay loop is just very satisfying.
??? minecraft?
It's bait, or satire. Unsure which one.
Its this game about squares.
cubes.
Redditor
failed ragebaiter
I might have an existential crisis, but: I don't think any game you enjoy is bad by definition. Or is this about Metacritic ratings being bad? How do you know a game is bad, if you enjoy it?
Alpha Protocol, a spy-themed RPG by Obsidian and probably their worst game. The gameplay was absolute garbage, but it had some of the best writing in games and your dialog choices actually affected the plot in dozens of ways. It was the first time I can remember since the old Sierra days where a minor choice you made ten hours ago could come back and screw you over.
In some ways it was the game that Mass Effect claimed to be, one that reshaped itself around your choices and let you lead the plot where you desired. It just sucks that in all other ways it was a buggy piece of crap, where everything from combat to stealth to hacking were miserable chores that weren't fun even when they did function properly.
Excuse me.
The question was about bad games that you enjoy.
Not about fuckawesome games that are fuckawesome and that Sega needs to burn for not allowing us to have a sequel of.
Alpha Protocol is one of the great tragedies from Obsidian's days of doing contract work, back when they were never given enough time or money but still put out brilliant but flawed games like AP, New Vegas, and Knights of the Old Republic 2. I would do terrible things for a remake of any of those games where the original team was given the resources to do things properly.
(Though IMO I think AP might work better as a Telltale-style game in the vein of Dispatch or the Walking Dead. The dialog is the star and all the other gameplay only detracted from it.)
Alpha Protocol being rushed was especially tragic because there's no other game that changes the plot to such an extreme degree based on your actions. It really felt like your story. It also avoided an obvious "best" route by having every choice be a tradeoff, where helping one contact could alienate or even endanger another. It's not like a Bioware game where you can pick the top option in every dialog and cruise your way to an ideal ending for everyone. You had to pick a side eventually, pitting you against former allies who you genuinely liked.
I bought this on a sale and never played it..
I bought a physical copy for PC cheap on sale, and never played it (my PC at the time wouldn't run it for some reason IDR).
Now I live in Japan and it's not available for sale here, on GOG or Steam, so I hope I can get that disc to work under Linux! I see there's an official patch that removes the DRM, but there's one for North America, and another for Europe, and I bought the game in Australia, so I it's a coin flip which one I've got. Hopefully once I install it there'll be some clues.
You are doing yourself a disservice.
Install and play it now.
Its a fantastic fucking game. Literally no two playthroughs are the same.
OK I installed it, I'll give it a go
I remember being impressed when an NPC commented on how I wore combat armor to a clandestine meeting. There were a lot of little touches that were nice.
Back 4 Blood. It was a zombie game marketed as "made by the same people who made Left 4 Dead" but they really didn't have any of that talent left after 15ish years and just seemed to be pretty unpolished all around. However, they had a card system where you make a deck of bonuses you want and after each mission you get one that you keep until the end of the campaign. But the devs, Turtle Rock, had a habit of nerfing any cards that were strong or fun into the ground even though the game was mostly PvE. Also they made a change halfway through the game's lifespan so that you get the entire deck at the start of the first level instead of building up to it. I still don't know if that was a good change or not, but they never rebalanced the game so the first couple levels of every campaign were just ridiculously easy. Unpolished game, horrible devs, but I had fun while it lasted
I had a beta. And all I remember is that on easy game is truly easy. But once you up difficulty by 1, game becomes terribly difficult. Makes it impossible to play with bots and even with real people and voice chat it was quite a challenge.
Card system should be better and they shouldn't nerf all the fun cards. They shoul've taken inspiration from Dead by Daylight. But again, for a PvE game, nerfing fun stuff to the ground is dumb and a way to distance from the community.
As a 1k hours L4D2 veteran, I really wanted to like B4B. Not sure how could they fumble the formula that they participated in creation of. Sad to see it fail.
I definitely enjoyed my time with B4B. I don't think it's a really good game, but it also wasn't as bad as everyone was saying.
Haven't played in forever though so maybe it has gone to shit in the meantime.
A couple of buddies and I still play this. It is definitely unbalanced but thats part of its charm to us. Plus when you start getting a groove as a team its just tons of fun
The card thing made it a game that was fun when you play all the time instead of the once a month your busy adult friends are free at the same time, so a lot of people that had previously loved l4d couldn't really get into it
Bioshock Infinite. I wouldn't call it bad, but it gets a bad rep for not being the game that Bioshock superfans wanted. I hadn't been infected by the immersive sim brain worm when I played it and didn't judge games based on their box-stacking mechanics, nor did I care about how it fit into the lineage of *shock games. Evaluated on its own, It was a fair shooter with great visual style and okay story.
There are other cheap shot meme games that I enjoyed for how bad they were, like Mystery of the Droods.
I don't get how game that has 94/100 on metacritic and only lost to GTA5 on it's release year calling it "not bad" is an understatement to say the least.
As someone who didn't particularly enjoy the first two, I was very grateful that Infinite was different. The only really bad part IMO was the ghost fight. On the higher difficulties, she tanked more ammo than existed in the area.
Surprised to see this in the thread. Agreed it’s a fun game!
It's the #72 highest rated game of all time on Metacritic with a 94/100. I don't think BioShock Infinite really fits this thread.
It’s a funny case where it was pretty widely panned by diehard fans of the previous games, but it was extremely popular with basically everyone else. So there was a very vocal minority who shat on the game right after it released. But it hit a broad enough audience that the new/casual players overwhelmed the diehard fans.
Bioshock Infinite is basically the Fallout 4 of Bioshock games. If you played Fallout 4 first, you’d probably think it’s a great Fallout game. The gameplay is decent, you have roleplay choices for the story, there is lots of world building, etc… But if New Vegas is already your favorite game, you probably hated FO4 for not being enough Fallout. It doesn’t mean people enjoying FO4 are wrong. It just means the game didn’t deliver what existing fans were hoping for.
Speaking of FO4, my biggest gripe is just the loss of durability of everything, but power armor. That, and power armor becoming something anyone is able to wear and is all over, removing any speciality to it, IMO.
It's kinda unfair to compare FO4 to FONV, IMO, but it's still a decent game on its own.
FO4: Welcome to Fallout! Here's your nuclear war, here's your vault, here's your wasteland, here's your wacky robots, here's your dog, here's your Good Guy Faction, here's your power armor, here's your first Deathclaw, now either go find your son or fuck off.
It really tried to cram the entire setting into a playable E3 demo, made most builds nonviable, not to mention how half-baked the modding system and settlement construction tools are.
Forgot how if you follow the main story in the beginning you face a deathclaw early. Forgot how they scale most every enemy down to your level. Yeah, not a big fan of that for deathclaws since they are supposed to be terrifying and strong.
I'd say the modding system is okay and dies it's job well enough, but the settlement system? Oh boy, is that just an underwhelming thing. It's a cool concept, but it's done in a boring manner.
The modding has the same problem blacksmithing/enchanting in Skyrim has: You have to invest a lot of advancement in the system to get any benefit out of it. Older Bethesda games let you sidestep that by throwing money at the problem which is a totally valid way to let players have more freedom but all the good stuff is locked behind feats and high stats now. Why can't my character be an emotionally stunted moron with a skilled mechanic on retainer to access the good shit? Instead I am completely reliant on farming raiders of various factions and hoping for good drops. (This is the "looter shooter" thing the other guy brought up but I don't think it's a great version of that either.)
New Vegas will always be superior to Fallout 4 in everything but graphics.
Fallout 4 is a great looter shooter. But its an absolute ass awful fallout game.. Like they bought someone elses half finished shooter, and threw super mutants and a fucking horrible RPG system into it awful.
And stability. I've recently replayed the main Fallout games and the crashing and bugs in the vanilla New Vegas experience is inexcusable.
Cant help you, it was indefensibly buggy on launch, but its long since been fixed and been shockingly stable for me, even when modded out the ass.
I genuinely can not remember the last crash I had.
Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.
Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn't hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn't have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking "yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time", which was really unsatisfying.
Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock's soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.
Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.
Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC's don't really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren't people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you're shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.
The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every "arena room" area feels the same. The guns aren't that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn't all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn't used often and there wasn't usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.
So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.
So I'd say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn't live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.
I think that every Fallout game other than New Vegas and maybe 2 is like this. There are things that people like, but there are also changes that fans of prior games are really upset about.
Fallout 3 came out, and it was shifting a much-loved isometric game with fully turn-based combat into a pausable 3D shooter. Part of Fallout and Fallout 2 was that it had good world-building. I believe that "Fallout" was originally a play on words, referring not just to the radioactive fallout, but to the societal fallout. It showed a post-apocalyptic society. In Fallout 3 and on, a lot of that world-building made a lot less sense in favor of building little mini-stories.
Fallout 4 shifted from a tradition of being able to drastically affect the world to having dialog paths that almost entirely had no effect other than reputation with one's companion. Fans complained because the game felt like it was on rails. The skill system went away, which a lot of people didn't like.
Fallout 76, aside from being buggy at release even by Bethesda's standards, took a series with lots of characters to interact with and basically eliminated them until later updates brought them back in. It had a weaker plot (especially at launch). Fallout 76 had a bunch of design decisions around being a multi-player game that made it a rather weaker single-player game --- in a series with an immersive world, constant reminders about multi-player events and such kind of don't fit in well. There was very limited ability to mod the game, whereas prior entries in the series had been extremely moddable.
There was also good new stuff that came with each, but if you went into the game wanting prior game in series but with just what you considered to be improvements and expansion, you were likely to hit some things that you didn't like.
The best Fallout Experience in the 3d era is New Vegas. Which is fitting, since it was the only one made by the actual fallout creators, that had actual love for the setting that they created.
Fallout 3 was like a collection of short stories all bound into a single hardcover. Because nothing you did in location X, affecting anything out of location X. It tried, but I think the reason it got as much praise as it did in the early days, was simply because it was like muddy water in the desert to people dying of thirst, it whet their lips and throat and as a result was the sweetest thing ever tasted. . Until you got back home and drank proper, clean water again and realized how your desperation was making something bad into something grand.
Fallout 4 is a great looter shooter. But thats all it is, its not a fallout game.. Its like Bethesda bought some half finished game and threw super mutants and butchered/ruined the RPG system to enable infinite growth in a system where no one is going to get to level 200 under even egregious gameplay circumstances
I was a huge fan of the previous games. My friends were huge fans of the previous games. We all loved Infinite. Fallout 4 is another great example of that game being way better, and way better received, than the tone that you tend to see on forums. Perhaps because those people were so burned that they can't help but talk continually about how upset they were with it? I see this all the time in fighting game circles around Guilty Gear Strive. That series never broke 1M copies sold of a game before Strive, and Strive has sold like 4M+ by now. Not only that, but tournament entrants are consistently healthy at every major. If competitors weren't happy with it, they'd stop playing, and we know that from plenty of other fighting game scenes. Even if everyone who played a prior Guilty Gear also hated Strive (which isn't the case), it should be extremely rare to come across those legacy players' complaints, but even 5 years into Strive's success, those voices are quite loud in forums.
No way, FO4 would be mediocre even if I had never played any of the first person Fallout games. Bioshock Infinite just didn't feel like a Bioshock games, but I honestly thought it was quite good as a stand alone game. It was definitely better, more fun than Bioshock 2 for me.
I agree that infinite didn't feel like a BioShock game, but I still enjoyed it for what it was. But FO4 was pretty good. Writing could've definitely used work, but the gameplay was pretty tight. I remember having issues with the new skinny murder bot event even mid game. I didn't experience that in New Vegas. As much as I will always love New Vegas, it had some balancing issues that 4 did well.
I try to enjoy games apart from their predecessors.
FO4 just really didn't click for me. Maybe it was too over shadowed by FO3 and FO:NV, but the writing/story was bad, the dark humor didn't land, and the choices you were given didn't seem have any real consequence. I guess mechanically it was OK, but I think it just didn't live up to the expectations I had from Bethesda. In fact, I am not sure I have truly enjoyed a game they released since then.
FO4 was also up again a massive list of great games that came out around the same time. Just from memory I know that the Witcher 3, GTA V, Metal Gear Solid V, Bloodborne, and Shovel Knight came out around the same time. I am not sure which exact game it was, I am positive that I blew off FO4 once one of the others came out.
Apparently imsimmers really hate it for not being Bioshock 1 But More.
It seemed widely decried at release, but it really stood up in the end.
Bioshock Infinite had a wildly good reception. It's 91% positive on Steam with 47k reviews.
I enjoyed Infinite as well. The story was good enough to keep me hooked, and despite you having to escort Elizabeth or the majority of the game, she didn't feel like a burden.
Fallout 76
The game was a fucking dumpster fire on release, but honestly, I really enjoyed the item grind with nuclear bombs and the build system. I was building some really cool houses back then and I probably spend a vast majority of my time with that.
Haven't touched it in years tho. Idk how it is today.
I know it was broken as all hell at release, but a buddy and I had a blast playing it. I still love playing with a friend, going around, then after a big fight looking at my friend, looking at a corpse, back at a friend... "You gonna eat that?"
I played for awhile a couple years back and it was fun. I owned it for awhile before but didn't put serious time till then for whatever reason. I think the general consensus is that it definitely improved over the years since release. I never did anything but solo things too so the harder content was still nothing I checked out.
I think they got a lot of the major bugs out but given it's a fallout game there's plenty more I assume.
Last I played storage sucked without the subscription for the gathering box which is a big downside cause I love to pick up crap.
Oh also No Mans Sky.
I've put hundreds of hours into it, and there's definitely fun to be had, but it is so buggy and janky, especially in Co-op. It's great they're still putting out updates and content, but I really wish they'd spend a cycle or two just fixing bugs.
I bounced off No Man's Sky hard at first, I just started playing it again 6+ years later and man what a difference. The game was a buggy shell of the game they had promised, but now it is unironically pretty great. I have encountered far, far fewer bugs now, so they may have addressed many of those you rememember.
I love No Mans Sky. I feel like I would tell people to be careful going to others homes as you can easily get past all currency hurdles... that being said, I did that and still had a blast. Also, don't dig and then build in it, treat he ground like it will swallow you. lol
Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue
(original PC release)
Oh no. That's on my playlist but the psx version. (It's for an RA event). I hope I enjoy it...
Fallout 4 is good until it just stops working. It’s fine on PC but they never got it fully working on Xbox. They still sell it though.
It's not fine on PC, idiots keep releasing patches for the game to advertise shit on the main menu and it breaks mods.
I've always had pretty good experiences with Bethesda's 3D games on the PC, but I did play Fallout: New Vegas on both the PC and the XBox 360, and the console experience did make me appreciate some of the complaints from console players. Like, the loading times were substantially worse than on the PC, and I recall the game being obnoxiously less-stable.
My mods haven't broken anything, and I've got some from almost 10 years ago that somehow still work.
I just put in a good 100-hour playthrough just a couple months ago in fact.
Yeah, but at least on PC you can block the updates until all your mods update. And IIRC it just breaks scripting stuff like F4SE... for the most part... but a lot of stuff relies on that.
I like how GOG just flat out refused to push the "next gen update" until they fixed their shit or something. Thing is, they never did. Modders told them how to fix it, but apparently it had to be fixed on their end. They never do. Because they don't care.
Backyard soccer. The graphics were shit, even back then, if you built the right team there was no balance, but damn that game was so much fun.
Star control 3. I just wanted to see where the story was going
Oh wow I remember Star Control 3! I think I got that game for free from a PC Gamer Magazine demo disc or something like that. I loved it but never finished it. The alien races where so unique and interesting! I loved saving the dog aliens by paying off their debts. Their ships were insanely good in combat.
I remember there was a conversation event where you can convince the bad guys to let you join them! And then the game ends and it just says you died. Good times.
Starfield. I mean, I didn’t really, really enjoy it, but it was fun to me. It has issues I can’t overlook, like wish we had more factions and more NPC settlements. Player created settlements do not fill that void no matter what they add to the game. Hundreds of systems and only like 5/6 of them have major settlements that you can visit for actual quests. Aligning with the pirates is cool but then you’re only left with the Spacers as the only true enemy faction which sucks. I hate going to some world and there being friendly pirates. I wanted a firefight, not walk around and hear NPCs talk about being tough.
Bonus is Crackdown, the newest one with Terry Crews. I’m a big fan of the first game and semi liked the second, but the newest felt like a better return to the original without the dumb zombie invasion. Wish we had more gangs and all that. But open world mayhem as a supercharged cop is so much fun to me that I still go back and play the original in an emulator.
I still don't think that Starfield is a bad game. I can understand some of the complaints, but it really amounts to a "does not equal some prior Bethesda games relative to their release times" for me.
One of the big ones, wanting to wander around a big outdoor overmap and just stumble into things, mostly also applied to the kinda-Fallout-like The Outer Worlds, and it didn't take nearly the Steam review beating that Starfield did --- I'd call The Outer Worlds a substantially worse game, myself.