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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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
Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue
(original PC release)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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🫠
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uplink
Uplink wasn’t bad at all. It just was quite niche.
Yeah its a little old timey maybe.
I still own the original (mini) CD (80mb capacity?)
Old timey? You are making me feel older than Yoda.
I loved Uplink! It’s got that great '80s/90s-hacker vibe.
Oh man, mine is proper raw. The whole gameplay takes place on this map and like, two other locations:
The gameplay is basically just:
- resources appear over time in chests (near the quarry and such)
- pick up those resources and walk to a building nearby
- click “upgrade” on that building
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:
the game currently has only about 50% of the content I had planned […] I’m still quite dissatisfied with many things. As feedback, I’ve often heard that the combat system isn’t intuitive and is rather boring, which I can completely understand. Resource gathering is also still quite dull. As long as I don’t have really good ideas for both, I don’t think it makes sense to expand the game with new content.
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 ☹️
“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.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. It’s more of a camp and a meme answer tough.
