I’m going to say Battletoads. The game was mostly pretty fun, until you got the jetski section where it was biologically impossible for a human to react in time. The only way to get past this level was to perfectly memorize the sequence of buttons to push.
This reminds me of a method of trying to evaluate art in an objective way. Basically you ask yourself 3 questions:
What is this trying to do?
Does it succeed in what it’s trying to do?
Is what it’s trying to do worth doing?
If the answers to 2 and 3 are “yes”, then it’s probably a good work of art. This helps remove the subjectivity of “do I enjoy it?” when evaluating a work.
I would say the answers for Desert Bus indicate that it is indeed a good work of art. It succeeds in being a monotonous parody of a video game which makes a political statement about what games would be if they lacked any fictional elements or conflict. And I think the statement P&T were trying to make with this game was definitely worth making. Plus, we know from the amount of people who play it as a streamed challenge game that there is some desire for a game like that to exist.
Sonic 06. This is coming from someone who eagerly wanted to be optimistic about the game, especially given how, on paper, it seemed very reminiscent of the Adventure games. I purchased an Xbox 360 and the game to try it out, to see if it really was as bad as people say it is.
It was…very sloppy. There are glitches everywhere, to the point where a significant amount of deaths will occur due to them, such as wall running physics just randomly breaking, causing you to fall into pits of lava, having to hit the jump button 10 times just so Knuckles jumps off of a wall every time, and even when not considering the glitches, the controls just feel awkward and clunky, Sonic himself is slow and the physics leave a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the story much more than what the gameplay had to offer.
Disregarding the absolutely unplayable and broken, I think it’s a toss up between the 2008 Alone in the Dark or Final Fantasy 15. I’m more inclined towards the latter because I haven’t played the former since release. It’s just a godawful RPG, if you can even call it that, the game basically plays itself, has no depth whatsoever, the open-world is meaningless and empty of anything interesting. Not to mention the story is both dogshit and a confusing mess nonsensically split between different DLCs, movies and god knows what else. Definitely the worst big budget RPG (again, if you can even call it that) I’ve played so far, it’s borderline insulting. The worst of it all? It was my first Final Fantasy and it was so bad it killed any interest I had in the series.
I also didn’t like AitD. The tank controls, static “3D” screens where you overlooked something if you didn’t walk into every corner and a new screen presented itself… Oh wait, you’re talking about a remaster? I’m talking about the original…
As somebody who likes Tetris but essentially had no idea about PuyoPuyo until I came across that comment, that was a brilliant yet depressing read. I’m currently busy with life but wishlisted some PuyoPuyo games for this winter, just because that article outlined such an interesting game. It’s kind of hard to find something for current platforms in Europe though…
I normally try to play a game for a minimum of 10 hours just to give it a chance in case it grows on me, but this was just such a piece of shit I couldn’t even reach half that…
Seconding this one. I was like 11 years old and it’s the first time I can remember being disappointed when getting a game. Went from like Mario 64 to OOT to Banjo to Superman 64 and hoo boy what a drop off.
There are way more rings than that, and they’re actually the best parts of the game. It gets so much worse in the levels without rings. Awful combat, terrible puzzles, inconsistent framerate, and thoroughly unclear objectives.
There are probably worst games I’ve played that I don’t recall, but there was a Roller Coaster Tycoon knockoff for the Playstation once. First impressions were “I bet this is going to be as customizable a sandbox game as the computer version”. Nope. It’s like the actual Roller Coaster Tycoon, except the parks are tiny, so much of the land is unusable, everything costs a bajillion dollars to make, the parks get demolished every time you “succeed” (since it was level-based), and you get absolutely no warning before a game over screen just drops in on you because you took out the wrong loans. Even being a real park owner probably has less checks and balances than it.