Worst video game ever?

64-Bit Nintendo Machine

64-Bit Nintendo Machine

64 Bits of Power!
What's possibly the most unfathomable creation that can be called a video game? (In your opinion)
 
I personally haven't played any really bad games but I'm sure I could get some opinions from my friend Pat. He once did a whole Twitch series about Wii shovelware.
 
I sat through Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric once, but I kinda find it hard to revisit on repeat playthroughs.
 
Metroid Other M.

I'm not even a Metroid fan, but this game actually physically disgusted me, and I want to kick Adam Malkovich in the balls until he turns to dust and then detach the part of the space station it happened in while it's in the gravitational range of a dying star.
 
I have several answers.

Asset flip "games" that get sold on digital storefronts such as Steam, PS4 store, etc. They're not games nor are the people who make them actual developers. They're a jumble of pre-made assets or demo tools all combined into a Frankenstein's monster of a product and absolutely none of these are worth playing, much less, purchasing for any sort of fee. Some of these don't even have working executables.

Games that use greed and timers as their primary form of gameplay. Dungeon Keeper Mobile is one of the worst examples out there, not only having ridiculously long wait times just to develop one tile and the game coaxing you to spend money to speed it up, but it's a desecration of a beloved IP that hasn't seen an entry in years (in which the studio responsible for it was eventually shut down by studio killer EA). This also applies to premium 60 dollar games which have microtransactions and lootboxes in them, one of the worst examples being Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered, also being a desecration of the original game.

Then you have the edgelord troll games like Ethnic Cleansing or Custer's Revenge, those which are made blatantly offensive just for attention (while in the former's case, is pretty much developed and published by Neo-Nazis). Weird how none of those games are good to play either, being ugly to look at and controlling really poorly.

And then you have games that are just plain out awful. People already mentioned this in the thread, but I'll mention them here. Games such as Action 52, E.T. (landfills galore), Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, Superman 64. We pretty much know these games.

There's also games that are entertaining in their awfulness to the point where it's hilarious to watch YouTubers play them, notable YouTubers being We Broke, or listening to Angry Joe rant about them. Examples do include Big Rigs, Ride to Hell Retribution (which also has edgelord shit in it), Kreed (Russian jank with phenomenally bad voice acting), The Quiet Man, Sonic '06...

And...games swamped in all sorts of controversy, such as the lootboxes in Star Wars Battlefront II having attention in mainstream news, Mass Effect 3's ending, SimCity's always on-DRM rendering it unplayable, the lies about Aliens: Colonial Marines, and just Anthem + Fallout 76 in general, all attributed to their "live service" BS.

....

I haven't even played any of these games and I thank god that I don't have to. Dealing with gacha in the free2play Dr. Mario World and CTR's microtransactions are already bad enough, and I can't believe it's only some of the milder shit compared to how bad games can really get. What is the game I dislike the most...Super Mario Galaxy 2? I wouldn't even call it a bad game. Pokemon Dash? It's actually just fairly mediocre. Mario Tennis Ultra Smash? It's main problem is that it's barebones more than anything else.
 
One of the worst games I remember is Block Party for Wii. Even for a kids game it is very terrible. I only got it because I when I was 8 I loved bowling games and there was bowling on the box art so I got it and... there wasn't even bowling! Also, it cost $20!!! I lost it but I kinda wish I hadn't just so I can see how bad it is again lol.
 
The worst game I actually own and have played for a decent amount of time is Seablade, a boring and pretty broken flight combat game exclusive to the OG Xbox. Basically the premise is that IN THE FUTURE the world is flooded blablabla global warming blablabla apocalypse and you pilot submersible fighter jet to fight evil warlords.

The problem is that the game is ridiculously repetitive: you have six environements and three types of misisons: "Recon" (pick up a series of blue markers until you loop back to the start", "Rescue" (collect a 6 to 20 civilians and drop them at your mothership) and "Boss Battles". There's only 6 recon missions and (iirc) 3 boss battles so the vast majority of the game is spent in these mind numbing rescue missions where you waddle in these empty open zones and fetch a bunch of immobile dudes (multiple times since all of the playable Seablades have a low carying capacity). There's no objective beyond that, no time limit, no change in the environement, etc etc. Needless to say, it gets mind-numbing fast.

There's other stuff like how the cutscenes beyond the opening are just slideshows (albeit ones with a ridiculous amount of different pictures) the control scheme has half the buttons mapped to reversing the function of the two analog sticks (????) and that the ability to go underwater is, despite what the title implies, barely a factor, but really, nothing can capture the Seablade experience better than playing it yourself.


The kindest thing I can say about it is that the voice acting isn't too bad and the horrible CGI slideshows can be kinda funny

1565741335724.png



 
here's a few terrible games I've played unfortunately

1 Inuyasha secret of the cursed mask I got lost bout midway through it
never figured out where I was supposed to go it was really Vague and Confusing

2 Bleach the Shattered Blade laggy wonky Motion Controls
and long loading screens as well that game is by far one of the worst wii games I've ever played

3 Kingdom Hearts Rechain of Memories the battle system is a horrid Abomination
the battle system is even worse as Riku due to the fact you can't edit your command deck in any way

4 Arc Rise Fantasia now this game isn't as bad as Shattered Blade i'll give it that
but that's being a bit too generous the Voice Acting is Craptastically Bad and almost every thing you do costs ap
so if 1 or 2 of your party members gets KO'd you're up crap creek without a paddle

5 Sonic and the Secret Rings crappy controls that feel like Sonic is ice skating while Drunk
and the gameplay because of this suffers a lot

6 Yugioh Duelist of the Rose this game is terrible due to how the restrictive the deck building system is
and how tedious getting all 8 of the other factions rose cards can be
 
(personally )imma say talking tom. i haven't played it in over a decade but iirc you just do a bunch of boring stuff with a cat, and that's it

other (dis)honourable mentions:

flappy bird
nintendogs
lego chess
jurassic park 3: dino defender
zoo tycoon
insaniquarium
mario kart wii
big brain academy
mario olympics 2012 (full title is WAY too long)
phineas and ferb (nds), and its sequel
bad piggies
fifa games
zelda 1 and 2
crossy road

(edit: my bad it has been less than a decade since i last played talking tom but still probably over 5 years which to me is still absolutely ages)
 
i used to, but i stopped because i grew bored of it. some of the things were really frustrating to get and i wouldn't like having to wait for the vehicle to do its shenanigans all the time. i'd much rather be building worlds and stuff in minecraft than tinkering with specific vehicle bits to get it to complete a pre-made course.

that being said, i don't hate it, just slighly dislike it
 
Any game where raping someone is your mechanic. Custer's Revenge (also listed in @Cream 's post) is one. There was another in the early 2000s that I've forgotten the name of and don't want to Google for reasons. But it had multiple paths and the 'bad' path was the woman getting away and you not getting to rape her. Freaking yikes. It was Japanese only iirc.
 
Striker Mario said:
wha
Click to expand...
again that's a game i've not played in a VERY long time so my opinions are probably quite outdated but just... what i remember that game to be feels really lame to me now, even though i did like it as a child. i can't see myself coming back to it when i could be playing so many more games that are far more interesting to me
 
I feel in a bit of a meta sense, any video game that purports to be a sequel to a well-loved franchise but ends up being a mobile game with all the bad trappings of mobile games can count as terrible (such as RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile and the now defunct Breath of Fire 6), if only because in many cases, it had been years since the previous game came out (for the two games I'd mentioned, it had been 10 years between RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 and 14 years between BOF5 and BOF6) and fans of those games were probably wanting a full-blown sequel for consoles or PC, not some mobile game with microtransactions and other negative aspects common in those types of games.

Luckily though, I never played any shitty mobile sequels to classic franchises, but I can at least say what the worst game I've personally experienced is:
Lego Star Wars II

Now, not the regular version of the game on consoles and PC, which is still fun to this day, I'm talking about the DS port.

Mind you, definitely wouldn't make a list of 'the top 10 worst games ever!' (hell, not even a top 50 list), but it's still pretty bad. It's just glitchy as hell (it's not uncommon for entire assets to just disappear, like I'm talking things like your actual character, enemies, even entire rooms; in the free play mode, sometimes things wouldn't be triggered that get triggered fine in the story mode, so you can't even beat a level in free play; the co-op mode doesn't work [I remember trying to play it in middle school with a friend of mine. Literally ALWAYS froze our DSes after like five minutes]). And even aside from that, you got other minor problems like the camera was pretty bad (was hella slow and sometimes wouldn't focus on the right thing, and of course you couldn't control it), and the graphics were, while acceptable for the DS, some later Lego games like Lego Indiana Jones actually showed that you could have graphics that looked significantly better than this one did on the system.
 
Last edited:
Lady said:
I feel in a bit of a meta sense, any video game that purports to be a sequel to a well-loved franchise but ends up being a mobile game with all the bad trappings of mobile games can count as terrible (such as RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile and the now defunct Breath of the Wild 6), if only because in many cases, it had been years since the previous game came out (for the two games I'd mentioned, it had been 10 years between RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 and 14 years between BOF5 and BOF6) and fans of those games were probably wanting a full-blown sequel for consoles or PC, not some mobile game with microtransactions and other negative aspects common in those types of games.
Click to expand...

Considering how Dungeon Keeper and Command & Conquer got treated, with their games being left to rot until it was resurrected as a gritty monster in the mobile market, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a resurrection of Spore on mobile in the future, the game's ripe to pollute it with microtransactions.
 
There's a video game whose very existence is to erase files on the computer whenever an object is shot, which sounds like a nightmare if the player doesn't know what they are getting into (which they should because it has a disclaimer). Maybe the game's not that bad, but I think such a game felt like malware. Actually, ransomware that is disguised as a game, like another shooter with an anime aesthetic, is the worst because of the requirement to beat a score to unlock it (at least the creator of it designed instructions to remove it).

Lady said:
I feel in a bit of a meta sense, any video game that purports to be a sequel to a well-loved franchise but ends up being a mobile game with all the bad trappings of mobile games can count as terrible (such as RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile and the now defunct Breath of the Wild 6), if only because in many cases, it had been years since the previous game came out (for the two games I'd mentioned, it had been 10 years between RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 and 14 years between BOF5 and BOF6) and fans of those games were probably wanting a full-blown sequel for consoles or PC, not some mobile game with microtransactions and other negative aspects common in those types of games.
Click to expand...

It should be noted that it's "Breath of Fire", not "Breath of the Wild" since BotW is a Zelda title.

Anyway, it's certainly true, ever since I have seen how Dungeon Keeper got designed even though I have no personal attachment to that series. The way it is designed is not the least bit enticing to try. The most recent of the games I have seen with this sort of monetisation is Lemmings, which had a similar type of system where every move you make expends energy, and it's a dealbreaker for older fans.

Thank you for reading.
 
in fairness, the ransomware you're thinking of piggybacked off an existing normal shooter game, it wasn't a game in and of itself

anyhow my pick would be Limbo of the Lost

not only is it bad, buggy, incoherent, and offensive, it also stole left and right!
 
My vote for worst game of all time would be Ride to Hell: Retribution. It's that rare game that manages to do everything about a game horrendously, and it was actually sold as a game at one point. The gameplay is abysmal where enemies are hit sponges aside from headshots and combat is combo-based but a lot worse (with the hit sponge enemies and awkward stiff animations) and just doing the strong kick is enough to handle the combat. The AI is very, very inept, too. This is on top of the many bugs you encounter such as the infamous "all enemies are dead" UI notification that displays even though enemies are still alive and shooting you. The plot is nonsensical and plays the worst cliches (you begin the game in a literal montage sequence with a turret segment and quick-time events). The graphics are ugly as hell, with character models looking horrible (huge hands wtf) and looks last gen despite being a game from the 2010s. The voice acting is wooden and lifeless. Scenes are poorly choreographed and sound effects and music are weirdly missing, and the sound effects, particularly the explosion, sound cheap as hell. In other instances, the motorbike noises drown out the voice acting during important scenes. Menu controls are horrid (F1 to confirm a selection? 7 and 8 to switch categories? WHAT?) as well as weirdly missing menu music. The bike controls are slippery as hell and the driving is dull at best. The soundtrack is terrible, with grating generic rock music.

And on top of all of this, it manages to be offensive, conforming to the worst stereotypes of gamers culture, by treating scantily-dressed big-breast women as literal rewards that just want sex and you have sex with (which all characters are lifeless), even with one that was about to be sexually assaulted.

I mean just look at the Wikipedia reception section for this thing
en.wikipedia.org

Ride to Hell: Retribution - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

And unlike some literally unplayable or badly bugged games mentioned here, this one works in the end and isn't an asset flip, which makes it arguably worse.

It's fodder for some of my favorite videos on YouTube like this one
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back