Worst video game ever?

My copy of Sonic Adventure DX. Specifically my copy of it. I bought it used at GameStop and it was a little scratchy. Everything is glitchier than usual. Sometimes Sonic falls under the ground without any holes or cliffs present. And oh god the cutscenes, sometimes the characters mouths don't follow their faces.
 
The character's mouths never followed their faces in that game.
 
Man how could I forget. I hate Simpsons Skateboarding so much, I can't think of a game this boring and putrid yet functional at the same time.
 
The Simpsons Skateboarding theme is definitely what plays when you go to hell

 
I know it's been a couple years since anyone replied to this thread, but I was recently reminded of what has to be the absolute worst video game to get officially released and sold: Sqij! for the ZX Spectrum.

Sqij was a conversion of a game that had originally been released on the Commodore 64 and later converted to the Commodore 16. Now neither the original C64 version or the C16 version of the game are anything more than 'thoroughly mediocre at best', and that goes especially for the C64 version, (although being fair, the original developer of the C64 version was 13 years old IIRC), they did have one major benefit over the Spectrum version.

You could actually play them.

And don't think of that as an exaggeration like 'Oh no this game is so bad, it's unplayable'. I mean that in the literal sense: you cannot actually play Sqij for the ZX Spectrum. The game will load up and start but absolutely none of the buttons will do anything once you're in the game.

Why is that? Because the game's coding turns caps-lock on on the keyboard but the game is also coded to only accept lowercase inputs. To fix this, you have to break into the game's code (and this isn't some hardcore hacking, you literally press the BREAK key on the keyboard) and then press the POKE key (POKE being a command that sets the memory byte at a specific address) and enter the command to disable caps-lock. Yes, you literally have to hack the game so you can actually play it.

And what do you get if you actually do that? Well, you get this:
Sqij-Speccy.gif


For comparison, here's the Commodore 64 version:
Sqij-C64.gif


Yeah.

Even if you use the POKE command to disable caps-lock so you can move, the game is still unbeatable because there's items you're supposed to collect in the game (pieces of fruit, which you can trade so you can go through these otherwise impassable laser walls, and four pieces [down from six in the original C64 version] of the Enertree, collecting all four pieces of this 'Enertree' and assembling it on a pedestal in the center of the game's world is the entire goal of the game) except: you can't collect any of these items. It just doesn't work, you can press the key to collect an item all you want and nothing will happen. Once again, you have to modify the game's own code in order to get a basic function of the damn game to actually work (and, for added hilarity, if you collect more than one object, the game thinks you've collected zero objects - so you have to have to collect and assemble all four pieces of the Enertree individually, as if Sqij couldn't get any more amazing, huh?)

(Game is also prone to crashes, graphical glitches, and numerous other issues too, as you might be able to tell from the GIF above)

Did I also mention the game was actually illegal to own? Instead of being programmed in machine code, Sqij was written in BASIC, specifically using a third-party program called Laser BASIC. The problem with that is if you don't compile the BASIC to machine code, you'd need to have a copy of Laser BASIC in the system's memory in order for the game to run (well 'run' considering the whole 'the game literally does not work normally' thing). And that's what the developer did: the entire code for Laser BASIC (which cost £15) was included on the tape for Sqij, which retailed for £2.

Possibly the only entertaining bit to come out of Sqij is learning that the 15 year old programmer deliberately made the game as absolutely dogshit as he could in order to both spite and get out of his contract with the publisher. Basically the publisher wouldn't give him a reference copy of the C64 version of the game (rather important, obviously, if you're expecting to convert the game to another platform) and when they finally did give him one - it was on a floppy disk. The programmer did not have any means to load a floppy drive on his Commodore 64. Eventually, they did provide him with a copy of the game's world map for his conversion. At this point, he clearly didn't give a shit anymore and considering that there was a clause in his contract that basically said the company could reject the game if it was absolute crap, he threw together the crappiest game possible and submitted it to the publishers so they'd look at it and go 'This game is crap' and not release it and leave him alone.

They didn't. They released Sqij in all its awful glory not just once - but twice (standalone and in a compilation).

Also the first line in the source code for the game is '1 GO TO 2', meaning that the first thing the code does is go to line 2 in the code. There is no line 2.
 
Glowsquid said:
The worst game I actually own and have played for a decent amount of time is Seablade,
Click to expand...

And the worst game I've actually played to completion is Conflict Denied Ops. I have played and completed Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Rogue Warrior and Gundam Crossfire multiple times so this is a very serious statement.

1659232800344.png


The previous Conflict games were squad-based third person shooters, essentially playing like a more forgiving Ghost Recon. Denied Ops switch to being a co-op FPS (cashing on on the fad games like Army of Two and Kane & Lynch were also banking on), playing like a loathsome evil version of Star Wars Republic Commando.

The plot is that NOT HUGO CHAVEZ in Venezuela is doing terrible things, and you need to hunt down his various associates and suppliers all over the globe. All the cutscenes are like this.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1551226988697997312

You have two characters. Graves has a sniper and a silenced pistol, and he can unlock a masterkey and a camera to shoot around corners. Lang is more direct, having a LMG and a rocket launcher. He later unlocks a grenade launcher attachment. In single player, you can freely switch characters and give basic orders to the AI-controlled character. Each character is restricted to their loadout: you can't collect enemy weapons and your ammo is unlimited although "special" items like grenades need to be refilled at designated ammo ressuply boxes. If a characters gets down, they don't die and the other character has a fairly generous amount of time to revive them. If both die, then back to the checkpoint! Levels are linear and involve typically military shooter stuff like holding positions, blowing stuff up or hacking computers.

So far so good. It's an interesting premise but they screwed up all the little things that make video game fun

-They tried to go for a stealth vs direct thing, but the characters are majorly unbalanced. Grave's sniper has a fairly slow firing rate and doesn't one-hit kill on bodyshot. That would be annoying enough, but the huge problem is that you can't stabilize his aim - crouching and going prone reduce the aim sway while scoping, it never fully eliminates it, and there's enough sway to make headshots a PITA. Meanwhile Graves has 100-rounds (later upgraded to 200!) LMG that is reasonably accurate and can be tap-fired, and he unlocks a powerful and easy-to-use grenade launcher early on. Grave's camera makes him not completely useless but there's no reason to use him if you can help it.

-As you'd expect, the co-op partner AI sucks. They can't aim for shit, frequently get stuck on part of the map and so on.

-Since the revive system means you have functionally unlimited lives, the developer's answer to keep the game challenging was to spawn a lot of enemies. Who are very accurate and down you in a handful of shots. They sometimes spawn behind you, Checkpoints are few and far-in-between. A lot of the section have little or bad cover. It's a slog.

-Movement feel like shit. There's no jump button so everytime you have to get past a small crevise, you have to vault and it's sloooooooooooow.

It's a shame because there's actually a lot of neat little ideas in there but they don't coalesce into anything interesting.

-Missions beside the first and last two can be played into a non-linear order. Each time you beat a mission, you get pre-determined upgrades for your characters. In something more ambitious, they could've gone for a kind of Mega Man thing where you'd have to weight your tactical option and determine what is the best order to beat missions in. But they didn't do that.

-Each mission has a little side-objective that reward you for showing some finese. For instance, a level on a hijacked cruiser can be stealthed at the start so that the captured crew doesn't get executed. It's neat design, but doesn't server any purpose than providing achievement points on the X360 port.

This game would be prime fodder for "bad FPS" reviews alongside stuff like the aforementioned Turning Point, Haze the Battleship movie tie-in and so on, but despite the first Conflict: Desert Storm being a fairly popular game, there's barely any reviews of it on places like Youtube, which is suspect is because it's too much of a slog for most people to bother to dig deeper. Trust me, reading a rambling forum post is one thing and playing it is another.
 
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Glowsquid where do you find these "masterpieces"
 
I was raised by EB Games bargain bins.
 
That'll do it.
 
You know what I'm gonna say it: E.T. on the Atari 2600 is not nearly as bad as its reputation seems.

Is it a good game? No, but it's also not the worst video game ever made or even the worst video game released on the 2600. It is at worst a tedious and boring but otherwise complete and functional game (it's also one where you actually need to read the manual to understand how to play and I can understand that kids back in the 80s likely didn't even bother to read those things and people downloading ROMs of the game to play on emulators in the 90s and 2000s didn't exactly search up 'ET Atari 2600 manual' either).
 
Personally, I don't think people lump E.T. because it was mechanically the worst game (it was just a typical movie-licensed game, among the first out there, and according to some, set the standard of subpar movie-licensed games), but because it was a catalyst for the video game crash and it caused a massive dump on Atari and stripped it out of being the giant it was once. Even so, the buried dump thing wasn't just E.T. cartridges, only 10% of the cartridges buried there were E.T. ones, and they weren't buried because it was unsold but rather it was an unused stock, and not just games got buried there.

Even at the time, E.T. managed to get some positive reception, got a 6 out of 10 from Arcade Express. It managed to sold decently (it was the huge overproduction that was at fault here and ridiculous expectations that it was going to sell, on top of an expensive movie license that was a recipe for a catastrophic financial flop), was a bestseller during the holiday season when it was released.

Anyway Custer's Revenge is the worst game on the Atari 2600.
 
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