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Shadow Man. I owned the 'superior' Dreamcast version.

Two words: Irritating Stick.

Shadowman, a "bad" game? I had the N64 version and even that was closer to being a damn good game with annoyances than a "bad" game. What's the stick thing?

DELTA FORCE

Had laughably simple enemies, horrible graphics, incredibly obvious errors in animations/no animations and you are able to literally walk through whole regiments of enemies supported by tanks and helicopters, while armed only with an M4. But at the same time strangely amusing.

Bounty wrote:

Shadow Man. I owned the 'superior' Dreamcast version.

Two words: Irritating Stick.

Shadowman, a "bad" game? I had the N64 version and even that was closer to being a damn good game with annoyances than a "bad" game. What's the stick thing?

No one I knew liked Shadow Man and would groan at me endlessly if they saw me playing.

Irritating Stick video

"Video unavailable in your region"

Eleas wrote:That reminds me; I feel the exact same way about Wing Commander IV. Nice atmosphere and a universe with its own distinct feel and verisimilitude. Plus, it may just have been that I was young when I first played it, but I really liked the feeling of post-war "fighting for fighting's sake" insanity that WC IV had. While the game engine itself frankly sucked, at the same time it was cool to be able to control the different aspects of the ships' systems, plus, Mark Hamill made for a sympathetic avatar.
All in all, WC IV vastly outstripped its moronic successor.

Hell, I found some of Tolwyns (McDowell's) reasoning to make a certain sort of perverted sense which is really screwed up.

Deus Ex: Invisible War.

The levels are really tiny, the handholding is completely ridiculous (The level has one bar. You can't go anywhere but the bar at first. You get prompted to go to the bar about three times. I GET IT, I'M SUPPOSED TO GO TO THE BAR!), the different factions are all morons and none of your choices really mean a damn. The guns suck. And they also all use the same ammo. Which you can't carry a whole lot of, but that won't matter because just about anything can be easily killed with the techno-wakizashi. Hacking consists of using disposable glitter-ray shooting omni-tools. The much-ballyhooed physics are a textbook example of "packing crates flying miles away if you step within one yard of them".

And then there's the crowning moment of awesome. You screw one faction over enough, and they send a really angry SMS to the effect of "now you've done it, we're sending our assassins after you". Then two or three losers attack you, you kill them as easily as everything else, and five minutes later the faction that was supposed to hate your guts is asking you for favors again.

But for some reason I still play it occasionally.

Karza wrote:Deus Ex: Invisible War.

The levels are really tiny, the handholding is completely ridiculous (The level has one bar. You can't go anywhere but the bar at first. You get prompted to go to the bar about three times. I GET IT, I'M SUPPOSED TO GO TO THE BAR!), the different factions are all morons and none of your choices really mean a damn. The guns suck. And they also all use the same ammo. Which you can't carry a whole lot of, but that won't matter because just about anything can be easily killed with the techno-wakizashi. Hacking consists of using disposable glitter-ray shooting omni-tools. The much-ballyhooed physics are a textbook example of "packing crates flying miles away if you step within one yard of them".

And then there's the crowning moment of awesome. You screw one faction over enough, and they send a really angry SMS to the effect of "now you've done it, we're sending our assassins after you". Then two or three losers attack you, you kill them as easily as everything else, and five minutes later the faction that was supposed to hate your guts is asking you for favors again.

But for some reason I still play it occasionally.

I just bought it. I beat it on the hardest difficulty level my first play through (although I reloaded ALOT- I die easily). Partially pacifict walkthrough. It is hilarious after screwing over a group they still want you to help them- guess they are that desperate or to stupid to use the controls

It also had an overabundance of items and cash and horribly small inventory. Still, I liked the endings- is it just me or is all but one really bad?

Halo and Battlestations: Midway.

Halo is a Quake-em-up. It does nothing new, or decidedly original, on top of all that it's pretentious.

But, I suppose if any game is going to rip Quake off (again), it might as well do it as smoothly as Halo does. Good controls (barring limited watered down nature), big levels (barring the li-fucking-brary), clever but not comically weird guns (barring the needler), and good enemy variety (barring the Flood) just kept the game interesting enough for me.

Battlestations: Midway shits all over realism and detail. It made the chronic sin of slapping a health bar damage model onto my fucking battleships. Its single player is non-existent, and it's not even good looking.

But, it's unique. When *was* the last time a game was released that allowed you to directly control everything from Yamato to an individual Grumman Wildcat? The game handled wide scale unit control very well, and had a real tactical nature that didn't just boil down to "lawl heavy unit spam".

Lies! Bust A Groove was fucking AWESOME!

Jade Falcon wrote:Hell, I found some of Tolwyns (McDowell's) reasoning to make a certain sort of perverted sense which is really screwed up.

It does, and I think it's to McDowell's credit that he can take so an ambivalent and dark a character and make him compelling. Tolwyn commits atrocious acts, yes, but we never question the fact that he believes they're necessary to save mankind.

Quest 64. If I could remember how much I paid for it I'd probably hate it a lot more. But. Amidst the almost absolute linearity, basic story, and dumbed-down RPG mechanics something about the game managed to catch my interest. (Maybe it was the bizarre Scottish setting)

General Zod wrote:I always liked Shadowgate, despite the fact it was basically a Myst clone.

shouldnt that be the other way around? Shadowgate came out in 1987, and Msyt came out in 1993

The Oregon Trail 5. It's got super-shitty voice acting, asking advice from any fellow greenhorns is absolutely useless, it's nearly impossible to travel through the mountains in the winter because you go through food like crazy and you can't carry too much, or you'll eventually become too heavy for even 12 oxen to pull you, and it constantly interrupts your travels with historical anecdotes from the Parker family and their ex-slave trail guide (It IS a "learning game", after all.)

And I still keep putting it in.

Of course Mario 64 isn't a bad game (I just got it for the DS), I just hate it because I SUCK at platforming. 3D platforming to be more specific, I've actually gotten pretty far in New Super Mario Bros.

For an actual bad game I guess I could say Wario: Master of Disguise. I haven't really gotten far into, but it contains what has to be the DUMBEST story ever in the history of gaming. The game play isn't exactly inspiring either, touch the screen to use your one move per suit. I was quite disappointed with this because I enjoyed the Wario Land game I had for the Gameboy.

AMT wrote:

General Zod wrote:I always liked Shadowgate, despite the fact it was basically a Myst clone.

shouldnt that be the other way around? Shadowgate came out in 1987, and Msyt came out in 1993

Meh, either way. They're both old as hell.

Joviwan wrote:Ima second Dynasty Samurai Warriors Orochi Empires Extreme Legends Musou 9. I'm an unabashed whore for the series, and the only games I don't own are DW1-3, DW6, and Gundam Musou. Oh, and maybe that medieval one who's name I can't recall.

The games are endlessly repetitive, hopelessly identical, woefully uninspired, and undeniably fun, and I can't get enough of them. Each game has an iterate changes to the system that do very little, yet it's always slightly fresh despite the nine thousand titles in the series. The graphics engine is a joke that hasn't been overhauled since the first game came out on the PS2; the game's performance is surpassed by a title called "Nintey-nine Nights" which to date has had exactly one game, yet it handily triples or quadruples draw distance and the number of onscreen polys.

Yeah, I still can't get enough. The cheesy voice acting, the horrible melodrama, the "re-vamped" gameplay, the absolutely SHAMELESS smashing of their two biggest franchises, the "strategy games" they called Empires... It's all uninspired cash grinding, and I still have fun.

Heh. With my copy of SW2, I played over 100 hours... as Mitsuari. He's such a crap character, with horrible range, but I loved him.

I also loved Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII. Especially my last game, even though I was basically simulating the life of an unhappy and uncharismatic senior official whose oath brothers had all died within a month of each other and was constantly passed over for promotion by that dickhead Sun Quan, despite his superior intellect. Why would you play a game like that? It didn't have good graphics. Hell, it didn't even have Yuan Shao giving you sage advice like "stay away from Lu Bu!" it had nothing, but i loved it anyway.

I prefer the SNES version of Shadowrun, despite the Megadrive version being vastly deeper and better regarded by retro game enthusiasts. The SNES version has faster pacing and a really really cute kitsune character.

God, I've sunk so much time into Dynasty Warriors Gundam. I mean, it's not outright bad, but the gameplay is just painfully bland in the no-thought "do the same combo three hundred thousand times, win the stage, rinse, repeat" kinda way. There's absolutely nothing good about it except the childish glee of seeing all the characters from the different Gundam series trying to punch each other.

Scrapland is another; the ship combat is simplistic, the on-foot parts are frustrating, and the races are simplistic and frustrating, but somehow they gel together to make a pretty fun game.

I'm going with the idea that the games are not really popular, bug free, or ground breaking or whatever other nebulous reasons I can think of.

I loved the old Cossacks. Even though the military buildings in the game basically shit out soldiers, the default speed was hardly manageable, and any building could catch on fire from a few measly arrows (yet withstand shelling from five or six frigates FOREVER) I still enjoyed the horribly implemented combat. I loved churning out hundreds of soldiers and sending them across the ocean to invade the enemy's lands. The AI never failed to disappoint when they said sent their own army to meet me on their shores. I suppose what really sucked me in where the gameplay didn't was the setting. I liked the shift from Renaissance to Enlightment where Age of Empires had ended around the late Middle Ages to Early Renaissance.

The game required massive amounts of micromanaging too. You needed to watch your farms so the farmers did not over-work the land, you needed to watch your ports so the enemy just wouldn't come in and whack all of your fishing boats (thus decreasing the food output; famines are a bitch), you needed to seek out mines to harvest precious materials, and in going with the mines you needed to watch who was shooting what since coal and iron were used by all gunpowder units (save for the pikemen and some cavalry that would be nearly every unit in the game). Oh and the titular mercenary Cossacks (that could be purchased by any faction early game) could sweep in to any town without walls and capture peasants, buildings, and mines. The AI was usually pretty good against this because they somehow managed to place little pikemen everywhere (usually two at a time) to guard. I usually couldn't managed to do that when they came for me, however.

Another game from Europe that I liked was STALKER, but that's been covered by enough people here enough times that I shouldn't bother to retread any of its problems. I loved the vanilla version. It was so different in style and implementation from most of the home-grown (U.S.) shooters that I'm used to that I loved it despite it's difficulty. Oblivion Lost made it 100 times better to boot.

p.s. Currently working on Clear Sky.

Sonic Adventure 2.

Love it. Don't care if it's supposed to suck.

also, I've found that some people tend to whine about Wind Waker. Wind Waker was IMO the best Zelda game. A guy at my local GameStop will tell anyone who asks loudly that it's the worst one ever made, and people agree.

Blazing Angels: It's hella pretty but that's about it. Combat - certainly in multiplayer - comes down to who can turn the tightest. The physics are broken, they haven't modelled the planes right at all, the history is awful, and you want to punch all the characters in the face. Nonetheless there remains something highly enjoyable about diving under the Eiffel Tower, emerging on the other side, and slaughtering Bf 109s like I had dreamed of ever since reading Fly For Your life.

Imperial Glory: Collection of turn-based cliches married to below par real time battles. Wishes it was Total War and fails miserably. However, there remains something joyous about seeing ranks of redcoats and highlanders arrayed in waiting of the French columns.

Vortex: This SNES game is crippled by its own ambition. Using the Super FX chip, the designers wanted to give you the experience of piloting a sweet transforming robot. This thing was a robot, jet, car, and turtle all in one! The game mostly suffers from slowdown and some bad level design such as the stupid first person tunnel crawls were you have to get past traps just to get a key. Turning is kinda jerky and your weapons are kinda weak. The boss battles aren't terribly fun either. The execution is just bearable to the point where you can have a lot of fun transforming into a jet to chase down and enemy and then turning back into a car to race across some platforms. It almost screams for a modern remake.

Rules of Engagement

Space Commandos

two very bad sci fi games that were part of a larger networked series of games.

You mean Breach, right? RoE2 and Breach 2/3 were part of the silly interconnect thing. Shame neither of them worked properly.

Stark wrote:You mean Breach, right? RoE2 and Breach 2/3 were part of the silly interconnect thing. Shame neither of them worked properly.

correct, however Space Commandos was also part of another series of games in it's own universe.