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?
I loved Black Survival back in the day. It was early in the Battle Royal wave and it somehow made a visual novel style multiplayer BR fun for me, but any of my friends I convinced to try it absolutely despised it
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.
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 🫠
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.
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.
Alpha Protocol, a spy-themed RPG by Obsidian and probably their worst game. The gameplay was absolute garbage, but it had some of the best writing in games and your dialog choices actually affected the plot in dozens of ways. It was the first time I can remember since the old Sierra days where a minor choice you made ten hours ago could come back and screw you over.
In some ways it was the game that Mass Effect claimed to be, one that reshaped itself around your choices and let you lead the plot where you desired. It just sucks that in all other ways it was a buggy piece of crap, where everything from combat to stealth to hacking were miserable chores that weren’t fun even when they did function properly.
I remember being impressed when an NPC commented on how I wore combat armor to a clandestine meeting. There were a lot of little touches that were nice.
I bought this on a sale and never played it…
By all accounts, Quest 64 ranked somewhere between runny dog shit and aggressive bone cancer, but I was just enthralled with it as a kid. Actually kind of bummed when I got a Switch and it wasn’t on the retro games subscription thing.
That was my Blockbuster rental one weekend. Coming off of final fantasy games it was a little disappointing, but not a disaster.
Bioshock Infinite. I wouldn’t call it bad, but it gets a bad rep for not being the game that Bioshock superfans wanted. I hadn’t been infected by the immersive sim brain worm when I played it and didn’t judge games based on their box-stacking mechanics, nor did I care about how it fit into the lineage of *shock games. Evaluated on its own, It was a fair shooter with great visual style and okay story.
There are other cheap shot meme games that I enjoyed for how bad they were, like Mystery of the Droods.
It’s the #72 highest rated game of all time on Metacritic with a 94/100. I don’t think BioShock Infinite really fits this thread.
It’s a funny case where it was pretty widely panned by diehard fans of the previous games, but it was extremely popular with basically everyone else. So there was a very vocal minority who shat on the game right after it released. But it hit a broad enough audience that the new/casual players overwhelmed the diehard fans.
Bioshock Infinite is basically the Fallout 4 of Bioshock games. If you played Fallout 4 first, you’d probably think it’s a great Fallout game. The gameplay is decent, you have roleplay choices for the story, there is lots of world building, etc… But if New Vegas is already your favorite game, you probably hated FO4 for not being enough Fallout. It doesn’t mean people enjoying FO4 are wrong. It just means the game didn’t deliver what existing fans were hoping for.
Bioshock Infinite is basically the Fallout 4 of Bioshock games. If you played Fallout 4 first, you’d probably think it’s a great Fallout game. The gameplay is decent, you have roleplay choices for the story, there is lots of world building, etc… But if New Vegas is already your favorite game, you probably hated FO4 for not being enough Fallout.
I think that every Fallout game other than New Vegas and maybe 2 is like this. There are things that people like, but there are also changes that fans of prior games are really upset about.
Fallout 3 came out, and it was shifting a much-loved isometric game with fully turn-based combat into a pausable 3D shooter. Part of Fallout and Fallout 2 was that it had good world-building. I believe that “Fallout” was originally a play on words, referring not just to the radioactive fallout, but to the societal fallout. It showed a post-apocalyptic society. In Fallout 3 and on, a lot of that world-building made a lot less sense in favor of building little mini-stories.
Fallout 4 shifted from a tradition of being able to drastically affect the world to having dialog paths that almost entirely had no effect other than reputation with one’s companion. Fans complained because the game felt like it was on rails. The skill system went away, which a lot of people didn’t like.
Fallout 76, aside from being buggy at release even by Bethesda’s standards, took a series with lots of characters to interact with and basically eliminated them until later updates brought them back in. It had a weaker plot (especially at launch). Fallout 76 had a bunch of design decisions around being a multi-player game that made it a rather weaker single-player game — in a series with an immersive world, constant reminders about multi-player events and such kind of don’t fit in well. There was very limited ability to mod the game, whereas prior entries in the series had been extremely moddable.
There was also good new stuff that came with each, but if you went into the game wanting prior game in series but with just what you considered to be improvements and expansion, you were likely to hit some things that you didn’t like.
I was a huge fan of the previous games. My friends were huge fans of the previous games. We all loved Infinite. Fallout 4 is another great example of that game being way better, and way better received, than the tone that you tend to see on forums. Perhaps because those people were so burned that they can’t help but talk continually about how upset they were with it? I see this all the time in fighting game circles around Guilty Gear Strive. That series never broke 1M copies sold of a game before Strive, and Strive has sold like 4M+ by now. Not only that, but tournament entrants are consistently healthy at every major. If competitors weren’t happy with it, they’d stop playing, and we know that from plenty of other fighting game scenes. Even if everyone who played a prior Guilty Gear also hated Strive (which isn’t the case), it should be extremely rare to come across those legacy players’ complaints, but even 5 years into Strive’s success, those voices are quite loud in forums.
Speaking of FO4, my biggest gripe is just the loss of durability of everything, but power armor. That, and power armor becoming something anyone is able to wear and is all over, removing any speciality to it, IMO.
It’s kinda unfair to compare FO4 to FONV, IMO, but it’s still a decent game on its own.
Apparently imsimmers really hate it for not being Bioshock 1 But More.
It seemed widely decried at release, but it really stood up in the end.
Bioshock Infinite had a wildly good reception. It’s 91% positive on Steam with 47k reviews.
I enjoyed Infinite as well. The story was good enough to keep me hooked, and despite you having to escort Elizabeth or the majority of the game, she didn’t feel like a burden.
Surprised to see this in the thread. Agreed it’s a fun game!
I don’t get how game that has 94/100 on metacritic and only lost to GTA5 on it’s release year calling it “not bad” is an understatement to say the least.
I don’t know that anyone will understand, but, Rogue Warrior on the Xbox 360.
A game about Dick Marcinko and is voiced by Mickey Rourke. Its gameplay and movement dynamics were trash, but the storyline, vulgar language, and achievements were fun to work on. Because it was so poorly received, hardly anyone played online, so I’m still missing 1 achievement 😓. But I made some good friends on Xbox live during this days.
Plus, I got to learn about SEAL Team 6 and its history. I’ve also meet Adm William McRaven who’s spoken well of him and his accomplishments.
“April fool motherfucker.”
The lines in that game are truly something else. It’s really not a good game at all but I think that credits song makes up for a lot of it.
Something key to remember is that when a game gets “Mixed” on Steam, eg 50/50, that still means half the people who play it enjoyed it. Half is not nothing.
For instance, Aliens: Colonial Marines. To my knowledge, AI was kinda shit, but could be fixed in a text file, but apparently a lot of people still enjoyed it otherwise.
So there’s probably a lot of these that have niche appeal to people.
Drakkhen
I will likely be crucified for this, but it’s true…
Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. (SNES version)
This game was hard as fuck and super satisfying to beat.
I always liked the first Bubsy. Never understood the hate it got. The second one, though, is completely unplayable to me due to the lag between pressing the jump button and Bubsy actually jumping. No review I’ve ever seen has mentioned this for some reason.
Agreed, every sequel was trash.
Back 4 Blood. It was a zombie game marketed as “made by the same people who made Left 4 Dead” but they really didn’t have any of that talent left after 15ish years and just seemed to be pretty unpolished all around. However, they had a card system where you make a deck of bonuses you want and after each mission you get one that you keep until the end of the campaign. But the devs, Turtle Rock, had a habit of nerfing any cards that were strong or fun into the ground even though the game was mostly PvE. Also they made a change halfway through the game’s lifespan so that you get the entire deck at the start of the first level instead of building up to it. I still don’t know if that was a good change or not, but they never rebalanced the game so the first couple levels of every campaign were just ridiculously easy. Unpolished game, horrible devs, but I had fun while it lasted
The card thing made it a game that was fun when you play all the time instead of the once a month your busy adult friends are free at the same time, so a lot of people that had previously loved l4d couldn’t really get into it
A couple of buddies and I still play this. It is definitely unbalanced but thats part of its charm to us. Plus when you start getting a groove as a team its just tons of 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.
Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue
(original PC release)Oh no. That’s on my playlist but the psx version. (It’s for an RA event). I hope I enjoy it…
