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[Alex]

My Nintendo Wii

Let's create a game console with the same hardware as our previous generation game console, give it a fucking remote with a motion sensor, and sell it for three hundred dollars.

Ensuring that Nintendo gets no third party support on any but the crappiest titles, this box is only useful for playing first party games. At least the gamecube had some standout out of house games, but most of the third party crap on the Wii wouldn't pass as live arcade titles for the x-box. I'm sorry, but they should have just sold us an addon for the gamecube.

A complete lack of HDMI support just makes it all the more frustrating - knowing that the wii can be emulated at full FPS in 1080p, but can't be played on even basic HD on my television is maddening. Bottom five may seem harsh, but I've never regretted a game hardware purchase more. The only reason I haven't sold the thing off to buy a PS3 or 360 yet is because my fiance uses it to play rune factory. Our Nintendo Wii is essentially the rune factory box. Brawl is also OK too, but I've got to be honest - I've never gotten much play out of fighting games.

B-but it's the third party developer's fault for not making anything good, right?  It's not like they could make a great game that wouldn't immediately be outsold by a 1st party title or shovelware within a week, right?[/sarcasm]

That's pretty much what I see every generation and find it kind of funny that 'No one wants to dump a game somewhere where it'll get run down with the snap of a finger' generally goes unnoticed.

Oh well!  At least my Wii can keep me entertained by being a little emulation box that my mom can use when she wants to play ye olde Tetris sometimes.

[Detonator]

All causal games ever.  I don't believe I need to explain myself on this one.

What the fuck are you talking about?  Can you give at least one example?  As Kazz said, Popcap games and Desktop Tower Defense are pretty fun.  So is Wii Sports.  I'm not going to delude myself into thinking something isn't fun just because a non-gamer might like it.

This reminds me: I downloaded Phantasy Star II onto my Xbox360. It takes up less room than some of my saves. It's small. When I looked at the XBoxLive Arcade, I thought I would see a sort of 2D revival. I thought I would see small scale RPG epics and Link to the Past knock-offs. I thought I would see some incredibly ambitious games tightly coiled into small packages.

You disappoint me, Video Game Industry.

I can't say I'm too surprised by this.  While an entire epic masterpiece from 1992 may only take up 1/1000th of the space of a similar game now, that doesn't mean the effort it took scaled in the same manner.  However, you're not going to be charging more than $10-15 for the game.  These differences mean that RPGs are probably going to be full-price titles, while XBLA games are going to be cheaply-made arcadey titles.  I hope that made sense.


Anyway, I was going to chide you all for judging a game based on its hype/fanbase instead of its own merit, but then I realized that's exactly what I already did with Rez, so I digress.  It makes the thread more interesting than naming strictly terrible games.

[Disposable Ninja]

Well, yeah, I understand all that.

But then I look at something like Lucidity. At first I was really excited about it, because the style and presentation for it are so unbelievably cool. Then I actually played the demo, and whatever good feelings I was having were quickly and violently crushed by a boogeyman named Casual Gaming. I expected a stylish adventure through a dreamlike and vibrant world -- what I found was a wretched Tetris-cum-Escort Mission.

[Doom]

I quit and uninstalled this game once I saw a dinosaur, yes, a fucking dinosaur, walk past a tunnel I was in.  I was like "I did not sign up for dinosaurs.  This game was started by geniuses and finished by retards.  Goodbye."

I guess that dinosaur was good security if he made the thief just up and leave.  

[Kayin]

Oh I just remember something else I did not like.

Scribblenauts

Now I never played Spore, so I guess this was my spore. Only I didn't buy it, I just played it for a bit on a DS emulator to see if it was any good. I actually put some time in the game too, in an attempt to break it and get some fun shit happening. No dice. Everything kept being solved the same way. Who cares if every object on earth is in the game if they don't interact in useful or interesting ways?

I knew things were going down hill when I got to the ramp jump and level and couldn't strap a rocket to a bicycle. This game fails at doing what Fantastic Contraption did better with like 5 parts. I can't help but to be amazed about how you can make a game with so much content yet so absolutely little emergent depth.

[Miss Cat Ears]

Wow, Scribblenauts was so bad I had blocked it from memory until just now.

[Friday]

Scribblenauts suffers from the exact same problem Spore does:

DO ANYTHING YOU WANT! EXCEPT EVERYTHING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS BORING

[Lottel]

TF2's Item System: I mean, this isn't a GAME, it's part of a game, but nothing else has annoyed me more. It baffles me that such a well designed game can be corrupted by such poorly thought out trash. And there is so much that make it extra stupid. You're more likely to get items you already have? REALLY?! WHY! WWWWWHY!

Oh yeah, useless crafting system that is so resource intensive that you'll likely have everything you want before you can use it. All it really works for is melting items into hats. Thanks Valve

Don't forget that it's only useful to craft hats if you idle for so long. Maybe if items dropped more or it was less costly to build items or hats it would be more useful but now it's like "Oh hey. I want a hat. I have 17 extra guns. Only 70 off! DOHOHOHO"

[Doom]

Hey now it only takes 81 junk items to make a hat.

108 if you want to bother with a token so you can narrow your random shot in the dark amongst every class

to a 1 in 5 shot in the dark for a single class

also you might get the pile of hats even with a token so go fuck yourself

Oh, that reminds me of a game I could add to my Bottom 5 for some straight up HILARITY: Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 1.

But that'd be another matter of divorcing what I like from what I hate and just going to town on the hate

is it worth the effort?

[Burrito Al Pastor]

B-but it's the third party developer's fault for not making anything good, right?  It's not like they could make a great game that wouldn't immediately be outsold by a 1st party title or shovelware within a week, right?[/sarcasm]

I'm increasingly suspicious of Nintendo's staunch refusal to certify Cave Story Wii.

Doom 3

This game was fucking terrible. There's a reason we haven't seen a Doom 4 yet and probably never will. You know what I'd take? A remake of the first with a new engine - with the same overpowered weapons, underpowered enemies, and impossible odds. Serious Sam was successful by recreating Doom. Doom 3 was a failure by completely fucking missing what made the game fun in the first place. Considering how many hours I logged in Doom and how much I enjoyed the game for it's simple, visceral gameplay, I could not have been more dissapointed by Doom 3. I can't even give it props for story or originality-  everything it did, System shock 2 had done better years before. And as an FPS, the game fails simply by handing you a stream of incredibly shitty weapons. The only guns you get that are worth using you never find any fucking ammo for!

http://doom.chaosforge.org/

But then I look at something like Lucidity. At first I was really excited about it, because the style and presentation for it are so unbelievably cool. Then I actually played the demo, and whatever good feelings I was having were quickly and violently crushed by a boogeyman named Casual Gaming. I expected a stylish adventure through a dreamlike and vibrant world -- what I found was a wretched Tetris-cum-Escort Mission.

I haven't played Lucidity, but I just pulled up the Steam page, and there's nothing about this game that looks casual. It looks like an Art game. Are you confusing Art games and Casual games?  They're very different things, but should not be confused.

Here is a simple test. If a game has exceedingly simple controls, it is probably either an Art game or a Casual game. If the game is also fun but has no redeeming value in terms of advancing the genre, it's a casual game. If the game is not particularly fun but is exceedingly pretty and/or has a nice soundtrack and/or has a lot of blatant symbolism, it's an art game.

If it is neither, it is probably a bad casual game.

Casual games are an interesting sector, because they are just about the only field of gaming anymore in which the sole criterion for quality is "Is it fun to play?"

[Mothra]

Man I really, really want to like Doom 3. I thought their whole hell sequence was top-notch, a lot of the monster designs were pretty bitchin', and the "growth" they had running across the base was creepy as the dickens. Parts of the plot were great as well, like the recordings you'd find from expeditions, and the various attempts to quantify and measure the SOULLESS DEMONSPAWN. It is unfortunately the least fun thing to play in the history of time.
This is made worse by the fact that Doom 1 and 2 continue to be fun and satisfying TO THIS DAY  

[Detonator]

Scribblenauts suffers from the exact same problem Spore does:

DO ANYTHING YOU WANT! EXCEPT EVERYTHING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS BORING

I've always thought that, in some strange way, Dwarf Fortress is a better Spore than Spore.  If you read the dev logs you'll understand: there's a level of interactivity and variety that those other games can only dream of.

[Bongo Bill]

F-Zero GX is the only game so bad that I gave it away rather than selling it. Any money I had earned from the sale would have been tainted. Here, let's make an awesome racing game with like thirty goddamn characters... but you can only use four of them unless you can beat the single-player mode. And the single-player mode is made entirely of challenges like "Using the awkward-ass swerve button, kill all 25 enemy racers, who are all faster and heavier than you are, have infinite boost, and get a head-start. You have two minutes." It's bad enough when you have to unlock so much of the game's content, but at least make the hoops you have to jump through sane.

The rest of my gettin'-mad-at-games is really just a hobby (Fandom is fun! Part of that fun is hating things!), but F-Zero GX? That game can burn.

Deus Ex. Everybody said it was awesome, but then I started it up and the end of the tutorial consisted of trying to get across a moat while a robot that could see through walls shot your arms and legs off. Did you know that without arms and legs, you can't activate switches? I'm pretty sure there was a switch, anyway. I'm not positive; it sort of just dropped me in there and said "Try to get across!" A switch would have made sense. For me, Deus Ex is a permanent badge of shame on my record: the game where I couldn't even beat the tutorial; and for that, I resent it deeply. It gave me little hope that the main game would be somehow less inscrutable.

Deep in the mists of prehistory, I once played Donkey Kong 64. I will never get that time back.

I only bought Blueberry Garden as part of some package deal with some other things that looked worth a try. This was the only one that turned out not to be worth, at least, a try. It is a game about running/flying around an abstract environment touching objects while the area floods with deadly water; every time you touch one it gets added to a big pile and warps you back to the start, so you end up repeating yourself a lot. In practice, by the time you usually find a new area, it's already flooded. Melancholy notes tinkle on a piano all the while.

Finally, Windows Solitaire always traps the card that I need directly underneath the card for which I need it.

[Büge]

Can we include games we've never played? Because I want to say Hellgate London.

[Shinra]

Noone likes to admit it, but Deus Ex is basically the least approachable game I have ever played that was made by a professional design studio. Ok, actually, Carnage Heart on the PS1 gets that award, but Deus Ex is fucking close.

[Shinra]

Can we include games we've never played? Because I want to say Hellgate London.

I'd have included this in my bottom 5 but I don't even want to remember it. Flagship Studios can go to hell.

[Bleck]

The thing about any Diablo clone is that they are never ever good ever.

Deep in the mists of prehistory, I once played Donkey Kong 64. I will never get that time back.

fuck you man that game has the dk rap

[Burrito Al Pastor]

Deus Ex. Everybody said it was awesome, but then I started it up and the end of the tutorial consisted of trying to get across a moat while a robot that could see through walls shot your arms and legs off. Did you know that without arms and legs, you can't activate switches? I'm pretty sure there was a switch, anyway. I'm not positive; it sort of just dropped me in there and said "Try to get across!" A switch would have made sense. For me, Deus Ex is a permanent badge of shame on my record: the game where I couldn't even beat the tutorial; and for that, I resent it deeply. It gave me little hope that the main game would be somehow less inscrutable.

I love Deus Ex to death, but I can't actually say I've ever played the tutorial. Are you saying that you never actually played the game proper? Unless you're playing on an unreasonably high difficulty, it's really not that hard.

Deep in the mists of prehistory, I once played Donkey Kong 64. I will never get that time back.

Oh, god. I'm replacing the entirety of my list with every game Rare has ever made that I have had the misfortune of playing, including, but not limited to, Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Racing, and Perfect Dark. I have not played Viva Pinata, and I don't particularly intend to, for obvious reasons.

Finally, Windows Solitaire always traps the card that I need directly underneath the card for which I need it.

That's not the fault of Windows Solitare - that's a flaw in Klondike, the solitare game that Windows Solitare plays, and which is a terrible game even when played with actual cards. The chance that any given game of Klondike is actually unwinnable no matter what you do may be as high as 1 in 3.

[Burrito Al Pastor]

The thing about any Diablo clone is that they are never ever good ever.

Deep in the mists of prehistory, I once played Donkey Kong 64. I will never get that time back.

fuck you man that game has the dk rap

Titan Quest was fantastic. Fall in a well and die, sir. An AIDS well.

[Shinra]

also Torchlight is pretty fucking great.