Ask Lemmy

When I was in elementary school one of my classrooms had Stratego among the board games meant for bad weather days or waiting after school.

I had previously played Stratego and liked it, but every single other kid in this classroom read that the 'Spy' piece could kill the 'General' (the most powerful) piece and concluded that the 'Spy' could therefore kill any piece on the board. I was shouted down by everyone for pointing out the actual wording of the rules and that a 'Spy' is called that because it's obviously supposed to be a sneaky piece.

Nobody agreed and just played the game with the 'Spy' as a rampaging super piece killing everything. That was pretty miserable.

I have had the displeasure of playing the two worst video game of all time. E.T. The Extra-Terestrial and Custers Revenge. Both were Atari games released in 1982.

Nobody should answer "Monopoly" because it's intended to be un-fun, as an object lesson in why monopolies are bad.

I rented Superman 64 at Blockbuster once.

Don't reccomend.

Much broken.

Such bugs.

Wow.

Capitalism

Mario Party 9 was so bad I think I only played it one time.

The moment I saw the car thing and read that there was no way to get around it, we quit and went back to the older games.

7-yo me hated the original Ghostbusters game on NES. So much so that I devised a plan to get my birthday money back.

Toys R Us would only refund unopened games, but you could get an even exchange if a game was 'defective'. So I made up some mumbo jumbo about how something didn't work in the game, and my mom got it swapped for me (she was nervous for some reason). Took the unopened game to a different Toys R Us location and got my money back. I felt like a criminal mastermind.

I can't really remember what I didn't like about the game...probably I had a certain expectation as a big Ghostbusters fan that no NES game could meet.

10-player game of munchkin. Could feel my soul trying to crawl out of my mouth after the 3rd hour.

Space Station 13 is simulteanously the worst and best game I have played depending on the station you choose. I've been one a shift where we fought back every monstrosity thrown at us with ease. I've also been on a shift where I am the only medical crew and the capitan is a traitor and why is the ship already on fire its been 10 minutes?

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Snakes and Ladders is the only game bad enough to avoid that I've nevertheless been obliged to play repeatedly.

Mario Party.

I. Fucking. HATE. Mario Party.

Played an old LoTR game for the SNES that was so full of bugs, it actually held my interest longer than it should have because I was curious whether the game could even be completed.

Master of Orion III, a 4X game from around the turn of the century. The two previous instalments were fun strategy games. This one was like playing the world's prettiest spreadsheet.

Arc: Survival (dinosaur game). Shit. Played for 15 minutes. Poor optimization and almost 1tb of space needed… wtf.

Monopoly. Tragically boring.

Long format games like monopoly, risk, etc.

The game is dead long before it's over.

If you enjoy going in depth, there's a podcast called How Did This Get Played that is now called "Get Played" because they couldn't bear subjecting themselves to these misfortunately made games for too long. But the early many episodes were chock-full of titles.

WWF King of the Ring on Gameboy.

Even as a kid who was a hughe wrestling fan and was long looking forward to getting it, I rarely played that poor game.

The graphics and sound was bad, even for Gameboy standards, and as far as I remember, you could only hurt your opponent with punches or kicks but NOT with wrestling moves. In a freaking wrestling game...

Shadow Madness was an amazingly bad PS1 RPG. The details have faded with time, but I remember it was an incoherent hodgepodge of every RPG trope, every party member was a bad cliche, the random encounter system was this terrible "red light, green light" thing. It was insultingly easy, and Harv-5 was like someone's shitty Shadow the Hedgehog OC of Bender from Futurama.

I have had a grudge against this terrible game for 25 years.

Maybe a hot take but I stand by it.

Red Faction: Armageddon. It was just so very boring and inferior to its 3-year-old predecessor. THQ actually tried to claim that no one was interested in the franchise anymore because of the lacklustre sales of that game. But the franchise is excellent, Armageddon was just a bad game.

I have played many, many games. I remember some of the best. I forget the others. Why would I remember the worst?

Monopoly. Literally designed to be frustratingly unplayable to represent the frustratingly unplayable user experience of capitalism, but people insist on playing it anyway.

AD&D 2e. Insists it's a game about exciting fantasy adventuring, then all the rules are about painfully slow tactical minutiae. The combat mechanics are taken from a game about modern naval warfare, hence bigger Armor Class means easy to hit. It's unclear why anyone thought ships with guns was a good model for medieval sword fighting. Entire sections of rules have to be ignored - hello encumberance - and gameplay regularly has to stop to look up charts, tables or niche rules like grappling.

Screamball. Like ping pong, except the point goes to whoever screams the loudest during a volley. We made it up as teenagers. It was awful.

It's hard to narrow it down to a single game, but all of the worst games I can think of were licensed games on earlier consoles. E.T. on the Atari 2600 is an obvious example, but the NES was chock full of garbage tier licensed games like Jaws, Ghostbusters, Last Action Hero, Dark Man, Superman, Robocop, Mad Max, Wayne's World, Hook, Back to the Future... it just goes on and on (Weirdly I don't think Friday the 13th belongs on this list, I actually like that game). All that being said, Superman 64 for the N64 is probably the absolute worst. The game is bad at every level. Ugly, buggy, and unfun. It's not even fun to try it on an emulator to see how bad it is. Consider it toxic waste.