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?
Enter the matrix was fun as hell, at least the first mission with all the bullet time, kung-fu and acrobatics. It wasn’t a good game, but it was everything I needed from a Matrix spinoff
Kane and Lynch!
I liked it way more than Gears of War, which was also a 2 player coop cover shooter released around the same time.
I just really liked the banter, the characters, the setting, the way that you could see how one of the characters was crazy because when you play coop as him he sees different things.
Loved every second of it when I played it, even in single player.
The Matrix Online. It was not a very good game mechanically, but the community and the monolith employees that would log on to role play major characters was the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games in my life.
Bear with me…
Megaman legends 2
Silly kids game, lots of fun, early dungeon crawling, but they snuck in heavy philosophy.
There is a scene where the protagonist is recalling long forgotten memories. The last living human, in luxury, in extravagance, in exactly what techbros want today but actually achieved here, has a perfect system, a perfect world, serving his every whim. A world without poverty, disease, suffering.
And he is lonely.
He befriends a bot in this system charged with keeping order. Basically a cop in this world. But he gives him special privileges to be able to “think” in ways the others are restricted from. This one is special. He literally creates a friend.
Then he uses the incredible technological prowess to recreate suffering.
He creates a synthetic recreation of humans, designed to be vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to suffering. They are subject to pressures that simply delay their deaths. And through doing so they achieve meaning and happiness. They exist.
The master watches them, like fish in an aquarium, for generations. Eventually, he goes down to earth to fully experience them. Thousands of years of disease free living have basically robbed this last human of an immune system. He is vulnerable there. No force in the universe can take him out. Man has become god. And yet, he goes down there anyway.
To experience the smell of a dinner bearing prepared.
He dies. Before he does, he released the bot that brought him down to earth from the rules of the system that governed him and told him to burn it all down. Perfection was not a remedy, it was a curse. And then he dies as the bot holds him in his hands, watching him fade away.
This was a game for children. And I understood way too much of it.
Hmm, I guess I’ll go with Barbie Explorer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Petz Sports. Also arguably Ostrich Runner because it’s unfinished/unpolished in some places: particularly I don’t know how the final level is meant to be played because it ends on its own without the player really doing anything. I played those as a kid so I was less critical back then.
#game #videogames #gamingClive Barker’s Jericho
It’s janky af but it has great atmosphere.
I thought it was great, loved the characters, the atmosphere and all the lore, didn’t know it was considered bad until now 😅
Really cool to see this mentioned. It was a mediocre game indeed but had such an amazing premise. I still think about it often.
I played all the 16 bit Phantasy star games when i was a kid. Phantasy star 3 is considered to be the black sheep of the series but it is the one that stuck with me the most, something about the music and atmosphere, and odd take on scifi fantasy it portrays.
The first Witcher game. I adored it. Janky controls, weird plot holes, subpar graphics. But oh man - the environments, the ambiance, and the dialogue absolutely slap.
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.
Excuse me.
The question was about bad games that you enjoy.
Not about fuckawesome games that are fuckawesome and that Sega needs to burn for not allowing us to have a sequel of.
Alpha Protocol is one of the great tragedies from Obsidian’s days of doing contract work, back when they were never given enough time or money but still put out brilliant but flawed games like AP, New Vegas, and Knights of the Old Republic 2. I would do terrible things for a remake of any of those games where the original team was given the resources to do things properly.
(Though IMO I think AP might work better as a Telltale-style game in the vein of Dispatch or the Walking Dead. The dialog is the star and all the other gameplay only detracted from it.)
Alpha Protocol being rushed was especially tragic because there’s no other game that changes the plot to such an extreme degree based on your actions. It really felt like your story. It also avoided an obvious “best” route by having every choice be a tradeoff, where helping one contact could alienate or even endanger another. It’s not like a Bioware game where you can pick the top option in every dialog and cruise your way to an ideal ending for everyone. You had to pick a side eventually, pitting you against former allies who you genuinely liked.
I bought this on a sale and never played it…
You are doing yourself a disservice.
Install and play it now.
Its a fantastic fucking game. Literally no two playthroughs are the same.
OK I installed it, I’ll give it a go
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.
Starfield is great if instead of wanting to play a good RPG with a great story, you wanna just play 1st person Diablo with guns in space and be a loot goblin.
Castlevania 64. Not even Legacy of Darkness, the original one. It gets a lot of hate I think just because the rest of the series has such awesome games and it gets held to a high standard but just as a N64 game I loved it.
Far Cry 2.
The game is fundamentally broken in a way that mods apparently can’t even fix. The enemy militia checkpoints instantly fully respawn as soon as you trip an invisible trigger. It makes combat with them pointless, which means getting stuck in a firefight with a checkpoint tedious.
The weapon degradation feature is way overtuned to cause some weapons to start visibly rusting from shot to shot.
These two aspects turn the game into a slog. Not even in a way that makes it immersive and survivalist, but immersion breakingly frustrating.
It’s a shame because the game was so ambitious. The game having a mechanic where a player at 0 health can get randomly saved if they befriended an NPC which will drag them to safety is really cool. The fire spreading everywhere was visually and tactically great. The malaria bouts were controversial, but I think they were a good way to increase the feeling of survival and desperation. There’s a lot good with a bleak, serious, and grounded Far Cry game but it just missed the mark in all the most impossible to ignore ways.
‘Far Cry 2 (2)’ would be amazing.
Starbound is kind of like Terraria in space, but with a worse gameplay loop, worse characters, and worse bosses, but I did like gentrifying the cosmos.
Man, the full release Starbound was such a… I don’t want to call it a disappointment but it’s definitely a shame what happened with it. It went through so many cool mechanics throughout the development and threw away like half of them (not to mention the near complete rewrite of the lore). Such a weird situation.
I barely touched the 1.0 version but I still play some of the beta builds from time to time - they might lack in content but boy do they grab me in a way the full release never managed to.
I love starbound, it’s definitely not a bad game at all.
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
I had a beta. And all I remember is that on easy game is truly easy. But once you up difficulty by 1, game becomes terribly difficult. Makes it impossible to play with bots and even with real people and voice chat it was quite a challenge.
Card system should be better and they shouldn’t nerf all the fun cards. They shoul’ve taken inspiration from Dead by Daylight. But again, for a PvE game, nerfing fun stuff to the ground is dumb and a way to distance from the community.
As a 1k hours L4D2 veteran, I really wanted to like B4B. Not sure how could they fumble the formula that they participated in creation of. Sad to see it fail.
I definitely enjoyed my time with B4B. I don’t think it’s a really good game, but it also wasn’t as bad as everyone was saying.
Haven’t played in forever though so maybe it has gone to shit in the meantime.
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
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.
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.
FO4: Welcome to Fallout! Here’s your nuclear war, here’s your vault, here’s your wasteland, here’s your wacky robots, here’s your dog, here’s your Good Guy Faction, here’s your power armor, here’s your first Deathclaw, now either go find your son or fuck off.
It really tried to cram the entire setting into a playable E3 demo, made most builds nonviable, not to mention how half-baked the modding system and settlement construction tools are.
Forgot how if you follow the main story in the beginning you face a deathclaw early. Forgot how they scale most every enemy down to your level. Yeah, not a big fan of that for deathclaws since they are supposed to be terrifying and strong.
I’d say the modding system is okay and dies it’s job well enough, but the settlement system? Oh boy, is that just an underwhelming thing. It’s a cool concept, but it’s done in a boring manner.
The modding has the same problem blacksmithing/enchanting in Skyrim has: You have to invest a lot of advancement in the system to get any benefit out of it. Older Bethesda games let you sidestep that by throwing money at the problem which is a totally valid way to let players have more freedom but all the good stuff is locked behind feats and high stats now. Why can’t my character be an emotionally stunted moron with a skilled mechanic on retainer to access the good shit? Instead I am completely reliant on farming raiders of various factions and hoping for good drops. (This is the “looter shooter” thing the other guy brought up but I don’t think it’s a great version of that either.)
New Vegas will always be superior to Fallout 4 in everything but graphics.
Fallout 4 is a great looter shooter. But its an absolute ass awful fallout game… Like they bought someone elses half finished shooter, and threw super mutants and a fucking horrible RPG system into it awful.
in everything but graphics.
And stability. I’ve recently replayed the main Fallout games and the crashing and bugs in the vanilla New Vegas experience is inexcusable.
Cant help you, it was indefensibly buggy on launch, but its long since been fixed and been shockingly stable for me, even when modded out the ass.
I genuinely can not remember the last crash I had.
Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.
Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn’t hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn’t have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking “yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time”, which was really unsatisfying.
Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock’s soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.
Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.
Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC’s don’t really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren’t people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you’re shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.
The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every “arena room” area feels the same. The guns aren’t that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn’t all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn’t used often and there wasn’t usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.
So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.
So I’d say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn’t live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.
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.
The best Fallout Experience in the 3d era is New Vegas. Which is fitting, since it was the only one made by the actual fallout creators, that had actual love for the setting that they created.
Fallout 3 was like a collection of short stories all bound into a single hardcover. Because nothing you did in location X, affecting anything out of location X. It tried, but I think the reason it got as much praise as it did in the early days, was simply because it was like muddy water in the desert to people dying of thirst, it whet their lips and throat and as a result was the sweetest thing ever tasted. . Until you got back home and drank proper, clean water again and realized how your desperation was making something bad into something grand.
Fallout 4 is a great looter shooter. But thats all it is, its not a fallout game… Its like Bethesda bought some half finished game and threw super mutants and butchered/ruined the RPG system to enable infinite growth in a system where no one is going to get to level 200 under even egregious gameplay circumstances
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.
No way, FO4 would be mediocre even if I had never played any of the first person Fallout games. Bioshock Infinite just didn’t feel like a Bioshock games, but I honestly thought it was quite good as a stand alone game. It was definitely better, more fun than Bioshock 2 for me.
I agree that infinite didn’t feel like a BioShock game, but I still enjoyed it for what it was. But FO4 was pretty good. Writing could’ve definitely used work, but the gameplay was pretty tight. I remember having issues with the new skinny murder bot event even mid game. I didn’t experience that in New Vegas. As much as I will always love New Vegas, it had some balancing issues that 4 did well.
I try to enjoy games apart from their predecessors.
FO4 just really didn’t click for me. Maybe it was too over shadowed by FO3 and FO:NV, but the writing/story was bad, the dark humor didn’t land, and the choices you were given didn’t seem have any real consequence. I guess mechanically it was OK, but I think it just didn’t live up to the expectations I had from Bethesda. In fact, I am not sure I have truly enjoyed a game they released since then.
FO4 was also up again a massive list of great games that came out around the same time. Just from memory I know that the Witcher 3, GTA V, Metal Gear Solid V, Bloodborne, and Shovel Knight came out around the same time. I am not sure which exact game it was, I am positive that I blew off FO4 once one of the others came out.
It seemed widely decried at release, but it really stood up in the end.
Apparently imsimmers really hate it for not being Bioshock 1 But More.
Bioshock Infinite had a wildly good reception. It’s 91% positive on Steam with 47k reviews.
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 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.
As someone who didn’t particularly enjoy the first two, I was very grateful that Infinite was different. The only really bad part IMO was the ghost fight. On the higher difficulties, she tanked more ammo than existed in the area.
Surprised to see this in the thread. Agreed it’s a fun game!
