This is the worst game I've ever played

[LAIS]

OK - I know a similar topic existed back in 2008, but it seemed a bit much to drag that back up after all this time...

What's the worst game you've ever played, and what was so bad about it? For me, it's the following...



I got a Gameboy Advance back in the early 2000s and I picked up Super Mario Advance, Pokemon Silver...and this.

I was young, and I didn't know any better...but I learned quickly that a game tie-in is almost always a red warning flag.

Firstly, the theme music. Here's a Youtube "lets play" of the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0J8LdyJsDU

Just listen to that music. It's the audio equivalent of rubbing your eyes after cooking with chillis. The word "grating" doesn't do it justice.

But hey, it's the Gameboy. A lot of games were like that on the system.

"Maybe it plays well?" thought my stupid young mind.

...go back to the Youtube video. Look at Bart's catapult. It's impossible to kill an enemy unless they're at a very precise angle - which makes things pretty damn difficult as most villains are mobile, and need to be shot more than once to die.

The gaming is VERY repetitive. Go through a door, grab a key. Go through a door, grab a key. Go through a door...you get the picture.

It's also very, very difficult not to get hit. If you bother to play as far as the boss levels (again, I can't emphasize enough - YOUNG AND STUPID!) you'll sometimes find yourself in a situation where you're killed by one hit, and those hits are impossible to avoid. And when you do get hit (it will happen) you're right back to the start of the god-awful level.

One of my biggest regrets is buying this game...

So, over to you - what's the worst game you've ever played? (No need to be as long-winded as me!)

[thingonaspring]

Jungle Story on the Commodore 64.

Yes it was an early Mastertronic game. Yes it was £1.99. No it wasn't even worth that. Complete and utter rubbish. No gameplay. No progression. No achievement. No fun. Music was awful, too.

Surprised there is even a video on YouTube for it at all, tbh...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQAjhI27Di8

At least the cover was pretty decent.

[Bluce_Ree]

Superman on the Speccy.

So bad. It's got weird Atari-esque graphics and is basically unplayable filth.



More recently, Mastercube on PS4.

[TwoHeadedBoy]

Hexic HD on the 360... So dull I fell asleep playing it, and so bad that falling asleep didn't affect the game at all.

[The Beans]

Pimania on the ZX Spectrum.

Narrowly beating every single game I've played on the Atari 2600 except for Space Invaders and The Empire Strikes Back.

[Scratch_Porkings]

Red Heat on the Atari ST, I blanked the disks for save games.

[ianpmarks]

Not sure it's the worst game ever, but the most disappointed I've ever been with a game was Kong on the ZX Spectrum by Ocean.
I so wanted a Donkey Kong game to play at home, but Kong was awful. Too fast and too fiddly (it was almost impossible to get up the ladders as you had to be in a pixel perfect position). Also Kong looked rubbish. Was so angry at having wasted my money on it... it still rankles to this day.

[Antiriad2097]

Jungle Story on the Commodore 64...

Surprised there is even a video on YouTube for it at all, tbh...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQAjhI27Di8

I am less surprised. That's our very own Witchfinder with his Mastertronic Chronicles. He did a video review of every Mastertronic C64 game, as well as at least some of the games that weren't on C64 (it may have been the whole range).

I don't think I could name the worst game I've played, since there are so many barely remembered/forgotten stinkers from those early days when a BASIC listing could get published with little quality control. So many badly programmed arcade game conversion attempts, awful Space Invaders clones, Lunar Landers, Breakout, you name it, I played a terrible version.

[adippm82]

Green Beret on the C16, nothing else has ever come close to how terrible this is, shocking graphics, just one noise for a sound effect, ugly blocks round all the characters, the enemies have guns, when you only have a knife, there is nothing right about this game, nothing at all.

[ShadowMan]

Hard to pin down just one game... But from off the top of my head I'd have to go with:

Final Fight & Street Fighter 2 for the ZX Spectrum. They just seem unplayable to me...

Wolverine Adamantium Rage: I never finished this game back in the day, so I picked it up recently to finish the job. I now assume the reason why I never finished it was due to it being absolutely terrible. Even by licensed super hero game standards its terribly bad,

And on more recent systems...

Tadeo Jones 2 and Muppets Movie Adventures: Both for the Vita and both 2D platformers. Both using terrible engines so the frame rates are variable (especially TD2) plus the dodgy physics mean the games handle like rubbish more often than not. The only good point on both games is that they are both mercifully short, so you don't have to endure them for too long.

[David]

the worst for me personally, relative to the greatness I had heard about, were the Saturn panzer dragoon games I just recently tried

[Antiriad2097]

Ah, now if you're going for reputation vs reality, Shenmue would be a contender for me.

That and The Great Space Race (though at least that was down to prior dev rep and marketing hype rather than retrospective review).

[Shinobi]

Quest for Quotanna Roo on the 2600 looked amazing from the screenshots and couldn't wait to play it.. Started disapointing climbing the Pyramid.. Entering the tomb you become a white square stuck in a room.. I got into another room once with a pink square(think it was a mummy).. Whatever version the graphic's where on not the VCS as the box claimed...

[Negative Creep]

Either Bubsy 3D or Terminator 2 on the SNES. If you thought the AVGN was exaggerating for comic effect, you'd be wrong. The latter really does have the worst driving mechanics I've ever experienced

[thingonaspring]

I am less surprised. That's our very own Witchfinder with his Mastertronic Chronicles. He did a video review of every Mastertronic C64 game, as well as at least some of the games that weren't on C64 (it may have been the whole range).

so it is
i didn't realise. and i remember the game and the instructions well, and that was part of what upset me about this game (one of the first i bought with my own pocket money etc). it mentions getting fire from the village if you get far enough. but you don't. it never changes, apart from everything getting a bit quicker. you already have the fire. in a pot, from the start. which is what you fire at shere khan (or the leopard as witchfinder calls him). he didn't like the cover either
he loved it as much as i did though...