Difficulty-wise, The Lion King on SNES. This game shattered my childhood.
Made at a time where video game rentals were popular so they had to make games impossible to beat in 2 or 3 days.
I can say it wasn’t any easier in the Megadrive/Genesis.
The game was fun to some degree, just required an unfair time investment. The final fight was a memorably bad experience though. I was like eleven years old when I made it to the end and swear I spent almost a full hour clawing at Scar before I figured out that I wasn’t actually doing damage.
Also very difficult, but fun on the game gear!
I could never get through the 2nd ostrich riding sequence in the 2nd level as a kid. The rest of the game was fine, though, once I used the level select to skip ahead. Turns out, it was because my eyesight was shit and I couldn’t even see the correct obstacles on screen (I was trying to avoid the branches, but no it was pink hippos and bird nests the whole time, so my timing on the double jumps was always off). Replaying the game a couple years back when Disney re-released it alongside Aladdin, I found it still tricky, but doable.
Battletoads.
same tbh
I forgot how many times my siblings and I tried to beat that
Superman 64 was a hell of a mess
Seconding this one. I was like 11 years old and it’s the first time I can remember being disappointed when getting a game. Went from like Mario 64 to OOT to Banjo to Superman 64 and hoo boy what a drop off.
Same for me. It was my first flop I played and boy was it bad.
You didn’t like flying through 150 rings?
There are way more rings than that, and they’re actually the best parts of the game. It gets so much worse in the levels without rings. Awful combat, terrible puzzles, inconsistent framerate, and thoroughly unclear objectives.
Oh, and everyone’s favorite: escort missions!
escort missions
Clark Kent must really have not made much money as a reporter if he had to walk the streets at night too
Hard disagree. You just need to play it long enough for the Stockholm syndrome to kick in. Once it has its claws in you, you can’t stop playing it. Trying to figure out what makes this garbage puzzle box tick.
Same as a lot of other gen-xers: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
It’s a classic answer, E.T. on the Atari 2600.
Custer’s revenge would have been an acceptable answer as well.
It had misogyny and racism to push it over the top for worst game. ET was just an unplayable mess that disappointed kids my age. Custer’s Revenge is a borderline hate crime that should have gotten everyone involved fired.
PacMan on the 2600 was pretty disappointing to say the least.
That shitty mobile version of SimCity.
Took a beloved childhood classic (the original SimCity) and took a giant free-to-pay shit all over it.
The app store is a massive pool of free-to-play shit.
If you haven’t given pocket city 2 a try yet I highly recommend it
Ooh, neat. TY!
There are probably worst games I’ve played that I don’t recall, but there was a Roller Coaster Tycoon knockoff for the Playstation once. First impressions were “I bet this is going to be as customizable a sandbox game as the computer version”. Nope. It’s like the actual Roller Coaster Tycoon, except the parks are tiny, so much of the land is unusable, everything costs a bajillion dollars to make, the parks get demolished every time you “succeed” (since it was level-based), and you get absolutely no warning before a game over screen just drops in on you because you took out the wrong loans. Even being a real park owner probably has less checks and balances than it.
oh shit you just reminded me Theme Park World for the PS2. I think I both loved and hated that game
That was the one.
Mostly any modern mobile game. Piles of shit with p2w and gambling addictive mechanics that aren’t fun but stressful…
ROTFL
Mario is missing. Imagine being a young kid thinking this is Mario 3/4 (can’t remember where it fit in) and it’s a platformer not realizing it’s an educational game when you got it. What a pos, greatest let down of my life.
Same with Mario’s Time Machine. Such a waste of an interesting concept.
I loved both of these games as a kid.
A bunch of early access survival crafting games on steam in the early days of early access. One was trying to be like starship troopers and it got like one update
Starforge?
Yup that sounds correct. That game taught me a good lesson about early access.
Oh god, survival crafting games were a dime a dozen back then. Though I am eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release of Satisfactory next month so clearly I never got my fill :p
The factory must grow, whether in 2d or 3d
Sonic 06. This is coming from someone who eagerly wanted to be optimistic about the game, especially given how, on paper, it seemed very reminiscent of the Adventure games. I purchased an Xbox 360 and the game to try it out, to see if it really was as bad as people say it is.
It was…very sloppy. There are glitches everywhere, to the point where a significant amount of deaths will occur due to them, such as wall running physics just randomly breaking, causing you to fall into pits of lava, having to hit the jump button 10 times just so Knuckles jumps off of a wall every time, and even when not considering the glitches, the controls just feel awkward and clunky, Sonic himself is slow and the physics leave a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the story much more than what the gameplay had to offer.
I’ve always maintained it would have been an amazing game without the glitches. In a way I can appreciate it for what it nearly was.
I’m going to say Battletoads. The game was mostly pretty fun, until you got the jetski section where it was biologically impossible for a human to react in time. The only way to get past this level was to perfectly memorize the sequence of buttons to push.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit on NES. Ghostbusters was more disappointing, but I’ve at least kinda figured out how to play it over my lifetime. WFRR I’m clueless on. I think it’s some kind of point and click, but I’m not really sure. There’s a part where you have to call a real life telephone number to progress.
Pretty accurate depictions of what it feels like to play these games.
😄 The phone call was just to get some simple bonus tips, nothing really necessary.
What killed me was, to swap items, you hold Select and use the arrow keys. It’s soooo unintuitive!
Finally, I know what the phone call does! Maybe I’ve been too hard on Roger Rabbit NES…
By the time I got around to playing it, the number was deprecated and I definitely wasn’t figuring out how to actually beat it! I guess I just assumed it gated me from the end, when it was probably some other esoteric thing.
Back to the Future on NES. All I remember is a series of pain in the ass mini games having little to nothing to do with the plot. One of them was called “That Sinking Feeling”, where Marty apparently had to platform his way out of his own stomach.
And E.T. of course, fuck that game.
Desert Bus.
This game is pain on purpose.
Yeah, can a game even be bad if it’s excellent at what it intends to be?
This reminds me of a method of trying to evaluate art in an objective way. Basically you ask yourself 3 questions:
- What is this trying to do?
- Does it succeed in what it’s trying to do?
- Is what it’s trying to do worth doing?
If the answers to 2 and 3 are “yes”, then it’s probably a good work of art. This helps remove the subjectivity of “do I enjoy it?” when evaluating a work.
I would say the answers for Desert Bus indicate that it is indeed a good work of art. It succeeds in being a monotonous parody of a video game which makes a political statement about what games would be if they lacked any fictional elements or conflict. And I think the statement P&T were trying to make with this game was definitely worth making. Plus, we know from the amount of people who play it as a streamed challenge game that there is some desire for a game like that to exist.
The fact that it is talked about and marathoned decades after release mean it’s good art
I agree with you completely, and I’m glad the game exists. It’s just objectively the worst video game I’ve ever played.
I tried to play it but it was just a bus lol. never found out what that was about
Superman 64.
Weeks and months of hype (the era of print gaming journalism), Blockbuster stocking 100 copies on launch day for “guaranteed availability” etc.
Then I finally popped the cart in, and this thing was so bad it just defied all logic. Horrific controls, shitty graphics, unclear user interface and objectives, terrible draw distance. Timed level segments and insane difficulty.
There might be “worse” games but I have never been more disappointed in a release than Superman 64.
And don’t forget the oddly weird multiplayer.
