The CRAPPIEST game

[Mr.Bookworm]

Raven. You are right. When I was six I thought it was a complete piece of shit.

I would have to say Enter the Matrix. The only thing I found pleasurable about it was entering all of the cheats and killing everything. I couldn't even get past the Airport level, because my console crashes every single time I get there.

Greed: FUCKING DIE YOU LITTLE BITCH!

[Monkeybonk]

Alright. First of all, I'm not going to chose any old games. There's pretty much DOZENS of horrible games made within the same short span of time when gaming was 'new'. Bible Adventures, the 'Custard Rapes an Indian' game, E.T., the list goes on.

My choice for the most terrible RECENT game goes to....

Oblivion

Now before I go further, I'll tell you this right now: I have a beast of a gaming rig. My comments about the graphics were NOT caused by 'low settings' or any bullshit like that. I'm talking 1920 x 1200 full settings w/ HDR and Bloom (horray ATI hack/patch).

Without further ado....

GRAPHICS: Oblivion's graphics were pretty amazing, I'll give you that. That is, the graphics were pretty amazing up to about 30 feet away. Also, they'd be pretty amazing if you were playing the UNRELEASED version of Oblivion that Bethesda used to create every screenshot, advertisement, and promotional video, before they silently stripped out many of the 'promised' features without telling anyone. Where's the object shadows we saw in all the videos? Like I said, the game looks good as long as you don't really ever look too carefully at the 'Distant Terrain'. That is, the 'distant terrain' is composed of a horribly artifacted low-resolution blurry 'texture' that not only looks like complete crap, but usually doesn't even match the same elevation of the 'real' terrain. All too-often you'll see the 'distant' terrain floating above the area in front of you, only to dissapear when the 'real' terrain loads. Next there's characters themselves. While NPC textures aren't too shabby, character animations are only somewhat improved over Morrowind's infamous "stick up the ass" waddle-walk. And don't even get me started on the jumping animation. Finally, characters are made of the 'segmented bodies' that were used in Morrowind. In many cases, this can lead to very obvious seams along joints, making the characters look like action figures.

To complete the graphical dissapointment are the LIMITLESS amounts of utterly untapped ideas. While it's unfair to hold 'missed potential' against a game, it simply cannot be overlooked. Bodies of water are void of anything to look at such as ambient fish (not to mention the water itself is about as clear as an oil slick when you swim under it). There's absolutely NO ambience at all. No birds, no passive wildlife outside of deer, nothing of the sort. The complete lack of attention to detail here makes the game world feel very dull and dead. (It should be mentioned, however, that at least ONE mod adds these things to the game - a well-funded studio given five years was unable to include these things at all, and yet one man working for free creates it in a few weeks in his spare time?)

SOUND: Sound should be the easiest catagory to place in, and I can't say a whole lot against it, except for the biggest, most glaring strike against the game: Voice Acting. The voiceovers are simply atrocious. Bethesda has, not counting the 'unique' voices (Patrick Stewart, Viggo Whatshisname), only a handful of voice actors. There are, what, 10 races in the game? And HALF of them share NOT ONLY the same voice actor, but the same VOICE. In Morrowind, Dark ElF males had raspy voices. In Oblivion, they sound like everyone else. On top of it all, many of the male voices sound awfuly... well... "that way".

It gets worse. Not only do the NPCs all share the same lame dialog, but even THAT'S screwed up. Many times you'll find a character whose voice will change COMPLETELY between dialog choices.

GAMEPLAY: Oh christ here we go.

This game has GOT to be a fucking JOKE. First, I'd like everyone to remember that Oblivion took 5 years to develop.

Now I don't even know where to start, this game is so fucking BROKEN.

Oblivion is a role-playing game the same way Everquest or World of Warcraft are RPGs. I'm not going to play bullshit semantics here with the definition of a role-playing game. Go play Fallout 2 if you want to see what a REAL RPG is like. Oblivion has no consequences for your decisions. There are effectively no decisions in the game to be made ANYWAY! Oblivion is, actually, closer to a first-person DIABLO then it is to, say, Planescape: Torment. Effectively, the game is based around NOT role-playing, but simply hack-and-slashing your way through randomly-generated and level-dependent content.

Yes, the content. Bethesda decided that in order to both save a TON of time, a SHITLOAD of money, AND to take the easiest way out (because balancing a game is a lot of work), EVERYTHING IN THE GAME SHOULD BE LEVEL-DEPENDENT. In other words, at Level 1, you run into weak enemies. Everywhere. At level 20, you run into strong enemies. EVERYWHERE. This means that the penniless drunks down at the bar in town will be carrying DAEDRIC WEAPONS, the most rare, powerful, and expensive weapons in Elder Scrolls lore (outside of artifact weapons, of course). You will run into Bandits you will demand 100 gold from you while wearing armor worth THOUSANDS of gold. And forget about causing some havoc with your new-found weapon. City guards are ALWAYS 10 levels higher then you (which begs the question why THEY aren't out saving the world, seeing as how they're better then you), and around the time you find good weapons and armor, even your basic citizen will have a few hundred hitpoints.

Speaking of good weapons and armor, those are ALSO scaled to your level. This means that at low levels, you ONLY find low-level gear. At high levels, you ONLY find high-level gear. Searching for treasure is pointless, because you won't find it - the game has decided that your level is too low and, inside that chest guarded by the Minotaur Lord that took you an HOUR to get to, you will find 8 gold, a lockpick, and some Tongs.

Next up is the game world. Effectively there are three different types of 'worlds' in the game. Dungeons, the Overworld, and Oblivion.
- Dungeons: I've never seen a game actually FAIL at creating dungeons. I've seen games where dungeons (caves, Ayleid ruins, tombs, etc) were poorly designed or overpowered, but never have I seen a role-playing game make them POINTLESS. Yes, that's right. There is NO reason to look inside a dungeon, because unlike Morrowind or Baldur's Gate, or any REASONABLE game, you won't find phat lewt inside after a difficult fight through maybe some sort of boss. I've already stated why - they are all level-scaled, making EVERY dungeon similar to the last, until you level up. If you're lucky enough to level across a 'threshold' where NEW enemies spawn, suddenly the world will become extinct of the weaker ones. POOF.

Secondly, the dungeons themselves are practically coma-inducing. Every dungeon in the game is literally made of pre-fabricated rooms and hallways glued together in different formats. Way to use some ingenuity there Bethesda. Wouldn't want you to put some EFFORT into your game, would we.

- Oblivion is without a doubt the best part of the game, because it's the most realistic. You see, the plane of Oblivion is like hell in The Elder Scrolls. Bethesda wisely made Oblivion SO boring, repetitive, and visually bland (If you don't think shiny black rock, lava, and bodies hanging around can get bland, you just wait) that you actually feel like you are in hell! Oh yes, you will get sick of the Oblivion plane. You might not think the first few gates are bad, but after the 15th or so... and you see, every gate is the same as the last. You go inside, head for the EXACT SAME-LOOKING TOWER you went into last time, go up the almost EXACT SAME FLOORPLAN as last time, and destroy it the EXACT SAME WAY you destroyed the last dozen gates.

- The Overworld. Without a doubt, the most cliche part of this game. The game world is styled after medieval Europe - the most cliche RPG setting in the universe. I'll bet you I could give Oblivion to some space-travellers from another galaxy and they'd give it back saying "Yeah I'm sick of trees and castles". That's effectively all the game is - trees and castles. However, this has to be said about the gameworld flora. Every time you look around at the trees and grass, it's like you're seeing them again for the first time. Because you are. 90% of Cyrodiil looks EXACTLY like the first little bit you see when you leave the sewer. There are only two three types of terrain. Trees and Grass, Less Trees and Snow, and Less Trees and More Grass. Also there's water. Which counts. Almost.

CONTROLS: How the fuck does a game in 2006 screw up GAME CONTROLS? I don't know, but Oblivion did it. The game stinks of 'dumbed-down for Xbox kids', and the control scheme reflects this. The controls are limited, you only have 8 hotkeys with no choice of modifier keys, and the interface is a bloated, gigantic monstrosity (in case you're wondering, it does NOT scale with resolution allowing you to see more of it at high-res, and it was made so you could read it from your couch. 15 feet away from your screen. While asleep.)

Oblivion has so little going FOR it, it's not even worth mentioning. Almost EVERY aspect of this game was a complete joke. I'm sick of writing this so I'm going to stop, but there's so much more I've left unsaid. I didn't even get started on the LAUGHABLE "Radiant AI" (which is ALMOST the dumbest AI I've ever seen), or the 'dumbed-down' features. Even their 'official mods' they CHARGE for should be considered a federal crime.

I don't even think I got on my biggest complain - the complete lack of CHOICES when it comes to quests and dialog. Yes, almost EVERY quest and dialog 'tree' is more linear and railroaded then a Valve game.


IN conclusion, Oblivion is a crap game made for simpletons, fanboys, and ADHD kids who hate their brains. Without a doubt the worst 'mainstream' game of this century.

[Roy_D_Mylote]

Hey. I enjoyed Drake of the 99 Dragons. The game I hated the most? Hard to say; probably one of the Tony Hawk games. Because I hate their storylines. But I love their music.

And I did not like the last about half of Halo. I mean, what? A "follow the guy" quest in an FPS? No. Just...no.

[Impulse]

I can't believe people forgot this one

Mario is Missing!

This whole game is basically a geography test, complete with no gameplay. There's also another called "Mario's Time Machine" which is basically the same but with history, except WORSE (You literally have to take a REAL fill-in-the-blank history test before you get to do anything)

There's also another terrible CDi game that often gets overlooked

Mario Hotel

[ArlanKels]

According to OPM(Official Playstation Magazine) Spec Ops for the PS1 was one of the worst games ever released for it. I found it to be a mildly enjoyable, albiet it highly flawed, video game.

However, as for the worst game in my own personal opinion? I would probably lean toward it having to be a game I played with a friend on Sega CD. It was a flight simulation/dog fighter game, where a little targetting reticle would appear on the screen and you would click the button at the right time. Just once. And it would then show a short video of a guy screaming and his plane exploding. Repeat twenty thousand times.

[Feynman]

Dungeon Lords. Horrible, never-ending waves of random monsters, (some of which will randomly spawn much stronger that you), a worthless skill progession system, every secret room in the game is empty... the game was never even finished, but released upon an unsuspecting public anyway.

[greed]

I love you too Bookworm.

I thank Monkeybonk for saying what I was too lazy to do, but I'll add what really pisses me off about Oblivion(other than the constant bugs, poor VA). Many of the problems can be fixed and have been fixed by modders, really Oblivion is a skeleton, you get the meat form the mods. I like mods, but I hate when you NEED them. There are so many examples of retarded choices and fucked up game design, sheer mind-blowing laziness and outright whoring to the mainstream in Oblivion that in order to make it playable you need GIGS of mods. My copy of Oblivion is literally more third party than first.

You throw these in among a slew of others( primarily Book covers, Fletching, Hunting, Armour Crafting and OOO) and Oblivion can be playable and even enjoyable. But really you shouldn't have to, most of these mods are things that should have been in the game in the first place, really they're not even mods they're fucking patches.

Speaking of patches, the fact that an unofficial patch came out months before the official one, fixing most of the problems, while Bethesda pumped out pay-content just pisses me off as well.

[BitVyper]

One thing that really pisses me off in RPGs: Blocky hands and lack of facial expression. There's just no excuse for it when we can do stuff like Legacy of Kain: Defiance. In an RPG, expressiveness is really important; it can make or break a really dramatic scene. In the same vein, blocky hands completely ruin scenes. Hands themselves can be really expressive: How a character grips something, how characters touch each other, clenched fists or a carefree wave, and all that kind of stuff. But when the hands, and anything near them is just fixed in one position, it destroys that.

[Dunxco]

Barbie Horse Adventures: Because some things you don't even need to touch to feel the pure crappiness radiating from them.

I also think lowly of Toejam & Earl 2 (TJ & E 1+3 were great, in my opinion), and a little-known (thankfully) action game on the PSOne called Rosco McQueen. God, what did I ever see in that game... Besides the demise of my faith in mankind...

[notasfatasmike]

I've kind of made a career out of playing bad games. I've played some doozies for the NES and SNES. But no game disappointed me as much as or bored me as much as Final Fantasy VIII. I played through the entire first disc of that game, complaining the whole time, because of all of its proponents on the FFRPG message boards kept telling me it "gets better". It doesn't. There is no point to doing anything BUT summoning your GF every fight, for every action. Every battle is a damn joke. I didn't die once in however many hours it took for me to get through that first disc. Hell, I had more fun with the card sub-game than the game itself.

And Squall! In the name of all that is holy, just shut up already, you self-centered prick! Given the themes of revolution, I probably could've got into the story, if the main character wasn't an inexplicable jerk and every other character was some boring stereotype.

Inevitiably, someone will tell me I "played the game wrong" and that I need to not "powergame" and play it more "fairly". Guess what? It's not my fault that every character can summon; it's Square's fault. Therefore, you can't say the game is better than it is because I'm "playing it wrong". It's poorly designed. End of story.