The original release of No Man’s Sky, and Starfield.
I myself don’t see them as bad games, but acknowledge the false promises, shortcomings, bugs, etc.
Personally I’d classify Starfield as solidly mediocre. Not anywhere near the revolution that Bethesda promised, but not awful as some people say either.
5/6 out of 10 is still good enough to play, just not worth AAA prices.
I prefer launch no man sky to what it is now. Sometimes you don’t need a hundred features and multiplayer in a game. Sometimes you just want to calmly explore the universe and feel alone for a bit. Not have a million things to do and pop ups . I have enough of that in my life and other games
Yes the feeling of being alone in a whole solar system was / is awesome. And launching into space for the first time.
I’ve always wanted a game that I could pilot from the planet to space and we’re here
Speaking of No Man’s Sky, I got it for VR and never played it flatscreen, but I have over 100 hours in it even though the VR mode is ridiculously terrible and mods go only so far to fix some of the annoyances.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It comes with a laughable 11 modules which you tire of after a couple weeks of playing. It’s badly coded and its modding support is flimsy and haphazard. The developers are unreachable and uncooperative.
Without mods, you’d put down the game after a week and forget about it completely. With mods (created for free by the community) you now get a wealth of thousands of modules, but you also need multiple extra mods to get simple basic functionality that should be in the base game. Wanna play more than 100 modules? Game crashes on startup unless you install the Tweaks mod. Wanna play just the modules that your friends enjoy? Gotta mess around with Steam workshop subscriptions for hours unless you install the Mod Selector mod. Wanna play a specific set of modules you like? Good luck getting the right RNG, unless you install the DMG mod. Wanna play more than one bomb? Needs the Multiple Bombs mod. Some modules are genuinely unplayable unless you get the Boss Module Manager mod, which in turn relies on a volunteer-run external website to be running and to be constantly updated by volunteers. Even Camera Zoom is a separate mod!!
99% of the game is made for free by volunteers, and yet it’s the garbage 1% that everyone has to pay for. It’s a travesty.
Cool, didn’t know the modding community was the way to go. I would always break it out at a party, it would be fun for a bit, but yeah, eventually it’s just the same thing but faster. I’ll have to take a look at the mods.
The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it’s such a mess that I need to clarify which version I’m even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.
The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I’m concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).
Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.
That kept me playing.
Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.
They’re slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn’t feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.
And yet there’s none other like it.
Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn’t (or didn’t until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.
You got me watching gameplay videos of The Isle. The old version looks so great for emergent gameplay.
Sonic R. Genuinely the worst racing game I’ve ever played. But the low poly models and the music are so charming to me. I used to just sit down and 100% it when I was stressed.
Pokémon Channel may be one of the worst Pokémon games ever released; it’s annoying to play, incredibly tedious and teaches kids to watch more TV instead of less.
I really liked playing it as a child. The thing is, I can’t for the life of me remember why I even liked it that much.
Kinetica for PS2
- Nausiating physics engine
- Tacky and nonsensical maps
- Unnecessarily and confusingly sexualized characters
But it’s a fun fast-paced racing sim and the soundtrack slaps.
BULLETSTORM
So many dick jokes. So much fun though
NOT NEARLY ENOUGH DICK JOKES
(sorry, I feel the compulsion to write in caps when talking about BULLETSTORM)
I play a really old build of minecraft, and am intimately familiar with how bad of a game that version really is. It has many, many flaws.
Deadly Premonition
Victoria 3 on launch. First game I turned Finland into the richest country on earth by capita is 30 years.
Victoria 3 still isn’t a good game, but I agree with it as my answer to OP’s question. It scratches the same itch as Cookie Clicker while being about a million times more convoluted.
Victoria 3 is the game I keep tabs on the news feed for - it’s getting better (mostly - slowing down economic growth is just far less fun) but not there yet… and the potential is amazing.
How does it compare to vic2? I still love vic2.
Unreal 2: The Awakening
I never played the first one as a kid, but my little brother found a used copy of its sequel for the Xbox while in town with mom once. I was like, 9 years old at the time, and the game blew my dang mind! Big over the top first person action with all these cool looking guns, shooting these weird giggly aliens, their bodybuilding handler aliens, buncha dudes in power armor, all while on a big journey across space visiting many different worlds, it was so sick for me at the time!
Much later, I finally checked out the first game on PC and uh. Yeah. Yeeaaah Unreal 2 is kind of an insult to how majestic the first game was.
Unreal 2 is a bad game in comparison, and I will admit it! It’s slower, the enemies are mostly boring to fight compared to the Skaarj in the first game, the weapons are bog standard with little that makes them stand out, it very much suffered from “We can do Halo, too!” The story is kinda lame, the levels aren’t the most interesting to play in, and most importantly: It lacks that sense of adventure and wonder the first game was loaded with.
But man, when I was a kid? It was god damn cinematic to me.
The black hole gun you get in Unreal 2 is really neat.
Robocraft is pretty awful. The current game is in maintenance mode. The only thing the devs can make is their LEGO-like live service game, but even that is too hard for them. This year they just quit and restarted on yet another attempt of a sequel to the only thing they’ve had success with. That being said, I still enjoy spending hours in the lab and shooting apart other players’ creations.
Robocraft used to be one of my favorite games and slowly watching it become worse was painful.
Back 4 Blood. I actually quite enjoyed the game and the characters. Sadly it was doomed from the start and they can blame no one but themselves. It’s essentially dead now I gather.
This game has one of gaming most fun moments in it…. If you get the right song on the jukebox.
That mission was so amazing the first time with Black Betty blasting.
I liked that game a lot too, but it’s nowhere near the quality of its predecessors in terms of longevity.
I’ve been enjoying Suicide Squad. Very redundant but entertaining enough. I hate everything it stands for, but I guess the gameplay style is right up my alley.
The game feels like it is so close to being really good, but just a bit off. The gameplay and combat are great! The endgame content is just a bit too repetitive.
Burger King: Sneak King. Hilarious and entertaining. Surprisingly well made
