What is the Worst Game you Ever Bought?

[CatPix]

Worse than the HMG 7900 version too?

 

 

[Blazing Lazers]

Grand Theft Auto IV.

 

No, I'm not kidding. Yes, I own literally thousands of other games for literally many dozens of platforms.

 

And I never enjoyed a game less than I enjoyed that clunky, glitchy, pretentious piece of wannabe arthouse trash.

 

Amen to that! I'd played all of the previous ones, and had high expectations of IV. Having also played the original Saints Row when it came out, I had been extremely impressed by the GPS map system, mission savepoints and replays, as well as the superb controls. And given the hype and high reviews surrounding IV (reviews that must have been paid for, in hindsight) Ii was immensely disappointed with IV when I finally got it. No frickin way it is a game deserving a perfect score on Gamespot. Clunky controls (I actually stopped playing the game around the mission where you chase Jayvon on a motorcycle, which was impossible to control), BORING and repetitive missions, lack of car and weapon variety compared to previous games, dreary in game world, and the professional reviewers were all insisting it was the greatest game ever. No, the Emperor was naked all along, and immense dissatisfaction with IV actually turned me off of Rockstar as a developer to the present day. So yeah, GTA IV is also my worst game I ever bought.

[CatPix]

GTA IV Is on my list of "games that dissapointed me the most" but I can understand that people enjoy it.

 

What bothered me the most on my game (I say that because strangely, other people doesn't seems to have this problem) was, in addition to the too realistic and unfunny controls, the "all-town" map that made it looking small compared to the various and funny landscape of SA, was the "social" part.

 

I couldn't play more than 30 minutes without having one of the characters calling me to cry about how I don't care about them/never visit them. And really they were calling me like every two ingame days. I felt like I was sharing half of my playing time between repetitive missions and going out to get drunk with those freaks.

 

Not counting the times when they could call me and says "sure, I'll wait for you here in 1 hour" and you know you're screwed from the start because you're on the other side of the map and you know that you'll never make it in time, meaning that the dude will me even MORE pissed than before!

Gosh!

[Cynicaster]

Atari 2600 Sorcerer should be up there for me, but I didn’t buy it myself (it was a gift), and besides, it didn’t seem so bad back then. Playing it now, though… wow.

 

The aforementioned Independence Day on PS1 is up there, but luckily, I only burned for a rental fee on that one.

 

So, my answer has to be Sword of mother f*#king Sodan on the Genesis. I bought it second hand from a rental place in the early 90’s because the graphics and gore looked cool, but geeze what a steaming bag of ass that game is.

[bdog_147]

State of Emergency comes to mind.

 

Oh god. I bought this game because of GTA3 and Max Payne thinking since Rockstar made (or just published?) SoE it would be gold. Wow. I was wrong.

[slab0meat]

 

Oh god. I bought this game because of GTA3 and Max Payne thinking since Rockstar made (or just published?) SoE it would be gold. Wow. I was wrong.

 

Yep.... yep.

[S1500]

Add me to the list of State of Emergency buyers' remorse. I was always too late for mission #2 and failed it each time. With that, free roam play got boring after 5 minutes.

 

Would you believe they made a sequel to it?

 

RAGE(bethesda) & SoE(Rock*) have taught me just because a publisher/developer made a great game, doesn't mean their other titles are as good.

[Tempest]

Am I the only one who liked State of Emergency? It had its flaws, but I found it fun at the time.

[Hyperboy]

Am I the only one who liked State of Emergency?  It had its flaws, but I found it fun at the time.

I really liked State of Emergency..

[Blazing Lazers]

Am I the only one who liked State of Emergency? It had its flaws, but I found it fun at the time.

Naw, I loved that game when it came out. Great mindless fun!

[amiman99]

Top Gear Daredevil for the PS2. The last game I will ever buy based on the cover.

That was my first game for PS2, I think $20 for new, what a POS game. It's like a Pacman game, but using cars, I was very disappointed.

The worst game I got was probably "Pryzm Chapter One: The Dark Unicorn" for PS2 made by DICE, who new they could make crappy games too.

Edited October 8, 2013 by amiman99

[carlsson]

Worst game I ever bought was Munchman for the C-64. [..] "Munchman" was just a greater-than/less-than symbol, the dots were periods, the energizers were (non-blinking) asterisks, and I don't even remember what the ghosts were...but every object was basically part of the default character set. There wasn't the slightest attempt at redefining any characters.

 

It has to be this game, published by Keypunch Software 1985?

http://gamebase64.com/game.php?id=5084

 

In that case, Munchman looks to be a filled circle, and the ghosts to be spades.

 

It should be mentioned though that another 5-6 titles containing the word "munch" were published on the C64 alone prior to that game, and most of the other ones contained custom graphics to be somewhat more faithful to the original. Perhaps Keypunch Software borrowed screenshots from one of their competitors, i.e. Atlantis Software, Solar Software or Mastertronic?

 

However the GB64 entry suggests it was part of a game collection, like a lot of the other Keypunch releases were - most probably re-released public domain software - which doesn't quite match your memories.

Edited October 8, 2013 by carlsson

[Bixler]

Sonic the Hedgehog for the PS3.

 

I couldn't even finish the game, and the six hours I spent with it were some of the most headache-inducing I have ever spent with a game in my life.

[+FujiSkunk]

The only game I ever ended up returning because I didn't like it (you could actually do that back then) was OutRun 2019 for the Genesis. I seem to be in the minority with this opinion, but the game just felt way too easy and not really immersive the way the original OutRun was. It had its moments, and I might appreciate it more today if I were to play it again, but after I completely beat the game in one night, all I could think of was, "Meh."

 

Other than that I've been pretty lucky with my new-game purchases. I've played (and own) plenty of clunkers of course, but I didn't buy them new. The only other episode that comes close to "new game disappointment" was when I rented Destruction Derby Arenas for the PS2. I rented two games that week, DDA and Burnout 3: Takedown. I was curious about DDA because I'd had a lot of fun with Destruction Derby 2 on the first PlayStation. Of course, very few racing games can compare to the magic that was Burnout 3, but even compared to the earlier DD titles, DDA was a let-down. I played it once, then spent the rest of the rental time on B3.

[cimerians]

Anything from Apollo Games. Hmmm, Spacechase wasn't too bad but ugh..............

[Dauber]

 

It has to be this game, published by Keypunch Software 1985?

http://gamebase64.com/game.php?id=5084

 

In that case, Munchman looks to be a filled circle, and the ghosts to be spades.

 

Yup - that's EXACTLY the one. And it wasn't in a collection of games -- it was just Munchman. That's it. That's all that was advertised on the outer box, that's all that was on the disk.

[carlsson]

As for the worst game I've ever obtained, I think it goes to G-Loc R360 on the Amiga. There was a magazine giving out a free game to their subscribers, but the initially advertised title (that I can't remember) was sold out and instead they sent out this Sega arcade conversion. I'm not a big fan of flight or helicopter simulators in the first place, but I found this one to be rather worse than one could fear for. The LemonAmiga community partly seems to agree with a combined average of 4.44 out of 10. Interestingly, the magazines of the day seem to have had different opinions, ranging from 7% to 86%.

Edited October 8, 2013 by carlsson

[JamesD]

[Dauber]

Speaking of Amiga...never bought it but played it a few times: Trivial Pursuit. I thought it was such a rip-off, basically using the honor system to determine your progress. I'm assuming TP on other platforms was the same...

[carlsson]

Yes, Trivial Pursuit on e.g. the C64 works the same way. As long as you don't have multiple choice questions, I have difficulties seeing how the game would work otherwise. If you type in your answers, either the game would need advanced fuzzy matching or you had to spell the answer entirely as it was programmed in order to progress. It is possible that a computer of today has the computational power and algorithms to make those decisions, or even consult an IRC channel full of on-duty TP judges to determine if you answered correctly. Now that would be a dull job if anything, eight hours a day get fed with questions, correct answers and input answers and click "yeah" or "no" for every question.

[+FujiSkunk]

I remember Jeopardy for various home computers made you type in answers (I played on the Apple II). I can't recall how "fuzzy" the logic was, but I do seem to remember there were times I misspelled an answer and still got credit for it. So I believe it was possible, even back in the day.

 

Depending on how any such "fuzzy" logic was implemented, disk space may also have been a factor. If you go the "brute force" way and just attach a list of acceptable misspellings to each answer, that's going to take up a lot of room in a hurry.

[BydoEmpire]

Anything from Apollo Games. Hmmm, Spacechase wasn't too bad but ugh..............

Apollo makes some of my very favorite 2600 games!

[Asaki]

Worst game I ever spent my own money on was WCW Mayhem for N64. I really liked the THQ wrestling games, and read good reviews, so I spent $30 on it.

 

 

That was when I first found out that you can't return videogames after you open them =|

 

 

I tried to play it anyway, but it wasn't easy.

 

 

...recalled playing Populus for the PC and liking it, so I got it. Big mistake. Terrible port of that game.

 

What. I like the SNES version much better than the PC one. The controls are a lot nicer (even though you have to use the manual for most of the hotkeys), the graphics are a bit better, and IIRC it has the stuff from the expansion built-in.

 

 

- Super Pitfall. I've seen this mentioned as the worst NES game ever mentioned. It's a shame, because it could have been good. But it certainly wasn't.

We used to rent games a lot, and that one was probably one of the worst. Blech.

 

We got a lot of laughs out of it, though =) We'd put hip-hop music on and make Harry do a crouch dance to it.

 

RAGE(bethesda) & SoE(Rock*) have taught me just because a publisher/developer made a great game, doesn't mean their other titles are as good.

I don't know who Bethesda are, but id Software were the developers behind RAGE

 

 

 

I remember Jeopardy for various home computers made you type in answers (I played on the Apple II). I can't recall how "fuzzy" the logic was, but I do seem to remember there were times I misspelled an answer and still got credit for it. So I believe it was possible, even back in the day.

Most of the games like that that I've played, you had to spell a word exactly correct or you'd get it wrong. Sometimes they answers were kind of stupid...I think it was Jeopardy for the N64, we were playing, and I tried supplying "Tutankhamen" as my answer, and it told me the correct answer was "King Tut" =|

 

Here's a pretty humorous video demonstrating Family Feud for the SNES, apparently your answer only needs to have all of the correct letters in it in the correct order:

[thegamezmaster]

Too many for too many systems that really disappointed. Urban Champion for the NES comes to mind, Sword of Sodan for the Genesis. And the list goes on and on.

[MaximRecoil]

Karateka (Atari 7800). I bought it when I was a kid (12 or 13 years old in '87 or '88) based on the screen shot and description in the Sears catalog. Judging from the screen shot it looked similar to Karate Champ (arcade), a game that I liked, so I was hoping it would be similar. It has some of the most unresponsive controls I've ever encountered in a video game, and it is a real pain (literally) to play with the Pro-Line joysticks.

 

However, it was certainly a challenge. I was determined to beat it, though I never did until about 10 years ago in MESS, and a couple of years ago on the real hardware (after buying the cartridge for the second time, off eBay, though this time it was only a dollar or so).

 

I also bought Star Raiders (Atari 2600) when I was 10 at Kmart or Zayre or something, and that game was useless. However, I only payed the post-crash price of $0.99.