Worst game you finished because you liked it.

What is the objectively worst game you've finished, not because of outright stubbornness, losing a bet, or simply hate-playing it, but rather because you somehow found joy underneath all of the rubbish?

In my case that game would be the Sega CD's pack-in game, Sewer Shark. No doubt much of the reason was the novelty of the FMV-game medium to me on a brand-new system. However, teenage me also enjoyed the over the top cheesy script and presentation layered on top of a rather bland rail shooter. To be fair, if the price of getting to see annoying bermuda-shorts boss guy get his comeuppance was to shoot another several dozen sewer rats, then that was a price I was willing to pay.

Runners up:
Heiankyo Alien (GameBoy) - a game about invading aliens on a maze-like town map. You fight them off by digging holes, waiting for them to fall in, and then burying them alive before they can climb out. Ludicrous, but also oddly entertaining.
Crimson Sea (Xbox) - do you like shooting endless amounts of bugs with terribly repetitive gameplay? Not so much? Well, do you like massive cleavage? Then we've got the game for you! To be fair, the bug blasting was sometimes ok in a Dynasty-Warriors "zone out" sense (both game series by Koei), but I'm ashamed to admit that early 20's me became aware of the Crimson Sea mostly for the second reason stated above.

Mmmmmm

A game called Evil Zone on the psx
horrible yet amazing fighting game lol

Sewer Shark is still amazing to this day. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

Dracula Unleashed on Sega CD, on the other hand, was a horrible nightmare of piss-poor acting, bad script, and horrendous UI/controls, but got dayum did I love that game and beat the hell out of it several times over back in the day.

Candice came this close to nabbing my GOTY 2017. In the end I went with UnExplored, but I'm still left wondering if I made the right decision.

Either way, it's the most entertaining $5 I've spent in years.

From the Community GOTY thread:

Candice is a grand odyssey of lo-fi jank. It looks like a train-wreck on the surface, but its hidden depths reveal a folk-art masterwork. It's like this one guy had a grand vision but not so much the raw talent. Yet...no one told him that, so he proceeded to brute force the production. To write, program, record dialogue & music...basically just do everything himself. And the results are glorious.

Evil pop singer Krystal has stolen the tan-van from Candice's best friend in the trailer park, leaving her without a way to maintain her sexy, glowing orange complexion. Now it's up to Candice to travel the world getting her magic back for the final showdown with Krystal. A crazy setup, but the 10+ hour story has a lot of heart.

The trailer says it all. On a side note, I spent a good number of weeks completely obsessed with the Soundtrack and still rock it on my phone to this day.

Strange oddity, Candice has her own Twitter feed (played completely in character) that still sees daily updates. Now that's commitment to your art!

I don't know if it's possible to out-jank Candice DeBebe, but I did finish the original Deadly Premonition as well as Rule Of Rose (with the occasional help of FAQs/walkthroughs), which both were interesting as art but kind of abysmal as games.

AUs_TBirD wrote:

What is the objectively worst game you've finished, not because of outright stubbornness, losing a bet, or simply hate-playing it, but rather because you somehow found joy underneath all of the rubbish?

In my case that game would be the Sega CD's pack-in game, Sewer Shark.

Still waiting for the sequel to that one.
The game I still play sometimes is Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad on XBox 360 because the premise is beyond ridiculous.

Probably ET on the 2600.

But...if you like it...it's not a bad game?

FINE. I'll play along.

Star Wars: The Old Republic. Finished all 8 campaigns and took one of the classes to the end of the DLC. It was extremely repetitive at times as only an MMO can be but it was fun. And I dug how Bioware did what they could to tell an epic SW story. And all 8 class stories differed in quality but told 8 unique stories with individual supporting casts. It was a monumental effort and I greatly appreciated it.

Outpost 2. There was a novel that was written as a text file to the hard drive when you completed a level, and at the time I thought it was interesting. The game play wasn't horrible, and the multiplayer wasn't too bad either besides the fact that trolls could crash your client from the lobby (they'd PM a bunch of characters to overflow the client's chat system and the whole client would crash). The story was OK, but not great. And the factions had a few differences that actually made choosing one side or the other matter. But most people who had bad experiences with the original Outpost wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Raiders of the lost ark on the 2600. That game sucked, but when you are a kid and have no money, you play the hell out of whatever you've got and you like it.

PWAlessi wrote:

Raiders of the lost ark on the 2600. That game sucked, but when you are a kid and have no money, you play the hell out of whatever you've got and you like it.

I came here to post this! I don't remember it sucking, it just seemed really tough. But yeah, I learned later how bad it stunk.

Most of the games I can think of are licensed ones. Games turned out to cash in on a property, but I love the property and the characters enough to drag myself through them.

One that sticks out in my mind at the moment is 1989's NES version of Back to the Future. Man, that was an awful game.

I think some of the "worst" games I've finished because I've loved them mostly came from the NES era:

If we get out of the NES-based games:

Jaws - NES

Stab the shark and see "THE END" screen, so anti-climactic after spending ages trying to figure out what you're supposed to do.

Beast Wrestler - Sega Genesis

You should avoid this game at all costs! The manual and box had some cool commissioned artwork that tricked kids like me into buying this abomination!

Well some would say Deadly Premonition is a terrible game but they are wrong so so wrong.

Ultima IX seemed to be widely disliked, but I managed to avoid any of the show-stopping bugs and finished it. I didn't hate it.

Mine would be Two Worlds. By every measure it was a bad game, but I got sucked into it and ended up playing through until the end. I enjoyed it so much I ended up being super excited about and subsequently purchasing Two Worlds 2 when it came out..... which I've never played.

mrwynd wrote:

Jaws - NES

Stab the shark and see "THE END" screen, so anti-climactic after spending ages trying to figure out what you're supposed to do.

Played through Jaws a few years ago for the first time. A buddy gifted it to me. I don't remember much about it other than it being short. You're totally right about the anti-climactic ending.

mrwynd wrote:

Beast Wrestler - Sega Genesis

You should avoid this game at all costs! The manual and box had some cool commissioned artwork that tricked kids like me into buying this abomination!

Love the bad translation and typos, but otherwise it really does look awful.
"Dragon Warrior: the strongest warrior ever to be found since the dawn of history."
- Why yes, I believe his name was Erdrick...

Budo wrote:

But...if you like it...it's not a bad game?

In a sense true, but the intended criteria is "objectively bad". Are Hot Pockets good food (or food at all)? No, but under the right conditions they can be enjoyable.

CptDomano wrote:

Cyberia

I never figured out for sure if Cyberia was a bad game. I bought it while on a long summer vacation at a friend's house who had an IBM-PC (I didn't), and was wowed by the bit that I played....or at least by the technology on display compared to my 16-bit consoles. I never went back to it after those few short sessions with it, though.

Phades wrote:

Two Worlds. I enjoyed it so much I ended up being super excited about and subsequently purchasing Two Worlds 2 when it came out..... which I've never played.

Admission time: I picked up Crimson Sea 2 upon release and have yet to play it as well.

Phades wrote:

Two Worlds. I enjoyed it so much I ended up being super excited about and subsequently purchasing Two Worlds 2 when it came out..... which I've never played.

Admission time: my Steam account shows 60 hours in Two Worlds 2.

Man, this is a tough one.

The game that sticks out for me is Evil Dead: A Fist Full of Boomstick. Or maybe Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. I stuck with some pretty crappy games on the original Xbox.

Maybe Chrome? Was Chrome a bad game?

Culdcept Saga on 360. Many hundreds of hours I'm sure. Why was it bad? The AI was dumber than dishwater. And there was no one to play online with. But I would comp stomp sooo much.

Too Human by Silicon Knights

I’m curious if anyone has ever seen or played this game, but when I was younger (like 8 or 9), my mom bought me an NES game called Bible Adventures. That makes my family sound weirdly religious; we were Catholic, but not in a fundamentalist way, and this was the only time she bought a religious-themed game for me. But still: Bible Adventures. It remains the only baby-blue cartridge I’ve ever seen.

When you turned it on, you got treated to a midi loop of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and you got to pick from 3 games, which all played similarly: Noah’s Ark, David and Goliath, and Baby Moses. I finished the first and third, but never could clear the second.

They were all built around weird platforming and some light exploration. You could pick up some objects and carry them overhead, and often would have to escort them to a specific point. The Baby Moses example is the most straightforward: you were Moses’ mom, and had to get him to the reeds where he would be left to be adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter. For some inexplicable reason, this required you to jump around different levels, mostly set on rooftops through Egypt, as if you were in a very early prototype of an Assassin’s creed game. You had no offensive capabilities that I remember, apart from maybe throwing Moses at people, and if you got hit, whatever you were carrying overhead (usually Moses) would go flying across the screen, super far.

The Noah levels were a bit different. You had to collect animals and bring them back to the ark (of course), and you had a defined map that remained constant across levels, but the animals on the map didn’t. There was a mountain and caves to one side of the ark, and a forest and trees to the other side. The thing I remember most clearly is that Noah had superhuman strength: he could carry up to four animal in a stack, military-pressed over his head, at a time.

The David levels were a mixture of catching & returning sheep, and then killing Phillistines. I never made it to Goliath, who was at the top of a mountain that you could reach with some platforming (a great place for the Phillistine army’s unbeatable giant).

LastSurprise wrote:

But still: Bible Adventures. It remains the only baby-blue cartridge I’ve ever seen.

Like baby Jesus' eyes!
So if I'm reading this right, in 1 game you can throw your baby at enemies, with the goal of abandoning it at a body of water; 1 game involves stealing collecting animals in stacks; and 1 game involves repeatedly killing your squishy ideological enemies in the hopes of eventually fighting their tank, which is kept at the very back.
I never knew the Bible was so edgy!

Running Man wrote:
LastSurprise wrote:

But still: Bible Adventures. It remains the only baby-blue cartridge I’ve ever seen.

Like baby Jesus' eyes!
So if I'm reading this right, in 1 game you can throw your baby at enemies, with the goal of abandoning it at a body of water; 1 game involves stealing collecting animals in stacks; and 1 game involves repeatedly killing your squishy ideological enemies in the hopes of eventually fighting their tank, which is kept at the very back.
I never knew the Bible was so edgy!

Yep, that's a pretty accurate summary!

I honestly can't think of anything to put here. I have enough trouble finishing games I consider good. I'm pretty sure there were ones back when I was a kid when I made a bad choice and was stuck with the rental for 5 days.

onewild wrote:

Well some would say Deadly Premonition is a terrible game but they are wrong so so wrong.

I don't know, man. This is an old issue, but... it was a great game but a bad GAME game, don't you think?

Running Man wrote:

I never knew the Bible was so edgy! :)

There's a lot to be said about the Bible, but it definitely has a lot of edgy parts.

beeporama wrote:
Running Man wrote:

I never knew the Bible was so edgy! :)

There's a lot to be said about the Bible, but it definitely has a lot of edgy parts.

It's funnier if you imagine it in Marge Simpson's voice.

PurEvil wrote:

Outpost 2. There was a novel that was written as a text file to the hard drive when you completed a level, and at the time I thought it was interesting. The game play wasn't horrible, and the multiplayer wasn't too bad either besides the fact that trolls could crash your client from the lobby (they'd PM a bunch of characters to overflow the client's chat system and the whole client would crash). The story was OK, but not great. And the factions had a few differences that actually made choosing one side or the other matter. But most people who had bad experiences with the original Outpost wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

I actually loved Outpost 2, even after trying -- and failing -- to love the original.

LastSurprise wrote:

I’m curious if anyone has ever seen or played this game, but when I was younger (like 8 or 9), my mom bought me an NES game called Bible Adventures.

Never played it, but this is how I found out about Bible Adventures years ago.

Warning: strong language (obviously, since it's an Angry Video Game Nerd episode)

Mantid wrote:

Most of the games I can think of are licensed ones. Games turned out to cash in on a property, but I love the property and the characters enough to drag myself through them.

One that sticks out in my mind at the moment is 1989's NES version of Back to the Future. Man, that was an awful game.

Yea, but I remember being so super stoked when I finally got to drive the Delorean and then, after many a fail, got it at 88 miles per hours.

That was some serious sh*t.