Archived Discussion

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Great Pikmin Fan: O.K. is Big Rigs Overthe Road Racing So Bad, It's Good or So Bad Its Horrible? It is currently on both, which cannot be^*

, unless half the people think it's one, and the other half think it's the other.

David: Actually, a Video Game can be both. The Legend Of Zelda CDI Games are so bad they're good because of their animated sequences, but their gameplay is So Bad Its Horrible. The same can be said about Hotel Mario & Mario Is Missing. Mario Is Missing is another interesting example, as it has no redeeming qualities on the NES & SNES, thus making it So Badits Horrible. However, the DOS Version introduced Weegee, who looks so stupid that the game Crosses the Line Twice & becomes So Bad, It's Good.

Sir Lemming: I took the liberty of removing Another World from this page, due to the fact that the game is critically acclaimed and loved by many gamers. Whoever wrote this is pretty much the only person I've ever encountered who doesn't like it:

Another World (also known as ''Out of this World''), a side-scroller adventure game for the SNES and Sega Genesis, is one of those games that makes you wonder why the creator didn't shoot themselves. The game gives you no weapons to start out with, no clue as to where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to do, no life counter or anything showing how much life you have. A single hit KO's you, and enemies appear out of nowhere to mangle you to death. You can die quicker in the first section of this game than you can in the first section of the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game.

Norm : I'm removing this:

Not to mention that players, as faithful warriors of Rambo-Jesus, are expected to run around the city gunning down atheists, scientists and goat-headed demons roaming the streets. Blessed be the Peacemakers, indeed.

because it's factually inaccurate. I played the demo and skimmed the guide for the full game a Game FA Qs.com and I can attest that the most frustrating part of the game is that in over half the levels killing anyone is an autolose.

and to who ever wrote that; You Fail Video Games Forever

Dockmarm: I know it's informal here, but what does the following contribute to this trope? It's not informative, it's not funny — it's just spiteful. Can we nuke this?

"Well what can you expect from a video game that adapts a piece of American Fundamentalist Christian literature? (The whole concept of the "Rapture" seems to be a strictly US American phenomenon, it isn't even commonly known in Europe. This editor was always puzzled by all those references to people being "raptured up" in American movies and literature, until she finally heard about the Left Behind books.)"

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Yes, please nuke it. It's not So Bad Its Horrible just because it mentions the Rapture!

Dockmarm: Agreed. This belongs It Just Bugs Me! as far as the Rapture goes. As for what to expect from an adaptation of a "piece of American Fundamentalist Christian literature," I would hope for something truer to the books themselves. That obviously did not happen. The portion just quoted strikes me as a religious version of Complaining About Shows You Dont Like.

Dockmarm: OK, nuking this for reasons described above. Just as a point of reference, it was originally posted in the vein of the Left Behind video game.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. So Bad Its Horrible shouldn't be culture-dependent.

Nintendo's other biggest hardware failure was the e-Reader, a GBA accessory which read special barcodes off of printed cards in order to play video games. Though there were some fairly good uses for this (for example, the additional levels for Super Mario Bros. 3), it seemed like it was mostly used as a Revenue Enhancing Device to lock away parts of GameCube or GBA games and make you buy packs of cards to get them. It also featured ports of NES games, but most of these were already available for free in Animal Crossing for the GameCube, and could even be downloaded to the GBA from that game. As a result, e-Reader support ended in the US before much of what was promised for it even came out (such as the other half of the Mario 3 levels and any Game & Watch games beyond the Manhole version included with the e-Reader).
- Surprisingly though, the e-Reader was an actual success in Japan, and is still being produced there... Go figure.

And this entry, because So Bad Its Horrible shouldn't depend on Word of God. (If I'm wrong about this one, go ahead and put it back.)

Doom: Rampage Edition suffered from poor level design, repetitive gameplay, bad graphics (including a horrible skybox,) and illegal MP3s that made up a full three fourths of the package. It would have been just another mediocre total conversion, had the author not responded to criticism by claiming on his website that it was perfect and everyone loved it. This would result in its winning Worst Wad at the 2004 Cacowards.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here, for now. Fake Difficulty alone, even extreme Fake Difficulty, isn't enough for So Bad Its Horrible, or most early Sierra games would qualify.

The Spec Ops series (four games!) for PlayStation are remarkable in their Fake Difficulty. Even after playing for days, this troper couldn't even get past the first level on any of the games. Dreadful.

Eric DVH: What the… First proper PS2 RPG for north america? Ephemeral Fantasia came out in the USA over a year after Summoner, which was actually developed by Americans to begin with.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here until someone can determine that the Gizmodo itself is So Bad Its Horrible; as it stands, it's just its creator that is—the system itself could've conceivably put Playstation Portables to shame...

Two handheld systems, the Gizmondo and N-Gage, attempted to break the dominance of Nintendo's Game Boy Advance before the PSP came along, and failed miserably. The Gizmondo was a victim of mismanaged money (its creator was even arrested for grand theft auto, money laundering, criminal association and possession of drugs) and was never given a real chance to become popular.

Drow Lord: Wait...Quest 64 is So Bad Its Horrible? Seriously?? Man, I'm really out of the loop...

Lord Seth: Removed:

And if you thought that was bad, try owning a Wii. Sonic and the Secret Rings may not be unplayable, but it was boring and repetitive to the point of making you feel like a robotic arm in a assembly line. With the "3D" world being nothing more than a Crash Bandicoot game with the Sonic name and character speed, you'll give up halfway through out of boredom, guaranteed.

Because while there are very few (if any) people who would dispute that the 2006 Sonic game was a disaster, Sonic and the Secret Rings is generally considered to be a a large improvement in the 3D games (though still with some major flaws). Listing it is just Complaining About Video Games You Don't Like.

Danofthe Dusk: I'd like to call in to question the entry concerning Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, under So Bad Its Horrible Voice Acting:

The acting in Metal Gear Solid 3 is a bit of a paradox for this troper. While David Hayter (Snake) is so bad he's amazing, Lori Alan (The Boss; also Diane from Family Guy) is just plain BAD. Even more confusing is that, with the game's high production values, you'd think they'd be able to afford a better actor.

I'm of the opinion that this would be suited more to a 'Justbugsme' page, as it seems that the author has been somewhat critical (I've found multiple sources applauding Ms.Alan's performance through Google), and again the parts regarding David Hayter and "you'd think they'd be able to afford a better actor" would be more attributable to the troper's personal opinion (which they do openly acknowledge at the beginning of the entry), whereas (as far as I've been led to believe) the entries on this page are by and large decided through consensus of the majority.

Charred Knight: Given that I have heard only good things about MGS voice acting, I can only think of this as someone's thinking that his opinion is everyone elses opinion. Also just because Lori Allen plays Diane from Family Guy does not mae her acting horrible, it was fine. Once it becomes unlocked I am re-deleting it. Most of the complaints about MGS ARE ALWAYS THE WRITING. An example is no one can make Raiden and Rose from MGS 2 work, its not possible.

That Other 1 Dude: And yet someone restored it the instant I removed it, and reversed all of my other edits including one that was just cleaning up some natter. I've heard her, and she sounds fine; definitely not So Bad Its Horrible. Really, it seems pretty stupid to list an individual element of a game (several of which aren't nearly that bad) as So Bad Its Horrible much less an individual performence.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut and placed here for now. I accept the argument that the cutscenes aren't So Bad Its Horrible—they may be bad, but I feel the entertainment argument is valid, seeing as I see its memes all over the site. And the game itself isn't So Bad Its Horrible, as far as those who actually played it remember. Perhaps the whole was worse than the parts—but for now, this goes here.

The Zelda CD-i games (well, definitely the animation and the acting in the cut scenes... apparently, the games themselves aren't exceptionally bad). Nintendo has formally declared them to not be part of the Zelda continuity, Zelda fans refuse to consider that they exist, and some have been temp-banned from forums for mentioning them. They are, at least, excellent meme generators ("Mah boi! This peace is what all true warriors strive for?", "My ship sails in the morning. I wonder what's for dinner...", and "No! Not into the pit! It burrrrrns!").
- This troper thinks the CD-i cutscenes should be considered So Bad, It's Good due to the sheer entertainment value and hours of parody on Youtube

Charred Knight: The game is clearly So Bad, It's Good, what line ISN'T a meme?

That Other 1 Dude: Well, plenty of people don't find them funny, just sickening (and even really scary with all the weird ways their faces contort). It's probably worth noting.

Nezumi: Is there actually a valid reason for the So Bad It's Horrible voice-acting segment to have been nuked, or was it vandalism or an over-eager editor trying too hard? I can see spinning it off into its own So Bad It's Horrible page, but there's not a particularly good reason to just erase it from the wiki entirely that I can see.

Freezair For A Limited Time: Agreed. I think there was a valid distinction there. After all, even decent games can have truly attrocious, ear-grating voice acting, without the gameplay itself being So Bad Its Horrible. Video games seem to have a harder time getting quality voice acting than anything else...

Nezumi: I don't feel qualified to make a new page for it — I don't know how the Wiki works well enough to properly sort it, and I'm much better at editing pre-existing pages than writing new ones from scratch, so I'm re-instating the "voice-acting" section to keep it from falling off the page history until someone can spin it off into its own page.

Air Of Mystery: I don't think the comment on Aerith's voice acting was valid - for Advent Children at least, I haven't played KH II. It seems more like just one person's complaint rather than a widely agreed thing.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. When it gets reinstated by the majority of Nintendo 64 fans, please explain why this is So Bad Its Horrible.

Quest 64, for the (you guessed it!) Nintendo 64. At least, according to some people. This troper sees nothing wrong with it despite confusing town layouts, and of course is in the minority.

djkates: Second that request. I've heard some of the complaints; however, from personal experience, I would argue that, at worst, the game's simply mediocre. It's nowhere near the horror of the other games listed in the article.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Am trying to figure out if the American Ninja Gaiden 3 listing is justified. I'm reluctant to use standards that would knock Sierra games on here; and that one is, in fact, still early enough to be in the Nintendo Hard era.

Mike Rosoft: I have removed the following entry as Complaining About Games You Don't Like - from what I have gathered, it is a mediocre game, not a truly horrible one. (You are probably looking for Sequelitis.) And it also seems to me that somebody accidentally put it to the top of the page instead of to the bottom (I can't be sure, since the history doesn't go that far).

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. Unplayable controls, endless glitches, dull storyline and absolutely nothing to suggest this is a Tomb Raider game except for Lara, who has become a flanderized Jerkass.

Danel: Something's gone wrong with the voice-acting segment - I understand that some people wanted to just talk about voice acting specifically, but a lot of it now is NOT So Bad Its Horrible. It's just griping. A lot needs to be cut.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut a few things. Also cut this and put it here. If many people think it's So Bad, It's Good, it isn't So Bad Its Horrible.

How did it take this long to list Resident Evil? It's nearly legendary for this, though many find it So Bad, It's Good.
- "Stop! Don't open. THAT DOOR!"

Coolnut That said, Valkyrie Profile just doesn't belong here:

The English version of Valkyrie Profile has insanely wooden voice acting which is explained once you see the voice actor cast and realize that most of them are {{4Kids}} veterans.

When it was released, I heard many reviews saying that the voice acting was quite good, at least for the time. (Compare to tri-Ace's previous work, Star Ocean: The Second Story.) Granted, it's pretty crappy compared to today's dub works, but still. And just because it uses 4Kids veterans!? That would put many, many other video games (and anime) under SBIH (including Tales Of Vesperia, which had Lenneth's voice actress do Judith's voice in that game). I know a lot of people hate the 4Kids dubwork, but there is a HUGE difference between actors and acting directors.

Charred Knight: From every thing I have seen New York has some great dubbers that are sadly not used enough compared to the pool in Texas, Los Angelos, and even Vancvouver. The problem with 4kids dubs are editing, and scripts not the actors. Check out Gai Gao Gar which had a good dub that just sold like shit because no one buys 10 year old anime except for Dragonball Z.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut these and put them here. None of these are quite right. Siren's voice acting, at least the English-language version, might be So Bad, It's Good. Persona 3 looks inconsistent. (Come on, what's wrong with a detached nihilist, characterwise?) And it is possible that someone listed the voice acting in a Mega Man game that didn't have voice acting.

The voice acting in Siren. Wooden, awkward, stilted. Also, it was done in Britain, and they didn't bother to allot accents in any sensible fashion... so while most of the characters are from the same village, they have wildly different accents for no obvious reason. Bonus points for the boy (from outside the village, at least) with the inexplicable Liverpudlian accent.
- Granted, the voice acting is terrible in both English and Japanese (though more annoying in Japanese), the English accents grow on you after a while.
Persona 3 is usually known to have top-notch voice-acting, but there's a few characters whose voice-acting quality are almost universally loathed.
- Ken (Mona Marshall) is often cited as sounding too gruff for a child, and his voice is extremely inconsistent and grating in battle.
- Natsuki is thankfully a MINOR character, she had an annoying, stereotypically Libby-style voice that makes her sudden nice streak hard to swallow.
- IKUTSUKI. The man sounded like a newsreader narrating a documentary on sea moss. The fact that he maintains the same detached, lifeless delivery even during his Reveal as a nihilistic madman was frustrating to no end.
- Yeah, I know that Aigis is supposed to sound more human as the game progresses. But after Palladion mutates to Athena, her battle calls change to something that is... annoyingly high-pitched and whiny. Particularly her Olive Oil-esque rendition of "I need your hellllp!".
Mega Man 8 simply must be mentioned. From the little-girl voice of Mega Man, to Dr. ~~Fudd~~ Light, the voicework was horrendous all around. And there's really no excuse for it. The animated Mega Man had great voicework, even if just by comparison to this audiological atrocity. Why not get Ian Corlett to reprise Rock? Is it any wonder that Mega Man 9 is going back to its NES roots? Sadly, the X series isn't spared, ranging from Narmful to just plain bad in the vast majority of cases. What a way to treat your flagship character, Capcom.
- Except Ian Corlett wouldn't have fit the original Megaman design in the least. This said, the above troper has clearly not played Megaman X: Command Mission, Megaman X8 or Megaman: Irregular Hunter X, all of which feature superior English voicework (complete with Mark "Domon Kasshu" Gatha delivering a character-defining performance as X himself); that's three out of the five Megaman X games with English voice acting ('vast majority'...ha).
- Only two actually, X4 and X7 had awful English voicework. X5 had no voices, and X6 was in Japanese with Engrish subtitles.
Plasma Wing: Cutting the reference to Sophia in the Star Ocean 3 section. I've heard few complaints about her voice, and none that would describe it as "soul-searingly awful," especially compared to Farleen, who inexplicably sounds like Elmo. Compare this (the brown haired girl) to this (the purple haired girl in the second half).

Redkun: Nothing wrong, character-wise, with a detached nihilist. But he sounds exactly like a guy in a booth reading a script in the most flat, matter-of-factly way possible. And he sounds like this in Every. Single. Scene.

Nezumi: Yay. Someone unilaterally removed the "So Bad It's Horrible Voice-Acting" section again. Suggesting we spin it off to a separate page so that this stops happening. There's no particularly compelling reason to get rid of it — the "just griping" complaint isn't compelling, as it applies to too much of So Bad It's Horrible, and it's possible to police — but people seem to feel the need to do so. I'd do it myself, but I'm not sure how to make a working "So Bad It's Horrible" sub-page

Smashy: Working on it right now... EDIT: Done.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Wait, the Gameboy Advance vs. of Sonic The Hedgehog (1) had a cheap MIDI imitation of the original's soundtrack, and had Crowning Music Of Awesome?

Komodin: No, the original poster of the example was referring to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) for the Xbox 360 and PS 3, which has some merit. Sure, the game was horrid, but the music was awesome.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: I visited the site that wants to destroy all copies of Shaq Fu. It doesn't explain why they want to do it. For all I know, the site was founded by Kobe Bryant to wipe out advertising for the competition, so we need an actual reason to list this...

Shaq Fu is a tie-in so notoriously awful that there is actually an internet movement dedicated to eradicating every single copy from existence.

Ethereal Mutation: More cuts.

Possibly the most infamous licensed game is the E.T. game for the Atari 2600, which has the dubious honor of nearly killing off its entire medium, a feat few products can boast. It was so bad that Atari attempted to literally bury their shame by taking all of the returned and unsold copies of the game and dumping them all into a New Mexico landfill. Snopes covers it.
- ET was painful to play; this game was harder than Nintendo Hard. You had to deliberately fall into pits to find pieces of the phone you needed to assemble. You had no way of knowing in advance which pits had pieces of phone in them. You could levitate yourself out of a pit, but it took a long time of pressing the joystick straight up, and any slips without pushing up sent you all the way back to the bottom of the pit. There was no risk of dying in-game that this troper recalls, but it could get boring, and since it's an Atari 2600 game, there was no way to save. Add in that Atari 2600 joysticks were fragile, and you have a game that earned the rage of its players.

E.T. was a bad game, yes, but it was better than half of the Atari games (many of which were literally unplayable). Most people tend to forget that for every Pitfall, there were two dozen non-games like the Star Wars lightsaber duel. Also, it wasn't the badness that really hurt the medium as it was several factors. Atari was fresh from the Pac-Man fiasco (something which put the buying public in a foul mood) and decided that even though over-producing Pac-Man was a failure, they should be able to pull it off with the latest Steven Spielberg movie. Thus, it was a high profile, heavily marketed, overproduced licensed game for what would become one of the highest grossing movies that was so unfaithful, it completely turned people off from the medium. While it has its place in history, it was really more of a contributing factor and scapegoat than a true cause of the crash.

Anyway, back to the point. E.T. actually does have a small fanbase (not one that actually considers it worthy of being called "good", but have a fascination with "the game that brought down Atari") and while it was an obtuse game, it was generally playable from start to finish. Most people just aren't patient enough to spend any longer than 10 seconds on it due to the constantly hammered point of "IT IS SO BAD".

The OHRRPGCE game Magnus is considered to be the worst of its kind, failing in just about every way possible. (Those with a morbid enough curiosity will have to play the fixed version, as the original doesn't run properly in modern versions of the engine.)

Non-explanatory. At least add some of the reasons it's bad instead of just asking for people to take your word for it or waste a bunch of time downloading stuff.

Not to mention that the game is enormously and hideously biased. The developers of the game decided to make every man in your "army" white with a sweater vest. The only foreign names and individuals? The Global Community (the evil faction) contains several Arab members. Shall I continue? OK, I will. While the male recruits can become whatever specialty you want them to be, the females can only become musicians or nurses. Not even doctors, nurses. The two opposing factions also have strongly biased differences; while the Trib Force (good side) trains its members in a community center, where does the GC train? College. The difference between "good" and "evil" musicians? The evil ones are either male rock stars or female pop stars. You can't make this stuff up. This troper is even both a Christian and a fan of the series, and was still appalled.

General complaining about thematic elements.

One truly iconic example: Desert Bus. Created by the magicians Penn and Teller in response to Janet Reno's complaints about violent and objectionable computer games, it was intended to be a videogame that contains absolutely nothing that would possibly be considered objectionable, in any manner, to anyone, ever. Desert Bus has, nevertheless, achieved cult status, with fans and detractors alike considering it the one true 'worst game ever made'. The plot of the game? Well...there is none. You are to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada, on a flat desert road. The trip takes eight hours. Real time. With no way to save the game or pause. Though the road is totally straight the entire way, the bus is designed to pulled to the right constantly, making it impossible to simply 'tape the joystick down' and go for a drink. The bus can't even crash — there's nothing to crash into. If the bus goes off the road, at any point, the player must wait for the towtruck to arrive from one city or the other, which happens, again, in real time.
- There is a reward for getting to Vegas: a point, and the ability to drive the eight hours back to Tuscan for another point.
- It's satire, so it might qualify for So Bad, It's Good. For some people, at least.
- It's also weirdly reminiscent of a game mentioned in Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, which does the same thing, but with a space voyage to Alpha Centauri. Anyone who left their computer turned on for three thousand years would be rewarded with a little white dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and the message "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home."

This most likely belongs in Stealth Parody. Hell, not even Stealth Parody: just outright satire. Also, it was one of a large number of mini-games, so it wasn't a ripoff.

The PlayStation game Vampire Hunter D, the plot of which was loosely based on the second movie Bloodlust, tried to do what Onimusha did about a year later - meld Resident Evil style gameplay with an intuitive combat system for swording monsters. It didn't just fail horribly, it failed spectacularly. Anytime this editor hears someone complain about bad mechanics in videogames, he can't help but die a little on the inside. They don't know the horror...
- It wasn't the worst. It took a lot of work (a lot more than it should have, mind you) but it wasn't the most horrible game play ever made. The camera angles and the slow walk speed were the worst parts.

Contested example.

Hour of Victory. ...there's nothing "victorious" about it.

Non-explanatory.

Kabuki Warriors for the X-Box. The reviewer at Game Informer literally won a match by bashing the controller against his ass.

And that makes it different from any other button masher how? Even the beloved Tekken series have had some characters like that.

This troper cannot believe that Bible Adventures hasn't been mentioned. Just look at the review by The Angry Video Game Nerd.

It's So Bad, It's Good due to its total cheesiness.

Tunguska: Legend of Faith on the original Play Station is a miserable flop of an adventure game that tries to be Grim Fandango but fails miserably. So, so very miserably.

Non-explanatory. Is it a Pixel Hunt? Completely illogical sequence of events?

Mman: I'm reinstating Tunguska (slightly edited) as I can very much confirm it fits this trope; I've played hundreds of games, including many regarded as mediocre, and this is one of the only ones I've given up on within half an hour because it's so utterly awful.

The Macekre Persona 1 is considered horrible by fans of the series and even non-fans who tried to play it. Let us list the offenses:
- Redrawing all the character sprites and portraits to look less Japanese, including turning one character black and loading him with so much Jive Turkey that would've been offensive even back when it was released!
- Silly renaming of Personae to avoid offending moral guardians and losing a good amount of hidden-meanings and foreshadowing.
  - Unfortunately, not all of them were changed for that reason. Some of them were just because of stupidity. Loki and Beelzebub accidentally got their names swapped, and a few get weird names that are technically acceptable romanizations of the kana, but which reflect no understanding that those names were actually supposed to be something; like "Armati" becoming "Allmighty."
- The complete removal of a popular side-quest because it was considered too hard for Americans, thus removing some character development.
- Quite a few Engrish phrase, rendering some dialogue incomphrensible without a guide. Or turned serious moments into Narms.
- The battle system is also criticized for being quite slow, and not leaving enough money and experiance points for the effort.

This just belongs in Macekre. Ignoring the stupid changes, it was still a very good game.

Mystery Quest, a side-scroller for the 8-bit Nintendo, was so bad that Nintendo at one point tried to deny it was released - and it wasn't even made by them. It had terrible controls, pointless abilities, and required a trip through the same monotonous plot four times to finally beat it. The company responsible got out of the video game industry soon after.
- This troper considers that game So Bad, It's Good.

Contested.

BMX XXX: How do you do a quick cash in on the Tony Hawk craze? Make it a stunt-cycle game and add naked breasts. Penny Arcade had its own theory about how the game got green-lighted.

It's a fun story of Executive Meddling, Misaimed Marketing, and Completely Missing The Point, but the game wasn't any worse than any other "extreme sports" bicycle game churned out to capitalize on the demographic.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. There may be So Bad Its Horrible Wisdom Tree games, but I sincerely doubt any of these are it.

By the early nineties, Nintendo was catching on to Color Dreams' unlicensed game publishing, so Color Dreams decided to change their name to Wisdom Tree and changed their agenda to a Christian video game company. After all, what company would hate on a Christian game developer? (Don't answer that.) The glut of bad games didn't stop though, from the lousy Bible Adventures and the obvious Zelda knockoff Spiritual Warfare, to Super Noah's Ark 3D, essentially a ROM hack of Wolfenstein 3 D with the player as Noah wandering around his ark and shooting fruit at goats.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: to clarify: Bible Adventures is contested. Spiritual Warfare is a knock-off of a game that's so good that some of the goodness rubs off. And Super Noah's Ark 3D is a knock-off that's all but authorized by the creators of the original, so, if Wolfenstein 3D isn't bad, this doesn't belong here.

Ramidel: Removed Quest 64. It's a bad game in so many ways, but it's got the Nintendo-game ability to be plain fun even when it sucks by any other metric you want to use. When the troper who put it there mentioned that they loved the game, it's a Guilty Pleasure or So Bad, It's Good, not So Bad Its Horrible.

Midna: Removing

Sonic Team promised not to screw up again, but they broke their promise, and the camel's back, with Sonic Unleashed. Quick, take Sonic away from them if you can, Sega, he doesn't deserve this desecration. Or maybe it's best to euthanize the Sonic franchise(ie he's had his day in the sun).

due to zero explanation as to WHY it sucks and probable BS. I've never played the game myself, but as far as I know, the game's got fairly decent reviews, thus making this just Complaining About Video Games You Don't Like.

(As a note to the editor who added this line: you placed it incorrectly, and made it look like some fan made a port of Sonic Unleashed to the GBA [when the only fan-made port of Sonic games to the GBA that actually end up being good was of Sonic 1].)

Komodin: Yeah, whoever added the unjustified example for Sonic Unleashed is probably some jaded fan/troll. To most people, it's one of the best/THE best 3D/One of the best Sonic games so far. It definitely does NOT deserve to be in the SBIH article.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this (and deleted some related material) and put it here. Popularity may not equal quality, but a lost part noted that "plenty" of people like Sonic 2006, and that plus the soundtrack (which is good) makes the odds of the game truly belonging here low.

Sonic The Hedgehog (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions) deserves special credit for pulling this off with one of the most beloved mascots in gaming - endless glitches, slow gameplay, and Four Kids Entertainment are almost tolerable in the face of an inconceivable number of loading screens and the return of Sonic's ultimate nemesis, an ill-designed camera scheme hell-bent on sending him careening blindly into a bottomless pit. And then, as though mocking the player for wishing things would go quicker, come the on-rails "Mach Speed" segments in which Sonic becomes uncontrollably fast, with the Fake Difficulty factor of pitiful collision detection thrown in just for fun! After surviving this and waiting through a loading screen, you'll be treated to the "adorable" romance between Sonic and the very human Princess Elise. It can perhaps best be described as what you would get if you took the previous examples of Jumping the Shark, made them worse, and then threw in a slew of additional problems. A prime example of why rushing game development (in this case, to get it out around Christmas) is a bad, bad idea.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. Roguelikes are supposed to be difficult. And the other points are Voice Acting and Wall Banger, respectively.

Dark Angel Vampire Apocalypse, not to be confused with the TV series Dark Angel. Vampire Apocalypse is a dungeon-crawling Roguelike RPG released for the PS 2 by Metro 3 D. The point of the game was to take your flat static sword chick through the dungeons to get more powerful weapons and armor. After you played for 100 (real time) hours the final boss appeared and you had to hope you were strong enough to kill him. While most gamers can't even stand to play a good game for that damn long, it becomes exponentially worse when you consider...
- The music, which came in and faded out entirely randomly and often sounded like someone smacked an electric guitar with a sledgehammer and recorded what came out of the amp.
- Armor works by level, not type. To better explain...a suit of level 1 full plate mail costs about 10 times as much as a suit of level 1 leather armor...but has the exact same stats.

Ephraim225: This Troper had a thought: should we remove Sonic The Hedgehog Genesis from this article? Because STHG was a Porting Disaster, not So Bad Its Horrible. Or put every So Bad Its Horrible Porting Disaster on the article. Just a thought.

Komodin: I think we should leave it here, since pretty much everyone hates Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis. To many, many people (myself included), it's a total bastardization to a well-known classic. It's a particularly bad Porting Disaster.

Caswin: There are folks out there who would call me crazy for this, but I'm afraid I must protest Action 52. Having played it on a ROM, I can attest that a few of the games have genuine entertainment value — as much, in fact, as could be expected from a game with 1/52nd of an NES cartridge to work with — and others can very easily be enjoyed as a farce or under the heading of So Bad, It's Good. This page is only for the truly, irredeemably awful, and whatever 52 may be, that is not what it is. On these grounds, I propose that it be moved.

Caswin: The Cheetahmen ran off... (By which I mean I'm moving it.)

HeartBurn Kid: I never thought I'd see the day... somebody actually defended Action 52. Seriously, I have the ROM too, and every single thing about every single game on there (graphics, sound, gameplay, stability) is mind-wrenchingly, soul-searingly, indescribably bad. If Action 52 doesn't belong here, then nothing does, and I sincerely doubt the humanity of anybody who could even claim to have enjoyed it. But don't take my word...

Caswin: Talk about Accentuate the Negative. I won't defend Action 52 to the point of actually being good, per se, but it's clear that those guys aren't even giving it a chance. (The way they continue to complain, while cussing as punctuation, even while doing something they acknowledge as worthwhile — turning "Slashers" into a dance party — says something about their approach. Oh, and they're playing "Meong" wrong.) Apart from the fact that my defense only extends to So Bad, It's Good, which I hope you will at least consider, I cite "Underground" as an example of something enjoyable on the cartridge that is Action 52. Seriously, by the time the last level comes, I always wind up humming the Matrix lobby battle music.

HeartBurn Kid: I'm sorry, but there is nothing "good" about Action 52, not even So Bad, It's Good. If it was the last game on Earth, I'd give up gaming forever. Actually, I lied a bit there — The Elton John Abyss(tm) in Non-Human was moderately amusing, but other than that, there's not a single game on the cartridge that even approaches being tolerable. I mean, if we were talking about the Genesis version, I could see saying it's not hideously horrible, but the NES version? It simply cannot be redeemed.

Caswin: I hate to disagree like this, but I can say with conviction that there are games on the cartridge that more than fulfill the requirement of "approaches being tolerable." Going in with appropriately low expectations, I have played the likes of "Ninja Assault", "Underground", and parts of "Cheetahmen" (although level five is admittedly Nintendo Hard beyond all reason; save states were involved) and enjoyed them in their own right. Other games work on a more morbid level, serving mainly to be made fun of, especially with company; I find impromptu in-game dance parties and inappropriate drama applied to just-playable skeleton plots amusing. This I stand by.

So apparently we're not going to come to a consensus on this. Can we get a third party in here?

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Right now, the entry says "Most of Action 52." (Emphasis added here and may be added there later.) If there are three So Okay, It's Average games and 49 games that range from Horrible to outright unplayable, we can leave the entry on the page, especially for a $250 cartridge. Games that are only enjoyable when they are MSTed may still count as Horrible, just as there are Horrible movies and Horrible fanfics with tolerable MSTs.

Caswin: Now that you mention it, I think I put the "most of" there to begin with.

Caswin: I just wanted to add a link to this series of Action 52 reviews. It's much fairer and arguably more entertaining than the "Worst Game Ever" videos. Carry on.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. The first rule of So Bad Its Horrible is, the work cannot be good. The troper who inserted this game admits it's good. The song shortage is a Wall Banger, yes, but as it stands, this isn't even a full Porting Disaster, let alone horrible.

Beat'n Groovy, an American localization of Pop'n Music. While the gameplay and controls themselves aren't bad (when you consider that this game is 3- and 5-button only, and lacks the full 9-button mode due to it using the Xbox 360 controller) at all, there is one big issue with it: there's only 9 songs, and the hardest song is a still-easy level 3 song, and there's been no official mention of downloadable songs. For Western Bemani fans—this troper included—who were excited to finally get their no-import, no-$200-controller-necessary Pop'n fix, this was a HUGE letdown and a disgrace to the Bemani franchise.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: I repeat - a game cannot be good and Horrible at the same time. Cut this and put it here.

Marathon was a good game. It's physics, on the other hand, are horrifyingly bad. You can't jump (for no apparent reason, since, unlike Doom, Marathon actually has aerial physics), but they decided to throw in platforming segments anyway. The result? To "hop" from one platform to another, you have to run at breakneck speed and hope you land. This is fairly easy, because, to accommodate, the gravity is less than half moon gravity (which makes sense in the first game, where you're on a spaceship, but becomes less realistic in the second and third games where some levels are planetside). Your air control is a joke, so any time you run off a platform in multiplayer, you're an easy target even for mediocre players as you descend to the ground with all the urgency of a petal. Even worse, under certain conditions you would bounce, slowing you down significantly and putting you at the mercy of crippled air control until you land, which takes four seconds thanks to the terrible gravity. On the ground, the control was pretty fluid, except for some reason you have the inertia of a wrecking ball, such that it can take up to five seconds to change direction. The worst part is, all of this is because Bungie was too lazy to add a fucking jump button!

Caswin: It sounds like a direct complaint about the game's physics system, and that alone. But no, unless it's voice acting, this isn't meant for discussion of single, crippling flaws of something that's otherwise good.

Eddie Van Helsing: I'm really tempted to add Clive Barker's Jericho to the main SBIH/Games page, but I'll be a good kitty and mention it here first. Jericho is a first person squad-based shooter published by Codemasters for the Xbox 360. Its color palette consists mainly of shades of grey, red, brown, and black. Its approach to humor consists mainly of jokes like "How many telekinetic lesbians does it take to move a barrier". Your AI-controlled squadmates act more like drunken morons than like battle-hardened members of an elite group of soldiers with preternatural powers. You can expect numerous "Press X to not die" moments, and the ending makes no sense whatsoever.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Looks like it might fit to me. Anyone want to third this?

Eddie Van Helsing: Good luck finding somebody else who was stupid enough to rent or (Pinhead forbid!) buy this game. :)

Inspector C: No mention of [Zero Punctuation "Clive Barker's "Clive Barker's Jericho" by Clive Barker"]?

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: I understand why Hydlide was removed from the listing. Face it, if the series has three to five games in it (depending on what country you're in), then there must be a redeeming quality. But the fella who removed it removed everything above it, including the intro. So I restored everything but Hydlide. (I'm still uncomfortable about most Atari 2600 games being listed, but oh well...)

Antwan: Hey, we got a lot of entries here, guys. Maybe we should start alphabetizing them or putting them in order by genre?

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: We'll have to alphabetize. No way we can assign genres to "most games for the Atari 2600," "most games by Color Dreams," or "most of Action 52."

Antwan: Gotcha. If I find some time, I'll give it a shot.

Insanity Prelude: Nuking the bit about the Gamecube controller being the best of its generation. I'm too tempted to add "Ever played with a Dualshock 2?" in response.

Ethereal Mutation: Would anyone object to me organizing this by platform in a generational order? For multi-platform releases (which seem pretty rare for this list), there could just be a general entry for that particular generation. For example:

Playstation

Chronicles of the Sword.
Bubsy 3D.

Sixth Generation

Aquaman: Battle For Atlantis.

Xbox

American McGee's Bad Day L.A.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Good idea! Generational order is unambiguous and well-defined for every console or portable system, and every game on this list has a known system it belongs to. Not sure how generations & PC games mix, but I believe it can be worked out. (Would the Virtual Boy be a class of its own?) I suggest that for releases that are Horrible on more than one platform, use the earliest generation with a Horrible port. You'll probably want to subdivide the early portable Mortal Kombat entry - that's four different games on four different systems and (I think) three different generations.

Eno: Just removing this original bit here about Deadly Towers:

Or better yet, see the Seanbaby version of it, long before some nerd was stealing his schtick of coming up with verbose and vulgar descriptions of bad games.

That just sounds needlessly snarky to me. I know this isn't Wikipedia, but the debate over whether the AVGN "stole" someone else's concept (because reviewing bad old video games is such a specialist subject) is unrelated to the subject at hand.

Oh, and Seanbaby's article was already linked in the original description of the game, so that just adds to the fact this edit was made just as a snipe.

Falcon Pain: As a side note, isn't it kinda pointless to mention that a game was so bad that a Caustic Critic smashed it or made up new words to insult it or things like that? I mean, they're Caustic Critics. They do over-the-top things for the entertainment value. It's their equivalent of saying "this movie was so good, Roger Ebert gave it a thumbs up", and does nothing to strengthen the argument that the game was More Bad Its Horrible than any other game.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. If there is a sincere fanbase for the game (one not fueled by Bile Fascination), then it is not Horrible. From the looks of it, there are at least two bases: people who think the game is So Bad, It's Good, and people who truly enjoy the game. (If you became a gamer during the Atari/Sierra era, you might enjoy games that are all but impossible. This game is just old enough to still make the cut.)

One of the worst video game RPGs made, according to Japanese fans, is Hoshi wo Miru Hito, which can be translated as Stargazer. The background graphics make no attempt to blend the tiles and, combined with the dark, dull palette choice end up looking abysmal. The battle system is clunky, slow and unforgiving. Select the wrong battle option? Too bad, there's no button to back up. A lot of the locations and items on the map are invisible. You can't even see the first village you're supposed to go to, and you have no introduction or instruction on what to do first. The game is so bad, Japanese fans have given it the title of "densetsu no kusoge", or "legendary shit game". Read here for more info.
- Despite the large amount of hate this game received, however, the game does have its fans! One group of people actually remade the game, and it's actually pretty good (though you need to know Japanese to play). The game can be found here, if you're interested. There is also a fan site of the original game with loads of info if you actually are masochistic enough to play here.

Inspector C: Mc Cartney, just chipping in here: I have played through Hoshihito and finished the game. It's as horrible as the HG 101 article claims (the difficulty factor comes from all the wrong reasons, some of which the article itself doesn't even have), and there are trillions of hate websites for it (think Seanbaby). Unfortunately, I've only read what I can find through the Babelfish translator, so knowing whether or not some of the sites are made out of true love for the game is out of the question for me since I do not know Japanese. With that said, I would keep it under SBIH for now, though if enough evidence to the contrary pulls up, of course it can be relocated.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Point taken. Restoring entry.

Midna: Besides, if they called it a legendary shit game...

Great Pikmin Fan: Does Sonic 3D blast count? I hate it, a lot of Sonic fans hate it, just wondering if it has a big fanbase.

Midna: Well, I like it for its So Bad, It's Good-ness... does that count?

Midna: Time to cut some crap!

Target: Terror, a so-bad-it's-good arcade game from 2004, got ported to the Wii four years later and somehow lost much of the cheesy charm. Graphics literally have different framerates going on at the same time. The controls hardly work. And now you can hear the same Stock Sound Effects that were used in the original Doom! It didn't help that the game was priced at $40 and was released a week or so before Grand Theft Auto IV. Best left to the arcades, then...

This would probably fit better in Porting Disaster...

The Toy Story game ported to Game Boy. This was a basic linear platformer game available at the time on SNES, Sega Genesis, PC, and Game Boy. The first three shared the same layout (with various design and/or level changes) and had generally pleasant graphics, a varied and decent soundtrack, and challenging (but not unbeatable) levels. The Game Boy version, however:
- Was frustratingly slow (The Angry Video Game Nerd would probably say that Woody "moves like he's on the Goddamn moon!").
- Had grating music (the soundtrack comprised a total of three songs, all really high-pitched and squealy - even for Game Boy - that you get sick of within the first ten minutes)
- Had awkward hit detection (particularly when trying to use Woody's pull-string as a weapon or a grappling hook).
- Had messy, pooly blended graphics (with original Game Boy's unlit green screen, game play was all the more aggravating due to the complex textures and sprite designs; almost like they tried to give them too much detail rather than adapt them to Game Boy standards).
- Removed many levels, including all that were outside the "platformer" realm (the overhead racing levels, 3-d maze, etc.) and the boss fights (Nightmare Buzz, regular Buzz Lightyear and the notorious Claw), thus taking away much of the fun element from the other ports.
- Was really, really, really friggin' slow.

...as would this. I'm going to move both to that article in a few.

Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum for the NES. How did this shovel of shit get authorized by Nintendo?

This, on the other hand, is just non-descriptive. How boring.

Antwan: Okay guys, I'm finally going to organize the entries by video game generation. Wish me luck. Update: Done and done. I hope it helped you fellow tropers a bunch. It's organized by generation and alphabetically.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Thank you! Though we had better make it explicit it's alphabetical within the categories, or it won't stay that way. (Think anyone will think of a Horrible first-generation game?)

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. The game might be bad enough for here, but we can't just list it because this esteemed Caustic Critic panned it. He engages in hyperbole, and we need independent verification that it's warranted. (Yes, that'll be hard to get for an NES game, but oh well...)

Transformers for the Famicom. By the Angry Video Game Nerds review, it looks to be about as bad as Action 52. It's fortunate that this horror didn't get exported to the US.

Antwan: There better be somebody that reads Japanese in that case.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Okay, I clicked through the link. All indications are that this game is bad. But your 1.5 is an outlier. Gamespot proper gave it 4.0; the mass of critics and the mass of players gave it 5.x...

Star Trek: New Worlds, an RTS game for the PC. I can't even begin to describe what's wrong with this game in just one paragraph, so read my review.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: I notice that the game has been replaced. I won't pull it again immediately - at least it's not cryptic. I will note that, if that entry was posted by the same person as the one above, that you can't be sure how useless the tutorial is until you finish it. I will also note that, in general, if a game of this sort has both a detailed map that covers only a small part of the playing field and a minimap that covers the whole field but has almost no detail - you can move your ship a lot faster on the minimap! (Perhaps World Map will have something to say about that...)

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here, as it's listed under So Bad, It's Good by someone who found the games hilarious. (The entry on Western Animation still stands, at least.)

While they do straddle the line between games and animation, Phoenix Games. Go look them up on You Tube and witness the... well, horror is far too light a term.
- You gotta love the fact that they aren't even pretending that they aren't copying the Disney character designs. Also, since when is Thumper the size of a horse?
  - Case and point: The Lion and the King here◊
- Their most infamous "games" are English dubs of Disney rip-offs from Dingo Pictures (who are already covered on So Bad It's Horrible Western Animation)... let's not even speak of their actual games. This explains why and how Phoenix Games can create such horror.
  - Elite Team!? Never trust a company that uses the term "Super Budget".
  - In short: We make crappy game so we can make profits out of the initial investment, coz development costs money.

Antwan: Um...checking the Dingo Pictures entry shows that half of it is So Bad, It's Good and they work for Phoenix Games. The other half is considered So Bad Its Horrible Perhaps you can make it so that some of these games are terrible?

By the way, remember that if you see something in So Bad, It's Good, there's a possibility that it could very well be the other way around and Phoenix Games doesn't belong there. Thanks.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Thanks. I'll reinstate the entry with modifications.

Great Pikmin Fan: cut:

Uwe Boll made a PC game, called 1968 Tunnel Rats, based off his movie. So, it's a movie tie in game, based on a movie by Uwe Boll, who also made the game. As bad as you might think it would be, its worse.

Non explanitory.

Antwan: No, no it's not. Explanations for cutting stuff is recommended; we're not mind-readers.

Great Pikmin Fan: I mean that the entry was non explanitory, not the cut reason. here, I saw a lot of entries being cut because they where non explanitory, so why should this one live?

Antwan: Ah, very well.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here — it's in the same class as Desert Bus, just at the other end of the complexity scale. If it's funny, it isn't Horrible — even if it is hell to play.

Takeshi No Chousenjou is a borderline example. Unlike other games on this list, it's a pretty ordinary-looking Famicom game (and damned if that music isn't catchy as hell). Also unlike other games on this list, it was made by a man who hates video games. The game is basically Unwinnable - it can be won, but doing so requires you to do things like sing a certain song at a karaoke bar three times in a row (and you actually had to sing and get it right - the Famicom had a microphone), don't press any buttons for one hour, divorce your wife, beat up some random old man, and - the best part - defeat a final boss with one million hit points. As in, you have to punch it one million times. Of course, making a game that was so stupidly hard it was actually funny was the entire point, so it's hard to say whether the game is horrible or a brilliant work of art.

Komodin: Removed this:

There's the Squicky storyline, where Sonic romances a 14-year old human girl, complete with Reset Button ending inducing kiss.

1) Elise is actually 17 years old, as the manual and the official site of the game shows.

2) Sonic didn't romance anyone; Elise had a crush on him.

3) You're technically using the Uncanny Valley link wrong. Being a human in and of itself doesn't make her a denizen of the Uncanny Valley (as the human characters of Sonic Unleashed shows); it was her being a realistically designed human in a game that contains a cast of cartoony Funny Animal characters that makes her so.

I disagree. Elise was an Uncanny Valley monster even by herself. Her vaguely realistic but bizarrely deformed face made her one of the most hideous characters I have ever seen in a video game. She looked like a ghoul. She's in a sort of horrible limbo where she's neither photorealistic nor attractively stylized. A photorealistic woman might have looked odd next to Sonic, but it would have been an improvement over that thing that was in the actual game.

4) The kiss itself didn't induce the Reset Button ending; it was Elise blowing out the flames of the original Solaris that pressed the button, metaphorically speaking.

5) Really, the Squickiness of the whole subplot is debatable at best, of which the only part more-or-less universally considered to be WTF-inducing was the aforementioned kiss of life.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here, for now. This game is not quite unplayable, and parts of the story are apparently beautiful, touching, and excellent even though they unhappen. Horrible works are not supposed to have features that strongly redeeming...

The suck factor of Sonic The Hedgehog (2006 vs.) has been exaggerated by the Hatedom to the point of its staining other games in the franchise, which is why it has been removed from this list several times. You can the lingering effects of this Demonization with titles as Sonic and the Black Knight and Sonic Unleashed, games that have unfairly been rated lower than this one. And yet, even after you set aside the Hatedom, the bare-bones facts of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) show that it still deserves to be on the list.
- First of all, the manual contains references to Blatant Lies that can only be excused because the game is an Obvious Beta. It references a nonexistent Shield power-up, upgradable levels of Custom actions (they aren't), and (nonexistent) Chaos Drives/Light Cores.
- Expanding on the Obvious Beta issues are the controls. For the most part, they're barely adequate; but they become extremely slippery in certain segments, rendering Sonic's Mach Speed segments and Shadow's 'shoot the train' segments unnecessarily Nintendo Hard. Compounding this are the infamous Camera Screws and spotty spawning of enemies and background objects.
- And the clincher: the Loads and Loads of Loading. When people say that 10 to 20 percent of your time is looking at a loading screen, they are not kidding. You can cut down on this waiting by sticking to the main quest; but if you want 100% Completion (which involves a lot of shorter sidequests), you are going to be looking at these screens a lot.
  - Just to illustrate exactly how bad it is here is an outline of a day in the life of Sonic '06. A typical sidequest will consist of a short dialogue with an NPC, a full loading screen (20 seconds at least), followed by about 3 more lines of dialogue, another full loading screen, and finally the mission. By the way, if you fail (gods help you), you'll load another 3 line failure dialogue, load the main world and then get the pleasure of talking to them again so you can go through your friend the loading screens again! Yay!
- Then there's the Reset Button ending. Squick aside, this is the lowest moment of not only the game, but possibly the entire franchise. Sonic 2006 did have cool moments in its story up until then, such as Silver's childlike wonder towards the pre-apocalypse world, Blaze's Heroic Sacrifice, Shadow and Omega's Shut Up Hannibals, and massive amounts of character development for Shadow, Rouge, and Omega. And it was all undone with a Hand Wave.
  - Even though it made all those good moments never happen, everyone universally praises the Reset Button ending for killing the Sonic x Elise ship (though no one supported it). Still, retconning precious Character Development out of existence is a BIG no-no.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Two things:

I've just alphabetized a "Lord Of The Rings: Part 1" game for the SNES generation. Now, we've already listed a "Fellowship Of The Ring" game by Interplay for the SNES. Copyright laws being what they are, I suspect that they're the same game. (That they both have huge maps is another hint.) So, would someone kindly determine which title is the true one so the entries can be consolidated? Or else prove one of those is a pirated game?
Someone has just argued that Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is both So Bad, It's Good and So Bad Its Horrible. I was under the impression that those were mutually exclusive? Though, under the circumstances, I can understand the idea — if this was a film (one of those with the pushbuttons), it would've been So Bad, It's Good...

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. If the gameplay is that innovative (in a good way), then this is a decent but severely flawed game, not a Horrible one.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces suffered from this. It had some mildly interesting components: a relatively inventive system for acquiring new buildings (capturing and repurposing them rather than building them), easy resource management, the ability to recruit allies from neutral and enemy factions (though as such you can't spawn units; you have to convert them). All of this, however, fell into a shambles due to shoddy graphics, unpolished gameplay, Anvilicious fundamentalist Christianity (which should really be expected of a Left Behind game), and the third level of the single-player mode which was borderline Unwinnable.
- The specific reason the third mission was Unwinnable: the third mission involved soldiers attacking your chapel. You have no military units, and if any of your units die, or if you kill any enemy units, you lose instantly. As such, you need to evacuate your units immediately and let the soldiers blow up the chapel, in a Fission Mailed scenario. The problem is that when the chapel is destroyed, an orphan spawns at the chapel. The orphan also counts as being on your team, and must survive in order for you to succeed. The orphan spawns at the opposite side of the chapel, such that the soldiers are between you and him. The soldiers are faster than you, and the orphan dies in pretty much one hit. Game Over.

Excel-2010. This line bugs me:

An RPG Maker community once held a contest with the objective of creating the worst game ever using RPG Maker.

It sounds like the horrible factor was an intentional objective. Doesn't this mean that they should be put in Stylistic Suck?

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: I cut Hydlide again. Apparently, the Japanese consider it So Bad, It's Good (there is no way it can be truly good with that description), and since they were the original intended demographic... It figures. It's the first in a series, and it's a non-pirated game for the NES. Those together were already evidence that it wasn't Horrible.

The original Hydlide on the NES is an unplayable exercise in tedium and frustration. The game doesn't just give you no direction — the path you need to take to even finish it is impossible to figure out without a guide. (An example: to complete the game, you must free three fairies. One is hidden in a random tree.) The battle system is a crapshoot where any frontal attack leaves you dead in less than a second against even the weakest enemy. The controls are sluggish, the game glitches all the time, and there is no feeling of reward for getting through it. All the while, a tinny low-budget knockoff of the Indiana Jones theme loops endlessly in an effort to drive you mad.
- However, it must be noted that this opinion is only held in North America and the West. In Japan, Hydlide is a cult classic. It also must be noted that the game was first released in America between 4-5 years after it was originally made.

Cliche: I would like the person who wrote this to confirm where this opinion was received:

Steve Moraff was one of the worst game developers of the 1990s. Although he released his first title in 1988, it wasn't until the early-mid '90s that his games really achieved noteriety. Not for their creativity, since they consisted entirely of a few derivative Roguelike RPGs and numerous minor variants of Mah Jong solitaire; nor for their innovative use of graphics or sound, since they had neither. No, what Moraff was known for was his early adoption of the shareware distribution model; and his ludicrious overuse of shareware nag screens and anti-pirating code. Both the nags and anti-pirate features seriously detracted from the playability of the demos; and at one point it was clear that more effort was put into creating that code than was put into developing the games themselves. Interestingly, Moraff's games were rarely pirated. This was mainly due to the fact that the anti-piracy code was so heavily integrated into the game code it was almost impossible to remove or bypass; and the games themselves were so dull that no one wanted to bother. Although Moraff is still producing simple puzzle and solitaire games; his work is typically ranked well behind more innovative commercial offerings from Pop Cap Games, and free gaming on MSN Game Zone.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here for now. Did many people pirate this game for the Fanservice? If so, it's not Horrible — the graphics are the redeeming feature... In general, if a game is heavily pirated for reasons not related to Bile Fascination, then it's not Horrible.

Bikini Karate Babes. The controls were choppy, the storyline is non-existent (unless you figure that a bunch of women getting together on an island in skimpy and easily ripped off bikinis and lightly tapping the crap out of each other is sufficient - some might), and the extra modes are simply deplorable.
- What was also great about this title was that despite being a quirky porn-lite game that would be popular in the file trading scene, the author was unconcerned because the amount of video meant the game was a really big download (for its time). File size was his copy protection!

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. Anything that provides Narm likely doesn't belong here. The length of the game in single-player mode is irrelevant. And the innovative multiplayer maps have not been explored...

Rogue Warrior. A stealth action title based on the exploits and autobiography of real-life Navy SEAL Dick Marcinko (voiced by Mickey Rourke), and with a multiplayer mode that was supposed to revolutionize online play with its randomized maps, this was supposed to be Bethesda's big game for the 2009 holiday season. The result was a game that got roundly trashed for its completely broken enemy AI, hit detection and stealth mechanics, a single-player campaign runtime of under two hours, and for having a script so foul-mouthed that it was more funny than hardcore.

Glowsquid: I don't think innovation in itself should count as a reedeming feature. Karate is the first fighting game ever - doesn't mean it's not an unplayable piece of shit. And about the Narm thing... well, one part might be funny but it's a videogame. If the gameplay is bad, I doubt anyone will still continue to play it.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Okay then, objection withdrawn. If the game is truly unplayable (and sufficiently broken hit detection and stealth mechanics can send it there), then feel free to reinstate it.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here for now. This entry is for a digital card game; the note below it notes the existence of a Collectible Card Game it's based on; and the note below that says that one of these is So Bad, It's Good — but I'm not sure which one. It does make a difference.

A Game Boy Color Dragonball game, Digital Card Game, in which its gameplay is a mix of "strategy" and cards. It was extremely difficult and confusing, and the computer cheated.
- Based, God help us, on probably the most broken, incomprehensible Collectible Card Game ever created.
  - You mean the one with the plastic sword and scouter? C'mon, that was clearly So Bad, It's Good. Every single character card was obsolete in a month or two, by way of So Last Season being worked into the game mechanics.

Archived Discussion Horrible / VideoGames