So Bad, It's Horrible is one of the more flame-bait-y parts of the site, so a cleanup thread is needed to ensure that works aren't added simply because someone doesn't like them.
If you want to list a work under this, keep the following in mind:
- The work must have very few fans or defenders (both genuine and ironic). It should fail to appeal to any type of audience.
- Being offensive in its subject matter isn't enough.
- It isn't horrible just because a certain critic disliked it, though their reviews can be used as sources and citations.
- The work should have notably poor reviews (e.g., less than 3/10 on IMDb, or single digit scores on Rotten Tomatoes)
- For a Moral Substitute to qualify, it cannot even appeal to its target demographic.
- Please be polite while writing and as much as possible, avoid falling into Complaining About Shows You Don't Like. Instead, focus on explaining why the work is horrible.
In addition, per No Recent Examples, Please!, a work must be at least one month old before it can be added, to prevent knee-jerk reactions.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 6th 2024 at 3:34:45 AM
do you wanna have a bad time?
Sounds like an easy cut then.
I have to ask, should we remove Mystique and Playaround from Video Games: Other, due to being porn, even if is really badly drawn porn.
Edited by randomtroper89 on Aug 15th 2023 at 2:32:55 PM
Most of the Mystique and Playaround examples don't have enough context about why the game is Horrible beyond just having bad graphics and a stupid/offensive premise. For example, Bachelor Party is just described as a Breakout clone, which isn't Horrible on its own since these were the Atari days, so you could still get away with selling something so basic.
Custer's Revenge at least has some boring gameplay on top of its atrocious premise and graphics, so it might be keepable if more details about that are added.
I think Seltzer and Friedberg's entry needs to be rewritten:
- Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg started off only writing parodies, doing the divisive Spy Hard (which was directed by Jason's father Rick Friedberg, and even then the script was supposedly heavily rewritten by Rick and the film's star Leslie Nielsen) and Scary Movie (actually some of it; their script was merged into the Wayans' script before production began). Then after years of not being able to see their script done, they decided to make movies themselves starting with 2006's Date Movie, and their persistence led to their names becoming shorthand for "utterly incompetent parody". Their shtick consisted of only doing parodies of the most recent movies, a lack of research beyond watching the previews, wave after wave of painfully-dated pop-culture references, rehashing jokes from the original work (such as Epic Movie having Wolverine Flipping the Bird with his claw, something he did in the first X-Men film)... and to make everything worse, their penchant for Toilet and Vulgar Humor makes the movies nauseating to watch. For some perspective on the quality of their films, Film Brain reviews Epic Movie here
and Smeghead reviews Meet the Spartans here.
Korey Coleman of Spill and Double Toasted would go on to list Friedberg and Seltzer as his mortal enemies in his Epic Movie
and Meet
the Spartans
reviews (until he watched InAPPropriate Comedy, that is). For a while, Critical Dissonance kept them rolling - low budgets made the movies financially successful despite bad reviews and eventual audience backlash, to the point that a rare feature-interview on both
noted how they managed to both be "among the most consistently successful in all of Hollywood" and "score frightening level of Internet vitriol". This changed with:
- Disaster Movie, which along with all the narrow/shallow parodies and crude jokes, consists of long running gags that were never funny to begin with. What makes Disaster Movie "special" is that it goes even further on all of this, managing to be more aggressively unfunny, more pandering, more vapid, and even cheaper-looking than the films before it. The film shot up (or down?) to the #1 spot on IMDb's worst film list in less than a day and bombed in theaters. This film was so bad that Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus states that "Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have produced what is arguably their worst Movie yet" and Pajiba "[refused] to dignify [their] movie with a new review"
instead composing their review of the film from bits from reviews of their previous films. USA Today film critic Louis Fehrey, in his review, said that Disaster Movie was an insult to the intelligence of him and his fellow Americans and an insult to cinema. He subsequently published an article in USA Today summing up all the reviews of the film, which were near-universally negative. It was part of I Hate Everything's trilogy Movie review
alongside Date, Epic, and Disaster Movie, noting that Disaster was the worst film he's ever seen (at the time of his video), noting how disrespectful the professionals involved are over other amateur projects that might look worse on the surface, as well as how the film would be only half an hour long without the insane amount of references, and how the longest amount of time the film went without one was 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Korey and the Co Host 3000 of Spill suffered greatly after watching the movie.
- Follow-up Vampires Suck managed to get somewhat better reviews than predecessors for at least attempting to parody the source material instead of just being a reference parade, to the point that Rotten Tomatoes called it
"a slight step forward for the Friedberg-Seltzer team". But then they stopped getting studio backing, and their self-made work - usually barely hitting theaters before/while hitting video on demand - hardly made any money while still attracting hate. The Starving Games and Superfast!, shallow parodies of The Hunger Games and The Fast And The Furious respectively, were more of the same. Their first "original" work, Best Night Ever, was a Found Footage comedy in the vein of Project X, when the subgenre was already earning backlash, ramping up the gross-out humor to compensate for lack of references, and featuring scenes which just won't end - the A.V. Club pointed out
"the movie has more awkward dead space than jokes". It's impressive how Seltzer and Friedberg still keep to their schtick.
- Disaster Movie, which along with all the narrow/shallow parodies and crude jokes, consists of long running gags that were never funny to begin with. What makes Disaster Movie "special" is that it goes even further on all of this, managing to be more aggressively unfunny, more pandering, more vapid, and even cheaper-looking than the films before it. The film shot up (or down?) to the #1 spot on IMDb's worst film list in less than a day and bombed in theaters. This film was so bad that Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus states that "Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have produced what is arguably their worst Movie yet" and Pajiba "[refused] to dignify [their] movie with a new review"
- First off, I think the header can be shortened.
- I don't think that the second sub-bullet does a good job explaining why Best Night Ever, The Starving Games and Superfast! are horrible besides the usual
- It mentions Meet The Spartans, and Vampires Suck, both of which actually have fans, and I know that because I know people who actually like these movies
- Shouldn't Epic Movie be in a sub-bullet point?
Edited by Paperfly on Aug 15th 2023 at 8:26:25 AM
Image Pickin' BacklogSpeaking of zero or bad context, I commented out these examples on my sandbox: Horrible Video Games Companies And Developers
- Color Dream: Only developer history, no games listed
- Digital Homocide: Devil's Share and Galactic Hitman: Zero context, two games on one bullet point, only talks about ECC Lawsuit. Also I checked the article listed and it makes no mention of any legal action.
- Dragon Co: Wait and See! and Tom & Jerry 3 Zero context
- Head Game: Extreme Tennis and Extreme Rodeo: Zero context, two games on one bullet point
- Mystique: Bachelor Party, Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em, Philly Flasher: Only describe raunchy themes
- Mythicon: Brief developer history, lists Star Fox and Fire Fly with zero context
- Nice Code Software: No games listed
- Ninja Pig Studios: Jumpy Cat: Describes plagiarism without any other context
- Phenomedia Publishing: Lists one game with little context
- Playaround: Multiple games list, including six under one bullet, all zero context
- Resistance Records: White Law and ZOG's Nightmare parts one and two: Zero context and three games under one bullet point
- Strategy First: No games listed
- Thin Chen Enterprises: Jurassic Boy 2 and Challenge of the Dragon: Low context
- zhenhe xue and shao zheng: Two developers under same bullet point, lists two games on one bullet point, zero context
Edited by randomtroper89 on Aug 16th 2023 at 10:37:03 AM
Hi, I'd like to add The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival to Horrible.Video Game Generations Seventh Onwards. It's borderline plagiarism and has negative reviews all over, so I think it fits. I just want to check over here if everything is okay about this for its possible entry:
- The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is a blatant copy of The Last of Us released on the Nintendo Switch eShop in June of 2023 before getting pulled in August of the same year. Its premise is both barebones and nonsensical, with a soldier being sent to the future to stop a zombie outbreak in a city. The gameplay consists of wandering a generic city environment fighting off against zombies and performing the occasional lock-picking minigame, and the entire game can be finished in less than half an hour. During the minigame, it is possible for the zombies to attack and kill the protagonist with no way to fend them off, leading to cheap deaths. Digital Foundry in their review
calculated that there is finite ammo for the whole game, including the melee weapon (as it relies on stamina, and stamina replenishes are also finite), meaning it is possible to end up in an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation from killing zombies in the wrong places. Bugs and crashes are common, and because the game does not disable menuing during its Unity boot-up screen, it is possible to select "new game" before the menu is visible and erase all progress. The text is riddled with grammar and spacing errors, with part of the opening exposition scrolling offscreen. It is widely thought of as one of the worst games of 2023. Sony took legal action on the game for copying the premise and character designs of The Last of Us, causing its removal.
I'm unfamiliar with The Last of Us besides the barebones premise of a man and a teenager surviving a post-apocalyptic city, so if anyone has anything to add on how it's a ripoff of Last of Us feel free.
Edited by greatpikminfan on Aug 17th 2023 at 9:34:07 AM
I made my username back in 2009 when I had no idea how capitalization/camel case worked. That's why it's in all lower case.Is it a paid-for game? We're trying to be stricter about that now.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallYeah, they were charging money for it. I forget how much, but they did charge. As for how much the game was a ripoff of The Last of Us, it apparently didn't have enough gameplay to rip off anything from The Last of Us. Its cover was definitely designed to make you think of The Last of Us, but gameplay similarities were limited to "you have to protect a girl who looks like Ellie," and "both games have zombies in them. Basically, it was the video game equivalent of a mockbuster.
Bigotry will NEVER be welcome on TV Tropes.Alright, just making sure, no complaints otherwise.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallHere's some entries from the Smartphone Games page:
- Castle Master 3D looks like a passable game at first, but a variety of issues elevate it to being on this list. For one, the goal of the game is to conquer all the enemy castles, but the AI is near impossible to beat, as they can upgrade their castles just as fast as you. The AI can also, with no warning whatsoever, launch attacks to retake castles at any time, making any sort of progress outright impossible, and if they retake all the castles, the game will be restarted. But what might be the icing on the cake is the game's Romance Sidequest. The player is offered two choices, and it's completely random which one is right or wrong, meaning the hints the game gives mean nothing. Furthermore, upon reaching the final stage, the game forces the player to pay with premium currency to reach the end, and even if the player perseveres, the weapon they get is impossible to use because of the level required to use it. And the reward if they somehow do win the game? The game starts again anyway. Fortunately, this app is no longer playable on today's devices, so you'll be spared of any frustration.
The game received a 3.5 and Bronze ranking from Pocket Gamer (which reviews mobile games). While the game has been delisted, it seems that this game also has a lot of fans who liked and missed it based on Youtube comments.
- Godzilla: Strike Zone takes The Problem with Licensed Games to levels none would think fathomable. Released in 2014 to tie in with the reboot of Godzilla, the game is riddled with mountains of bugs and an overly sensitive motion-sensor; even slight iPad movements will knock the player way off to the side. There's tons of Fake Difficulty throughout which makes Item Abuse 3 look like the easiest game on Earth; one bit involves parachuting through a ravaged San Francisco, which has the buildings placed so impossibly close together that it's hard to navigate. The graphics look ugly as hell, even for a 2014 iPad app. There are only three levels, two of which have the same basic setup. And if you're Just Here for Godzilla, too bad: Godzilla only shows up in silhouetted glimpses in all three sequences where he chases you (only actually getting a proper appearance right at the end), while his M.U.T.O. opponents make no appearances at all beyond background noises. In addition, for being a first-person shooter-styled game, your character doesn't do a lot of shooting, using the gun only twice to destroy objects blocking the way. You'd think that when he doesn't need the gun, he'd lower it or holster it, but instead he lugs it around everywhere, blocking the view at times when it's needed the most. If you have to play this game, play the PC version - you'll quickly find that the horrible controls become much more bearable when you have the precision of a mouse and keyboard.
Another game that has people being fans of it in YT comments, as they talk about how they wish the game would return and how much they enjoyed it.. Also the game was essentially a free advergame for the movie, not really a proper game.
- RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 was the supposed mobile follow-up to the popular Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, except it combines the worst aspects of the aforementioned Dungeon Keeper Mobile with the worst aspects of free-to-play smartphone games. The game not only used to require money to buy alone, it also runs on a freemium system that's designed to rip off the player with the usual "pay real-life money to speed thing up" and cool features actually requiring real money to buy. To add insult to injury, when Atari tried to pacify the fans by saying there would be a more AAA-like experience on the PC, they ended up botching that up beyond all belief too, though for different reasons.
A weird case since while the game was trashed on Metacritic (with 35 critic and 0.4 user score), the Amazon app store (which is the only app store where the game hasn't been delisted) sits at a 3.2 rating, and there are some people who did give positive reviews, though there are talks about technical issues still
I'm re-writing this
- Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg gained infamy during the late 2000's for their parody movies. Breaking into public attention as "two of the six writers of Scary Movie", they made their directorial debut in 2006 with Date Movie. Their shtick consisted of only doing parodies of the most recent movies, a lack of research beyond watching the previews, wave after wave of painfully-dated pop-culture references, rehashing jokes from the original work (such as Epic Movie having Wolverine Flipping the Bird with his claw, something he did in the first X-Men film), and their penchant for Toilet and Vulgar Humor which made the movies nauseating to watch. While Meet The Spartans and Vampires Suck have some fans, and Date Movie is considered unremarkable compared to their other efforts, the same cannot be said about their other movies:
- Epic Movie is supposed to be a parody of Hollywood blockbuster movies released during the 2000's decade, but even ignoring the title (not all blockbusters can be described as "epic"), the movie relies entirely on having characters from franchises with installments between 2005 and 2007 show up, announce their presence, do gross stuff, and/or die. For some perspective on the film's quality, Film Brain reviews Epic Movie here
, and Korey Coleman of Spill and Double Toasted would go on to list Friedberg and Seltzer as his mortal enemies in his Epic Movie
and review (until he watched InAPPropriate Comedy, that is).
- Disaster Movie is considered the absolute worst of all their "movies", as it goes even further on all of the expected. It manages to be more aggressively unfunny, more pandering, more vapid, and even cheaper-looking than the films before it. The film shot up (or down?) to the #1 spot on IMDb's worst film list in less than a day and bombed in theaters. This film was so bad that Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus states that "Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have produced what is arguably their worst Movie yet" and Pajiba "[refused] to dignify [their] movie with a new review"
instead composing their review of the film from bits from reviews of their previous films. USA Today film critic Louis Fehrey, in his review, said that Disaster Movie was an insult to the intelligence of him and his fellow Americans and an insult to cinema. He subsequently published an article in USA Today summing up all the reviews of the film, which were near-universally negative. It was part of I Hate Everything's trilogy Movie review
alongside Date, Epic, and Disaster Movie, noting that Disaster was the worst film he's ever seen (at the time of his video), noting how disrespectful the professionals involved are over other amateur projects that might look worse on the surface, as well as how the film would be only half an hour long without the insane amount of references, and how the longest amount of time the film went without one was 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Korey and the Co Host 3000 of Spill suffered greatly after watching the movie.
- While follow-up Vampires Suck managed to get somewhat better reviews, the duo stopped getting studio backing, and their following efforts went straight to VOD. The Starving Games and Superfast!, shallow parodies of The Hunger Games and The Fast And The Furious respectively, were more of the same.
- Their first "original" work, Best Night Ever, was a Found Footage comedy in the vein of Project X, when the subgenre was already earning backlash, ramping up the gross-out humor to compensate for lack of references, and featuring scenes which just won't end - the A.V. Club pointed out
"the movie has more awkward dead space than jokes".
- Epic Movie is supposed to be a parody of Hollywood blockbuster movies released during the 2000's decade, but even ignoring the title (not all blockbusters can be described as "epic"), the movie relies entirely on having characters from franchises with installments between 2005 and 2007 show up, announce their presence, do gross stuff, and/or die. For some perspective on the film's quality, Film Brain reviews Epic Movie here
Any feedback?
Edited by Paperfly on Aug 25th 2023 at 8:13:21 AM
Image Pickin' Backlog
I'm not sure where you got that Meet The Spartans has fans, as it has a 2.8 on IMDB still, it has a lower audience score than Epic Movie at 25 to 29 percent, and the Metacritic user score is a 2.9, which I feel firmly cements it into horrible. (Vampires Suck also has a 3.2 IMDB and 2.8 MC user score, and a 29 RT audience score, so again another movie that I would say qualifies and doesn't really have fans). Lastly, Date Movie has a 2.8 IMDB, 2.9 MC User, though the highest RT Aud score at 35. I feel that you could give those movies full writeup as well, as these scores indicate that they are no better than any of the others (who have similar scores)
I don't really know what I could write about the others, and I actually know people who like Spartans and Vampires
Image Pickin' BacklogHas this one been discussed?
From Horrible.Comic Books:
- The Avengers #200 had Ms. Marvel Put on a Bus, via an Idiot Plot that raised countless troubling questions. Carol Danvers suddenly becomes pregnant and has a baby three days later, which is treated as nothing out of the ordinary by the other Avengers. Carol's concerns about the whole ordeal are either ignored or outright dismissed. The rapidly-aging kid then reveals he is actually an extradimensional being named Marcus, who brought Ms. Marvel to Limbo and forcibly impregnated her with himself so that he could escape. That's not Fridge Logic either — Marcus explicitly states that he used Mind Control to make Carol fall in love with him. Hawkeye is the only Avenger who doesn't sympathize with Marcus, and is treated as being in the wrong. Even Ms. Marvel, who was consistently disturbed by all of this, suddenly falls in love with Marcus as he reaches adulthood and decides to leave with him to Limbo, reinforcing the idea that Carol was "being unreasonable". Her return in Avengers Annual #10 revealed that she was still under mind control when she left and had her chew out the Avengers for not doing anything to save her, in an attempt to try and salvage some of this disaster. Jim Shooter regrets having been involved in it
, and none of the writers want to take credit for the plot. Linkara
also took a look at it, and has gone so far as to say it is the second worst comic he's ever reviewed,
after Holy Terror.
I'm not disputing that it really is that bad... but as the SBIH main page says, "individual episodes and chapters don't belong here". And this is specifically about issue #200, not the series as a whole?
Comics are kinda different because ones like those are self contained stories and not comparable to one episode or chapter.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallSo, I have potential addition in mind, but I'm not entirely sure, so it was suggested to ask here, before I even bother with writing a draft.

It's Russian animated film, which came in 2009; its title, if translate literally, would be Our Masha and the Magic Nut (working title was Krakatuk, and IMDB still lists old poster, but it was renamed before release). Apparently, it started as the adaptation of Nutcracker, but became its own thing. It came through massive Development Hell, which is the reason behind most of its problems.
So, what's wrong with it?
- It has rating of 2/10 on IMDB
, hated by viewers and critics alike, and is a common pick for various top-10 worst cartoons in Russia itself.
- It has extremely ugly 3D models, suffering from Unintentional Uncanny Valley and bad lipsync. They were cheap and ugly even for 2009.
- Plot is nonsensical, and entirely relies on the main villain's stupidity (Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? is in full force). It's likely related to several rewritings, caused by constant change in management, and their requests.
- Project was constantly moving from studio to studio, with each new leadership demanding changing it for different audience (which got the people who originally started the project quit). So it went from "okay, let's make a fairytale for kids" to "let's make it for teenagers" to "let's make adult cartoon, and make the chick hot". Then, some strange thing happened, resulting in the mix of all three: plot is a fairytale for little kids, main character is 14 years-old... and she still has adult-looking model with visible nipples and jiggle physics. Yeah. To make it even more gross: to animate the model, they made her entirely nude (officially, to make smoother animation), and only then dressed up; no attempts were made to hide it, and the renders later leaked out into internet. This sexualisation of minors is the most common reason why people hate it, as well as what it's most well-known for.
- Related to the point directly above, main villain is portrayed as being obsessed with Masha, almost to the point of lusting for her. He looks older than her.
There's a page for it on Russian Wikipedia (no page on English one), but something glitches every time I try to link it anywhere, so I can't provide the link; it lists more details on its screwed up production history.
Sounds like a hot mess
So. I'm here to discuss I'm looking for 3024 people, which supposedly is an ARG that originally requires you to buy an NFT to even participate in the ARG (which should serve as an warning to the ARG's quality; it was later released on Steam with a much cheaper $5 price, but still, most ARGs don't require money to participate). So why is horrible?
- Most of the voice acting is text-to-speech, and the voices are very dull (I've seen better usage of text-to-speech voice acting btw).
- The website the ARG directs you to barely gives you any information or hints on what to do next. Speaking of which, you don't even need to purchase the game to go to the website.
- The supposed "live footage" on the website is actually stolen videos from a Turkish Government website.
- One part of the gameplay, specifically the "project" part is pure Fake Difficulty: You're supposed to "rely on your instincts" to navigate a maze under a strict time limit with no visual indicators where to go, but also vague audible instructions on where to go (and sometimes hard to hear!). You're supposed to complete it to get access to a code for use in the Discord server, but you can just simply get it by browsing the game files, rendering the whole point of it moot.
- Speaking of the code, you have a very strict period to enter it: on every Wednesday at 8:00 to 8:10 PM Palo Alto time, you must enter the code given. If the code is incorrect or already used, you have to wait another week before you have a another chance. Oh, and you must have the Steam account linked to your Discord account alongside proof that you own the game or it will not work. This means that 3024 unique users have to send 3024 unique codes at that period of time, which is almost impossible to do because of how Discord works.
- The music is also taken from a free sound website.
- The next step is Unintentionally Unwinnable: You have to get all the squares on top of the screen a la Twitch Plays Pokémon, but because it's impossible to get all the squares up due to the puzzle requiring a lot of people to get it up (and slowing the Discord server), this resulted in the players calling out the developer for scamming, and most of the players refunded their money afterwards (most of them didn't even play for 2 hours). Oh, and the stream that was supposed to show the puzzle got shut down, effectively making the whole game completely unwinnable.
Also, while there are positive reviews, it's mostly astroturfing to hide the criticisms of the ARG. Speaking of hiding criticisms, they also went the extra mile to copyright strike Jauwn for speaking out against the game, but they thankfully didn't fully go through with it and instead exposed everyone on how not to make an ARG.
Thoughts?
Eh, good enough.The contents of Horrible.Web Games were moved to a dedicated folder in Horrible.Video Games Other, but the page is still up. Permission to cut?
