VisualNovel Just awful enough to reccomend
This is a real experience, this game. The "animation" is stiff yet hilarious, the voice acting sounds like it belongs in a cartoon more than anything. It feels like a kid in powerpoint wanted to make some visual novel and decided to have fun and just screw around with it. It's odd, stupid, crazy and it's so damn fun. You can actually play the full game on Youtube. It's honestly worth your time if you want to laugh at something awful with your friends.
VisualNovel They had to have known it was bad
This game... wow. Without a doubt, it's absolutely terrible. But to me it falls into So Bad Its Good territory. All the absolutely horrible cut scenes, the Big Lipped Alligator Moments, the horrible breaking the fourth wall... In fact, I have a reason to believe this was actually supposed to be bad. Like, they knew it was terrible. It seems like it was just an inside joke with the developers. Which again begs the question: how did this get published?
VisualNovel Take your damn clothes off!
Now this game is odd. Yes, it's utterly terrible in so many ways. Yet, it's so terrible it's hilarious. While it certainly is not much of a game, considering eventually there's only one choice that moves the story onward, it is still absolutely hilarious. Mainly for just the ridiculous filters, the laughable script and acting, etc. They LEFT A FUCKING OUTTAKE IN THIS.
Really, if one plays this game (on Youtube. Yes. You COULD buy a 3D0 and the game, or download a 3DO emulator ad a ROM, but it's so much easier to 'play' on Youtube.), don't expect a work of art - but allow yourself to laugh at the sheer nonsense you will witness.
The only question I have is...how did this game ever get published?
VisualNovel Few visual novels are this hilariously bad
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, a title for the ill-fated 3DO console, ostensibly "Plays like a Game... feels like a MOVIE!" and while it delivers on neither count, it's unintentionally hilarious in its own way.
The "plot," or what passes for a story, is about a plumber named John meeting a young woman named Jane when the latter arrives at a job interview. The one thing they have in common is that their parents are pressuring them to get married.
The "game" is more like a visual novel, since you watch the story unfold and occasionally make choices. Oddly enough, the changes usually control the outcome of the scene, rather than the viewpoint character's actions- for example, when the interviewer rejects Jane, you don't choose whether Jane accepts the decision or begs, but whether the interviewer changes his mind, stands firm or takes advantage of Jane.
The VN features a scoring system, with the narrator giving points for good decisions and taking them away if you make mistakes, which is all well and good, but there are two major problems with this. The first is the fact that in most cases, the game immediately ends if you make a wrong choice; while linear visual novels aren't necessarily bad, it seems rather lazy that the developers didn't even try to flesh out the story routes. The second problem, and the worse of the two, is that you're forced to make a choice that permanently puts your score into negative points, and causes the narrators to yell at you.
Perhaps the strangest part of the VN is the narrator interacting with you, judging you on your choices and eventually getting briefly replaced by a rival. The VN almost seems self-aware of how bad it is, but most So Bad, It's Good works at least have better production values.
The VN, despite being advertised as full-motion video, has one instance of FMV, with the rest of the images being still images that are often edited for no apparent reason(for example, turned upside down and/or turned negative, to say nothing of the narrator wearing a chicken mask for no reason); I'd suspect that they did all the photography in the course of a single day at or around their company headquarters. Similarly, the soundtrack sounds like cheap public domain songs or elevator music.
Despite all this, there is one thing I can say in the game's favor- it's quite hilarious in all the wrong ways. Anyone can put a perfunctory effort in and make a half-baked game, but it takes a special kind of insanity to make a game this amateurish and with this many fourth wall breaks in 1993, long before that kind of thing became popular in video games. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is a rather special sort of game, and the fact that there were hardly any visual novels out at the time helps.
In short, Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is anything but good, but it's still hilariously bad and worth checking out on YouTube. I particularly recommend seeing The Angry Video Game Nerd review of it.