Something that really piqued my interest during the last podcast was the discussion about bad video games. Since no-one actually posted a thread, I shall do the honours.

I'll start because I'm tired as hell and I want to keep finding excuses for doing actual work today:

SaGa Frontier scored pretty well.  It's aggregate was in the mid 7 range, so that's respectable enough.  However, I've yet to actually speak to someone who enjoyed this game.  It had beautiful graphics, but aside from that. . . there was just nothing to the game.

There were two story lines in the game.  Both were told in pieces.  You could jump from one's storyline to another and different point in history of each storyline at any time, so the narrative was completely noncohesive.  On top of it, there was seemingly nothing to do in the game.  I didn't come close to finishing the game, but in one of the storylines I never actually did anything.  I'd walk around, talk to people, and then the chapter would end. So I'd pick another chapter, walk around, talk to people, and then it would end.

That may have actually been a blessing though, because the other storyline did have combat, but it was horrible.  The menu system was all kinds of messed up and was completely unintuitive.  It was the first RPG from Squaresoft that I didn't play all the way through and that was a pretty big deal as I was a major fanboy for them back in the day.  Horrible horrible game.

My specialty I'll leave out the games people seem to like such as Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Mario vs Donkey Kong 2.

Let's start from the bottom:

Ka-blooey (SNES) (gameplay footage)
See my review that covers it in detail.  Yarcofin also has his own review.

Controls terribly, sounds even worse, and quickly becomes completely unplayable.  G-G-G-G-G-Get ready.

Army Men: Sarge's War (GCN/PS2/Xbox) (gameplay footage)
See my review.

Remove all the charm of playing as little army men toys and just throw them in an ugly brown nothing-to-do-with-being-army-men world as well as any decent controls.  Throw in some bugs and repetitive terrible voice overs and you've got a recipe for the same crap 3DO has released for years.

Trigger Man (GCN/PS2/Xbox) (gameplay footage)
What I dubbed the jaggiest game I've ever seen, Trigger Man is impressively terrible.  The first level is filled with identical security guards who take up to 10 shots to kill with your pistol.  The ammo is in a random crate at the start of the level, so you run out and have to run all the way back.  And the guards are seemingly omnicient.  Words don't do the failure justice.

Spy Games: Elevator Mission (Wii) (gameplay footage)
A 50-story building that you have to traverse to find randomly placed bombs in the building.  The enemy's bullets are visible, so you can actually just sidesteo them.  Enemies just magically pop out of unopenable doors.  And finally the game, not exaggering, does look at best like an N64 game.

Charlie's Angels (GCN) (gameplay footage)
See: Alex Navarro's video review

There's a reason this game didn't make it passed Microsoft or Sony's quality control.  When playing through this game, I turned on the turbo button and taped the kick button down.  It also contains the longest ladder climbing sequence in history.  The best thing I can say is that honestly it wasn't quite as bad as it's made out to be.

High Heat Baseball 2002 (GBA) (no video)
Unrelated, but see Judgment Day's review of High Heat Baseball 2003 for PC

Another gem from 3DO.  Every player looks identical - it doesn't matter if you're Barry Bonds or David Eckstein, you look the same.  You can't throw different speeds, what happens when you hit the ball seems completely random, and it's buggy.  If you get consecutive walks, the runner doesn't advance; I had 4 straight walks and had a group of 4 tightly packed runners circling the bases.

I think I'll stop here for now.  Yes, I have actually played all of those.

Did anyone actually play Superman 64?

Yodariquo said:

robio said:

Did anyone actually play Superman 64?

Yes, yes I have.  It's multiplayer is the most overlooked aspect of the game, because it's even worse than the main game.

  I rented it with a friend for about ten minutes.  We actually though it would be good.