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As a rule, my general reaction to a bad game is antipathy. I identify what’s wrong with it, and ruminate over how or why it went wrong, what the developer was at least attempting, and how I’d have done it differently. It’s very rare that a bad game infuriates me to the point that I’m shouting at the screen, or throwing my pad across the room. Generally, I only rage at a good game which has a frustrating bit (see: various bosses in Ninja Gaiden 2); my anger towards bad games is limited to those which are buggy and Snake’s Revenge.
In fact, most bad games are bad not because they actively seek to annoy the player (as Snake’s Revenge did), but because they’re boring. Sometimes, in games like Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, a good plot is butchered by uninspired or repetitive gameplay. On the opposite end, in the case of Valkyria Chronicles, my ability to enjoy the gameplay was hampered by the writer’s idea of character development being a lecture on baking bread. In the case of these games, I simply turned off my console and never looked at them again.
However, there are some games which got everything so monumentally wrong that, while they were objectively bad, I somehow managed to enjoy them. Whether they marry a dreadful plot that’s unintentionally amusing with poor gameplay that’s so bizarrely awful that it’s anything but boring, or they perform a bait-and-switch with the player’s expectations to the point of satire, I found them amusing.
Of course, I don’t recommend these games at all (I have rather strange tastes), but here are four bad games which I got something out of. Even if it was just a smirk…
Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltoid
Platform: CD-i | Developer: Philips Media | Publisher: Philips Media | Release: 1992
The Philips CD-i is probably most famous for the horrible Nintendo licenses including The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Hotel Mario, but when Philips Media wasn’t greedily licensing and destroying Nintendo’s much-loved franchises as the result of a botched SNES CD deal, they were building and developing their own franchises to try and boost the expensive CD-i’s appeal. One such original IP was Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltiod, Phillips’ attempt at merging a B-movie and educational gaming.
Zombie Dinos is pretty much a kids' game going after the younger audience of the TV show Dinosaurs, but it was pretty much ill-conceived from the start. Designed to tick the “children covered” box on Philips’ CD-i lineup strategy, Zombie Dinos has all the hallmarks of a poor game made for younger ones: The simple gameplay and cheap full-motion videos are tell-tale signs of a small budget (probably done in the hope that the kids wouldn’t give a crap), and its gameplay has about as much depth as a Petri dish. It’s a shame for Philips that nobody in this game’s target audience could afford the $700 asking price of the CD-i, so this title was pretty much a waste of money.
And let me tell you, even if they could afford it, I don’t know any child that would enjoy this game. I certainly wouldn’t have. For starters, the game is about as interactive as a cabbage. You move the cursor across a prehistoric map, picking grid coordinates in the hope of finding clues about the dinosaur in danger and saving it before a rhyming alien with an inside-out colon for a face captures it, zombifies it, and transports it to the present day.
The charm of the game is in how ill-conceived it is! Generally, B-movies don’t strive to be edutainment, and the same can be said of their gaming equivalents. Teaching me about different dinosaur bones and having me research them with the in-game encyclopedia to find out which species they came from is a far cry from the “let’s kick some brain” B-movie attitude the box art presents.
Kids are supposed to enjoy this…
I could almost picture the face of the one disappointed child who received this for Christmas, and while this is very mean-spirited of me, I enjoyed that thought. I’m just glad he wasn’t me…
Escape from Monster Manor
Platform: 3DO | Developer: Electronic Arts | Publisher: Electronic Arts | Release: 1993
HOLY OVERENTHUSIASTIC NARRATOR, BATMAN! As I watched the opening cinematic of this game, I realized I was in for a treat. Then I played it and smiled.
I would describe this game as the blandest, most uninspired corridor shooter ever. And it is. But still, the mix of ridiculous lore, hideous sprite animation, and horror-esque audio that sounds like it's on steroids was enough for me to see this one through.
The aim of the game is simple: navigate corridors, collect fragments of the talisman, and escape from the monster manor. What little atmosphere is created by the short, looped background tracks and occasional appearance of props in what is otherwise a bland room is completely destroyed by the game’s few sound effects. Entering a room full of enemies and carelessly blasting them away with my overpowered laser pistol sounds something like what I imagined LeChuck’s screaming chair to be.
Seeing what awful animation and hideously overused sound effect would be next kept my interest piqued, and like most one-disc 3DO games, it was a relatively short time investment.
Hooters Road Trip
Platforms: PC/PlayStation | Developer: Hoplite Research | Publisher: Ubisoft | Release: 2002
Ubisoft is a publisher well-known for going after the lowest common denominator, and Hooters Road Trip is no different. Much like the Burger King Xbox titles out in 2006, Hooters Road Trip is ostensibly an advergame. However, unlike those titles, Ubisoft felt it was worth selling at full PlayStation-game price at the time.
Too bad the game sucks. The cars handle like a hovercraft, and a generic thirty-second guitar riff which is far too loud plays over the hum of my vehicle’s engine and, well, pretty much everything else for that fact. But that’s not so bad, is it? After all, I imagine most people buy the game for the girls, right? Well, prepare to be disappointed, horny toads; the game contains a ridiculous three and a half minutes of Hooters girls footage, most of which is in the form of three to five second clips. And besides the occasional jiggle, there really isn’t anything titillating about this game at all.
If you know someone who wants a game that has robust racing mechanics and treats women like human beings, then this isn’t the title for them. However, if they want something which objectifies and degrades women for the benefit of a predominantly dick-waving audience, then tell them to buy Hooters Road Trip. The combination of playing Ubisoft shovelware and having a disappointed penis is pretty much what they deserve.
I suppose the graphics are good for a PSone game
Nothing makes me happier than thinking about some idiot paying full price for this.
Fox Hunt
Platform: PC/PlayStation | Developer: 3Vision Games | Publisher: Capcom | Release: 1996
Fox Hunt is the mack daddy of guilty pleasures when it comes to adventure gaming. It’s objectively bad in so many ways, yet it still manages to make me grin like a chimp for no reason other than the fact that it’s a beautiful car crash. Every aspect of this game is horrendous, and together they make a compelling experience which I’ve completed five or six times now.
For starters, the game comes on three discs, yet each playthrough takes around about 90 minutes, give or take. How is this even possible? Well, for an FMV game Fox Hunt had a big budget, and what better way to spend that money than to film protagonist Jack Fremont (played by Andrew Bowen) walking, turning, and looking slack-jawed and guppy-mouthed as he flip flops from one dumb scenario to the next.
Speaking of scenario, Fox Hunt’s is pretty poor. An old Soviet film director has managed to acquire nuclear weapons, somehow, and is blackmailing the US government into letting him have his name credited on his movies with the threat of flattening Hollywood. That’s where pop-culture obsessed Fremont comes in, and he’s kidnapped by the spooks and hired as a government mule who, though the course of the game, will uncover all the secrets of both the Russian Mafia and the CIA.
The whole thing is supposed to be a comedy, but the game fails at surrealism and instead comes across as dumb.
Married to the awful plot is dreadful gameplay. Not only does seeing an FMV of Bowen turning every time I rotate my character become tedious, but the game tops even the King’s Quest series for abstract “designer logic” puzzles and a branching narrative that has trial and error elements akin to smoothing a steel bar with sandpaper. When you die, the game resets right to the beginning, and if you forgot to save before death, then that’s just too bad.
Overall, Fox Hunt requires you to think like a complete and utter moron. More often than not, I jokingly picked the weird or absurd decision to see how insane this game could go, only to find myself unintentionally catapulted along to the next segment in the most unceremonious way possible.
Words can’t describe how bad this game is, but you need to play it just to see. The six or seven hours of joy I’ve had out of Fox Hunt isn’t from the quality, but the sheer quantity of awfulness that it contains. In short, it made me feel like a pig rolling around in a metric ton of shit.
If you think there are other bad games I'd get a kick out of, be sure to let me know via Twitter or in the comments below.