Numen: Contest of Heroes is a game that sits at about 50% recommended on steam. I beat it years ago and really enjoyed myself, but I knew it was a unique fit for me. I only say “bad” so that we have common ground, but I value that experience.

What are “bad” games you enjoy?

  • 🫐 BerryStumped 🫐@catodon.rocks
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    1 day ago

    Hmm, I guess I’ll go with Barbie Explorer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Petz Sports. Also arguably Ostrich Runner because it’s unfinished/unpolished in some places: particularly I don’t know how the final level is meant to be played because it ends on its own without the player really doing anything. I played those as a kid so I was less critical back then.
    #game #videogames #gaming

  • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Bear with me…

    Megaman legends 2

    Silly kids game, lots of fun, early dungeon crawling, but they snuck in heavy philosophy.

    There is a scene where the protagonist is recalling long forgotten memories. The last living human, in luxury, in extravagance, in exactly what techbros want today but actually achieved here, has a perfect system, a perfect world, serving his every whim. A world without poverty, disease, suffering.

    And he is lonely.

    He befriends a bot in this system charged with keeping order. Basically a cop in this world. But he gives him special privileges to be able to “think” in ways the others are restricted from. This one is special. He literally creates a friend.

    Then he uses the incredible technological prowess to recreate suffering.

    He creates a synthetic recreation of humans, designed to be vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to suffering. They are subject to pressures that simply delay their deaths. And through doing so they achieve meaning and happiness. They exist.

    The master watches them, like fish in an aquarium, for generations. Eventually, he goes down to earth to fully experience them. Thousands of years of disease free living have basically robbed this last human of an immune system. He is vulnerable there. No force in the universe can take him out. Man has become god. And yet, he goes down there anyway.

    To experience the smell of a dinner bearing prepared.

    He dies. Before he does, he released the bot that brought him down to earth from the rules of the system that governed him and told him to burn it all down. Perfection was not a remedy, it was a curse. And then he dies as the bot holds him in his hands, watching him fade away.

    This was a game for children. And I understood way too much of it.

  • bonegakrejg@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Castlevania 64. Not even Legacy of Darkness, the original one. It gets a lot of hate I think just because the rest of the series has such awesome games and it gets held to a high standard but just as a N64 game I loved it.

  • LemmyLegume@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    The first Witcher game. I adored it. Janky controls, weird plot holes, subpar graphics. But oh man - the environments, the ambiance, and the dialogue absolutely slap.

  • Ilixtze@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I played all the 16 bit Phantasy star games when i was a kid. Phantasy star 3 is considered to be the black sheep of the series but it is the one that stuck with me the most, something about the music and atmosphere, and odd take on scifi fantasy it portrays.

  • sness@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Maplestory. I had a ton of fun hanging out with friends and grinding for hours with cute art. I would never recommend anyone play it, absolutely does not respect your time.

    • Summzashi@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Really cool to see this mentioned. It was a mediocre game indeed but had such an amazing premise. I still think about it often.

  • FryHyde@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Friend and I played through Redfall and enjoyed it immensely , specifically because of how broken and half-complete it was. We just could not stop laughing.

  • orenj [he/they]@leminal.space
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    3 days ago

    Starbound is kind of like Terraria in space, but with a worse gameplay loop, worse characters, and worse bosses, but I did like gentrifying the cosmos.

    • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Man, the full release Starbound was such a… I don’t want to call it a disappointment but it’s definitely a shame what happened with it. It went through so many cool mechanics throughout the development and threw away like half of them (not to mention the near complete rewrite of the lore). Such a weird situation.

      I barely touched the 1.0 version but I still play some of the beta builds from time to time - they might lack in content but boy do they grab me in a way the full release never managed to.

  • SSTF@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Far Cry 2.

    The game is fundamentally broken in a way that mods apparently can’t even fix. The enemy militia checkpoints instantly fully respawn as soon as you trip an invisible trigger. It makes combat with them pointless, which means getting stuck in a firefight with a checkpoint tedious.

    The weapon degradation feature is way overtuned to cause some weapons to start visibly rusting from shot to shot.

    These two aspects turn the game into a slog. Not even in a way that makes it immersive and survivalist, but immersion breakingly frustrating.

    It’s a shame because the game was so ambitious. The game having a mechanic where a player at 0 health can get randomly saved if they befriended an NPC which will drag them to safety is really cool. The fire spreading everywhere was visually and tactically great. The malaria bouts were controversial, but I think they were a good way to increase the feeling of survival and desperation. There’s a lot good with a bleak, serious, and grounded Far Cry game but it just missed the mark in all the most impossible to ignore ways.

    ‘Far Cry 2 (2)’ would be amazing.

  • Summzashi@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Bad is very subjective ofcourse. Most of the time these days it means that a video game is very polarizing. Elite: Dangerous is a great example of this. I fucking love it and have lived in that game for thousands of hours. But it’s not hard to see how it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Alpha Protocol, a spy-themed RPG by Obsidian and probably their worst game. The gameplay was absolute garbage, but it had some of the best writing in games and your dialog choices actually affected the plot in dozens of ways. It was the first time I can remember since the old Sierra days where a minor choice you made ten hours ago could come back and screw you over.

    In some ways it was the game that Mass Effect claimed to be, one that reshaped itself around your choices and let you lead the plot where you desired. It just sucks that in all other ways it was a buggy piece of crap, where everything from combat to stealth to hacking were miserable chores that weren’t fun even when they did function properly.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Excuse me.

      The question was about bad games that you enjoy.

      Not about fuckawesome games that are fuckawesome and that Sega needs to burn for not allowing us to have a sequel of.

      • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Alpha Protocol is one of the great tragedies from Obsidian’s days of doing contract work, back when they were never given enough time or money but still put out brilliant but flawed games like AP, New Vegas, and Knights of the Old Republic 2. I would do terrible things for a remake of any of those games where the original team was given the resources to do things properly.

        (Though IMO I think AP might work better as a Telltale-style game in the vein of Dispatch or the Walking Dead. The dialog is the star and all the other gameplay only detracted from it.)

        Alpha Protocol being rushed was especially tragic because there’s no other game that changes the plot to such an extreme degree based on your actions. It really felt like your story. It also avoided an obvious “best” route by having every choice be a tradeoff, where helping one contact could alienate or even endanger another. It’s not like a Bioware game where you can pick the top option in every dialog and cruise your way to an ideal ending for everyone. You had to pick a side eventually, pitting you against former allies who you genuinely liked.

    • jtrek@startrek.website
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      4 days ago

      I remember being impressed when an NPC commented on how I wore combat armor to a clandestine meeting. There were a lot of little touches that were nice.