The original release of No Man’s Sky, and Starfield.
I myself don’t see them as bad games, but acknowledge the false promises, shortcomings, bugs, etc.
I prefer launch no man sky to what it is now. Sometimes you don’t need a hundred features and multiplayer in a game. Sometimes you just want to calmly explore the universe and feel alone for a bit. Not have a million things to do and pop ups . I have enough of that in my life and other games
Yes the feeling of being alone in a whole solar system was / is awesome. And launching into space for the first time.
Dwarf Fortress. It’s always broken, and historically has an interface style that most people don’t get. It’s also the masterpiece of a reclusive genius, and is a simulation so deep it has to be explained in parables, like the drunken cats one.
That’s such a fun story.
Drinking Dwarfs spill beer on the floor.
Liquid behavior on floors is modelled.
Cats might walk through the puddles.
Cats clean their paws by licking them.
Animals inherent the ability to get drunk from some class.
QED: cats get drunk.
And, because every drink of alcohol was assumed to be one cup worth in some throwaway bit of code, and cats are small, they got massive alcohol poisoning and almost instantly puked themselves to death.
So, bug. The observed behavior was cat corpses and cat vomit accumulating in bars. The expected behavior was… not. Eventually Tarn managed to figure it out, and it was fixed by better modeling of the volume of just a layer of liquid on a body part. You also can’t suck stuff off yourself to quench thirst in adventure mode anymore.
Dwarf Fortress is such a special game. One guy added capitalism to the game and the dwarves ended up doing a communist revolution.
Lol, do you have a link? Off the top of my head I’m not sure how you’d do that, mod-wise, since dwarves only do fairly undirected violence when unhappy right now. (Insurgencies will be in a future version, eventually, just like everything else)
I mean, I enjoy it, but usually games are supposed to just work. Most of the difficulty of DF, at least historically, comes from trying to work around the hard edges and broken bits. Adventure mode is also pretty aimless and depressing, and Legends mode isn’t even really a game.
I’d break it down in more detail, but I’m not really a great video game designer either. Most other people certainly agree that it’s not very good as a game. Tarn even has said things to that effect.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It comes with a laughable 11 modules which you tire of after a couple weeks of playing. It’s badly coded and its modding support is flimsy and haphazard. The developers are unreachable and uncooperative.
Without mods, you’d put down the game after a week and forget about it completely. With mods (created for free by the community) you now get a wealth of thousands of modules, but you also need multiple extra mods to get simple basic functionality that should be in the base game. Wanna play more than 100 modules? Game crashes on startup unless you install the Tweaks mod. Wanna play just the modules that your friends enjoy? Gotta mess around with Steam workshop subscriptions for hours unless you install the Mod Selector mod. Wanna play a specific set of modules you like? Good luck getting the right RNG, unless you install the DMG mod. Wanna play more than one bomb? Needs the Multiple Bombs mod. Some modules are genuinely unplayable unless you get the Boss Module Manager mod, which in turn relies on a volunteer-run external website to be running and to be constantly updated by volunteers. Even Camera Zoom is a separate mod!!
99% of the game is made for free by volunteers, and yet it’s the garbage 1% that everyone has to pay for. It’s a travesty.
Simon’s Quest doesn’t deserve to be called a bad game. The music and graphics are quite good for the NES and the open structure of the game was quite novel and many elements like the leveling system became staples of the series from SotN onward. The thing that really holds it back is the terrible english translation which makes the puzzles way harder than they need to be.
But I might be biased.
