games

why timesplitters will never come back.

Says you, some of us are still holding out hope.

In hindsight that Shadow the Hedgehog game was cringe af but 11 y/o me absolutely loved it.

50 Cent: Blood in the Sand is pretty entertaining. Terrible game, but everything is so over the top that it's fun.

I love the Dynasty Warriors series.

Including Dynasty Warriors 9.

Oh Tomb Raider AOD, I was so hyped for this game back at release as a teenager only to be so let down. Notable because Lara has boob jiggle physics, obviously the team were busy on that and not the camera.

Balan Wonderworld is such a wonderful pile of nonsense. It has all of these different power-ups, but a good portion of them are just different ways to shoot or jump. It feels like it was made for small kids, but there's no way a kid could get through some of the difficult parts toward the end. The absolute lack of any explanation as to why anything is happening. I love it so much.

Not bad bad, but I have a soft spot for mediocre early 2000s sci fi shooters, especially knockoffs of more popular ones. The combination of graphical/engine limitations at the time, plus the combined zeitgeist of residual 90s techno-optimism muxed with war on terror bleakness and paranoia created a really singular vibe to the shooter environments of that genre and era. Playing them induces this slick, sleepy liminal effect in me where i just get into a flow state and stare at the pretty PS2 laser effects. Games like Project Snowblind, Fire Warrior and the hilariously named Chaser.

the game that killed free radical and why timesplitters will never come back.

I love Deadly Premonition

I also like the Game Gear and Master System Sonic games. Even obscure ones like Tails Adventure. Sonic Blast can die in a fire though.

I like Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, which while popular, are considered very rough around the edges.

I'm sure there are more which I will add as I remember them. Gonna have a look through my retroarch ROMs.

Sid Meier's Beyond Earth is a nigh unplayable mess but it has so many well done mechanics that it's still worth a play from time to time even if it doesn't result in an actually playable experience

Drakengard's OST is good. Do not slander it.

EYE Divine Cybermancy was translated from French very badly, and the plot didn't make much sense anyway, and I love it so. It's an extremely weird, janky 40k knock off built on the source engine. It's got completely uneccessary amounts of RPG character customiztion and build specialization, tons of weird obscure systems, and a six foot long power sword that turns werewolves in to Salsa. The werewolves may be your guilt for betraying your ex-wife.

Drakkhen on the SNES was an unmitigated train wreck plagued by translation errors, a nonsensical plot, and one shark-infested moat that should feel out of place, but given the rest of the game's disjointed bullshit, fuck it, why not.

Lichdom Battlemage is my favorite example of a really cool and promising set of gameplay systems, and then you get the worst most boring fucking enemies to fight with them

Iron Harvest 1920+

The writing is pretty and the tone is wildly inconsistent.

The aspect comes from the plot about Not-Poland defending themselves from an invasion by Not-The-USSR with the help of Not-Weimar-Germany. While all the protagonists are saying things like "We take pride in the fight for our homeland and the help of our allies!" all I can think is "Yeah that's gonna work out reaaal well in like 16 years."

Oh and as for the tone issues, the tutorial for this game about the horrors of mechanized warfare revolves around children having a snowball fight.

The only redeeming factor is that it plays almost exactly like Dawn of War.

The Cursed Crusade is a hack-and-slash with local co-op that delightfully full of jank and gave me one of my all-time favorite gaming memories.

One of the core mechanics is that your character can briefly swap between "Earth" and "Hell" versions of the level. If you stay in Hell too long, Death approaches and kills you instantly upon reaching you.

We triggered a cutscene late in the game, but the game didn't switch out of Hell mode for whatever reason. The entire time the characters were talking, Death was in the background, walking closer and closer. We tried to advance the dialogue quickly, but Death eventually walked right up to my character and killed him mid-cutscene, and we had to restart the level.

I played and enjoyed so many dumb shooters/action games from the 2000s/2010s, some actually had merits, many were just fun to riff on.

I played Winback on N64 and enjoyed it quite a bit. That console had no shortage of FPS's but lacked tactical shooters.

Games, moreso than movies, present opportunities to be really creative when it comes to gameplay and game mechanics. Sometimes they swing and miss, but sometimes it's worth the frustration and engaging with the game as it was intended.

I don't have much time to game anymore so I don't play a ton of "bad" games per se, but just a few I've played and like.

Deadly Premonition - The prime example. Legally distinct Twin Peaks. The graphics are bad. The controls are stiff and the combat sections were tacked on at the last minute. The music varies, but there are some hilariously mistimed cues. The voice acting is comical. Somehow, the game succeeds in telling a truly moving story that had me crying at the end. I don't even think the PC version is able to be completed due to technical issues, but if you can play it, you should.

Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise - Probably the most recent good "bad" game I played. It has some pretty great combat mixed in with some very strange story telling and dialogue. The game is a lot of fun if you embrace the nostalgia of treating Jack, the main character, like the edgy 2000s video game protagonist he is.

Indigo Prophecy AKA Fahrenheit: I remember getting drawn into this one from the premise alone and not knowing anything about the devs. The game starts strong with you playing a character, Lucas, that comes to in a bathroom of a diner in NYC during an endless snow storm with a dead guy on the floor and the knife in your hands. It immediately has you try to hide the evidence. You play both sides of the story, Lucas and the police. Shit goes off the rails though when Lucas starts becoming more powerful and the unhoused are like a secret network of helpers and there's something with an Indigo Child or whatever. It ends with Lucas literally doing a Matrix 3 style fight flying through the air against the main bad guy.

The Guild 2: A Eurojank medieval dynasty simulator. It's pretty damn good and delivers an experience I haven't seen in any other games. You control a dynasty in medieval England and have you get married, have kids, do politics, run businesses, etc while dealing with rival dynasties.

Space Station 13: Jank upon jank. An absolute dumpster fire of a game written in a very obscure language. It's a multiplayer space station simulator where the players take roles as crew of a space station each with their own duties. It has bad pixel art, its laggy, and it's unnecessarily complex to the point of pain, but I've had some of the most emergent gameplay experiences in my life in it. Though how fun it is really depends on other players.

I don't think a game needs to be a good as a game to be a good game

The most recent example of this for me was Rule of Rose, a cult classic survival horror PS2 game I played recently. It's a really clunky example of the genre and you can tell it was made by a team with not much experience in making such a game while also running out of time and money. It's combat is downright awful at times and exploring its sparse environments is very repetitive. Still, the game's story, characters, music and overall aesthetics were compelling enough that I happily played through the entire game.

I looked up discussions about the game and I saw several people express the opinion that the game should be remade as a modern walking simulator or visual novel type experience to keep the story and cut out the jank, but to me the survival horror was the hook that made me interested in the first place

Unreal Championship 2. The mechanics take some serious practice, but making a garish 3rd person shooter with Raiden of Mortal Kombat fame a guest character is just wonderful. The game was Xbox exclusive and is probably the only reason at this point that I have my Xbox still packed away somewhere. So much heart and edginess was poured into that failure of a game. P.S. My partner loves Drakengard.