Empire total war on release, the battle AI was absolute garbage to the point where you can just start as the Netherlands, walk over to Paris and take their country.

Before everyone researches fire by rank you could just spread out the infantry and have 2x firepower. Cavalry charges straight into you, pathfinding was so bad that you’d have a single column of men moving through a wide area. Fucking loved it though, it was a grand strategy spectacle and naval battles felt intense.

I had fun unlocking the pirates via config file edit and spamming out general units from a single buccaneer sword infantry and took over all of the Americas.

Probably Minecraft, I know its Robloxslop but the gameplay loop is just very satisfying.

Some of them born from my period of discovering Castlevania and having to play all of them.

First, the N64 Castlevanias. Ugly, terrible platforming, bad camera, but occasionally trying cool stuff. Oh, of course, bonus point for the second one being technically a sequel with new characters and a continuation of the story and basically the same game with a lot of reused and slightly tweaked levels.

And now for the worst one…Castlevania Judgment (Wii). A fighting game featuring several characters from the Castlevania series fighting in gimmicky arenas with a generic “I gathered you all from all over the timeline to fight the ultimate big bad”. I loved to hate that game.

Most characters are unrecognizable. They got Obata of Death Note fame to redesign everyone, and it shows.

Simon Belmont has the usual beefy barbarian body with Light Yagami’s head grafted on it. Death is basically Ryuk. Maria has a distinctly Misa Amane gothic lolita style that has nothing to do with any of her apparitions. Grant Danasti is… well it’s not as much as he’s a Death Note character, he just basically became Voldo from SoulCalibur for some reason. Eric Lecarde was brought into the game as a young boy and doesn’t look anything like his two apparitions in the series, he’s the token shouta brat in this.

Funnily enough, the game has Cornell, the werewolf from the aforementioned second Castlevania 64, despite those games being basically purged from the Castlevania canon in everything else. Likewise the boss is a very random reference to the Kid Dracula NES game, basically a Castlavania parody game featuring… a young Alucard? maybe? He technically already had a reference in Symphony of the Night, but in this game he’s specifically referencing “lore” from the parody game.

Even the characterization is unsufferable. Maria is a teen from somewhere between Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night, and she spends the whole game envying other female characters who have bigger breasts. In fact almost everyone is obsessed with something they have to bring up in almost every line, and it’s either a very basic background tidbit or completely out of place.

All in all it’s very much bad SoulCalibur with an attempt at CV fanservice completely missing the point. I spent way too much time on that shit.

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.

Somehow my brother wound up with a copy of Crash Time: Autobahn Pursuit for Xbox 360. There are many reasons to call it a bad game, and it’s a little odd to release a video game in North America for a German TV show few people in North America have heard of. We each beat the game eventually, but we had a lot more fun not playing the game the way it was intended and just driving around the open world racing each other and crashing into things. I even wrote to them suggesting they add a mode similar to the car soccer games Top Gear tried on their show (this was several years before Rocket League was released).

Athena for NES. Now THAT’S some jank!

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.

Clive Barker’s Jericho

It’s janky af but it has great atmosphere.

Escape From Tarkov is so fun. It’s such a shame that the game is a flaming pile of hot garbage. Runs like absolute ass. You can lose tons of progress from the game bugging out. The game is a huge grindfest. It’s stupid expensive with predatory tiered pricing and addons. And the devs lie through their teeth about shit constantly.

No game has come close to matching its feel though.

Thing thing on Crazymonkeygames

Life is Feudal. It had the potential to be something great, but ended dying in a hail of bad server coding and poorly implemented monetization.

Every so often I will reinstall it, find one of the free servers and just chill for hours on end.

Back 4 Blood. It was a zombie game marketed as “made by the same people who made Left 4 Dead” but they really didn’t have any of that talent left after 15ish years and just seemed to be pretty unpolished all around. However, they had a card system where you make a deck of bonuses you want and after each mission you get one that you keep until the end of the campaign. But the devs, Turtle Rock, had a habit of nerfing any cards that were strong or fun into the ground even though the game was mostly PvE. Also they made a change halfway through the game’s lifespan so that you get the entire deck at the start of the first level instead of building up to it. I still don’t know if that was a good change or not, but they never rebalanced the game so the first couple levels of every campaign were just ridiculously easy. Unpolished game, horrible devs, but I had fun while it lasted

I had more fun with Jurassic Park: Trespasser and Die By the Sword than I should have just because they had early physics engines.

I actually wonder if Trespasser would make a good VR conversion.

‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ (2003) by Bethesda

Edit: Also ‘Age of Pirates’ (2006)

I just liked pirates I guess.

Populous: The Beginning (1998). I don’t think it was actually bad, it’s just been forever. But man did we have fun with that.