What is a bad video game that you enjoy?

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.

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.

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.

Diarrhea 4

But I might be biased.

The Isle is honestly pretty bad in many respects. In fact, it's such a mess that I need to clarify which version I'm even talking about, because there is an OG version and an on-going complete rewrite, prompted by them having fired their only coder and no longer being able to understand their own codebase.

The OG version was special. It was very simple, quite buggy and in a constant, obvious state of plans-and-hopes (being EA), but it had a unique atmosphere - the only true survival-horror to date, as far as I'm concerned/aware (only rivalled by some of my experiences playing DayZ, back when it was still an Arma 2 mod).

Playing a herbivore, resting/hiding in a bush in the pitch-black darkness of night with only limited night-vision letting me see my immediate surroundings and footprints on the ground, the sound of a massive, rumbling carnivore sniffing for traces of food was quite a thrill. Not to mention the moments after when a pair of jaws around my size suddenly emerge out of the darkness.

That kept me playing.

Then they stopped working on that and began their rework from the ground up. The rework (which they call EVRIMA) has (or had) no day-night cycle (always daytime), went from being set in an arboreal environment to tropical jungle, and had two playable dinosaurs (one herb- and one carnivore) of about equal size. No creepy nights, no asymmetric gameplay, no horror elements, different feeling in both how it feels to play and how it looks, and it also ran like crap on any device.

They're slowly working on it; it has some more dinosaurs now etc, but last I played, it still didn't feel the same and it was still buggy and severely incomplete. What emergent horror elements one might get out of the reworked version I feel are but shadows of what could have been.

And yet there's none other like it.

Edit: I believe the current version does have night-time, but it doesn't (or didn't until recently) have night-vision and IIRC the nights are not as horrifying.

I play a really old build of minecraft, and am intimately familiar with how bad of a game that version really is. It has many, many flaws.

dark souls 2. i actually don't even think it's bad, but people seem to not like it.

BULLETSTORM

Sonic R. Genuinely the worst racing game I've ever played. But the low poly models and the music are so charming to me. I used to just sit down and 100% it when I was stressed.

Alpha Protocol - rereleased on GOG now! Get it while it's hot with only a slight discount!
Still as buggy as ever! And it will probably work on your modern PC!
Support the revival of old games!

This is not an ad! It's a series of exclamations!

Pokémon Channel may be one of the worst Pokémon games ever released; it's annoying to play, incredibly tedious and teaches kids to watch more TV instead of less.

I really liked playing it as a child. The thing is, I can't for the life of me remember why I even liked it that much.

Kinetica for PS2

• Nausiating physics engine
• Tacky and nonsensical maps
• Unnecessarily and confusingly sexualized characters

But it's a fun fast-paced racing sim and the soundtrack slaps.

Deadly Premonition

Raid: Shadow Legends. The commercialization is ridiculous, the constant attempts to grab money are downright pathetic, but hey, it looks good on my tablet.

Unreal 2: The Awakening

I never played the first one as a kid, but my little brother found a used copy of its sequel for the Xbox while in town with mom once. I was like, 9 years old at the time, and the game blew my dang mind! Big over the top first person action with all these cool looking guns, shooting these weird giggly aliens, their bodybuilding handler aliens, buncha dudes in power armor, all while on a big journey across space visiting many different worlds, it was so sick for me at the time!

Much later, I finally checked out the first game on PC and uh. Yeah. Yeeaaah Unreal 2 is kind of an insult to how majestic the first game was.

Unreal 2 is a bad game in comparison, and I will admit it! It's slower, the enemies are mostly boring to fight compared to the Skaarj in the first game, the weapons are bog standard with little that makes them stand out, it very much suffered from "We can do Halo, too!" The story is kinda lame, the levels aren't the most interesting to play in, and most importantly: It lacks that sense of adventure and wonder the first game was loaded with.

But man, when I was a kid? It was god damn cinematic to me.

Victoria 3 on launch. First game I turned Finland into the richest country on earth by capita is 30 years.

Robocraft is pretty awful. The current game is in maintenance mode. The only thing the devs can make is their LEGO-like live service game, but even that is too hard for them. This year they just quit and restarted on yet another attempt of a sequel to the only thing they've had success with. That being said, I still enjoy spending hours in the lab and shooting apart other players' creations.

I've been enjoying Suicide Squad. Very redundant but entertaining enough. I hate everything it stands for, but I guess the gameplay style is right up my alley.

Dead by Daylight.

Objectively pay-to-win garbage that survives purely off novelty, but god damn if it isn't fun at the highest level of play. Once you've paid for all the content, there are very few games that allow that level of variety and character customization.

Anyone remember the Kane & Lynch games? Most people said they were shit, but I actually found them fun

Back 4 Blood. I actually quite enjoyed the game and the characters. Sadly it was doomed from the start and they can blame no one but themselves. It's essentially dead now I gather.

Power and Revolution (geopolitical simulator 4) absolute jankiest (grand strategy?) game I've ever played and bugged as hell but I often come back to it because it scratches some my itches perfectly. If anyone has any game similar to this one I'm all ears

Burger King: Sneak King. Hilarious and entertaining. Surprisingly well made

Is my friend Pedro considered bad?

The reviews for Hyperbolica say it's too short and not a full game, but I really enjoyed it.

most games on s&box are pretty bad but still funny as fuck

Corncob 3D.

A little out of left field, Miasmata from back in like the 2010's. It is pretty rough around the edges, and the special antagonist AI system was over-promised and under-delivered... But for a literal two-brothers dev team, the cartography system is solid, and the art is passable at worst and when the light hits the island just right, it's downright picturesque. I'd say it's worth your time if it's still available on steam.

Wanted Dead

But I don't agree with the general perception that it is "bad", because in all the aspects that actually matter for making an action game fun, it was actually really good. It just got blasted for being lacking (admittedly, very lacking) in production value because somehow we are still giving importance to that in the 2020s...

I would never play it myself so I'm not sure how much this counts, but there's something about Garten of Banban that keeps drawing me back to it whenever a new episode drops. I'm well aware it's just some shitty bottom of the barrel reaction streamer/theory crafting bait and it's mostly me wanting to see where the train wreck goes, but I think I'm enjoying it on an ironic level too.

Is Skyrim a bad game?, I have 2500+ hours on it

I really don't enjoy bad games. They're bad because something significant disrupts the fun, such as major bugs, janky mechanics, poor pacing, bland story or characters, no sense of progression, grindy RNG time-wasting, systems (e.g. crafting) that are either far too shallow or way too convoluted, half-baked level design, or even external factors like obnoxious DRM or microtransactions.

The bad game I sunk the most time into by far is No Man's Sky. People keep insisting "it's good now", but all the gameplay mechanics are truly awful. It's an okay sandbox and entertaining enough if that's all you're after, but as a game specifically it has about 2/3 of the issues I mentioned above.

Knights and merchants

It's a bit like Warcraft without the supernatural stuff. You have to make a functional town that has farming, stock logistics, weapons manufacture, etc. and then you also have to win against a nearby kingdom.

The mechanics are so broken. You can usually just wait it out for your enemy to run out of resources (to be fair it was the same in Starcraft) but every other level was a battle in an open field, and it was very hard to manage the actions of your army.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Gameloft j2ME games. They were apparently considered clones.

rpg's are kind of a boring concept. but enjoyable for some reason.