So, I’m currently suffering through the execrable Dino Crisis 3, having promised myself to finish the piece of crap before I review it (well, OFFICIALLY), and it had me wondering. What’s the worst game you’ve ever had to review? I’m talking games so sincerely bad that it hurt to play them all the way through, to earn your paycheck. How’d you force yourself to get through it, or did you finally bite the bullet and give up halfway through? And, as a codicil, how many of you think that reviewers are obligated to finish the games they review (provided that they actually have a linear narrative that can be completed) before producing the review itself?
It’s really that bad, huh? I had flirted with the idea buying it if KB Toys has that 30% off sale, but it it’s that big of a stinker maybe I’ll take a pass.
Mortyr. Followed closely by Daikatana. I got frustrated enough at the level design/pathfinding of Daikatana that I was chewing my hand until it bled. Mortyr was a much more subtle kind of pain.
It’s a solid action game hampered by the worst fucking camera I have ever come across. Worse than RE-1. The camera is, at almost all times, zoomed in so that your character is in the center of the screen and you can’t see more than five feet in any direction. Dinosaurs make 20-foot lunching charges, and if they connect, you lose half your health, on normal difficulty. You have to dodge these charges, but when you can’t see the dinosaurs, as is almost always the case, you’ve got a milisecond to react to their charge and get out of the way. You’re usually in huge rooms, surrounded by dinos that spawn out of mid-air, without any ability to see what’s going on around you, with camera-relative controls, with angles that can frequently whip around 180 degrees between portions of the same massive rooms. It’s awful. This game is painful to play.
Oh my god. You had to review Mortyr? It is a testament to your mental resiliance that you’re still with us, my friend.
It would have to be Charlie’s Angels on the GameCube. I kept trying to come up with excuses not to play it.
Can you feel the savageness :wink: of the deja vu emanating from this thread? Well, I never jumped in before, so here goes.
Finish or die. :lol: What if there’s a show-stopping bug late in the game, or a stinky game gets better halfway through, or an interesting game eventually gets bogged in repetition or crashes? Inquiring minds want to know. People pay a lot of money for games, and obviously they want to know the truth going in or they wouldn’t bother to ferret out reviews in the first place. I’m also a big believer in reviewers only reviewing genres that they have a lot of background in and steadily follow. Without a lot of comparisons to draw from, proper grading (where a game falls within the standards of its genre) often suffers.
The HexBox’s Dark Angel and LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring (yeah, yeah, I know they came out for other platforms, too, but I reviewed the XBox versions), as well as the PC’s Chemicus: Journey to the Other Side, Archangel, and the lame, boring, buggy mess that was TR: Angel of Darkness come to mind for real stinkeroos.
Oh my god. You had to review Mortyr? It is a testament to your mental resiliance that you’re still with us, my friend.[/quote]
I failed, actually.
I reviewed the demo and started on Mortyr but found I got motion sickness from the speed-up, slow-down effect of the engine.
What I find really odd is that there’s a sequel in the works for Mortyr. Did it really sell that well, or is the Polish government funding its development? What a piece of shit that game was.
I’ve read very, very few reviews that give any indication that the reviewer played more than a few hours of the game. That’s not to say that they haven’t, but I’m sure a lot of the “big name” reviewers can’t be troubled to finish a game, especially a bad one. If a game is so bad that the reviewer has to quit playing to save his sanity, that’s more important as a review than any listing of pros and cons. Any good reviewer is going to stick to a bad game longer than I will on my Blockbuster Game Freedom Pass, so if they say it’s unplayable, unless it’s some kind of niche setup, I’m going to take it seriously. I’ll still cross-reference it with a host of other reviews from non-bought sites, etc., but it speaks more to me than the people who played to the end and used cognitive dissonance to try and find reasons for why they did it. However, I have little investment in the games I play, being able to grab a game and take it back within hours if it’s horrible, so reviews as a whole become less important than curiosity.
What does it matter if a game pulls out of its nosedive long after any sensible pilot has ejected? Well, money matters. To the crowd who throws down $50 for a new game and feels that wallet become noticeably lighter, that review is incomplete, because they’re going to get their money’s worth and finish that game if at all possible. This group of people is important, and so I have to say that yes, it’s important for a reviewer to finish a game, whether I personally need them to or not.
As an avid reader of game reviews, if the game is so godawful horrible that the reviewer bails after a few hours of play, that’s cool, as long as that’s clearly spelled out in the review:
“We tried to play through the full game, we honestly tried – however, after a mere three hours of Nazgul Thunder, we found we couldn’t stop dreaming of other, more productive uses of our time (getting stapled, watching a From Justin to Kelly marathon, playing Mortyr, or trying for the world’s first auto-appendectomy, all of these came to mind at one point or another). Nevertheless, we kept playing for another four hours, hoping we might find something to recommend it: we didn’t. So, we’re throwing in the towel – as such, rather than giving Nazgul Thunder a base score, it gets GamingJokes notorious ‘Stinky Fish’ award. Buy it if you insist, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
Airline Tycoon Evolution - lousy business model, superfluous animations, pointless features. And very, very boring.
Troy
I didn’t realize Tom had reviewed Nazgul Thunder. /rimshot.
The Mystery of the druids. Horrible engine, stupid puzzles (Why do I have to wipe the dust off the flasks to ask that man about them?), boring game altogether. I hated it.
I am a staunch defender of the “play” faction. You don’t judge a movie after the first half hour, don’t judge a game by it’s first four levels.
Arthur’s Knight’s II: The Secret of Merlin. I had to review this turd a while back, and it nearly drove me bonkers.
D.A. Pursuit of Justice: The Sunset Boulevard Deuce http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/nov97/sbd.html
This purported to be a game that recreated all the fun of being a real prosecuting attorney. In reality it recreated all the fun of preparing for the multistate bar exam.
Gold of the Realm for the Amiga. Maze after maze after maze with zero gameplay. If they could have worked in jumping puzzles, we could use it to torture enemy prisoners.
Then I’m at CGDC around 1991, sitting at a table with my editor and maybe three game developers. One guy says “So what’s the worst game you’ve ever had to review?” I said “The Amiga version of Gold of the Realm.”
Wouldn’t you know it… His response? “I did that port!”
Luckily, however, he too hated the game.
I reviewed Skydive.
Actually, as far as review assignments go, it was easy. You could play everything the game had to offer in about one hour, and the game was so absent of gameplay that it was easy to form an opinion and back it up.
It’s probably the worst game I’ve reviewed, but one of the best review assignments I’ve had.
Worst games I ever had to review were Dogs of War and Outlive… closely followed by Flying Heroes and Shadow Watch
BURN THE HERETIC!
–Dave