• CanadaPlus ( CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    18·
    3 years ago

    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.

      • CanadaPlus ( CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
        2·
        3 years ago

        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.

  • Timwi ( Timwi@kbin.social ) 
    15·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • teawrecks ( teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ) 
      5·
      3 years ago

      Cool, didn’t know the modding community was the way to go. I would always break it out at a party, it would be fun for a bit, but yeah, eventually it’s just the same thing but faster. I’ll have to take a look at the mods.

    • Noxar ( Noxar@lemm.ee ) English
      3·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • BruceTwarzen ( BruceTwarzen@kbin.social ) 
      2·
      3 years ago

      I always thought the game was really good. I played it for days as a kid. I never got far because some puzzles are pretty much impossible to solve without a guide as far as i remember. I loved the day night cycle, even tho they went kinda crazy with it.

  • Alice ( Alice@beehaw.org ) 
    8·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • Blóðbók ( sudoreboot@slrpnk.net ) 
    7·
    3 years ago

    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.