The worst games

[Tweed]

Some games are bad and then they go away, but some are so bad you have to talk about how bad they were. Whether it was terrible design, personal taste, or the disastrous impact they had on the industry, some games are just special in their own way.

Halo by itself was an average shooter with annoying consoleitis problems, but it featured a lot of design choices that were new at the time that ended up poisoning the first-person shooter genre forever. Regenerating shields means you don't need to plan out health and armor pickups anymore by forcing the player into popamole shootouts. Popamole design also means you can cutdown on level sizes by turning your levels into arenas and corridors, just lock the doors until every enemy is dead. Two guns at a time means we don't need to balance around the player being a walking armory anymore. Halo sent the genre into the dark ages and it never fully recovered.

[WhiteShark]

I loathe Mario Odyssey for almost entirely abandoning platforming as a core gameplay element to replace it with a gimmicky, time-wasting collectathon. This was the game that made me realize old Nintendo is dead.

[sheet]

SimCity (2013), the final nail in the coffin for Maxis, a company that made my childhood.

The Last of Us, attracting foids to the hobby and cementing the movie game as the default for AAA.

Diablo III, even though I played it for many hours and had fun, distilled the fun and simplicity of loot lust from Diablo II into a cynical and homogenized process. The itemization was boring, too.

[J1M]

In the most ruthlessly practical sense, any game that expanded the gaming market beyond myself and people who like the things that I like was detrimental. This puts funding towards the wrong projects, dilutes actual talent across more studios, and encourages people to enter the industry that do not have the same background and interests as the developers that worked 20-30 years ago.

In other words, all mobile games, all games made with Unity, etc.

[Tangerine]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

[Xenich]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

Total Annihilation and eventually Supreme Commander were peak RTS for me. I loved being able to create my own units.

[DecadeRiptide]

I think dungeon keeper and war for the overworled are awful. The gameplay and design is so bad. The music is stupid as well


All the fallout games were terrible. All the elder scrolls were really bad too. Anything by Bethesda is just pure trash.

[Tweed]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

E-sports craze in general turned what could have been perfectly good games into ****.

[roldet]

Worst games i have finished due to sunken costs fellatio was GTA4 and RDR2. Patiently played those until them getting good but they never do. Every quest consisting of ride car/horse and shoot your crosshair. Truely created for ****** minds.

[Tangerine]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

E-sports craze in general turned what could have been perfectly good games into ****.

Woah, that makes StarCraft extra ******!

[maidenhaver]

Thi3f Deadly Shadows.

[Vlajdimir Ermenović]

Any game made before 2008

[Xenich]

I think dungeon keeper and war for the overworled are awful. The gameplay and design is so bad. The music is stupid as well


All the fallout games were terrible. All the elder scrolls were really bad too. Anything by Bethesda is just pure trash.

All the Fallout games?

[Xenich]

Any game made before 2008

Tell us you are ******** while not actually saying you are ********.

[DecadeRiptide]

- Re9
- Battlefield 6

[Mortadela_Viva]

Dragon Age Inquisition - Fake and GAY
Fable 3

[traxtan]

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for ******** all over what people liked about the first game.

[Tweed]

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 for ******** all over what people liked about the first game.

There's a place reserved in Cocytus for Vavra.

[SpellSword]

William Shatner's TekWar

William Shatner's TekWar.webp

It wasn't completely terrible. There is some fun to be had navigating the sprawling urban environments, and the city parts of game game looked nice for the time. This one felt like it could have been something but just wasn't completely finished when they shipped it. As far as I know, parts of the UI and some of the pick ups don't actually do anything. The enemy variety is also pretty bad. They're basically all the same hitscanner with little noticeable difference.

It's a shame. The game is very ambitious:

• Large almost open world areas connected via subway.
• The ability to enter cyberspace like in System Shock.
• Police that respond if you don't keep your weapon holstered.
• Large moving vehicles roam the city. (Basically just running everything over in their path. Cool for the time.)

The game is overall a rather lackluster experience and needed some a lot more polish.

► Back when it came out, I got suckered in by the demo. If you're curious about it, I'd actually recommend you play that instead of the full version.

William Shatner\u0027s TekWar - Demo Walkthrough
Although there may be more content in the full version, most of the best of it is was found in the demo.

---

Nerves of Steel

Nerves of Steel.webp

With TekWar, there was some good that shone through. That is not the case with with Nerves of Steel. This one's an abysmal first person shooter. The game's music isn't that bad, but sadly as far as I can tell, whoever was responsible for it is uncredited.

► See for yourself. It's quite bad.

Nerves of Steel 1995 PC

I found a bit of information about the developer Rainmaker Software and its founder Bruce Mack. Its a more interesting read than the game is to play. You can't say they had no success. After all they did manage to sell me a copy. Their publisher Merit Software was a real mixed bag when it came to the quality of their releases, and from the sounds of it when they went down after releasing Harvester, Rainmaker went with them.

► Trivia about Rainmaker Software and Bruce Mack.

Rainmaker Software was created by Bruce J. Mack and some friends.

Their first game Isle of the Dead was marginally successful when it was released about the same time as Id's game Spear of Destiny.

Their second game Nerves of Steel was overshadowed by Id's release of DOOM.

Shortly thereafter their publisher Merit Software went out of business taking Rainmaker Software down with them (because Rainmaker Software's office was in a back room of Merit Software's office).

Biography of Bruce J. Mack

Before landing his first software developer job at Solid Ideas, a high resolution graphics/photo/logo treatment company, Bruce J. Mack worked for six years at Domino's Pizza. Encouraged by his brother Chris A. Mack (the "Gentleman Scientist") who allowed him to write a Quick Basic photo resist chemical/light exposure graph module in 1991 for Chris's groundbreaking PROLITH lithography modeling package, he went on to write tile based war strategy games on his own for learning purposes as he taught himself the C programming language. So, from delivering pizza to working on a Sun Micro-systems 3D Sparc-station writing hi-res mats and compose algorithms almost overnight.

Scott M. Grey, owner of Solid Ideas Inc., already had the rest of the troop that formed Rainmaker Software, Inc. working for him except for Scott Simmons (3D modeler) and Sean Glaspell (sales/marketing). Mr. Grey saw the potential in his crew and inspired them to create Rainmaker Software, Inc. Bruce took the lead role as president and 3D programmer. Together they brought the first 32-bit DOS game with virtual memory (Isle of the Dead) to the shelves for the 386 PC in 1993 just after the 486 and Pentium PC's came out. RainmakerSoftware.com was online for a few short years as he worked on their 2nd game, Nerves of Steel. This game was originally called Tunnel Rat and hoped to include the book with it. Merit Software pushed them in another direction (back to the campy style of their 1st game) after selling 10,000 copies to Tandy Corp. (also the maker of Bruce's first box loving known as the trash 80). Bruce wanted to be first to market with the first 640x480 res game utilizing the new VESA standard for VGA (Video Electronics Standards Association, which is an international non-profit corporation standards body for computer graphics formed in 1988). Instead of following Bruce's advice, Merit blew their wad on changing to Merit Studios (ooh, ah) and bringing DigiFX on board with their Harvester title. Harvester never would have made the selves without the help of Bruce J Mack.

Frustrated with their lack of vision he left the game industry for the business world working on HHC for the DSD segment of the supply chain industry where he spent 11 years and has been a successful business software developer ever since. At the time of this writing, June 2015, he is a C# architect and has left the rat race of Dallas Texas for the peaceful town of Tyler in east Texas.

There was also a DOOM total conversion mod based on Nerves of Steel that looks interesting, so at least some good came from this.

► Nerves of Steel Remake (A DOOM Mod)

Nerves of Steel v2.1 Showcase

The Impie, author of the mod, gives a good description of how badly flawed this game is:

Last year I did a sort-of longplay of the worst fps ever made: Nerves of Steel. It's even worse than the likes of Rahz's Revenge or the Fortress of Dr. Radiaki, because some of the levels are actually broken and prevent you from completing the game. Everything about it is wrong: texture design, texture usage, map layouts, and ohhhh the glitches. EVERYTHING has its own little glitch or three. In short, it's an unplayable mess.

For whatever reason the author appears to have been banned from the Doomworld forums, and unfortunately the links hosting his mod seem to be dead.

Impie Banned from Doomworld forums.webp

I hope his mod got backed up somewhere. Looked pretty good considering the source material.

► I've actually still got the boxes of both of these.

TekWar and Nerves of Steel's boxes.webp

You'll notice the Tekwar one has a big white circle on the cover. Capstone made the bizarre choice to include the CD on the outside of the box inside that white space. Such an odd decision. What's the point of the box?!

A CD on the outside of the box, but why!.webp

It even came with a note inside the box to extract the CD from the outside of the box!

TekWar came with a note about not including the CD inside the box!!!.webp

What were they thinking?!

[rusty_shackleford]

Starfield, I actually believed Todd's lies...

[rusty_shackleford]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

It's ironic that RTS died because it's a terrible genre for watching.

[Tweed]

William Shatner's TekWar

It wasn't completely terrible. There is some fun to be had navigating the sprawling urban environments, and the city parts of game game looked nice for the time. This one felt like it could have been something but just wasn't completely finished when they shipped it. As far as I know, parts of the UI and some of the pick ups don't actually do anything. The enemy variety is also pretty bad. They're basically all the same hitscanner with little noticeable difference.

It's a shame. The game is very ambitious:

• Large almost open world areas connected via subway.
• The ability to enter cyberspace like in System Shock.
• Police that respond if you don't keep your weapon holstered.
• Large moving vehicles roam the city. (Basically just running everything over in their path. Cool for the time.)

The game is overall a rather lackluster experience and needed some a lot more polish.

► Back when it came out, I got suckered in by the demo. If you're curious about it, I'd actually recommend you play that instead of the full version.

William Shatner\u0027s TekWar - Demo Walkthrough
Although there may be more content in the full version, most of the best of it is was found in the demo.

---

Nerves of Steel

With TekWar, there was some good that shone through. That is not the case with with Nerves of Steel. This one's an abysmal first person shooter. The game's music isn't that bad, but sadly as far as I can tell, whoever was responsible for it is uncredited.

► See for yourself. It's quite bad.

Nerves of Steel 1995 PC

I found a bit of information about the developer Rainmaker Software and its founder Bruce Mack. Its a more interesting read than the game is to play. You can't say they had no success. After all they did manage to sell me a copy. Their publisher Merit Software was a real mixed bag when it came to the quality of their releases, and from the sounds of it when they went down after releasing Harvester, Rainmaker went with them.

► Trivia about Rainmaker Software and Bruce Mack.

Rainmaker Software was created by Bruce J. Mack and some friends.

Their first game Isle of the Dead was marginally successful when it was released about the same time as Id's game Spear of Destiny.

Their second game Nerves of Steel was overshadowed by Id's release of DOOM.

Shortly thereafter their publisher Merit Software went out of business taking Rainmaker Software down with them (because Rainmaker Software's office was in a back room of Merit Software's office).

Biography of Bruce J. Mack

Before landing his first software developer job at Solid Ideas, a high resolution graphics/photo/logo treatment company, Bruce J. Mack worked for six years at Domino's Pizza. Encouraged by his brother Chris A. Mack (the "Gentleman Scientist") who allowed him to write a Quick Basic photo resist chemical/light exposure graph module in 1991 for Chris's groundbreaking PROLITH lithography modeling package, he went on to write tile based war strategy games on his own for learning purposes as he taught himself the C programming language. So, from delivering pizza to working on a Sun Micro-systems 3D Sparc-station writing hi-res mats and compose algorithms almost overnight.

Scott M. Grey, owner of Solid Ideas Inc., already had the rest of the troop that formed Rainmaker Software, Inc. working for him except for Scott Simmons (3D modeler) and Sean Glaspell (sales/marketing). Mr. Grey saw the potential in his crew and inspired them to create Rainmaker Software, Inc. Bruce took the lead role as president and 3D programmer. Together they brought the first 32-bit DOS game with virtual memory (Isle of the Dead) to the shelves for the 386 PC in 1993 just after the 486 and Pentium PC's came out. RainmakerSoftware.com was online for a few short years as he worked on their 2nd game, Nerves of Steel. This game was originally called Tunnel Rat and hoped to include the book with it. Merit Software pushed them in another direction (back to the campy style of their 1st game) after selling 10,000 copies to Tandy Corp. (also the maker of Bruce's first box loving known as the trash 80). Bruce wanted to be first to market with the first 640x480 res game utilizing the new VESA standard for VGA (Video Electronics Standards Association, which is an international non-profit corporation standards body for computer graphics formed in 1988). Instead of following Bruce's advice, Merit blew their wad on changing to Merit Studios (ooh, ah) and bringing DigiFX on board with their Harvester title. Harvester never would have made the selves without the help of Bruce J Mack.

Frustrated with their lack of vision he left the game industry for the business world working on HHC for the DSD segment of the supply chain industry where he spent 11 years and has been a successful business software developer ever since. At the time of this writing, June 2015, he is a C# architect and has left the rat race of Dallas Texas for the peaceful town of Tyler in east Texas.

There was also a DOOM total conversion mod based on Nerves of Steel that looks interesting, so at least some good came from this.

► Nerves of Steel Remake (A DOOM Mod)

Nerves of Steel v2.1 Showcase

The Impie, author of the mod, gives a good description of how badly flawed this game is:

Last year I did a sort-of longplay of the worst fps ever made: Nerves of Steel. It's even worse than the likes of Rahz's Revenge or the Fortress of Dr. Radiaki, because some of the levels are actually broken and prevent you from completing the game. Everything about it is wrong: texture design, texture usage, map layouts, and ohhhh the glitches. EVERYTHING has its own little glitch or three. In short, it's an unplayable mess.

For whatever reason the author appears to have been banned from the Doomworld forums, and unfortunately the links hosting his mod seem to be dead.


I hope his mod got backed up somewhere. Looked pretty good considering the source material.

► I've actually still got the boxes of both of these.

You'll notice the Tekwar one has a big white circle on the cover. Capstone made the bizarre choice to include the CD on the outside of the box inside that white space. Such an odd decision. What's the point of the box?!



It even came with a note inside the box to extract the CD from the outside of the box!


What were they thinking?!

Crapstone was a weird company that made mostly slop, though I have a soft spot in my head for Corridor 7. The Witchaven games are kind of alright and one of the developers went back and tried to fix them up more later on as well. Joe Abatti was also quite the musical talent when he tried.

Looks like Rainmaker took heavy inspiration from the Shadowrun cover art for their game box.

[SpellSword]

Crapstone was a weird company that made mostly slop, though I have a soft spot in my head for Corridor 7. The Witchaven games are kind of alright and one of the developers went back and tried to fix them up more later on as well. Joe Abatti was also quite the musical talent when he tried.

Looks like Rainmaker took heavy inspiration from the Shadowrun cover art for their game box.

I agree about Corridor 7 being one of Capstone's rare good titles. Its engine was a bit dated when it came out, but the gameplay was solid enough that I had fun with it.

As for Witchaven, that box was too cool to pass up:

Witchaven.webp

[Tweed]

Crapstone was a weird company that made mostly slop, though I have a soft spot in my head for Corridor 7. The Witchaven games are kind of alright and one of the developers went back and tried to fix them up more later on as well. Joe Abatti was also quite the musical talent when he tried.

Looks like Rainmaker took heavy inspiration from the Shadowrun cover art for their game box.

I agree about Corridor 7 being one of Capstone's rare good titles. Its engine was a bit dated when it came out, but the gameplay was solid enough that I had fun with it.

As for Witchaven, that box was too cool to pass up:

Ken Kelly, did both game covers and some metal albums. Could easily be mistaken for Brom.

I miss when guys like this were doing covers for fantasy games.

[Cedric]

Only one game ever made me ill and that was The Incredible Crash Dummies for the SNES. What a piece of garbage.

I also was not very fond of Out to Lunch on the GameBoy and Krusty's Fun House on the same system.

[roldet]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

It's ironic that RTS died because it's a terrible genre for watching.

AoE2 is fun to watch especially tournaments with commentary.

[Oyster Sauce]

I blame StarCraft for killing the RTS genre. It led to the focus on e-sports and a hyper-focus on balance.

It's ironic that RTS died because it's a terrible genre for watching.

AoE2 is fun to watch especially tournaments with commentary.

I hate watching RTS matches because they always resign instead of satisfyingly destroying every unit and building. The chess match ain't over until the king is dead.

[methoxetamine]

It's ironic that RTS died because it's a terrible genre for watching.

AoE2 is fun to watch especially tournaments with commentary.

I hate watching RTS matches because they always resign instead of satisfyingly destroying every unit and building. The chess match ain't over until the king is dead.

Based. You ain't quitting ******, bend over and take this checkmate

[Manny V]

It's ironic that RTS died because it's a terrible genre for watching.

AoE2 is fun to watch especially tournaments with commentary.

I hate watching RTS matches because they always resign instead of satisfyingly destroying every unit and building. The chess match ain't over until the king is dead.

[fork]

Broodwar is the only e-sport I still seriously follow, and it's great fun to watch. It also has great singleplayer campaigns and casual online modes. I don't see how it destroyed the RTS genre, other than it being too perfect for other devs to even try.
Can't imagine watching anything else without actively playing (which was the case with Quake 3 for a while 2 decades ago).