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
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.
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.
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.
You got me watching gameplay videos of The Isle. The old version looks so great for emergent gameplay.
Raid: Shadow Legends. The commercialization is ridiculous, the constant attempts to grab money are downright pathetic, but hey, it looks good on my tablet.
A likely story. How much did they pay you for this “ad”?
/s
😆
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.
The black hole gun you get in Unreal 2 is really neat.
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.
dark souls 2. i actually don’t even think it’s bad, but people seem to not like it.
Here’s the thing. Dark Souls 2 is the worst Dark Souls game, but the worst Dark Souls game is still miles ahead of 95% of the other day-one-dlc-riddled, mtx-infested triple-a trash released since.
Dark Souls 2 is great. I’ve beat it 10+ times.
the worst Dark Souls game is still miles ahead of 95% of the other day-one-dlc-riddled, mtx-infested triple-a trash released since
Looking at you Dragon’s Dogma 2, absolute disappointment.
Burger King: Sneak King. Hilarious and entertaining. Surprisingly well made
Is my friend Pedro considered bad?
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.
Robocraft used to be one of my favorite games and slowly watching it become worse was painful.
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…
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.
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!
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 drunk cats one.
That’s such a fun story.
Drinking Dwarfs spill beer on the floor.
Liquid behavior on floors is modelled.
Cats might walk through the puddles.
Cats clean their paws by licking them.
Animals inherent the ability to get drunk from some class.
QED: cats get drunk.
And, because every drink of alcohol was assumed to be one cup worth in some throwaway bit of code, and cats are small, they got massive alcohol poisoning and almost instantly puked themselves to death.
So, bug. The observed behavior was cat corpses and cat vomit accumulating in bars. The expected behavior was… not. Eventually Tarn managed to figure it out, and it was fixed by better modeling of the volume of just a layer of liquid on body part. You also cant suck stuff off yourself to quench thirst in adventure mode anymore.
Dwarf Fortress is such a special game. One guy added capitalism to the game and the dwarves ended up doing a communist revolution.
Lol, do you have a link? Off the top of my head I’m not sure how you’d do that, mod-wise, since dwarves only do fairly undirected violence when unhappy right now. (Insurgencies will be in a future version, eventually, just like everything else)
I think I saw it originally on mastodon, or maybe it was youtube. Couldn’t tell you.
DF is not bad >:(
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.
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.
