What game do you absolutely love that you know yourself is bad, but love it anyway?
For me, it’s Callisto Protocol. Loved that it was just more Dead Space. Not good by any metric but I liked it.
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Skyrim. Load up some new mods, play a completely different character. The magic of Bethesda’s old games is that they leave the player free to imagine what they are. The upside of having the PC have no personality is that you get to project whatever personality you like onto them. Don’t initiate the main quest, don’t bother with dragons, play pretty much the entire game as if it is your own sandbox. It’s grand.
Kingdom Hearts. The writing is equally sappy and edgy fanfic crossover slop. But there’s something so satisfying about the combat, especially after the introduction of the command deck.
I remember back when streamers and big YouTubers weren’t a thing. I watched a complete play through of kingdom hearts when i was sick. No commentary nothing. I’m still not convinced that game isn’t a fever dream. Somehow i never really heard of it, just the name and i don’t know anyone who has played it.
Sonic 06.
If you try to play it casually it’s absolutely awful because there’s no guidance on what to do and some of the tasks are awful if you don’t know how to skip them.
But if you watch enough speed runs and LPs of the game you start to figure out why the game breaks, how to do the bad parts, and how to intentionally mess with it. And it’s hilarious to do so. It’s like an unintentional broken sandbox. And the best part is even when you’re not trying to it breaks anyway.
Also the physics in the game are absolutely WILD. It’s one of the few games on earth that’s so bad it’s hilarious.
Hentai games are my guilty pleasures in that regard
Are they like good at all or is it just anime girls?
There are a few that are actually fun as games, Tifa Tanx2 being the only example that comes to mind, it’s a fun Kung Fu (NES) like beat’em up with easy combos. There are even some work-safe gameplay videos of it on YT
A lot of the games are visual novels, this is where you find a decent variety of styles, though a lot of them use daz3d models, which I don’t like. I’d wager that hentai games are like 60% VNs, 30% RPG Maker, 10% everything else
It’s also squids.
I guess Genshin also counts. The monetisation is horrible, the character designs are facepalm-worthy, the localisation is so bad it makes me wince, Paimon is the worst, but damn, I love the exploration gameplay, landscapes and music 🤷 (Also it helps that I’m f2p, so at least I’m not supporting Hoyo’s predatory practices…)
Turok 2 for GameBoy Color. It was one of my first games for the GameBoy and I still love it, although, objectively speaking, it might not even be average. The translation was bad and left me confused (non-native English speaker), the levels were not particularly well designed and the platforming and shooting was very bland. But I did not care and it really threw me into the Lost World (was a huge fan of the Lost World movie based on the novel and also the cheesy 90s TV series). The music was great, though, to the point that I would consider it to be in my top 3 all-time gaming OSTs (I think the composer was Alberto Gonzales). Nowadays, I replay it from time to time on my retro handheld. Despite the general forgettable nature of the game, I still have fond memories playing it and the music plays a big role in this as well.
Sometimes I want to blow things up and get headshots. So I’ll see if there’s a Call of Duty on sale and just play the single player. It’s rare though, and at the moment my blowing things up itch is being scratched by Space Marine.
Have you played Titanfall 2? That game is often on sale for 5 dollars and it’s the best single player campaign i have ever played.
Yes it’s an excellent game, I enjoyed it thoroughly and played the co-op defense for a while as well!
Don’t worry BT I’m not going anywhere
This is why I play Ravenfield. Sure, it’s bots. But an hour session usually scratches the itch for a few months. Plus I don’t have to deal with awful lobbies and trash talk.
Oh I’ll have to try it out! Added to my wishlist.
all those Artifex Mundi hidden object games :D
They’re essentially reskins of the same simplistic gameplay and weak stories for like 15 years, but sometimes I still get in the mood for one :D
I love the better ones’ environmental art, but I’d be wary to pick up ones made in the last few years bc I’m pretty sure they started to use AI as soon as it became available, due to the conveyor belt nature of the genre.
EDIT: Ok apparently I was wrong, and they just altogether stopped releasing their games on PC since the pandemic O.o
Skyrim. I mostly just like to install a fuckzillion mods and not play it, though…
Right there with you.
Heroes of Might and Magic III, although I don’t think the game is bad.
What’s bad is that there’s really nothing new to it and yet from time to time I sink lots of hours into a new campaign.
It’s a kind of time machine bringing me back to more innocent times…
For the same reasons I need to beat some computer opponents in Broodwar on Big Game Hunters every once in a while.have you played HoTA(Horn of The Abyss)? its a community made expansion + rebalance of HOMM3, I found out about it this year and I have lost soooo much time to it, new towns new maps new artifacts…
I haven’t and truth be told I wasn’t even aware of it.
Thank you for your support in wasting some more time with HOMM 🤗
I played a bunch of HoMM 3 but I don’t think I understood how to really play the game. That game is a lot more complex than it initially seems and it’s not trivial to me when to add new heroes, explore and split your units.
What puzzles you is the core of each campaign and highly depends on the layout of it.
You gotta try and if you fail, try a different approach.Saving the game from time to time helps avoiding catastrophic failures without having to start from the beginning.
Goat simulator and its sequels/DLCs. It’s a dumb shitpost game where you run around and create chaos but I enjoy it without any irony for some reason
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.
Yes the DoA franchise has a solid fighting game mechanic, but this was made purely for the fan service.
Final Fantasy VIII impressed me in my childhood and since then I’ve finished it 4–5 times. The story is a bit of a mess and doesn’t make sense sometimes, the fighting mechanics are peculiar, but the game is very dear to my heart. Thinking about giving it another go now, ha!
As a kid I picked up VIII before VII (thanks to demo discs) and it has always been my favourite FF game despite its predecessor’s huge shadow. Learning all of the quirks of the games systems felt really rewarding, though I can understand why it didn’t appeal to many.
I also played ff8 before ff7 and largely prefer it. The combat system is a mess but I’ve grown to like it.
Goddess of Victory NIKKE.
I try to be careful where I play it because the character designs are pretty uh… well the characters have huge personalities, usually. That’s not why I play the game, but I recognize some people have more of a problem with that than others so I try to be respectful about it. Also, NIKKE is a mobile gacha game, which a lot of people dislike. So I would say it counts as a guilty pleasure, although I don’t really feel guilty for playing the game.
For me, I don’t really spend money on it. Except for their two collabs with Neon Genesis Evangelion and one collab with NieR, because for me it is literally the law that I pay at least a little for IPs I really like. I am not a Whale (Richard Nixon impression lol), I am not even a Dolphin(?) I think I am called a Minnow. Whatever they call a basically F2P player that spends so rarely they might as well not spend at all. Besides, I have played for 3 years and only spent $60 total, I think that’s a pretty good deal so far.
Anyway, I like the gameplay. I realize to some people this might sound like I am saying “I read Playboy for the articles,” but hear me out.
When I was younger, I really enjoyed going to arcades. In the tail years of the arcades, newer games started to pop up, among them being lightgun games. I really enjoyed playing Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, and later on playing Silent Hill The Arcade, Alien, Terminator, and others. It was fun while it lasted, but now arcades are dead and game developers don’t really make those kind of games anymore. Beside my home arcade cabinet where I emulate the older games (and get a worse experience because I have neither the pizza grease and cigarette smell, nor the different shaped controllers), I don’t have new options for lightgun games these days. Then NIKKE came out and the gameplay was close enough for me that I felt that same fun of a lightgun game. I enjoy my time with the game mostly because it reminds me of the fun I had in actual arcades with lightgun games.
Stellar Blade has got some personalities as well…
Starstruck Vagabond, Yahtzee Croshaw’s game.
It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.
I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.
But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.
I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.
Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.
