[Top 5 Shittiest Games of All Time]

Top 5 Shittiest Games of All Time

1. Don't Shit Your Pants (Rete, Browser, 2010)

Billed as a survival horror game, Rete's Don't Shit Your Pants takes the crown of "Shittiest Game of All Time" by applying a laser focus to the fundamental challenge (and art) of defecating: namely, shitting somewhere other than one's pants. The honesty of this title was a breath of fresh air even though it's theme was not (laugh track)! And despite its simple nature, DSYP offers a multitude of endings that can only be obtained by stretching your imagination as well as your arsehole.



2. Toilet Kids (Media Ring, PC Engine, 1992)

"Just think Twin Bee, only it takes place in a toilet bowl and most of the enemies either are clumps of poo or they attack you by throwing poo or pee at you." -senseiman



3. Tarenagasi (Ikiki, PC, 2007)

Not only is Tarenagasi the only game to ever feature a shit hose, but it's also a striking commentary on the state of gaming, since the goal is to cover the walls of Mario's mansion with as much feces as possible.



4. Engacho (NAC, Playstation, 1999)

"To understand this game, you need to know what does 'engacho' mean: Imagine two Japanese children walking down the street. The first one of them steps into something disgusting (I'll let your mind fill the blanks here). The second one exclaims: "engacho!". The first one makes a circle by connecting his two thumbs and two index fingers together, which the other child breaks with a light chop of the hand. That little ritual is basically intended to break the spell and wash off the grossness, like a 'cooties shot'. 'Engacho', therefore, designates anything foul, especially for children." -Damien Poussier



5. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Rare, N64, 2001)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w5neFPat1w



Honorable Mentions: Super Meat Boy, Duke Nukem Forever, Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure

[1.]

I know what I definitely don't like, and it's when a boss fight goes like this:

1. Boss is totally impervious to all attacks

2. Bait boss into doing something stupid (e.g. ram into wall, get tentacle stuck in grate, etc.)

3. Weak point opens up

4. Hit weak point until it closes (modern games: do quick-time event first)

5. Start over

It's totally artificial and repetitive.

I like the bosses in Dark Souls because there are all kinds of ways to hurt them all the time (even if it's not for a lot of damage). You can also take advantage of the environment... but unlike most games where they have some obvious setup for you it's usually much more free form.

They do have weak spots sometimes, but it's a bonus if you can manage to get them, rather than being the only way to kill them.

Wonder Project J



http://hardcoregaming101.net/wonderproject/wpj1.htm

OMG yes that is it!

 

[lighthearted pleasure]

you guys should completely rewrite thesaurus and call it tigsaurus or indiesaurus or whatever. you should also hire paul eres and gimmy tilbert to do it because they can do it the best.

Enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure: "anyone who turns up can join in the fun".

As opposed to the type of fun that comes from watching a tragic play or playing Silent Hill. With games they're probably describing simple reflexive challenges and puzzles.

so when they use word "fun" they mean LESS FUN lol they mean PLEASURABLE BUT NOT SO PLEASURABLE!

I got that definition from Googling "fun", so the connotation of light-heartedness is definitely there, dude. But yeah, I don't think most people equate "fun" with "pleasure". "Fun" is certainly pleasurable, but "pleasure" is a much more general term in English.

If playing Silent Hill 2 is like spooking your friends in a graveyard, then I'd agree that sounds more like "fun", "light-hearted pleasure", etc. I haven't played it... I thought maybe the game had a really oppressive atmosphere.

Anyway, I'd probably just use "fun" the way you're using it, in a more general sense, so whatever.

Is it C-Dogs?





http://db.tigsource.com/games/c-dogs

He's giving his own definition of "pleasure" the broadest possible meaning and giving everyone else's the narrowest.

ive seen a lot of people use the narrow definition themselves. people who say stuff like "games dont have to be fun" and then talk about how silent hill 2 is not fun and yet "compelling".

Without knowing exactly what examples you're talking about, I'd guess that they're using a definition of "fun" that is more like this:

Enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure: "anyone who turns up can join in the fun".

As opposed to the type of fun that comes from watching a tragic play or playing Silent Hill. With games they're probably describing simple reflexive challenges and puzzles.

I don't know how useful it is to try and list "compelling things". Partly because they don't sound very compelling to me in a list format and partly because I think very few games are developed by checking off a list like that.

Well, in that passage icycalm is basically saying that "pleasure" is a very broad concept that means different things to different people. By his own admission, then, we aren't really maximizing the potential of games to provide pleasure.

This part:

challenging them to imagine themselves in situations they could barely deal with (in which all of their "dammed-up strength", as it were, i.e. all of their energy, could be discharged — energy discharge being quite simply the essence of pleasure)

Can apply to video games, certainly, but the fact is that in video games we expend most of our energy on dodging, shooting, and solving puzzles. And it's great that we have so many opportunities to do that, but then it's also nice to have more variety (beyond remixes of dodging, shooting, and solving puzzles).

Imagine a tragic play where the tragic hero can overcome his own suffering by shooting through an army of monsters. It's not really a tragedy at that point. The challenge and pleasure involved becomes entirely different.

I don't think we have many true mainstream video game examples of that kind of pain, do we?

Consequently the claims of the artfags and the pseudo-intellectuals that as regards their "artistic games" the issue of pleasure is irrelevant, are naive, idiotic and preposterous — a game that fails to give pleasure is quite simply a bad game.

Man, he loves doing this - make up the other side's argument for them to paint them in the worst possible way. I've never heard anyone claim anything even remotely close to this. He's giving his own definition of "pleasure" the broadest possible meaning and giving everyone else's the narrowest.

Everyone wants games to become more pleasurable the way he is describing. The argument really rests on how to give more pleasure in games, but he's confusing things by creating a new, artificial argument (namely, that mysterious, lurking, feminine "art fags" want to steal your entertainment from you).

Oh, and one other thing:

And finally, to the physiologically and/or spiritually exhausted it provides a much-needed stimulus for their frayed and diseased nerves — an artificial path to psychological excitation, to rare and elevated feelings, which, being exhausted, they could not have achieved by natural (i.e. non-artistic) means.

This could easily apply to people who play traditional games. In other words, it wouldn't be hard to turn this line into an argument FOR the art fags!

It's a little weird because "compelling" seems to have positive connotations, whereas "compulsion" has negative ones.

Similarly, "fun" is generally seen as positive, but in gaming it seems like it sometimes implies frivolity.

Thanks for the feedback and congratulations.  I guess it's very hard for me, as the author of those articles, to see how my arguments are hard to understand.

However, I should note that dinofarmgames is a "blog", and it's treated that way.  I don't write outlines for it and I don't "edit" the posts very much.

Something closer to what you can expect from the book is some of my work for Gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/167418/what_makes_a_game.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/172587/A_Way_to_Better_Games_Establishing_Functional_Theory.php

For these, I write outlines, and I edit them.  Also, there is indeed an editor for my book as well.

The writing is much more clear in these articles!

I do question how useful your theories are, though. This one line, for example:

It is my sincere belief that the only way we can really improve our games is by looking closely at what makes a game a game.

...is, in my mind, one of the more controversial statements you made in your articles, and you treat it as a foregone conclusion. Why is this the only way we can really improve our games?

Not to mention that this following argument is not at all implied by your definition of "game":

If we can agree that meaningful decisions are important, then we can hone in, focus our games down on offering as many interesting, meaningful decisions as possible per moment spent playing the game. I call this "efficiency in game design".

Even if we accept that games are defined by meaningful decision-making, it's very unclear that we should then offer as many decisions as possible per moment. To use your music theory analogy, it'd be kinda like saying: "Music is defined by musical notes, therefore we should focus on offering as many notes per moment spent listening to the music. I call this 'efficiency in music'."

The implication of your theory is that a perfect game throws cataclysmic decisions at the player every possible moment, and that just doesn't ring true to me at all. There is such a thing as pacing and emphasis in game design, and in many cases "efficiency" runs totally counter to one's overall enjoyment of a game.

Robotron


Smash TV


Mutant Storm


Quadnet

I am not exaggerating when I said that I have been searching for over a decade for this one. I have been trying to track this down for SO long.

I feel so much vicarious satisfaction when this happens.

As for the word "gameplay" my problem with it within this thread is that it's circular and "compelling games have compelling gameplay" is like saying "in order to make a compelling game you have to make a compelling game." My problem in general is that it's vague and leads to lazy thinking, implies that audiovisuals are somehow separate from the experience of playing a game, and sounds obnoxious when said out loud.

I can't remember when I first encountered the word "gameplay", but it never sounded weird said out loud. Maybe it's because there are other words that end in "play", like "swordplay". There's nothing that ends with "listen" or "read", so the "musiclisten" and "bookread" examples don't jive with me.

On the other hand, I really can't stand "gamer". So I sympathize.

I can think of more things than audiovisuals that are not included in gameplay, though - like story, cinematics, certain menus, bugs, etc. But you're probably right about it being vague and abused.

Mm, yeah, I was in the middle of writing a post to say that I had a more specific reason why I didn't gel with your blog posts on design. Moczan kind of hit on it, though...

Basically, I think you need to work on the flow of your writing, because you tend to take a lot of detours. For example, your score articles:

http://www.dinofarmgames.com/on-score/
http://www.dinofarmgames.com/score-in-videogames/

I honestly couldn't follow your thought process a lot of the time, because I got lost in all of the ideas I was supposed to "consider/imagine" and all the rhetorical questions I was supposed to be asking. Very rarely to you make a simple statement explaining what your argument is (e.g. "Players don't value scoring in video games as much as they do in sports or board games because the scoring systems are worse in video games."). I end up feeling like I'm following a convoluted path backwards to what should be the very first sentence in the article.

[EDIT:]

Reiner Knizia wrote the foreword? That's pretty cool! He's huge in the board game world.

I'll be honest, though, I'm not a huge fan of your blog posts on game design. I feel like you're trying too hard to sound academic and you seem to evoke icycalm and David Sirlin too much in your ideas and general tone. I'm glad you're writing and you bring up some interesting topics... but your voice is still lacking authority.

This could be cleared up in the book. But I wasn't sure if the book is just a collection of your blog posts or what. What's the relation?

EDIT: And obviously, whatever my opinion is, congratulations on the release of your book. It's no mean feat.

[As far as Vanquish goes, speaking more specifically to that title, I'm hoping you could explain the name and how it fits into the game, and if you can explain how the game is going to stand out to Western gamers, who are used to high-quality third-person and first-person action games.]

I think it's useful to break down games into two types. Those that use a game to tell a story, and those that are mechanics focused. The mechanics and story must compliment and support each other, but not get in the way of whichever is the main thrust of the game.

that's a false dichotomy. games can be both; in fact, they should be both. the idea that there is such a thing as "focus" of the game lol is invented by the slaves, the bunglers, to make up for their lack of skill. they had to invent some sort of exclusivity to the simplistic crap they make so that they could turn the pyramid on its head -- so that they could at least feel to be on the same level as the real masters of the craft.

in reality, simplicity has no exclusivity whatso-fucking-ever, and games that have both story and "mechanics" are the best games.

Well, according to you Shinji Mikami is a bungler, since he focused on gameplay for Vanquish (which is honestly pretty obvious while you're playing the game).

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/28/interview-shinji-mikami-on-vanquish-evolving-game-dev-locales/

As far as Vanquish goes, speaking more specifically to that title, I'm hoping you could explain the name and how it fits into the game, and if you can explain how the game is going to stand out to Western gamers, who are used to high-quality third-person and first-person action games.

"Vanquish," the word obviously has to do with conquest and destruction. In any war there's always a winning side and a losing side, there's winners and losers, but one of the themes in the story is, what makes a true victor in any conflict? And so that's where the name ties in.

Can you speak to the importance of story in games, in relations to the Eastern and Western philosophies? How important is the story in Vanquish, and how important it is to your team?

So, this time, actually, I am emphasizing gameplay over story. But, Mr. Kojima, obviously, emphasizes story a lot more.

Which do you feel is more important for a game? Is it more important that you focus on gameplay first, or is it important that you marry the two?

So, the ideal, obviously, is to meld the two. For both story and gameplay to be really compelling.

He basically said what James said, actually. That both should be compelling and work well together but that he focused on gameplay for at least that one game. I don't think anyone would say that a game should have ONLY one or the other, and the majority of games have at least a bare bones setting... but certainly there are lots of great games that emphasize telling a story versus challenging you with rules, obstacles, etc.

Focusing on something in a game is good, and it's certainly not an idea that was invented by "slaves". Have you heard of the "Covert Action Rule"? Sid Meier came up with that:

Covert Action integrated a story and action poorly, because the action was actually too intense.

Or what about Doom? You've read the Doom Bible, I'm assuming, and know the differences between the planned game versus what eventually got released? Again, it did kind of boil down to "story versus gameplay".

Now, moving forward, would it be great to see more games that have lots of both? Sure. But there will also always be room for new games that focus on one or the other. Like painting or movies or music or any other artform - if you de-emphasize one thing you can emphasize something else.

And even if you did make a game that had heavy helpings of both (I dunno, a game like Deus Ex or something) - at the detail level you'll still be making decisions about what to emphasize and when.

(Also, what's the problem with the word "gameplay"? It's too vague or something? It seems useful enough for this discussion, at least.)

This topic has been moved to Announcements.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=27834.0

Started making yet another 16 bit remake of Barbarian, but I got bored.

Maybe I'll revisit this thing in another 6 years!

BY CROM!

[Defining Games:]

Nice thread... I got a Saturn cheap at a garage sale and I'm looking for more games (it came with Daytona).

The Racketboy articles are worth looking at, too:

Defining Games: http://www.racketboy.com/retro/games-that-defined-sega-saturn

Hidden Gems: http://www.racketboy.com/retro/best-undiscovered-sega-saturn-games

For those who never experienced his games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QRf69POM6U

That's kind of an awesome video.