This year has so many terrible games that I eventually want to try for cheap or nothing

I posted a month ago about all the bad licensed games that were coming out this year and how in some ways it seemed like we had returned to the "glory" of the 90s, when it seemed like a third of all games were licensed and 80% of those were terrible. Since then things have only continued, with a late contender taking the scene in the form of The Walking Dead Destinies, a game that combines a lukewam license, a decent premise (Play through the early seasons of The Walking Dead TV show but make different choices about who lives and dies, changing the course of events), and production values and gameplay from Wii shovelware you'd find for sale in a discount drugstore in 2009 to stand out as a particularly notable piece of trash in the Great Pacific Gaming Garbage Patch of 2023.

No sane person who respects their time and leisure would ever want to play this. But I do! I played Balan Wonderworld through to the credits after writing that nothing could dissuade me from wanting to do so. That same year I played Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood. I am currently kind of picking my way through Redfall. My history of playing terrible games is unassailable!

The thing is, if you just like horrible games then there are more available than you could ever hope to play (if you ever hope to play bad games.) The Switch eshop alone has seemingly dozens of shovelware games launching every week. This wek alone has seen the release of things like Guns & Spurs 2 and The Trotties Adventure. I haven't played those games, maybe they're fantastic, but I'm pretty sure ASMR Slicing is not. Please feel free to come for me if you're a fan of Virtual Families 3: Our Country Home or Furniture Flipper Simulator 2023. And of course there's even more of this stuff on Steam and mobile. Fans of crap games can eternally gorge themselves at these electronic garbage buffets.

But while I have sampled some of this stuff in my time it's not really what I'm talking about here. These asset flips and cheap student projects all kind of blend together and you can see basically everything one of them has to offer. Some of them seem like they were never really intended to be played at all. They seem to spring out of nowhere like mushrooms, hundreds of them, with no discernable purpose or market.

What interests me are bad games that have at least some money and marketing behind them; a team of people spending significant time to churn out something that's...bad. Often these are licensed games, which tend to at least have teams of professional developers behind them even if they are vastly under-resourced. Sometimes they are games like Redfall or Balan, which come from larger studios backed by major publishers and still end up very bad for whatever reason. These games are interesting, and seeing why they're bad can help you appreciate why good games are good.

This year has had a ton of these interesting bad games. Gollum. Redfall. Skull Island: Rise of Kong. Forespoken. Walking Dead: Destinies. And then there's a plethora of other random licensed stuff that looks at least a little interesting, like the new Grinch game or Smurfs Kart (why in 2023? WHY?) I find these kinds of games fascinating because of the ways that some production values are high while others are skipped, or how you can see what the designers were going for but couldn't quite get right.

Sometimes, like in Redfall, you see that they did have something of a budget but you have no idea what they were going for and it makes the game surprising in a way that most games aren't. "Wait it works like this?" "The mission is over? I literally just got here and shot one guy!" "Who possibly thought this was a good idea?" Some games do this intentionally by changing up mechanics or introducing something totally off the wall (Super Mario Wonder recently did a version of it with the Wonder seeds radically changing levels and mechanics) but when it happens organically it is sometimes even more interesting. Balan Wonderworld will forever remain fascinating for me because some of its decisions are obviously the result of a singular, very stupid, vision. Many of them are infuriating and make it unfun to play much of the time, but at least they aren't boring.

And that's the ultimate attraction of these bad games. They aren't boring. Okay, Redfall is often boring, but that boredom is at least punctuated with weird memorable moments when you encounter something that doesn't make any sense.

And in addition to not being boring, the games often feel freeing in a way. When I play good games I try to play well, to catch every line of dialog and really appreciate the experience. When I play bad games I don't care about any of that. I can die and it doesn't bother me (unless the game gets really frustrating) I know I'm not missing anything if I pop on a podcast and ignore the soundtrack, I can bail permanently when I get bored. I can do all those things with good games too, but it feels like a waste because I generally only play each game once, and even if you replay something you never have that experience of discovery you do the first time. I don't want to cheese and half-ass my way through Tears of the Kingdom, but Forespoken? Hell yeah.

The one thing I don't want to do with these games is pay for them. At least a lot. Because I often don't finish these titles and even if I do they're often short I have no interest in paying full price. Free on Game Pass or PS+ is ideal, but I don't feel too bad of spending less than $10, or especially less than $5. Time is more valuable than money, of course, but it feels bad to hand over a bunch of cash for a game that a publisher shat out as a cash grab anyway (Game Mill I am looking at you.) Gollum has been as low as $10 physical but even that seems like a lot for an unfinished mess of a stealth game. Besides, it's been memed so much there's probably not a lot of juice left in that lime.

So I've put a bunch of these games on my watchlist for when they go free with subscription or super cheap. Even that feels like giving money to publishers who don't really deserve it, but there's no ethical consumption in capitalism and $5 for a dumb Walking Dead game where you can shoot Rick Grimes in the face with a shotgun 20 times is not the most unethical purchase I will ever have made. And I'm looking forward to seeing all the ways they messed their good idea up and laughing at the off brand voice acting.

This year will be remembered for its bumper crop of huge, beloved, games like Baldur's Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, CyberPunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Super Mario Wonder. But it's a bumper crop for fans of interesting trash too. It's just going to take a little bit longer for me to actually harvest them.

I picked up Redfall this week for much the same reasons as you've talked about - curiosity kills me sometimes. I did the same thing with Godfall sometime this year too, and I've had - sigh - Duke Nukem Forever installed on my Deck for a while. Been meaning to play through that dreck for years if just to make a blog or something out of it.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Buying Redfall? For money? That's braver than I am. I am very nervous about always online games that flopped after I thought about buying Babylon's Fall. To be fair I doubt Microsoft will cut bait with Redfall within the next couple years considering they're still patching it, they have plenty of server space, and it might still serve a purpose on Game Pass, but I thought Squenix wouldn't kill BF as quickly as they did anyway.

Godfall has lasted longer than I thought it would but I still haven't bought that one for similar reasons.

Honestly Redfall is not that bad a time even if it is a very bad game in a lot of ways. I'm assuming you bought it cheap on the BF deal and...just seeing the weird depopulated world and hilariously bad AI (which has allegedly been patched but is still the dumbest I've seen in the last decade) is probably worth it.

Hope you have "fun" for some meanings of that term.

Ah, now Duke Nukem Forever has historical significance. I don't blame anyone picking that up just to see and feel 14 years of development crushed together.

@manburger: Some of the ideas in Balan are just...did you know the game's actual story is in an e-novel you have to buy separately? Fantastic!

I don't fully agree with you about Shenmue 3. I think a lot of that game's decisions were driven by budget. The first Shenmue was the most expensive game ever made at the time and 3 was like a low AA budget. You're just not going to make a full on Shenmue title that cheaply. Maybe it doesn't need a GTA budget, but it probably needs at least as much as something like Saints Row to build the detailed world that's the core underpinning of Shenmue. You look at Yakuza and you look at Shenmue and you can tell which got more money.

Flashback 2 is just depressing. Not only because they made a sequel so far after the fact with no real plan to make it worthy but because it's a 2D game and bad 2D games are much worse than bad 3D games. Look at Blight Club. Have they even done a 2D game? Bad 2D games don't tend to be full of weird decisions and hilarious bugs, they tend to be broken and either very boring or very frustrating or sometimes both. Part of the fun of a bad game comes from the weird ways poorly made games interact with the complexities of 3D environments. 2D games are simpler so they tend to just kind of feel unpolished without being weird.

There are a few exceptions, but they are very rare.

The funny thing is, I found myself not too offended by Duke Nukem Forever. Yeah, I see all the problems with it, but its not that bad on PC. On consoles, its terrible, because of the bad framerate on top of everything else. The shooting is pretty basic, and I thought the ways you can boost your health by interacting with different objects in the game is something other games should be using. DNF for me is more of a tragedy instead of a bad game.

I also find myself gravitating towards interesting games rather than good games. I feel that maybe I have seen what good games have to offer and am looking for something different. I'm currently playing through Resident Evil 5 with the intention of playing 6 after that. If you want a game where you have to do real-time inventory management in the middle of a boss fight, then RE 5 is the game for you.

The Xbox Series S is a gold mine for older games that you may have missed that you can frequently buy for cheap. I recently played through Breakdown, perhaps the first game to feature first-person barfing. It's a bad game that I don't recommend to anyone, unless of course you want to see Japanese developers make Half-Life on a console with a fair serving of anime.

I also played through Duke Nukem Forever, and I did so on the Xbox when I could have played it on the PC where it would at least look and run okay. This game is jaggy on a console, even for a 360 game. But the merciful thing about it is that it's short and easy. Duke talks about being old-school but he did adopt regenerating health and that allows you to hide behind objects as much as you need to as the enemies are not smart enough to come get you. There are also a few good jokes when the game isn't trying too hard to be edgy. But I agree with the reviews of the time, it's very much a 4/10 game for me.

I keep eyeing Forespoken when it's on sale, and it hasn't quite gotten to my threshold yet.

@bigsocrates: Heh, yup, the World of Balan truly is. A Wonder.

Mh, good point regarding Shenmue —I shouldn't have implied it was exactly the same situation— although I do think the game still would've ended up baffling and backwards with the proper budget due to Suzuki's, uh, strong direction. But a more polished baffle.

Regarding Flashback 2, I was going to say "This might be less fun-bad than the other examples," but I did see someone mention that the story, at least, might occasionally be 'so bad it's good.'

Hmmyeah, that might be true about 2D games. Though F2 is not always fully locked to 2 axes, it might be more frustrating in this case since apparently it can be hard to tell when/where/what to interact with. A good time all around with this one.

@apewins: I wouldn't go so far as to say I am MORE drawn to bad games than good ones. I like a mix. I just finished Hi-Fi Rush and I'm playing Like a Dragon Ishin, so the majority of my game time goes to games that I think are at least good, and I even make time for great games once in awhile!

But the bad stuff does tend to b more interesting. Though honestly Hi-Fi Rush is interesting in its own way because of what a throwback it is and the shadow drop etc... However it doesn't really have any decisions around it that are baffling. The decisions all make sense and they work, even if I personally didn't love them all.

The Xbox Series consoles really do have a lot of interesting crap on them. That I 100% agree with. There's no way that Bill Gates' favorite game Fuzion Frenzy would get an actual remaster so having it easily avialable is essential!

@borgmaster: Samsies. At this point I think PS+ is my best bet. I did see it for $17.50 physical and I briefly thought about it, but that's still too much and I don't want a Forspoken disc lying around reminding me of my shame.

@manburger: I agree that Shenmue would inevitably have ended up weird and interesting. The first two games are weird and interesting. I just think it might have been less bad with a bigger budget. There are lots of weird and interesting games that aren't bad. I do think it would have had some bad aspects, but I think it would have been more uneven over anything else.

Flashback 2 sounds like a game that would be fun to watch videos on but not necessarily fun/interesting to play. I often say that if your game is going to be bad at least make it easy. Nothing worse than a frustrating bad game because you push through the frustrating part and end up just getting more bad game to play as your "reward"

@bigsocrates: If you want to play a bad Flashback game with a whole third dimension, I would recommend Fade to Black. It's atrocious.

Is it my imagination or was Fade to Black reviewed favourably at the time?

@shindig: Gamespot gave it a 7.1 and to my memory that's about where it sat, at least as an average, though I think some outfits liked it more and a significant number panned it.