I really like jank games with obscure controls/mechanics or weird elements. Some of them can be considered bad yet be very immersive and make you want to finish them. Examples I like are anything by Kimberley Kubus, or old yoyogames sandbox games. Do you have any games like that? (please no online multiplayer games, I know league of legends is the worst game ever made that you can’t stop playing but that’s not the kind of game I’m looking for 
)
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Joke’s on you, I’ve never played League of Legends and never will!
Anyways, the first game that comes to mind is SNK Vs Capcom Card Fighters DS. It doesn’t seem particularly bad at first glance, but it quickly falls apart as a card game if you poke at it a bit. The balance is completely busted, so much so that I was able to just load my deck entirely with cards that had girls on them with no actual problems, and the entire game is a long grind of repetitive battles with the same few opponents over and over. The localization is also a joke translation, the end result of unprofessional translators getting bored by the standard shonen excuse plot and stuffing in bizarre ad slogans (including Where’s The Beef I kid you not) and dated memes. It’s a genuine mess of a card battle game, where deck building barely matters at all and the “story” is just a string of mind controlled generic kids anime people before reaching the obligitatory poorly explained gimmick villain organization.
I have also poured hundreds of hours into it. The lack of challenge makes it fun in a brainless way to play it over and over, and while the localization is very bad, it doesn’t have the usual joke dub problem of being a cuss filled edgelord parade of bigotry and just comes off as stupidly charming, where I genuinely wanted to see what new lows of dumb it would get to (which did include, if my memory is correct, sneaking in Larry the Cable Guy’s catchphrase, this being way before he came out as a moronic fascist). It’s the perfect melding of dumb and poorly balanced, hitting a sort of zen state for me while I play. The closest comparison I have for this is maybe the original Mass Effect and its wonky mechanics, but that had a lot of good writing and I can say with confidence it is actually good.
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incredible I need to try this on my DS emulator.
Reminds me of the dragonball Z legendary super worriors card game for gameboy color:
very jank but fun to exploit.
We discovered Cardinal Syn through our pod and while it is a janky fighting game it still had a lot of charm and was quite fun.
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The worst game that I nonetheless played a boatload of was Off Road Challenge for the N64. The graphics were hideous, the gameplay was very meh, the challenge was surprisingly hard because it was so difficult to hit the powerups you need to succeed. I played so much of that game when I was tired of other racing games I had, and got pretty good at it eventually. IGN gave it 2.5 out of 10 and even the official N64 magazine review was bad.
California Speed N64 got a lot of bad reviews back then, and IIRC it was missing some of the hotter jams of the arcade version, but how can you really hate a game where you can unlock a track where your giant car just runs over the entire state of California, complete with screaming sound effects when you run over buildings?
(Yes, we all know about that one billboard in the Mojave Desert track.)
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Just posted this in another thread, but The Town With No Name is excellent. Awful, but excellent.
It pains me to see a SNK Vs Capcom Card Fighters game in this thread 
I know allllllll about that one unfortunately.
Give me a drink, bartender
*whoosh*
*CRASH*
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It depends on what the definition of “bad” is. If it’s a game that not a lot of people like, I submit Irritating Stick (Saurus/Jaleco for the original PlayStation). It’s an almost insultingly simple concept with little depth— but that’s why I love it. Oh, and it’s quirky.
Street Sk8er (Microcabin/EA for the original PlayStation) is another example of this.
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Ilum is a boring repetitive game where you do the same thing 100 times in a row for 10+ hours. However it’s also an absurdly detailed 220 square kilometer recreation of ancient Mesopotamia with archaeologically accurate city layouts and tens of thousands of full furnished buildings so it’s kind of also the coolest thing ever.
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i played quest 64 for 18 hours straight last year and i don’t regret it
edit: simon’s quest and castlevania 64 are good too
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It seems like people don’t like the original Rune Factory for the DS, or they like all the other games better, but I still think it’s great. I replayed it recently, and there’s something charming about a game/series finding its legs. It’s broken in fun ways, and it’s probably my favorite DS game.
I like how you don’t need to worry about money once you unlock mining rubies, and that happens pretty early in the game.
You can get the bulk of materials to upgrade your house from a single town event.
I especially like how you can craft a sword that looks suspiciously like Ichigo’s sword in Bleach, and I’m pretty sure the developer gave it way better stats than what the game shows for it. It feels like a fun secret available to anyone who finds the reference. It’s so strong that you can just barrel through the rest of the game with it, and level your character easily. I can’t think of any other games that do something like that.
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The aesthetics alone made me love it. Such a nice blend of cozy and cool
The other games play far better, but i inevitably always come back to this one for its charm
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My pick here is Hyper Light Breaker, but I do not think it was a very bad game, especially the version that launched. I’ve seen pretty much nothing but negative sentiment around this game online, and it’s made me feel kind of crazy. My friends and I were hooked on this game when it dropped. I think the lack of clear onboarding and punishing early game is part of why I liked it so much. It felt very fun to control, play, and grow stronger with, but it was still kicking our butts. But after prat citing, trying things out, learning how the system worked, we started doing better and better, then winning, then fleshing out our upgrades. We ran out of early game content relatively quickly but stopped playing really pleased and excited to see what came next.
What came next was complete changes to the game, totally restructuring it, because player feedback was so vocally negative. Almost all of the mechanics we enjoyed, including the extraction elements (I am normally very unenthused by extraction elements but I was loving it in a purely PvE setting), were gone. It seemed like the players wanted a more traditional roguelite, and Heart Machine wanted to keep the game alive/active/profitable, but after the big changes the game never got a second tailwind and it collapsed. My friends and I went to give it another shot, but we found it really hard to enjoy without the elements that had sunk their teeth in.
It really bummed me out for Heart Machine and definitely increased my ire toward the fans, but I know it was a more complex situation than whatever small glimpse of it I got as a player. I still think that the launch version of the game, friction and all, was something really special.
I absolutely loved Trespasser. The physics, the immersion. The execution is incredibly … interesting!
This is my elevator pitch:
One time I accidentally shot myself in the head while picking up a shotgun in narrow doorway.
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SOLD.
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The objectively correct answer is Two Worlds. It’s the best Oblivion knockoff (before you could know to make a Skyrim knockoff) but also clearly extremely janky and not finished.
You can merge two of the same sword together and it just becomes a stronger version of the sword. I forgot if there’s an upper limit to that at all or if the scaling falls off for weaker stuff. Extremely good “Fuck it I’ll go in this direction and see what happens” type game.
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Starbound. It’s a game so deeply unfinished and terrible on so many fronts. Total overhaul mods like Frackin’ Universe exist to try to make the game make sense and have some flow.
But I like it. It’s fun to run around and do… something. What, I never know. I do appreciate the fact the game actually just works when it comes to multiplayer. No hosting shenanigans for Terraria, you just launch and invite someone. I enjoy building weirder and weirder structures. I just wish the game had more to it at times.
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I liked No Man’s Sky at launch more than I like what it is now.
Also one of my favourite games (Yoda Stories) is probably a bad game to some people, I dunno.
EDIT: I just remembered, I fucking LOVE Virtual Hydlide on the Sega Saturn. It’s a piece of shit, but it’s MY piece of shit!
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