I feel like a lot of the games mentioned so far aren't really shit games, just games that didn't live up to their hype or what people were expecting.
I'm surprised that (unless I missed it) Jurassic Park: Trespasser hasn't been mentioned.
Other than setting the gold standard for what a Let's Play should be, it was really a sorry thing. There was so much promise, and really it feels like there's a pretty good game, somewhere, buried under absolutely broken game design, lies, incomplete features, bugs, and just general incompetence.
It was supposed to be an action-adventure game with a living island with dinosaurs that reacted realistically to the player and each other, an open world, with physics-based gameplay.
We got... Well. Maybe half of that, if we're being very generous.
Early on they had to axe the open world - You were supposed to be able to move around the island, but the island is broken up into little sections that you move through in a very linear fashion - there's a trail, and you follow it. The opportunities to go off the trail are minimal, and you can never backtrack to a previous section. The game only "opens up" a handful of times, in the main town, in the loading docks, etc. The rest of the time you might as well be on rails for all the actual freedom you have.
It IS an action-adventure game... sort of. Well, it's an adventure game. Action is open to interpretation. The controls are incredibly, obnoxiously jank. You know QWOP, and the legion of shitty youtuber-bait games it inspired, like I Am Bread, Mount Your Friends, and most importantly, Surgeon Simulator? Yeah, Tresspasser was way ahead of the curve. You have to interact with the entire world with your mutant noodle-arm which you, very awkwardly, control with the mouse. This includes
all weapons... You have to maneuver your noodle to grab the weapon, then pray like hell you can somehow point it at the enemy you want to shoot, and then shoot. And should you run out of ammo, good luck switching weapons on the fly! And as for melee weapons, wellllll... They're even worse, but don't bother, they're bugged anyway.
The physics based-gameplay IS there, but it's mostly limited to a few set-piece puzzles like "shoot this thing to make it fall over" or "stack these obvious crates here", things like that. Beyond that, it's just an annoyance, frequently glitchy, and it involves using your noodle arm, which is just a nightmare.
And as for the dinosaurs... Hoo. They don't react to shit. The raptors WILL attack you, but they're stupid. There's just a lot of them, and they tend to be bullet spongey. Although thankfully there IS locational damage... IF you can aim well enough to bother. But other than a few scripted events like a t-rex attack here or there, there's no real dynamic behavior. Dinosaurs don't "hunt" you, they rarely interact with each other, etc.
The graphics look okay for the time... Although the island looks pretty sparse. Dinosaurs (the only enemies in the game) have this really weird, slow motion "moving through syrup" look to their motion, and when you kill them they act like a puppet with the strings cut - they just sort of collapse and fold in on themselves.
Here and there the game actually has a few really neat bits. There was a pretty neat sound engine for gunshots, if I remember right. And it was one of the first games to not have a UI... But although that was a neat idea, in practice it just was a pain... To tell how healthy you were you had to look down and stare at the heart tattoo on your boobs, and the only way you knew how much ammo you had in a gun was your character occasionally making voice comments... "Feels full", "Feels almost empty", etc.
But it DID have one hell of a lets play.
I feel like Sims 3 as it is could've been great, but the issue was that the code of the game was way way worse than even the one in Sims 2. Sims 2 already suffered from world corruption, but Sims 3 took it to another level, with mods that could completely break everything, and even worse, add that broken code to every other mod or anything custom made.
And if that wasn't enough, the "load and simulate the entire map at once" idea led to the performance crippling, especially with every new expansion pack, as EA was adding too much and the code was too shoddy to handle it all. Even today, if you install every single possible mod to get the game running better, it will still run worse than Sims 2 without any perfomance tweaks.
It' so bad that there's one expansion pack... Island Life, I think it was called? Whatever, the island one. It's notoriously unplayable for a huge chunk of people. The island map is glitched and it's never been fixed - the game quickly slows to an unplayable crawl. There's been fan attempts to fix it, and they work... sort of. But they're sometimes finnicky and don't work for everyone .
