Shit games that could have been good

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

What'd they fuck up, Jim Sterling?
Not saying there's nothing wrong with the game, but that is very orange man bad of you

Nigger, what the fuck is this suppose to mean?

 

[Sultan Bin Jewstar]

Nigger, what the fuck is this suppose to mean?

Why was it bad
Use words
Tell us why it was bad

 

[JVTim112]

Chrono Cross

There's a good story potentially in there, but the pacing is all over the place. The story needed a few more passes to fix where you learn things and remove some dumb additions. The story hook of exploting what happened to all the timelines that got fucked with by crono and crew was a good one, but it had a lot of trouble conveying anything clearly. Drop the clone daughter schala thing, and don't relegate the entire story to exposition by Belthazar. I don't even mind that crono's crew is dead or massively screwed over in the two timelines Serge can access because Dalton of all people never got killed. Though in true Dalton fashion they should've had him start Porre's military and end up getting betrayed and killed by his own men(Like have Viper realize he's a moron and just end him). Just make it clear that these aren't the only 2 timelines, since trigger had like 15 endings. The dragons plotline also needed a bit more work. Lastly don't make party characters that you aren't willing to write stuff for. So many of them are just the same exposition but with a different accent with no real tie to the story.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Dark Void. Jetpack mechanics were amazing and so was the established world, set pieces, levels and mindblowingly incredible combat, but they apparently ran out of budget and had to stitch toogether whatever they had left leaving the game a discombobulated mess of pure nonsense story wise that could have been so much more.

To this day dark void is the best jetpack game to ever come out.

 

[Need for Sped]

A 1920s setting would have been perfect for the next game in the series, but the devs liked their story too much for that to happen and opted for a direct sequel instead. What's interesting to me is that the devs have taken another setting that would have been great for a game in the series, 1940s Los Angeles, and used it for an upcoming game about managing a film studio. It's a kind of game that's been tried before of course, but this looks less like seeing characters flail around like in The Movies, and much more in line with the gameplay of This is the Police.
At first glance, it looks interesting - but I would not be surprised to learn that the devs fall into the same pitfalls of yore. One of my main problems with the story of This is the Police was how rapidly it swung between whacky hijinks and super serious mode. Some stuff in their trailer, like how you can indulge a movie star's vices to curry favour with them, seems to suffer from the same problem:

It goes straight from "referential humour" to "realistic and mundane" to "wacky fantasy" to, well, I don't think the last one needs to be explained. I'll give the game a once-over when it releases, but sadly I expect it to be another game with good ideas but poor execution.

For what is worth, I've been playing a game that was written by the same writers of TiTP, which is basically the same idea, but with you being the US president (This is the President), and it has the exact same problem, probably even worse:
You have no idea who you are, literally. At some points, you hear things like you've been involved in a gay relationship with a nigger at some point, or that you and your wife have a hidden son, or that you might have murdered someone at some point, and it gets thrown on your lap just like that.
The tone is also all over the fucking place. It constantly pinballs from serious, to satire, to retarded. In a single turn, you can get events ranging from:
1) A military submarine on a secret mission has sunk in Cuban waters, and you have to choose whether to rescue them or not, and deal with the diplomatic fallout that follows.
2) Investigating a rash of sudden maternity leaves from the White House cleaning staff. Turns out they take part in orgies in a mansion somewhere outside DC, which your VP also attends; you have to shut it down, as discreetly as possible.
3) A new brand of cocaine is making its way into the US, with two variants: A high-quality one, named after the previous president, and a lower-quality one, named after your VP. This clearly cannot stand, so you have to sabotage the higher quality version somehow, so your VP's name stays on top (Yes, it's literally this).

I get that the US presidency and US politics in general are some of the most fertile ground ever when it comes to satire, and that some levity from time to time might be needed so the tone doesn't get way too dour, but this is moronic. Both TiTP and TiTP2 handled this balance way better.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Leaving aside the craziness of a black woman in 1972 not only being in university

???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelman_College

1881

 

[General Emílio Médici]

???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelman_College

1881

Her being enrolled alone isn't unrealistic. The insane part here is the combination of her being enrolled + on a exchange programs in some latin american shithole + not leaving when the civil war starts + taking up cleaning lady job + being somehow trusted to do that job enough by random high rank people to be allowed to do so alone on literal nothing.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Her being enrolled alone isn't unrealistic. The insane part here is the combination of her being enrolled + on a exchange programs in some latin american shithole + not leaving when the civil war starts + taking up cleaning lady job + being somehow trusted to do that job enough by random high rank people to be allowed to do so alone on literal nothing.

I get you, I agree, making it an American doesn’t make sense and does t add anything.

 

[sillybillyguy]

Alone in the Dark on PS3/360/PC. If that game only had 9-12 months more development time...

It was an open world horror game, with vehicles, side quests and several men's restrooms to explore.
View attachment 4415332

There's often several solutions to obstacles and if you come up with a solution it will probably work. This one just shows metal conducting electricity.
View attachment 4415336
There's also realtime lighting, not that fancy, but some enemies(the ooze) cannot move into the light and this creates an interesting puzzle. In a pitch black sewer environment, how can you use what you have to create light in such a way that you don't cast a shadow? (that's one of the oooh moments in the game)

Fire! Just light shit on fire, fire that spreads!
View attachment 4415328
Is there a wooden door in your way and you don't have a key? Light it on fire! Be careful with that. Like I said, it spreads to other flammable materials...
View attachment 4415356
Or if you have something heavy you can just break the door to pieces, pieces that can then be used as melee weapons. I had a great moment where I got corned by enemies, ran into a bathroom, kicked the toilet stall into pieces and used one to beat the shit out of the enemy pursuing me.
This also works for metal doors except it is a slow process. They don't splinter or break, instead they dynamically deform depending on where you hit them.

Crafting before crafting was gay.
View attachment 4415340

Despite all of this the game is not good... I still love it though, it was almost there.

I played this a lot and really liked it until the more clunky game mechanics and story made me put it down. It also had this cool TV style "Previously on" clip show whenever you loaded your save.

I remember it being the first game of that era that actually felt next gen in its graphics.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Not a game but more like... one specific mechanic within a game. I started playing Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey again. Great game if you understand what you're getting into (it's supposed to be a game of curiosity/discovery by fucking around, and people went in not realizing how much you have to shift your way of thinking to that). But the core hominid-breeding mechanics suck.

You have this thing where you're basically trying to just level up your monkes. It's all dressed up with neuroscience and evolution babble, but at the end of the day its an RPG skill tree. Hominids have age cohorts, baby, adult, elder. Adults can couple up and breed two babies. You're limited to six total of any cohort at a time, advancing a generation swaps the cohorts (elders die, adults become elders, babies become adults). The reason you advance a generation is that it locks in your skill progression.

The way all of this done is in the most annoying, tedious way, though. You have to go pick some bugs off their back, then lure them over to the bed to shag, then skip the baby cutscene, then get the baby to jump on your back which, due to the presence of the bed, will tend to involve some awkward camera wiggling. You have to do this three times for each three couples. The problem is that while this isn't especially long, you do this A LOT (imagine doing this whenever you'd "level up" in another game), and there is no incentive whatsoever, as far as I am aware, to play the game in any other way. You level up faster the more babies you have with you. Your troop is more intimidating to animals, can carry more tools/supplies, can help each other the more you have. There are some specific circumstances where you might justify having, say, a duo of elders go on a deep scouting mission, but in general, nope. You are going to want all six babies all of the time, and that means every single time you have to go through the whole rigamarole.

I was thinking, how do you make this less obnoxious, and the answer I came to is this. You come across other hominids out in the world. They're just there as replacements for ones that die; you have to interpret their body language and bring them something specific and they join you. What the game should have done was made those hominids much more rare and have an incentive for breeding your troop with them, like being worth three times what an in-troop baby is worth. Then you've got a very real trade off between churning out more generations (level up faster) or spending time searching (level up better). And they might have made some kind of mechanic where you do want to lock in the pregnancy as soon as you can, but you benefit more if you can arrange something like a good habitat (to abstract the time skip) or something, so you don't just jump straight from shagging to birth.

The whole thing was ill-conceived.

 

[Kurt Eichenwald]

Planet Zoo would have been pretty cool if most of the content wasn't spread out across seventeen $10 DLCs.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Alone in the Dark on PS3/360/PC. If that game only had 9-12 months more development time...

It was an open world horror game, with vehicles, side quests and several men's restrooms to explore.
View attachment 4415332

There's often several solutions to obstacles and if you come up with a solution it will probably work. This one just shows metal conducting electricity.
View attachment 4415336
There's also realtime lighting, not that fancy, but some enemies(the ooze) cannot move into the light and this creates an interesting puzzle. In a pitch black sewer environment, how can you use what you have to create light in such a way that you don't cast a shadow? (that's one of the oooh moments in the game)

Fire! Just light shit on fire, fire that spreads!
View attachment 4415328
Is there a wooden door in your way and you don't have a key? Light it on fire! Be careful with that. Like I said, it spreads to other flammable materials...
View attachment 4415356
Or if you have something heavy you can just break the door to pieces, pieces that can then be used as melee weapons. I had a great moment where I got corned by enemies, ran into a bathroom, kicked the toilet stall into pieces and used one to beat the shit out of the enemy pursuing me.
This also works for metal doors except it is a slow process. They don't splinter or break, instead they dynamically deform depending on where you hit them.

Crafting before crafting was gay.
View attachment 4415340

Despite all of this the game is not good... I still love it though, it was almost there.

I've played alone in the dark, that game was unironically extremely kino but people hated it because it was associated with the alone in the dark franchise. Had they named it lightbringer it would have been way more sucessful I think, that game was genuinely way ahead of its time.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Planet Zoo would have been pretty cool if most of the content wasn't spread out across seventeen $10 DLCs.

It also would have been cool if animals can kill your park visitors.

 

[Two Dollars]

Sonic Superstars is a recent but huge example.

• Center the camera on the player so you're not constantly hit by obstacles that are offscreen despite being two feet away from you
• Make the enemies/interactable objects pop out more against the environment so they don't blend in
• Remove the bosses' absurd amount of post-hit i-frames that prevent you from hitting them multiple times
• Make the bosses' attacks more telegraphed like every other Sonic game and don't randomly make them insta-kill
• Get rid of Jun Senoue
• Cut the battle mode costumes prices in half

Done. Now one of the worst 2D Sonics is one of the best.

 

[Croaking Spider]

Warhammer 40K Eternal Crusade.

The game was meant to be an MMO third-person shooter in the same vein as something like Planetside. They intended to have large-scale combat that would have multi-way fights between the factions. They claimed there would be "battlefields with 1,000 players". Each faction had unique traits, weapons and vehicles that were more attuned to that race's specialty. They also claimed that the Tyranid would be included and serve as a PvE faction.

Unfortunately, the game was developed by a studio who had only made movie-to-game adaptations. The development process itself was hell and the studio head was really bad about saying "yes" to every suggestion from their community, ever expanding the scope of the project. To this day I'll never know if Miguel Caron is one of the best bullshit salesman in the gaming industry or if he genuinely sincerely believed the shit that came out of his mouth. I can't peg him to Randy Pitchford level of shitheelery though. I feel bad for Nathan Richardson stepping in to take over after Miguel's job was "made redundant". It was tragically funny watching him talk the fanbase down from Miguel's promises. Poor bastard didn't stand a chance.

As of now, the official game is dead, but the player community is trying to breathe some life into a community-owned private server. Shame too, I think it really could have been something great, but under experience and over ambition killed it. Warhammer fans just can't have nice things when it comes to video games.

I'm somewhat still salty over this one. I had a small friend group that kept up with every update over the years and got behind it early. Considering we got burned on both this and Firefall around the same time, we were pretty blackpilled on gaming for a while.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The Crew is godawful and I finally uninstalled it. I did it after driving all the way from Washington DC to Dallas to Salt Lake City and feeling nothing.

I can't really critique as it a racing game because that's not a genre I have experience with. At the time I first played it I did give it, its world, its story an effort. Arcade racing gamers may have found it worthwhile for its MMO concept (though I can't see why) or found it novel for its road tripping setting. But I got it FOR the road tripping setting, and its just horrible.

The scale was always going to be an issue. I've entertained the idea that things like American Truck Simulator could have racing built in, at least as DLC or an exploitative spinoff using similar maps, but I don't know that it would really work. I assume the truck simulator games achieve 1/20 scale because they stick purely to interstates (eliminating most actually interesting urban and rural roads) and by having everything strictly off the road itself be just wallpaper.

There used to be a bunch of morons on GTAForums that were always suggesting retarded ideas for GTA: USA and such. I realized it's not actually that impractical. You build this world, even with pedestrians, anyways, there's no reason to not just throw guns and the ability to get out of your car anyways. Or better cars. I hate the way the car chases uses fantasy EMPs and bullshit instead of having natural chase breakers in it. Study old movie/TV car chases, like 70s era, and you could see the makings of a much better game.

The roadtripping is ass when it doesn't bother giving flavor text to anything. You have these landmarks to uncover, but the landmarks are things like an entire city, not a building. It takes literally no effort to have the office sperg just write up text. You get to Salt Lake City and it absically just says "city with an economy built around skiing." Doesn't mention the giant fucking temple in it, for example.

Overall, it's just complete piss.

 

[Level99Manchild]

AEW: Fight Forever would have been cool if Aew wasn't a woke trash fire of a wrestling show, and the game didn't take 4 years to come out as a giant turd. Play-testing the game, less or no shitty mini-games, better character/game customization, and not trying to 200% copy an old wrestling game only 5 pedoneckbeard smarks cared about would have helped too. Oh yea, keeping Aubrey Edwards and Evil Uno away from development would have helped too.

Eh who am I kidding? Even with these changes I still wouldn't have bought it because it's Aew, one of the biggest woke trash fires that came out of prowrestling.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It's even better: in the game this is a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY STUDENT NEGRESS! Leaving aside the craziness of a black woman in 1972 not only being in university but also doing a exchange to a country and not immediately GTFO'ing out of a civil war but somehow doing a job as a cleaning lady to "survive" instead of just asking to leave and the embassy helping her out. My idea would have a actual local woman not this.

As the BroTeam clip said: "Shit is so pretentious it gave me a film school degree."

This doesn't have any political/espionage angle to it but it sounds like something you might find interesting, in terms of being a period piece where a woman snoops on people.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1243850/This_Bed_We_Made/

 

[Friendly Primarina]

The scale was always going to be an issue. I've entertained the idea that things like American Truck Simulator could have racing built in, at least as DLC or an exploitative spinoff using similar maps, but I don't know that it would really work. I assume the truck simulator games achieve 1/20 scale because they stick purely to interstates (eliminating most actually interesting urban and rural roads) and by having everything strictly off the road itself be just wallpaper.

FWIW ATS does include roads other than interstates. SCS try to capture the "feel" of a road when they build it. If there's a particular turn or landmark that gives the road character, that will be included. You get the impression reading their blog that SCS are very, very passionate about their work. For example this road on Route 66:

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Planet Zoo would have been pretty cool if most of the content wasn't spread out across seventeen $10 DLCs.

When planet Zoo came out I had Kidney Stones and spent an autistic amount of time building a hyper detailed food court.