Subject: Wait, no. The Oregon Trail.
Author:
Posted on: 2015-06-25 18:26:00 UTC
Has anyone ever made it to Oregon without their entire party dying horribly? Because that game traumatized me as a child when I made the mistake of naming everyone after my family.
Then I caught on that I'd never beat the thing and started naming people after various bullies and deliberately making poor decisions. Fun times.
Or, alternately, what's the worst game you have ever seen someone else play?
Mine is...
AIR CONTROL!/u>
It really is quite bad. I wonder if it's actually possible to make a worse game.
I think the worst games I've played/seen are
1. Superman 64
2. Sonic '06
3. Metroid Prime Hunters
I really wonder how people could get interested in Metroid Prime Hunters... I couldn't even figure out what was happening. Sounds like a wonky basis, but it really wasn't good. At all.
Going back to my childhood and the NES.
I give you: Bible Adventures
It consists of three absolutely terrible games, not because of the subject matter, but because the gameplay is just boring, repetitive, and stupid. Seriously, in the David and Goliath game, you start by herding sheep. Noah's Ark is one giant fetch quest where you carry around a stack of animals above your head. Terrible.
On the other hand, the same company produced a game called Exodus which was actually pretty all right. It had a level of complexity and difficulty that was nice.
-Phobos
I know Noah lived a long time; I didn't realise he was actually Superman. ^_^
Also, I see from the front cover that Goliath was a Roman legionary. And also that he was about the same size as Moses. New headcanon: Goliath wasn't tall, it's just that David was a pixie. 'Sling' is a typo for 'wings'.
hS
The Hebrew word for sling is 'קלע' (Kela'). The Hebrew word for wings is 'כנפיים' (Knafayim). It simply... doesn't work.
We have lotsa puns, they're just different puns. Like puns on having mercy and lettuce (because those two words sound very similar).
Here's an unrelated pun for you as compensation: Tea-ology, the theology of tea.
Where one of the Ten Commandments was "Thou shalt commit adultery".
There's always time for a reprint, lads. =]
The plot is nice and clear, at any rate:
The magician Saul (well, he does summon the dead...!) bargains with David, taking him on as his fairy servant. David defeats Saul's enemies for him and secures his place as king - but Saul should've known better than to trust a fairy. Before too many more years have passed, David has befriended Saul's favourite son - and managed to get himself declared Saul's heir. When Saul and his sons all die in the same battle (which isn't suspicious at all), the fairy servant becomes king over Israel.
Which probably explains why, a few generations later, most of the country schisms away... would you want to live on under a fairy dynasty?
(All in silly fun, I hope.)
hS
Because in the book, it's mentioned that a few people were actually magicians before the time of the Aureates (the Golden Age of English magic, during the first reign of the Raven King). One of them was Joseph of Arimathea, who in the books had a chat with the Glastonbury Thorn in addition to planting it. =]
And since fairies in JS&MN generally look to humans to figure out what to do (the show makes the Gentleman with Thistle-Down Hair a lot more overtly villainous than he is in the book), humans tend to remain in charge even in fairy brughs - which is probably where the Raven King got so much of his power from. Most, if not all, of the Aureate magicians had at least a few fairy-servants. Some had more. Lots more. Fairies are just better at magic than humans are, because they can talk to the landscape properly while humans don't think it's really possible.
Now, another interesting crossover would be JS&MN/Harry Potter. I'd be interested to see how well English magic can fare against Death Eaters, considering its long and storied history. But then, would the Raven King not have tried to squash Tom Riddle flat the moment he started trying to kill his subjects? Remember that during the Aureate period (roughly 1066-14XX) the north of England was basically a separate country with the Raven King's capital at Newcastle...
Hm. This needs further thought. =]
But about my main genre, car racing games, I guess it is the critically acclaimed Need For Speed Shift (and its sequel).
I wonder if the "racing drivers" who reviewd the game as being a realistic simulation have ever driven a car in their life.
Long story short, handling is terrible. A full race-spec car on slick tyres handles like a brick on soap wheels. Steering is incredibly inconsistent too - cars will either refuse to steer or go on a full four-wheel drift. No mid way in between. I initally thought it was due to me using a keyboard, but after hooking up my steering wheel to the PC results were the same.
Tuning is pretty inconsistent either - I can swap a fully tuned 800 horsepower Toyota Supra engine on a "works" (full race tuned) Toyota Corolla GT-S (basically a Super GT GT300 class car), and yet I can't set the top speed any higher than the non-swapped Trueno's 264 kph... meaning that the engine is stuck with the wrong gearing and the car is actually SLOWER.
A stock-bodied (so basically no aerodinamics aside a small optional spoiler with... 20 kilograms or so of downforce) Toyota Sprinter Trueno (Japanese Domestic Market equivalent of the Corolla GT-S) tuned to 240 horsepower in Gran Turismo will consistently set faster lap times on the Nurburgring Nordshleife than the GT300 wide bodied, full aero, 350 horsepower full-on race car Shift offers.
This:
Is faster than this:
That's all.
...it's Sonic '06. I haven't actually played it, but from what I can tell, it's horribly cliched and involves a Canon Sue.
They do an even worse job of retelling the book, and don't even get me started on the ridiculous Shrieking Shack level with the charmed skeletons.
"We've got an injured boy who has to drag himself into and out of this place every month! Let's litter it with pitfalls and monsters that try to attack everything they see! That's a good idea, right? RIGHT?"
Maybe I'm being nitpick compared to everyone else, but Rowling, I loathed that game.
On the flip side, I love the LEGO Harry Potter games. The LEGO games are always awesome.
Has anyone ever made it to Oregon without their entire party dying horribly? Because that game traumatized me as a child when I made the mistake of naming everyone after my family.
Then I caught on that I'd never beat the thing and started naming people after various bullies and deliberately making poor decisions. Fun times.
I should note that I played the fancy "new" version, where you just recruited a bunch of people to join your wagon and there were actual graphics. I have a feeling the difficulty may not have been as high. That said, I would start a new game if anything too bad happened to my party, and I went through a lot of games...
If you liked Oregon Trail, there's this game on Steam that's basically Oregon Trail as a side scrolling game with a plot written by a hyper imaginative 8-year-old. (Which actually works surprisingly well)
While I don't really have one in particular, my two worst games have got to be Guise of the Wolf and Zoo Race. The first has shitty graphics, horrible scenery coding, a crappy attempt at a jumpscare, sound effects that actually loop over each other, and a stupidly difficult first freaking level that includes several instant-death traps right behind a surprisingly difficult maneuvering puzzle that's made even harder by clumsy controls and hitboxes for obstacles that don't even work properly. But that's not the worst thing about this 'game,' oh no. The worst thing is that the developers of the game actually *threatened to sue a critic who gave it a bad review, essentially trying to quell dissenters, dictator-style.* Given that the critic in question, TotalBiscuit, not only has access to that lawyers of Polaris, a company owned by mother...ing Disney, but has a degree in law. That's basically like trying to fight a battleship with nothing but a slingshot and a claim that you're invincible.
The second is another Bible game centered around Noah's Ark, but you actually don't even get to see the ark. No, no, no: you play as one of four people transformed into badly textured animals by God himself to reenact animal races that Noah had in Biblical times. Note: the game never actually tells you this. I had to figure that out myself from the terribly animated and voice-acted cutscene. I found a review for it online by Jontron, which goes over this piece of shit's problems far better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2av978FgLI
As for worse games, well, Stuart Ashens has a series about them, but the worst game I've ever played was probably Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the PS1. It was very definitely Not Very Good, and it's based on my least favourite of the Harry Potter novels.
And that horrible bloody segment with the cat can DIE IN ALL THE FIRES-
Really, Stu should do more Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of.