So Bad It's Good/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


YOU'RE WINNER!

"I'm glad I got this... because, it's fun. Not fun as in good, fun as in 'fun seeing all the horrible stuff on here'."

"Not content with just creating an NES-style game, Capcom has also created some NES-style artwork for Mega Man 9. And by NES-style art, we mean it's so intentionally bad that it's good."
—Sidebar in Nintendo Power v. 233

Yeah, okay, we know these games aren't very good, but at least you can derive some entertainment from the unintentional comedy they bring.

If you don't want to subject yourself to the actual gameplay, you're in luck, as most of these are perfect Let's Play fodder.

Hardcore Gaming 101's Weekly Kusoge feature conveniently gives a long overview of this type of game. Many of them are even intentionally so bad it's good, and many might very well already appeared below.

Examples of So Bad It's Good in Video Games include:

Games

  • Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. So awful it's too funny to be in the horrible section. The game pioneered innovative gameplay features such as an opponent who never moved (if you get the patch he moves very slowly but never crosses the finish line), the ability to randomly go through scenery (or fall through the level), a track that crashed the game when loaded, the ability to accelerate backwards infinitely, climb the steepest mountains with almost no loss of speed and go outside the level's boundary. As a result, the game's ending sequnce is easily the best part of the game. The GameFAQs board is a joke board devoted solely to BEING WINNER and declaring this game WINNER !
    • And rejoicing about how the LOSER HWSNBN got fired.
  • Street Cleaning Simulator[1] is rapidly building a similar ironic fandom, thanks to its sloppy implementation of a rather boring subject matter.
  • Target: Terror. The first time you shoot a terrorist in the junk in this arcade shooter, you'd understand how awesome it is. And in Gold Edition you get a score bonus for doing it enough times. The Wii port, on the other hand...
    • Just the blood and gore of killing a terrorist in a time where we are reluctant to make such games in a humorous fashion is going to be somewhat good.
  • Similar to the above, Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror, paints a rather dismal and menacing military subject in a completely new light, with horribly outdated character models, copious amounts of gangster rap, and (even though the rest of the game is a First Person Shooter) martial arts battles against the bosses for no reason. The result is so hilarious that after playing it, you might crack up every time you see any picture of Osama Bin Laden anywhere.
  • Sprung earns the So Bad It's Good title by making itself a Dating Sim - only to give you a Nonstandard Game Over when Brett scores a threesome, and having to do absurd tasks like speaking to a Cow-headed Hippie (no, seriously), and the fact you win the final round by a coin toss, regardless of all the decisions you made in previous rounds.
  • Any video game made by Phoenix Games, whose amazing incompetent feats of video games have to be seen to be believed.
    • Animal Soccer World, one of Phoenix's titles, deserves a special mention. It's not actually a game, really, just a cartoon with a few minigames thrown in. The animation's bad, but the dubbing is even worse; it seems to be improvised by a couple Dutch guys who aren't entirely fluent in English, with no attention paid to Mouth Flaps whatsoever. It has to be seen to be believed.
    • Animal Soccer World isn't the only "game" guilty of this. There are several other "Cartoon Movies" packaged with minigames that Phoenix created, such as Mouse Police and Son of the Lion King, complete with the same unintentionally hilarious dubbing, the same footage from Dingo Pictures, and, occasionally, Obligatory Swearing.
    • Their rendition of Peter Pan, dubbed from something other than Dingo Pictures for a change, has one (very bored-sounding) man doing everyone's voices regardless of gender. It's as hilariously awful as it sounds.
    • Their actual games are little better - London Cab Challenge (a Crazy Taxi clone) has cars that are little more than cuboids on wheels, a draw distance so near that you can't even see the car in front, spectacularly bad physics, glitchtastic collision detection and spectacularly bad AI. And that's on the Playstation 2 version.
  • The Freespace 2 user-made campaign Second Great War Part II is considered one of the worst among the Freespace community. Supposedly set after the FS2 main campaign, it has so many plot holes and isn't even consistent with the universe it's set in. But there are so many ships present in every mission (Freespace players call this the Battle of Endor Syndrome) that there's so many things to blow up, it becomes kind of fun. You get to singlehandedly take down half a dozen squadrons and 10 cruisers and stuff, just destroying stuff for the heck of it.
  • The Postal series by Running With Scissors, most especially the second game, which got negative reviews not only for its technical issues, but also its Black Comedy. Quotes from these scathing reviews were included on the box for the Postal Fudge Pack collection. Aside from that, it's the only game where you can urinate on Gary Coleman, and shove cats onto gun barrels.
  • Wacky anti-Chinese propaganda SNES game Hong Kong 97 is a terrible shooter with photographed graphics all taken from various parts of Chinese culture. It's intended to mock the Chinese government, but the gameplay is horrible. It's been reviewed here.
  • Kart Fighter. Yes, it's unlicensed and has crappy graphics, but how many NES Fighting Games (other than Street Fighter) would allow the player to perform hadouken motions? It's also one of the few games barring the Super Smash Bros. series where you could have Mario Kart characters physically beat each other up, and better than most other NES fighting games out there.
  • The games by Artix Entertainment probably wouldn't be the same to some players without the puns. And trust me, the creators make sure that you know that they are aware of how many of them they make.
  • The makers of the Philips CD-I licensed characters from Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda for a number of games: Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces Of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure. They were produced without input from the original creators, and are unanimously considered non-canonical. The gameplay is generally considered to be slow, monotonous and unfairly difficult, but the infamy comes from the laughably bad cutscenes. They are, depending on opinion, Narmishly hilarious with every line a meme ("Mah boi, this peace is what all true warriors strive for?", "I wonder what's for dinner..." and "Nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic, Gay Luigi![2]"), or horrifying (the animation was nightmarishly poor).
    • There is also I.M. Meen, animated by the same people responsible for the above. The gameplay itself was pretty lackluster, but the crazy personality of the titular Big Bad, I.M. Meen, makes the game endlessly entertaining.
      • There's also Mutant Rampage Body Slam, which features the same kind of horrible animation along with terrible racial stereotypes, a stupid premise and repetitive dialogues.
  • BloodRayne, a franchise about a half-vampire woman who fights other vampires and Those Wacky Nazis, often fighting enemies that are both. It's gory, it's cheesy, it makes no sense, the protagonist is an exhibitionist to say the least, and it has become a Cult Classic for all those reasons. As Giant Bomb explains, "the franchise features supernatural vampire-on-Nazi violence, bizarre plots to destroy the world, and a focus on overt gore and the sexuality of its female protagonist" which is what makes it popular, it seems.
  • Mario Is Missing, the MS-DOS version in particular. It's so bad it unleashed Weegee upon the world. What makes it even wor--er, "better" is that it was supposed to be Luigi's grand debut as a main character.
  • Zoo Race, a completely mediocre racing game with a less-than-subtle Christian message. Yet there's so much about it that makes it unintentionally hilarious, such as the Nightmare Fuel that is Rueban, horses being shot out of cannons and the fact that the race announcer is God, while seemingly stoned.
  • Frontlines: Fuel of War would be just another mediocre military FPS if it wasn't for the absolutely hilarious graphical glitches. Hundreds of flying hats, anyone?
  • Chaos Wars has a hilariously bad English dub, which is the result of a CEO hiring his family members to do the dubbing job. It has attracted the game lots of attention and is always good for a laugh. The voice acting makes everyone sound like they're stoned.
    • And a hilariously bad localization effort, too. For example, every "Breath" attack was translated as "Bless". So watch out for those dragons and their "Fire Bless". And the card game "Rebirth Moon" was translated as "Reverse Moon" despite there being an English translation on the logo displayed where they wrote this.
  • Dawn of War: Soulstorm has spawned dozens of memes because of its hilariously bad writing and voice acting, of which "SPESS MEHREENS!" and "METAL BOXES!" are only the tip of the iceberg. See They Just Didn't Care for more information.
  • The monstrosity that is Ninjabread Man which somehow managed to get a large fanbase on the cover art alone.
  • The Celebrity Deathmatch video game.
  • Samurai Zombie Nation
  • A single black pixel. That's all. Ladies and gentlemen, Spot the Dot.
  • Home Improvement on the SNES. You play as Tim Taylor, collecting power tools and other related things as you battle dinosaurs and such. It feels like Tim Taylor himself designed the game. It didn't even come with an instruction manual, merely saying, before the title, "Real men don't need instructions."
  • Final Fight Streetwise. The graphics were terrible, the "zombie druggie" story-line was unnecessary, you can't play as Cody, Haggar or Guy in single player and except for the increase in bad language the game feels lackluster overall. However, the pit fights were great, the overreaching story harkens back to Final Fights of long ago, and the surprise final boss and (relatively) happy ending make it worth playing.
  • Mortal Kombat had many clones, with various degrees of success. Among those that are bad, there are many that are a great source of it. This doesn't apply to all of them, since there are some (like Kasumi Ninja) that don't have anything fun in particular, or others (like Shadow War of Succession) that are just plain horrible. If you want to see MK clones, just see the Follow the Leader section in the Mortal Kombat page.
    • Primal Rage would just be another generic fighting game if wasn't so stupid-awesome. In it, the dinosaurs went extinct because a wizard from another dimension imprisoned one of their gods in the moon. An asteroid hits the Earth, releases the ancient dinosaur gods, rearranges the continents into a T. rex skull, and turns the Earth into the Grimdark post-apocalyptic "Urth." Throw in some Gorn, an ape who uses various bodily functions as weapons, and the ability to eat your worshippers while playing, and you've got the coolest game ever.
    • Both of Strata's fighting games (Time Killers and Blood Storm) just have to count. Both are attempts at creating a Bloodier and Gorier rival to Mortal Kombat, and both fall flat on their face because of horrible graphics, terrible sound, and piss-poor gameplay. And yet, this was the first fighting game to let you chop off people's limbs...and keep hacking it out. Time Killers would even let you cut off someone's head at any point in the match with just a single button press. Blood Storm was more of the same, but now you could cut off someone's lower body. If they still had some health left, they could still move around by sliding on their exposed entrails. It's just so incredibly stupid and immature it suddenly becomes hilariously awesome.
  • Speaking of Strata, Ninja Clowns is a Beat'Em Up involving two clowns trying to stop a villain named Twisto from causing a Zombie Apocalypse, but you don't really fight any zombies whatsoever (Save for one in the first level). Your enemies consist of (but not limited to) lawyers, hippies, girl scouts who throw cookies and ElvisImpersonators. The bosses are more odd, such as a bowler, a chicken who sqauts and fires eggs, and a spider explodes into green popcorn when defeated. To get health, you have to punch hobos or mimes so they drop hot dogs and pizza, and besides your punches and kicks, you can attack with pies, tomatoes and spray bottles. But it is playable if you can get past the absurdity and stereotypes.
  • Rumble Roses. Says Noble Savage Aigle, "Cowgirl has teats more magnificent than my sheep!" Oddly enough, it is a solid game, especially compared to the generally low-quality wrestling games of the time, and it is presented well, but conceptually it's just so mind-bogglingly terrible that it seems much worse than it is.
  • P.N.03 for the Game Cube, a.k.a. "Striptease: The Game", a massive blob of Fan Service disguised as a Third-Person Shooter. Every move the female protagonist does is designed to show off her lovingly crafted behind, and it seems she can't even shoot without moving her behind like a stripper, or groupie in a rap video. In the cutscenes, on the other hand, she's constantly snapping her fingers, bobbing her head, and tapping her feet like she's got some awesome dance tune blazing through her invisible headphones or something. The voice acting is goofy, and the protagonist has a horrible... it's really not clear what her accent is. To top it all off, the plot is a Sci Fi Cliché Storm that can't decide if it wants to rip off Metal Gear Solid, or Metroid. The ending should tell you everything you need to know. She kills a giant robot by snapping her fingers, finds out she's a clone of her employer, and then dances. Roll credits.
    • It should come as no surprise that the creators would later go on to make Bayonetta.
  • Two Worlds would be an otherwise generic Elder Scrolls clone, were it not for the fact that it appears to be as deliberately bad as possible and still be (just) playable. From the character creation screen (sliders that do next to nothing, manipulating an image too small to make out at standard definition), to the fantasy Cliché Storm, to the hammiest voice acting ever with Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and no respect for natural diction or pronunciation (wonderfully MSTed by Escapist Magazine). You'll realize something is amiss about five minutes in when the onscreen text tells you to "arm yourselve." If that doesn't raise warning flags, just wait until the townsfolk start mispronouncing words.

Hushhhh... They will not... find us! insuchastormasthis. YOU must rest.
Nay. Too many have died already. 'Tis an accursed place that is.

    • The character's speech is no better. This gem is announced on contact with water.

Mmm... WET.

    • That's not even scratching the surface of all the subtle stupidities that make that game so awesomely horrible:
      • The evil threatening the land is called The Taint. The number of accidental innuendos this causes is quite simply ridiculous.
      • Artificial Stupidity on a truly epic level. It is actually possible to get an archer to jump off a cliff by moving gradually closer to him while he backs up to get into range to shoot at you.
      • If you kill someone in a building and their body lands near the wall, their head will be sticking out outside of the building.
      • At one point along the road you'll notice all the trees have, for no apparent reason, become bamboo. You enter the city, and BAM! you're in Japan. Japan, where everyone has horrible accents (which clash amazingly with the "fare thee well" dialogue - you haven't lived until you hear a man say "mayhap a bandit methinks!?" in an accent lifted from 1940s Yellow Peril movies). Japan, where everyone has names like "Mako Yamamokuzi" and speaks in great stereotypical monologues about honor and their ancestors. Japan, where the shops only sell katanas. The kicker to all of this? Every citizen of the city, except for the mayor, nobility, and other important figures, has black skin!
      • In the forest of dead trees you see a wizard in a hut, clearly a side-quest, except it's impossible to get because he will get jumped by a crap-load of enemies that come out of nowhere, and after trying about seven times, you realize it's impossible to stop them from killing him, thus you'll never know what the quest was.
      • Another side-quest involves gathering flowers for a lisping Camp Gay artist with an obvious crush on you.
      • A broken "alchemy" system where any potion you make is more likely to poison you than heal you.
      • You can get access to a "horse" (some of them are undead, or scaly, or whatever), but the controls are impossible, turning is very awkward, especially when in a full gallop. So if you push the gallop button, you'll find yourself saying "Okay turn. Turn. TURN! Gah! What are you doing?! Get back on the road you stupid horse! How do you stop this thing?!" By the time you figure out how to stop the horse from running, you're probably on the other side of wherever you were aiming to go.
      • After gathering all the pieces of the Artifact of Doom, you take them to where they're to be forged, and you get ready for a cutscene, as they say "get ready, there will be much lightning during the ceremony." Except there is no cutscene. It just jumps to "Forsooth! I can't believe he betrayed me! Now I have to stop that pentagram that appeared in the sky of else some vague doom will befall the land!"
      • Oh, there's a cutscene. However, it is definitely as cheesy and as stupid as the description sounds.
      • About 90% of the enemies you face will either be wild animals (like bears and wolves) or skeletons.
      • And to top it all off, the title lies. You only visit one world.
    • And yet somehow, it still manages to be addictive, despite being full of bugs, plot holes, and ridiculously illogical moments of stupidity.
    • Two Worlds 2 not only failed to fix any of the issues of the original, but somehow managed to be worse. How bad? many of the items are called by their file names in the inventory menu screen. That's right. The programmers where so lazy they forgot to input item names.
      • Or maybe they just went "Forget it! It's not like this game's gonna be any good anyway".
      • They've also added baboons that throw their feces at you as an enemy.
  • Kids' Tetris. Mouse controls, a mode that deals out two-block pieces, and "YOU'VE GOT TALENT, KIDDO! YES YOU DO!" "GREAT! YOU'VE WON Tetris!"
  • Snake's Revenge is a rejected chapter from the Metal Gear canon made for the overseas NES market. Its gameplay isn't bad, although unreasonably difficult, rather short, and strikingly experimental in places (with side-scrolling stealth sections that make Contra look like Tetris DS), and it has some legitimately good moments (like the boss battle against the tank and the container ship infiltration). However, the plot is incoherent even for a Metal Gear game, thanks in part to the game's Blind Idiot Translation (one part of the game involves getting in touch with a captured ally who is actually an enemy spy in disguise, a plot twist you can see coming thanks to his suspiciously specific denials); the graphics are so bad that the heaving back of a dying man looks like some kind of vibrating phallic tentacle (and Snake wears a luminous orange shell-suit to a stealth mission); the American manual was famously bizarre ('Higharolla Cockamamie'?); and yet nothing even comes close to the final battle. It involves Big Boss coming back from the dead, transforming into a giant purple cyborg that breathes fire, and chasing Snake through a maze because he WANTS REVENGE. This was stupid at the time, but later games in the Metal Gear series has made it extremely Hilarious in Hindsight.
  • Turok Evolution. Yes, Electronic Gaming Monthly didn't like it. And yes, it was an Obvious Beta. But you could shoot poisoned arrows at badguys and watch them vomit and die through your scope. And the final boss was a Confederate-general-cyborg riding a T-rex. And the soundtrack was excellent. What more do you need?
  • Rygar: The Legendary Adventure for PlayStation 2. Dear God. A blatant Devil May Cry rip-off, including bearded minotaurs, caterpillars, and Narmtastic cutscenes ("I SWEAR MY VICTORY TO THIS FEATHER!"). Oh, and that blue-skinned, androgyn, dual-saber-wielding demon you fight? That's Aristotle.
  • To some, the short Flash game Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog is considered by some to be a Cult Classic. The game is set in the Sonic the Hedgehog canon, but it stars Sonic's misunderstood rival. Possibly the greatest extent the E10 rating was ever pushed to, the game contains dark environments, violence, guns, references to the murder of Shadow's friends by a corrupt military-industrial corporation, and constant use of mild oaths such as "damn" and "hell," all of it taken to an extreme that is so obviously gratuitous that it seems almost satirical. The game clumsily modifies series continuity to make sense of its plot, but it still makes little sense, and can scarcely be seen as anything other than a vain attempt to capitalize on the popular gothic trends. Surprisingly, the music is catchy, and the gameplay is tolerable most of the time, so it can be worth playing just for camp value.
    • The pushing of the E10 rating becomes even more funny when you realize it was one of the first games to ever have the rating (coming out just a few months after its creation).
    • While we're dealing with Sonic, Sonic R was a Mario Kart Follow the Leader attempt. Sonic barely ran faster than Amy's "car", the songs on all of the courses were sung by a woman who was probably high, and the Tails Doll was so horrible he was horrifying, and it was amazing.
  • Even the American Girls Collection was no exception to this - the American Girls Premiere for the PC and pre-OS X Macintosh was supposed to be a fun game for little girls looking for some theatre action while learning American history. It turned out to be a laughable little game to kill some time with, allowing players to spawn Felicity Merriman and her friends and subject her to rounds and rounds of crude humour and profanity, thanks to the speech engine.
  • In Japan, such games are so beloved that they have been given a title, "Kuso-ge" (translation: "shitty games"). Not all are terrible, but to qualify for this title, they need to be enjoyed primarily for Camp value, rather than gameplay.
    • The Cho Aniki series is perhaps the greatest known series of kuso-ge (also a prime example of "Baka-ge", a subgenre of kuso-ge reserved for particularly stupid games), especially now that America has learned of it too. The first game in the series was a scrolling shooter that featured bizarre motifs of human body parts spliced with mechanical devices, as well as two gay muscular characters who helped out the protagonists, which all was goofy enough, but since then, the series has become entirely focused upon homosexuality. Specifically, musclemen and phallic imagery are recurring themes in the game art, though there is no actual pornography in the series--YET...
  • NeXgame: a game with a live-action guy breaking walls of ice by punching them, and smashing the last one with his head. It's super full of narm, like when the guy starts running off when he's done, and 'yes!' 'yyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!'
  • Calling Progress Quest a game is stretching the definition of the term, but it's still a So Bad It's Good parody of MMOs with repetitive Level Grinding and a non-interactive game world.
  • Left Behind: Eternal Forces, the licensed game for the titular novel series, is a truly terrible RTS loaded with bad controls and Ark-loads of Unfortunate Implications in addition to the source material's own problems. However, a game which features mechanics like the main character running through New York frantically praying aloud so his faith isn't eroded by the hordes of guitar-playing buskers on every corner has massive comedy potential.
    • Also, you get the option to play as Satan!
  • M&Ms Kart Racing, if only for the incredibly repetitive quips by the racers.

APPROACHING SOUND BARRI- Look, a nut.

  • The Japan-only Famicom RPG Hoshi wo Miru Hito, aka Stargazer, is called by many Japanese gamers the "legendary shit game". Listing all of its faults would take up entirely too much space here (to start with, the towns' tile graphics don't seem to fit together in the slightest and exiting them teleports you somewhere else entirely, you can't cancel any of your selections in battle menus, the HP counts in battle are truncated so that only the last digit is visible, you're forced to use passwords instead of battery saves and they don't even save your level), so you can read about it at this link.
  • 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. What other game has a plot that can be summed up in the phrase "Bitch took my skull!" On its own, the game is a browntastic, competent Gears of War style shooter. But the fact that it stars an Immune to Bullets 50 Cent, with a swear button (and you can upgrade your swearing), collecting Bling Shine and making random comments about the scenery while gunning down people by the dozen. It's full of Narm.
    • The kicker? The gameplay itself is fun. Some programmers were putting a lot of work into it, despite everything above.

50 Cent: Help me the fuck up.

  • Legion on the PC-Engine CD has plain bad gameplay, but the inept, deadpan, out-of-place narration at the beginning of each levels is nothing short of hilarious.
  • An RPG Maker community once held a contest with the objective of creating the worst game ever using RPG Maker. Though the original account has been deleted, it has recently been revived. (Those are just some of the examples.)
  • The Trapped Trilogy by Godlimations, a point-and-click adventure Flash game series. Guide Dang It puzzles, Unexpected Gameplay Change to shooter, obvious Art Shift between games making characters unrecognizable, horrible interface that changes between games, lackluster voice acting, a plot completely lacking in logic and continuity, and Christian references clumsily shoehorned in... And yet, it's strangely addictive.
    • Retsupurae has riffed on this series and their commentary make the game more hilarious.
    • If nothing, it's worth hearing Edwyn Tiong's performance as Dan Mc Neely, who sets a new record on how smug you can make a human being sound.
  • Battle Construction Vehicles is an unusual fighting game where two people battle each other in construction vehicles. The controls are unresponsive, the vehicles move slowly, and basic attacks are a pain to pull off (in some vehicles, attacks sometimes hurt the attacker more); most of the fights consist of slowly ramming and scraping against the opponent (and randomly pulling off super moves) until someone wins. The ridiculous premise, awesome plot, and hilariously bad voice acting make up for the actual game's shortcomings.
  • Believe it or not, Kemco's Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure is nowhere near the train-wreck gamers make it out to be. It could've used a few improvements in many areas--mostly to make the "experience" of going to a theme park slightly more realistic--but the fact that it features Back to the Future: The Ride as a playable minigame AND one of the most awesome intros and outros ever seen should help its reputation.
  • Trio the Punch. Made by Data East, it's regarded as the first kuso-ge. The three characters are the most stereotyped heroes ever (a ninja, a brawler and a barbarian that looks like Rastan), each has his own theme which loops endlessly throughout the entire game, Karnov is inexplicably a common enemy, clearing a stage nets a "WIN WIN" and a roulette where you can power-up or down with an old sensei declaring "LUCKY! CHA CHA CHA!", a sheep boss turns your into a sheep for the whole next stage... since it would take too much to list everything, here's a 3-parts commentary on this (clearly voluntary) crappy game.
  • Chaser, an obscure first person shooter by Slovakian developer Cauldron has numerous graphical and gameplay glitches, absolutely horribly-written dialogue and worse voice acting, but it also happens to be a genuinely fun shooter despite these faults, with absolutely awesome music, a unique gritty cyberpunk-ish style, and a certain charm to its quirky unpolishedness.
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants Flash game Boat-o-Cross.
  • Drakengard. The 'bad' part is very repetitive and boring gameplay, the 'good' part is a plot that's completely absurd/crazy and sets new records for dark and edgy.
  • This is the entire point of games developed for Glorious Trainwrecks.
  • Deadly Premonition features FBI criminal profiler Francis York Morgan (Just call him York. That's what everyone else does.) going to a town to investigate a link between a drug and murders. The controls are awkward, the characters are all mired in the Uncanny Valley, the American voice acting is often out of sync with the character animations that seems to have been motion-captured by a Japanese amateur theater troupe, the soundtrack is limited (leading to common Soundtrack Dissonance), most of the graphics looks like they were meant for a Dreamcast game (despite being made for 7th generation consoles), and the first 20-30 minutes of game consists of arguably the weakest part of its gameplay - a level of Narmy, Resident Evil inspired Survival Horror combat. And yet, behind this hides a pretty entertaining Twin Peaks-esque Wide Open Sandbox game, which is quite charming in its own quirky way. The Destructoid review also mentions the quirkiness as one of the game's strongest points:

"This game is so bad, it's not just become good. It's pretty close to perfect."

    • It can't be overstated just how awkward the controls are, particularly the shooting. In most shooters on Play Station 3 and Xbox 360, you'd hold the left trigger to enter aim mode, use the right stick to aim, and the right trigger to fire. The reason for this is because of the way most gamers hold the controler, with thumbs on each stick and the index and middle fingers over the bumpers and triggers. In Deadly Premonition, you hold the right trigger to enter aim mode, use the right stick to aim, and the A button to fire. If you used the left stick to aim it wouldn't be nearly as bad - unusal, but still workable. However, using the right stick means you aim, and then take your right thumb off the right stick to fire while the target is moving (and occassionally teleporting a few steps forward). Not only that, the right stick somehow manages to be both extremly slow and extremly sensitive, reacting to the slightest move, but taking its dear sweet time doing so. This adds up to you emptying your gun, shooting in all directions and hitting nothing.
  • The hilariously weird Dreamcast launch title Blue Stinger. Please to enjoy.
  • Home Alone 2 for the SNES counts as So Bad It's Good, despite it's a video game based on a movie. It has an absurd cast of enemies, decent graphics, and weird sound effects.
  • Death Crimson, an "horror-themed Light Gun Game for the Saturn is one of Japan's most beloved kusoge, thank to its epicly horrible graphics and the soundtrack, which is a Crowning Moment of Funny by itself.
  • Revenge of the Sunfish. Art Shift on every stage, terrible art, inexplicable gameplay and something that vaguely resembles a plot all combine to make this a Mind Screw as you try to figure how and why anyone would make this.
  • Tournament Of Legends, according to this Official Nintendo Magazine review. They even reference the trope with the positive "So bad it's almost good".
  • Sewer Shark is a dull rail shooter with repetitive backgrounds and several vital facts the game doesn't bother to tell you, - In other words, the perfect game to package your untested and expensive add-on with. However, while the actual game is terrible, the cutscenes saves it, featuring an awesomnly cheesy script and performances by actors who clearly knew what they were into. Witness the madness here.
  • Mario Teaches Typing 2. The first game was just bad all around, but the second game for its credit had some of the most Narm-filled, uintentionally hilarious cut scenes known to man, like this ending and the somewhat silly mafia like scene here.
  • Jaws Unleashed is a favorite target over at GamesRadar.
  • Kreed is an obscure Russian first-person shooter. Though the actual game isn't very good, it is immensively entertaining thanks to the bad animation, horrible character design,, unfitting buttrock music played at random moments and hilarious voice acting by Russians clearly not fluent in English. "Quit winning!".
  • Darkened Skye has terrible gameplay, and two categories of dialog: Hilariously overdone, intentionally bad dialog, and intentionally lampshading and mocking category one.
  • Maka Maka, a highly obscure Japan only SNES RPG, is another prime example of "kusoge". It's infamous for the fact that it was released without being bug tested, and caused its company to go bankrupt due to its poor sales. Besides its overall bugginess, it's plagued with a high encounter rate with low EXP and money payouts, slow movement, has unexplainably bizarre enemies and bosses, an odd cast of characters (including but not limited to, a cheerful explorer who wears a box of oranges, an ultraman-lookalike Alien, an army of homosexual ant-men, etc.), and generally unbalanced and broken gameplay.
  • Pepsiman. You're Pepsi's mascot, running around various landscapes trying to bring Pepsi to people via Excuse Plots, Everything (including giant Pepsi cans) is Trying to Kill You, there's no in-game music, the graphics aren't very well polished, there's a fat American bloke that is present in all the cutscenes, each mission is time-limited and it's very hard. However, partly because it's still an enjoyable yet frustrating game, partly because the main theme is pretty awesome (with a catchy theme tune screaming "PEPSI MAAAAAAN!!!"), partly because God only knows, some countries loved it. And no, there were no Pepsiman ads in these countries, oddly enough. Another reason is probably how ridiculously goofy Pepsiman take things on, and some death scenes can get amusing for poor Pepsiman... (helps that Pepsiman himself is an Iron Butt Monkey)
  • The Last Resurrection: the gameplay is glitch-ridden and fiddly, the graphics resemble a cross between a 16-bit JRPG and Fuzzy Felts, the dialogue is corny and full of mistakes, and to top it all off the entire thing's a blatant Author Tract about the evils of Christianity - the final boss is none other than Jesus himself. What's not to love?
  • The Vietnamese bootleg translation of Pokémon Gold and Silver, with hilarious errors such as "monaters", "missle bomb" instead of Team Rocket or "fuck" instead of "put in". A really entertaining LP can be found here.
    • The best part is that the use of the f-word, used as an analogue to "put in" as in "player put that item in his bag", comes right after we get to see how that translation calls the Potion item: "DRUG."
  • And there is also a translation of Pokemon Green before it came out in North America. There are some... interesting ideas of what would be the names. Played in this video game marathon.
  • Indie RPG The Demon Rush, despite the title, is painfully slow paced. However, it makes up for it with hilariously shoddy graphics and music, goofy looking and acting characters, a nonsensical, unfollowable Cliché Storm of a story, and several Inherently Funny Character Names. See the full, very long experience in these two videos.
  • Rise of Immortals is a MOBA trying to cash in on the success of League of Legends and the announcement of Dot A 2. However, it manages to be horribly balanced, with confusing stats, weird interfaces and lacks the ability to change characters once you've logged in. That said, it also has some of the hammiest voice acting in the history of video games, the character designs are so cliche it's hilarious and if you're playing with friends, it actually manages to be surprisingly fun.
  • Soldner: Secret Wars. As its Eurogamer review says: "It's a terrible game whose redeeming features are its bugs – it's performance art, improvised comedy, terrible coding. It will always hold a place in my heart and a space on my hard drive."
  • Haze is a playable if unimpressive FPS which fell victim to its overblown hype. However, the true star of the show is its storyline. A bold attempt at deconstructing the standard FPS plot, it stumbles due to its ham-fisted morality, a Plot Hole-ridden setting and some truly stupid lines. Those flaws, combined with the poor acting, weird music and the technical issues of the game itself, combine to form a surreal and damned funny mess, the like of which will probably never be seen again. Here's a sampler.
  • Mega Man: War of the Past is a fan-made Beat'Em Up for the Dreamcast, combining the Mega Man universe with a Streets of Rage-style engine in a rather clumsy fashion. There's nothing really wrong with the gameplay, but some of the misuse of graphics is laughably terrible. The menu screen shows characters from other Mega Man series' (who aren't in the game), Eddy is used as an enemy, and proportion is a mess, courtesy of the creator's combining Mega Man 7 sprites with those from Marvel Vs. Capcom with no regard to resizing. Even Duo and Gutsman are shorter than Roll, many of the enemies (such as an army of Cutman clones) are even smaller, and so is Dr. Light. Also, the bizarre enemy names, like "Jewish."
  • Night Trap. While the gameplay itself is lacking, the movie that plays out during it is pretty damn hilarious. (Sadly, you won't see most of it if you're going for a perfect score.) Click here to watch it. (Don't worry, it's completely work safe.)
  • Town With No Name, as Retsupurae'd here, is nothing short of hilarious.
  • Overblood is certainly one of these. Tank controls, Guide Dang It, Narm to the tenth degree and average graphics for the time. Hilarious deaths, great fighting and... it's beautiful.
  • Sniper: Path Of Vengeance is a thoroughly glitchy and ugly game that you could hardly call playable, but the nature of these bugs gives it its charm. You have a school bus that bleeds when you shoot at it, and eventually disappears into thin air, being able to fly by pressing jump+duck, some truly idiotic AI, weirdly deforming characters, and the "climactic" shootout of the final cutscene, where the developers forgot to give the characters guns (yeah, they fire by pointing with their fingers). Became a Cult Classic comparable to Big Rigs in Hungary, when a game reviewer trashed it to bits, and later made several follow-ups, as the glitches just kept coming.
  • Banned From Equestria, a weird, unfinished pornographic point-and-click fangame of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It includes a dead end area with nothing at all to click, random dropouts in art quality, and the infamous grey square which doesn't appear to do anything but is vital for exploring part of the game. It can be found here (Warning: NSFW), or you could watch this censored LP instead.
  • The obscure Italian-made Driving Game Blomby Car had only had a limited arcade release in the 1990s, but since has become somewhat more known through emulation. The player's car has ridiculous acceleration and handling, and is good at producing engine noise and smoke, caroming off walls and overturning continuously when it crashes. Other vehicles (including first-aid trucks) lie across the road, forcing the player's course off it at some spots.
  • Paris-Dakar Rally Special, a Driving Game for the Famicom that is utterly deranged. It actually starts out as an adventure game. Enemies in the driving stages range from very fast cars that try to rear-end you to boulders that fall from nowhere. There is even an Under the Sea level.
  • Metal Wolf Chaos. The story centers around the President of the United States of America, Michael Wilson, fending off a coup by the Vice President, Richard Hawk, in his gigantic mecha, Metal Wolf. The gameplay, mostly centering around blowing up American landmarks, is fun and genuinely good (as you'd expect of From Software), which means the ridiculous plot and dialogue, containing mangled Engrish that is spoken by native English speakers, can be enjoyed by all. Oh yeah, there's also a fight sequence where the President yells "SUCK ON MY MISSILE PUNCH!" and "EAT MY FLAME OF JUSTICE!" We'd vote for him.
  • The Atari Jaguar featured a Mortal Kombat clone called Kasumi Ninja, with controls broken in as rudimentary ways as the menu screens, and many an Ethnic Scrappy in the roster of characters. Those features would tend to make it a horrible game for the most part, but on the plus side, one of those characters is a Scotsman who can lift up his kilt and shoot fireballs out of his crotch.
  • SaGa Frontier. It's the sheer randomness of everything; the plot, the visuals, the battle system, the difficulty level. At least the randomness of the growth system is intentional. It's like Square's B team wanted to make the ultimate RPG with multiple races, cultures, and skill systems, but kinda had a brain fart halfway through that decimated most of the team. The graphics are... not polished. Many of the sprites have a slightly icky, pixelated, rendered look to them (no wonder they went for an illustrated look in later games), but what really borders on Narm is how the monsters are always comically bigger than your characters in battle. Even if they were the same size as your sprite when they were shown on the overhead map! Despite all this and a classic Blind Idiot Translation hack job by Sony's first party, the game is still rather fun. Go fig.

Voice Acting

  • The American voice acting in the original PSX version of Star Ocean the Second Story, particularly Claude's VA, straddles the line between So Bad It's Good and completely unlistenable. Claude's best/worst victory line is "Crawd has advanced forward!". (Yes, he actually says "Crawd", not "Claude". This game had a rather... spotty localization.)
    • One of the characters sounded very "special" whenever she chirped, "I deserve this!" upon leveling up. And I always wondered why they made a seemingly asexual (judging from the listing of his default feelings towards other characters) character sound a little gay in certain lines, intentional or not...
  • While Devil May Cry has top-notch gameplay, the lines Dante gets caught pulling off are often considered more cheesy than a Pizza Hut joint.
    • Vergil is a worthy successor in this regard. He's got a jacked-up notion of awesome lines, and it's starting to piss me off.
  • Castle Shikigami II, whilst having fun gameplay - it's a Bullet Hell game - received terrible yet hilarious translation and voice acting. For example:
    • "I like girls. But now, it's about justice."
    • "Too chatty the bar E, since you're the fifth"
    • "Still want to live? Why? MIGHT!"
    • "Slaves for fashion dislike bulges."
    • "You, get on top! I'll teach you."
    • "I'm Dundeon. Let's fight, Mr Beam!"
    • "Happy to shoot you!"
    • "Dance your heart out! With friendship."
    • "Strong and dumb!"
    • "Don't come yet! Don't soil your hands!"
    • "Lil' bro! Dead but still bros!"
    • "Villians gather, heroes do it alone"
    • "Keeping it a fool free zone"
    • "I'm kim of two homes and seven moms"
    • "Hold me if I'm dying, and visa versa okay?"
    • There are so many more examples, it's difficult to list them all...but Here's one of the more infamous cutscenes.
  • Symphony of the Night from the Castlevania series is a very good game, but its dialogue is somewhere between this and Narm. The PSP version changes the previous great lines to less over-the-top dramatic ones. Not everyone welcomed the change.
    • What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets? But enough talk, have at you!
    • The XBLA version lacked the awesomely cheesy "I Am The Wind" that played over the credits in the original Playstation version.
    • Even I Wanna Be the Guy brings the scene up just be careful of the wineglass.
      • What is a Man? wineglass kills you GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
  • The voice acting of the Duke Nukem games. With lines like "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of gum", and "I've got balls of steel!"
  • The first Resident Evil game, despite being a pretty scary game, has horrid voice acting to make the game seem like more of a B-movie. Most of it comes from a clumsy ally named Barry Burton. Examples include, after a ceiling nearly crushes your character Jill, saying you were almost a "Jill Sandwich." Another infamous one is how Jill is the Master of Unlocking.
    • Allegedly the reason why the acting in the first game was laughably bad was because the actors were directed by a Japanese director.
    • In Resident Evil 4, the President's daughter gets kidnapped, so they send in the only dude who's bad enough to save the President's daughter: a pretty boy named Leon Kennedy whose only experience prior was surviving his first day as a rookie cop during a Zombie Apocalypse.
      • As of the release of Darkside Chronicles, we discover that Leon's been working for the president for a while (and in more of a Black Ops and not a Secret Service capacity).
      • Nonetheless, Resident Evil 4 is considered one of the best games ever, let alone the best Resident Evil game...which doesn't prevent the script from being drop-dead hilarious, with some of Leon's best gems being "Well, I don't really give a damn! Rain or shine, you're going down!" and "DON'T WORRY, ASHLEY! I'M COMIN' FOR YA!"
        • Two of Leon's best lines: "Saddler, you're small-time" and "No thanks, BRO."
          • "Where's everyone going? Bingo?", "Your right hand comes off?", and "A senior moment perhaps?"
  • You should have stayed away from So Bad It's Hilarious voice acting in House of the Dead... Suffer like G did?
  • Unreal Tournament is about a sport, agreed? Yet for Unreal Tournament III, someone had the job of writing six cutscenes that turn it into a revenge story in the midst of an interplanetary war. These cutscenes are hilarious.
  • Though Star Fox 64 is an amazing game, its voice acting is hilariously cheesy.

Peppy: Do a barrel roll!


Music/Graphics/Etc.

  • The Blue Dragon boss battle theme, Eternity. There are just no words for how bad this song is, but somehow it works in a twisted sort of way.
  • The first Mega Man game had North American box art that must be seen to be believed. Fans have come to love its ridiculous inaccuracies. As the page quote indicates, Mega Man 9 paid tribute with silly box art of its own. This wasn't even the first time -- Inticreates' previous game, Mega Man ZX Advent, included an in-game Shout-Out.
    • Capcom USA has also brought us Mega Man Battle Network 4's Blind Idiot Translation, which was a much, MUCH worse translation job than anything else in the entire series, both before and after it. Examples include "What a polite young man she was!" and "Mega Man, is the jack out now!" Even the manual had its share of silly mistakes.
    • And then there's the bad voice acting in Mega Man X4.
      • It goes beyond just that scene. X is a pre-teen girl, Zero is constantly out of breath, and Sigma is a grouchy old man.
      • The legendarily awful dub job for Dr. Light in Mega Man 8. It's made of crystallized Narm. You know your voice acting is bad when Mega Man sounds more like a girl than Roll.
  • Persona 3 Portable brings us the song Sun, which manages to combine ALL of the common critisism towards the game's soundtrack. And it is amazingly catchy.
  • The old Lesser Demon model in RuneScape. With those beady eyes and little poorly-rendered goatee, it was borderline cute. Same goes for the dragons.
  • The Creeper, one of the most iconic characters from Minecraft, was actually a miserable failure from the coder's part to create the 3d model of a pig. Its distorted shape and downright terrifying face, as well as the fact that it sneaks onto you with a SSSS sound followed by your death - and probably a heart attack - make it one of the most original and frightening enemies in modern videogaming history.
  • The pause screen "music" in Wario World.
  • The lyrics to "His Name's Frank", the ending theme of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, wherein the band Lifeseeker attempts to find every possible word that rhymes with the names "Frank" and "West". It's either so bad it's awesome, or vice versa.
  • From Kinect Star Wars: "I'm Han Solo." It's about as hilariously bad as you'd expect a cheesy pop song about Star Wars could get.


Game-related Fan Works

  • Chaos CompleXX, a hack of Super Mario World made by the same man who made The Second Reality Project. It's a intentional joke hack.
  • The Half-Life Fanfiction-made-Garry's-Mod-Video "Full Life Consequences". So bad it has to be seen to be believed.
  • Pokémon Quartz, a hilariously awful hack of Pokémon Ruby with ugly to terrifying fake Pokemon, gratuitous swearing, bizarre dialogue, a nonsensical plot--and did we mention all the author insertion and the Gary Stu professor? It must be seen to be believed--and these Let's Plays don't even cover all of it.
  • Phoenix Drive, an Ace Attorney Eroge fangame, not only has Engrish out the ass (having been translated by the developers themselves), but a plot that makes NO sense (Courtroom sessions at night? Phoenix declaring himself the murderer?), even more over-the-top dialogue and effects than the official series (such as Phoenix shouting "Whoooooooo!!" in mid-trial and all sorts of special effects going on in the trial scenes), female characters whose breasts jiggle on their own, and ridicuously Off-Model sex scenes. On the other hand, the courtroom music is surprisingly awesome. Here's some worksafe footage of the game.
  • Paper Mario World, a Super Mario Bros. fangame, enjoys this reputation to so great an extreme, the game's original creator has produced a series of videos playing off of its legendary camp value, as well as apologizing for the whole thing. According to him, because the game was made in the earlier days of fangaming, he had no idea what sort of quality or expectations existed. As a result, he released a "game" that was really essentially just a string of clumsily-conducted experiments along the set Mario theme. Though they do display a good amount of the various things TGF can do, the developer spent little to no time honing any one aspect to the optimum capacity, and as soon as the site that hosted it began allowing reviews, the game was nitpicked to death by numerous players. Most of its camp value owes to its particularly horrible graphics, with sprite styles that clash, as well as badly scaled individual sprites (numerous doors the player can enter that are much smaller than himself may be the greatest example), background scenery that ranges from dull to nonexistant, curiously-placed terrain, such as magma floating in mid-air, and bosses that bounce around the arena with no true animation frames. And the Narm Charm of its completely unnecessary narrator.
  • Atomic Sonic, a hack of the original Sonic the Hedgehog for Mega Drive. Badly hand-drawn replacement graphics! Glitchy audio! Completely unfitting music swaps! Kaleidoscopic grass! Only one level that actually works! See it in action here. Like the above-mentioned Chaos CompleXX, the badness is almost certainly intentional.


Other

  • "All Your Base Are Belong to Us". A horrible translation from a Japanese game (Zero Wing) into English that was so bad it became a massive internet meme. Especially amazing since that was the only cutscene in the entire game, and those practically set records for bad translation in the late 1980s anyway. The game itself is actually quite good, though.
  • This "trailer" for the DS and PSP ports of the Duke Nukem trilogy. The sheer reliance on Mundane Made Awesome is amazing.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 has an engine that doesn't quite replicate that of the original trilogy, and as such, many old fans hate it. Still, that engine does allow for some hilarious violations of physics.
  • The live action cutscenes in Shinobi X/Shinobi Legion. They honestly do look a bit awesome when it comes to fighting though.
  • This scene during Nintendo's press conference at E3 2008, though other gamers consider it to be terrible.
  • A few of Sonic the Hedgehog games have really, really odd stories or cutscenes, becoming the most apparent around Sonic Adventure, where the characters are generally poorly animated (Policemen walk away from Chaos... But they don't bother to reverse the walking animation, so he's moonwalking away from Chaos.), or have odd proportions (Sonic's mouth is huge in the game).
  1. ↑ (Page is in German)
  2. ↑ "...eh, Luigi?"
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/So_Bad_It%27s_Good/Video_Games?oldid=2037112"