8 Bad Games You’ll Love To Hate
These games definitely fall into the “so bad it’s good” category.
Every day, more than a hundred games come out for mobiles, consoles, and computers, which is no small task when you think about how designers, artists, and coders have to work together to make such big products. It makes sense that sometimes things go wrong during production, but sometimes these mistakes can lead to a unique piece of art that shows how creative ideas can come about.
Or it could just be that goods with short deadlines and small budgets are funny and stand out. No matter how these games were made, they are all great examples of “so bad it’s good” games that fans of unusual games should enjoy. Here are a few good examples.
Wanted: Dead
The people who made Dead or Alive, Nioh, and Ninja Gaiden, Team Ninja, quietly put out a bad hack-and-slash game at the start of 2023. The lackluster combat, which was a big change from the studio’s previous games, turned off reviewers and users, but fans of simple swordplay got a flawed but bold experience with a lot of different gameplay styles and over-the-top characters.
Wanted: Dead tries to have the same kind of silly humor as the Yakuza series, but its unique, janky style sometimes makes jokes go even further. The weird charm of the package comes from the stilted speech, strange background elements, nonsensical minigames, and random anime cutscenes. This makes you wonder if every design choice was made on purpose.
Shadow The Hedgehog
Sonic Team has made a surprising number of games that aren’t tuned well, from the well-known Sonic 06 reboot to Sonic Boom. There are a lot of funny bugs in these games, but they take away from the accuracy that makes a fast-paced platformer fun. Shadow the Hedgehog gives up on 3D platforming in favor of shooting, which is the goofiest way to solve this problem.
Shadow’s edgy take on the Sonic formula is probably best known for the crazy way the story goes in different directions after Dr. Robotnik’s daughter dies. At the end of each level, the player can choose between two endings based on the choices they made along the way. This overly ambitious mechanic often leads to a story that doesn’t make sense, but each intense moment feels like it came out of nowhere. This package has a lot to offer, like firefights with Sonic and conversations between Shadow and the President of the United States.
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
It’s easy to see why Spider-Man games by Insomniac are some of the best-selling and highest-rated character games of all time. Due to the special deal with Sony, the development team had the time and money to make the game as good as it could be. But Web of Shadows was made at a time when licensing games were made on a small budget to make money.
The complex, non-linear story made this game well-known among fans because it gave them a choice. It seemed to be based on the plot of Spider-Man 3, which was a bad retelling of the Venom story that both critics and fans didn’t like.
Web of Shadows makes this already bad idea even worse by adding a morals system that lets people play Spider-man and make bad decisions. Every mission has a bad finish that is both funny and evil, and the dialogue and voice acting only add to the humor.
Sneak King
Sometimes, all you need is a simple idea to make something fun, and Sneak King gives you just that with a stealth game based on the wacky Burger King figure.
With his strangely big head and few movements, the king is a unique stealth protagonist who feels out of place when he is hiding in the shadows. The difference between the main character and his goal is shown in different ways. During cutscenes, the king seems like a creepy stalker, but when you play the game, his majesty’s campy side comes out through dance sequences that use the game’s unique flourish meter.
Snow White And The 7 Clever Boys
Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys is an example of bad rip-off media that is funny, and its famous box art got people interested in it because they were afraid of it. In the console space, obvious copies of existing IP are very rare, but Phoenix Games chose to try their luck by putting out a lot of low-quality games that looked like Disney’s versions of public domain stories.
In these games, there is an animated movie and some sliding block tasks to break up the action. The movie, which was made by subsidiary Dingo Pictures, is the best part of the deal. It has lines that were poorly translated from German, unique voice acting, stiff animation, and a story that makes no sense at all.
Qwop
Qwop is a simple and silly game that was made to be hard to play on purpose. Users handle a runner by using his leg muscles, which they do by pressing the Q, W, O, and P keys separately. The hardest part is getting all of these muscles to work together, because it’s hard to stay balanced while pushing the body toward the finish line.
Doodle Baseball is interesting because it uses physics. The main character often bends in strange ways before landing flat on their face. Bennett Foddy made this surprising Flash hit. He went on to make other strange and hard physics-based games, such as the famous Getting Over It, which uses the mouse instead of the keyboard.
Counter-Strike Neo: White Memories
Outside of the main game, Counter-Strike has a strange history. Neo is a Japanese video game with a story mode that takes place in space. The arcade game’s replacement, White Memories, is a flash-based visual novel that can be downloaded in twelve parts. This is a dating game, like many other spin-offs of visual novels. However, it takes place in an internment camp, where a rescuer and a hostage find things they have in common.
The idea is shown to be even more silly in the talk. From the start, each character’s biography has an opening that looks like anime and a theme song that goes with it. Aside from the plot, the visual novel itself is pretty normal, but the parts where you shoot things are the real stars. Parts of the story are fast-paced and full of action, just like a Counter-Strike game, with guns you know and a focus on accuracy. But the limitations of Flash Player make the high-stakes firefights feel more like a Wolfenstein 3D game than an esports game. The enemies look like cardboard cutouts and the movement is slow.
Super 3D Noah’s Ark
Super 3D Noah’s Ark was a Christian version of Doom in which death was replaced by sleep and eating. Noah used a range of weapons-like tools to keep the animals on his big ark from getting too crazy. On its own, the game can be pretty boring. The level design and visuals are boring and repetitive, the guns don’t have a reticle, which makes it hard to aim, and there are parts that test your knowledge of the Bible. But compared to the hellish world that inspired it, the censorship levels are fun to enjoy.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. The story of how the game was made without a license adds a lot of comedy to the game’s clean branding. The original SNES cartridge got around copyright by using a game adapter to make the system think it was an official title. This gave the game a small cult following, which led to new versions being made.