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Games built from taking established formulas and mashing the copy-paste buttons until you’re left completing an endless conveyer belt of identical, perfectly efficiently designed challenges until the emotional part of your brain dries up. In contrast, bland games are a cultural void. By examining precisely why the fox intermittently turning into a cube was a stupid idea we gain fresh appreciation for game design fundamentals. Just as outsider art is necessary to help us question our inherent biases and understandings of what art can be, truly bad games are an enriching part of the culture that surrounds gaming. I mean, what was with that fox that intermittently turns into a cube? And yet, it presents itself so confidently. That’s why Balan Wonderworld was my worst game of 2021 – I challenge you to find a more car crash fascinating game than that. A more appropriate phrase might be “car crash fascinating.” The sort of thing where you really want to break it down and try to figure out the logic that went into it. I wouldn’t use the phrase “so bad it’s good.” “So bad it’s good” is very rare in video games because most games feature at least some kind of repetitive gameplay loop and you can’t usually MST3K through the same thing over and over again.
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They might be frustrating, annoying or incomprehensible in the moment but at least I know they’ll be interesting to write about later. It’s only a specific kind of bad that I want populating my bottom five list, games that are awful and misguided but which I still come out of feeling positive. That being the case, the very worst thing a game can do is not provoke much feeling at all. The only reason we play games or experience any kind of art is to make ourselves feel something, and even contempt and disgust are feelings. Sometimes people ask me if I prefer to review good games or bad games, and frequently I reply that they’re about equally as fun, it’s the bland games, the mediocre ones that feel like a chore.
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I started doing this because being bland is not quite the same thing as being bad, in my estimation. Regular ZP viewers will know that many years back I began supplementing my annual top 5 and bottom 5 with the blandest 5 games as well. I’m standing up now for video gaming’s right to really, really suck. The fact is, the current system for both triple-A and indie games just doesn’t bring enough exposure to incredibly bad games. The meritocratic system just isn’t good for helping niche games find their audience.īut that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. The point is I ended up giving it more of my time than I have a lot of other games that people have recommended to me promising I’ll really love this one this time no really, and it was only pure happenstance that I found it. Yeah, take note, indie developers, there’s your fast track to a shout-out right there.įilcher’s not that great or easy on the eyes and the title’s one letter away from a very naughty word indeed but I enjoyed it because its primitive 3D art and first person stealth gameplay based around light and noise levels and socking guards unconscious with a small black dildo brought back fond nostalgic memories of the early Thief games, quite intentionally I’m sure. There’s a game called Filcher on Steam with all of 57 reviews at time of writing that I bought for the sole reason that one of the creators tagged me on Twitter mentioning it’d taken influence from a game I made, and my ego is very large and ungainly these days. There are no doubt oceans of middling quality games on Steam that I’ve never caught wind of but which would uniquely appeal to me and I just haven’t got the time to play every sodding game to look for them. It’s not good games that float to the top, strictly speaking, it’s the ones with broad appeal, hence all the anime sex games that show up on Steam’s trending list, which certainly do have broad appeal, lol pun. There are a lot of problems with the meritocratic system for indie games. You can’t be mind-blowingly good or new all the time and it’s unreasonable to ask that of anything. I was thinking about this after talking about Undertale last time, and it’s true, indie games on Steam are a pretty purely meritocratic system where only the really good and innovative titles accrue the word of mouth necessary to get a visible profile, but you know what, that just doesn’t seem fair.