Advent Calendar 21: That Is Bad, And You Should Feel Bad

By Circe -

Not all games are classics. Last week I covered some games (E.T., Superman 64, Duke Nukem Forever) that simply couldn't surmount the enormous gap between expectations and reality. But what about games that took a swing at expectations that were low or non-existent, and somehow still missed? Games that no one asked for, which could easily have remained unpublished forever, but somehow still escaped the facility to waste the public's disposable income?

Stuart Ashen, better known as "ashens" or "the guy with the manky brown sofa", has a particular love of these things, mostly from the UK 8-bit micro scene, and in addition to running his YouTube channel, gleefully makes the rounds of auditoriums and lecture halls to tell people all about them live.

This also exists in the form of a pair of books, Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of and Attack Of The Flickering Skeletons, which I dearly want but don't dare buy because I have nowhere left to put them.

Sometimes, someone takes a good game and converts it into something awful by accident. Matt McMuscles covers a lot of these on his series Wha Happun?, but a particularly notable mention is the Silent Hill HD Collection (which combined a trio of great games into a complete clusterfuck for what was supposed to be an upgraded re-release). Konami had a history of slapping together ports of questionable quality of their Playstation games for PC, but the HD Collection was supposed to be a serious reissue of classic hits for collectors. Oops. 

There are also cases where the game is made worse on purpose. The trailer for Watch Dogs at E3 2012 was absolutely stunning, full of cinematic, moody lighting and environmental effects. The final release was... not. Rumor had it at the time that the PC version had its graphics forcibly downgraded to better match the capacity of the console ports, so as not to embarrass the fuck out of Sony. Which is bolstered pretty well by the fact that modders reinstated all the cool stuff on PC almost immediately, on perfectly ordinary PC hardware available to normal people.

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