There Are No Games So Bad They're Funny

Clive Thompson examines an artifact unique to the medium of videogames: the hatred of 'B' games. Unlike in television, movies, or even books, there doesn't seem to be room in gaming for appreciation of offerings so bad they're good. "Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad. I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. Or think of it this way: A bad game is like being stuck in traffic. You've got goals, you've got places you're trying to get to, but the system won't let you. So you just sit there grinding your teeth. Lousy art can sometimes cause joy; lousy games can only cause stress."

Re:Wrong...

But those games were all MEANT to be funny. Take a look at some of the games in the game gallery. How many times do you see Strong Bad? The games are fun because they were meant to be that way. Bad games are generally no fun at all because they're too hard to play, or the game mechanics are just plain broken. Just because something has no instructions doesn't mean it's a bad game.

Re:Wrong...

It was only the translation that was bad in Zero Wing. The game itself was OK, though not great by any means. This [wikipedia.org] is what you're after.

Re:Wrong...

Mocking games is not the same as a game gaining a cult following.

Mocking games = Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Cult following = The Rocky Horror Picture Show....it was so bad but has a huge following BECAUSE it was bad.

There aren't really any games that people play because they enjoy how bad they are. There are games that people mock because they were bad. There are memes started because of poorly written games (All your base....). But how many times do you go back any play them?

That was the point of the article. Not that there are games that are constantly mocked.

Layne

Re:Wrong...

Mocking games = Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Cult following = The Rocky Horror Picture Show....it was so bad but has a huge following BECAUSE it was bad.

Well this is actually a little more complex than that.

I would argue that there is plenty of "mocking" in the popularity of RHPS. That doesn't make it any less fun to watch it, or have any less of a cult following. In fact, you could reasonably argue that a show like Mystery Science Theater 3000 grew directly out of the audience participation in RHPS.

RHPS was also intended as a b-movie. It wasn't made with the thought that they were making a quality film. They wanted people to make fun of it, and hoped to generate a cult following through that. The producers were disappointed when it didn't happen originally - then the audience participation part kicked in a few years post-release, which reportedly took everybody involved by surprise.

There are other movies like that, intended to generate a cult following by purposely copying traits found in unintentional b-movies. The Evil Dead series is another example. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. Heathers. The list goes on. It's almost a genre unto itself, these purposeful b-movies. I think people end up enjoying these on several different levels (some people on more or fewer levels than others), whether they realize it or not.

As for games, I think there are several that fit into that same category - games that don't really adhere to modern standards for what we consider a "quality" game, and that ape conventions from the past or from campy sources with the intent of generating a cult following. Enjoyment comes as much from the camp value of these games as the gameplay mechanic. I'm thinking of a game like Viewtiful Joe in this category. Or Katamari Damacy. I'm not saying these aren't good games (they are), but they are definitely intended to be laughed "at" rather than "with" to a certain degree. I mean nobody who watches the first cut-scene with the "King of All Cosmos" would ever take the game seriously. It's not just about humor, either; it's about ridiculousness.

I also think there *are* some unintentional b-grade games that are popular and are taken at face value. The Resident Evil series is a perfect example of that. It's total camp horror, and a big gore-fest, but people love it.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I disagree with the original article. There are b-grade games that are fun to play, both of the intentional and unintentional variety.

Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2006/02/28/penn_tel.sh tml [waxy.org]

"Years ago, I'd heard about a mythical unreleased videogame developed by Penn & Teller for the Sega CD and 3DO. The game was supposed to be an oddball adventure game, with some cruel magic tricks and minigames thrown in for good measure. This Absolute Entertainment press release from March 1995 sums it up nicely.

The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point."

Re:Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

There was more, P&T were going to include a contest in the pamphlet. The person with the highest score after a year (verified by a screenshot of the score counter, which had 5 or 8 digits IIRC, even though it took a full 8 hours to get one point) would win an actual bus trip across the desert with a fully loaded bus with Playboy bunnies or whatever they could get.

IIRC at least some playable form of that game exists because there are strategy guides online for how to beat the adventure portion of it (it was pretty kooky even by adventure game standards, in some places you can have Teller get on his hands and knees behind a bad guy and have Penn push the bad guy back to knock him over for instance). I think there was a side or top scrolling shooter in there too. It's a shame Penn and Teller developed it for a doomed system like the SegaCD.

Zero Wing

'nuff said

right and wrong

i think the premise of this story is wrong.

there aren't many "b" games, because "b" games are often buggy and unplayable. bugs are not fun or funny or tolerable. I don't crash out of a game and go "haha that was so bad it was fun". no.

even with the worst movies, they still "work" because all you are doing is watching them. there's no technological requirement. it's not like the movie film breaks while watching or anything.

it would require an unusual development house to create a game with no programming bugs and reasonable graphics engine to support a totally shoddy gameplay that allowed for humour and enjoyment.

Not entirely true.

The AI in some games really is funny. Scorched3d for instancs, when you play the "easy" mode, has bots so dumb, they often shoot themselves. However, this isn't really a "bad game" as the higher modes are more challenging.

How about the Street Fighter II series? Certainly, at some point, if not from the beginning, it was so bad -- it became a joke. I have recently started up a game of this, not because it was fun, but it was a great laugh -- its infamous.

Of course, no discussion of B games is complete without talk of Cluster's Revenge...

SF II? What?

How about the Street Fighter II series? Certainly, at some point, if not from the beginning, it was so bad -- it became a joke. I have recently started up a game of this, not because it was fun, but it was a great laugh -- its infamous.

You're kidding, right? The game that largely launched the 2D fighter genre in America? There were similar games before SF II, but it was the first of its kind to reach the kind of popularity it has when it was out.

You could make the argument that someone along the way its sequels became derivative and boring compared to games like the Tekken series, but the original SF II was a classic.

Flawed premise

Just because the author never sits around and laughs at really bad games, or plays them with friends in social settings, they shouldn't assume no one does.

Ironically enough, this story gets posted just days after I ordered the dreamcast "classic" Illbleed, for the express purpose of having some friends over and mocking it roundly as I force them to play the first level or so. (I have some very fond memories of when it was inflicted on me, so I figure it's time to pass it on.)

Another good example is "detective" from the interactive fiction scene, which was actually bad enough that someone made an MST3K version of it, where as you play, Tom Servo, Crow, etc, mock it along with you. (Ahh, the joys of a text based interface.)

There are definitely game equivalents to Manos: The Hands of Fate. I submit that the author just hasn't looked hard enough.

"Stealth" for the NES

I disagree with this assertion. As a counterexample, I offer the game simply titled "Stealth" for the NES. This is a game where your stealth fighter attacked a group of enemy fighters whose numbers increased by 2 per mission. It started at 4 and went, as far as I can tell, into infinity. The so-bad-it's-good-ness came from the mechanics of flight. Your fighter managed to fly just as effectively straight up into the air, straight down, upside down, etc as it did in any other position. But the best part was the combat; all you had to do to avoid enemy fire was turn around. Much like actual dogfighting, your enemies could only damage you if you could see them.

What!?

"Are you a bad enough dude to save the president?"
"This guy are sick!"
"All your base are belong to us."

Cases of B-Gameplay being funny are harder to think up (partially because we don't have a strong vocabulary to talk about gameplay) but I have fond memories of watching my friend play Super Mario Bros 2, float behind Wart's head, then proceed to throw vegetables at him from that location where Wart couldn't hit back. Or watching a big fearsome undead boss in a Final Fantasy get killed by a Phoenix Down.

Though yes: "bad in a good way" only happens with certain kinds of bad. When the controls are painfully bad, that sucks. Though similarly if the lighting is terrible on a TV show, that doesn't make it campy, that just makes it an eyesore.

Completely off the mark!

There are *numerous* games my brother and I have played over the years that are so bad they're hilarious. "Awesomely bad," I believe is the term.

Sure, games can't hope to achieve the level of greatness in this regard that films like Commando and Showdown in Little Tokyo or American Ninja 4: The Annihilation have reached, but there's definitely some gems that stood out over the years.

Exhibit 1: Captain America and the Avengers for SNES
This game has some of the most horrible dialogue and "voices" I've ever had to endure, but it's so bad it's memorable. The combat, and some boss fights (Juggernaut for example), is an atrocity because of the poor collision detection and lazy animations. And, it's impossible to beat. But hey you get to play as Captain America and Iron Man!!!
But really this game crossed from "bad" to "awesome" when I showed it to a friend, touting it as "one of the worst games I own." That day, it glitched like never again -- all the normal enemies had 10x the hit points they usually do, and all the bosses had only 1 hit point. But just as the 3rd boss arrived, "chopping" a tree down with his arm-scythe even though it was just a sprite temporarily hovering over a tree stump and the trunk/stump were different colors, the game froze :-(

Exhibit 2: Rise of the Robots for SNES
AMAZING graphics, AMAZING music. And the sort of gameplay that you can make jokes about to this day. It's a fighting game, but Player 1 can only use 1 character! This lame cyborg who has awesome moves like "punch," "crouch and punch," "kick," and "jump kick." I swear the Turtles from TMNT III: The Manhattan Project (awesome game) had more moves. Player 2, on the other hand, could use any of the "evil" robots from the single-player mode. They also had like 5 moves, but at least they looked cool and.. there was more than one of them. Player 1 *could* use any of those robots, but only if one entered a cheat code. Yes you had to cheat to use more than 1 character in a fighting game!! That game was awesome... we'd have matches where we'd say "ok you can only use 2 moves this time to fight" and so we'd use jump-kicks and crouch-kicks only or something. Oh yes, and the final boss had a move that took off 1/2 your life, and a move that recovered 100% of .. "her" health.

Exhibit 3: Amagon for NES
Nobody has actually beaten this game except for a friend of mine and I on emulator. It is right up there with The Adventures of Bayou Billy when it comes to ATROCIOUS game design. There's a million cheap deaths, the lamest enemies (and main character) I have EVER seen in a game by a huge margin, and typos in level descriptions because nobody has gotten to most of those levels anyway. The music is pure arse, and the ending? You get a big black cock in your hand. Or is it the handle of a ship steering wheel... hard to tell with the way they cropped the image. Given the rest of the game, it's probably a cock.

So yes, those games are so bad they're funny, and when I think of them I don't think "omg worst experience ever" I think "hahahhahaha." And that somewhat redeems them.

There definitely *ARE* "B games"...

... it's just that they are not "B games" because they're "so bad that they're good", they are "B games" because they were some publisher's second-string lineup that no one *expected* to be any good.

Consider:

Katamari Damashii was a low-budget, barely translated, non-marketed, import that Nameco dumped straight into the $20 bargain bin when they released it to the US. They probably figured that since there was so very little work to do to localize it for the US (No voice acting... just translate some text.), that if even a handful of copies sold to the extreme Japan-o-nerds for $20, they'd make a few extra free bucks. The release of Katamari Damashii very much followed the pattern of a B movie... in the olden days it would be the first movie shown on the drive-in before the frature attraction, and now it'd go direct to DVD without ever seeing a theatre screen.

Katamari was a "B game" in pretty much every sense except being bad... It turned out to be so uniquely, spectacularly, and unexpectedly great that people forget, now, that in the US it was intended only as a second-string and second-rate release.

cya,
john

Daikatana

For "just so freakin' bad" I nominate Daikatana.

OTOH, for "kind of cheap but it knows it's bad and has fun with it," I nominate Duke Nukem.

No BC3K?

I can't believe no one mentioned BattleCruiser 3000 yet. of course, the funny part came in reading the authors usenet posts and the flame wars they generated, but still. If you consider the whole experience part of the game, then it was so bad, it was great.

I really hope Derek Smart replies to this. It would be just like the old days!

Gotta go, some kids are on my lawn!