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Games Entertainment

On The Most Boring Videogames Of All Time 154

Posted by simoniker from the snoozeworthy dept.
Thanks to 1UP.com for its feature documenting what the writers consider to be the most boring videogames ever. The intro explains the criteria: "These ten games weren't necessarily bad or good -- they were just really, really dull", before pointing to titles like Donkey Kong 64 ("a mediocre platformer bogged down by forty hours of useless doodad-hunting"), King's Field ("It's kind of like an RPG, and it's kind of like an FPS, but mostly it's like falling asleep"), and Aquanaut's Holiday ("...doesn't really have a point -- it's a blocky, dithered simulation of what it's presumably like to go deep sea diving.") What would your pick be?
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On The Most Boring Videogames Of All Time

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  • Xenosaga. My god, I've never been so bored during a game before. It was almost a chore to get through it. Luckily I cut my losses and sold it.
    • Seriously. In fact, I think Satan created this game--which had no random encounters but huge completely empty areas one was required to wander through until you met a mysterious set of conditions, as a "be careful what you wish for!" joke on everyone who hates random encounters.
    • Well, Parish has already given Xenosaga enough abuse [1up.com]. I'd also link his review of it on his personal site, but it was taken down quite a while ago.
    • Xenosaga is one of those games where I wonder why they just didn't sit down and make a TV series. That's obviously what they really wanted to do; the cut-ins get a million bazillion times more effort put into them than the gameplay, which got repetitive and irritating really fast.

    • Re:Gotta be... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Lovebug2000 ( 195893 )
      GAH!

      For years, I've wanted something with a deep plot, decent graphics, meaningful characters, and a good music score.

      I've had to live with Final Fantasy et al to be the best I could get in this regard. Yes, what I wanted was a TV show on my playstation. If you ever look at what it takes to make a TV show and make it work, you'll see you can't just blow millions on it and make it, the competition is too fierce, especially in the japanese animated market. But there is a great niche market in video games
    • Dude. You're absolutely right. I mean, I liked Xenogears, the "sort-of-prequel;" I thought it was fun and had a pretty in-depth plot. Xenosaga just went completely overboard and was this long, drawn-out, half-assed anime with a game thrown in seemingly as an afterthought. And it would have maybe been all right if the story was interesting, but it wasn't; it was just random, badly-written gibberish that made no damn sense at all. And when you weren't watching boring plot scenes you were walking through

    • Re:Gotta be... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by GTarrant ( 726871 )
      I think, if one wants to go for console RPGs, that I would cast a vote towards Beyond the Beyond.

      Back before the PSX became the de facto standard for 'traditional' RPGs, all you really had was King's Field to sate any RPG desire. Then came...Beyond the Beyond! I know a ton of people that bought it (including my roommates and I back in our dorm) solely because it was the first traditional console RPG out for the PSX in the US.

      Big mistake.

      The story was incredibly uninteresting, the characters bland, t

      • Not only was the encounter rate ridiculously high, you often needed to seek out even MORE encounters to progress in the game. Talk about super levelling grind. I'm glad we demand more from our games these days.

    • Re:Gotta be... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Kyouryuu ( 685884 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @01:02PM (#9858203) Homepage
      Truly.

      I liked the original Xenogears, even in spite of the text... that... read... like... this. The storyline was cool and there were lots of evil characters from the outset, only to be bested by one of them, and then we're left to question whether or not said character was really evil in the first place. And I liked how the intro cinematic was just this disconnected, looming scene until about three-quarters in the game when it finally begins to come together.

      But Xenosaga was a pithy, monumental mess of a game. It lacked any of the interesting characters from the first game. It bastardized the battle system from the first game. It recited its storyline like it was some demented gospel. And it took itself so damn seriously, I honestly laughed. The best part is getting e-mail from this futuristic world, talking about nonsense like AGWS converters, that the game takes for granted I'm supposed to instantly understand. I guess that's what the huge built-in encyclopedia is for. Lame.
      • Actually, even though I hated the gameplay of xenosaga and eventually sold the game halfway through (too much running down empty hallways), I kind of liked those stupid cutesy future emails and pseudoscience. The one I remember the best was how there was a bug in the nanotechnology that produced buildings, and therefore there were locked "Secret Rooms" throughout the entire game. Like they needed a stupid sci-fi explanation for every convention and cliche of the RPG genre.

  • Championship Manager (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Killjoy_NL ( 719667 ) <slashdot@@@remco...palli...nl> on Sunday August 01, 2004 @07:35AM (#9857107)
    Don't think this is flamebait because I know a shitload of people love this game series, but for the life of me, I can't see the appeal of the game.

    To me it's nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet.

    (not giving one iota about soccer is also a factor I think)
    • It probably appeals to the same folk who enjoy the fantasy sports on Yahoo though. People who don't like sports or staring at statistics, vicariously living their lives through professional athletes, probably can't ever understand.
  • Where the hell is Pitfall? Pitfall has to be the most boring game on the planet, hands down.
    • The CG fighting game that promised to be revolutionary. It was SO boring. Even the animation was glitchy, the collision detection horrible, and moves had a really weird timing, and things like just jumping would respond. What a piece of crap!
  • In fact, we're at a loss to remember any of this game's specifics.

    But yet, its apparently one of the boringest games of all times. Now that's journalism.
    • In their defense, aside from a few unique ways of doing things, it(Paladin's Quest) was basically a (crappy)generic console RPG. Part of what made it bad was its constant demanding of you to stop and walk around in circles to gain levels every step of the way. One of the few things that made it unique was that instead of having an MP stat, you basically spent HP to cast spells. Woo. Any number of unique ideas in it were crushed by the fact that the story, graphics, and music seemed to all be conspiring to l

  • 2. Lufia: The Legend Returns (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Elledan ( 582730 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @07:47AM (#9857125) Homepage
    Having played this game, I must say that I didn't consider the dungeons to be especially boring, although it might be that my expectations were just really low :p

    Anyway, whereas Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (SNES) is definitely one of the best RPGs, the mind-numbing music (not like any GB games ever had 'good' music), among other factors, of this GBC-sequel eventually turned me off.

    So, in retrospect, I don't disagree with calling Lufia: TLR a 'boring' game, although I would like to blame this partially on the platform it was made for, and the limitations this imposed.
    Something like the PSX version (Lufia III, cancelled) might (should) have kicked much ass.

  • Metroid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Korgrath ( 714211 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @07:48AM (#9857128) Homepage
    ok, I don't mean to get nintendo fans mad at me, but I always found the Metroid games very boring. Sure, when you get to explore and fight bosses they're a total blast! But it suffers from something that I believe to be the biggest drag in any video games, backtracking. Even with a pretty face like Metriod Prime, backtracking is still backtracking, and doing things like trudging from one point to get an item or flip a switch, only to have to go back through the same area a dozen times or so doing fetch quests, it get's very old and repetitive.

    • Re:Metroid (Score:2, Interesting)

      by vslashg ( 209560 ) *
      To each his own, of course. The purpose of this point is not to convince you that you really do like backtracking (you don't), but to explain why I do.

      The reason I like this aspect of Metroid is how non-linear it can make a linear game feel. Whenever you get a new ability in Metroid Prime, three or four missile packs as well as the next big powerup become accessible. What's great is the obsticles were right out in the open... the game teases you with spider tracks for the first hour until you get a spid
    • Metroid isn't so much about switch-hunting through. The idea is that on the way to get a super item, you notice places you can't reach with your current powers. Once you get that item, you recur on all of those places where it might be useful. And chances are, you'll reach some new place in the world and explore it, find some other item, and be dumped out in a very familiar location in the game. Backtracking is only bound to get worse in games, I think. As developers fervently try to make every game Fi

      • Re:Metroid (Score:3, Informative)

        by moonbender ( 547943 )
        As developers fervently try to make every game Final Fantasy length, and as worlds become increasingly more time-consuming to build, developers are going to naturally seek to reuse as much content as they can get away with.

        The conclusion is, of course, to make content creation easier. And I'm sure this is already being done: instead of creating a chair from scratch, I guess most world editors offer chair templates.

        An extreme example of "Rapid World Developement" is the Neverwinter Nights editor, which al
        • That's part of it. UnrealEd has a similar thing going with the concept of static meshes, high-poly decorative objects that are shared between all maps.

          But another part of it is reusing entire parts of the world. A random RPG Town could be visited time and again as the quest proceeds. It might be for a weapon that appears there early on, or a particularly omniscient NPC.

  • a c64 classic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lu Xun ( 615093 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @08:00AM (#9857153)
    The Great Escape [gb64.com] for the C64, a mostly monochromatic (except for the little border around the tiny game screen) simulation of escape from a German concentration camp. During the day, you had to go through the routine of a prisoner or risk being put in solitary. Solitary involved looking at your character in a locked room until the guards let you out. If you didn't touch the joystick for 5 mins, the game took over for you.

    I never had the patience to collect all the items and info needed for escape; I think my character just died from boredom.
    • The screenshot you linked to was to the Spectrum version of the game. As far as I can remember, the C64 version was significantly better-looking. Also, I don't remember the game being so boring, but I do remember that it was hailed as the best game ever when it came out...

  • Tekken (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wick3t ( 787074 )
    I'm not a big fan of 3D beat-em-ups. No matter how much I try to like them, I can't. They just don't hold the same ground as 2D fighters like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Samurai Spirits, Killer Instinct, and more recently SVC Chaos. Of all the 3D beat-em-ups, the Tekken games have to be the worst/most boring. I've beaten seasoned Tekken players by just button bashing. I played Soul Calibur 2 for the first time the other day with some friends and won the majority of games and they didn't want to b
    • Hehe, but I like Tekken and SB for the same reason! It's mostly a matter of timing and maybe sidestepping.. great fun in exactly the situation you mentioned haha - but still, against someone knowing all the moves you do NOT stand a chance with button bashing =P It's even more fun when you play with lots of energy and it's about throwing each other out of the ring ;)
    • You're either really good at these games (Tekken, Soul Calibur II, etc.), and therefore can win consistently, or you're not. It's still fun to half button mash and half know what you're doing and stumble upon some crazy combo.

      This one time, I was playing Ivy in Soul Calibur II. I threw the other guy out of the ring, but then accidentally speared him in the air and pulled him back into the ring...

  • Genesis Beat-em-ups (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dstillz ( 704959 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @08:19AM (#9857185) Homepage Journal

    Some of the later (especially superhero-oriented) beat-em-ups on the Sega Genesis were awfully boring.

    I eagerly purchased Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety, expecting it to be as enjoyable as the original Maximum Carnage, but it was drudgery.

    The Tick is quite possibly the most boring game ever, with hours and hours of monotonous fighting. "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas," indeed. Falling into pits and being forced to play the same miniboss/cutscene challenges over and over was worst of all.

    Most of the Batman games for Genesis were horrid. Batman Returns had mundane combat, mixed with some absurdly difficult timed jumping. The Adventures of Batman and Robin had extremely boring combat, except that the occasional tit-for-tat enemy who gave as good as he got and required a bit of movement in the vertical plane. Batman Forever had great motion-capture graphics, but frustratingly repetitive combat.

    Other bad Genesis beat-em-up games include Captain America and the Avengers, the second X-Men game, and the last 2 16-bit Shinobi games.

    You couldn't pay me to play Superman or The Incredible Hulk. I actually used the latter cartridge, along with a broken copy of Sub-Terrania, to prop up my desk hutch during my freshman year of college.

    Early Genesis beat-em-ups could be quite fun. I loved the Golden Axe and Streets of Rage series, Altered Beast, and the original Maximum Carnage. I find most of the "good" games to still be playable today.

    • Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety

      I got bored during the first level in that game. Maximum Carnage was cool, though.

    • Now wait a second there. Do not, I said do NOT, dare to insult Shinobi 3 - Return of the Ninja Master. That was one of the most fun and intense action games ever made.

      • If by fun and intense, you mean mindlessly repetitive. It also suffered from stiff controls and "doesn't feel as good as later 16-bit games" graphics.

        If it had played more like Strider or Golden Axe, or been smoother, I'd have liked it more. It feels stilted, rushed, and old-fashioned to me.

        The early Shinobi games were better. I stand by that statement. III and Shadow Dancer are hardly playable anymore. I put them in front of my younger cousins, and found that they prefered Revenge of Shinobi and eve

  • Aquanaut's Holiday (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Sunday August 01, 2004 @08:45AM (#9857241) Homepage Journal
    I have Aquanaut's Holiday and I recall it being an enjoyable, soothing game. There was a vast array of creatures to see, an interesting evironment to explore and an artificial reef to build. Any game with leafy sea dragons scores highly in my book.

  • My vote goes to.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by antime ( 739998 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @08:48AM (#9857248)
    Japanese console RPGs. Nothing like a one-hour game that's extended to 40+ hours by including tons and tons of irritating, unavoidable random encounters.
    There's little more tedious than having to trudge through endless maze dungeons where you can take at most five steps before having to waste another couple of minutes fighting some stupid creature that popped out of nowhere. Add to that mechanics that were outdated twenty years ago (seriously, compare the early Ultimas and the latest and greatest out of Japan, and after you've scraped away the candy-coating you're left with a far less enjoyable game) and you're forced to draw the conclusion that they're designed for lobotomy victims

  • Shenmue ?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IntergalacticWalrus ( 720648 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @09:22AM (#9857337)
    What? No Shenmue on the list?

    I never really understood why people actually liked this game. It was boring as hell, as most of the "gameplay" was dialogue and wandering around, and the only real moments of interactivity were mini-games (the two classic Sega arcade games were more fun than the rest of the game!), a poorly executed battle system, and Dragon's Lair-style sequences that while being very nostalgic, aren't very fun.

    I stopped playing the game when I reached that point where you get a job carrying crates with a forklift. That was completely uninteresting, and a complete waste of my time. I don't play videogames to do fake work. I have enough work in real life, and in RL I actually get real money. What the hell is wrong with the people who made this game ??

    • Re:Shenmue ?? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Yorrike ( 322502 )
      Shenmue deserves a top 20 position on the boring list, but not a top 10.

      This Penny_arcade comic pretty much sums it up: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-11 -15 [penny-arcade.com]

    • Can you tell me where I can find some sailors?

    • Re:Shenmue ?? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by steeef ( 98372 )
      G4/TechTV had a poll for the worst video games ever, and Shenmue was near the top. Personally, I love the game, but I can understand the reason a lot of people don't. They're expecting a greater action/story ratio.

      I like to think of Shenmue as a good mystery novel, whereas most video games are like an action movie. It's easy to enjoy an action movie, as there is (usually) not a complex plot to follow, and there are enough action sequences to keep you interested. A good novel is harder to get into than an a

    • Re:Shenmue ?? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by raygundan ( 16760 )
      I kinda liked the game right up until that forklift part. You could ignore all the myriad sidequests for the most part, although I was raising the kitten because it was on my way to and from everywhere.

      But the forklift work scene? Gahh. If you quit when you get there, the game's not half-bad. I pity the fool who spent hours "working" in that warehouse just to get to the end.

  • A few suggestions (Score:1, Interesting)

    by RogueyWon ( 735973 )
    Not played all of the games mentioned in the article, although I agree with the author on those that I have. A few further suggestions:

    Halo (single-player): sure, the multiplayer's fun, but single-player Halo seemed to basically amount to killing vast numbers of identical monsters over and over again with a couple of samey weapons, while moving between identical rooms. Fun for the first 30 minutes, then unadulterated tedium.

    Unlimited Saga: Normally, I love Squaresoft's games, but god only knows what they

  • DK64 had good boss fights at least (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) * on Sunday August 01, 2004 @09:41AM (#9857403) Homepage
    Too much damn collecting, but DK64 had some excellent boss fights...maybe Rare realized the dichotomy, because once you beat a boss you could select the fight from a menu off of the title screen. So I give them some kudos for that.

  • three little words (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sega
    bass
    fishing

  • Worst videogame of all time (Score:5, Funny)

    by veganjay ( 244303 ) <veganjay AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday August 01, 2004 @09:43AM (#9857413)
    Well I know that it is not always true that "worst = most boring".
    But, Barbie for the C64 can definitely qualify for both! Get this:

    Ken calls Barbie, asks, "Would you like to go to dinner?". She says "sure", and he replies, "Great! Pick you up in an hour." So she drives around and goes shopping for clothes for dinner, gets her hair done, etc.

    Ken calls back, "Barbie, plans have changed! Would you like to go to the prom? Pick you up in an hour." She drives, shops, Barbisizes some more.

    However, when she gets home, Ken is again indecisive: "Barbie plans have changed! Want to go to the movies? Pick you up in an hour"

    Finally Ken makes up his f*ckin mind and they goto whatever final destination he chose after Barbie has spent several hours answering to his every whim!

    Not only is this the worst game, but what does this teach our children? To be ready for whatever demands Ken makes, not having any input for the decision, and making unreallistic demands like getting ready for "a Prom" in an hour?!?

    • Ken calls Barbie, asks, "Would you like to go to dinner?". She says "sure", and he replies, "Great! Pick you up in an hour." So she drives around and goes shopping for clothes for dinner, gets her hair done, etc.

      Ken calls back, "Barbie, plans have changed! Would you like to go to the prom? Pick you up in an hour." She drives, shops, Barbisizes some more.

      IIRC, you had to return home on the hour to proceed to the next step. It's one of the more obscure things that I might recall from the game (don't ask

      • Forgot to mention that it was my little sister playing the game ;)

        Although the one cool thing about the game is that you can give Barbie green hair like a punk rocker. Which is kind of funny - I used to do the same thing with her Barbie dolls - cut the hair with scissors and die it green with food coloring! (oh she absolutely loved that!)
    • How hard would it have been for the makers to come up with a Barbie Dream Labyrinth, complete with a BFG, triple armor and quad damage. That'd teach Ken to keep changing those stupid plans.

  • Mazes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flyboy Connor ( 741764 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @09:45AM (#9857418)
    Old text adventures had mazes. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the maze, the more boring the adventure. Later on adventure makers caught on, and either delivered games without a maze, or put in "a maze with a twist".

    Unfortunately, when some nincompoop license holder thinks it is a good idea to create an adventure game based on his license, he invariably seems to give the assignment to a game developers that know squat-all about adventures. And thus, we see "Star Trek DS9: Harbinger". Not only a terribly boring and unattractive game, but also the game with the biggest, saddest, slowest, and most irritating 3D maze it has ever been my misfortune to wade through.

    I stopped playing "Myst" when I got in the underground maze, came to a dead end, and realised I had to track back for at least 10 minutes to get to the right path again. Can't say Myst is a boring game on the whole, but in the maze it sank to the pits.

    Strangely, some games that were fun to play 15-20 years ago are terribly boring nowadays. Who remembers "The Bard's Tale"? Who enjoyed it? And who would loathe to play it today?

    • I remember the Bard's Tale, but it was actually before my time. I got it on a disk of pirated games from a guy my Dad worked with, when I was about 8.

      I can still play through the PC version of the first game from memory, and did so recently, in a let's-boot-up-the-386-for-friends demonstration that included Neuromancer and other fine "guess which word you're supposed to say to the character" games. The Mac and NES versions seem unbearably slow to me now.

      I never really enjoyed the Bard's Tale games, esp

    • Re:Mazes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sigma 7 ( 266129 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @11:17AM (#9857800)
      Old text adventures had mazes. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the maze, the more boring the adventure. Later on adventure makers caught on, and either delivered games without a maze, or put in "a maze with a twist".
      While I can tolerate mazes within text adventures (technically, the entire map is a maze), pushing things to the extreme will get annoying, such as the infamous "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."

      Not only that, but some of those text adventure games (such as Adventure) also had a time limit on how long you could play, by either having a limited amount of battery power for your lamp, or by some other limitiation.

      I stopped playing "Myst" when I got in the underground maze, came to a dead end, and realised I had to track back for at least 10 minutes to get to the right path again. Can't say Myst is a boring game on the whole, but in the maze it sank to the pits.
      There is a solution for a maze - when you enter a node for the maze, you hear an audio sound that gives a hint on the direction you are supposed to go. It's possible to learn the sounds from the world with gears, but can be learned through "trial and error" within the maze.

      However, this maze is still annoying due to the long transition times, especially since there is no indication on whether or not you are on the right track at any point. (The audio alert that I mentioned doesn't count, since it incorrectly assumes that the player is always capable of hearing such information.)

      Strangely, some games that were fun to play 15-20 years ago are terribly boring nowadays. Who remembers "The Bard's Tale"? Who enjoyed it? And who would loathe to play it today?
      I wouldn't exactly loathe that particular game, but I tend to prefer other game genres over RPGs because of the amount of time spent levelling up your characters to ensure that they can defeat the end-game boss. The only issue would be the lack of map and the encounters that pop-up randonly, but that is not too much of an issue considering the maximum complexity of the engine at the time.

      (BTW, I heard that one player managed to get an unlimited number of songs from his bard. Don't know how it happened or how to reproduce it, but the infinite healing songs basically made his party invulnerable.)

      I wouldn't loathe other old games, provided that there aren't any annoying puzzles or mazes. As long as the game is designed properly, there is no problem playing it at all.

    • And let's not forget the not one but two (three?) annoying as hell maze sequences in Max Payne.

      If i hadn't had 5.1 to be able to listen where the screams/cries were coming from, I never could have finished them.
    • Strangely, some games that were fun to play 15-20 years ago are terribly boring nowadays. Who remembers "The Bard's Tale"? Who enjoyed it? And who would loathe to play it today? I remember wasting months on the first Bard's Tale. Literally. While I liked it, the main reason was that I was stuck -- possibly for more than a year, before I broke down and bought the hint book. (Turned out I had missed a single square inside a dark area.) At least, by then, my party had leveled up enough to easily beat the

      • Same here, the first time around. And I was even drawing my own maps, with what I thought was completeness.

        The Bard's Tale series and other Interplay games from that period, like Neuromancer, could be punishing, if you didn't know exactly what word to say to a character, or if you'd missed that one crucial item that you had to give to someone. Luckily, game saves were easily hacked.

    • one of the great things about maze type adventures is you get to break out on the pencils and graph paper!

      Some of the best games i did this for was Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (C64), Bards Tale (C64), Eye of the Beholder (Amiga) and all of the AD&D games (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn, etc, etc on the Amiga). Damn, now that I think of it, those gold box AD&D games absolutely rocked!

      It just seems that there's more magic in those older games. perhaps in the newer ga

  • Panzer Dragoon Orta (Score:3, Funny)

    by bigman2003 ( 671309 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @10:00AM (#9857454) Homepage
    This was one of the most boring games I've played in a long, long, long time.

    Sure, it looks pretty. But the gameplay consisted of me basically holding down the 'A' button to shoot.

    I got through the first level, and to the first bossfight. Basically I circled some big ship for about 10 minutes until it finally blew up.

    Then the next level I was flying up some river, and went past some butterflies- then the butterflies started to attack me in some way, so I held down the A button there. Then finally two giant caterpillars started attacking me.

    I didn't have the patience to hold down A long enough to see what was next.
  • OK, so I'm gonna take some flak from my gf on this one to say the least. But after the first year of farming you are almost FORCED into a routine or the game doesn't work! Every "day" in the game you water your damned crops, feed the damned animals, collect the damned eggs/milk/whatever, woo the damned girl. The monotony doesn't end ... ever!! Oh well ... if you don't mind that ... and you're a girl (no offense but I've never met a guy who likes the franchise) ... then I spose it's all right :)

    Kleedrac
    • Hello. My name is Calmiche, I'm a guy, and I'm addicted to Harvest Moon.

      Now, are we talking about the original Harvest Moon on the SNES or are we talking about the misguided newer versions? (Sadly, I own all of them. I even had to break down and buy a GameCube this year just so I could play the newest one.)

      I loved the original one, but the rest of them put me to sleep. I still pull the SNES one out every couple months and play through again. It takes about 30-40 hours, same as a normal sized RPG.

      All
    • I feel your pain brother.

      My cthonic wifette is nothing short of a "Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life" farming scientist. She has tracked everything in the game. The only people with better notes on the lifecycles, productivity cycles, and farming mechanics are the development guys from Natsume's Japan offices...I think even they would be surprised at the "otaku" level to which my wife has plumbed the highs and lows of the game. Her biggest complaint is that you can't hug/kiss/anything with your wife, whi

  • Gran Turismo 3 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by happyhippy ( 526970 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @10:37AM (#9857621)
    I really really really REALLY like driving around a track for an hour or two and get the same car prize as I got the last two times I played it.
  • I always thought Peasant's Quest sucked even worse than Rabbit Algebra. It only featured 16 colors and 2 bit mono internal PC Speaker sound.

    Peasant's Quest [homestarrunner.com]

    Also, Strongbad reviewed the games he would make if he could. They all sucked too.

    SB Emails [homestarrunner.com]
    • One thing about Pesant's Quest...total nerd nitpick, but CGA is the "maximum requirement"? Those were clearly at least EGA graphics...
      • Seriously. CGA was all about "how can we pick the least appealing colors possible." Four colors in the graphic mode, and they where Cyan, Magenta, White, and Black. There was a second mode with yellow, red, green, and black-- I have never figured out why the first set was the more popular. I'm not sure I ever saw a game using the second mode. I only learned of its existence when I googled to check my memory of the awful CGA palette.

        But yeah, Peasant's Quest has to be at *least* EGA. I see more than
        • I saw a few Yellow Red Green games, I think maybe the version of Boulder Dash? Dunno.

          Is Peasant's Quest going to make it past the preview stage? I thought it was just a gag. I know they are making that RPG for the Atari 2600 for real...
          • I have no idea. At least one of the other games they mention in their "from the makers of" section is already a flash game on their site. I particularly enjoyed discovering that if you burninate a peasant and they run back into their hut, the hut catches on fire.

            I'm guessing they'll make it, but it will be a flash game that looks like a mid-80s era EGA King's Quest title, except with short pants and burnination.

            Whoops! I stand corrrected! Since I looked last, it's already been released! [homestarrunner.com]

  • Tedious Game (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sludge ( 1234 ) <[gro.dessot] [ta] [todhsals]> on Sunday August 01, 2004 @11:39AM (#9857872) Homepage
    The most absolutely tedious game I've ever played was on a Sesame Street Cookie Monster Counter. Cookie Monster tossed a couple cookies back and forth, and when one made contact with his hand, you had half a second to press the juggle button. Between the lines, the goal of the game was not to let your eyes glaze over from the rhythmic tedium.

    I remember seeing full grown adults playing it for an hour at a time, trying to beat their old juggling highscores.

  • Myst? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 )
    Where the myst option? There was..... well I don't know whatthere was, I got sick of it after five minutes and gave up. Donkey kong on the other hand I played throughfor quite a few levels (damn loyalty to the old country games!)

    • Re:Myst? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Kyouryuu ( 685884 )
      Myst has a devoted following and some people must enjoy it for them to keep making it. But, from game one, I never understood what all the hoopla was about. It was as boring as a Hypercard slide show. Oh wait...

  • Tail of the Sun (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Calmiche ( 531074 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @12:58PM (#9858189)
    I've actually got a copy of "Tail of the Sun" in my entertainment case just a couple feet from where I'm sitting.

    I don't think it deserves to be called the worst game ever. It wasn't great, but it wasn't completely without merit either.

    Theoretically, the idea of the game is to collect food, build up your civilization, invent weapons, etc. Eventually, you are supposed to hunt down hundreds of Mammoths and collect their tusks. The only way to win the game is to build a tower of them tall enough to reach the sun.

    In actuality, the game was more about exploring and discovering Easter eggs. The world is HUGE, and without a map or compass, it can be a bit hard to find things, but there are giant stone monoliths, caves, creatures, lakes, oceans, hidden islands, things to hunt, aliens, monstrous fossils, Stonehenge.. The list goes on. You can literally spend hours exploring, always finding something new.

    It gets boring after awhile, but it can still give a good 10-15 hours of play without running out of things to do.

    -Calmiche,

    • Re:Tail of the Sun (Score:2, Insightful)

      by chris411 ( 610359 )
      Mind you, the article was about boring games, not bad games. So it wasn't called the worst game ever in the article; just the most boring one.

  • Halo (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BigBadaboom ( 122579 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @01:38PM (#9858363)
    Maybe not as boring as some of the games listed here, but am I the only one who thought Halo was completely over-rated? Seemingly endless sequences of room after room that looked the same?

    Am I crazy?
    • Single player HALO sucked. Almost all the stages could have been 75% smaller but they just had a lot of repetition. Especially the Library or whatever the Hell it was called. The reason HALO is given so much praise is for it's multi-player aspects. I've had a blast every time I've gotten together with 15 other friends and done HALO parties. The ability to link 4 X-boxes together is great and makes for a very enjoyable night.

      And the best part of HALO has to be cloaking and then running around and pistol-whi
    • No, not at all. I love Halo and wish its first player mode wasn't based on 3 maps that were endlessly repeated.

  • Universal Studios: Theme Park Adventure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mirkon ( 618432 ) <mirkon.gmail@com> on Sunday August 01, 2004 @01:46PM (#9858418) Homepage
    Ever wanted to pick up trash [gamefaqs.com] in exchange for points to play mundane minigames?

    Of course, if you really wanted, you could also just wander around the park in a dazed attempt to figure out where you're going or how to get somewhere else. Humanity has yet to accept this ultimate challenge.

  • All the boredom of the real thing.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kmahan ( 80459 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @02:37PM (#9858699)
    The Bass Fishing games..

    I guess to me "real" fishing is more about being out with friends and drinking beer than it is trying to outwit a fish.

  • I recently finished StarFox adventures. Hopefully that curt statement will give you some indication of how lackluster it was. It kinda f felt like it wanted to be Zelda for kids, which would be a nice concept id it didnt suck so badly.

    I wonder if there is a 'dull' warning. Some places are needlessly obtuse to get to, often you have to run back all the way through an area after you've done the important put of returning whatever thing belongs there. Boy howdy thats tedious. I could go one, but then that wou
  • I'm surprised no one mentioned this yet. Hold the button [holdthebutton.com]
    • OK, I checked out Hold The Button - about 6 seconds into it I was done.

      And the record? 3 Days. Did the duct tape fall off the mouse after that long? Or was there someone who held out hope that "any second, something cool is going to happen, I can feel it".

    • I'm surprised no one mentioned this yet. Hold the button.

      Oh, man, that game rocks! I wonder if/when they'll make an Xbox version, with a green button...
  • I recently picked up the GBA RPG Golden Sun for a long plane ride. It seemed liked I had to read 10 pages of text for every battle I got into. Maybe I was just in a bad mood because of the long plane ride, but I've already put the game back up on eBay.

    -prator
    • You get used to repeatedly tapping A throughout the whole battle. It's not a bad game at all... then again, the story ends rather abruptly with a "go play Golden Sun 2"-type message, and Golden Sun 2 bored me to tears with all the sailing.
  • I don't have a boring game per se but some RPG's can be interesting. In FF1, for example, much of the game was level building. Just walking around killing for XP. in FF2/4 though that isn't needed at all. Now the rest of FF1 was good so I don't think of it as too boring but many games almost try to have stuff like that.
    Basically unavoidable situations that are virtually identical to a thousand others make for a boring game. Really early games such as those for Atari were often like that because they couldn'

  • My vote for the most boring videogame (Score:4, Funny)

    by DocSnyder ( 10755 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @05:58PM (#9859657)
    Windows 95 Hardware Detection is scanning your system...
  • I remember playing it on the Apple //GS.

    The game was 99% waiting around watching 1-line cut scenes from gangsters. Sometimes you got to choose a line to say, sometmes you got to do some haphazard drive-by shootings. Mostly, your pointer was a fly on the wall.
  • Everquest started out interesting, but quickly became boring as everywhere you would go there would be a group or a single person camping an item or a spawn. You'd play striving to see something new and interesting someone told you about, and then finally, when you're close, you learn that that new and interesting thing now has a calendar set up to schedule who's allowed to "enjoy" it.

    It became one of the more boring games I've ever played. Sad, because I thought it had a lot of potentional except for the
    • And if something better were offered, how much would you pay for a subscription?

      I've been toying with some software that could handle maybe up to 200 simultaneous players on a modest colo machine.

      First off, some rules.
      1) No playing out of character. Your subscription money isn't worth you ruining the game for everyone.
      2) Not everyone is invited to play. You fill out an application, and maybe we accept you. This isn't totally to just be pissy... but if you work 3rd shift EST, we can kind of get an idea who

  • World Pool Championship... (Score:3, Funny)

    by sammaffei ( 565627 ) on Sunday August 01, 2004 @08:04PM (#9860166)
    on the XBox. I could never find anyone on Live to play. I think I was the only one stupid enough to buy it.

  • ET? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by urbaer ( 778997 )
    No one has mentioned ET yet? Or were boring games only invented in the last decade?
    • ET wasn't so much 'boring' as 'unplayable'. The first time I played, I never figured out you could just lift out of the hole and kept resetting every time I fell into one.

      Even after I figured that out, it was pretty dang unplayable.
  • Boring scenery where every screen looked the same, boring castles where every room looked the same, boring music that, well, you know.

    My dad actually spent the weeks required to beat the game, but I never saw the point.
  • I'm stunned that Ys Book I & II is on that list. I'd still rate that as one of the top ten games in the history of ever.

    I've never actually encountered someone before who played that game and didn't love it. From the text of the article, it seems like the author didn't understand how combat in the game works. I mean, no shit it seems like a dumb game if you don't understand its relatively simple mechanics. Soccer would seem like a pretty dumb game too if you thought the sole object was to see how
  • Oh my god, I cant believe The Sims is not on their list.

    I honestly dont understand the fascination that this game has for some people. As far as I can tell you have to make sure your little sim gets up for work on time in the morning, has something to eat, goes to the loo and then gets to bed.

    Thats far too much like my own life. I play games to escape the mundane, not to immerse myself in it. The only time I have ever enjoyed the Sims is when a friend added a cheat to get loads of money and then designed
  • Seriously, played this sleeper off and on for a few months (how could I play a boring game for so long? High tolerance for boredom I guess. . .). Actually, I thought it would get more interesting as I got into higher level content, but it really didn't. It has *got* to be one of the most tedious MMORPG's ever (most of them *are* pretty tedious anyhow).

    I'm kinda surprised at how tedious most MMORPG's are. In theory the chief design consideration is keeping players paying subscription fees for as many months

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