What game do you absolutely love that you know yourself is bad, but love it anyway?
For me, it’s Callisto Protocol. Loved that it was just more Dead Space. Not good by any metric but I liked it.
As weird as it sounds: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (The OG one).
On the surface, it’s a shit platformer game for kids, but what makes it interesting is the ways you can break the game and the lively speedrunning community. If you just try to play the game by following its rules, you’re going to have a bad time.
However, if you use cool speedrunning glitches and exploits, it becomes much more fun to break the game in ways the developers didn’t intend. I tend to play from time to time 100%ing it using exploits to reach locked areas earlier, skip entire sections, and play some levels backwards.
That’s a classic! I hear the new one Titans of the Tide is really good.
I still enjoy the game even as is. It’s well made for a show/movie themed game
Fortnite. No story to catch up on, no true goals besides winning, no long-term strategizing. I’m sure PUBG is the same/better, but my SO is entertained by the cartoonish nature of FN. It brings us excitement when I’m close to winning. With the introduction of zero build, I fair well. I used to feel more guilt for it being a “bad” game and for not giving time to the betrer story/campaign titles, bur you know what? I’m tired and my time is limited as an actual adult. I’ll take my dopamine where I can get it, thank you.
I’m replaying Ace Combat 7 right now. I can’t believe how bad the writing is. I played it in 2020 and had a grand time with probably 6 runs for the various achievements. Turns out, I remember basically nothing of the story. It’s definitely amusing to revisit the AI story aspects now that “AI” is in full swing. I guess AC5 set my standard for AC stories, but maybe that doesn’t hold up well either. Regardless, I’m in it for the fun, respectable flight physics. Just don’t ask me where I keep 144 missiles stored.
My kids play fortnite and I sometimes join them. Was watching some tournament on a stream and the “meta” at a high level of this game is just completely bonkers.
I quit around 2019 because I just didn’t stand a chance anymore. I’d place 2 walls and a ramp in the time it took most top-25 players to build a small castle with a wine cellar, jacuzzi, and escalator (or so it felt). I can’t keep up with these goddamn Ritalin-riddled kids.
It always cracks me up when my go-to move (in zero build) is to just stand still when it gets to close quarters. They start jumping like a cracked out kangaroo and miss shot after shot. I only do pitch/yaw and some sideways strafe, no jumping. It lets me use my Ps1/Ps2 era PvE experience.
I still say Enclave was a great game. The reviewers at the time absolutely misunderstood it.
Most of the complaints from 2003 are things people love about the Souls games now…
HD version:
Wrestling games.
Ravenfield is a stupid shooter with bad graphics but it scratches my itch for destruction without a lot of work.
If I have a bad day I throw on some metal and shoot those little stick men.
Man, I wouldn’t even consider that a bad game. It’s awesome.
If only they would add multiplayer to Ravenfield…
One reason I like it is because it’s not multiplayer
It’s battlefield but for single player. Even the name is similar.
I’ve sunken so many hours in that game, half of which is fiddling with load outs to fit the scenario I’m thinking of lol
Ahh yes, the “army of 10 from future is invading army of 100 who have WW2 weapons”
Mechwarrior 5 Mercs - stomping around the inner sphere with a 1000 to 1 kill ratio
Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.
I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.
Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.
Yeah, I like the game but have the same problem. I’m just not good at the avoiding damage part.
But at least you can still enjoy the lore. There’s Mechwarrior books as well.
Play with keyboard and mouse - makes hitting things much easier. Redesign all mechs to have max armour. For most of the campaign bringing as many SRMs to the field as possible is good. Focus fire with your lance mates - makes them much more effective. Remove JJ - useless. LBX10s are great. Remove useless single LRM 5s and 10s from most things - put a lot of lrms on mechs with good quirks - Archer, Longbow. Keep moving, ideally always at least 45 degrees to your target
I still play that on my PS4 when the mood strikes. Fun game.
Sometimes I want to blow things up and get headshots. So I’ll see if there’s a Call of Duty on sale and just play the single player. It’s rare though, and at the moment my blowing things up itch is being scratched by Space Marine.
Have you played Titanfall 2? That game is often on sale for 5 dollars and it’s the best single player campaign i have ever played.
Yes it’s an excellent game, I enjoyed it thoroughly and played the co-op defense for a while as well!
Don’t worry BT I’m not going anywhere
This is why I play Ravenfield. Sure, it’s bots. But an hour session usually scratches the itch for a few months. Plus I don’t have to deal with awful lobbies and trash talk.
Oh I’ll have to try it out! Added to my wishlist.
Kingdom Hearts. The writing is equally sappy and edgy fanfic crossover slop. But there’s something so satisfying about the combat, especially after the introduction of the command deck.
I remember back when streamers and big YouTubers weren’t a thing. I watched a complete play through of kingdom hearts when i was sick. No commentary nothing. I’m still not convinced that game isn’t a fever dream. Somehow i never really heard of it, just the name and i don’t know anyone who has played it.
Pocket Pool.
Not to be confused with pocket billiards.
Goddess of Victory NIKKE.
I try to be careful where I play it because the character designs are pretty uh… well the characters have huge personalities, usually. That’s not why I play the game, but I recognize some people have more of a problem with that than others so I try to be respectful about it. Also, NIKKE is a mobile gacha game, which a lot of people dislike. So I would say it counts as a guilty pleasure, although I don’t really feel guilty for playing the game.
For me, I don’t really spend money on it. Except for their two collabs with Neon Genesis Evangelion and one collab with NieR, because for me it is literally the law that I pay at least a little for IPs I really like. I am not a Whale (Richard Nixon impression lol), I am not even a Dolphin(?) I think I am called a Minnow. Whatever they call a basically F2P player that spends so rarely they might as well not spend at all. Besides, I have played for 3 years and only spent $60 total, I think that’s a pretty good deal so far.
Anyway, I like the gameplay. I realize to some people this might sound like I am saying “I read Playboy for the articles,” but hear me out.
When I was younger, I really enjoyed going to arcades. In the tail years of the arcades, newer games started to pop up, among them being lightgun games. I really enjoyed playing Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, and later on playing Silent Hill The Arcade, Alien, Terminator, and others. It was fun while it lasted, but now arcades are dead and game developers don’t really make those kind of games anymore. Beside my home arcade cabinet where I emulate the older games (and get a worse experience because I have neither the pizza grease and cigarette smell, nor the different shaped controllers), I don’t have new options for lightgun games these days. Then NIKKE came out and the gameplay was close enough for me that I felt that same fun of a lightgun game. I enjoy my time with the game mostly because it reminds me of the fun I had in actual arcades with lightgun games.
Stellar Blade has got some personalities as well…
Skyrim. Load up some new mods, play a completely different character. The magic of Bethesda’s old games is that they leave the player free to imagine what they are. The upside of having the PC have no personality is that you get to project whatever personality you like onto them. Don’t initiate the main quest, don’t bother with dragons, play pretty much the entire game as if it is your own sandbox. It’s grand.
Goat simulator and its sequels/DLCs. It’s a dumb shitpost game where you run around and create chaos but I enjoy it without any irony for some reason
all those Artifex Mundi hidden object games :D
They’re essentially reskins of the same simplistic gameplay and weak stories for like 15 years, but sometimes I still get in the mood for one :D
I love the better ones’ environmental art, but I’d be wary to pick up ones made in the last few years bc I’m pretty sure they started to use AI as soon as it became available, due to the conveyor belt nature of the genre.
EDIT: Ok apparently I was wrong, and they just altogether stopped releasing their games on PC since the pandemic O.o
Lego Tower. It’s a silly game with almost nothing to do. And I put more hours into it than anything else
Anything from Paradox, but right now it’s Europa Univeralis V. I really like some of their grand strategy staples, even if it’s an abusive relationship where they sometimes release updates that make the games worse and annoy you into buying overpriced DLC to make the last update slightly less bad. The new Crusader Kings 3 DLC is excellent, though. I hope they do more like that.
As a Stellaris player, nothing is more infuriating than Paradox putting out an update that breaks the save of your 2 month multiplayer game when you havent even reached the endgame lag yet. At least we can downgrade versions.













