What's the best worst game you've ever played?

Oh god, S.T.A.L.K.E.R for sure. It's the buggiest, glitchiest, most unstable, bug ridden piece of unoptimized trash and I fucking love it. All the significant (read: gamebreaking) jank has been ironed out by the absurdly loyal community and the rest of the jank is just that S.T.A.L.K.E.R charm. I've put so many hours into modpacks. The series holds a special place in my heart and I can't wait for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 in 2021

Arma 3.
The physics model is buggy as shit. The AI is just as bad. I kept playing it because it was still a ton of fun: a military sandbox with "Next Sunday A.D." level future-tech.

It's the most fun playing with a group, but good luck finding a group that likes the game as-is. Most of the groups and clans are military fetishists to some degree or other. I played it with an ex-Marine for awhile, until he took his own life due to chronic pain (he was in demolitions and his cartilage was all fucked up) and his divorce. He was only 29 and had 3 kids. :(

When he died, it got harder and harder to fire up the game and tool around. Eventually I stopped playing it altogether and am now learning to play guitar.

So I moved from Arma 3 to Guitarma 3, and it was a good decision. Having way more fun now. RIP Jim, aka Silky Actual.

Superman 64. My friends and I were young enough that we didn't notice all of its flaws and had a blast playing the multiplayer, which had nothing to do with Superman at all. It aged terribly (as most games of that era did in my opinion) and was a buggy mess but we enjoyed it all the same. I didn't realize until about a decade later how much everyone hated it.

Good question!

For me, maybe Bubsy 3D? It's universally regarded as bad. I think it was one of the first games I got on Playstation (first two were Ridge Racer and Megaman X4). I pretty much only had access to cheap, used games and took what I could get. So, I played the crap out of it.

Oh I love this question! This might be a weird choice, but Akrham Knight. It's a beautiful game, but should really have been a third of the length that it was (and it was already super short). I loved the feel of the game, and I liked the story enough. However, the bat-tank parts and a lot of the mechanisms just got super repetitive. There's only so much hide and seek tank one can play. And it's quite button-mashy. I would have preferred more mystery, slealth and detective work/puzzles. And character and story wise, they made some really odd choices (Babs and Tim - why?) Can't even say why, but I found it super relaxing to play. Sometimes, I just glide around or drive around doing nothing.

Saints Row 2, PC Port.
It was bad because the PC port was buggy and sloppy and incomplete.
I kept playing it because it had a wonderful story and the mayhem was beyond compare.
And if it didn't exist, then SR3 and beyond never would have been made.

I have to say Night in the Woods, because of how it treats itself. It has amazing world-building, great characters, good visuals, everything about this game is really cool, except for the ending. You get to go on this journey, get invested into the story, get to know the characters, take your time exploring and forming bonds with people (yes, that was a great mechanic there), and ultimately the whole story being built up ends up abruptly on a note that doesn't make any sense in the game world, that ends up being a political commentary. And it's not even the fact that the ending is political - I've played a lot of political games and if they made effort for the commentary to make sense in the world, to actually be a part of the story - I never had any problems with it, but in that game you wouldn't ever get a clue on what the ending means, unless you go to the twitter where author had to explain it to everyone. It just seemed that at some point in development they ran out of creative juice and decided to quickly wrap things up, but in the end nothing is resolved, nothing is explained, no character growth happened, it just ended.

There are games that have this kind of Big Lebowski vibes, like Journey - where ultimately nothing changes and it's just a story that happened, but this game clearly sets up something bigger, more mysterious and interesting in the beginning just to throw it all out in the end. Imagine if in Stranger Things there were no lab, no demigorgon, and it would've been revealed in the end that one characters just suffers from mental illness, and the story just stopped with a cryptic line at the end that makes no sense in-movie. That's what Night In The Woods is.

This is made even worse by the fact that exploration and dialogue is all that game has, apart from that it has no gameplay, so in its case if the story is bad then there is little to nothing to salvage there.

Brink. It had such a great high concept. Stylish, with a post apocalyptic solar punk aesthetic. Adding parkour to a shooter!

But it suffered from dumb AI. Missions were limited and super repetitive. No actual story/single player to fill the gaps in the well acted dialogue. Terrible balance. Most weapons felt the exact same save a few such as the grenade launcher. If you set yourself up as a heavy medic with a grenade launcher you could run around healing yourself and be near unstoppable with easy corners to cheese indirect fire.

I actually love playing kusoge pretty often. They're games I can play for a bit and never be upset at not finishing.

If there is a bad game I particularly love, I would have to put it as a tie between Zero Divide for the Playstation and Battle Arena Toshinden REMIX on the Saturn. Zero Divide is a bit of a cop-out since most of my love for it is from it's creation by one of my favorite video game studios (who I love for their bad games, naturally). They tend to have great ideas but fail on the execution, and Zero Divide is the perfect embodiment of this since it got two sequels which were actually pretty good IMHO. Of course, they didn't come out in my country, so those games are forever out of reach for my collection.

But Battle Arena Toshinden is hilarious just for the poorly voice-acted dialogues between bouts. It's got accents so bad that it's almost as if they chose voice actors who hated their character's nationalities. And of course it's got the original BAT's legendarily stiff gameplay. It's honestly very hard to tell if the game is too easy or unfair because each time you win you will have no idea how you managed it.

Dragon's Lair, on the 3DO. Action game of the earlier variety, but with a horrible twist. Apparently the arcade version had little flash of light that would happen many action scenes to let the player know roughly what sort of thing to do and when. The 3DO had no such prompts. I spent an hour trying to figure out the first scene before giving up in frustration. Came back years later and accidentally got past the first scene, only to die in the next scene. Wash, rinse, repeat until I get to the THIRD scene, where it again happens.

Eventually one drunk day about 15 years after I bought the game, a friend and I ripped through it to get stuck on the final sequence. That princess makes me want the world to burn.

Imagine not getting any flashy queues like you see in this, and every time you die you have to restart the whole thing over again from the beginning. That was this awful, awful, hideous, stupid, frustrating, awful game.

But eventually, we conquered it and slew the dragon with the magic sword and saved Princess Daphne. Though I rather wish I didn't.

Oni PC game. It was bad because it was buggy as hell, at least on my installation. I remember I actually had to skip a level with cheat codes because it would crash upon loading every time. I really enjoyed the combat mechanics but what really made me keep going all the way through was the fact that it was one of the few games I owned that worked without the CD. My CD-ROM was broken and I was stuck with Oni and Hitman and I played the hell out of both. My dad wouldn't let me get a new CD-ROM until the summer brake...