Submitted 12 hours ago by Theprogressivist@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
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.
Final Fantasy VIII impressed me in my childhood and since then I’ve finished it 4–5 times. The story is a bit of a mess and doesn’t make sense sometimes, the fighting mechanics are peculiar, but the game is very dear to my heart. Thinking about giving it another go now, ha!
As a kid I picked up VIII before VII (thanks to demo discs) and it has always been my favourite FF game despite its predecessor’s huge shadow. Learning all of the quirks of the games systems felt really rewarding, though I can understand why it didn’t appeal to many.
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.
Far Cry games at least until 4. I like mindlessly collecting 300 map markers sometimes. Funny enough, I don‘t like 5 cause there doesn‘t seem to be a collectibles map that lets me just move up and down the map collecting everything lol
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
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.
Yes the DoA franchise has a solid fighting game mechanic, but this was made purely for the fan service.
Escape from Tarkov, but single player (SPTarkov, not the paid upgrade). Lots of controversy surrounding the game, but I quite enjoy it playing at my own pace and difficulty
If you got friends, grab project fika mod and enjoy pve with friends. It’s a ton of fun and works great.
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.
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.
Starstruck Vagabond, Yahtzee Croshaw’s game.
It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.
I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.
But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.
I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.
Skyrim. I mostly just like to install a fuckzillion mods and not play it, though…
Right there with you.
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.
Probably Vampire Survivors or Vampire Hunters: Sometimes it’s just nice to play something where you don’t really have to think too hard.
Deadly Premonition. What a sloppy mess but damn it’s fun.
Just looked it up and looks right up my alley. Especially with the Twin Peaks vibe. Gonna look into this one. Thanks!
shame the sequel was so tedious and dull. Somehow they found a way to make the first one look like a masterpiece in comparison
A sloppy messterpiece! I love Deadly Premonition! Highly recommend if you want some fantastic nonsense!
I guess it depends on why you think it’s bad, so for me it’s Wuthering Waves. I absolutely love that game, but it’s “bad” because it’s a gacha game and that monetization scheme is absolutely fucking disgusting.
The game itself is actually really good and the story/side stories had me cry like 4 times already lol
Does the story actually get good? I tried it out around launch but when they introduced a knockoff Paimon I noped out. I was there for a dark post-apocalypse story, not Sunday morning cartoon. Not that there is anything wrong with it but just not for me. I felt a little mislead.
It all depends on what you like. It’s a good mix of dark and light and the paimon knock off is pretty chill, they really only pop up at important times in the story they aren’t the constant annoyance always speaking for the player like paimon is.
The 2.0 arc goes through a fantasy like land that leads to a gladiator/rome themed area so not sure how you feel about that but it gets dark all throughout that. The next area we’re going to is kinda unknown but it seems like it’s going to be much heavier in the “tech” vibe and should give a lot of backstory to the main character since they seem to have some connection to this new place.
For me it’s Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. It would be super easy to whale out and spend a bunch of money to get the characters and weapons I want, but I (almost 100%) limit myself to the basically fixed monthly costs.
I was surprised how super in on hoyo stuff I was until I started doing the dailies and the checklists on the regular. I kinda ruined my approach into Honkai because by the time I got into it, I learned from genshin I needed to do those dailies to get a decent shot at getting characters I actually cared about.
On the gacha front, I play Zenless Zone Zero. Parry mechanics are nothing new, but I love both the way they have you parry by swapping in an agent to take the blow, and the very detailed effects and animations they have for each attack.
It’s still a gacha, and I remind myself to stop playing anytime it bores me; but it manages to hold my attention decently.
I play that as well as genshin… I have a problem lol
ZZZ got me to stop spending money though, they’re way too fucking greedy. I went full pity and lost every single 50/50 in that game and almost all of them were nekomata… Hoyo can go to hell lol
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.
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
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.
I still play that on my PS4 when the mood strikes. Fun game.
At the risk of pissing some people off, Kenshi has a special kind of jank
When it comes to games, I have no guilt anymore. I enjoy some games and despise others. I think the only one that comes to mind for this category is E.V.O. The Search For Eden (SNES). I prefer it with a patch to improve the translation.
A classic. I loved how in the last phase you could make the right combination of nonsensical choices and end up with human and do really well. Not as well as my hyper-evolved Rhino-montser, but really well.
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.
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 with WW2 weapons”
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.
Skyrim! I always boot it up at least once a year
You think Skyrim is bad?
Tons of bugs. Rereleased on every platform. Zero fixes. Special editions fix nothing of note either.
Counter Strike 2. It’s a toxic community, but I find it oddly addictive.
The update from CS:GO to CS2 made the game unplayable on my aging hardware which is the only thing that got me to stop playing.
I’m in a single-player game phase now, and I have to say it’s nice having gaming sessions where I don’t get called every slur imaginable. That being said, Counter-Strike scratches a very specific gaming itch for me, I’ll definitely come crawling back one day.
Oof… sorry. I haven’t played it in so long that I think I was playing CS:GO. It does have a certain appeal.
I also live in a third world country so most games ping is very high. But CS is popular enough that there must be local servers. Because my ping is super low in CS. Another good reason I play it.
I don’t play them anymore these days, but for me it used to be the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. Dunno what it was with younger me but they just hit for some reason
You may want to check out the new “One Piece” game on the same engine. It has the same game play loop, interrupted by a accessible surprisingly nicely animated story line.
I noticed a fair bit of anime adaptations borrow that mechanic, that being one of them.
Berserk: Band of the Hawk is another.
Polarity
You’re essentially just trying to make less mistakes then your opponent but the semi-hovering magnets have an awesome table presence
super deepthroat
True art.
Vanquish is so idiot and the story is atrocious but damn the shooting is good.
Final Fantasy II - not Cecil's, but Firion's. If I could see people's faces in FF circles when I say that, I bet they'd be looking at me weird. e.e"
Grinding evasion by dual wielding shields and attacking yourself is peak game design.
defeats the dawn of souls final boss, phrekyos and deumion with the art of slapping
Stranglehold. I friggin love this game. It’s the John Woo videogame that is technically a sequel to the movie Hard Boiled and has Chow Yun-fat as the lead. I don’t know but I just really dig this game. Similar to it Enter the Matrix I also love. I go back and replay both every so often.
It’s also a bit of a comfort type of thing as those came out in the early 00’s when I was in my early 20s and still living at home and had more money than I knew what to do with hah.
Inspector Tequila was bad ass.
Wet. The reviews were pretty harsh due to the length and number of loading screens, but the gameplay was extremely fun. It does end with a cinematic and quick time events which was a bit disappointing, but it’s one of the few games I’ve played through multiple times.
I knew I forgot something! Fantastic style and soundtrack, engaging gameplay and a bit rough in execution - it was great.
Pretty much most of the CoD series… But then again I’m mostly a multiplayer guy, and I only really buy CoD games if I like the beta enough. BO7 is something I kinda do like (MP only with the occasional Zombies) but I have to agree with the fact the campaign is absolute cheeks. It’s like Treyarch wanted to make a horror game campaign but they’re stuck making Call of Duty so they just shoehorned it in.
For a bit it was Destiny Rising, I quit D2 over a year ago but DR does genuinely do a lot of things much better than the base game and directly addresses a lot of my core complaints that made me quit after 10k hours in the first place. Stupid mobile gacha game with predatory monetization out the ass, and I was shrugging aside the handful of AI NPC voicelines.
Needless to say I came to my senses and dropped it entirely on a whim. Can’t support the AI bullshit, I found I’d spent much more than I thought on the game already, and the endgame is entirely just p2w or get a handful of mats you need every 2 weeks.
That entire franchise is just a warehouse full of monkey paws
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 54 minutes ago
Random my little pony and other young kid games. Hate to admit it but even the paw patrol games are entertaining in this way.
They are short and easy, and kinda junk, nice palate cleanser, and often very cute and encouraging. You don’t know a silly morale boost until you play something that says “you’re doing great!” periodically on the easiest thing you’ve done all day.