Which is the worst video game of all time?

[Rath Darkblade]

Just what the subject says. For my money, it has to be ET: The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600. The object of the game is simple: ET has to find 3 pieces of his phone by falling down pits, then get back to the forest where the mother ship dropped him off, and phone home. Sounds simple, right?

Well... no. The pieces of the phone are buried deep within pits, and to get out again, ET has to stretch his neck and levitate out. This proved to be so hard that many people simply gave up in disgust. The primitive graphics didn't help much. 5 million copies of the game were made, but very few were ever sold, and this led to Atari going bankrupt back in 1983.

So what's your worst game of all time, hmm?

[Tawmis]

Wow. This would have to take some serious thinking... because I have played a lot of bad games...

[BBP]

We had a topic about it before: http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=2103
It's not easy to pinpoint only 1 total gaming disaster experience: particularly since I get scared out of games easily, and since I've been gaming for quite some time, there's just a lot of stuff that's hard to compare.

Probably what sticks best in my mind is "Mozart, the conspirators of Prague". I have the Dutch copy, which sort of mixes English language puzzles with Dutch language puzzles in a confusing manner. It was released way before it was finished, which is painfully visible in the closing credits: one guy is listed as "needs translation". Repetitive games, a butt-stupid plot (Hurry, Mozart! There's a bomb under Prague that's about to explode! You can only defuse it by conducting this orchestra really well!), jarring graphics, hotspots in the wrong place... The only thing the game has going for it, is the music. You're better off just buying a CD of the good man.

[Rath Darkblade]

We had a topic about it before: http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=2103

That's true, but that thread is about the worst games within their own genre (e.g. worst RPG of all time, worst RTS of all time, etc.) This time, I'm asking for the worst game of all time - no specifics about genre needed!

It's not easy to pinpoint only 1 total gaming disaster experience: particularly since I get scared out of games easily, and since I've been gaming for quite some time, there's just a lot of stuff that's hard to compare.

Probably what sticks best in my mind is "Mozart, the conspirators of Prague". I have the Dutch copy, which sort of mixes English language puzzles with Dutch language puzzles in a confusing manner. It was released way before it was finished, which is painfully visible in the closing credits: one guy is listed as "needs translation". Repetitive games, a butt-stupid plot (Hurry, Mozart! There's a bomb under Prague that's about to explode! You can only defuse it by conducting this orchestra really well!), jarring graphics, hotspots in the wrong place... The only thing the game has going for it, is the music. You're better off just buying a CD of the good man.

eek??? *laughs* That's hilarious. Mozart the bomb defusing specialist...!

[BBP]

And guess what? Here's a walkthrough!

[Rath Darkblade]

Well... so far it doesn't appear to be so terrible! There are some things I've noticed here:

1. The intro music to this game is the beginning of Mozart's overture to his opera, Don Giovanni. I've seen Giovanni twice at the theatre, so I know this for certain! The music, incidentally, is beautiful... but what else can we expect of Mozart?

2. The emperor mentioned by Mozart (Joseph II?) is a very real Holy Roman Emperor. The military defeat he mentions is quite possibly the Battle of Karánsebes, in present-day Romania. It wasn't really a battle - more a scuffle between the Austro-Hungarian cavalry and infantry over a barrel of schnapps, of all things - but it caused a self-inflicted disaster, which allowed the Ottomans to capture the important town of Caransebes in 1788. If this guess is right, then Mozart would be writing the divertimento for Così fan tutte (1790). Mozart would only write two more operas after this (La clemenza di Tito and The Magic Flute , both finished in 1791). In the same year, he wrote his famous Requiem Mass, a work he failed to finish due to his untimely death.

Incidentally, there's an amusing anecdote concerning Joseph II and Mozart. The Emperor commissioned the creation of Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), but when he heard it, he complained to Mozart, 'That is too fine for my ears – there are too many notes.' Mozart replied, 'There are just as many notes as there should be.' The opera was a huge success, which made Mozart a famous man - but, alas, not a rich one.

3. The actor playing Mozart mentions that coffee was discovered by the Ottomans. This isn't quite true - coffee was first discovered (depending on which story you believe) by a goat-herder in Ethiopia, by a starving mystic in Ethiopia or by a monk in Yemen. Regardless, coffee spread from there to Egypt; it only reached the Ottoman Turks, and the rest of the Middle East, by the 16th century. From the Middle East, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas. (Funnily enough, in England, coffee at the time caused outrage in some circles; a "Women's Petition Against Coffee" claimed that it caused impotence).

[BBP]

I love Don Giovanni. <3 Would love to see it live but I'm in a culture hellhole right now.
Anyway, have a go at watching the rest. Seeing there's a translation patch available (Dutch version is the only one that used English voice acting) and Dutch new copies are like 2 euros a piece, I could get you a copy. It's not a hard game and you'll finish it in a few hours. Unless you use a touchpad, then it's impossible.
One of the mini-games, the one that comes back 8 times, is "follow a circle with the mouse cursor". To the beat of a Mozart tune. And if you mess up, the music sounds horrible. Up to the final one I played all of them with a touchpad: little short of a nightmare. The final time you have to do this (not the last puzzle) you're conducting an orchestra and if you don't do it well enough, the city of Prague will blow up. This could give you an awesome animation of the beautiful place against a deep blue sky soaked up in a big ball of flames; but no. Instead, the secondary-lead-who-is-poorly-introduced-and-completely-ignored-in-the-ending, will wake you up, tell you you've fallen asleep at your music stand and tell you to start conducting. Because it's the last one, it's ultra-hard: and you can't complete it without messing up a number of times and hearing this silly scene over and over and over.
Oh, and the ending you'll get, well: that's basically Joseph and Mozart sitting together at a harpsichord saying "Phew, that all went well, but it won't be long until I'm in another weird adventure." It not only leaves plotlines unresolved (whatever happened to the secondary lead who may be poorly introduced but is infinitely more sympathetic than Mozart? And what happened to his girlfriend who got shot and fell into the Moldau, did she survive?): it sets us up for a sequel. The horror, the horror.

[Tawmis]

So I have given this a lot of thought. I have - in my old age - played a lot of bad games. And I even went as far back as to think of the Atari games. And yes, I'd say ET was the worse. (Yes, my friend Chuck actually owned a copy). But you know, despite some of the other bad games I played (Temple of Elemental Evil - fun game, but bad setting in how brutal it was; the D&D game whose name I can't recall - where it was a Diablo knock off, but nowhere near as good; and on and on) - I honestly have to say, despite all of that - I do believe that the worse game I have ever personally played is Mask of Eternity. Having just given it another swing just a few weeks ago, it's extremely fresh in my mind. The graphics are dated (even for when it was made), the voice acting was not good (in my opinion), the controls are completely horrible, the story did not seem all that great (for as far as I got - the snow man, way back in the day - didn't even get that far, trying to replay it). I think because even in some of the other bad games that I played - I found some enjoyment out of it. Temple of Elemental Evil is brutal - but still, it managed to be fun. The D&D wanna be Diablo game was more hack and slash than Diablo was (no real story), and it was still fun. Codename: Iceman was brutual in some areas; but still was fun as far as I made it (except for a few specific spots). Wizardry 8 uses the same style graphics as MoE, but was still fun. (Very fun, actually). MOE failed to make anything enjoyable. It failed in every sense of the word.

[Expack3]

I'm going to go with Natural Fawn Killers, which claims to be a parody of hunting simulator, but ends up feeling more like a pathetically-cheap animal murder simulation. Here a "Let's Play" video of it in action: