10 Video Games That Are So Bad They’re Actually Awesome
Proving that awful games are an art unto themselves...
Even in today's age of Let's Plays and non-scored reviews, we still like to put games on a convenient linear scale of 'bad' to 'good'. It's simple, it's concise, and it conforms to all our silly human delusions that just about everything can be judged on a spectrum.
But there are some games out there that defy the logic of this spectrum, games that manage to do so many things wrong on a technical level, and should be bad, yet somehow come full circle off the bad end of the scale, and actually end up kind of awesome. A visual analogy would be those old-school wraparound arena games where you go off the left side of the screen and come back on the right.
Such games are special cases, and stand out from the 'just plain bad' crowd through their awful voice acting, hilarious glitching, or just outright ludicrous stories that tap into our childish fantasies.
Here are what we can call the greatest 'B-Games' of the video games industry, cementing themselves in our memories by way of their ingenious, unapologetic crappiness.
10. Darkest Of Days
If a ludicrous storyline alone could sell a game, then Darkest of Days would have topped even the likes of Battlefield 3 and the Black Ops series. Unfortunately, the 'Battlefield' and 'CoD' brands are also a major factor in a game's sales, so time-travelling shooter Darkest of Days (which was never popular enough for people to bother referring to it as DoD) was completely overlooked.
It's the kind of time-travel guff you'd concoct at the age of seven (but still secretly think is awesome), as you travel to key historical scenarios, such as Pompeii the day Vesuvius erupted, Antietam in the American Civil War and World War II in an attempt to prevent key figures in history from being killed. It's a bit like John Romero's massive failure Daikatana, but better... aaand still a complete trainwreck.
The gameplay never really comes good on its promise to let you truly explore its intriguing historical environments, and it plays out like a pretty linear shooter, but with the opportunity to mow down Roman legionnaires with a machine gun - infantile sci-fi at its finest!
The sheer madness of DoD's scenarios works with the cringe-a-minute hammy dialogue makes for an awesome B-Game package.