What truly is a REALLY BAD IF game? 25% of games didn't make the cut!

Playing IF Reviews and Essays
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You missed out …

CRASHES!!!

(There’s one object early in the game (hook? I think so. Maybe not…) which if you examine, the game crashes with no warning nor relation to the original cause, 3 turns later. I’d say that’s pretty bad.)

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On CoK, the point in this comp is writing intentionally bad games, and placing intentionally a game-breaking bug is fair game.

But a genuine, non-intentional, game-breaking bug is another matter, at least IMVHO.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Sometimes, it’s obvious whether a bug was done on purpose or not, but I think this one wasn’t (because I could got back to the bar and leave again in a new playthrough).

STILL: game breaking is game breaking. And that makes it a bad game. Even if unintentionally done.

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stage fright, by Griffin Raynor

stage fright is a short horror Twine piece, with a looping component. During a student play, your sparring partner gets a nosebleed, bad enough that it freaks you out and stops you from performing the rest of the scene. Queue leaving the stage en embarrassment and… finding your way back to the start again. Reliving the same scene over and ov–

oh, no, actually. Just once. Because you run into some broken links which stops you from experiencing the other coded scenes (though some of them are broken in other ways). It is a bit of a shame, because the concept of the story is really interesting in and of itself, and the nightmare/horror loop to escape (as some sort of stage fright metaphor) is pretty cool to explore.

Why it is not a REALLY BAD IF game?
~ the horror loop is neat! I would never want to ever feel this happening, but it’s a cool concept!

Why it should be considered REALLY BAD IF?
~ broken passage links, making it impossible to explore all that there is (though a couple of hidden passages also look empty or with more broken links)
~ the transitions between passages make it a bit more funny than horrory :joy:

The I don’t know if its bad or not, because it made me howl:
~ the Eminem reference :joy:

Final decision: Unbroken the game so I can escape this loop of hell!

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105

Dr Syrup’s Revenge by Noah Si

:woman_shrugging:

So… instead of submitting a game, only a walkthrough was submitted. The reasoning being that it was inspired by the WalkthroughComp… But it’s unplayable, because… there is literally no game to play or load. It can neither be a good or bad game, because the game doesn’t really exist. So, since I can’t judge it for what there is (since there is nothing to play), it will be disqualified.

Final decision: Schroedinger’s Game (disqualified for not even making a game)

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106

GUT THE MOVIE 2: GUT vs. TER THE TWOVIES, by Coral Nulla

GUT2 is the spoof/sequel of GUT THE MOVIE, where you don’t just play as the original trio, but also TER, the (Eurovision inspired?) rival trio, who is trying to one-up GUT by making a sequel before they do. It uses a similar gameplay as the original game, with having different actions for each character, except that it flips from one trio to the next.

Until the original, this spoof does not let you go very far, with most of your attempts being losing endings (either because your chosen idea was bad/impossible to make or because the game is broken), and one win by default (because GUT just doesn’t bother making the sequel). Still, it was funny how it poked fun at the original game, with even sillier actions or by simply giving up on it. It probably has also the smallest iframe I’ve seen in a long time.

Why it is not a REALLY BAD IF game?
~ it tickled my funny bone!

Why it should be considered REALLY BAD IF?
~ it was doomed from the page load: get ready to scroll (or open the frame in a new window)
~ your basic broken links and empty pages
~ made no attempt at pretending it would be good from the start

Final decision: “Not only is it a bad haircut, it’s a bad haircut done badly.” - complete stranger, 2018 (the blurb says it all!)

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An honorable mention for:

Y despues de esto, Que hacemos?, by ArtistSynth

which was submitted in Spanish… a language which I have terrible control of and have lost all my knowledge after a decade of not practising so… :confused:
I tried! With google translate open… and got even more confused later.

So… if any Spanish-speaking peeps are around and would like to give it a go and let me know if there is anything bad further than ambiguous endings!

Final decision: It wouldn’t be fair for me to judge

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108

And now… before we close this first edition, let’s look at one last entry:

the 500 rooms by… me :stuck_out_tongue:

the 500 rooms is an “experimental” parser (for the author who used this jam as an excuse to try Inform 7) where the goal is to get through all the 500 promised rooms. The game is linear, only requiring the player to find the correct direction to move to the next room, and so on and so forth (only using the main 4 compass directions).

Two stories seem to run in parallel: the main room descriptions and the title of each room. The first is displayed word by word, each revealed as you go through the rooms. The second starts as descriptions of the room, before breaking the forth wall and talk to the player.

The game was actually a Neo-Twiny idea from last year, where there would be 500 rooms and each of them would only have one word, forcing the player to move between rooms to make coherent sentences. This didn’t happen then, and I attempted this version about 4h before the deadline, and my limited knowledge of Inform (as well as the deadline) forced me to cut corners left and right. Instead of one word per room, the story was revealed one word after the other. The “story” wasn’t 500 words long, but 92 (which was TOO LONG TO CODE ROOM BY ROOM MANUALLY).

So it does not fulfil the 500 rooms spiel, the story itself is just taunting the player (in two different annoying ways), and it’s not even coded in a way that would make it fun (it’s pretty easy and quick to go through it).

And that is why it got 2 1-star on IFDB!!! DESERVED! It’s trash :joy:

the 500 rooms wished it was The World’s Most Annoying Game. Or the food at home meme.

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It has taken me A WHILE, but we are finally at the end of this BAD journey. First by sharing some ideas, then by actually submitting games, and finally by putting my through this gruelling experience and playing and reviewing every single entry. Good think I didn’t promise to do the VN version too… it would have been too much!

As expected, some of us didn’t follow the rules and got disqualified because their entries were not only not bad, they were really good! Many edged the line between bad and good, with quite a few entries that were entertaining even though they were still pretty bad. And a few that were really bad.

So let’s quickly go back through the entries and see how bad (or not they were). They are only categorised, not ranked.

D-Tier: AKA the disqualified entries

C-Tier : Cut-Rate

B-Tier: Yeah… that’s bad

A-Tier: Atrocious

and finally…

S-TIER: Skin-crawling

THE ENTRIES THAT MADE ME WANT TO THROW MY LAPTOP AWAY

(lol, one of each type of IF: choice, parser, VN)

So what did we learn?

Bad games come in different shapes and form. There are some objective elements that make a game bad, like broken links, bugs, undefined commands, inaccessible interfaces… But at the end of the day, it still ends up being pretty subjective. What I found funny or entertaining wasn’t to the taste of others. What some people thought was pretty cool, others really didn’t like it AT ALL.

So yeah. 25% disqualifications, 3 games REALLY BAD.

We’ll be back in a few months to hopefully decrease the first, and increase the second.
(NO RAGRETS!)

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That’s not as many disqualifications as I might have thought! Good job, er, everybody else, since I was bringing down the average :slight_smile:

This was such a fun jam – thanks for organizing it and reviewing it!

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I’ve really enjoyed your reviews of this jam! I’m also glad to hear that you’re planning to run it again, because I had a great/terrible idea but ended up not having the energy to implement it.

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@aschultz, @climbingstars, and Zack, consider yourselves the best worst IF authors by the 100% objective criteria! Congratulations!

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I think that’s Andrew Schultz (@aschultz), not Andrew Plotkin - I am very curious what a bad-on-purpose Zarf game would be, though (if such a thing were even possible)!

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Oops. Thanks.

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perhaps inhumane ? :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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A thoroughly entertaining jam! Thanks, @manonamora !

I’m reminded of Simone Giertz’s comments about her early work - there’s something freeing about making something that is supposed to be bad. I think there are a lot of would-be IF authors who struggle with actually releasing games due to scope creep and their own perfectionism, so jams like this are a fun way to break that pattern and just enjoy coding with no expectations. Well done everyone!

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@manonamora Thanks for that jam! That was good fun! But I gotta ask, who truly made the worst game and got first place?

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This was so fun to read through! And cool to see reviews for my own games. In this bundle are the first two “games” I have released in Twine, also the first three short “games” I have released, amd the first three since Milliways, so it’s interesting to see.

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:joy:
They are all the worst in their own special ways.

Hope you also had fun participating in it!!

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Aww! But since you said this,

I’ll take it you already gave me first place! Woo! :rofl:

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