Gaming The System: Best of the worst, Part 2

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: SEGA
FMV game Night Trap was once the centre of controversy... 1992 was a really different time.

In a universe with unlimited possibilities and a horrifying amount of awful games, there are always a few titles whose awesomeness comes from that awfulness. Here are a few more games that didn't make last week's cut.

Hong Kong '97 (Super Famicom, 1995)
Who knew that displays of extreme xenophobia could be absolutely hilarious if portrayed poorly enough? HappySoft's Hong Kong '97 stands as a testament to that idea. Yet another kuso-ge (Japanese for “shitty game”) in its home country, this bootleg Super Nintendo title released in 1995 featured an absurd plot involving the killing of China's entire population by Bruce Lee's fictional brother Chin during the future reunification of Hong Kong and the mainland. The game's audio is nonexistent. There are no sound effects, and the music solely consists of the first few notes of a Chinese children's song played on a continuous loop. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Various Full Motion Video games (PC, 1990s)
The CD-ROM gaming craze defined the industry in the early '90s for a lot of reasons — good and bad. While the push towards making a technology that was capable of better storage for more expansive games more widespread is certainly admirable, instead, the floodgates were opened for some absolutely terrible video games that tried to take advantage of the CD's capabilities in the worst ways. A staple of early CD-ROM games were FMV (full-motion video) games; titles that promised a melding of movie-like experiences with the interactivity of gaming. What we instead got was loose gameplay that served as an excuse to tie together extremely cheesy and hilarious live-action cutscenes. An exemplar would be the SEGA-CD launch title Sewer Shark. This otherwise mediocre lightgun action is made worth chugging through for the Aliensesque characters, your copilot trying his absolute best/worst Bill Paxton on you. There's a massive library of FMV games, most forgotten for the right reasons, but nevertheless entertaining for all the wrong ones.

Various Simulator games (PC, mid-2000s to present)
Their boxart appearance seemingly mirrors the aesthetics of Microsoft's various Flight Simulator titles. And yet, these various inane simulator games made by various European developers, achieve zero quality and everything poorly. Probably the most notorious of the rip-off sim games are Farming Simulator and Street Cleaner Simulator. Before you ask exactly who in their right mind would ever want to experience such mundane mundanities, no, these games fail to bring any actual realism to the table. Instead, their extreme brokenness and creative interpretation of vehicular physics and logic make for some unintentionally hilarious gameplay.

An odd choice: Deus Ex (PC, 2000)
For the love of god, DON'T CRUICFY ME JUST YET. I am NOT in any way implying that this classic PC game, considered one of the greatest FPS/RPG hybrids ever made, is itself a bad game. I've played and loved it, but it's undeniable that after your first clean playthrough, the game is fun to revisit for the purpose of exploiting glitches. Although with the game's ambitious and expansive nature, a few bugs are to be expected, the sheer amount of entertainment value drawn feels very similar to screwing with a poorly coded game. Whether it be climbing up a 20-storey building by sticking mines to walls, or triggering characters to try to kill a robotic vacuum cleaner, the amount of things in the game to break completely add a whole new dimension to the game.