Guilty pleasure games

[FollowMyRuin]

Admittedly, some games that are universally garbage really seem to appeal to me, and I love nothing more than trying to justify to folk how in some cases, poor execution, derivative gameplay and storyline, careless continuity etc etc sometimes make a game hilarious or just ridiculous to the point you can enjoy it.

I've got two games that do it for me.

The Sabatour, critically panned but I thought it was a real 'hoot'. From its terrible dialogue and a woeful Irish accent...truly,gently driving along the spatially and geographically inaccurate 5 minute journey from the Parisian city centre to fucking Saarland I'm Germany!? has never been as accurately depicted, who could deny the comforting monotony of placing explosives on German constructs every...30...seconds. Yeah, I liked it, it was a laugh riot and not a terrible game on the whole.

Enchanted Arms on the 360 was another insensitive and excruciating game to play. i recoil at the metacritic score as the game for me is cumbersome and jarringly stodgy. The gaps between every line of spoken sentence often makes me gag involuntarily in protest....however there's something to be said about homoerotic delivery of the dialogue from the characters, laced in every sentence that makes this god awful game so funny, and by no means a chore. Like from software are really contrived in their efforts to represent a gay video game icon and well overshot the mark, creating a derogatory and offensive stereotype...poor form indeed!

My question is, does can anyone else share their guilty pleasure games?

[DomsBeard]

Song Pop, if only to annoy my wife and her friends I play with by picking videogames or j-pop every chance I get!

[mik]

I loved The Saboteur. That game was a blast.

Actually, I really liked Enchanted Arms and I love Song Pop, too. Perhaps my taste is games is just poor.

[Sean]

I will defend Alpha Protocol to the death.

[mik]

Fuck. I love that game, too.

[DomsBeard]

I make 3, I loved Alpha Protocol even if it has a couple of near broken sections. Took me about 50 times

Spoiler: show

to beat Marburg in the museum

[countstex]

The Leisure Suit Larry games. All of them.. yes even the none Al Lowe recent ones! I have no shame!

[RoboticMonk3y]

there are no guilty pleasures...
(this is my justification for watching adventure time)

[Scrustle]

I like how The Saboteur is described as a "hoot". That made me chuckle. And I thought that game was supposed to be pretty good. It may have been critically panned but I gather the fan reaction to it was pretty good. It's got some pretty cool ideas in it to from what I gather.

I also had Enchanted Arms. God, that was terrible. I liked the art style though and the battle system was kind of interesting. But I got bored of it after a while and hated the characters.

I was actually thinking of making a thread like this myself, although in a slightly different way. I wanted to frame it as "bad games you like", since I don't really have any "guilty" pleasures. I just play what I enjoy, even if I can recognise that I shouldn't. No shame in it though.

Anyway, the game I wanted to talk about it Import Tuner Challenge. I remember looking in to it when it first came out and thinking it looked like a really terrible, empty, lazily made game, with a stupid win state mechanic, so I just dismissed it. But then more recently I was just looking up random stuff about obscure racing games, more specifically those made by Genki, and I came across the game again. Turns out that Import Tuner Challenge is actually part of the Shutoko Battle series, also knows as Tokyo Xtreme Racer in the West. For some reason they just decided to give this instalment a terrible name. I already had one similar racing game from Genki, and I had more appreciation for the style of racing in the Shutoko Battle games than I had before, so I went and got it. Twice.

The first time I got it it turned out that I had bought a broken disc. Although it was pre-owned and in an awfully tatty case, the disc looked like it was in good condition, but it just wouldn't read. It also made my Xbox exhibit strange behaviour too. It started to become very reluctant to read any discs at all, so in fear of it becoming bricked I actually went and bought a whole new console. The disc tray was already acting up anyway, so it was only a matter of time. But the game pretty much broke my Xbox.

Second time round I actually managed to find a new copy of the game, slightly cheaper than the pre-owned version too. Even though when I actually played it most of reasons I avoided it before turned out to be true, I actually got hooked on it for a while. For a few weeks I was addicted to it, and I intend to go back to it at some point too. I think I enjoyed it much more than I would have back when it was released since I have much more of an appreciation of the Japanese quirkiness of games like it than I used to have. It was also a really great game to play while listening to podcasts and stuff. But unless you're really in to weird, slightly clunky, repetitive Japanese racing games then I wouldn't suggest it. I had some good fun though.

Also, the only justification anyone needs to watch Adventure Time is that it's awesome, because it is. Cartoons can be for anyone if they're good enough, and Adventure Time is more than good enough.

Plus, Pendleton Ward loves QWOP.

[Dante Fireseed]

I actually really enjoyed the world championship snooker games on original xbox/ps2 and would play them for hours, much to the chagrin of my friends who would watch me play at my house, I imagine that that was incredibly boring.

For some reason I really enjoyed playing them, even though objectively I can see they were pretty bad!

[Guy_JD]

I'm a big fan of the Carmageddon series including the bastard child that is TDR 2000

[Sly Reflex]

Sacred 2. It's the best dungeon crawler on 360. Seriously, even though most of it is broken. It's absolutely massive and it has a lot of feature that other looting hack and slashers would do well to implement.

[Scrustle]

Sacred 2. It's the best dungeon crawler on 360. Seriously, even though most of it is broken. It's absolutely massive and it has a lot of feature that other looting hack and slashers would do well to implement.

I remember that came out in that period when there wasn't really any decent traditional fantasy RPGs coming out, didn't it? Two Worlds, Risen and Divinity 2 came out around the same time if I remember correctly. Well, when I say "the same time" I actually mean a pretty long period of time. There didn't seem to be anything good in that genre for ages. It was kind of depressing. But out of that lot Divinity 2 caught my eye and I got it when they re-released it with the expansion included. It has some charm to it I suppose, but the vast majority of it was garbage. It also had some of the ugliest graphics I'd ever seen on a 360, even with the supposed touched up re-release. It even looked bad compared to games from the last generation. Surprisingly, the voice acting wasn't bad, actually.

[Sly Reflex]

I played it (Sacred 2) in the middle of 2011 and yes, it's ugly, slow, unimaginative, buggy and had badly implemented instructions on the UI. I had a great time with it though, it's one of the worst best games I've ever played. I rank it up there with 50cent: Blood on the Sand which was also awful and awesome all at the same time.

[[CQC]Don]

My ultimate guilty pleasure game is Twisted Metal. The story is one of the worst I've seen in a video game, the cutscenes are these awful cheesy live action videos that often make no sense, and it takes absolutely no skill to play, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't contain my excitement while playing this game. It's just too fun. Brain candy. Brings me back to playing the games for the original ps. Once I picked up the controller for the first time, I was a kid again.

[Guy_JD]

Twisted metal back on the PS one was great, one of the first open world driving games that I remember playing, fair enough the world wasn't that big and you'd regularly get pummelled by the AI opponents is you stopped to look around but it was great fun

[ratsoalbion]

Wasn't TM Black a PS2 game?

[Combine Hunter]

there are no guilty pleasures...
(this is my justification for watching adventure time)

Adventure Time isn't a guilty pleasure. Adventure Time is brilliant

[Sean]

My ultimate guilty pleasure game is Twisted Metal. The story is one of the worst I've seen in a video game, the cutscenes are these awful cheesy live action videos that often make no sense, and it takes absolutely no skill to play, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't contain my excitement while playing this game. It's just too fun. Brain candy. Brings me back to playing the games for the original ps. Once I picked up the controller for the first time, I was a kid again.

Right on, man. Probably the most overlooked game this year, IMO. Really wish it didn't launch with so many online problems, as, the online was one of the best multiplayer experiences I had this year.

[Guy_JD]

Wasn't TM Black a PS2 game?

I said back not black