I won't call it bad, but I hate that I like Kingdom Two Crowns that much. There are much better things with an actual stream of original content to waste my life on, and yet I come back to this evil addictive game. I put off playing Dead Lands because I knew it wouldn't end well, and look, where did 60 hours go?

You Are Empty

I've played those, and they're not bad. Maybe not the best of their genre (although Archimedean Dynasty is a classic), but not "bad".

Oblivion. Hate love relationship with hundreds and hundreds of hours in a game with an enemy scaling system that I consider gamebreaking and I hate. Better than most marriages :D

Honestly, years later I can say that it is a bad game. But I liked it because I knew it.

These are games that I enjoy but still know they're objectively bad...

Unreal 2
Bulletstorm
Dead Effect 1/2

Older games from the DOS era has a few some that I think might qualify as "bad but still charming/enjoyable", like:
Quarantine II: Road Warrior (inspired Stainless Steel to make Carmageddon)
Pyrotechnica (If I can run it properly)
Interpose (At least compared to games like Raptor and Tyrian).

And Quake 4 and Archimedean Dynasty isn't objectively a bad game, though, they haven't exactly aged very well.

https://www.squakenet.com/game/interpose

I think it's different from movies, where a film can be really bad in all ways but is still enjoyable because of nostalgic appeal or cheesy fun. A game that feels legitimately bad to play probably can't be enjoyed. However here's a few examples where I think a game is really bad in a lot of ways, but I still enjoy playing it:

Splinter Cell: Double Agent - Simplified, short and pretty much broken on PC, but I still enjoyed it because I am super into stealth and love the series. Also the "double agent" sections where you're undercover are kinda cool, like a mix of Splinter Cell and Hitman.

Hitman: Absolution and Splinter Cell: Conviction - I don't think these are bad games, they're just bad Hitman and Splinter Cell games. I bet a lot of games mentioned in this thread will be similar. Games that strayed too far from what their series was about, but are still good games when taken for what they are. I love predator stealth from the shadows stuff, and these games are good at that.

Deus Ex: Invisible War - I just love cyberpunk and immersive sims too much to not enjoy it, even though it is very flawed and much worse than the rest of the series.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 - Such a drop off from Morrowind, with simplified mechanics for consoles and super derpy dialog and scenarios (in part because of the switch to full voice acting and fitting those voices on a DVD, but also bad writing). I have vivid memories of playing Oblivion the week it released, with Morrowind being maybe my favorite game of all time, and just being heartbroken. That all said... I love wandering around in Bethesda's worlds, and still enjoy doing it. Just replayed Fallout 3 a few months ago actually.

Early Sierra Adventures with Dead Ends - This is just incredibly poor game design. Deaths are fine, but dead ends where you didn't pick something up three hours ago and it makes you start over, are wretched. Anyone who defends that is blinded by nostalgia. A lot of these early games still had great presentation though, and foster a lot of nostalgic love.

I agree :) I love them for interface reasons, the feeling of playing those familar titles. Something that will never come back, but today the dead ends shouldn't be a standard for a god game.
I am convinced that the ninety per cent of those deadends were programming errors or not aware design details.
Of course I am not reffering about space quest 1 or 2.
All the dead ends and evilness in these games are voluntary and were done because they hated you. :)

What about games with dead ends, but which also have multiple save spots and provide a clear warning before the point of no return that there's something you might need?

Oh yeah a warning makes it fine. Morrowind let you do anything and kill anyone, but if you made the main quest unbeatable it would pop up a little message telling you that. I think good adventure game design would have areas you could never go back to, but also make it so you need to have everything you'll need in the future to leave them.

King's Quest VI had a labyrinth that could be a dead end, but it had an NPC who warned you before going in if you didn't have everything you needed. I think that was more or less fine. It's the Space Quest "whoops you didn't pick that thing up in the opening act and now you're screwed 4 hours later" thing that drove me nuts back then.

- Alpha Protocol flopped and was critically panned, but it's in my top 10
- few people name Jaws on NES as a classic, because it's very grindy and a lazy, pointless adaptation of a movie, but I enjoy it
- Hitman: Absolution is the least liked of the Hitman series, I played it for almost 100 hours and like it at least as much as Silent Assassin
- Duke Nukem Forever, completely solid FPS sequel to Duke 3D, only panned because it took forever to make a comparatively mediocre game
- Legendary, not sure why it's so hated, yeah, it's just a mediocre shooter in the end, but it has cool mythological creatures and set pieces
- Fallout 4, most of its flaws can be easily corrected with mods, have 900+ hours in it, like it better than Fallout 3 nowadays, no regrets
- Saints Row 2, horrible stilted dialogue, lazy animations, laughable driving physics that they left wonky because it was funny I think, made fun of GTA IV's bowling at launch because spraying sewage on people is more fun, etc. etc. played it for several hundred hours

I enjoy some genres that just would never fly today without modification. Old school beat-em-ups for instance. I wouldn't call Double Dragon or Final Fight bad but these days they'd be frowned upon for not having leveling/skill charts. Confessed in another thread I like the new Splatterhouse.

Old grind heavy RPGs. I've played Final Fantasy 1 like 5 times. Something about the difficulty and the freeform ability to make terrible choices is wonderful. You sure you want nothing but heal bots with a dagger and a staff between them? Go for it. It's only repetitive if you let it be. My friends and I were thinking up Achievements back in the NES days to breathe new life into the few games we had.

Weird games that tried to bring something new to the table and never took off. Back when the big studios still took risks we got some games that tried to break the mold but didn't really always work. You wanted them to be better then they actually were but I appreciate the effort even if it failed.

Probably tons more but I agree with the idea bad games are different from other media. I can watch Plan 9 From Outer Space and enjoy it, just in a way that wasn't intended. A broken game can sometimes be non-functional.

I can't classify games the same way I do movies, if I find a game legitimately bad then I'm highly unlikely to see any value in continuing to play it, let alone enjoy it. I'd sooner watch someone else suffer through a let's play in this case.

I guess there's one objectively bad game I enjoy, simply because I find the character designs (Well one in particular) and artwork for the SNES version just so damn charming: Brutal: Paws of Fury.

There are some games that I enjoyed that I think cop more flak than they deserve, even though the zeitgeist seems to consider them bad:

Duke Nukem Forever
Shadow the Hedgehog
Unreal 2

I really do sometimes enjoy re-playing Dragon Warrior for the NES. This particular version of the game (and the Japanese Famicom version, which it's based off) is notorious for the large amount of time needed to level up, and leveling up is required (beating the game below level 17 is not going to happen without RNG manipulation, and even level 17 requires getting a 1/16 success rate on a spell). This means that you will be spending hours wandering around in circles, fighting the same enemies over and over just to get experience needed to (eventually) level up, and there's no (reasonable) way around it.

There's also SaGa 1, with its incredibly buggy battle system that's filled with logic errors. So many effects handle stats in strange ways, sometimes the opposite of what you'd expect (multi-hit attacks do more damage to high AGI characters, blindness boosts accuracy and evasion for the most basic attack type, MELT does more damage against targets with high MANA, weaknesses reduce damage taken from all-target elemental attacks (which there might only be one in the game, but that's beside the point).
Famously, there's the SAW, both the item and ability form, which only works on targets it's not supposed to work on. At 100 STR, for example, there are only two enemies that it will work on; one you are not meant to be able to kill, and the other is the final boss!
There's also the fact that the human and esper growth systems don't follow the rule of diminishing returns; it's easy enough to max stats early on if you're patient.
Despite all this (or perhaps because of this?), the game manages to be fun. (Perhaps the game's short length helps here? By the end I'm still wanting more, so I will often start over and re-play the game.)

I think I tend to prefer Dragon Warrior (the original, not the remakes that drastically boosted XP and GP awards, making the game much shorter).

It has a few balancing issues, but otherwise it's really a great game.