I can imagine that happening somewhere along the line towards evolving into Eloi

(Obviously this modern obsession with protecting the general public from every little danger eventually has the human race evolving into Eloi)

That's exactly the kind of horrible thing I'm talking about!

Someone HAD to have known how obnoxious that would be...

I'd also mention something like Limbo. They play with your expectations through the game. Here's an example...

There's a crusher with an activation switch in the middle of a very slight pit. First time you probably don't even notice... step in the pit areas instead of the raised button in the middle get squashed. You reload and you jump to the middle, pass that trap then find another identical one. You assume, of course, that it's the same thing. Except this time you jump to the central button because last time it was safe... except this time it's the activation for the trap and you die again.

It's hard to call that 'intentional bad design' though as you load almost immediately on death and it's more humorous how your expectations are being played with.

Arkham Asylum also comes to mind where the game tricks you into thinking your computer has crashed. Love that moment. It makes that same awful sound you hear and the screen gets distorted as if you were getting a hard crash.

Also, don't forget games like Syoban Action and I Wanna Be The Guy, or the various troll levels for Mario Maker and its sequel.

Games like this can be fun; they just need to focus on being humorous rather than frustrating. It also presents an avenue for interesting puzzles if done well (see Syoban Action's end of level puzzles for an example of this).

Edit: By the way, have you played Undertale?

Are you a naturally gifted moron or trained? The OP asked for ideas on bad ideas for games and you come in here with filth and insinuate filth.Get another half brain moron and thanks for the unbelievable laughs.

At the start of a game you encounter a room full of 50 keys. You may pick up 10.

At the end of the game, one of the 50 keys is randomly selected to be the only key that will unlock the final boss.

The key is only selected after leaving the room, so you can't load a saved game knowing the winning key.

Pray you picked up that key.


A variant of the RNG-is-evil theme. Can you play through most of the game in the knowledge that your failure is predetermined?

Oddly enough, a platformer used this exact idea.

In Kid Klown in Crazy Chase, you had to earn keys to rescue the princess. Failure meant a bad or worse ending.

You had 4 keys, 10 slots, and 60 seconds.

Let's make a driving game based in an engine which features absolutely no driving.

I'm sure this has occurred more than once.

Why stop there when you can add a third game (another platformer) using TrackIR for head motions and then a fourth game (puzzle game) using voice commands?

And then add a timer for every level, forcing you to start over if you're not fast enough?
"You're winner!"
D'uh, that's the basic idea for countless horror games/films!

Don't forget each foot. That brings it to six games.

Do you count troll/rage quit games like "Cat Mario" in this category?

From the sounds of it, you only lose 60 seconds if you make the wrong choice.

Also, this sounds a lot like rescuing princesses in Ultima 1; when you kill the jester in the castle for the key, it only has about a 50% chance of being the correct key. (Then again, this whole "rescue the princess" makes absolutely no sense, but then again, so do a lot of other things in the early Ultima games.)

Actually, I enjoy games like Syoban Action (which is probably the game you're referring to). It helps that the deaths are meant to be funny, and that the game is quite easy if you know where all the trolls are (assuming you don't forget; forgetting is a common cause of death here).

Also, Syoban Action gives you infinite lives; you won't ever have to start all over, even if you die so many times that your life counter becomes negative.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-rally :-)

It's actually fun.

On-topic: What about an RPG which allows for countless variations of character builds, which are all more or less fun to play - until you hit the wall because after dozens of hours there is a boss which can only be defeated by a certain build - and there is no re-spec option?
I'm sure games like this exist, the first Gothic - in a milder sense - guilty of this (archer build is powerless against final boss).

Actually, I thinkg the game with voice cmmands should be a fast-paced game where precision is important, and perhaps intentionally use a bad speech-to-text library to handle that input.

I have sort of encountered that in SaGa 2, where you suddenly encounter a boss that is immune to offensive magic, which is otherwise a very good offensive option in that game.

However, SaGa 2 is designed so that a respec-like feature is not needed to change builds; a high score in one attribute doesn't hurt the growth for others (except for robots, who can just get the equivalent of a respec by changing their equipment), and there's a gun you can buy that hits reliably for decent (not great, but enough for this boss) stat-independent damage, even if your stats are low.

Also, in the Mana series:
* There is one boss that I wasn't able to beat at starting Power; I had to raise Power once to defeat it. This boss appears mid-way through the game. (One Power increase was enough, and spells work on every other boss, so this was the only hiccup on my pure mage attempt. Also, getting Nuke early wasn't a problem.)
* In Sword of Mana (a remake of FFA, but completely redoes the game mechanics and is basically a different game), if you play as the girl and go full mage, you reach a boss early on you can only do 1 damage to at a time. I was able to beat that boss, but it took way too long, all because of poor balancing. (That boss should have been given lower magic defense and perhaps a weakness to the element you have at the time to make that setup viable for that boss.)

I more meant Interstate 76', which runs on the Mechwarrior 2 engine.

Well, "runs" might be an overtly flowery way to describe it. Still, interesting find.

Every arcade game from the eighties …
The first Star Wars Knight of the Old Republic game has a real-time turret battle, using the mouse to aim (as well as the WASD keys, fortunately, which are faster) in the round, with the entire hemisphere potential attack vectors for the fighters. You have a radar to help, but only a couple of hits will end the game.

And then you have to go back to your last save, which is probably the safe place just before the first boss fight (to get off the first planet), which is a difficult fight (RNG to skew likelihood of unkillable villain predominance in that fight, whilst you try to kill the other bad guy), to trigger the cut scene ending, whereupon you have to dodge randomly across the area to the exit and avoid overhead laser damage which is serious enough to one-hit kill you if you haven't used a medkit after the battle, to watch an unskippable three-part story link before the mini game starts.

I hate this part of the game. I have rage-quit more times than I can remember. (KotOR is a turn-based RPG with pause.) Fortunately, next time I reach this bit there is a mod that makes the minigame a lot easier, apparently.