The Worst Game Ever
So what was the worst video or computer game ever released? Man, the lists can be impressive. There's a lot of crap to choose from. I personally try to avoid games that I hear are truly bad, so I undoubtably have avoided some really spectacular failues. I have been rescued from pain by timely reviews or word-of-mouth.

So for me, it's going to have to be something personal. A game which, for whatever reason, spoke to me. By "speaking to me," I mean personally insulted me and all of my immediate kin, screaming profanity in my name. A game which not only sucked, but one which whispered promises of delights in my ear, but left me waking up in a bathtub of ice with my kidneys removed. A game with a name that inspires fear and anger as much as the name of a classic, beloved games fills me with nostalgic memories.

A game... like Trespasser. Yep, that's gotta be the one. For me, at least. Perhaps, this little venting of the spleen will allow me to let the healing start. Maybe.

The Hype
Trespasser was the "interactive sequel" to the second Jurassic Park movie. Which was pretty lame itself. It makes one wonder if Trespasser was Dreamwork's attempt to make the movie look good by showing how much worse it could have been. Oh, wait, they DID come out with Jurassic Park III, didn't they?

Okay. So the concept, design, and the previews made it sound awesome. You play a female character (oooh, progressive!) named Anne, voiced by none other than Minnie Driver. You crash-land on Isla Sorna, which is where the company InGen did it's primary Dinosaur R&D. Dinos have taken over the island, and you have to somehow survive and escape the island. And to make it more realistic, there was no HUD (Heads-up-display, gaming parlance taken from the miltary to refer to the stats and game information appearing on the screen that you shouldn't actually see). To see your health, you look down at your own cleavage, upon which is tatooed a heart which fades gradually as your health drops. Okay, so maybe the concept wasn't entirely without it's flaws.

The lead developer, Seamus Blackley, was an alumnus of Looking Glass Studio, and had previously worked on such System Shock, Flight Unlimited, and Terra Nova. His concept, as I understood it, was to combine realistic physics and AI to create a truly organic, open-ended adventure game. The dinosaurs would be driven by needs and primitive instincts, and the objects in the game would demonstrate real-world properties. So you could come up with your own clever solutions to manipulate the environment. This is a tall order, but considering his pedegree, I expected him to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but it should at least shake up the idea behind adventure gaming.

Oh, and while there would be firearms, it wouldn't be a shooter. Okay, good. It sounded like the ultimate action / adventure game to me. I was all ready to fall in love with it.

Now, I can be pretty forgiving of flaws or deficiencies in games. I mean, I'm a big fan of indie games, which do lack the production values and sheer sets of features of mainstream games. Not that those are really flaws, but I know many hardcore gamers have a tough time looking past things like a game with "only" 2D graphics, or, say, the lack of mouse support in Aveyond. I'm pretty lenient reviewer. I try to avoid judging a game by my expectations and comparisons to similar games (though that's impossible to do entirely), but instead focus on what it is, and what it is trying to achieve. This allows me to compare, say, Oblivion with the far-more-primitive Ultima IV. Maybe it's a flaw as a game designer. But I like to approach every game with as much of an open mind as I can.

I actually got Trespasser the day AFTER it appeared on the shelves. I was too busy at work on the day it was released, but some friends at the office (who actually had the luxury of being able to go HOME that night) picked it up with high expectations. The next day, they came to work with tales of woe, and how horrible the game was.

I protested, knowing that my coworkers were hardcore FPS fans. "You don't understand, it's a different kind of game," I insisted. "It's an adventure game, not a shooter."

"We know that," they insisted. "That's why we got it. You just have to play it. You'll see."

So I did. I bought Trespasser that afternoon, and took it home with optimism tempered by my coworkers' dire warnings. I reduced my expectations, realizing that the game was certainly going to have its flaws. But that was okay. The only thing that mattered was if the game was FUN.

The Truth Is In There
So the game started. Richard Attenborough's familiar voice explained the situation as a reading of his memoirs, and the initial setup was awesome. Washed up on a beach, an abandoned lab building or something up the hill, and all was quiet. Just like a good horror movie.

And just like a horror movie, the true horror gradually showed itself.

First off, there was the wonderful waldo-simulator that was the principle game interface. Apparenly, Anne of the Tattooed Cleavage was some kind of mutant with one very very funky arm. Controlling this arm was an exercise in frustration. Doing it successfully required the level of control necessary to consistently succeed at a claw vending machine. I saw two teenaged girls who could do that once. They pulled a plush animal out of the machine with every coin. After that, they took requests from my daughters for any plush toy near the top of the stack. I imagine they would have done pretty well at the interface to Trespasser. But they would have quit in disgust from all the other bugs.

For one thing, this mutant arm would get stuck on things. I would walk through a door, unaware that somehow my hand had gotten stuck on the door frame. I wouldn't notice this until I had walked about fifty feet, and find out I couldn't use the complicated waldo-controls to bring my arm in front of me to pick up an interesting stick. Then I'd turn around and discover that my arm had stretched out behind me the entire fifty feet. Yes, Reed Richards or Elastigirl would be proud of Anne. But unfortunately, too often I couldn't just jiggle the waldo-controls to free her hand. Instead, I'd have to WALK back to the other side of the door to retrieve my own hand.

Then there was the physics simulations. Physics in the world of Trespasser was pretty different from physics of the real world. For one thing, there was no friction in this world. Energy didn't get converted / absorbed on collisions. No. No, what would happen would be that you'd put your pistol down gently on a slight incline so you could try to stack boxes (since you had only one "inventory" slot). The pistol on this ten-degree slope would then proceed to ROLL down the slope. Not just slide, no. ROLL. End-over-end. In slow-motion. So you'd do a little stacking, trying to prevent the boxes from sliding off of each other, stop, grab your slowly rolling pistol so it didn't drop down to where the Velociraptors were hanging out, move it back up next to you, and go back to stacking boxes that refused to actually stack while keeping track of your pistol rolling at a speed of about six feet per minute.

The end result was that you were constantly juggling objects in the world that utterly refused to stand still.

Still, I persevered. I mean, this was a whole New Concept for a game, right? Surely there'd be a glitch or two. But like an uncut diamond, there was sure to be a gem of great value hidden within the ugly stone. I'd keep digging.

Unfortunately, the organic and open-ended gameplay promised by the game never really materialized. The advanced AI of the dinosaurs appeared no different from scripted AI of any other game. I mean, the velociraptors (as far as I got) were always out to kill you. Sure, there was one scene where a Tyranosaurus was preoccupied with fighting another dinosaur and you had to stay out from underfoot, but that was pretty much the extend of things. If the velociraptors were using some kind of clever pack behavior, I missed it as I saw them pacing blindly beneath me as I stood on a beam trying to prevent my pistol from slowly rolling over the frictionless edge.

And the physics puzzles? Pretty much box-stacking (with greased boxes) or stack-knocking-over. Pre-scripted. The physics was limited to very specific items only. Sure, if you ran out of bullets, you could actually CLUB the dinos with your rifle, or a fragment of a door that you smashed open earlier, which was admittedly pretty cool. But I was deliberately searching for clever solutions "outside the box," and I found very, very few. The dinosaurs weren't possible to simply fend off or outsmart. It pretty much came down to trying to shoot them with an impossibly weird aiming system (imagine trying to shoot a rifle one-handed while holding it as far away from you as your arm can reach. That's pretty much the "challenge" of the game), and then trying to club them over the head with an empty gun when you run out of bullets.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when I arrived at the town. Admittedly, my machine wasn't entirely bleeding edge, but it was more than powerful enough to handle all of the games of the era (including Unreal, I later discovered, which was lamented as a "pretty slideshow" by too many gamers with less powerful systems). But when I arrived in town, my framerate dropped to unplayable levels. Something like 3 frames per second. I took a few painful steps, and then a velociraptor teleported next to me. Though it looked like he had teleported in via the transporter on the Starship Enterprise during an episode in which they were having "transporter malfunctions." The dino appeared inside a fence, half on one side, half on the other. It shrieked and hissed (I know I would, too, so the AI felt very realistic at that point), unable to escape its merger with a wooden fence. I would have felt pity for it, if a minute later (which was how long it took me to take maybe a dozen steps) another raptor hadn't appeared out of nowhere and killed me instantly. I didn't even have time to look down at my breasts to see if my heart-shaped tatoo was fading.

I tried several times, trying to turn the detail levels down to "nothing." Nothing worked. Well, I mean that nothing that I tried worked to salvage the game... there wasn't a "nothing" detail setting that worked. Though that would have been strangely appropriate. The game was simply unplayable from that point on.

Aftermath
The next day, I returned, shame-faced, to my coworkers and admitted to them that they were both correct and very wise. I returned the game to the Software, Etc. store where I'd purchased it. They only allowed a trade, so I desperately searched for another game that I was interested in that I knew DIDN'T SUCK. Unfortunately, the only one of equivalent price was a copy of Unreal --- a game which I could buy from the company store (we'd been bought by GT Interactive, Unreal's publisher, by that point) for a third of its retail cost. It didn't matter. By this point, I was so disgusted by Trespasser that I just wanted to put some physical distance between me and the game, and I'd like to feel my money wasn't COMPLETELY wasted.

But apparently, the scars remain.

Incidentally, that same year, Blackley's former company released Thief: The Dark Project, and later Thief 2, which I thought captured the type of gameplay promised by Trespasser. And the budget "sci-fi hunting game" title Carnivores captured the whole man-against-dinosaur thrills almost present in Trespasser. So the actual concept - the idea behind Trespasser - was demonstrably sound. It's just that the design and execution were fumbled horribly.

Since then, a wonderful postmortem has explained just how such a wonderful idea crashed and burned. This is perhaps the single, salvageable good thing to emerge from the wreckage. And, in the tradition of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a group of honest-to-goodness fans have emerged to try to convert the sow's ear into a silk purse. And I do have to admit that the game did bring me some enjoyment for perhaps the first fifteen minutes or so. So perhaps it is not the objective worst game of all time, nor even the worst failure of all time. That last prize probably goes to E.T. the Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600... he game that destroyed the system... but as I never owned a 2600 nor had to personally experience the horror of that game, except for a few minutes at a friend's house before swapping out the cartridge for Missile Command, it doesn't burn in my memory like Trespasser.

But for me, when we talk of how much a game sucks, Trespasser set the high bar for craptastic-ness that has yet to be exceeded. It is my Eye of Argon for computer games.


(Vaguely) related musings on the Nature of Suckage:
* Why Battlefield 2 Sucks
* Quality Ain't Easy
* Polish: Attention to Detail
* How To Get Me To Buy Your Indie RPG
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Labels: Adventure Games, Game Design, Mainstream Games, retro

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