Hmm, I guess I’ll go with Barbie Explorer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Petz Sports. Also arguably Ostrich Runner because it’s unfinished/unpolished in some places: particularly I don’t know how the final level is meant to be played because it ends on its own without the player really doing anything. I played those as a kid so I was less critical back then.
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Bear with me…

Megaman legends 2

Silly kids game, lots of fun, early dungeon crawling, but they snuck in heavy philosophy.

There is a scene where the protagonist is recalling long forgotten memories. The last living human, in luxury, in extravagance, in exactly what techbros want today but actually achieved here, has a perfect system, a perfect world, serving his every whim. A world without poverty, disease, suffering.

And he is lonely.

He befriends a bot in this system charged with keeping order. Basically a cop in this world. But he gives him special privileges to be able to “think” in ways the others are restricted from. This one is special. He literally creates a friend.

Then he uses the incredible technological prowess to recreate suffering.

He creates a synthetic recreation of humans, designed to be vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to suffering. They are subject to pressures that simply delay their deaths. And through doing so they achieve meaning and happiness. They exist.

The master watches them, like fish in an aquarium, for generations. Eventually, he goes down to earth to fully experience them. Thousands of years of disease free living have basically robbed this last human of an immune system. He is vulnerable there. No force in the universe can take him out. Man has become god. And yet, he goes down there anyway.

To experience the smell of a dinner bearing prepared.

He dies. Before he does, he released the bot that brought him down to earth from the rules of the system that governed him and told him to burn it all down. Perfection was not a remedy, it was a curse. And then he dies as the bot holds him in his hands, watching him fade away.

This was a game for children. And I understood way too much of it.

Starfield is great if instead of wanting to play a good RPG with a great story, you wanna just play 1st person Diablo with guns in space and be a loot goblin.

Castlevania 64. Not even Legacy of Darkness, the original one. It gets a lot of hate I think just because the rest of the series has such awesome games and it gets held to a high standard but just as a N64 game I loved it.

Hard Times by MDickie.

It’s crap, but has generated some stupidly fun shit because of it

The first Witcher game. I adored it. Janky controls, weird plot holes, subpar graphics. But oh man - the environments, the ambiance, and the dialogue absolutely slap.

I played all the 16 bit Phantasy star games when i was a kid. Phantasy star 3 is considered to be the black sheep of the series but it is the one that stuck with me the most, something about the music and atmosphere, and odd take on scifi fantasy it portrays.

Maplestory. I had a ton of fun hanging out with friends and grinding for hours with cute art. I would never recommend anyone play it, absolutely does not respect your time.

Clive Barker’s Jericho

It’s janky af but it has great atmosphere.

Friend and I played through Redfall and enjoyed it immensely , specifically because of how broken and half-complete it was. We just could not stop laughing.

Athena for NES. Now THAT’S some jank!

Bad is very subjective ofcourse. Most of the time these days it means that a video game is very polarizing. Elite: Dangerous is a great example of this. I fucking love it and have lived in that game for thousands of hours. But it’s not hard to see how it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Starbound is kind of like Terraria in space, but with a worse gameplay loop, worse characters, and worse bosses, but I did like gentrifying the cosmos.

Thing thing on Crazymonkeygames

Far Cry 2.

The game is fundamentally broken in a way that mods apparently can’t even fix. The enemy militia checkpoints instantly fully respawn as soon as you trip an invisible trigger. It makes combat with them pointless, which means getting stuck in a firefight with a checkpoint tedious.

The weapon degradation feature is way overtuned to cause some weapons to start visibly rusting from shot to shot.

These two aspects turn the game into a slog. Not even in a way that makes it immersive and survivalist, but immersion breakingly frustrating.

It’s a shame because the game was so ambitious. The game having a mechanic where a player at 0 health can get randomly saved if they befriended an NPC which will drag them to safety is really cool. The fire spreading everywhere was visually and tactically great. The malaria bouts were controversial, but I think they were a good way to increase the feeling of survival and desperation. There’s a lot good with a bleak, serious, and grounded Far Cry game but it just missed the mark in all the most impossible to ignore ways.

‘Far Cry 2 (2)’ would be amazing.