Question Mid-Week Question: What's your favorite janky game?

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is pretty janky (granted, it's in Early Access). Elder Scrolls/Fallout games can be pretty janky, too. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, Vampire The Masquerade, Alpha Protocol... all various degrees of janky.

What's your favorite janky game? Janky, meaning, a little busted, a little broken, quite rough around the edges, which can sometimes be kind of charming. We're looking for the kind of game where the jank is sorta part of what makes it great or memorable.

Answers by Wednesday, please, and we'll publish some along with our own. Janks very much!
 
Has to be Morrowind. Some of the janky parts could actually be game-breaking, but thankfully most of the time the jankiness would be strange A.I/character movement, dialogue and expressions (you would think they learned with Oblivion) and the motherload of janky combat. Might sound like the worst game ever? Nope, while it made you feel like a total dimwit when you first started playing, you soon realized after some levels, the game had a lot more to offer. Let's just call it an uncut janky gem.
 
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Zloth

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Outside of PC gaming, the Adventure game from Atari on the 2600. That game had plenty of bugs to exploit and weird AI behaviors to mess with. (Trapping the yellow dragon between the key and the sword so it would constantly try to run back and forth between two screens then leaving the game like that overnight... am I evil because of that? And yes, I made sure the bat was stuck in some castle.)

The most fun I've had with a really buggy game would be Sword of the Stars 2. It took a year before it was even really playable and even then the AI had issues (look up the Save Our SotS mod for some help there). It sure had great ideas, though, and the ship customization is the best I've seen.
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The Gothic series. Gothic 2 and 3 are both very special to me, and are unquestionable janklords.

Gothic 3 was a true open-world adventure, which had it not released 1) badly broken and 2) in the same year as Oblivion (ouch) could have been memorable well beyond the fanbase. Instead, despite an expansion, it let the franchise slip into obscurity. It also needed extensive community patches beyond what the developers patches to make it fully playable - addressing larger scale issues than those tackled by even USLEEP for Skyrim.

Gothic 2, though divided into chapters like the first game, offered great freedom exploring the world within each chapter and really encouraged you to find your own path. I'll pin the jank mostly on the combat, though that may be just because I suck at it :)

I never got far into the Risen series, also by Piranha Bytes. And the release of Elex 2-3 years ago showed there is, unfortunately, still such a thing as a "Piranha Bytes game"; a label they badly need to break free from. i.e. Jankfest whose vision outstripped its execution.

Gothic deserves a mention for being topical too! NB the teased potential remake:
Edit: Apparently THQ Nordic have confirmed they now intend to press ahead with the remake.
 
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Zoid

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As others have said, [Insert Bethesda RPGs Here] are always bug fests, but endearing nonetheless.

I think my favorite janky game is Kerbal Space Program. Was it a little rough around the edges? Absolutely. But its flaws just added to its character. Did you not reinforce your rocket enough? Noodle-rocket time! And of course, there always loomed the threat of the Deep Space Kraken striking when you least expected it, which became so beloved (though feared) by the community that a Kraken easter egg was actually added into the game.
 
Janky, meaning, a little busted, a little broken, quite rough around the edges, which can sometimes be kind of charming.

Ah, I wish I'd noticed this bit before I commented on the final article. (Which, this might have been included there, but I missed it then, too.)

I still think most games these days are a little broken. So much so that when a game isn't? I sit up and take notice. It'd be easier for me to list all the not-at-all-janky games I love, than the ones with varying degress of jank.

ANYway. The Sims have always been a bit "janky," to the point where I've never really considered any of them "proper games," and more just playgrounds to mess around in. Bethesda games come close to that, but at least they have stories and quests and dialogue and whatnot, to prop up and/or hide their underlying jankiness. Whereas with The Sims, the flaws are just right there at all times, and you have to just try to work around the weirdness.

Also Planet Coaster. It LOOKS beautiful and polished, but the underlying structure and AI is janky as all get out.
 
Feb 13, 2020
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Dude i think you mean just cause3! lol
But really, that's what made the game fun, and really spoiled it when they tried to fix it in the new part
 

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