Your favourite (euro)jank games

[Pifanjr]

Based on this article:

Flawless victory was never on the cards for eurojank, but I honestly can't tell if it won or lost

An ode to the wonky yet wonderful projects of yesteryear, and their modern successors.

www.pcgamer.com

What are your favourite janky games? Games that are almost painful to play but have something unique that allow you yo endure the bad UI, strange controls and/or terrible graphics.

 

[BeardyHat]

Gothic
Stalker

I think Gothic 2 is really what introduced me to the concept of Eurojank; of course, we didn't call it that back then. But the whole idea that you had this world that responded to you and you couldn't access certain areas after making certain choices, that was pretty damned impressive at the time.

Ditto for Stalker. I remember going over to Best Buy day of release and being surprised it was only $40. But again, it had the similar vibe, where the world just doesn't care about you. The world isn't there for you to play with, it's there for you to exist in and see if you can make your way around it. It felt absolutely incredible at the time.

 

[Pifanjr]

The first one that comes to mind for me is Conquest of Elysium. It has it all: bad graphics, bad UI, no tutorial (though the manual is great, if ugly), no proper balancing, a mostly braindead AI and their website looks like it has kept the same design since the developer started in the 90s.

Yet I have over 100 hours spread over the third and fourth installment of the series and I'm strongly considering getting the fifth once it goes on sale again. The ridiculous amount of factions and content in general means there's always something new to discover.

 

[Pifanjr]

Another game I have almost 100 hours in is Eador: Masters of the Broken World, a game so janky that I lost my save of over 70 hours when the game suddenly crashed to desktop every time I tried to load it.

The entire game is about conquering shards, each controlled by a different opponent with a different special power. When you ask your advisor what your special power is, he answers you control time itself, aka savescumming.

The game has a lot of interesting ideas, but the pacing is really slow, especially because you are forced to start from basically zero when conquering the next shard, which also makes the game rather repetitive.

---

While on the topic of games where my save game got corrupted, I'll also mention Two Worlds II. It has one of the most interesting magic systems I've ever seen in a game, but I sadly didn't get to see all that much of it because it was too broken to play.

 

[Zloth]

Two Worlds 2 also did something funky with 3D Vision. They made the entire game pop out of the screen. Instead of the far distance basically making your eyes parallel, it put it at screen depth. It was like the entire world existing between you and your screen. It should have felt like I was playing in a little doll house, but it didn't! It still somehow felt like the far distance was really far. I would put my hand out to try to touch where I thought my screen was, and I would be way off! There's some very interesting perception science going on there that I don't get at all.

Anyway, to the topic....

• Gothic 2 and just about everything else Piranha Bytes made. Thus, I am now scared to death of wild boars.
• Distant Worlds 2 - are the Code Force guys in Europe or the USA? Well, it's published by Slitherine which is U.K..
• Egosoft's X series - Germany (mostly), and it feels German to me, too. Still my favorite single player game.
• Drakensang: The River of Time (I never played the first).
• The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos - French studio Artefacts
• Expeditions: Rome - Logic Artists in Denmark
• Forgotten City - by Modern Storyteller in... err.... Australia. (Hey, I'm American, our education system is terrible, right? So, I get to count it!)
• The Invincible - Polish
• Just Cause & Mad Max - Sweden. What, you didn't notice all the moose in those games?
• No Man's Sky - U.K.
• Solasta - Tactical Adventures in France
• Talos Principle - Croteam in Croatia
• Tower of Time - Event Horizon in Poland
• Tropico series - Bulgaria
• Sword of the Star.... oh, Canadian. I don't think I can get away with that one.
• Endless * games - Amplitude, France.
• Divinity 2 (the rest would be more AAA) - Larian, Belgum
• Witcher 1 (the rest would be AAA) - CDProjekt, Poland

Outer Wilds is published out of California, but I couldn't figure out easily where the devs are.