You know, putting some more thought to it, I don’t think Desert bus should be on that list.
If we think about it, sure, desert bus is boring. But it’s functional, so we can’t really call it broken. It’s not a cash in, and frankly, it doesn’t make awful choices.
So, what makes it a bad game is that it’s boring, which normally would be reason enough for a game to be boring, except, there’s one big difference between Desert Bus and almost all other games - it’s intentionally boring, whereas most other games are made to be enjoyable. And it achieves that objective, it makes the statement it wants to make, fills the goals it sets out to fill.
So, if it’s not broken, it’s not just some cheap cash-in, it’s decently made, and it achieves pretty much every objective that it set out to achieve, and those objectives wern’t harmful. In any other scenario, we’d call that a big success, we’d call that a good game. But because the objective was for something other than for the entertainment value of the game itself, does that make it bad? Or just different to most other games?
