Can a game be 'so bad it's good'?

One day, as we all sat around in our splintered cyberlimbo slurping up the feeds and making absolutely no effort to better ourselves, a reader called Akwan entered the chat channel of Jank's subscriber-only Discord like a quiet ghost with a stinking fish carcass. "Just out of curiosity," they said, with the tone of somebody who may or may not know the grenade they are holding has zero pins. "Does anyone here have a computer game they think is 'so bad that it's good'? I've seen movies I think fall in that category but no computer game comes to mind."

Suddenly, everyone woke up.

I enjoy the forum-post-as-conversational-pipe-bomb, and this instantly qualified. When you think of "so bad it's good" movies you might think of big dumb fun in a vintage Arnie movie, or cult stinker The Room. This kind of movie is easy enough to identify even if it's impossible to draw the line at any specific point. Sometimes just a concept is enough (Snakes On A Plane, Sharknado) but in many instances it is all down to the dialogue and the delivery of that dialogue.

There are games with writing or dialogue that inspire similar groans of begrudging joy - this is what Hideo Kojima is for. Tekken games have absolutely braindead story modes that I cannot help but slug through with a pained grin. Ace Combat 7 has many moments of dialogue that make me howl with laughter for badgood reasons, and Resident Evil is so fertile a game series in this regard that it has spawned endless movies and TV shows of exactly this nature. 

But as we arranged our cyberchairs in a circle for our online tournament of Russian Roulette but with opinions instead of bullets, some Jankers pointed out a crease in our thinking: where is the "bad" in the game itself? The actual flying and shooting in Ace Combat 7 is smooth, fearless, swift, and cool. Tekken is a well-engineered fighting game (well, depends who you ask). And the puzzles, bullet scrounging, and leap-o-scares of Resident Evil can be cracker stuff, entirely independent of the Jill sandwiches and weak action hero quips of used car dealer Leon Kennedy. 

Shitgreat films will have cruddy sets, duff CGI effects, and overzealous editing. Which suggests that a trashnice videogame ought to also have some equally poor components of play. I haven't played it, but many who have suffered through Deadly Premonition speak in awed tones about just how awkward it is to get around town and how repetitive it is to fight enemies. Other nominations during our civilised bar fight include Murdered Soul Suspect, Daikatana, or Goat Simulator. What is more shitebrill: the entire works of David Cage? Or the entire works of M Dickie?

I bring this up as a post, mostly because I thought it was a fun conversation, and I want more answers from the wider commentariat at Jank, not just insight from the smoke-filled board room of paid subscribers who secretly run our blog from the shadows.

A reminder here that the "so bad it's good" concept is ultimately a heuristic that protects our brain from using up precious resources wondering why we are giggling. Like the phrase "guilty pleasure", it exists to succinctly give us permission to micro-ashamedly indulge in something we truthfully just plain enjoy, but feel - at some nagging level - that we ought not to. I am as much a victim of this mindset as any, even if I am forced by the critic's curse to sometimes have a deep think about why I like some vomit-inducing shooter for reasons obscure even to myself.

This doesn't eliminate the usefulness of "so-bad-it-good" as a shorthand - you can enjoy stuff while making fun of it. There must be a game that makes you feel the same way. So what is it?