A while back I explored the phenomenon that some games are like some movies, and are so bad that they become good. Clive Thompson, perhaps reading my article, has recently explored this idea in his column, though he wasn’t able to find any games that traversed the SaT.
The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony — the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.
Bad games never produce this pleasure. Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children’s show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it’s just … bad.
I’ll concede that he may not have gone far enough back into gaming history. All of the games he played were relatively modern. Many games in the 8-bit heyday fit squarely into this pigeonhole. Games like Bad Dudes (“President Ronnie has been kidnapped by ninjas, are you a bad enough dude to rescue President Ronnie?”). They do exist, you just need to expend a bit more effort to find them.
EDIT: Whoops, almost forgot about the original Resident Evil.