For the best reading experience, have this
on in the background.
- The eponymous author in Alan Wake is supposed to be a gifted-though-frustrated novelist who is unsatisfied with his "schlocky" work and suffering from two years of writer's block. During the game, he has to dash off a horror novel in two weeks to satisfy a malevolent Reality Warper Genius Loci. These are made available to the player in game, and they're as corny as you expect.
- Alien Hominid's mini-game "Super Soviet Missile Mastar." See it for yourself!
- Alone in the Dark (2024) invokes this trope with its "Derceto 1992" cosmetic DLC, which lets you change the main characters' appearances to exactly as they were in the original game: tens of polygons, static, abstract faces, and rendered at a massively-pixelated 320x240. Curiously, once the introductory cutscene is over and you've selected your character, the one you didn't choose will revert back to their modern appearance.
- Andy's Apple Farm: A lot of the game's presentation is poor by design, from the unmoving artwork, the repetitive dialogue, and the outdated visuals.
- In Artist Colony masterpieces produced at lower skill levels are the perfect example of this trope.
- Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: The portions of the game that are set in the modern era allow you to hack into the computers of Abstergo Entertainment to uncover various confidential company documents; among them are internal marketing evaluations of the protagonists of the previous games in the series. These are presented in a stilted, flat tone of voice that mispronounces their names and utterly dismisses the cultural context in which they lived. You also get to watch various promotional trailers for the pirate movie that you're researching, which are hilariously myopic and overacted in what can only be Self-Deprecation from Ubisoft directed at its own industry.
- Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore was made to be a Spiritual Successor to the Zelda CD-i games. As such, the cutscenes largely emulate the Deranged Animation (complete with characters going constantly Off-Model), hammy voice acting (with two of the original voice actors from the CD-i games) as well as the original background artist. The gameplay at least is entirely functional
- Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning looks terrible, but only to induce a specific kind of nostalgia by emulating an old, poorly made Edutainment Game from the 90s. The game is actually a surrealist horror; the math problems are either super-easy or impossible to solve, and Baldi is an Evil Teacher who will try to kill you for getting even a single one wrong (and you will get more than one wrong by design), while the rest of the equally bizarre characters unintentionally make it easier for him to get you. Due to the Uncanny Valley effect, it's surprisingly scary.
- Baldur's Gate II has a play performed by troupe that lacks its leading actor and replacement Biff the Understudy is hilariously bad at filling his shoes, turning the play into one of these (naturally, Minsc thinks it's a masterpiece). A bard CHARNAME can inherit the theater after completing the associated quest line and put on a play: Depending on how much money, time and effort you put into it, the play can end up as one of these or become genuinely good.
- In the Girls Anthology event of BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!, the girls of Afterglow work together to try and come up with a manga plotline; naturally, all their ideas end up a Cliché Storm of sudden swerves and barely-explained plot devices. Moca admits early on that she came up with all the cool, exciting scenes first but they can't work out the stuff leading up to them so it isn't actually very interesting. And when they try to mash all of their ideas together into one barely-coherent story, they all agree that it's awful and they're not even sure what's meant to be enjoyable about it.
- The mini-game "Hero Klungo Saves Teh World" in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, developed entirely by Klungo. All you do is jump your way to the end as the game auto-scrolls and the only obstacles in your path are Bottomless Pits, badly drawn critters, and walls that will squash you against the screen. The graphics make the NES look like a next-gen console, the music consists of crappy chiptunes, the text is filled with Klungo's Sssssnaketalk everywhere, the boss is the Holy Grail of all Anticlimax Bosses, the Excuse Plot consists of Klungo literally saving the world by carrying the Earth in his hands the game screen is framed by a contrasting Animesque border and best of all, it randomly crashes (after which Klungo will reset the game for you while noting that he was sure that he fixed the crashes).
- Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden pretends to be a Japanese game with "Blind Idiot" Translation for comedy. For example, the plural of "gun" is "gun's", and people who use gun's in combat are called "gun'sbrasters" (because they brast things with their gun's). This Running Gag even extends to the developer's name, Tales of Game's.
- According to the liner notes of the game's official soundtrack, "Salamander Beat Crush mix (CRASH MIX)" from beatmania CORE REMIX was produced the way it was to replicate the sound of a Bemani Pocket toy on a full-sized arcade machine. As such, it is deliberately mixed at an extremely low sample rate, resulting in an obviously muffled sound even in the album recording, and comes replete with primitive beeps and robotic voices (if you can even make them out).
- Very small example: At one point in BioShock Infinite, Booker and Elizabeth have a quiet moment where Booker plays a guitar and Elizabeth sings. During rehearsal, their voice actors (Troy Baker and Courtnee Draper) were perfectly in sync, which would have been a bit odd for a pair of amateurs who have never made music together before. In the finished product, Baker's playing is more casual, and Draper's singing doesn't quite match the notes.
- Borderlands 2 has a mission where you have to help Scooter write a poem to impress a girl by finding inspiring scenery to photograph. Such as a guy who hung himself on a tombstone and a corpse and a robot that look like they're spooning. Needless to say, the poem is not exactly Shakespeare quality. It's so bad that the girl the poem is supposed to impress shoots herself.Daisy, I like you a whole lot
More than that bandit liked spoonin' that ro-bot.
You are a diamond in the rough
Or a flower surrounded by shrapnel and stuff.
I will hang myself from my own tombstone
if within you, I cannot put my bone. - In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the player can find a series of books based on the events of the game’s prequel. They start out decent enough, but quickly spiral into hilariously unreadable madness. Pretty much all of the “bad fanfic” clichés turn up at some point, from Rouge Angles of Satin to the gradual hijacking of the plot by a God-Mode Sue. The final volume, which reaches a level of Troll Fic writing akin to Half-Life: Full Life Consequences, simply must be seen to be believed.
- Brütal Legend's intro features Kabbage Boy, a Nu Metal Fake Band that comes off as a Lighter and Softer Linkin Park. When you unlock their song for the in-game radio (categorized under the utterly pretentious-sounding "genre" of "Second Wave of American Tween Melodic Rap Metalcore"), Eddie lets out an exasperated groan. The song itself is a Cliché Storm of everything disliked in mid-2000s metal: overly peppy lyrics, a random rap section, and a singer who doesn't seem to have gone through puberty.
- Chaos CompleXX, a Super Mario World ROM hack which parodies terrible ROM hacks, complete with bad spelling and grammar.
- The art style of Chimps On A Blimp (Which is creator Pilotredsun's artstyle in general).
- Pencil Whipped have graphics designed to look like pencil sketches coming to life. The entire game's 'verse allegedly takes place inside a notebook.
- Chindōchū!! Pole no Daibōkennote , an exclusive WiiWare game only released in Japan, jumps on the nostalgia wagon started by games such as Mega Man 9... but instead of celebrating the good ol' games of the past, it turns into a (not always) Affectionate Parody of them. Nothing is spared, from graphical glitches to bugs, from inane plots to the meaninglessness of Scoring Points. This article at Hardcore Gaming 101 notes that the weird sense of humour of the game is based on the Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: the game plays the role of the dim-witted boke, and the unseen narrator is the tsukkomi, the straight man baffled by all the nonsense provided by the stupid companion.
- Control
- Threshold Kids is an extremely low-budget edutainment puppet show put together by members of the Federal Bureau of Control in order to teach the children that they've taken away (specifically Dylan) about the paranormal. None of these people had any experience in writing, puppetry, or creating anything that wasn't inadvertently nightmare-inducing or weirdly sexual. If it was meant to put anybody's minds at ease about all the horrors that the FBC faces on a daily basis, it failed.
- You can find a voiceover explaining how an obstacle course work and its objective, but the actor sounds incredibly bored reading his lines and even trip over words a couple of times. Once you finish the course, you can find a note by the actor complaining that the Bureau used one of his rehearsal takes.
- One of Cruelty Squad's defining features is that it looks like a 90s Internet hellscape, with bright, nauseating colors and ugly low-poly models. The creator even advises against playing it if you have photosensitive epilepsy.
- The Deadly Tower of Monsters will often use intentionally fake looking monsters or creatures to evoke Special Effect Failure.
- Most of the books that be found in-game in Disco Elysium qualifies as this. Hjeimdallerman, the Man from Hjeimdall is a Conan knockoff (you can get into an argument with the book about its literary merits, or lack thereof), that is openly parodying Sword and Sorcery pulp stories. Dick Mullen, meanwhile, is a ridiculously overexaggerated wish-fulfillment version of a Hardboiled Detective. Both are, in-universe, formulaic dreck with dozens of titles to their name.
- The Doom mod Mockery is a deliberately terrible map created as a parody of crappy Doom WADs. Since then, there's been plenty of likewise badly made "jokewads" released, such as WOOO.
- The "game" Dottori-Kun is deliberately simple and low-tech, looking like a game from the mid-1970s despite coming out in 1990. The game was only made to comply with a Japanese law that required arcade cabinets to be sold with a game, so Sega made the cheapest game possible to comply with the law with the expectation that arcade owners would throw it out and replace it with something better.
- The Elder Scrolls contain a lot of in-game books; most either contain background info about the gameworld, some advance the plot, and some are there for amusement, many of the latter group falling into this trope. Particularly notable is "The Lusty Argonian Maid". It is a semi-pornographic play featuring a main character very similar to the author attempting to get his "spear polished" by the titular Argonian maid. It is godawful, but is popular enough in-universe (and out) to have spawned a sequel, a Gender Flipped version for the ladies ("The Sultry Argonian Bard"), and each is still in publication over 200 years after the first one was written.
- The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] touts itself as a "remaster" of a non-existent DOS game, with four-color IBM CGA graphics and cinematic platforming gameplay reminiscent of Another World.
- Farnham Fables has the Cheese Wedge Dating Sim in Episode 4, which brings together the traits of the worst in the genre. Purple Prose filled with spelling errors, awful art, choices that don't actually matter, a pointless and frustrating mini-game with a Game-Breaking Bug that thankfully gives the player infinite lives, one part where you have to give three items to progress with no indication of what these items are, and a Fan Disservice H-scene which comes out of nowhere right at the end. Good thing Theresa is the one who has to endure all of these flaws, and not us!
- In Final Fantasy VII, the infamous date scene involves Cloud and whoever his date happens to be viewing a ridiculously bad play involving a king and a dragon, one in which they're thrust into the main roles, with various levels of reluctance depending on the date.
- In Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, Genesis will not stop quoting from the epic poem LOVELESS, which has somehow become popular enough to be turned into a musical, which is successful enough that they renamed the street the theater is on after said poem. All this despite the poem being unfinished. Literally every named character not named Genesis who's seen or read it considers it garbage:
- Cid mentions going to see it in the original game, and he thought it was overwrought drek.
- Sephiroth also identifies a quote of Genesis' as coming from LOVELESS, but states that the only reason he knows it is because Genesis has "beaten it into [his] head."
- Hojo doesn't seem to have a high opinion of it, either. That's mainly because it can't benefit his research, but he still hit the nail on the head when he called it "pure drivel."
- Though we don't see all of it, in Final Fantasy IX the play "I Want To Be Your Canary" seems to be an overdramatic mishmash of several of Shakespeare's plays (it's even been penned by a "Lord Avon" and has characters named Cordelia, Leo, and Marcus). Oddly enough, there are flashes of quite good dialogue and some interesting story; it's just the onscreen acting that's melodramatic.
- The infamously narmful laughing scene from Final Fantasy X. Common complaints are about how forced and horrible the laughing is. That's rather the point; their laughter is forced, and it's supposed to ring hollow. When you know the context, and what they're trying to cheer themselves up about, it's actually pretty sad. All the characters react accordingly to the horrible laughing. ("You probably shouldn't laugh anymore.")
- When the scene had a memetic resurgence in the The New '10s, James Arnold Taylor—Tidus himself—uploaded a video during a month-long retrospective on FFX explaining that, yes, the laugh was meant to be awful and it's just as "bad" and awkward-sounding in Japanese. In a follow-up video, Taylor shows his copy of the game's script: the fake laughter is written out as a stilted "Ah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!"
- When the scene had a memetic resurgence in the The New '10s, James Arnold Taylor—Tidus himself—uploaded a video
- The 2018 and 2019 Starlight seasonal event in Final Fantasy XIV has you conducting a choir. If you mess up, the choir starts singing off key. The singing is done with real voices too, so the singers had to sing both the normal version of the choir and the laughably off key version for the game. Behold, the 2018 performance and 2019 performance in their disastrous glory.
- Final Fantasy XV had a sidequest that served as brazen Product Placement for Nissin Cup Noodles, who presumably sponsored the game. The voice actors recorded two takes for the quest; one which took it seriously, and another which played up the cheesiness. The latter was what ended up in the finished game.
- Franken:
- Gameplay-wise, it looks like a normal RPG, but it quickly becomes clear that you only have one attack with a fixed outcome, and so do most enemies, so combat is purely dependent on whether or not you have enough levels and the right equipment before starting the battle.
- Graphics-wise, Cerberus appears as a (poorly-Palette Swapped) scorpion due to his actual battle graphic not being done yet. Later, he shows you his actual sprite, but it's very poorly-drawn. Bloodman also appears in a similar badly-drawn style during their Desperation Attack.
- Friday Night Funkin' has a Game Mod in which you face Bob, a crudely doodled character amidst the scenery looking like something out of stock child's drawings, in a parody of typical FNF format.
- Though it's less blatant about it, the Spiritual Successor to Sexy Hiking, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, has many of the same characteristics. The graphics are better, but consist of an assortment of random generic objects jokingly described by the creator as "asset-core." The gameplay, perhaps moreso than its predecessor, consists almost entirely of Fake Difficulty (mainly due to the deliberately unintuitive and inconsistent mouse-controlled movement) and has no save points, because the entire goal of the game is to make players frustrated by forcing them to start over every time they screw up. Basically what you'd expect from the creator of QWOP.
- After getting a surprisingly positive response to the product of a game jam that was never meant to be taken seriously, Coffee Stain Studios produced Goat Simulator. The game is filled to the brim with deliberately buggy physics. It's both Stylistic Suck: The Game and Good Bad Bugs: The Game.
- Going Under: Swomp, mispronounces words and speaks without punctuation and all lowercase letters, to fit his Cloudcuckoolander personality, such as:
- provacatively clad demons
- dont descriminate yo
- All the songs in Goodbye Volcano High have a deliberate slight "unfinished" quality to them; some lack proper beginnings or endings, sometimes the mixing isn't perfect, and some have gibberish filler lyrics. This was done to illustrate how Fang is still a young musician and learning to perfect their craft.
- Every so often on VCPR in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories are episodes from two very very very bad 1940s radio dramas, one of which, Gordon Moorehead Rides Again, revolves around a violently misogynistic and racist private detective who spends more time hitting his girlfriend, making up wild conspiracy theories about foreigners plotting to destroy America, and shooting innocent people for being "commies" than investigating the mystery, and another about a guy who time travels every time he masturbates. They're so bad that even the announcers admit they're terrible, but they have to broadcast them as part of their public service remit. Gordon Moorehead Rides Again would return in Grand Theft Auto V, this time as a TV show.
- The Doom mod Grezzo 2 is full of poorly edited and inserted textures and sprite, contrasting styles of resources taken from completely different sources, numerous minor graphical glitches, inaccessible areas left in the map that make it impossible to complete some levels with 100% score. In most cases they were made by the author on purpose, or, if not, were simply acknowledged and left there.
- Guild Wars Nightfall has Prince Bokka the Magnificent's theatre. The plays he puts on are all comically bad (sadly, we don't actually get to see Summertime for Bokka). One instance of this, a retelling of events from the Prophecies campaign, is actually justified: the "actors" are in fact Kournan soldiers who staged the play to lure your party into a trap.
- Guilty Gear XX gives Robo-Ky an alternate theme that is styled after his template's "Holy Orders," but is completely, utterly, and shamelessly mangled (by means of deliberately untuned instruments) in a way fitting only of... well, Robo-Ky. It must be heard to be believed.
- Guilty Gear Xrd's art style is a half-example. By 3D animation standards, the animations are extremely choppy, but the whole point was actually to make cel-shaded 3D models and have them behave like 2D frames in the previous games, with animations done in individual frames instead of normal animation and with effects like animation smears applied that wouldn't have been possible with normal 3D animation. The result has been repeatedly praised for perfectly capturing the style and feel of the previous games even after the shift to 3D.
- Hand Simulator, like many of the "Simulator" games, has intentionally cheap models, difficult controls, and minimal gameplay. For example a group of players can try to kill each other. The difficulty comes from the game itself as you can rest your arm in the place before the gun loads and watch it float away and you stay powerless to do anything.
- The early areas of The Halloween Hack doesn't have much scary or technically impressive things, but that's to trick the player, to lower expectations.
- Henry Stickmin Series: Henry can use the Downgrader to do this in Completing the Mission. This of course leads to a failure.
- The Hex has a lot of this.
- Super Weasel Kid '09: Super Redux is a parody of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), and thus is an Obvious Beta with flickering textures and buggy enemies. Even the music is bad, having only a vague sense sense of melody and rhythm.
- Secrets of Legendaria is the only game explicitly played from start to finish, and yet it is extremely short. It also contains lots of tedious grinding segments (clearly made to pad out the game) that have in-universe developer shortcuts.
- Once the mods start activating in Waste World, they are very unprofessionally-made, containing typos, plot holes, and content that clashes with the established setting. Most of the gameplay segments from that point onward would be monumentally difficult or outright impossible without the in-universe cheats.
- Walk features good gameplay and production values, but the insufferable developer's commentary undermines the game and presents the developer in a very poor light.
- The entire point of The House of the Dead: OVERKILL is this, presenting itself in a way that makes the series' infamously Narmy dialogue and voice acting intentionally hilarious by doing it like a Grindhouse film.
- Hypnospace Outlaw has tons.
- The Enforcer video tutorial has portions where the professional voiceover is (poorly) dubbed over by an intern using an extremely low-quality microphone.
- More than a few pages are poorly crafted due to their users not knowing how to work with the pagebuilder.
- HypnOS will actually run slower the more you play, simulating computer memory leak. This'll keep going until the computer "crashes" or the player performs a system reboot.
- Special attention to Counselor Ronnie's birthstones rap, which is horribly arrhythmic and completely mispronounces the gemstones (ruby is pronounced as "roob-why", for one). Strangely enough, the sucky aspect of the rap is intentional In-Universe! Ronnie is an Invented Individual whose content was designed to be deliberately terrible as a part of a game to see how bad the hacker group m1nx could make his content before Hypnospace officials took notice.
- Inscryption: The game's first act is beautifully made and involves an Affably Evil game master who genuinely works hard to make the card game he plays with you interesting, with constructing maps, carving wood figures and setting the tone well. The third act, on the other hand, lacks any of these elements. P03's section of the game is run by a Munchkin who cares little for Leshy's craftsmanship and attempts to make the game interesting, and just focuses on gameplay mechanics instead of story, narrative, cohesion and theming. P03's game is an Excuse Plot just to show off the mechanics he's interested in, and said mechanics are very easy to break. This is because P03 is using the game as a means to an end to try and upload Inscryption onto the internet, and it doesn't actually care too much about the setting as a result.
- Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime:
- Some of the sound effects sound like people making the sounds with their voices.
- The Speaking Simlish for Roxy, a bird, is just a person saying "chirp chirp" over and over in a deadpan tone.
- The sky background outside the jail has a bunch of "STOCK-EM-UP IMAGES" watermarks on it.
- Just about any game from indie developer Jazzuo, up to and including his website itself. But especially Sexy Hiking. To quote the instructions:use the humer as if u were really climbing something and ull see
- John Cena's Sexy High School Adventure!!! is deliberately made to appear crude, with the title screen itself applying a liberal use of WordArt, and all the characters being the same picture of John Cena's pose (in the exact same location when multiple characters appear at once) with MS Paint edits.
- Kane & Lynch: Dog Days is presented as if it was being recorded with a cheap camcorder or somebody's bootleg cell phone, with its visual style takes inspiration from user-generated content, documentary films, and hand-held cinematography. This includes visual artifacts, lens flares, deliberate technical flaws like low-resolution visuals and screen tearing, Jitter Cam when players are running (as if someone was struggling with you while filming), and blurry pixelization censoring for nudity and graphic violence, similar to that of newsreel footage and television crime shows.
- Kingdom of Loathing's stick-figure aesthetic.
- Nearly everyone in Labyrinths of the World 2: Forbidden Muse produces this kind of art/music/etc. Justified because the patron muse of the town the game is set in was divided into three parts by the villain.
- League of Legends: The Odyssey universe's cinematic trailer, "Welcome Aboard", is a recruitment video shot entirely by Jinx, who has lots of enthusiasm and absolutely no skills as a cameraperson. As a result, there are details like an intentionally terrible chromakey job introducing their Cool Starship, footage from Malphite's birthday party that has been incompletely taped over, and a lot of shots that are obviously tilted not because Jinx is deliberately trying to do a Dutch Angle, but because she apparently put the camera down on something and it's not perfectly level. They even manage to stage a few legitimately good shots so they feel like Jinx only managed them by accident.
- In the last level of the First Year in LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4, Ron tries to put Fluffy back to sleep by whipping out a trumpet and playing "Hedwig's Theme" horribly off-key.
- The Magic Circle puts you in the role of a QA tester for a game stuck in Development Hell, so the whole thing is done in a very Obvious Beta style. There are unfinished areas, missing textures, raw wireframes, and even a whole Dummied Out section with pixel graphics. In the end, the game goes open-source, and things really go down the tubes in a matter of seconds.
- In Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, Midbus' dialogue is supposed to sound like a badly-dubbed kung-fu movie.
- C. Evil Ryu is Arpa/Chainsawdentist's Take That! against the MvC: EOH project (a fan project trying to recreate the feel of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in the M.U.G.E.N fighting engine, but whose huge roster falls victim to quantity over quality, with characters possessing moves that simply don't fit with the balance of the game). He has sloppy hitboxes, can throw in mid-air, unfitting moves, annoying voices from Yasunori Masutani and CvS hit sparks even though it is ostensibly based on Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
- Max Payne 2. The various TV shows the player can catch snippets of during the game (which often have plot elements reminiscent of Max's own experiences) have scripts ranging from Cliché Storm to pure Mind Screw, the dialogue is overacted, and the visuals consist of a small selection of still images. Especially funny is one scene in Lords and Ladies (a cheesy, Austenesque soap opera), where a villain is stabbed with a sword, but the actor is visibly tucking the blade under his arm; the arm facing the camera, at that.
- The entire point of adventure game META, although of course some reviewers missed it.
- The bulk of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is made up of extremely unsubtle repeats and allusions to the previous game, making it seem like a complete carbon copy with little redone but cosmetic dressing. Until you get to the Mind Screw ending, and it's revealed that it was intentionally done that way in order to give the new protagonist the same experience as the protagonist from the previous game. Which makes perfect sense until you found out that that person who was manipulating everyone, was being manipulated, although it's still possible that it was done that way as a part of manipulating him. The point is, MGS2 is confusing. In theory. There's also the tanker episode's quirky "MGX" computer program "SPRITE v2.21" with its vintage 2d animation.
- One of the Multiple Endings in Meteos has Meteo getting stabbed by a giant galactic fork from nowhere; the ending's image resembles a sloppy crayon drawing.
- Subverted in Mishap: An Accidental Haunting and Mishap 2: An Intentional Haunting. In the first game, a painting supposedly done by amateur artist Judith Kaufman is an attractive, tasteful fantasy work which doubles as an illustration of how her art was the only thing in her daily life which made her feel free. In the second game, a song supposedly written by heavy metal performer Mercedes Vixen is no worse than genuine examples of the genre and her voice actress is a decent singer.
- Mondo Medicals: low-res, blurry pixelated borderline MS Paint graphics, with Engrish Good Bad Translation. Of course, it just serves to increase the creepy.
- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: The piano in the Bloody Lip Bar is played by a monkey, and the soundtrack reflects this. The bartender says that the impressive part isn't the quality of the music, it's that a monkey can play the piano at all.
- Moshi Monsters has a species of skeleton musicians called Creepy Crooners. They de-tune their guitars and dislike "decent" music.
- One of the playable characters in Muse Dash is Part-Time Warrior Rin, a version of Rin drawn in a simple, scribbly style, complete with only a few frames of animation and no voice acting. She was released as part of an April Fool's update claiming PeroPeroGames were running out of money and thus couldn't afford anything better.
- Not for Broadcast has many examples of this trope, usually Played for Laughs. The The Medicated film preview for example plays in the first broadcast and is utterly random. Then we get the Hey, Friendship! skit, where the in-universe kid actors are blatantly in the clothing room of the studio. The Neil's Deals as well the Pleasure Corp ads are also this, the former being an Insane Proprietor and the latter being a master of Bait-and-Switch holiday locations.
- The ObsCure series revels in this, as part of its homage/throwback to late '90s teen horror movies. The first game's theme song is by Sum 41, for example, while the teenaged characters all speak in badly-researched/made-up slang.
- Odallus: The Dark Call is a retro-style platformer. Neither the game itself nor the visuals suck, but the audio features digitized voice clips that are intentionally muffled as though recorded with a low sample rate typically used in 1990s-era video games with digital voices. The merchant's "Wel-Come" is particularly good example, as the ham-fisted delivery is accompanied by a noticeable amount of static.
- Oxygen Not Included: When a Dupe with a low art skill draws on a canvas, the resulting pictures look like small child's scribblings. To be fair, Dupes are literally days old.
- The community for Paladins invoked this directly via the subreddit for the game. As a protest against the "Cards Unbound" card systemnote implemented into the OB64 patch, the community made intentionally bad fan art of the games' characters with MS Paint in a bid to attract the attention of the developers. The best part? The protest worked! Within a week, the developers took notice, and announced that the system would be restored to it's former glory, and would reintroduce the 15-point loadout system that the game used before OB64, whilst keeping all cards free.
- Not only that, the developers added some of the bad fan art to the game as sprays. Now players can tag walls with crudely drawn art alongside the regular, well-drawn sprays.
- Taken to a new level in the third episode of Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, an entire game done in Retraux 16-bit style... with a sequence which the characters get trapped in an even retraux-er 8-bit game.
- Pizza Game is full of typos, with both trailers bringing them up. There's also the UI, which, according to the unlockable developer commentary, was meant to resemble "a teen girl obsessed with otome games trying to put one together on paper."
- Pizza Tower's sprites are pretty much this. They all look like they were hastily made in an MS Paint-esque art program, what with their one-pixel-thick lines and saturated colours. Their actual animation is surprisingly smooth, taking advantage of the MS Paint aesthetic for comedy.
- Pony Island is a Game Within a Game made by Lucifer himself which consists entirely of a badly-drawn pony running forwards and jumping over gates. Later parts of the game add more bad game design elements, such as unavoidable enemies and Forced Level-Grinding, that you must hack around.
- Wheatley's first test chamber in Portal 2 is deliberately designed poorly because the developers wanted to give it the feel of being designed by a first-time level editor, complete with the corny idea of signing huge words into the scenery. This is done to exemplify Wheatley's severely limited intelligence in comparison to GLaDOS.
- Progressbar 95, being a parody of the Microsoft Windows line, starts you off with a limited color palette and simulated resolution as well as considerable loading times when the game tallies up your end-of-level points. As you earn points to upgrade your simulated PC's hardware, these load times decrease, you get a fuller color palette, and your screen resolution improves, and you also start to unlock operating systems that simulate newer versions of Windows, until eventually the game looks like the desktop of a modern-day PC.
- The 2021 re-release of Quake includes Quake 64, a port of the Nintendo 64 version of Quake. By default, Quake 64's displays the game as if it were on a CRT screen, with very low resolution included (although the player can disable it, either through a console command, or through a display setting added in a later patch).
- In an extremely subtle example: Hideo Kojima stated that he deliberately capped the frame rate for P.T. at 30fps in order to hide the game's true nature, making the reveal of the title and his own involvement more surprising.
- At one point in Scarlet Nexus, a wanted poster of a character is published on the news. Since their family refused to give permission to use a photo of them, a laughably crude drawing of their face is used instead.
- The movie tie-in game for Spider-Man 2 (well, the version for consoles, anyway) had a series of side missions where Spidey has to deliver pizzas within a time limit. However, every one of these missions is backed by a hilariously bad rendition of the Italian folk song Funiculi Funicula which is not only really poorly compressed, but sounds so utterly deranged that the song itself is now better-known as "The Spider-Man 2 Pizza Music". What's more? When you start to run out of time, it starts speeding up.
- Used straight for Captain Qwark's "video-comic" games-within-a-game in Ratchet & Clank. Also, his attack plans are drawn using crayons and childish doodles on lined paper.
- Saints Row: The Third has several notable examples, particularly in the DLC content. Attack of the Clones features Pierce in a stereotypical (female) pop star outfit singing in a hilariously awkward and monotone manner. Gangstas in Space features the titular movie, which has a ridiculous plot and horribly stilted dialogue from the Boss.
- Saints Row IV:
- One mission is set in a 16-bit era side-scrolling beat-em-up, complete with heavily pixelated graphics, a reduced colour palette and badly delivered, heavily compressed voiceovers.
- Matt's rescue mission ends with going through a text adventure with 8-bit graphics designed by Zinyak. Since Zinyak believes True Art Is Incomprehensible (and the place is a simulation meant to trap Matt in "a world he doesn't understand"), the text adventure makes no sense: the President just randomly goes from one setting to another, including a random room with Edgar Allan Poe references and an island that has a dominatrix on it. The player character is quick to point out how absurd the whole game is.
- Sam & Max: Freelance Police: The Devil's Playhouse is incredibly well-written, even the things that are Stylistic Suck are hilarious. The game has a puzzle in which Sam listens to audiobooks of Max's godawful and borderline plagiaristic (but nonetheless hilarious) 'ideas for novels', including some of his Self-Insert Fan Fic.
- Sid Meier's Pirates!: The national theme that plays when you visit a poor and desolate town is slow, plinky and generally painful to listen to. But it sure does a good job of letting you know what you're in for.
- In The Sims 4, it's entirely possible◊ for paintings like this to be considered masterpieces.
- If you get an E Rank on a mission in Sonic Unleashed, the usual level completion theme will be played very, very badly. And it is hilarious.
- Squishcraft deliberately features graphics that has no coherent style. Most tiles are simple but functional. However, normal blocks are poorly-drawn catgirl faces, and controllable blocks are pictures of developer's face. In addition, the front in this game is also incoherent.
- Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer is framed as the product of an incompetent 37-year-old Manchild finishing and releasing an FPS he dreamed up during his highschool days in the early 2000s. That translates into a Duke Nukem-styled shooter with terrible graphics, voice acting and spelling, a ridiculous Nu Metal soundtrack, and a hero dressed in the fashion of yesteryear, who possesses magical hacking powers ala The Matrix, and whose crude toilet and Your Mom one-liners that sound like they were written by a 13-year-old.
- The real-time strategy game Stalin vs. Martians was obviously aimed towards So Bad, It's Good territory, but ended up in the other end of the badness spectrum. It is a perfect example that attempting this does not necessarily give the appropriate result.
- The Stanley Parable:
- The save-the-baby Mini-Game is an uninspired Obvious Beta that few players would tolerate playing for four hours as demanded by The Narrator (who claims it delivers a deep message about family life). Its gameplay features little more than a photo cutout of a Too Dumb to Live, constantly crying baby on a stick moving inexorably against a generic backdrop towards a deadly fire. The one (on-screen) button that affects this in any way instantly returns the baby to its starting position with a loud unpleasant noise.
- In the Collection Sidequest route of the Ultra Deluxe version, The Narrator shows you a brief video recap of you collecting one of the figurines, which appears to have been produced with minimal effort using stock Windows Movie Maker templates.
- Old (non-canon as of the official release) lore for Starbound has the book Floran Peace, intended to be the "Great Floran Novel" that would forever redeem the species and escalate them into high culture forever; the author was mentored personally by the Glitch scholar Professor Irondome for the specific purpose of producing the greatest writer of their generation. It... didn't quite work out. It's panned by every non-Floran critic in the known universe (as well as several actual Floran critics) for its poor writing style, unlikable protagonists who just solve every problem with gratuitous murder (admittedly in-character for Florans), and a lengthy (fifty-thousand word long) diatribe against the Hylotl being inserted midway through for no reason. A critique you can find mentions that Irondome's body was later found with a copy of the book wedged up his mouth. (The fate of the actual author is unknown.)
- In Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective, the entire game is a hyper-clichéd and amateurish action movie that Strong Bad has written and directed, and much like its Flash cartoon predecessors, has hilariously low production quality. Everything about it is terrible, but most subtle is the bad camera work, which includes things that are hard to render in a video game. This includes bad handheld-camera zoom, ignoring of the 180 degree rule, and a split-screen camera which doesn't join up in the middle.
- Super Mario Maker: Many official Nintendo courses in Super Mario Maker and its sequel are deliberately designed to be awful, as a sort of homage-slash-Take That! to the user-created courses.
- SUPER MIARO BORS, a deliberately awful Mario fan game meant to resemble a newbie's first game development experience. Complete with oversized versions of Mario and Luigi from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! running around and killing badly JPEGed versions of their enemies from the same show.
- Super Smash Bros.:
- In Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, many of Mega Man's animations are rather stilted and choppy — which is done to mimic his sprites from the original games.
- In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Steve/Alex/Zombie/Enderman's animations, in contrast to the other fighters, are rather stiff and jerky, reflecting the Limited Animation of their home game.
- supra mayro bross and supra mayro kratt. MS Paint graphics, horrible controls, music by a guy that can't play a guitar, a very Obvious Beta, and terrible spelling? All intentional.
- The voices in Team Fortress 2 are supposed to be this, ranging from incorrect accents (Scout, who has a Brooklyn accent despite being from Boston), to incorrect grammar on foreign words the characters are supposed to be fluent in (Medic — it should be Schweinhunde and Dummköpfe), to tons of Poirot Speak. Apparently Valve wanted the feeling of a 1960s pulp novel written by Americans who didn't do the research. The voice acting is a blast to listen to, though, and you can tell the voice actors are having a lot of fun.
- There's also the dev team's attempts at horror every Halloween. The first event involved a Bedsheet Ghost in a hat that the in-game characters consider terrifying. Subsequent years involve the dev team inserting Faux Horrific Cliché Storm Non Sequitur with copious amounts of writing sound effects in text into blog posts announcing the event.
- The adventure game Total Distortion is centered on creating music videos, and gives you an in-game editor to do so. But the songs, sound effects and video clips you start with are more compressed than the rest of the game's assets, since the whole point is to find new footage in the Distortion Dimension you were teleported to.
- To the Moon has a holiday minisode where Neil makes a video game based on the events of the main game. All characters are represented by disembodied heads, the scenery is extremely pixelated (one pixel of the scenery is the size of one RPG Maker tile) and story is extremely vague, being told by Neil getting items from various characters and placing them elsewhere to open doors.
- Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom (or anything Encounter Critical).
- Trio the Punch: Never Forget Me... was deliberately designed to be nonsensical and just flat-out bad all-around. It features a heavy amount of engrish, a complete lack of any plot or context (the game suddenly goes through locations such as a tropical beach, to a jungle, to a sci-fi area and the like with no explanation), enemies that are just odd (such as giant bronze statues and slime things that can take on Godzilla-like shapes), moments such as fighting a pink sheep that curses you into another sheep or going against a man that resembles Colonel Sanders, and an ending where you're forced to kill harmless animals before the camera pans down to show a pair of giant, orange eyes staring from the darkness underground. Towards the end, the game has the audacity to say "YOU FIGURED IT OUT," when it's really just one Mind Screw after another.
- Ultima VII also had a play about the previous exploits of the protagonist, who indeed runs around at random spouting monosyllables like "name, job, bye". You get to apply for the role, but you won't get it since you don't look enough like, er, yourself.
- Also, the anvilicious "Passion Play" put up by the Fellowship, which even your companions will complain was a terrible waste of their time to watch.
- Undertale is intentionally made with 16-bit graphics MOST of the time, in spite of the game's engine, in order to mislead the player's intention of the quality of gameplay until it REALLY hits hard. Many attacks are vector-based and will subvert the player's traditional understanding of 16-bit projectiles. Entire animations will not adhere to the traditional expectations of a 16-bit character model. The final bosses are intensely detailed and will derail most players' flow of combat, forcing them to dodge like they've never dodged before. And all of this pixelation is designed to hide the true humor, horror, and everything in between until it's needed to make a joke. Also, it would be hard to animate Temmie in all her Cloudcuckoolander glory without low-res.
- Upgrade Complete. The graphics start out low quality and it's up to you to upgrade them. Overall, the game takes unlock systems to the extreme (you spend money on things like better graphics, better sound effects and music, a proper character portrait, straightening the crooked menu, getting rid of that annoying hum, spelling the title properly, getting the store owner to stop insulting you...) And there's Upgrade Complete 2, which takes it up a notch.
- In the inital Vanilla Level Design Contest trilogy of collab hacks, the Worst World overworlds are deliberately designed after low-quality Super Mario World ROM hacks.
- Among the things a World of Warcraft rogue can pickpocket off NPCs are a couple of "Steamy Romance Novels." Opening them allows the player to view a couple pages of melodramatic Purple Prose laced with several game-related and groan-worthy double entendres. (It's doubly amusing to find one of these on, say, an enormous hammer-wielding ogre.)
- The romance novels — there are around five of them — are Blizzard's joke items regarding erotic roleplaying.
- The Waligie Bros. series, made as a parody of bad Clickteam product games. Graphics that consist almost entirely of pictures taken from Google, MIDI files and unfitting and overly loud sound effects everywhere, awkward physics, and enough bad spelling to kill a Grammar Nazi. And yet we wouldn't have it any other way. And then the Super Hyper Paper Deluxe Mario Bros. Galaxy World Land 4: Partners in Sunshine Super Star Island & Saga of Time Advance 64 DS series inspired by it.
- The microgames throughout the WarioWare franchise are made with varying degrees of skill (and the lack thereof) on the part of the in-universe developers.
- The tutorial in D.I.Y. has Wario scribble on the spots of a ladybug to Penny's chagrin. Right after she explained how to make perfect circles using the circle tool. Wario rebukes by saying that it adds charm.
