for me it has to be "the incredible hulk" on the SNES. an old u.s. gold title (for the younger readers, think of u.s. gold as the 90's equivalent to ubisoft) based on the marvel comic book. it was godawful, hard as hell, had really bad controls and graphics that were kinda okay in a really unimpressive way. it was sort of a hybrid between a sidescrolling beat 'em up, a classic j& r and even had some stealth mechanics that seem to have been inspired by 'flashback'- there were sequences were you would run around as bruce banner without any means to defend yourself, so you had to duck enemies, crawl through ventilation shafts and sewer pipes and find some sort of energy pills so you could transform to your hulk form again.

me and my friend spent weeks, maybe months on that game, memorizing the levels, finding out new moves (a pal of ours actually stole the game from a bargain bin, the security-rfid-whatever-stickies were only on the packaging, not the cartridge itself, so he just took it out of the box and pocketed it. yay free game! boo, no manual! that's why we had to find out the moves by ourselves. i think my friend even wrote down a move-list at some point), playing the first couple of levels all over again and again and again trying to progress further in the game. even back then we knew it wasn't a good game, but it was free, we didn't have that many other games and after all you got to be THE FRIGGIN HULK!

i think we never finished the game, but we got more enjoyment out of it than you'd think possible from a mid-90's-u.s. gold-comic-license game. i revisited it a couple of years ago via emulator and could not believe how god-awful it really was. it really amazed me how my past self could put up with that game's bullshit for days on end...

there are quite alot of other really bad games i spent way too much time with, but that's for another post, first i wanna hear some of your bad-games-good-times memories!