The 2nd greatest cultural achievement of everyone's favorite apartheid state. If you make an unfun, obtuse game on purpose, it's still a pain to sit through, and I'm not sure if Armed & Delirious was trying to be bad in order to create a surreal atmosphere or if the developers were just that bad at their job.
Starting off with the game's most grave sin, the jokes don't land. I wasn't a fan of Psychonauts' "random and quirky" sense of humor, but this game seems like a mean spirited imitation of Psychonauts made by people who also didn't enjoy the game. Most of the humor comes from the nonsensical actions of the repulsive looking main character and her dementia-ridden worldview. Granny's character isn't defined enough to have decent jokes come from her bizarre reactions as some sort of psychotic break of character. Most of her bits involve "drinking" or referring to objects incorrectly, with random acts of violence sprinkled in. She's a Z-tier Peter Griffin, but the game also has too much restraint with what antics Granny will get up to, so her random outbursts come off as unsettling without the sort of shock that good Family Guy jokes have. This isn't an awful concept, you could either have her be a chaos demon interacting with the world like a violent, cruel Alzheimer's patient or have her be a sweet old woman, bumbling about a demented fever dream. They didn't bother to choose either.
She's easily the best part of the game, the rest of the characters are annoying and shallow, and the game lacks the wit to have them be interesting foils to Granny. Her family's characterization is equally unfocused and crude. Their main characteristics consist of "torture animals" and "are horny in a particularly greasy way". This doesn't make them stand out among the rest of the game's cast, as there are plenty of other NPCs who either hate animals or express their desire to bust to the player. The main antagonist feels detached from the game's events outside of specific plot dumps that go on for entirely way too long and kill whatever piss-poor pacing the game already had. The plot dumps are especially infuriating because the game lacks any consistent internal logical, which the game could have used to bounce off of and make a fucking joke.
The rest of the game's humor is dependent on how funny you find the unintuitive adventure game design and the solutions to puzzles that you wouldn't be able to find out the solution to without obscene pixel hunting/trial and error. Everything downstream from that is irrelevant, because it poisons the experience so fully that the rest of the game's faults don't look as bad. Granny, despite being able to do flips and other acrobatics in cut-scenes, apparently can't lift her hands above her head in almost all other situations and the player needs, on average, three to six different objects unrelated to a given puzzle in order to trigger a given plot flag. Inventory management is done with a visual basic window that's either way too small to read what the item is, or requires the player to resize the window every time you want to dig for the shovel so you can unlock a pizza or whatever stupid bullshit this game's on at that given time. There is zero deviation from the given path either, you have to perform these arcane steps in the exact order the game wants you to, even if """logically""" out of sequence actions should get you to the same destination. If you do know a puzzle's solution (you're following a guide for every step), context sensitive actions are entirely too picky and you'll have to attempt most actions multiple times for them to register. It's one thing to watch a longplay of this game, I did that years ago, but the actual process of having to disk swap constantly and mash on the same background object over and over again in the exact order to go to another disk swap sequence solidified just how wretched this game is to play on a moment to moment basis.
The presentation is awful, but not in similarly interesting ways. The game's early 3D models are ugly, but less in a "they were dealing with strict hardware limitations" sense, and more "the art direction in this game was bad, whoever worked on this game was a bad artist" ugly. The settings aren't strange enough to come off as totally alien or unsettling, if anything the worlds feel stock and forgettable outside of their use of weird camera angles. The characters fare slightly better, not in the sense that they had good direction, but in the sense that they're so revolting that they stick out in your mind (like the 3'9 Vectorman baby). I swear to god, there are renders of specific characters that look off model, like they outsourced animation for their own 3D rigs. The audio was poorly mixed, with important lines of dialogue being very hard to hear. Sound effects layer on top of each other at times, and I would have loved to mute the game but the game has no subtitle options. The music's my second favorite part of the game, because most of it sounds like it was pulled off of a royalty free music CD and is bland, but inoffensive unlike almost everything else in this game.
Most really bad games I've played haven't left me with any negative feelings towards the staff that worked on it. Dual Heroes is a game that's as bad as Armed & Delirious, but that's just an incompetent mess made by a team that primarily worked on RPGs and Bomberman ports, I hope everyone at Produce landed on their feet. The artistic choices that the staff at Makh-Shevet made reflect poorly on them as people, but not even in an interestingly offensive way, in the same way that David Cage's worldview poisons his games. This is a mean, ugly and unfunny game that compares poorly to its regional peers (which were also morally repugnant, being IDF flight sims), and it's for the best that the company folded shortly after this game's failure.
Starting off with the game's most grave sin, the jokes don't land. I wasn't a fan of Psychonauts' "random and quirky" sense of humor, but this game seems like a mean spirited imitation of Psychonauts made by people who also didn't enjoy the game. Most of the humor comes from the nonsensical actions of the repulsive looking main character and her dementia-ridden worldview. Granny's character isn't defined enough to have decent jokes come from her bizarre reactions as some sort of psychotic break of character. Most of her bits involve "drinking" or referring to objects incorrectly, with random acts of violence sprinkled in. She's a Z-tier Peter Griffin, but the game also has too much restraint with what antics Granny will get up to, so her random outbursts come off as unsettling without the sort of shock that good Family Guy jokes have. This isn't an awful concept, you could either have her be a chaos demon interacting with the world like a violent, cruel Alzheimer's patient or have her be a sweet old woman, bumbling about a demented fever dream. They didn't bother to choose either.
She's easily the best part of the game, the rest of the characters are annoying and shallow, and the game lacks the wit to have them be interesting foils to Granny. Her family's characterization is equally unfocused and crude. Their main characteristics consist of "torture animals" and "are horny in a particularly greasy way". This doesn't make them stand out among the rest of the game's cast, as there are plenty of other NPCs who either hate animals or express their desire to bust to the player. The main antagonist feels detached from the game's events outside of specific plot dumps that go on for entirely way too long and kill whatever piss-poor pacing the game already had. The plot dumps are especially infuriating because the game lacks any consistent internal logical, which the game could have used to bounce off of and make a fucking joke.
The rest of the game's humor is dependent on how funny you find the unintuitive adventure game design and the solutions to puzzles that you wouldn't be able to find out the solution to without obscene pixel hunting/trial and error. Everything downstream from that is irrelevant, because it poisons the experience so fully that the rest of the game's faults don't look as bad. Granny, despite being able to do flips and other acrobatics in cut-scenes, apparently can't lift her hands above her head in almost all other situations and the player needs, on average, three to six different objects unrelated to a given puzzle in order to trigger a given plot flag. Inventory management is done with a visual basic window that's either way too small to read what the item is, or requires the player to resize the window every time you want to dig for the shovel so you can unlock a pizza or whatever stupid bullshit this game's on at that given time. There is zero deviation from the given path either, you have to perform these arcane steps in the exact order the game wants you to, even if """logically""" out of sequence actions should get you to the same destination. If you do know a puzzle's solution (you're following a guide for every step), context sensitive actions are entirely too picky and you'll have to attempt most actions multiple times for them to register. It's one thing to watch a longplay of this game, I did that years ago, but the actual process of having to disk swap constantly and mash on the same background object over and over again in the exact order to go to another disk swap sequence solidified just how wretched this game is to play on a moment to moment basis.
The presentation is awful, but not in similarly interesting ways. The game's early 3D models are ugly, but less in a "they were dealing with strict hardware limitations" sense, and more "the art direction in this game was bad, whoever worked on this game was a bad artist" ugly. The settings aren't strange enough to come off as totally alien or unsettling, if anything the worlds feel stock and forgettable outside of their use of weird camera angles. The characters fare slightly better, not in the sense that they had good direction, but in the sense that they're so revolting that they stick out in your mind (like the 3'9 Vectorman baby). I swear to god, there are renders of specific characters that look off model, like they outsourced animation for their own 3D rigs. The audio was poorly mixed, with important lines of dialogue being very hard to hear. Sound effects layer on top of each other at times, and I would have loved to mute the game but the game has no subtitle options. The music's my second favorite part of the game, because most of it sounds like it was pulled off of a royalty free music CD and is bland, but inoffensive unlike almost everything else in this game.
Most really bad games I've played haven't left me with any negative feelings towards the staff that worked on it. Dual Heroes is a game that's as bad as Armed & Delirious, but that's just an incompetent mess made by a team that primarily worked on RPGs and Bomberman ports, I hope everyone at Produce landed on their feet. The artistic choices that the staff at Makh-Shevet made reflect poorly on them as people, but not even in an interestingly offensive way, in the same way that David Cage's worldview poisons his games. This is a mean, ugly and unfunny game that compares poorly to its regional peers (which were also morally repugnant, being IDF flight sims), and it's for the best that the company folded shortly after this game's failure.