This is the worst game I've ever loved.

Afrika is bad in ways that made me laugh almost every time I picked it up. Because I could tell this game was made by people who had never made or played a video game before, but damn if these National Geographic dudes weren't trying their hardest to rise to the challenge.

It's much harder for a bad game to be enjoyable than, say, a bad movie, or a bad book, because a game still has to be a functional piece of software. Movies will progress through linear time no matter how cringe they are. You can skip over a few paragraphs of flowery descriptions when an author is being self-indulgent. But if a game is bad in the wrong ways, you can't play it. And if its bad in other ways, you won't want to play it.

So how did Afrika keep me hooked until it's completion? Because I could feel the love these developers had for animals. The sincere desire to educate. This objectively bad "video game" feels like a herculean task and accomplishment for those who set out to make it. I was charmed and endeared by the nature of its faults when compared to the earnestness of its endeavors.

Let us begin. By which I say that it takes like five god damn minutes to load into your save file! After the game has already made an installation onto the PS3 system! The save file for Afrika is near half a damn gigabyte! In any other game, these would be insulting. I mean, it still is, but once I saw the PS2-era .jpg trees that were the result of all this loading, I burst out laughing.

Afrika is a photography safari game. You get missions to take pictures of specific animals, and eventually gain access to better cameras and more areas as the diversity of fauna blooms.

But the opening hour is brutal. Your camera sucks, all your photos look like crap, and the tutorial level is so sparsely populated you barely have a giraffe and a zebra to rub together. Worse, you have an NPC tour guide who drives you to your photograph spot, taking the most round-about sight-see-y routes imaginable.

Which made me laugh so damn hard. Because there's such majestic orchestral music playing. It's an original piece that's rousing me to adventure! But fucking nothing is happening while I'm watching an NPC drive me across a barren game map with a repeating grass texture, terrible trees, all to arrive at an "oasis" that is little more than a muddy puddle with two zebras idling by it.

I get the impulse! They want to show off! To ease players into what the gameplay loop is going to be like before you start driving the car yourself! But it is so embarrassingly meek a showing that the intention is farcical. Especially since the music unceremoniously cuts out the second you dismount the car. The exclamation point the game accidentally puts on its own misguided hubris is comedy gold.

When you get to start actually playing the game, it's curbside appeal remains low. Animals run away when you approach them. Climbing a tree or hiding in a bush is boring as hell while you're waiting for animals to saunter into snapshot range. You can see the stiltedness of their transition animations as they turn like tanks to run if you so much as sit too loudly.

But as you stick with it, there's something real to that experience.

As a launch year PS3 game, they had to throw that gyroscope in somewhere, and here it is to turn the controller to switch between horizontal and vertical shots. And you know what, I really like it! Same with using the PS3's pressure sensitive buttons for pressing the shutter button on the camera. That half-press to focus, full press to take a picture was nostalgic to when I had cameras in my hand and not my phone.

When I got my first camera upgrade, it was life changing. Optical zoom! Auto-focusing! The ability to take pictures that were kinda cool instead of "will let me pass this mission" levels of lameness! For a moment, I almost learned what all the different specifications of the cameras and lenses meant! (But only almost.) Most importantly, I felt empowered to keep playing the game in a way that made me rethink the same basic actions and behaviors I'd be learning before.

Mind, everything about the game experience was still slow and tedious. Afrika has 5 main areas and no way to fast travel between them. It has a day-night cycle with minimal ways of altering time besides sleeping to the next day. There's no way to bring your car immediately to your side if you wander too far and forget where it is. Driving uses tank controls, and your car will instantly lose all momentum the instant you hit a .jpg of bushes. You can't take pictures until your car comes to a complete stop.

So many decisions would be made differently by anyone with more familiarity with how games work. Someone dyed in the gamer impulse to remove all frictions, to let player desire translate to action as quickly as possible. But at the same time, there's a rhythm that develops that builds real relationships with these cumbersome mechanics. When a request comes in to take a picture of an animal at sunset, I groaned instinctively. But when I submitted those requests, they always felt special. Because I knew the annoyance that went into them. (Maybe I was primed to know how to enjoy parts of this game by another I played earlier this year.)

Thinking about the game separate from its clunky and fricative user experience, Afrika makes several decisions that are pretty bold and kind in a way most games wouldn't dare. Multiple animals don't have any missions assigned to them - you can complete the campaign missing several entries in your animal encyclopedia. Past the tutorial area, animals rarely have more than one mission assigned to them, and multiple have gimmick encounters. For every instance where it looks like Afrika is stalling for time or padding with its copy-pasted assets, it surprised me with moments of unique scenarios or animal models that appear once and never again.

It's not that the people making this game don't care. They're just bad at this.

The perfect capstone to the experience was the final mission, where you board a hot air balloon as a final send-off to the terrain you've been driving across for the last couple dozen hours. They try to stuff every character model they have in there, and the frame-rate TANKS. It looks so bad. The texture repeats are egregious. The grass almost shines. And it plays the EXACT SAME MUSIC TRACK AS THE TUTORIAL LEVEL BECAUSE THEY ONLY WROTE ONE SONG. But then a few minutes later during the credits, there's another orchestral arrangement of the same song that's just... better?? They even show video clips of the orchestra playing the song (they're so proud)! But they don't even show the recording of the part in the song that's playing! And the conductor's not even in tune with the music you can hear! Aughhhhhhh!

I want to complain about some other parts of my experience. Like how I almost gave up on the game in the first couple missions waiting for a damn hippo to yawn. How I never took a picture of an eland because I could not tell the difference between a gazelle or an impala or any of the other million animals that have horns and all look the same. How I missed taking a picture of the hyrax, which cut off a whole chain of new missions, and when I did unlock them, there weren't any ostriches around anymore and I had deleted all of my old ostrich photos, meaning scouring pages of decade-old forum posts to find someone with my exact same problem to force the RNG seed to spawn some ostriches in the termite nests (labeled Anthills on the map).

But for all my complaints, Afrika was still functional as a game. Which meant that I could still find ways to engage with it that might be inaccessible for a game trying harder to be "good".

I still can't recommend it. Anyone watching me play this game cringed out of their skin and thought I was crazy for sticking with it. But you know, maybe Afrika was just too real in expressing through game form how being a wildlife photographer kind of sucks for a reward that is only kind of neat to anyone who doesn't work at National Geographic.

Ask me to talk about Afrika and I will only have complaints, but if you pay attention, you will see that I only have a smile on my face.

This is the worst game I've ever loved.

Afrika is bad in ways that made me laugh almost every time I picked it up. Because I could tell this game was made by people who had never made or played a video game before, but damn if these National Geographic dudes weren't trying their hardest to rise to the challenge.

It's much harder for a bad game to be enjoyable than, say, a bad movie, or a bad book, because a game still has to be a functional piece of software. Movies will progress through linear time no matter how cringe they are. You can skip over a few paragraphs of flowery descriptions when an author is being self-indulgent. But if a game is bad in the wrong ways, you can't play it. And if its bad in other ways, you won't want to play it.

So how did Afrika keep me hooked until it's completion? Because I could feel the love these developers had for animals. The sincere desire to educate. This objectively bad "video game" feels like a herculean task and accomplishment for those who set out to make it. I was charmed and endeared by the nature of its faults when compared to the earnestness of its endeavors.

Let us begin. By which I say that it takes like five god damn minutes to load into your save file! After the game has already made an installation onto the PS3 system! The save file for Afrika is near half a damn gigabyte! In any other game, these would be insulting. I mean, it still is, but once I saw the PS2-era .jpg trees that were the result of all this loading, I burst out laughing.

Afrika is a photography safari game. You get missions to take pictures of specific animals, and eventually gain access to better cameras and more areas as the diversity of fauna blooms.

But the opening hour is brutal. Your camera sucks, all your photos look like crap, and the tutorial level is so sparsely populated you barely have a giraffe and a zebra to rub together. Worse, you have an NPC tour guide who drives you to your photograph spot, taking the most round-about sight-see-y routes imaginable.

Which made me laugh so damn hard. Because there's such majestic orchestral music playing. It's an original piece that's rousing me to adventure! But fucking nothing is happening while I'm watching an NPC drive me across a barren game map with a repeating grass texture, terrible trees, all to arrive at an "oasis" that is little more than a muddy puddle with two zebras idling by it.

I get the impulse! They want to show off! To ease players into what the gameplay loop is going to be like before you start driving the car yourself! But it is so embarrassingly meek a showing that the intention is farcical. Especially since the music unceremoniously cuts out the second you dismount the car. The exclamation point the game accidentally puts on its own misguided hubris is comedy gold.

When you get to start actually playing the game, it's curbside appeal remains low. Animals run away when you approach them. Climbing a tree or hiding in a bush is boring as hell while you're waiting for animals to saunter into snapshot range. You can see the stiltedness of their transition animations as they turn like tanks to run if you so much as sit too loudly.

But as you stick with it, there's something real to that experience.

As a launch year PS3 game, they had to throw that gyroscope in somewhere, and here it is to turn the controller to switch between horizontal and vertical shots. And you know what, I really like it! Same with using the PS3's pressure sensitive buttons for pressing the shutter button on the camera. That half-press to focus, full press to take a picture was nostalgic to when I had cameras in my hand and not my phone.

When I got my first camera upgrade, it was life changing. Optical zoom! Auto-focusing! The ability to take pictures that were kinda cool instead of "will let me pass this mission" levels of lameness! For a moment, I almost learned what all the different specifications of the cameras and lenses meant! (But only almost.) Most importantly, I felt empowered to keep playing the game in a way that made me rethink the same basic actions and behaviors I'd be learning before.

Mind, everything about the game experience was still slow and tedious. Afrika has 5 main areas and no way to fast travel between them. It has a day-night cycle with minimal ways of altering time besides sleeping to the next day. There's no way to bring your car immediately to your side if you wander too far and forget where it is. Driving uses tank controls, and your car will instantly lose all momentum the instant you hit a .jpg of bushes. You can't take pictures until your car comes to a complete stop.

So many decisions would be made differently by anyone with more familiarity with how games work. Someone dyed in the gamer impulse to remove all frictions, to let player desire translate to action as quickly as possible. But at the same time, there's a rhythm that develops that builds real relationships with these cumbersome mechanics. When a request comes in to take a picture of an animal at sunset, I groaned instinctively. But when I submitted those requests, they always felt special. Because I knew the annoyance that went into them. (Maybe I was primed to know how to enjoy parts of this game by another I played earlier this year.)

Thinking about the game separate from its clunky and fricative user experience, Afrika makes several decisions that are pretty bold and kind in a way most games wouldn't dare. Multiple animals don't have any missions assigned to them - you can complete the campaign missing several entries in your animal encyclopedia. Past the tutorial area, animals rarely have more than one mission assigned to them, and multiple have gimmick encounters. For every instance where it looks like Afrika is stalling for time or padding with its copy-pasted assets, it surprised me with moments of unique scenarios or animal models that appear once and never again.

It's not that the people making this game don't care. They're just bad at this.

The perfect capstone to the experience was the final mission, where you board a hot air balloon as a final send-off to the terrain you've been driving across for the last couple dozen hours. They try to stuff every character model they have in there, and the frame-rate TANKS. It looks so bad. The texture repeats are egregious. The grass almost shines. And it plays the EXACT SAME MUSIC TRACK AS THE TUTORIAL LEVEL BECAUSE THEY ONLY WROTE ONE SONG. But then a few minutes later during the credits, there's another orchestral arrangement of the same song that's just... better?? They even show video clips of the orchestra playing the song (they're so proud)! But they don't even show the recording of the part in the song that's playing! And the conductor's not even in tune with the music you can hear! Aughhhhhhh!

I want to complain about some other parts of my experience. Like how I almost gave up on the game in the first couple missions waiting for a damn hippo to yawn. How I never took a picture of an eland because I could not tell the difference between a gazelle or an impala or any of the other million animals that have horns and all look the same. How I missed taking a picture of the hyrax, which cut off a whole chain of new missions, and when I did unlock them, there weren't any ostriches around anymore and I had deleted all of my old ostrich photos, meaning scouring pages of decade-old forum posts to find someone with my exact same problem to force the RNG seed to spawn some ostriches in the termite nests (labeled Anthills on the map).

But for all my complaints, Afrika was still functional as a game. Which meant that I could still find ways to engage with it that might be inaccessible for a game trying harder to be "good".

I still can't recommend it. Anyone watching me play this game cringed out of their skin and thought I was crazy for sticking with it. But you know, maybe Afrika was just too real in expressing through game form how being a wildlife photographer kind of sucks for a reward that is only kind of neat to anyone who doesn't work at National Geographic.

Ask me to talk about Afrika and I will only have complaints, but if you pay attention, you will see that I only have a smile on my face.