What is the ugliest game that you have ever played and loved?

Probably Morrowind. The game is ugly and the mechanics are a bit clumsy, but damn did I love it. Prolly clocked over 3,000 hours in Vvardenfell man.

Cruelty Squad

Kenshi. It's simultaneously janky and beautiful.

Does Old School Runescape counts? Cuz damn do those graphics have aged but I still love it to bits.

Minecraft

Seriously how the hell? It's fairly basic and unless you have the chops and patience to rebuild a minecraft new york city, not much else going on

But then I fire that pixelated crap up again and off i go trying to recreate a giant tower that looks like a penis.

Nethack

Nidhogg 2 - I love the first game and the second game is fun, but I honestly hate the art.

For me, it has to be Dragon Age Origins. I love the brains out of it, but it is as ugly as you can get. Thankfully the rest of the game is fantastic.

VVVVVV

I feel like responding with Cruelty Squad might be cheating a bit...

Pathologic is a pretty ugly game, but, if anything, it adds to the charm and atmosphere of the game.

I assume we are only talking about games that looked ugly pretty much upon release, and not games that look really bad now but are still really fun.

In that case starting with the most recent:

Save Room - Puzzle game that is just the inventory management from survival horrors like Resident Evil. Might be just a simple joke game, but I had a lot of fun with it.

Outcast - The voxel tech just wasn't ready. Amazing game, one of the best of the era, but it its visuals left a lot to be desired. Modern updates have greatly improved its look.

Eradicator - This one was looking out of date when it came out, but its a surprisingly awesome and deep 90's era shooter.

Sid meiers colonization.

Beauty is, I think, somewhat in the eye of the beholder. A few games that couldn't have been called very conventionally pretty, though:

• A number of roguelikes that use ASCII graphics (though today I play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead* in graphics mode). Same for Dwarf Fortress. Often these are very deep games with a lot of gameplay to explore and a lot of replayability but nobody is playing them because of their graphical beauty.

• The Dominions series and Conquest of Elysium series from Illwinter are fairly-involved strategy games, which both have graphics that...well, I can understand someone appreciating some aspects of them, but again, nobody is buying these games for the graphics.

• Kenshi -- a squad-based open-world sandbox game -- has a certain amount of attractiveness, but the textures and models are limited in detail and I don't think that people are going to call its graphics beautiful or on-par with high-budget games today.

• Noita is a difficult action roguelite game where one constructs wands using various spells and spell modifiers and gives one's wizards various powers as they dig through a world. The graphics are pretty chunky pixel stuff, which someone can enjoy but aren't something that you'd probably play the game just to look at.

I think that the importance of graphics is more-important for games that don't have a lot of replayability. There's a lot of "oh, wow" factor when you see something beautiful and it's still novel. But if you see something many, many times, eh, less-impressive. A lot of roguelikes and roguelites focus on replayability -- the graphics of something that you've seen countless times are going to be old hat at some point, no matter how pretty.

Probably Risen, I'm a Pirahna Bytes fanboy.

Hogs of War.

I'm sure I'm doing it something of a disservice here, but even at the time I remember thinking it looked pretty grim.

Lots of browns and greens, lots of repeated textures and lots of pretty clumsy animations.

And you know what? None of that mattered in the slightest.

Vangers is definitely an ugly game. Aged horribly. But it's just so intriguing.

Barring that Warriors of Might and Magic for the PS2. It's really not a good game but I love it so much. It's a dame shame 3DO went under.