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THE GUARDIAN'S 30 worst video games

Started by Onken, October 15, 2015, 11:48:27 AM

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Onken



The first half is published today. Rest to follow tomorrow. How exciting.

Quote50 Cent: Bulletproof (Multiple formats, 2005)
Aliens Colonial Marines (PC/PS3/Xbox 360, 2013)
Bad Street Brawler (NES, 1989)
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (PC,2003)
BMX XXX (Multiple formats, 2002)
Bomberman Act Zero (Xbox 360, 2006)
Bubsy 3D (PlayStation, 1996)
Custer's Revenge (Atari 2600, 1982)
Daikatana (PC/N64/GameBoy Color, 2000)
Duke Nukem Forever (Multiple formats, 2011)
ET the Extra Terrestrial (Atari 2600, 1982)
The Guy Game (Multiple formats, 2004)
Hatred (PC, 2015)
Haze (PS3, 2008)
Hotel Mario (CDI, 1994)

I owned Hotel Mario for the Philips CDi. Its not actually that bad.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/15/30-worst-video-games-of-all-time-part-one

El Unicornio, mang

There's an interesting documentary called Game Over about Atari, and how "E.T." killed it, which actually puts forth that the game wasn't really that bad and was basically used as a scapegoat for the company's other failings. There's also a hunt for the landfill site where all the remaining copies were buried.
Spoiler alert
They do find them.
[close]

Utter Shit

I think the worst game I've ever owned was something called Mario Is Missing on the SNES. I assumed it was the latest Mario game (despite, in fairness, the title of the game explicitly stating otherwise) but it turned out to be a sort-of educational game where you played as Luigi and had to answer quiz questions to work out where Mario was. Pile of shite.

Another truly dreadful game was Player Manager on the PS1. Having just got into the Championship Manager series and been a long-fan of FIFA and Pro Evo, the idea of combining the two was an impossible dream...until this abomination arrived. It started out well - a decent layout, plenty of detail on the management and passable graphics. If it was just a management game, it would be a 6/10. The problem was the Player side of it. There was only one difficulty setting, and it was 'ludicriously easy'. Not 'amateur level on FIFA' easy, where a decent through ball will bypass the defence - I'm talking 'get the ball anywhere out wide and dribble diagonally towards goal - no one will try to stop you, including the goalkeeper, so you can just run the ball directly into the net'. You could also toggle between manager and player-manager during games, so if your pain-stakingly detailed tactical masterplan to turn Manchester United over at Old Trafford had failed and you were 3-0 down with five minutes to go, you could just take control of the team and run the four goals you needed in without any hassle whatsoever. Absolute bollocks. To be fair it only cost me about £3 second-hand but it still felt like a rip-off.

mikeyg27

One of my main regrets over not having a PS3[nb]Okay, fine, not even close to being a main regret.[/nb] is never being able to play Haze. I remember that they would preview it pretty much every week on whatever that games show that used to be on Bravo was called, and Rob Yescombe would go on about how revolutionary the story was going to be. Then it came out and pretty much everybody shat on it from a great height.

chand

Haze was just a pretty average-looking shooter, wasn't it? It was a disaster in the sense that it got 5-6/10 reviews after some sections of the gaming press incessantly called it "the new Halo" or a "Halo killer" and positioned it as the game to save the PS3, and as a result it totally flopped. But I never tried to play it even for the lulz, because it wasn't meant to be hilariously bad or a glorious broken failure, just mediocre. A lot of people say it wasn't a disaster in the Big Rigs sense.

One thing that was weird though was that it strangely ugly. I remember watching the gameplay demos and being distracted by the really terrible 2D ferns that would look shit on a PS1.

MojoJojo

Quote from: El Unicornio, mang on October 15, 2015, 12:35:12 PM
There's an interesting documentary called Game Over about Atari, and how "E.T." killed it, which actually puts forth that the game wasn't really that bad and was basically used as a scapegoat for the company's other failings. There's also a hunt for the landfill site where all the remaining copies were buried.
Spoiler alert
They do find them.
[close]

There's a very nerdy patch project described here http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ - that fixes a some of the bugs and makes a few minor changes. Ignoring the techy stuff it's interesting to read their description of the game - most of the problems seemed to be because it is complicated and actually needed users to read the manual, along with a few other problems (e.g. weird perspective with pixel perfect collision with wells so ET).

The other thing from that documentary I remember is that Atari spunked an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on the license for ET.

madhair60

I normally am too lazy but I'm gonna comment on all of these because my tea's cooking.

50 Cent: Bulletproof (Multiple formats, 2005) - Never played this one but the sequel "Blood on the Sand" is genuinely enjoyable.
Aliens Colonial Marines (PC/PS3/Xbox 360, 2013) - Horrible fucking game.  I'm pretty tolerant of scrappy mechanics and stuff but this was a vile experience, just dogshit.
Bad Street Brawler (NES, 1989) - Looks like any other shitty NES game, there are much worse.
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (PC,2003) - Yeah, literally broken.
BMX XXX (Multiple formats, 2002) - Played pretty much fine, was just gross.
Bomberman Act Zero (Xbox 360, 2006) - Never played this but, you know, it probably sucks.
Bubsy 3D (PlayStation, 1996) - Awful, baffling stuff.  So low-poly it almost comes off as an art game.
Custer's Revenge (Atari 2600, 1982) - One of the worst on-screen rapes.
Daikatana (PC/N64/GameBoy Color, 2000) - I genuinely like Daikatana, there I said it.  It's the last of its kind of shooter, intricate and full of secrets.  Yeah, has its problems - BIG problems - but they basically patched them all out and it's now fun.  Also the Game Boy Colour game is awesome and shouldn't be on here.  Here's me playing the PC version and talking shite.
Duke Nukem Forever (Multiple formats, 2011) - Not anywhere close to being one of the worst games ever.  Bad, sure.
ET the Extra Terrestrial (Atari 2600, 1982) - Pretty OK if you know how to play it.
The Guy Game (Multiple formats, 2004) - Dunno.
Hatred (PC, 2015) - Awful until the patch, now it's a tiny bit more fun.
Haze (PS3, 2008) - Solid 6/10.
Hotel Mario (CDI, 1994) - Eh?  This game's alright, innit?

Onken

Quote from: mikeyg27 on October 15, 2015, 01:07:37 PM
One of my main regrets over not having a PS3[nb]Okay, fine, not even close to being a main regret.[/nb] is never being able to play Haze. I remember that they would preview it pretty much every week on whatever that games show that used to be on Bravo was called, and Rob Yescombe would go on about how revolutionary the story was going to be. Then it came out and pretty much everybody shat on it from a great height.

I'll never be able to forget those Rob Yescombe interviews. I'm still astonished they allowed him to not only be the lead writer on Haze but sole spokesperson for the entire studio. One of the biggest complaints was the abmysal dialogue and storyline of the game he was responsible for. I tweeted him a year or two ago after his named showed up as a guest lecturer at a University's games course. Out of curiously and not expecting a reply I asked how he still had a job in the industry. He wrote four or five messages back about overcoming failure and seemed like a nice man.

Thursday

I think it was Haze that Miller from videogamer talked about being unable to suppress laughter when a PR for the game said "But get this guys, halfway through it turns out YOU'VE BEEN FIGHTING THE WRONG SIDE!!!" As if this was the most unbelievable twist there'd ever been in a game.


Hollow

#10
There's nothing wrong with Hotel Mario as a game, but as a mario game?...no.

All those games had some story or something remarkable, Bad Street Brawler was one of the only Powerglove games for instance. That's why these aren't even anywhere near the worst games ever made or even close...at least they had something memorable about them...no the REAL worst games are just cheap nasty shovelware...probably aimed at young girls...fact. :)

Good to see the tasteless Duke Nukem Forever getting what it deserves though.

All in all I don't like this ironic celebration of bad games...and what does the guardian know?

Consignia

I think the worst that can be said about most of these games is their mediocrity, and sometimes notoriety . You've just got to look at unfinished unplayable shit that gets published. All the shovelware on mobile. All leagues below anything on that list. It's done it's job, we've been talking about something published in The Guardian.



madhair60

They've not got to P yet.

Spoiler alert
They must be bursting!
[close]

Harpo Speaks

Quote from: Consignia on October 15, 2015, 03:21:09 PM
I think the worst that can be said about most of these games is their mediocrity, and sometimes notoriety . You've just got to look at unfinished unplayable shit that gets published. All the shovelware on mobile.

It seems to have been particularly rife on the Wii, just stick motion controls into any old shit and hopefully some parent will buy it for their kids. There were shelves full of it.

Still Not George

Quote from: Harpo Speaks on October 15, 2015, 03:42:44 PM
It seems to have been particularly rife on the Wii, just stick motion controls into any old shit and hopefully some parent will buy it for their kids. There were shelves full of it.

I made a bunch of 'em. For a while half the publishers on the market wanted Wii titles and didn't really give much of a shit as to quality, they just wanted market space.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Consignia on October 15, 2015, 03:21:09 PM
I think the worst that can be said about most of these games is their mediocrity, and sometimes notoriety . You've just got to look at unfinished unplayable shit that gets published. All the shovelware on mobile. All leagues below anything on that list. It's done it's job, we've been talking about something published in The Guardian.
Indeed yes. I bet they don't mention "The Young Ones" for the Commodore 64, that was absolute fucking wank.

Thursday


Still Not George

I'm about 99% sure they're the same person.

Goldentony

Quote from: Utter Shit on October 15, 2015, 12:51:01 PM
I think the worst game I've ever owned was something called Mario Is Missing on the SNES. I assumed it was the latest Mario game (despite, in fairness, the title of the game explicitly stating otherwise) but it turned out to be a sort-of educational game where you played as Luigi and had to answer quiz questions to work out where Mario was. Pile of shite.

Yeah I got conned by this fucking bullshit too. I wasn't allowed to rent games that often because but I managed to get enough together to go and rent this mad new Mario game that the shop had got in and wasn't on All Stars and got all geared up to have a great old time and then suddenly I was having to figure out why it was asking me

"Which cunt invented a-the telephone?!"

and why I couldn't advance any further without intricate knowledge on the Tombs of Thaarg and their discovery by Rodney Ponce in 1912 with his team of Egyptologists. It was fucking rubbish and I took it back immediately and I think I actually told them something to the effect of it was dogshit which caused the weird smoking men who ran the video shop to laugh and say aye fair enough and I managed to get Aero The Acro-Bat which wasn't bad, you were just some tithead bat flying around in a circus.

Phil_A

Quote from: MojoJojo on October 15, 2015, 02:11:13 PM
The other thing from that documentary I remember is that Atari spunked an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on the license for ET.

Yes, it was mainly the fact that Warners(who owned Atari at that point) were so desperate to get Spielberg to work for them they accepted an outrageous demand for 20 million dollars on top of the licencing fee, crazy money by 1984 standards.

The landfill story was partly true - there were ET cartridges buried, but along with a load of other dumped stock from one of Atari's production facilities that had been shut down.

There's a massive, detailed book on the early years of the company, "Atari Inc: Business Is Fun". In that they claimed another contributing factor into Atari's collapse was massive employee fraud, because security was so lax in those days that workers were just ripping off stock left, right and centre.

The other thing I took away from it was that Nolan Bushnell is basically the Stan Lee of the videogame industry, a self-mythologising ideas man who took a lot of credit for other people's work.

I think overall Atari just got too big and bloated and lost focus on what it was good at. Things like having two competing versions of the 2500's successor on the market at the same time(the 5200 and the 7800), which just seems insanely counter-productive in retrospect.

My personal picks would be either The Last Report or Men In Black.
Both for PSX. Both awful puzzle games that I 10-year oldishly persevered with in the hope they were leading somewhere.
And I mean, who thought it would be a good idea to make Men In Black into a Resident Evil clone?

thraxx


The worst video game is books.

Or this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7U2TFIayos

The sound effects were unbearable.


Onken


Osmium


Phil_A

Quote from: thraxx on October 15, 2015, 09:10:29 PM
The worst video game is books.

Or this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7U2TFIayos

The sound effects were unbearable.

Ha, that is amazing. You can almost figure out what's supposed to be happening, but the crazy sounds and constant glitchy flickering and flashing colours just turn the whole thing into a bewildering abstract nightmare.

It's like what happens when you circuit bend a normal game cartridge and everything goes mental, except it's the actual game.

Blumf

Wot no Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)?

Whilst Nintendo carefully keep their mascot pristine, Sega just paid tramps to shit all over theirs.

Consignia

Quote from: Blumf on October 15, 2015, 11:51:49 PM
Wot no Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)?


We don't know yet, they've only done the first half. Although, it's much better candidate than most, since it's as glitchy as fuck. Still, the absolute worst? At least it's completable (I assume, I gave up after a couple of levels).

Hollow

Quote from: Blumf on October 15, 2015, 11:51:49 PM
Wot no Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)?

Whilst Nintendo carefully keep their mascot pristine, Sega just paid tramps to shit all over theirs.

I'd argue nearly all 3D sonic games are bad though, it's just not something thats ever translated well.

I know Sonic Adventure 2 has it's fans, but that's despite it being totally rubbish, people just love Sega too much and will forgive lots.

Sega's total approach over the years has been that they know they are tasked with an impossible mission,  so just give it a kick ass soundtrack and hope the devs can crack moving a character that fast, in full 3D this time, which inevitably they can't,.

We've now got a situation where people just know a 3d sonic game won't really work, and they are happy with those broken mechanics so long as the fan service is strong.

Poor dead SEGA, at least they made Sonic Colours once, which wasn't bad at all, it had a lot of the same issues as the others, but it had it's own identity and it feels like a good game in itself.