Horrible / Video Game Generations: Fifth to Sixth

The start of the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Sega Saturn generation in the early- to mid-1990s gave way to higher-fidelity graphics and more advanced gameplay than could be expected from games for most of the early consoles. But even with more processing power, it didn't always add up to good – or even enjoyable – games.

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Fifth Generation (1993-2006)

• Animorphs: Shattered Reality is described by IGN as being so boring that your main challenge will be trying to stay awake long enough to complete each level. The characters have only four frames of animation, everyone constantly spouts annoying one-liners, and the gameplay is extremely repetitive. Tragically, this was the last game that Singletrac (yes, the developers of the original Twisted Metal just four years prior) ever made. Vinny from Vinesauce looked at this game for his first game in the Awful Playstation Games series he had here.
• While Arthur is a popular franchise that spawned books, a long-running TV series, and some interactive storybook games from the Living Books series, the same cannot be said for licensed "games" Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! and Arthur: Ready to Race!^note both developed by The Learning Company who are also responsible for much better Edutainment Games like The Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, Reader Rabbit, and the aforementioned Living Books for the Game Boy Color and PlayStation respectively:
  • Arthur's Absolutely Fun Day! is a Mini"game" "Game" with blocky pixel graphics, super annoying music and sound effects, and most of the mini"games" are either so easy they're boring, or so hard they're frustrating. Worse yet, you need to win 16 mini"games" when there is 10 in all, meaning you need to play some of these "games" again. The worst part is when you do beat all "16" mini-games, you unlock a new area with more mini games, however they are just as bad as the regular mini-games, and you don't even get anything for beating them.
  • Arthur: Ready to Race! is not much better. The "races" in this "game" are extremely easy to a boring degree, that can't be lost unless you actually try. Some of this "game" doesn't even consist of racing but rather walking through Elwood City and doing chores for other characters consisting of more ridiculously easy "games" to earn money for a new cart. The locations consist of flat mannequin characters standing behind a counter, one of which, the Joke Shop, having a character who tells forgettable "jokes".^note Knock, knock. Who's there? Tommy. Tommy who? The donut I ate is in my "Tommy". Not to mention the cutscenes feature extremely horrifying 3D models of Arthur, Buster, Francine, and the Brain.
  • It says something when PeanutButterGamer, himself a huge fan of Arthur, dislikes these "games".
• Batman & Robin, released in 1998 by Acclaim as a tie-in to the movie (which, while by no means good, can at least be enjoyed ironically), is admittedly a neat concept for its time: a sandbox-style game set in Gotham City, with three separate characters whose skills develop separately. But in practice, it's a trash fire. The number one culprit? The controls. Driving in this game is horrendous because the Batmobile is too big and handles too badly for the overly narrow streets—you'll either crash into traffic or just hit a wall. The fighting mechanics consist of repetitive combos or unintuitive gadgetry like Batarangs (which take forever to aim), not helped by tank controls combined with an uncontrollable camera. You can switch from a fighting mode to a detective mode to solve environmental puzzles, but unlike the later Batman: Arkham Series, the two are mutually exclusive. Thus, trying to solve puzzles while enemies are around is beyond annoying, which is made even worse by said enemies being capable of draining your health fast, which gets especially frustrating when you have a healing ability… that’s only available in the detective mode where you can’t attack on the fly at all. There’s also the mechanic of finding clues to figure out where the villains will commit their next crime, a good idea on paper; in execution however, a good chunk of the game becomes a series of frustrating scavenger hunts where clues are randomly scattered across the overworld, a good chunk of them can be completely useless, and certain clues will disappear if you leave a room. All this is further undone by the game becoming increasingly Nintendo Hard with too many Guide Dang It! moments to count, while giving you only one life without continues, and enforces a strict time limit for everything (something that would be better done by Dead Rising 8 years later), meaning that if you take too long, the villains can get away with everything and leave you with an instant Game Over, leaving very little room for error. And on top of that, you could be wasting precious in-game minutes just trying to find the Batcomputers scattered across Gotham that are the only spots where you can save your progress. This game had potential—it follows the story of the movie closely for the most part and had pretty good graphics for the time that faithfully recreated multiple sets—but the execution just utterly killed it. When SomecallmeJohnny (who, mind you, managed to suffer through Batman Forever in full) did a playthrough of the game, he aborted it one part in... and still pointed out even more problems that we left out for brevity. Rerez eventually went through the whole game, comparing the experience to a torture device, and would later rank it at the very top of their "Top 10 Worst Games Nobody Played" because of the strange amount of effort that seems to have been put into the game despite how utterly broken it turned out..
• Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge being a tie-in to Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings was already a point against it, but somehow, BAP Interactive found a way to make it all the worse. All but forgotten over the span of nearly 15 years, the game was a baffling affair that only half-heartedly integrated the source material—as in, through a series of unparseable grainy FMVs, the game primarily taking place in an irrelevant metaphysical world described by an old woman in the intro as "the world of Pumpkinhead". Even the most basic gameplay, in which you wander around looking for pictures so you can pick up items from said FMVs and later pick who Pumpkinhead kills or fails to kill, consists of Moon Logic Puzzles with no indication of how to solve them. There are no item descriptions, because those would actually be helpful, and this game appears to be targeting a particularly masochistic, extremist type of help-hating "Stop Having Fun" Guy that likely doesn't actually exist. Certain items can get your whole inventory voided for being a "thief", potentially stranding you in a single area and making the game unwinnable. Not that winning's worth it—you get a sophomoric Gainax Ending either way. The good end is just Pumpkinhead's suit actor dancing to a royalty-free doo-wop tune; the bad end is him giving you the finger. Spoony had to do two reviews, as the first time around, he struggled to even wrap his mind around playing it even after buying a second copy that came with a manual that turned out to be little help, ultimately rage quitting after his inventory was confiscated because he unknowingly grabbed some of the "stolen" items. Even LordKat, his guest on the latter, couldn't figure out the puzzles despite hacking the game with a hex editor. They ended up just borrowing from a secondhand playthrough, with permission.
• Bubsy 3D for the PlayStation, an attempt at reinvigorating the ill-fated Bubsy franchise. Inexplicably, Eidetic prioritized the game's resolution, pushing for 480i at a time when console games often ran at 240p. As a result, they had little time or resources left to actually design the levels, and boy-oh-boy does it show. The extremely primitive yet eye-searingly garish graphics, ranging from jittery models to flat, single-shade patchwork, harken back to "Money For Nothing." Just loading individual frames of the resulting mess would eat up most of the console's already limited video memory. The gameplay is abominable: it's difficult to move Bubsy in any direction other than straight forward, and jumping on platforms is a chore because of the bad camera angles. To add insult to injury, Bubsy has one of the most grating voices known to man and shrieks inane dialogue every five seconds. Bubsy's 2D games may have their fans, but Bubsy 3D put the bobcat to sleep for 21 years. Lead designer Michael Berlyn didn't realize how bad it was until he went to CES 1996 to show it off; there, he encountered a booth demonstrating Super Mario 64. By this point, it was too late to go back and fix. The game only got So Okay, It's Average reviews at first for being one of the first 3D platformers ever released—along with Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot (1996). As the genre grew, that factor was lost and any goodwill the game had evaporated. The Angry Video Game Nerd gives his take on it, along with several other notorious games, here. SomecallmeJohnny also reviewed this game along with the rest of the Bubsy franchise. JonTron also reviewed the franchise. Caddicarus also tackled it here. For the morbidly curious to just how bad it really is, Nitro Rad takes a look at it here, even though it almost costs him his sanity, while Matt McMuscles discusses the game's Troubled Production here. Joueur du Grenier allocates a large portion of its "from 2d to 3d" video to it, then later chose it as the single worst game he ever played in 11 years of videos.
• Cardinal Syn was made by Kronos Digital Entertainment, of Fear Effect fame — and Criticom infamy. That should set your expectations right away. Released after their similarly-crappy (though not quite to the same extent as Criticom) Dark Rift in what Gamecritics has referred to as the "Trilogy of Terror", it was developed simply so the company could keep its head above water long enough to develop the action survival-horror game they would be best known for. They attempted to use motion capture to create smoother character animations (done mostly in-house), but it still appears stiff and jittery — a shame as the game's graphics are otherwise somewhat nice. The game tries to draw inspiration from Soul Edge, but where Soul Edge had depth hidden in its simplicity, Cardinal Syn is as shallow as a puddle in comparison to its contemporaries, and the magical special attacks are all very same-y (and limited by magic potions per fight). None of this is helped by controls that are sluggish, if not unresponsive, making combos needlessly difficult, and made potentially harder by weapons bouncing off of nearby walls. Matt McMuscles concluded that for all of its exceptional presentation (which he considers a step up from Iron & Blood), it's just not a particularly fun game.
• Cheesy was released for the PlayStation in 1996 and published by Ocean Software, and its title couldn't be more accurate to the game's quality. The graphics are incredibly ugly with bland colors and hideous character models, the story is poorly explained and the controls are incredibly awkward. When you release the directional button while running, it takes Cheesy a while to stop running, which can result in a number of cheap hits. During the 2D sections of the game, Cheesy feels incredibly heavy when he's jumping and his weight can result in him falling back down to the first section, forcing the player to jump back up to begin the 2D section again. To make this even worse, both the 2D and 3D sections are separated by a loading screen which lasts for quite a while. On top of that, the game also has a tendency to suddenly change gameplay styles without warning, whether it be a top-down shooter or a vehicle section with slippery controls. Caddicarus reviewed this game here and would later place it on his Badvent Calendar.
• Chronicles of the Sword was a two-disc PlayStation game that isn't worth the $5 you probably paid for it. It has a horrible to nonexistent plot, delivered through dubious voice acting and confusing cutscenes, about the Arthurian knight Gawain as he tries to earn his armor and defeat the evil Morgana (or something like that). It's a standard Pixel Hunting Adventure Game that's mostly "find a large number of useless items and trade them repeatedly", but it's impossible to know their purpose since your inventory only shows a large 3D-rendered video of the object with no description. (A particularly bad example: Gawain at one point obtains a broken clay pot which has to be given to a perfume-making monk. Why? Because the pot has ambergris in it. But there's no way to know that without randomly attempting to give the thing to the monk.) Then there's the battle system, which consists of pre-rendered cutscenes. Unfortunately, whoever programmed it made the timing of the battle independent of the load time on the disc. By the time you can tell you're being attacked, you're dead. (Thankfully, there is an "Easy" option which removes the "interactive" element of the battles so you always win, making it the game's single redeeming feature.) Oh, and inspecting certain items in your inventory crashes the PlayStation. The PC version isn't much better, "earning" one star (out of five) from Computer Games Strategy Plus.
• Club Drive for the Atari Jaguar. For most of your missions in this game, you have to control an RC car and pick up glowing balls of string - something which has nothing to do with clubs and little to do with driving. The graphics are shoddy and the physics are incomprehensible to the point where it borders on Artificial Stupidity. In some instances, your car can levitate into the air and fly briefly. There's even an instance of Fake Difficulty to be found. In his review, where he names it the second-worst game of all time (behind only the E.T. game), Seanbaby speculates that the programmers of Club Drive "might have stolen their programming code from Dolphin Adventures in Tuna Nets".
• To celebrate the release of the Game Boy Color, Taito—with the help of Nekogumi—decided to create the (aptly named) Taito Memorial series^note a line of remakes of Taito's older games, two of which were dolled up for the western release into licensed games. While they were mostly So Okay, It's Average, Classic Bubble Bobble is horrible beyond belief. The Jump Physics were absolutely terrible and are comparable to the infamous Super Mario Special 3 bootleg port, the camera refuses to scroll down whenever Bubblun falls making every jump a Leap of Faith as you hope and pray that he doesn't land on a (once offscreen) enemy^note this makes Round 38 into a That One Level as there's no ground whatsoever, the boss fights are insultingly bad and the bubble physics are broken. Worse yet, the game steals its plot and graphics from two Game Boy Bubble Bobble games that are much better than this one—which makes one wonder why they didn't just pull a Twin Turbo and rerelease the two in a colorized form on one cart. The game virtually killed the concept of Bubble Bobble sequels—despite their relatively good track record up to that point—as other than a few low-key releases in 2005-2007 and some ports/remakes, the series wouldn't really bounce back until 2019 with the release of 4 Friends for the Nintendo Switch. Gaming Hell goes more in-depth into this disaster here.
• Cosmic Race, an early PlayStation title from a Japanese company called Neorex that has been heard of neither before nor since (it allegedly got its start with business software and wisely returned to that sector permanently after this disastrous attempt to branch out into video games), is an awful "racing" "game" with ugly graphics (some ripped straight from devkits, technically making it an asset flip), stupid characters (a caveman who pilots a flying bus/pineapple hybrid?!), forgettable music, random collision detection, an unnecessarily convoluted control scheme (R1 accelerates, which would be fine except you have to push the D-Pad and the corresponding face button to turn), and long, boring levels (the longest levels can last as long as seven minutes). It's no wonder Game Players Magazine gave it a 0% and named that rating after this game; to put this into perspective, 1-9% was known as "Shoot Me". If you really want to see just how sloppy, clunky, and poorly made this title is, enjoy this video, where the commentator has to go as far as to pretend that a Ludicolo is driving the flying pineapple bus just to drum up the motivation to pick a character, let alone play a course. A simple diagram of the game's absurd controls is provided at the six-minute mark, and the sheer insanity of the layout is very likely to cause headaches from just looking at it.
• Creative Isle for PlayStation is anything but creative: All you do in this game is place four characters and eight items on one of the five backgrounds. It doesn't help that this game is a port of My Make-Believe Treasure Isle for the PC, just heavily downgraded and with the Serial Numbers Filed Off. The original is quite a bit more fleshed-out with minigames, more interactive elements, and a cast of characters more fleshed-out and fitting with the setting, as seen here. Watch Mr. Enter play this "game" here.
• Criticom is oft referred to as "the worst fighting game of all time", and playing it — or even just seeing it in action — will convince you that it's certain a frontrunner for this dubious honor. The only consistent praise anyone has for it is that it looks nice, but when it comes to the gameplay, the game falls flat in every respect: the janky animations do a great injustice to the otherwise interesting character designs, and the controls are so utterly bad that it's a crapshoot whether you can actually do anything (while The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, because why the hell not?), on top of the game struggling to maintain a viable framerate. To top it all off, there is no arcade mode: winning a fight takes you right back to the character select screen. IGN's review is short and to the point, calling the game "ultimately disappointing". Fighting game aficionado Matt McMuscles reviewed the game as the inaugural entry for his "The Worst Fighting Game" series, and Criticom managed to hold the title of "The Worst Fighting Game" for 21 months before it was finally dethroned by Expect No Mercy.
• The Crow: City of Angels, a game loosely based on the similarly-named film, has all the hallmarks of the mountains of crappy licensed games published by Acclaim over its lifetime. The characters and pre-rendered backgrounds are washed-out and ugly even by the standards of the day, and the boneheaded decision to use Resident Evil-style tank controls in a 3D beat-'em-up, along with inaccurate collision detection and a jumpy camera, made the game an utter chore to play through. The Angry Video Game Nerd made a review for the game for his 10th Halloween Special and points out just how awful the game is. Vinny of Vinesauce also covered the game in his first Awful PS1 Games stream, and he not only found it worse than Batman & Robin, but also views this game as a special kind of bad with how it was developed under a big named publisher at the time and finding some special problems exclusive to this game.
• Cyberdillo is an FPS made by Pixel Technologies, who vanished after the game was published and for good reason: The controls are incredibly shoddy, guaranteeing you'll be struggling with trying to keep yourself from running into spiked balls or other sadistic traps, and the graphics can best be described as The Problem Solverz run through the saturation filter, as they are incredibly eye-searing and will guarantee seizures for any epileptic players and headaches for others. The game itself is boring, as the only things that can be done is shooting enemies, collecting items, walking through more similar corridors, rinse, repeat. The game has No Ending as well. All you get if you beat the game is a making-of video that doesn't explain anything about how the game was made (though it does suggest that drugs were involved). The person that reviewed the game for Hardcore Gaming 101 was just as confused as anyone else who played it.
• Daikatana is a cautionary tale on the dangers of uncontrolled hype. How much hype did this game have? Enough that ads published in magazines promised that "John Romero's about to make you his bitch.◊" Unfortunately, a horrendously Troubled Production ensued that resulted in delays and changes to the game's engine. The result, released in 2000 (two years after the originally-slated release date), was a mess of ugly graphics on an outdated engine, craptastic weapons that are just as likely to kill YOU as they are the enemies, AI companions with no survival instinct whatsoever whose deaths constituted an automatic Game Over, a restrictive save system that makes Dead Rising look downright generous in comparison, and for whatever reason, it front-loads the very worst of every single one of these elements into its first episode. And the less said about the Nintendo 64 port, the better. This game wound up sinking Ion Storm, effectively making John Romero its bitch (Romero would later regret that infamous ad slogan and apologize to gamers for it). Matt McMuscles of the Super Best Friends Zaibatsu takes an in-depth look at the game's history here, and Civvie 11 offers a very comprehensive breakdown of it. The game also received a Game Boy Color iteration developed by Kemco. Surprisingly, it's superior to the other versions in almost every conceivable way! Unfortunately, it never left Europe. Rerez briefly noted how it was the best version of Daikatana and how it resembled the RPG/Zelda Game Boy Color games in terms of quality more than either the PC or Nintendo 64 versions (both of which the duo also covered here, with the PC version being the greater focus, though having a hard time deciding if the Nintendo 64 version was worse or not^note Both Shane and Adam agree that while the Nintendo 64 version was no better than the PC version, the storytelling and character development are more fleshed out, and every level is presented as a single segment.).
• Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout is one of the rarest PlayStation titles released outside of Japan, having come out before Dragon Ball Z became popular overseas and thus only getting a limited print run. Once DBZ aired on Toonami and took the West by storm, demand for the game increased to such a degree that online sellers could command prices of a few hundred dollars for a copy, and by the time GT began airing in the States demand got so high that it was given an official re-release in 2004, a full decade after the console's release in Japan. Sadly, the game was hardly worth the MSRP: it was plagued with unresponsive controls, spastic character animations, an uncooperative camera, an overall lack of moves and variety among the playable characters, and such horrendous dubbed voice acting that, even with a cast of established West Coast-based voice actors, not even Steve Blum's portrayal as Goku is salvageable (and he'll be the first to admit as much). The Super Gaming Bros try to suffer through it here.
• Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 was a PlayStation title released in Japan in 1995 but not released in the States until 2003, right at the end of the original PlayStation's life cycle-and in all honesty, it should've stayed in Japan. This "game" featured an atrocious blend of sprites that look just like the anime with ugly, rudimentary 3D backgrounds, no storyline, and shoddy AI. Honestly, that wasn't a good way to exploit the DBZ hype that hit the American shores 15 years too late. To add some sour icing to this dragon-turd, the U.S. version got gimped, badly: The loading screens felt longer, the music no longer looped naturally, and all of the cutscenes between characters, including special cutscenes, were removed (except for the announcer during tournament mode... without being re-dubbed—or even subtitled—and with longer pauses in between his sentences, for some reason). Like Rise 2: Resurrection, single-player makes you fight every single character in the roster, including all the unlockable characters if you're really unlucky! Oh, and there's no reward to beating single-player either. The manual flat out tells you the cheat code to unlock all the characters, giving you no reason to play this beyond pure curiosity. It must be said that although Ultimate Battle 22 was simply a bad game and shamefully resurrected to maintain Western interest in the franchise with minimal effort, it did have a great (if somewhat repetitive) soundtrack, and served as a dry run of sorts for the much-improved Shin Butoden on the Saturn. When the now-defunct Gamenow magazine did a review of the game, the only positive quality they were able to list was "It's 20 bucks." Not even Mark Bussler can defend this game. BrainScratch Commentaries also took a shot at the game here. It failed at even really capitalizing on the demand for a DBZ game, as the first Dragon Ball Z: Budokai game (itself not exactly amazing, but still far better) was already out. To add insult to injury, an ad for Budokai is printed on the back of the game's manual, as if the manual was telling you, as Bussler puts it, "Ha ha ha, sucker! You should've bought this game instead!"
• ECW: Hardcore Revolution was a blatant rush job from Acclaim to cash in on the success of the then-recent WWF Smackdown and WCW vs nWo games. First strike is that the game is almost completely recycled from WWF: War Zone and WWF: Attitude despite War Zone coming out three years before and being outdated back then. Add bad controls (reversals and targeting are still overly confusing to do), and poor, floaty, and robotic animations. Bad, muted, and often annoying sounds litter the game ("ORIGINAL GANGSTA!!"). There are a few lackluster game modes (barb wire matches are pointless), as well as mediocre graphics. But it fails even worse as an ECW game as it has none of the core elements of ECW save for the roster (despite being quite large, many are in name only without trademark styles of wrestling. Example: New Jack wrestles on par with Tazz, whereas in the real world he's notoriously limited; RVD's move set is rather basic compared to the unique kung-fu and aerial style he's known for), barely any blood, no crazy stunts, and not even harsh language (the game has an M rating, but the language can only be set to teen with censor beeps). As Wrestlecrap pointed out, you can just create ECW stars in WWF: Attitude and you'd get the same effect as this game but better. And about six months later, the company released an even worse ECW-licensed game called ECW: Anarchy Rulz!
• Expect No Mercy was released on Windows in 1996 (the developers opted not to go for a console release because even they knew it wouldn't pass muster for official release, for reasons that will soon become apparent) to limited fanfare or attention, and those who played it will likely curse the fact that they have knowledge of this wretched attempt to cash in on the popularity of Mortal Kombat. The game is based on a movie of the same name, itself a straight-to-video shlockfest filled to the brim with budget visual effects, but development of the game began after filming concluded, so the developers couldn't even get the actors to reprise their roles for the game and had to go with vague look-a-likes. The graphics are mid at best, the character animations are stiff and unnatural, the characters themselves are laughably uninteresting, and the gameplay is as bare bones as can be: no special moves, no throws, just a bunch of normal attacks and some lame fatalities. A stamina meter forces you to ration attacks, which slows the game down unnecessarily. When combined with hit detection that barely works and no indication of whether your attacks actually land aside from a depleting health meter, the game becomes genuinely un-fun. Very few reviews of the game exist from the time of its release, so unknown as it was, but Matt McMuscles had the misfortune of playing the game when it came out and believed it may well be the worst fighting game of all time, worse still than Criticom, holding that dubious throne for several months before ultimately being dethroned by Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft.
• Atari tried to ride the 3D fighting wave by hiring Francois Yves Bertranda, a programmer who worked with Sega AM2 on Virtua Fighter to produce Fight For Life for the Jaguar. He programmed the game alone (which says a lot about the company's available budget), which took him 19 months, and the result was inferior to its inspirations in every possible way. It was the final nail in the Jaguar's coffin - it's the last game released for the system, and a fitting title to go out on. There's a persistent rumor that, after a string of broken promises and missed payments, Bertranda deliberately gave Atari an incomplete version, and then tried to hold the final build ransom for his pay. Guru Larry goes into further detail on the situation here, and you can find Hardcore Gaming 101's rather humorous review here.
• Fighting Force 2 shows what happens when you hand a sequel to a focus test group, and it may have been the game that sealed Core Design's fate. Hawk Mason, the only returning character from the original game, moves and controls like a tank. While watching Hawk punch the often brain-dead enemies into submission and making inanimate objects explode with just his fists can be amusing at times, it quickly becomes tedious due to camera-clipping problems, extremely-long levels, lack of save points (you can only save after completing a level), repetitive Copy-and-Paste Environments, and a Game-Breaking Bug during the last boss fight that can lock him in a room with no way to open the door, rendering the game Unintentionally Unwinnable. The cherry on the cake is a level in Alcatraz (which is still open in the year 203X for some reason) where you are sent to kill a prisoner, who is in an endless (until you find the guy) corridor at the end of the level. The kicker is that the guy appears randomly, meaning you will loop through the corridor until he pops up, which can take up to half an hour if the Random Number God decides it hates you that day.
• Gundam 0079: The War for Earth was a full motion video game attempting to bring the Gundam franchise out of its Japan-only status throughout most of the 1990's and bring new success for Gundam in North America. Unfortunately, while its full motion technology might have looked great for its time (primarily with the mobile suits), every other aspect of the game was a confusing, sloppy mess that ruined any potential enjoyability. If you ignore some of the weird translation errors in the story (like the Principality of Zeon being the Duchie of Zeon (pronounced as John), Char's name being Shar, and Zakus being Zacks) and the Canon Discontinuity story being put in small Walls of Text, the game centers on an arrogant driver (that the game subtly mocked itself early on in a brief moment of Self-Deprecation) entering a military base out of impatience before suddenly being forced into acting as a new Gundam pilot and a confusing set-up that the game expects you to get immediately with its controls. While the game can be beaten in a half-hour if you know what you're doing, even experienced gamers like Rerez can struggle for a half-hour (or longer) just trying to figure out how to get out of the intro cutscene alone! Reasons why most people usually struggle with it include strange symbols representing the actions you're supposed to do^note like four small diamonds representing movement, a lightning bolt meaning attack, a coffin being a shield, and an actual shield being an interact button, hitting the right button not always working properly, unskippable cutscenes, and the fact that they don't tell you what each button does until you already know how to enter the Gundam itself via Trial-and-Error Gameplay, including a Failure Is the Only Option moment that needs to be lost in a proper manner. And boy, does this game love using trial-and-error gameplay to ludicrous degrees^note one part has you lose if you don't pick up a badge in a brief second and a half, with the method to save your gameplay also being awkward to do in a proper manner. Combine all that with inconsistent results for certain actions^note shielding can survive a nuclear reaction, but fails to handle enemy fire properly, a maze section that's awkward to figure out without dying, awkward cuts in cutscenes ("Try taking out the cock-!"), an anticlimactic final boss fight ending on a Sequel Hook cliffhanger, and the fact that it was one of those rare games released on the Apple Pippen, and it's no wonder why this was the only Gundam game ever made by a North American developer and that they never truly bothered with the live-action angle for the series moving forward. Seriously, you're much better off watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime instead if you want a better understanding of the Gundam story it's trying to tell you.
• Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft was the first attempt to bring Dungeons & Dragons into the realm of fighting games, and to date, it is also the last. Take a relatively fresh-faced Take-Two Interactive back in their nascent days as developers, have them set about making their first fighting game as an homage to DND for a system (the M2) that they'll have to port away from later, mix in an unscrupulous publisher — Acclaim — who manages to secure the rights to the Ravenloft setting and inform the team that their game is now a fighting game adaptation of it, but do not grant them more development time or a budget to actually do the project justice and rush it out as soon as possible, and what do we get? A chaotic mishmash that is barely functional, as the camera struggles to keep up with the action, collision physics are subpar, attack animations are so fast and janky that it's damn near impossible to tell what's going on (while turning animations when characters have their back to the opponent, as well as animations for standing up after a knockdown, take forever), and the barrier surrounding arenas automatically knocks down anyone who touches them and disrupts what little pacing matches may have. The fights' UI also doesn't help, consisting of a lives counter and a torch that functions as a Life Meter (which does a piss-poor job of providing a metric of your remanining vitality). Combine these with a limited pool of endings (only two, one for the heroes and one for the bad guys) and an inadequate training mode, and you have a game that, in spite of making a tidy profit from the brand name alone, was considered by review outlets like IGN and Gamespot to be nothing more than a pitiful natural-1. Matt McMuscles also gave this game a thorough analysis and came to the conclusion that, against all odds, it dethroned Expect No Mercy (also listed in this folder) as the Worst Fighting Game.
• Iznogoud for the PlayStation is a Europe-exclusive licensed platformer of Iznogoud which few played, but can confirm the title: it's no good. Messy graphics, obstacles indistinguishable from the background, poor CGI cutscenes that make no sense, jerky animation, and annoying stock sounds placed randomly. The game's design is lousy with Fake Difficulty: the Jump Physics are both slippery and overly-heavy, frequently causing you to plummet; unreliable hitboxes cause ladders to sometimes not register when grabbed and enemies combine poor hit detection with the ability to stun-lock Iznogoud. Level design is subpar, with most amounting to poorly-laid out mazes; waiting at the end are bosses that barely do anything and are trivial to defeat. The worst sin is the combat: you fight enemies by throwing items like gold coins, which are your primary ammunition—but to clear levels, you need a certain amount of gold coins. This leads to the paradox of avoiding combat in order to preserve coins (as other items are in limited supply), but also having to fight certain enemies due to where they're placed. Sean Seanson reviewed the game for Obscure PlayStation series, proclaiming it the worst platformer on the system, a soulless and frustrating experience.
• Juggernaut: The New Story For Quake II, an unofficial expansion pack for Quake II, adds little more than a few monsters, most of them lazy reskins of enemies from the real Quake II, and eye-searing reskins of some weapons. What little new content there was turned out to be terrible. The level design is half-assed: the challenge came mainly from there being tons of enemies thrown in each room without any thoughtful design. Despite reusing many enemies and environments from Quake II, the story has nothing to do with it.
• Kang Fu is an Amiga platformer that would've remained lost in the dark and forsaken depths of video game history had it not been covered by The Angry Video Game Nerd. To even start the game is a convoluted task that is nearly impossible to solve without consulting the enclosed instruction manual: because of a programming bug with the Amiga CD32's boot sequence, the game would endlessly load or display an "Out of Memory" message if started on a CD32, unless the player starts the game after the CD32 logo's music stops playing. The graphics could be best described as a mish-mash of random assets taken from random sources, with cartoony animals juxtaposed with realistic assets (i.e. skulls and Roman statues) on a photographic backdrop. There is no story to speak of, and the game doesn't even live up to the title, as the playable kangaroo character uses a gun instead of kung-fu to defeat enemies. Even then, it fails even as a Run-and-Gun, as the controls are erratic and stiff, while the level design is haphazard and nondescript. Upon getting a Game Over, the player is greeted by a picture cropped straight from the cover of Michael Asher's A Desert Dies. The developers, GREat Effects Development (or GREED), boasted that their game "shows the full possibilities of the CD32". Far from being the Amiga computer or CD32's Killer App, the game's release date of 1996, two years after the discontinuation of the console, along with the quality of the game itself, indicate that this game was more likely either an act of desperation or a pet project Gone Horribly Wrong.
• Kasumi Ninja was Hand Made Software's attempt to get in on the sweet money Mortal Kombat was raking in, and filled the Atari Jaguar's niche for fighting games. Sadly, it's more of a poorly-made knock-off of Mortal Kombat than it is a competent or even remotely enjoyable game. Once you make your way past the overly convoluted character selection interface, you are forced to contend with bad animations, sluggish controls (made worse with the Jaguar's craptastic controller), and poor balancing that favors projectile spam above all else. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews it here as part of his retrospective on the Atari Jaguar, bashing the game for its frustrating controls, and Matt McMuscles sharing similar thoughts.
• Killing Zone takes nearly all the flaws that a 3D Fighting Game for the PlayStation could have and, unlike its predecessor Battle Monsters, adds no redeeming features. The "zones" are variously textured platforms from which you fling your opponents into the equally featureless surroundings. The character designs are comic book clichés, and there are no real special attacks. As for the story, you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of even an Excuse Plot.
• The Land Before Time is a beloved film; its numerous sequels less so, though they still have their fans. Bring in Sound Source Interactive / creator/TDK Mediactive and then you have a reason why absolutely no one who would defend the three games released for the PlayStation quite late in its lifespan: The Land Before Time: Return to the Great Valley, Great Valley Racing Adventure, and Big Water Adventure.
  • Return to the Great Valley is a 3D platformer that's just plain unappealing even to its target audience. There are no enemies to be found nor is there a way to die in the (very short) levels, but Fake Difficulty is abound with sluggish controls and character speed. You can play as all the main characters except Petrie, though they all play the same way, and there's no special reward for completing the game with them all, so it's practically pointless. As for Petrie, he serves the role of Navi, though far more annoying as he squawks the same obvious advice to you over and over ("You fell in tar! Be careful!"). The graphics and audio are also hideous considering this was released in 2000 for the PS1, with the characters in the cutscenes having facial movements akin to sock puppets, and the horrendously stilted voice acting done not by the main cast but by Lani Minella, reprising her role from the various LBT PC activity centers that are considered far superior in comparison.
  • A year later and we get Great Valley Racing Adventure, an auto-scrolling racing game that suffers from some of the opposite problems as the first game. Controls are too unresponsive when it comes to jumping but too responsive when it comes to turning, made even worse with all the tricky obstacles and terrain you need to maneuver across. You also have a screwy camera to deal with, which is inexcusable with games such as Mario Kart 64 and Crash Team Racing having no such thing. There are eight courses in total, half of which need to be unlocked by finishing in a certain time limit in the other half, but good luck with getting past the problems mentioned earlier. And continuing with the trend of snubbing Petrie as a playable character, he now serves as an announcer, though here it seems more justified seeing as he can fly. Perhaps the Monster Clown in the Vision Scape Interactive logo at the beginning is intended to scare kids away from playing this garbage.
  • Big Water Adventure ^note (developed by DICE Canada) was released a year after and is based off the plot of the ninth movie, where the main characters must lead their new friend Mo the Ophthalmosaurus back to the ocean. It is a side-scrolling platformer where you waste your time collecting tree stars across 14 stupidly easy levels to unlock simple, boring slider puzzles, with no enemies or deaths to get in your way (kinda like Kirby's Epic Yarn in the latter sense, minus the fun and charm Kirby had). You can play as all characters except Petrie (serving as Navi once again), and all play identically across all levels, though this time you can unlock something by beating the game with all of them. What is that, you may ask? It is but one boring top-down hoop-jumping game with Mo, after which the game ends anticlimactically with said character swimming out to sea.
  • Here is MarzGurl suffering through all these games.
• LEGO Racers for the Game Boy Color. The PC and console versions are very well-liked, but the GBC version suffers from extremely monotonous and repetitive gameplay. You play in an over-the-shoulder view, with you on a rather straight track being unable to see anything except for things two feet in front of you. Because you build up so much speed, this makes it impossible to tell if a powerup is coming up, and it's a coin flip if you're going to get one or not. The problems don't end there: the turbo boost is incredibly overpowered and will send you leaps and bounds ahead of everyone, and the cannonball is overpowered too. You never know if one is on your tail, and if it hits you you stop dead in your tracks and have to build up speed again, which takes forever. As if that weren't enough, the music is ear-bleeding: It seems that whoever did the music conversions had no clue how the GBC's sound chip worked, which can make the already sometimes annoying soundtrack downright unbearable. The monotony will probably prevent you from being interested enough in playing anything beyond the first circuit.
• LEGO Stunt Rally for the Game Boy Color. The original game wasn't that well regarded to begin with, but the GBC version took the already easy difficulty and toned it down even more - entire courses can be won by doing nothing but holding down the A button. The only time this ever changes is when there are obstacles that require a lane switch, like a road block. The sound is also extremely lacking, as are the graphics. Caddicarus takes a look at it here, who has no kind words for it.
• The Masters Fighter was a 1997 Fighting Game developed for the PlayStation by UNICO (who had released the far superior Dragon Master 3 years prior) and published by Cinema Supply. It's easily considered one of the worst fighting games of all-time, even worse than Shaq Fu or Rise of the Robots, due mostly to Hit Box Dissonance, heavy controls, very limited gameplay, poor graphics and near-nonexistent music... but the worst part is that unlike Dragon Master, which had original sprites, they actually plagiarized sprites from other games to make the characters, and some of them are even fusions of two characters. The horribly-defined sprites do very little to conceal the plagiarism. Pat and Woolie take a look at the game as part of Saturday Night Scrublords here and are completely mystified by the shamelessness and failure of the game. Even more baffling, the game is a Porting Disaster of the somewhat better Master’s Fury, (footage here, note that the graphics are far less grainy) which had faded into obscurity due to not being able to be emulated until 2020. Matt McMuscles tears it apart here as part of "The Worst Fighting Game" series.
• Men in Black was by all accounts a well-received, intelligently written, and enjoyably funny movie. The PC game, titled Men In Black: The Game, was developed by Gigawatt Studios and published by SouthPeak Games in 1997 and is a laundry list of every flaw a licensed game can have. It had Fake Difficulty in the form of horrible controls, bad camera angles, very few health or ammo pickups, and aliens who moved and fought faster than the lumbering controls would allow the player to compensate for. Add in tricky jumps on Floating Platforms over Bottomless Pits, a distinct lack of music, anemic voiceover work, boring puzzles, and slow, arduous pacing, and it's easy to see why the most charitable online review available simply calls it "Bad".
• Mike Piazza's Strike Zone for the Nintendo 64, despite having an admittedly cool endorsement, is widely considered to be one of the worst sports games ever made. The game has incredibly poor graphics, the players move like robots, repetitive sound, unbearable framerates, a very archaic pitcher/batter interface, and some downright bizarre physics (it's possible to blast a 950-foot home run). It's very likely that this was meant to be the start of a new baseball franchise, but the incredibly poor critical and commercial performance of the game killed any chance of that happening.
• Miracle Space Race for the PlayStation, developed by Miracle Designs and published by the infamous Midas Interactive is a classic example of how not to make a kart racer. It features some of the blockiest and least-animated character models for the platform, along with some of the worst controls in the genre - turning corners is too slow, leading to a lot of bumping into walls. In addition, the soundtrack makes use of precisely four songs, all low-effort MIDIs, none of which are in the least bit memorable. On top of that. the game has precisely nine courses, all of which are not only really short and make use of the bare minimum of tools other games in the genre use, but all use the exact same textures. Weapons are unoriginal, have no impact to them, and are rendered useless by the fact that you lose your weapon every time you get hit. For 2002, this is inexcusable. And to top it all off, the game can be finished in less than half an hour and doesn't even have the common courtesy to implement a multiplayer mode...though that's implying you'd actually be able to rope someone into playing this with you. Caddicarus suffered through it here. And it gets worse: two years later, Miracle Designs followed it up with Rascal Racers, which is uncannily similar to Miracle Space Race - same blocky characters, same janky controls, same tripe MIDI soundtrack, same lack of content - the only major difference being the change from a space setting to a more traditional theme of karting in a city, forest, and mountain. But the plus of having more environments is undermined by the fact that there is a bug on some copies that prevents the game from saving to a Memory Card.
• Mortal Kombat 4 for the Game Boy Color was a disastrous attempt at a stripped-down port of MK4. Even with the transition to color, the graphics still manage to be worse than the Game Boy version of MK3 in some ways, with some characters looking downright unrecognizable. The audio was risible, with music just barely outshined by bootleg cartridges, and scratchy samples of Shao Kahn from the previous game. Worse were the Fatalities, which were a laughably bad attempt to emulate the arcade game(!) and all amounted to either "loser explodes into a pile of blood" or "all the loser's blood goes out of a wound at once." The Fatalities are actually extremely choppy, blurry, low-resolution, monochrome video clips of the original game's Fatalities, lasting barely two seconds apiece. They also just play the same video clip for the winner each time: check out how bad it can get. For instance, in the clip Sub-Zero is clearly decapitating another ninja, not the distinctively cone-hatted Raiden. Amusingly, several of those Fatality video clips feature Johnny Cage as the victim (his light skin and bare chest show up brightest in the clips), even though he isn't even in the port!
• Mortal Kombat: Special Forces was one of two character-centric spinoffs made of the Mortal Kombat series, and compared to its predecessor Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (a game that is So Bad, It's Good), it's a hot mess, considered far and away the absolute worst game in the franchise, a sentiment that even its developers share. Troubled Production ensued when Midway saw an exodus of series co-creator John Tobias and about half of their staff, resulting in graphics that were ugly as sin, boring origin stories for Jax and Kano, controls that are awkward and unintuitive, and dialogue that is laughably awful. The only good contribution this game made to the series is the introduction of Tremor, who became a popular character in Mortal Kombat X. Hardcore Gaming 101 gave it a review, and declared that it failed to do anything that it set out to do.
• The Joe Montana Football series was a prime example of how Sega outdid Nintendo in sports games during the fourth generation. Those who stayed loyal to Sega and this series in the wake of the Sega Saturn's missteps were in for a rude awakening with NFL 97, the first and only installment in it to come out for the console. Developed by GameTek, whose only other claim to fame was mediocre game show adaptations, the game features ugly visuals, with a flat barren looking football field and bizarrely proportioned player sprites, made even harder on the eyes thanks to its very low frame rate. The gameplay does not fare any better, with very rubbery ball physics and a bizarre passing system where the throw trajectory is seemingly completely random, which absolutely breaks the offense metagame. What is most offensive is that Madden 97 came out around the same time, yet looks and plays better than this game in every single way, even on the same console. Even more embarrassingly, installments from years past on Sega's previous console also outclassed this game in all departments despite running on inferior hardware. YouTube video maker and Sega superfan (who especially is fond of the Saturn) Sega Lord X notably holds a huge grudge against this game and takes any opportunity he can get to rip it apart, especially because he paid the original fifty dollar price tag it came with.
• Perfect Weapon, a Beat 'em Up title released early in the PlayStation's life. It has a terrible, unfitting control scheme - imagine Resident Evil-style Tank Controls for a Beat 'em Up, camera angles that change completely if you move as much as two steps, a main character who constantly shouts "no way" every time you graze a wall, an unnecessarily unfair gimmick where you slowly lose health in the first level, and constant slowdown despite unimpressive graphics. It somehow managed to sneak onto the U.S. PlayStation Store, where it is among the worst-rated "PS One Classics" games.
• Planet Joker, a Shoot 'Em Up for the Sega Saturn, features an into-the-screen perspective like Silpheed except with polygonal graphics, which in this case are spectacularly ugly even after taking the Saturn's handicap with 3D graphics into account. The aforementioned perspective makes dodging bullets harder than it should be. The collision detection is bad. The controls are unresponsive. The game is ridiculously easy at even the harder difficulties, and is interrupted by several unskippable cutscenes involving babbling heads.
• Planet of the Apes (2001) for the PC and PS1 is a Video Game Adaptation of the movie remake, but taking elements from the first film and novel. The game has poor controls (even for the time), and a broken combat system where all you do is just button mash until the enemy dies as all your weapons are nearly useless. The PS1 version, in particular, has lots of glitches, with many of them softlocking or crashing the game. The game is way too hard with the aforementioned game-breaking glitches, weapons being nearly useless, a severe lack of any healing items, and the level design is confusing and hard to figure out what you are supposed to do. The game also lacks any checkpoints and lives. Many reviewers have bashed the game including AVGN, stanburdman and 10min Gameplay.
• Plumbers Don't Wear Ties on the PC and 3DO is a rare early Western example of a Visual Novel, but outside of the Live-Action Cutscene intro explaining the plot^note which only shows up in the 3DO version it had nothing but still images run through bad Photoshop filters with annoying narration. The game was no more interactive than a standard DVD menu, as the only way the player could affect the game's outcome was by selecting an option in a menu screen, but with the 3DO version's annoying addition of having to wait for the narrators to explain the options before selecting another one. The game railroads the player through a single specific sequence of choices, with all others leading to Non-Standard Game Over clips. Most of those choices in the sequence cause the narrator to scold the player, even though they're required to continue the story. One choice that you have to choose to win the game even includes a random outtake they apparently thought was so hilarious, they had to leave it in for some reason. The founder of GameFAQs called it the worst game he's ever played, and The Angry Video Game Nerd had a similar opinion, though doubting if it even counts as a game at all. He even thought that it was one of his weakest episodes at first because he didn't know what to say about it due to how bizarre it all felt. All of the game's "interaction" can be, and has been, easily replicated with video annotations on YouTube back when they had annotations, and was also riffed by Retsupurae! The worst part? It could've been So Bad, It's Good if it hadn't completely wasted the technical capabilities of the 3DO, or even if it were presented in a non-interactive medium altogether. There are genuinely funny Breaking the Fourth Wall moments, as it gleefully calls you a pervert and/or an idiot depending on your decisions.
• Power Serve 3D Tennis was to the American PlayStation launch lineup what Cosmic Race was to its Japanese launch lineup—the black sheep of the lot, and with good reason. The players are already difficult enough to control in single-player mode, but two-player mode is essentially unplayable unless you know how to activate split screen mode, which was highly unlikely unless your copy of the game came with the original instruction manual. The players also have no collision, which makes doubles rounds... interesting at best, and blatant Special Effects Failure at worst. The game was developed by Ocean Software, which was known for bad licensed Nintendo games and terrific computer versions of arcade titles; this game is more like the former category, without the excuse of being a licensed game. What's more, it doesn't even clear the low bar set by Tennis, which, to put it in perspective, was not only released just over a decade before but played as well as you'd expect from an early Nintendo sports title, and those games, while not the best the NES had to offer, were at least playable. Watch Retro Pals review it and discuss its flaws here, and even he thought Cosmic Race was worse.
• Rascal was released in 1998 for the PlayStation, and went down as one of the worst games for the console. The game's engine was built for directional controls, à la Super Mario 64... but then the publisher saw Tomb Raider I. The ensuing change to Tank Controls doomed the game almost single-handedly. For one: the stiff controls are not at all suited for the platforming style, and the camera constantly gets stuck on walls, making it very difficult to see what's going on around the player. But even discounting that, the game's far from perfect: The map system doesn't provide you with any idea of where to go, and only gives you a vague idea of where you even are. There are no instructions telling you what to do, nor is there any sort of tutorial. You have no real way to orient yourself when trying to shoot, and you run out of health and ammo very quickly. Thanks to a glitch, it's likely your character will run clean off the platform even if you let go of the d-pad. All this means you'll go through your three lives (no continues) very quickly, especially since there's next to no extra lives. The game also has very limited voicework, just grunts and screams which are mostly recycled and often unfitting. The saving system is prone to failure, due to another glitch—one that causes it to think the controller is unplugged when you try to save. There is an optional mini-boss in the first level that gives you absolutely nothing for defeating it making it completely pointless. The game received a 2 out of 10 rating from IGN. You can see Caddicarus's review for it here, and Stanburdman's here. Nitro Rad takes a look at the game here, discussing the game's shortcomings as well as what he thinks the game managed to do right (well, as right as you can get with a game here).
• The sequel to Rise of the Robots, Rise 2: Resurrection (or Resurrection: Rise 2, depending on how you view the title screen), released for the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and PC, made some subtle improvements over the gameplay, such as allowing you to control any character you want (instead of just the Cyborg vs. another robot) and having a more robust fighting system that makes it more comparable to Street Fighter. Unfortunately, it still manages to create some problems worthy of throwing it into the junkyard: The graphics look worse than the SNES version of its predecessor (unless you're playing the PC version, which had improved the graphics in that case), special moves are very difficult to pull off, the execution moves are very lame, most of the robots have no distinctive personality (and half the cast are just upgraded or better-looking versions of the other half), and some aspects of the game are left unfinished. For example: one character has a running animation that doesn't match up to the actual speed he's running, and the AI can be either really stupid to the point of breaking itself or really cheap to the point of resorting to projectile spamming the moment you leave melee range. On top of that, if you are playing single player, you have to defeat every single character in the roster on three continues! Did we mention there are a total of 18 playable characters? Your reward for beating it? A bunch of line drops of generic "you win" and "you kicked butt" messages. Once again, Play It Bogart gives the game the beating it deserves. Brian May was advertised once again to have composed for this game, but the game only has part of the chorus from Cyborg. The full track is on the disc. as in "you have to play it in a music player".
• Samurai Shodown: Warrior's Rage for the Playstation is a distant sequel of the original Neo Geo fighting games, and as such, features a largely new cast of characters, with only Haohmaru and Hanzo Hattori returning to the playable roster. Unfortunately, a cast of overall forgettable new faces is the least of this game's problems. The graphics do no justice, the controls are loose and unwieldy, the new life bar system used in this game is confusing, and the in-game animations are janky and stuttery, all of which is especially unfortunate since two Japan-exclusive Samurai Shodown titles previously released on the Hyper Neo Geo 64 (as well as the 2019 title) prove that the series could work in 3D, while this game is a case of a Video Game 3D Leap gone wrong. Gamespot called it one of the worst fighting games of its time that even hardcore fans would have a hard time enjoying.
• Savage Warriors fancied itself a PC-exclusive Mortal Kombat killer, which should already raise the same kinds of red flags as any other new game that fancied itself as the one that would dethrone a popular mainstream title. The fact that it's an MK clone with no fatalities is only the start of its problems. While the presentation of the game, with nice handdrawn backgrounds and 3D characters, looks decent enough, the actual gameplay suffers from unwieldy physics, same-y special attacks that are bound to a slowly-regenerating stamina meter, health meters being replaced with tiny numerical health readouts, environmental objects that add little to the combat, and an overall dearth of content (there are a number of secret characters, but they are useless compared to the main roster). Matt McMuscles compared it unfavorably to Ballz while also putting the game's magazine advertisement — a masterclass in bullshit — on full blast.
• Shadow: War of Succession (aka Shadow Warriors, not to be confused with the FPS Shadow Warrior) on the 3DO at first glance looks like just one of the many Fighting Games that tried to piggyback on the success of Mortal Kombat. But once you look beyond the cover and actually get to play the "game", everything changes. Shadow: War of Succession might be one of the most poorly programmed games ever released commercially, up to the point of making it virtually unplayable. Just to give something to compare with, the infamous Mortal Kombat Advance actually plays better. Horribly drab backgrounds, horrendous Digitized Sprites with animation frames in the single digits, character designs ranging from bland to ludicrous, the screen shaking every time a fighter lands after jumping, awful pre-rendered opening cutscene complete with MIDI straight off an SC-55, laughable voice clips, controls based on just two buttons, a Fatality prompt despite the developers not having programmed Fatalities into the game, and nonexistent collision detection are just a sampling of the long list of Shadow Warriors' flaws. And for some absolutely baffling reason, the final boss and most of its stage background are hand-drawn, clashing so horribly with the aesthetics of everything else that you'd think they were taken from an entirely different game. Watch it in all its glory here, as well as Retsupurae's riff on the game here and here. River City Gamers decided to have an inclusive tournament in the game, as well as exploiting the game for all its worth. The Angry Video Game Nerd also took a shot at it, along with other Mortal Kombat rip-offs.
• Shrek Treasure Hunt was released in 2002 for the PlayStation, but despite what the title may imply, the game isn't actually about searching for treasure. Instead, it's about retrieving items for a picnic that Shrek is planning for Princess Fiona. Unfortunately, the game has far more problems than just its story. For starters, the graphics look really hideous, especially for a game released in 2002, and on the original PlayStation no less (for reference, the PlayStation 2 had been out for 2 years, and Final Fantasy X came out a year before this game's release). As for the audio, while the music is passable at best, the sound effects are absolutely abysmal. The main game centers around you searching for the picnic items in the swamp so you can unlock a minigame to win certain items. However, the problem is that all the minigames are atrocious with glitches and freezing abound. On top of all that, the game is pathetically short, taking roughly one hour to beat. Caddicarus and his sister, Professor Juice both trashed this game as did Toridori.
• Sonic Jam for the Saturn was a delightful compilation of the Genesis Sonic platformers with extra bells and whistles. Sonic Jam for the Game.com... isn't. Only three of the four games the Saturn version ported are represented, in the loosest fashion possible: each game only used stage graphics from the first Zone of their respective games. Knuckles' gliding and climbing abilities are absent, making him play exactly like Sonic. The sound design is awful: music is barely present, consisting of muffled beeps and boops, and the sound effects are horribly compressed versions of what you'd hear in Sonic games. The controls are stiff, which makes playing the game a chore, on top of the game itself being as slow as molasses, which Sonic games never should be. As crappy as it is, it's no wonder it (and the other games Tiger licensed from other publishers) couldn't help the already infamous Game.com survive in the gaming market. Watch the folks at Find The Computer Room suffer through it here. Not even Mark Bussler of Classic Game Room and Shane Luis of Rerez could find a single good thing to say in their reviews of the game.
• Spawn has had a number of video games released over the years. Some, such as the SNES and Game Boy Color releases, are perfectly adequate. Others, such as the action arcade/Dreamcast title Spawn: In the Demon's Hand and the Devil May Cry clone Spawn: Armageddon, are actually really good. And then there's Spawn: The Eternal on the PlayStation, which is complete and utter crap. The graphics are ugly, the Tomb Raider-esque puzzle-solving is obtuse, the platforming segments are an exercise in torture that the Violator would delight in inflicting, and the combat plays like a very poor man's Mortal Kombat (which is now Hilarious in Hindsight, given that Spawn is a Guest Fighter in Mortal Kombat 11). As one last insult to injury, the player doesn't even get to fight the Big Bad Malebogia as the final boss (even though the ending cutscene still shows Spawn slaying him). Neither IGN, nor Gamespot, nor the Angry Video Game Nerd had anything positive to say about it.
• Spectral Tower - the very first game published by Idea Factory - is a roguelike which seems to collect together every bad game design idea possible. The fact that so few have completed it is not so much down to its difficulty than to its monotony; the final tower has 10,000 floors, which works out to 450 hours of gameplay, when you've seen everything the game has to offer by hour 2. Battling monsters on each floor is a complete Luck-Based Mission in which you have effectively no control, as every attack depends on a literal dice roll where everything has about a 50% chance of missing. Your only chance is to run around for rare items, the effect of none of which is explained until after you use them. You have specific stats for taking down each type of monster, that only level when you defeat that type with a critical hit (so you're screwed six ways if you meet something you've not regularly seen, or just if the dice don't like you) as well as a food stat (healing items of a higher level than your food stat hurt you instead of healing). None of this vital information is explained either in the game, in the manual, or in the official strategy guide, making this a game that actively wants you to fail. Oh, and whether or not you have accessible save points is randomly generated too. Watch a more in-depth analysis by RndStranger here.
• The Spice World video game (not to be confused with the So Bad, It's Good movie of the same name) is exactly what you'd imagine a game starring the Spice Girls to be like - thoughtless rushed-out-the-door tripe padded with archive footage from interviews with the group. The ultimate goal is to set up a Spice Girls concert (or something), and you guide your hideous Super-Deformed polygonal Spice Girl of choice (despite having left the group by the time the game came out, Geri Halliwell is playable) through mixing your own version of a Spice Girls song from a pathetically small library of samples which don't even cover the entire song, learning your dance moves through an asinine rhythm-based minigame with a blatantly racist black stereotype for a dance instructor and awkward timing for the button presses, and planning your choreography - which is exactly as exciting as copy-pasting the same move set four times sounds. In the end, you get to see the girls dance for you... and that's it. The whole game can be finished in 10 minutes. The only gaming media outlet to have given this game a positive review was Gaming in the Clinton Years - and they couldn't even pass Stage 2. Seanbaby and others show off the gameplay here. Caddicarus takes a look at the game here and comments on how much memory it has to use just to save remixes.
• Starship Troopers was a silly, schlocky movie that, despite negative critical reception, has a significant number of fans. The PC game adaptation, on the other hand, received no praise from critics or players, regardless of whether they watched the movie. The game is a rife mess of ugly graphics, Artificial Stupidity, and mind-numbing monotony with missions that vary little between each other. Eurogamer calls it "a vast waste of time and money." Fans of the movie are much better off looking into the Earth Defense Force series, which also features players shooting up lots of giant insects but does so in an enjoyable way.
• Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi is a Star Wars fighting game. Surely, the pantheon of legendary characters from one of the greatest science-fiction film series in a fighting game should be a winning formula, but alas: The Problem with Licensed Games is out in full force. The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, Darth Vader is That One SNK Boss to end all SNK Bosses in terms of sheer cheapness (if he doesn't accidentally throw himself from the stage like the other characters), and the special moves are too difficult to execute (which doesn't stop the computer from spamming them). The Excuse Plot is also fairly nonsensical, even for a fighting game: why would the Empire's solution to a Rebel army that destroyed their planet-busting space station be a single martial artist? The Angry Video Game Nerd postulates that this game's abysmal failure is the reason there aren't any more Star Wars fighting games (not counting Vader, Yoda, and Starkiller appearing as Guest Fighters in Soulcalibur IV).
• Superman for the Nintendo 64, a nominal tie-in game for Superman: The Animated Series, is considered a trainwreck in every conceivable way. It had such poor graphics that the game had to "excuse" the huge amount of fog as "Kryptonite Fog" in a simulation, made half the missions flying through rings with awkward controls and a brutally unforgiving time limit, has a crapton of glitches that make it very easy to get stuck, and it generally failed to be entertaining. The Angry Video Game Nerd trashed the game by popular demand, and it would be one of the small handful of games that the Nerd revisited ^note (the only others he revisited like this were Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES), and Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)). Dark Lord Jadow 1 was bold enough to play through the entire game, across a three-part review, enduring a whirlwind of Guide Dang It! puzzles, unforgiving Escort Missions, a very weak multiplayer mode, the final boss hardly doing anything, and the infamous A Winner Is You ending - and ultimately declaring the game to be the worst he's ever played, even to this very day. He even reviewed the tie-in comic book for good measure, which, while not nearly as bad as the game, comes with its own assortment of issues. Chris Stuckmann covered it as part of his Retro Rewind series, and Seanbaby named it #7 of his Top 20 Least Favorite Games, saying:
  "It would have been more fun if they made a game about Superman window shopping with Aquaman."
  • The rings, in which Lex Luthor tasks you to "Solve My Maze" (of linear ring formations, mind you), became a Running Gag in N64 Magazine and got promoted to a regular feature when it became NGC Magazine.
  • It's probably worth mentioning, though, that the game did have initially strong sales. It was one of the top-selling games of June 1999. However, as negative word of mouth spread, sales dropped considerably and numerous used copies were made available.
  • The final few levels of the game before Level 14 could also be skipped if you just play the game on Easy Mode and then turn it onto Superman mode once you're finished with Level 10. This obscure knowledge somehow was used for the official strategy guide for this very game, with it even recommending you do that. Not only that, but a hidden feature this game has with Easy Mode is that there's no rings in the infamous "maze" stages whatsoever, with the method of solving levels there is just using the in-game compass to get to a gigantic Superman logo that activates the missions in those levels properly instead of a unique ring to solve that level!
  • The game also has multiplayer. It has two game modes that involve flying awkwardly around in first person trying to shoot down other players and flying awkwardly through hula hoops in first person trying to shoot down other players. Watch BrainScratchComms try to play it here.
  • And as a final insult to injury, the prototype of the game, while still fairly flawed, is said to be better than the finished product. Objectives were more varied, the accursed "fly through rings" missions were absent altogether, and the "Kryptonite fog" isn't as dense. Word from the developers was that Executive Meddling from DC caused the transformation from the serviceable and promising game the prototype was into the steaming turd that wound up on store shelves.
  • In the Mexican Club Nintendo magazine, they had a little section in the reviews summing up the good and bad things about the game. A Running Gag when reviewing Titus games was the good thing being "It's from Titus, and Superman doesn't appear."
• Tiny Toon Adventures received a bevy of Licensed Games across many platforms from the NES to the Game Boy Advance, and most of them were very well-produced games in their own right. However, the series' track record of games on the original Playstation saw the series' reputation for having genuinely fun and well-designed tie-in games take a severe nose-dive with several games that ended up being an embarrassment to the beloved show and the games that came before them:
  • The Great Beanstalk was released in 1998 and was a supposedly Updated Re-release of a comparatively better-received PC game released two years earlier called Buster and the Beanstalk, both of which were developed by Terraglyph. The plot of the game more or less amounts to a parody of Jack and the Beanstalk with Buster and Plucky in the role of Jack... except the American PlayStation version doesn't even include the opening cutscene, leaving players confused as to why Buster and Plucky are even climbing a beanstalk looking for key pieces in the first place. But that's only the beginning of this Porting Disaster's problems; despite the main characters being fairly well-animated for the most part, the gameplay itself is a complete trainwreck. Half the game is a 2D side-scroller where the player (playing as Plucky) must follow Buster as they climb up the beanstalk, something that is easier said than done thanks to the rampant input lag that makes maneuvering Plucky a chore and an overabundance of annoying enemies and obstacles that can either knock Plucky out or cause the player to lose progress by sending him falling backwards or downwards to previous rooms. The point-and-click portions of the game are only slightly better, though that's not saying much; much like the original PC version (which only consists of these sections), it's a Pop-Up Video Game where you have to click on various objects and trigger an animation which hopefully matches what Babs Bunny wants you to find. However, whereas the animations in the PC version are hidden among many separate screens, and the challenge is trying to find the correct room and area to click on (with the added threat of Elmyra capturing you if you stay too long on a single screen), here, Buster flat-out leads you to the room that it's hiding in, making these item hunts far too easy as a result. If it wasn't for the abysmal platforming segments that drudge out the length of the game, completing the game by finding all nine key pieces would only take players less than a half-hour, tops. Finally, while the show's sense of humor with puns, pop culture references, and fourth wall breaks still hold over from the original PC version, it takes a backseat to questionably funny, mostly bizarre sight gags with an often clashing art style, as well as still-intact references to it being a CD-based computer game, despite it now being on a different game platform.
  • Plucky's Big Adventure, created by Warthog and released in 2001. The game is a 3D adventure/puzzle game wherein Buster, Babs, Hamton, and Plucky travel around ACME Looniversity to find the parts needed to turn Plucky's bike into a time machine so Plucky can go back in time and complete his homework. The fairly bare-bones story is the least of this game's problems, as the game is utterly atrocious in every aspect. The graphics are woefully outdated for the year 2001 (having an aesthetic that evokes Bubsy 3D more than Tiny Toon Adventures), the normally lively setting of ACME Looniversity is washed-out, drab, and devoid of any sort of energy, and the characters' animations are jittery and choppy. There is also no voice-acting whatsoever, let alone any from the original cast where possible (something that even The Great Beanstalk had). The gameplay is far too simple and boring; mostly based around inventory management due to each character only being able to carry two items with them at once and solving very confusing puzzles. There's little to no challenge in the game ^note (something not helped by the locker system used for holding items being easily cheesed due to the characters being able to use any of their friends' lockers despite the game intending otherwise) save for avoiding Montana Max and Elmyra Duff, who will cause one of the four characters to become trapped and halt all progress of the game until they are released by someone else (unless Plucky himself is captured, which immediately ends the game), and even then, they are very easy to avoid. The game itself is incredibly short and can easily be solved in half an hour even with Monty and Elmyra getting in the way if the player knows what they're doing, and this all leads up to a very unsatisfying ending where Plucky activates the completed time machine, only to crash it straight into the wall and smash it to pieces and render the entire game pointless, a somewhat fitting end to a boring, vapid, and overall just lazy-feeling game. Both this game and Beanstalk were reviewed by Rerez (alongside the aggressively mediocre Toonenstein: Dare To Scare) here, while a review by IGN gave it a "Painful" 2.3, calling it "an abomination of a game" and claiming that you would get more entertainment from picking your nose that playing it.
• While Titus the Fox isn't half bad on PC, the Game Boy Color version is completely atrocious, a Porting Disaster in every sense of the word. Inconsistent character designs, lots of Fake Difficulty (some platforms and rising walls are actually invisible and never reveal themselves even when reached), numerous bugs and glitches, and terrible collision detection. Oh, and there's also an Excuse Plot that says you're on the hunt to rescue your girlfriend (named Foxy), but don't expect any reference to it in-game.
• Tunguska: Legend of Faith, originally a PC adventure game, received a Europe-exclusive PlayStation port that most who've played can agree is one of the worst games on the system. Outside of the intro and ending, the story is non-existent, with the most you're given being meaningless religious symbolism. The solutions to its shoddy puzzles tend to be nonsensical; it often takes very precise clicking to get the required items to interact with them. The combat system barely functions—fights often come down to you and the enemy spamming attacks at each other. There's no music; only repetitive sound effects. Camera angles and the game's own subpar graphics frequently team up to obscure key items. Worst of all are the traps, which, unlike in the PC original, are either completely unavoidable or inert. Sean Season called it a disaster, dreading having to play it for his series; PSX Gaming Memories was more disappointed than anything, enjoying the idea but hating the execution
• Virtual Hydlide could've been a good game, using then-modern technology to update the original Hydlide (a game that was well-liked in Japan but suffered from the Americans Hate Tingle trope thanks to a crappy NES port listed under the "Third Generation" folder), but its attempt to shoehorn 3D graphics and digitized sprites only serve to be its undoing. Unlike the original Hydlide, the game world is procedurally generated - in theory allowing infinite replay value, but in practice making the game that much more difficult. The controls are unwieldy, judging distance to land your attacks requires the patience of a saint, the framerate is pitifully poor, the only shop in the game is superfluous since everything you can buy can be found in the world for free, the dungeons get very long and tedious as you progress, and the final bosses require a specific weapon that is never mentioned in-game. The one upside is that, if you know what you're doing, the game can be beaten in only a few hours, after which you receive a lame ending and you never have to play it again. The Angry Video Game Nerd called the game "Virtually unplayable" and spared no expense in his criticisms. ProJared's face goes numb with disbelief here, and you can also see it speedran at Games Done Quick here. This was the first game in the Hydlide series to hop into the third dimension, and to date is also the last Hydlide game period.
• The Virtual Boy may have its defenders, but even they don't have anything nice to say about Virtual Lab. Rumor goes that, upon hearing of the system's soon-to-be discontinuation, the developers decided to rush the game and release it in an Obvious Beta state. This explains some of the game's most obvious flaws, including placeholder graphics, laggy controls, poorly programmed menus, and a lack of a password screen despite the game giving them after every level. Other issues include ear-splitting music, the possibility of creating block setups that are impossible to remove, and overall being seen as ill-fitted for the system. The game even misspells Nintendo's name in the box! Nintendo Life pans it here, while Retronauts calls it the low point of the system.
• Virtuoso was a hilariously bad shooter... or something. It's hard to figure out what kind of game it was, mainly since the combination of shitty graphics and the terrifyingly bad camera made seeing the game something of a Bragging Rights Reward. Maybe that was a good thing, since the game was terrible on its face. Apparently, you play a "famous rock and roll music star" in the future who "escapes from the rigors of stardom" by logging onto the future version of a VR MMORPG, which is one meta level too many. The enemies were also terrifyingly repetitive: You fight spiders, bats, giant spiders, more bats, and the boss (are you sitting down?) is another spider. But bigger this time! Yay. And when it dies, it spawns more spiders, which is the point where Internet funnyman Seanbaby began to wonder if the game was actively trying to get people to destroy it.
• Virus: The Game is a strong example of a great concept falling victim to incompetent execution. The idea, on paper, sounds interesting: a Descent-style labyrinth shooter game with real-time strategy elements never seen before where you have to fight a virus within your computer, with the game even using some of your own files for the locations in the game (without doing any real damage to your computer). Unfortunately, the .execution leaves a lot to be desired. Even ignoring the fact that one way they advertised the game revolved around scareware^note (Its ad, "Russ.exe", fakes your entire system being deleted before shilling the game with its tagline "Thank god this is only a game..."), the game is rather subpar; the visuals are fine and the music is okay (though repetitive), but the gameplay itself is extremely confusing as you defend your system against a virus that seems to cheat^note (conceptually, it is only fitting considering how actual computer viruses act, trying to take over the system files and modify them in such a way to cause major frustration to users, but from a gameplay perspective, it just creates massive Fake Difficulty), and the control scheme is absolutely atrocious. The game combines elements of Real-Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter in a haphazard way; it's frequently unclear on exactly what you're supposed to do in order to win the missions provided in the game, as not only will you have to control ships around the maze of your computer, with the folders and sub-folders being represented as "floors" inside that your files are put in, you'll have to make sure you have enough Kilobytes (KBs) to build objects which do various tasks, like create new vehicles (all of which have specific jobs, like KBs collectors collect KBs from non-corrupted files, converters restore files to a non-corrupted state, attack crafts can attack the viruses, etc), and also have to make sure your files don't get corrupted by the virus... which, in later missions, performs various Interface Screws to make things even worse. Thankfully, the game provides a "map" of sorts which acts like the Windows Navigation Pane (showcasing all the folders in your system and what's in them), and you can automate your ships to go into specific locations, but due to the awkward AI, they frequently just loosely guide themselves to the directed location, and there's a chance that they may just spaz out on a surface before returning on their path. And the control scheme... oh dear, where to begin. You have to pilot your ships throughout your computer, and this is easier said than done. The controls are often unresponsive and floaty, which makes it incredibly difficult to navigate around your computer^note (and this isn't getting onto how it fixes itself to the CPU clock speed without any upper limit, making it unplayable by running stupidly fast on any modern computer or virtual machine unless it's severely underclocked), and even harder to aim at the viruses (which frequently repeat the same one-liners over and over). Not helping matters is they have a crapton of health, and your attack ships have limited ammo. They can't even defend themselves should you be doing something else, like controlling another ship, meaning you'll have to attack the enemies yourself (which is a real problem in a Real-Time Strategy game) for any offense and/or defense on your side... if you can even damage them, since not only is aiming at them a chore to do (as said before but we can't stress it enough), some enemies, mainly the eyeball creatures, are so poorly-programmed that they actually can't be defeated, instead causing you to sacrifice your precious attack ships in the missions where you have to navigate around them. (Did we mention that they can barely be aimed?) Finally, the game has a few instances of typos within the mission descriptions. As of 2016, there is only one walkthrough of the game on YouTube by computer virus guru danooct1, and he gave up trying to finish it on mission 9.^note (Out of all 15 missions of the game, 5 of them are training, meaning he only got to the 4th real mission of the game before he called it quits.)
• Developer and publisher Pantera Entertainment put out a slew of mediocre to downright abysmal PC games during their short time in business like Precision Skateboarding and 3D Scooter Racing, but by far their worst game has to be Winter Race 3D, released in 1998 on PC. You know you're off to a great start when the menus look like stock WordArt settings rendered in PowerPoint with no sound whatsoever...and then you actually start playing the game and even more problems pour in. The graphics are absolutely hideous, with tracks consisting of extremely basic hallway-like designs, and super basic model geometry that all looks like stock assets from a standard 3D modeling program. On top of that, the game takes place in a first-person perspective for little reason other than to not have to model your character, and bumping into walls does little more except cause you to go flying in whatever direction the game decides on with no other ill effects. The sound design is almost non-existent, and what little exists is bizarre at best (especially the heavy breathing whenever you go airborne for some odd reason). The game is also pathetically short on content, only having a small handful of stages. Lazy Game Reviews once listed it as number four on the Top 17 Worst PC Games list he did a long time back, and it's not at all hard to see why it earned such a high spot.

Sixth Generation (1998-2013)

• Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, for the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox, is generally considered to be one of the worst games of all time, inspiring the "Golden Mullet Awards", X-Play's ranking of the worst games of each year. (See their original review here.) The graphics are very reminiscent of the Nintendo 64 as the city of Atlantis has mostly bland grey buildings and everyone looks somewhat lifeless. Only Aquaman's hair has any graphical effort, and even that has a tendency to clip through his head. The missions have little variation, as you either beat up enemies (easily done by Button Mashing) or pilot an underwater ship to blow up other ships. As JonTron puts it, the game is a spiritual successor to Superman 64, and a boring experience from beginning to end. Rerez also looks into the game themselves here, noting that not only did their game get less stable the further they went^note Aquaman's spear for a hand suddenly vanishing for a whole level, graphical glitches and the game outright crashing on more than one occasion, but it also shared the same people that created the poor story adaptations of Batman and Superman for this gaming generation in Batman: Dark Tomorrow and Superman: The Man of Steel respectively.
• Bad Boys: Miami Takedown (released in Europe as Bad Boys II), a Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC game released to coincide with Bad Boys II, has two untalented expies of Martin Lawrence and Will Smith that constantly spout horrible dialogue. The controls are broken, the enemy AI is simplistic and predictable but also incredibly cheap when it wants to be, and the game's built in lock-on mechanic is awful. If using it, expect half your shots to miss, especially when using automatic weapons, and it will completely fail to properly lock on to certain enemies, meaning you're almost wholly better off aiming manually. The dodgy bullet mechanics also make most of the weapons in the game difficult to justify using, to the point that you need an unlockable cheat just to be able to reliably kill things with a shotgun. Finally, the lack of randomization and variety in levels gives the game minimal replay value. GameTrailers named this #4 in its "Worst Movie Games of All Time". Watch Two Best Friends Play make fun of it on Cryme Tyme here.
• Batman: Dark Tomorrow, released in 2003 for the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox, is a great example of how putting the emphasis on story and visual style over gameplay can end in disaster. Originally envisioned as an open world game, a troubled development cycle resulted in the game being hastily reworked into a linear adventure with as many blatantly sealed off and unfinished areas as a construction site. So much priority was placed on the story and cutscenes that basic gameplay functions like the camera and control scheme are troublesome to use. Extra features like stealth gameplay are near useless since enemies will probably notice Batman anyway and his attacks likely won't work if he can sneak up to them, and segments like Batman's hand glider and traversing rooftops are so broken that it becomes clear why they are so infrequent. Despite Batman's large arsenal of tools and many familiar faces from his Rogues Gallery, most fights can be easily won with basic attacks, and those that can't don't feel any less repetitive. Even if one tries to enjoy the game for the cutscenes that capture the style of the comics pretty well, their enjoyment will be destroyed as failing to perform a task unhinted at anywhere in the game will lock them out of the best ending, and saving before the final boss will require starting the game over again to be able to unlock it. The end result is a Metacritic score of 29/100 for the Gamecube version and a 25/100 for the Xbox version. Rerez breaks this game down here. PeanutButterGamer put the game at #2 on his list of his top ten worst licensed games, calling the game "a complete joke" and harshly criticizing its unfair difficulty and sheer level of Guide Dang It!^note notably, he ranked it worse than E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and fellow Horrible entry Superman 64 (ranked at #3 and #5 respectively).
• Bhagat Singh, a 2002 first-person shooter released on the PC by Mitashi Entertainment (which plagiarized Mario for its mascot). The game is based on the exploits of Bhagat Singh, an important revolutionary for the Indian independence movement during the early 20th Century. Some have gone so far as to call this game the worst FPS ever. Why? The game contained laughable 3D models for 2002 that would barely pass on the PS1 and downright hideous texturing. There are only two weapons, one of which has infinite ammo but can't actually kill anything. There's just three levels, the second one having the same layout as the first, and many, many bugs. The decent original soundtrack isn't enough to save this mess of a game. See it for yourself.
• Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, a third-person PC "racing" "game" published by Game Mill Publishing and "developed" by Stellar Stone released in 2003, is very commonly referred to as the worst video game of all time. It's easy to see why, considering its lack of collision detection, frequent bugs, poor visuals, no obstacles to negotiate, and severe lack of functionality, combined with the fact the opponent doesn't move due to lack of AI (which was patched in later, but even then the AI will always stop just short of the finish line, making the game unloseable). When The Angry Video Game Nerd finally took a look at this game, he divided the review into two loose sections: first he was driving around with a big goofy smile on his face, enjoying the So Bad, It's Good nature of a game that can barely run without crashing... followed by a good five minutes chewing out the "developers" for having the utter gall to actually charge money for a product so disgustingly unfinished he can't even call it a "game". He even called it a less painful yet objectively worse product than his arch-nemesis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES). Likewise, SomecallmeJohnny despises the game so much, that in his original review, he went to the extreme of burning the game on a grill, whereas in his rereview, he claims that Superman 64, a similarly terrible game, is not only cheaper than Big Rigs' $50 asking price, but an outright better game than Big Rigs. One year after Big Rigs was released, in 2004, Game Mill released one final Stellar Stone game, Midnight Race Club: Supercharged, which has the same courses as Big Rigs but has cars and motorcycles in addition to trucks. Though the game now has collision detection, this makes the game worse than the original Big Rigs at points, as bumping into even the smallest obstacle stops you dead in your tracks. Oh, and there is still no loss condition. Rerez covered both Big Rigs and Midnight Race Club at the end of their multi-pack video of some of the Worst Racing Games of All Time, with them not only mentioning other games that Stellar Stone did before Big Rigs, but also later mentioning that Midnight Race Club was worse than Big Rigs was (at least with the copy they had).
• If you thought Catfight! was strange, there was actually another all-female sprite-based fighting game released about six years later titled Bikini Karate Babes. The game suffered from dated graphics, unresponsive controls, terrible AI programming, and of course rampant sexism. The game has an 8.5% rating on GameRankings, with IGN in particular writing a hilarious review for the game.
• Charlie's Angels, released to tie in with Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, for the GameCube and PS2. The camera angles and controls are busted, and players must spend minutes moving their characters up ladders. The graphics are terrible, with the women looking more like living blowup dolls than the characters they represent. Even the lip sync is off, because it's matched to the French voice track instead of the English one. Surprisingly, it beat the E.T. game to be #1 on GameTrailers' list of the "Top 10 Worst Movie Games", at a time when it still carried its "worst game of all time" reputation. Really. They describe Charlie's Angels as being "degrading, not to women, not even to video games, but to humanity itself". It was named a "horrific display of ineptitude" by GameSpot and is the lowest-rated video game reviewed on GameRankings with more than 20 featured reviews, having a score of 24.57%. To make matters worse, the GameCube version even features a Game-Breaking Bug where playing the game without a Memory Card causes the second mission to repeat endlessly every time you complete it! JonTron looks into the GameCube version with the bug in full effect, while the AVGN goes a bit farther with it, albeit noting that each level's the same thing anyway save for some boss fights here and there. Rerez took a more in-depth look at it here, going through how truly insane its story really is when most people wouldn't bother otherwise.
• Cosmi Software's 300 Arcade Classics is a shareware disc of Windows games with barely any content worth playing. First of all, most of the games on the disc being in shareware mode means that even though you paid money for the compilation, you still have to pay to get the full versions of the games. Secondly, nearly all of the games are terrible, with some appearing to have been made by actual children using Clickteam's Game Makers ^note (more specifically the personal editions of Klik & Play and The Games Factory, both of which display a notice specifying that selling games made with them is illegal when you close the game). The controls in almost every game are unresponsive and terrible, and the gameplay is boring, repetitive, filled with Game Breaking Bugs, and ripped off from better games, if they aren't outright unplayable. Thirdly, almost every game is rife with stolen copyrighted assets - as just for a few examples, Buggie: Above the Law steals music from Nirvana, Daft Punk, and Inspector Gadget; Fire Guy steals music from Seinfeld and The X-Files; and Death Assault (sic) steals enemy sprites from Mega Man 2. ^note (Back in the early days of Game Makers, using copyrighted assets was often overlooked, sometimes expected, but that was because the games were typically distributed for free.) In fact, it seems like all the games were randomly grabbed from the Internet and put onto the disk with no regard for their creators or copyright. The game installers can get stuck when attempting to install the games, which is unfortunate because you sometimes need to run the installer twice. This game was packaged and sold in stores—it would be a disappointment if you got it from the dollar store. Vinny from Vinesauce takes a look at the game in two parts.
• Crazy Frog Racer was a group of tie-in racing games based on the infamous ringtone series. The console versions were, for the most part, mediocre due to their confusing controls and banal tracks, but were at least playable and had some redeeming qualities. The GBA version, on the other hand, was wretched beyond belief. The original characters besides the titular "Annoying Thing" are completely uninspired with no personalities or connection to the music videos, don't actually handle any differently from each other despite what the stats tell you, and generally reek of being rejected ringtone mascots themselves,^note For example; Rasta Dog, Mafia Hen, Punk Girl, and Big Elk, which are exactly what you'd expect. when you can even make out what they are among the blotchy (and predominantly pukish grey/brown) pre-rendered graphics that don't even show the karts' wheels turning. The controls are slow and clunky regardless of stats, and handle about as well as a tank on ice.^note Adding insult to injury, there is in fact a power-up that temporarily makes the controls a little more tolerable, which makes you wonder why they didn't just have those as the default. The courses are all ugly, overly-narrow and often excruciatingly-long wiggles of grey unimpeded road (with no jumps, obstacles or the like whatsoever) that simply aren't designed to accommodate the aforementioned dreadful controls at all. It's scored with the same tinny droning engine noise and bland Muzak throughout. There's very little variation in the modes; only a basic "Tournament",^note Complete with a pointless High Score table that ranks the time taken to complete any of the cups/difficulties at once as opposed to individually, meaning you can immediately fill it up just by playing the easiest cups repeatedly; regardless of your score from the races. a "Checkpoint Rallye/Madness" mode that's just repeated twice with little-to-no variation between each, and a "Last Man Standing" mode that's monotonous and close-to impossible to lose.^note It tries to do the F-Zero X "Death Race" formula, but on one of the aforementioned badly-designed racetracks and no goal beyond "take as long as you need to kill everyone else", and one go can often take fifteen minutes or more due to the infrequency of useful weapons, and trying to simply find your opponents as you whittle down their long, Mercy Invincibility-backed health bars while they seldom attack you back. There aren't even so much as basic kart-racing things; no multiplayer, no time trials, no secrets or unlockables, no shortcuts, no satisfaction or payoff to winning any of the modes, and no replay value. Overall? Drab, ugly, unpolished, near-uncontrollable, a shameless copy of better GBA racers^note Most notably Mario Kart: Super Circuit and Konami Krazy Racers without any trace of what made those great, and a pathetic cash-grab with absolutely no effort put into it; even for licensed game standards. Nintendo Official Magazine UK ripped it to shreds in their final issue, describing it as "Worst Ringtone Ever becomes Worst Game Ever. Not Crazy, just Crap" and that "If the Crazy Frog threw up on a grey pavement, it'd still look better than this". Ultimately, they gave it their lowest-ever review score (05%, or "Not Worth Stealing"), justifiably capping it off with "Avoid at all costs".
• Dangerous Vaults was a pornographic rip-off of the Tomb Raider games. It somehow had worse graphics than the original Tomb Raider I despite being released around the time The Angel of Darkness hit stores. Its play mechanics were beyond broken, and the sexual content tended to be laughable rather than erotic. The game is also no longer available to download.
• Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse (not to be confused with the TV series Dark Angel) is a crappy PS2 dungeon crawler. The game boasts a boring combat system, a laughably poorly-considered stat and equipment system (one of the worst examples being armor: all armor of the same level is the same except in price, meaning that Level 1 full plate armor is exactly equal to Level 1 leather armor despite costing several hundred times more), and a completely unfitting "soundtrack" that cuts in and out randomly and mostly consisted of someone wailing psychotically on an electric guitar with no thought for rhythm or basic musical structure.
• Daemon Summoner (also known as Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter) for the PS2 and PC is a dreadful FPS game that had some of the worst combat ever seen in a video game, as half the time your weapons will miss the enemies at point-blank range. There are also lots of other glitches (e.g. characters are prone to freezing and glitching, body parts of enemies disappear when you shoot them, you can randomly fail certain parts for no reason); the story makes no sense (the main character seems to be a vampire hunter trying to hunt down his vampire wife, but the game can't decide if it's to purify her or put her down); the main protagonist, James Farrington Higgs, is an unbelievably incompetent and unlikeable Expy of Van Helsing; the enemy AI is atrocious; the graphics are dated and look like something out of the late 90s (even though the game came out in 2006); and the levels are either boring and monotonous (with a long sewer section with a confusing maze and tons of enemies) or frustrating and unfair (there is a stealth section where you have to take the longest, most roundabout, and confusing path imaginable to sneak onboard a ship despite the said ship being very close to your starting position and only having a single guard in place). YouTube reviewer Tennings gives the game a sound beating in his "Worst Games You've Never Played" series.
• Dragon Ball Z Sagas took an idea that would later be picked up by the future hit Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot — to adapt the DBZ series (up through the Cell Saga, in this case) into an action-adventure game — and completely botched it. The controls and camera are unintuitive, the environments are bland and uninteresting, and the combat has little appeal with its overall lack of depth that devolves fights into mindless button-mashing. Matt McMuscles called it one of the worst DBZ games ever made, and IGN's review warns players to maintain a vast distance from this dumpster fire. Its one redeeming value is a nicely animated intro FMV that shows Goku's childhood adventures.
• Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu joins the likes of Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout and Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 in the annals of craptastic Dragon Ball fighting games. Released on the Game Boy Advance, it is a mess of glitches, inconsistent hitboxes, and Artificial Stupidity that can be easily beaten by mashing buttons (which you will often do since this game has all the depth of a puddle) accompanied by prerendered graphics that look ugly as sin and some bizarre liberties taken in regards to the source material (characters only staying transformed during super attacks, Android 18 having the ability to launch missiles out of her back, Fat Buu being replaced with Super Buu during two of his attacks, etc). The game's biggest selling point, the first playable appearance of fan-favorite villain Broly (which is also untrue, since Broly previously appeared in a Japan-exclusive Super Famicom fighter), would be rendered moot by his later appearance in the infinitely-better Budokai 3. About its only saving grace is a soundtrack that's decent by GBA standards, but that's never enough to save a game. According to the designers, it was rushed out to fill a deadline while they were working on Legacy of Goku II, and by its release, it had earned the nickname of "That Which Shall Not Be Named." Matt McMuscles takes a look at the game's issues here.
• Drake of the 99 Dragons for the Xbox attempts to be a comic-book-style action shooter, but this is undermined rather quickly by horrid collision detection, an auto-targeting system that forces Drake to flail his arms about like a drowning swimmer, and controls that show nothing but scorn and contempt for the player's desire to move in a given direction. The game supposedly adopts a "comic book" feel complete with SFX bubbles whenever a gun is fired or a character jumps, but this has the unintended effect of making the already hideous graphics look even worse by highlighting the similarities they have to a Rob Liefeld comic. Jumping is useless, as are any platforming elements, unless one could will collision detection into being from thin air, assuming one gets past the enemies by way of precognition first. There are no hints of what to do at any point, and only by pure chance can one figure out how to clear the levels. To simply call the game "bad" would be a gross understatement (although Gamespot, X-Play, ProJared, and the Angry Video Game Nerd have tried). Vinny of Vinesauce even streamed the game, and after several failed attempts destroyed the disc on camera for all the Internet to see. Matt McMuscles goes into better detail on how the game turned out the way that it is here.
• Elf Bowling 1 & 2 for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. To begin with, both versions expected you to pay $30 for a game that was already available for FREE on the Internet, and even then they're slightly downgraded from the PC originals by removing some animations and sounds and the coin toss from the beginning of Elf Bowling 2, which is unacceptable since the games were so minimalist in the first place. But even then, everything else about it is bad beyond belief - the graphics are pathetic and don't remotely take advantage of the GBA's or DS' capabilities, the music is nonexistent, the occasional quips from the elves are embarrassingly juvenile ("Those all the balls you got, Santa?"), and the gameplay is as barebones as can be with a bowling game.
• Falling Stars for the PlayStation 2 is a completely pathetic excuse for a Role-Playing Game geared towards little girls. It features a Cliché Storm of a plot with an insipid dialogue that is more likely to have the player question the Fridge Logic of the entire game. The battle system is insultingly simple and monotonous and is rendered even more idiotic by the highly predictable moves of the opponents and a complete Game-Breaker that allows your character to have virtually infinite health. ^note (Rotating the left analog stick during battle increases a meter that, when filled, allows your character to heal a certain amount of health. Rotating faster fills the meter faster.) With Loads and Loads of Loading, amateurish and cheap-looking graphics, repetitive music, terrible minigames with even worse controls, and frustrating enemy encounters, this is a game that doesn't deserve to be marketed towards anyone. Watch Vinny suffer through it here.
• FBI: Hostage Rescue represents everything that can go wrong with an Escort Mission. The time limits to rescue the hostages are unforgiving; while it is possible to receive a time bonus by rescuing one of the hostages, the rescue mission itself is rendered virtually impossible due to shoddy AI and glitches such as the hostages getting stuck in walls, walking in the wrong direction, going through locked doors, or simply vanishing. It is also possible for the game to freeze, or for the player character to be trapped by the scenery. The visuals are ugly, and clipping problems abound. It received a scathing 1.9 from Gamespot, which contributed to its Metacritic aggregate score of 25.
• The first rule of Fight Club is you don't play Fight Club, a soulless cash grab of a fighting game based on a film with a message about toxic masculinity and criticisms of capitalist society. The game's presentation is lackluster, which does little justice to the game's roster of characters, most of whom are based on side characters from the film that you may not even remember (save for hidden character Fred Durst). Not helping matters is the lack of variety among the roster in terms of gameplay, with only three fighting styles shared between the cast members. The game introduces a novel feature wherein certain attacks show an X-ray of the victim's bones breaking, predating the X-Ray Attacks and Fatal Blows of later Mortal Kombat games, but they only really matter in one mode where such injuries can disable certain moves, and lack the visual flair used in MK. The game features a full story campaign of its own that tries to tie in with the movie, but it's painfully boring with cutscenes that consist of nothing else than still images. IGN and Gamespot proceeded to savage the game in their reviews.
• The Flintstones: Big Trouble in Bedrock is an excellent example of The Problem with Licensed Games, and one that makes Grandslam's Sega Master System game from the late 1980's – another potential Horrible contender – look like Taito's Flintstones platformers of the early 1990's in comparison. Developed by Conspiracy Entertainment for the Game Boy Advance, the game's plot wouldn't even pass for an episode of the cartoon, where Dr. Sinister – himself the antagonist of the eponymous season 5 episode – has kidnapped Barney, but why he does this is never explained. The game consists of four worlds, each with three confusing and absurd levels, and there is no option to save the game, so the only way to even complete the game is to beat it in one shot. If Fred needs any help, he is forced to turn to Gazoo, as Wilma and Dino are mere spectators in the first two levels and most other characters – apart from Arnold, who appears as a recurring enemy that throws newspapers at Fred – are not mentioned at all. Even the graphics are awful – especially the cut scenes, which look like they had been taken directly from the cartoon itself – and the classic theme song is missing. Watch a full playthrough of this abomination here; its description says that the game "gives you nothing as a reward."
• Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror (aka America's 10 Most Wanted outside the United States) is an unintentionally hilarious example of a game taking itself too seriously when it has absolutely no right to. The graphics would've looked dated on the original PlayStation, the sound design is substandard, the gameplay is a boring trudge of lackluster FPS mechanics and wonky fighting game mechanics for boss fights, and the plot is a cynical ploy to exploit patriotic fervor following the 9/11 attacks by promising players that they would be able to capture Osama bin Laden with their bare hands. The game's original publisher, Infogrames, backed out of publishing the title shortly before its scheduled release, which shows that even they knew of the title's low quality. It was then picked up by Encore Software for North America, and System 3 in Europe, under their "Play It" budget label, another sign of the low quality.
• Godai Elemental Force, a 3D Beat 'em Up made by 3DO for the PlayStation 2, is a complete technical disaster. Despite featuring muddy textures, small environments, and few models displayed at any given time, the game chugs at a pathetically low framerate that can't even stay consistent. The game design isn't much better - while the main character has a handful of projectile attacks and moves, his main form of offense is a short Button Mashing combo that can't be changed or mixed up in any way, and while weapons can be collected throughout the levels most of them simply hit harder and don't change his fighting style. The fixed camera angles are screwed up, enemy variety is low, and the main character's gliding ability allows one to skip large chunks of the game with impunity. The game was eviscerated by players and critics alike, and 3DO went bankrupt within one year of releasing it. With games like this, it's not hard to see why.
• Despite its M rating, The Guy Game (2004) is completely wanting for any maturity whatsoever. The game tried to be a more adult version of You Don't Know Jack, where instead of getting rewarded with points for answering trick questions correctly, the game rewards players with live-action footage of bikini-clad women flashing their breasts on-camera. Unlike You Don't Know Jack, the questions are so hard and the rules are so complex that you're better off saving your money and looking up pictures of boobs on the Internet. As Guru Larry points out, you're not likely to come across any copies of the original game anyway, as they were all pulled from store shelves following a court order after it was revealed that one of the women exposing herself in the game was 17 when she was recorded. This means that The Guy Game technically qualifies as child pornography, thus giving it the questionable distinction of being the only piece of underage pornography to be licensed for video game consoles, while also being illegal to download and have in one's possession. While an interactive DVD version titled The Guy Game: Game Over was released without the offending (and potentially illegal) footage, the damage was done, and The Guy Game wound up not only being the only thing released by Topheavy Studios but also the last game that founder Jeff Spangenberg^note who also worked with Iguana Entertainment of Turok fame and Retro Studios - yes, that Retro Studios was involved with, with his only credit since then being on the Nightdive Studios remaster of the first Turok game, and he has seemingly disappeared from the gaming industry. It also served as a Creator Killer for the Gathering of Developers as a publishing label, as Take-Two Interactive folded it in 2004 shortly after the PC port of The Guy Game was released. Matt McMuscles, formerly of Two Best Friends Play, takes a closer look at the genesis of this sleaze fest here. Caddicarus also looked into it in a segment in his video covering banned games (found here), and concluded the segment by burning the game once he discovered the Medal of Dishonor that it has.
• Hidden Invasion for the PlayStation 2 was rushed out of the gate by (the now-defunct) Toka corporation (notorious for a number of awful console stinkers in the late 90s), and it shows in the final product. Actually, it's easily the worst of their lot; the game itself is marred by janky, awkward controls, fixed camera angles that repeatedly send your characters running aimlessly in and out of a new area, an awful aiming system that ensures your firearms will miss half their shots, and randomly-placed Invisible Walls you'll inevitably spend 60% of the game bumping into. The premise of a hidden alien entity manipulating mankind - hence the titular Hidden Invasion - could have been interesting, but the game squandered that premise by having the characters verbally narrate every major plot point and twists during cutscenes rather than actually showing them. The fact that the voice acting is stiff and seemingly recorded in separate sessions and awkwardly stitched together doesn't help either, and the game has a tendency to allow enemies to shoot at you from behind walls, before you can even see them, and most of the game's objectives are just pointless fetch quests that get boring after less than 15 minutes of gameplay (something that is not encouraged in a Beat 'em Up game). IGN sarcastically jokes that the best thing Hidden Invasion has to offer is the price (20 bucks cheaper than other titles at the time, and that's when said game is still new), while GameFAQs have a bunch of old articles that pokes fun at the game, like this one which said the game feels like an unfinished product (the reviewer isn't wrong) and another comparing the graphics to the then 9-year-old Virtua Fighter. Toka have not made another game ever since, to the utter surprise of nobody.
• Inspector Gadget: MAD Robots Invasion for the PlayStation 2 , a European-exclusive side-scrolling platforming game, sounds simple on paper, but the execution is terrible. The graphics make the game look like an early Nintendo 64 port; the cutscenes are horrible with extremely limited animation^note Though it does lead to one of the game's few redeeming features; namely, the various derpy faces Gadget makes, and the bizarrely disturbing death sequences, and are capped off with a voice actor for Dr. Claw who sounds nothing like him. The music is just the same grating loop repeating over and over again, and the sound effects are weird; Gadget makes an extremely annoying "whee" sound whenever he jumps, they sometimes use the wrong sounds for the scenes, and Gadget says "By my gadgets!" whenever he picks up a health powerup. What really kills it, however, is the gameplay. The game is simultaneously very easy and very hard; easy because extra lives and health powerups respawn when you die, the enemies are very easy to kill (despite occasionally spawning out of nowhere), and there are almost no tricky jumps. However, it's still difficult because of the very awkward jumping and slippery controls. On top of all this, the plot makes no sense; Dr. Claw makes a bomb that neutralizes all of Gadget's gadgets, which is admittedly a good setup, but Gadget somehow still has two gadgets^note An extending hammer arm for attacking, and a tennis racket to reflect projectiles and can get more for a limited time through "gadget batteries" conveniently found throughout the levels. This game was obviously intended for small children, but there's no excuse for giving them a shoddy product like this. TripleJump took a look at the game here, and besides the aforementioned unintentional humor they got from the aforementioned issues (and Gadget's context-less exclamation of "And now, let's go to Paris!"), had no kind words for it.
• The Xbox 3D fighting game Kabuki Warriors was described by Gamespot as "one of the worst games to be released this year or any year, on the Xbox or any other platform." Developed by Genki (who are mainly known for developing racing games), characters that are only differentiated by palette swaps of identical graphics, stages that differ only by backgrounds, terrible character animation, and a "fighting" system that is just as effective as closing one's eyes and mashing buttons make it one of the worst 3D fighters ever. It holds the dubious honor of being the first game Edge magazine - infamous for its refusal to adhere to the Four-Point Scale and stinginess with giving a 10/10 rating - has given a 1/10 to, and remained the only game with that rating until Flatout 3 10 years later. In Game Informer's review, the reviewer states "I literally won a match just by bashing the controller against my ass. I wish I was joking, but the score is seriously ''Kabuki Warriors'' zero, my ass one." - which was confirmed by other editors as indeed having happened. Two Best Friends Play this game and have fun riffing on it.
• The console/PC versions of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring from Vivendi Universal Games based on the original novel (to keep Electronic Arts off their back) are nothing more to write home about, but the Game Boy Advance adaptation is nothing short of a Porting Disaster thanks to being rife with glitches and broken beyond all salvageability. If a player wasn't careful, then by the midpoint of the game items essential to progress would simply vanish. There were glitches that rendered the game impossible unless one knew how to get around them. There's even a spot where you need to save during a transition between scenes to keep the game from becoming Unwinnable.
• Master of Orion 3 is probably one of the worst strategy games of all time, and reviews have compared it to doing one's taxes. At release, the AI would only build troopships, yet still fails to put up any kind of a fight even when fully patched. It doesn't help that Infogrames (the current Atari) fired the developers of the previous two games and hired some neophytes on the cheap. This game fails in every way - horrible music, ugly UI, dated graphics, and incomplete gameplay. The previous game is better in every way than this one, despite being released five years and one console generation earlier.
• Maze Action, a Japanese budget title released for the PlayStation 2 by D3 Publisher in 2003 (and released in Europe the following year by Agetec), is yet another lesson in why you shouldn't buy a game simply for its low price. The set-up amounts to four people competing against each other to pass the "Hero Academy final exam". Lazy title, the basic premise, and uninteresting visuals aside, the game's poor design makes a single mission nigh-impossible to accomplish: the controls are slow to respond which especially proves detrimental when attempting combat. Not only does firing a weapon require manual targeting and proximity to the opponent, but there's also virtually no chance you'll successfully land a shot since they will duck as long as they're in your line of fire (even if you try to shoot from behind) such that the most effective option is physically attacking the enemy and even then whether or not they block varies. On top of that, the game is presented in split-screen showing where both characters are walking through the maze despite a visible map in the top-middle of the screen to identify their locations. Tennings declared this game to be one of the worst he's ever played (and considering his experience with shovelware, that's saying something).
• The GBA had a few surprisingly good First Person Shooters, but the 2002 Game Boy Advance port of Medal of Honor: Underground isn't one of them. It was one of many titles that Electronic Arts licensed over to Destination Software, a well-known infamous budget publisher of shovelware for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.
  • Pop the game in and you're immediately treated to muddy, pixelated graphics coupled with an excruciatingly slow framerate (that appears to run somewhat better on an emulator for whatever reason). Enemies are so blocky that they completely blend in with the background (much like the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3-D), and the textures frequently warp and shift with movement as if you are experiencing a bad acid trip. The UI simply consists of an ammo counter, a pixelated compass, and a confusing health bar surrounding it, with the game's logo right in the middle taking up space. There is an auto-aim feature to attempt to alleviate the issues with fighting enemies, but it creates the issue of making the game a bit too easy. There's a multiplayer mode for a 2nd player via Link Cable, but the levels are so large and barren - even lacking collectibles! - that it's practically useless. The music is also an ear-splitter, with random loud, low-fi samples and square waves just droning away. It's no wonder that when EA released the exclusive Medal of Honor: Infiltrator the following year, they took a more pragmatic approach and made it a top-down third-person shooter to much better results. Stop Skeletons From Fighting takes a look at Underground and other GBA ports of FPSes here.
• Mortal Kombat Advance is one of the worst adaptations of a Mortal Kombat game on a handheld system known to man - it's a cheap bastardization of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. As the two ports of Deadly Alliance proved, Mortal Kombat can work on the Game Boy Advance. But Mortal Kombat Advance fails - tinny music, primitive-looking sprites, AI that's either too easy or too diabolical depending on the opponent (which sometimes results in getting an SNK Boss as your first opponent), collision detection that can't tell if you're next to the opponent or on the other side of the arena... you get the drill. Infamously, it was the first game that EGM gave the dishonor of earning a 0 out of 10. Watch AllieRX87's hilarious review of it here. Here's just one example of how poor this game's programming is: if you play as Shang Tsung and do a Fatality while shapeshifted, the game not only announces "(Your altered form) wins" instead of "Shang Tsung wins", but your shapeshifted form's portrait is shown on the ladder. They couldn't even get something that simple right! Midway outsourced the port to a third-party with no input or communication with Ed Boon's team, and gave the team three months to turn something out; Midway was only looking to turn a quick profit off the Mortal Kombat name while spending very little on development. With practices like that, it's no surprise that Midway eventually wound up bankrupt and defunct. Matt McMuscles meanwhile takes a look at the game here.
• Operation: Matriarchy may very well be one of the worst FPSes ever made. Never mind the nonsensical premise (dealing with a virus that turns all women on some space colony into a hive mind of men-enslaving monsters), the game is atrocious: enemies are dumb as bricks, ridiculously resilient and gang up on the player mercilessly - all that made much worse by the extremely cramped level design and the puny armament given to the player early in the game. The sound effects are unfitting and annoying, and there's no music. The graphic engine is actually surprisingly good for such a small release, but its relative competence, in turn, highlights the horrible art direction and poor animation.
• Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, released around 2001 during the then-ongoing craze over Dungeons & Dragons-based CRPGs of The '90s Gold Box series (this is an In Name Only sequel to the Cult Classic Pool of Radiance, in fact) and early 2000s such as Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate, but not only does Ruins of Myth Drannor have a poor, cliched story and atrocious gameplay as if the DM is really sadistic (and not in a good way), there are Game Breaking Bugs such as corrupted save files seemingly at random and a system-breaking bug where the uninstaller can and will wipe important Windows files seemingly at random during uninstallation if it's not patched. Yes, the game isn't just horrible and smears the name of one of the most memorable Cult Classic adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons, it doubles as a paid-for Trojan horse virus. Here's an archived review.
• Robin Hood's Quest is a miserable failure of a game that was released by Oxygen Games in the PlayStation 2 era. Aesthetically, it looks dreadful, with blurry graphics and poor-quality models better suited to an early PS1 game, all topped off by cutscenes consisting of slowly scrolling monologues of text on static backgrounds (and an extremely anticlimatic ending to wrap it up). Gameplay-wise, it's even worse, since not only does Robin not use his bow at almost any point in the game, but he also can't attack enemies at all, meaning the "brave" Robin Hood immediately falls to his knees and surrenders the second a guard gets close. Which admittedly likely won't happen, since the guard AI is about as intelligent as a rock and has trouble spotting anyone that's more than three feet away from their noses. And if you thought the gameplay could make up for it, nope - it's just finding keys to unlock chests and get items to give to other characters. It's slow, tedious, easy as all hell, and for the most part, could be beaten in roughly half an hour. Either way, critics tore it to pieces with Ace Games giving it a 1/10, Strategy Informer questioning whether how it could even be so incompetent, and YouTube reviews being hugely negative. Watch Ohhh Marmalade's review if you wish to see the horror for yourself.
• The 2003 RoboCop game, one of the last games produced by Titus Software (of Superman 64 infamy), is a trainwreck of a First-Person Shooter: RoboCop moves extremely slowly and only gets a few weapons, most of which aren't worth using at all. The repetitive hordes of enemies you have to mow down barely pose a threat unless they end up causing an explosion near you which can easily bring you from full health and shields to death. The graphics are ugly, the sound effects are atrocious, and the voice acting is full of lame one-liners that don't remotely fit RoboCop's character. You can read Alex Navarro's review on Gamespot here. Rerez also looks at the game here.
• The Simpsons Skateboarding was clearly an attempt to ride on the coattails of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, and replicates everything except any of the fun factor that made the Pro Skater series great. What do you get instead? A nonsensical storyline where the characters are competing in a skateboard contest for the grand prize of a meager $99, with terrible graphics, mediocre gameplay, skateboarding tricks that are basic at best and downright impossible to perform correctly at worst, voice acting that's rather terrible (and annoyingly repetitive) by Simpsons standards (most prominent in the "Skillz School" mode, where narrator Kent Brockman constantly mocks the player whenever they bail or fail to land a trick correctly), and bad controls. Even worse, characters are prone to bailing their boards easily when attempting to land a jump, unnecessarily adding to the frustration factor. Homer is a Low-Tier Letdown as his poor jumping stats make him unable to perform a normal kickflip without a high risk of bailing, and even if the player racks up stat points for him at "Skillz School" mode there would never be enough points to greatly improve his abilities. The game boasts having five unlockable characters aside from the Simpsons themselves, but none of them add any value to the game as the stat points do not carry over to other characters, meaning that whenever the player wants to change characters they would have to go back to square one in Skillz School mode. The Simpsons Skateboarding came out just one month after Pro Skater 4—you might as well have saved your money for that game instead of spending it on this stinker. IGN gave it 2.5 out of 10 in their review, with their verdict being "Not fun, and not funny" and describing it as "game design by way of the marketing department". Game Informer was even less merciful, giving it a rock bottom 1.0 out of 10 and stating that the game gets "everything, even the simplest of things, completely wrong". tamango2474, who called it the worst game he had ever seen, reviews the game here, and both Caddicarus and SuperMega respectively tackled the game here and here, both to predictable results. WhatCulture Gaming also tackles the game here as part of their "Worst Games Ever" series. How it even got past Matt Groening's radar after his personal step-in after The Simpsons Wrestling is really anyone's guess.
• The Sniper 2, widely considered the worst PS2 game ever developed. Originally a budget title developed by D3 Publisher, this game features the usual suspects: bad voice acting, worse gameplay, an idiotic storyline, and graphics that somehow go from PS2 quality to PS1 quality after the first cutscene! The game is bad that even the official description of the game on PSN points out how horrible it is. Vinny from Vinesauce played it as a charity incentive here.
• Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis, a.k.a. the GBA Porting Disaster. Like the notorious '06, it was given a near-impossible short development cycle so they could slap a 15th Anniversary logo on it. But while '06 has its moments and some defenders, no one is willing to defend this botching of a classic platformer. For starters, the devs had no access to the source code. Instead, they very hastily ported the Java mobile port (itself already a Porting Disaster in its own right, making this version a porting disaster of a porting disaster) to the GBA. No effort was made to optimize this glut of data for the already-overtaxed engine. As a result, the game slows down constantly (even the BGM contributes, despite being MIDI) and is loaded with bugs, to the point of Fake Difficulty. The inconsistent physics engine alone wreaks havoc on the difficulty curve and messes up the ending demo, in a truly emblematic display. Furthermore, the screen is cropped to the point of Trial-and-Error Gameplay even in boss rounds, and yet there's still pop-in. The bonus features — a level select^note Which is in and of itself almost useless because you can only see the ending if you start from the beginning., an "Anniversary Mode"^note The exact same as the regular game, albeit with the Spin Dash from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 added; which cannot be charged and only serves to further scramble the already-broken physics., and a Sound Test^note Unlocked on beating the game, but redundant since it's not only a standard feature on most Sonic games already, but only serves to put the incredibly cheap and badly-redone MIDI music and sound effects on full display. — are all worthless, meager contributions tacked on with no thought given to how they'd fit in, especially when Sonic Jam on Sega Saturn does virtually everything this trainwreck of a port could do but better. BrainScratchComms took several shots at it and much rage ensued. ExoParadigmGamer gave it his most damning Remake or Rebreak review thus far. Even the normally optimistic Cygnus Destroyer hated it. Simon "Stealth" Thomley of Knuckles in Sonic 1 and Sonic Megamix fame managed to outdo the entire team; Sega, to their credit, eventually hired him to work on the Star Engine ports of Sonic the Hedgehog and its sequel with Christian "The Taxman" Whitehead to great acclaim, as well as Sonic Mania and Sonic Origins.
• Spirit of Speed 1937, or at least its Sega Dreamcast version. Meant to simulate 1930s roadster races, the game was routinely trashed for its atrocious loading times, bad controls, lack of multiplayer mode (bad in a racing game), mediocre production values, and boring, drawn-out tracks. The original PC version was published by Hasbro Interactive, and they licensed the title over to Acclaim for its Dreamcast release. Likely because of how they knew of the game's quality, they briefly resurrected the much-reviled LJN label for this game only after they stopped using it for five years when it was previously last used for Revolution X on the SNES. Even the LJN Defender hated the game, going as far as to say it was a sad note for the rainbow to go out on, and given his mission is to defend LJN's games, that really says something. James Rolfe also covered it twice himself: once with Mike Matei on James & Mike Mondays in 2016, with Mike saying he'd rather play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) over this game, and the other time as the AVGN during December 2021 in the final part of his own LJN retrospection, noting that it plays slowly and the graphics look more appropriate for the Playstation or the early days of the Nintendo 64 than the Sega Dreamcast. Rerez also covered it as a part of a mega video for some of their Worst Racing Games of All Time.
• Strike Fighters: Project One was a lesson on why releasing unfinished games is a bad idea. Clicking on the briefing screen caused the game to freeze. Not that there was much to do - enemy planes would fly into the ground when they weren't shooting each other down. Adding insult to injury were the featureless barren landscapes. The magazine Computer Games (formerly known as Computer Games Strategy Plus) gave it a rare zero-star out of five reviews; in contrast, it gave Daikatana 1.5 stars. Even worse, you can't play this game on an LCD or high-res monitor. You're forced to play with a CRT monitor, and good luck trying to find one nowadays.
• How does one translate a reality show like Survivor into a video game? Very poorly. The 2001 PC game attempts to adapt the structure of the TV show into video game format: survival periods, Reward Challenges, Immunity Challenges, and the Tribal Council. None of them work in any way that can be construed as "intuitive" or even "fun". The only interactive parts of the survival periods are boring and repetitive dialogue choices which seem to have no effect whatsoever (a person who vows to ally with you will be just as likely to try to vote you off), the Challenges are monotonous and trivially simple, and there is no tension to the Tribal Councils (particularly since you'll likely always win the Immunity Challenges) on top of lasting forever and being completely unskippable. Gamespot repeatedly pleads with readers of their review to avoid the game at all costs, while IGN's review is titled "Please vote me off now".
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines had a crappy video-game tie-in for the contentious third film. The premise of the game was novel: instead of being a Terminator sent by the resistance to save John Conner, you played a Terminator sent by Skynet to terminate John Conner. The execution of the game does not do this premise any justice, unfortunately, as a combination of rampant bugs and glitches, dull and ugly graphics, and gameplay that combines crappy first-person shooting and crappy fighting game mechanics for boss fights against other Terminators make this game completely unenjoyable. IGN contends this game may be even worse than Fugitive Hunter (also featured in this folder, and developed by the same studio no less!), while Gamespot suggests just watching the movie and pretending this game never existed. Thankfully, the following year, a far better game would come out in the aptly-titled Terminator 3: The Redemption, making it all the easier to forget about this particular crapfest.
• That's Life!, an unofficial Sims expansion pack that is nothing but an installer for a bunch of stolen fanmade items that are available for free to download online. While this is already fairly common in many other mods, the real kicker is the fact that this was sold in stores. Even in its early years, the Sims community shunned the thing and petitioned stores to remove it from shelves. Despite all of this, X Media Publishing, a German company who released the expansion pack, made a sequel, That's Life 2. The sequel tries to one-up the original by including a 3D virtual mall to "shop" in. However, said mall is very buggy and crashes frequently. Watch Lazy Game Reviews tackle the pack and its sequel here.
• Who Wants to Beat Up a Millionaire is a game for PC and Sega Dreamcast that purports itself as a parody of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but fails on every conceivable level. Up to four players are given a question, and the first one to buzz in and answer correctly is given money and allowed some time to "beat up" a millionaire in a boxing minigame; after only a small handful of questions, the game ends. The game was panned by players and critics for its concept, both due to the ill-conceived mismatch of genres and due to its violence being seen as more horrifying than funny; not that the rest of the comedy—consisting of an annoying host who doesn't shut up—makes up for it. While the PC version has 2D cartoon graphics, the Dreamcast version uses 3D models that look much uglier, falling straight into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. Electronic Gaming Monthly rated the game a 1/10, PC Gamer gave the PC version a 15%, and Video Game Critic gave the Dreamcast version an F- and later placed it third on his list of the worst video games of all time.
• Winx Club: Quest for the Codex for Game Boy Advance is mostly a Shoot 'Em Up which follows the Season 2 plot very loosely, with some minigames thrown in. The Shoot 'Em Up sections are boring, repetitive (there are only a small sample of enemies and no boss battles), and hard to control. Of the five minigames, only one is worth playing at all; the other four are either too easy or too annoying. The icing on the cake? You're forced to play all the minigames multiple times during the story, regardless of relevance to the plot. Yes, helping Stella to choose a skirt that matches her shirt is going to be helpful in a fight against Darkar... and we don't even know why. Fortunately, the creators did learn from this trainwreck, because its sequel Mission Enchantix for Nintendo DS is pretty good.

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