Horrible / Video Game Generations: First to Fourth

"The European home computer market during the 80s and 90s was a hell of a thing. Crazy ideas and humor ran riot, and high-resolution texture-mapped 3D graphics were the stuff of a madman's dreams. Unfortunately, for some companies operating at the time, things like quality control and playtesting were apparently also the stuff of a madman's dreams."

— Stuart Ashen

Video games have come a long way from the early days of cartridges and cassette tapes. While these eras have produced several classics, there was plenty of room for developers to produce crap, as the entries below prove.

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Second Generation (1976-1984)

• Airwolf for Amstrad CPC takes The Problem with Licensed Games to its absolute extreme. In it, you have to navigate a helicopter (that can't stay still in the air, you know, what helicopters were built for in the first place) through passages so tight that you need to be pixel-perfect. You also need to destroy walls pixel by pixel. You have a health bar, but because there is no Mercy Invincibility it drains almost instantly. If you go from screen to screen in the wrong place, you die. Dessert with that? There's a timer that kills you when it hits 11:00. Your reward? The game just freezes at the last screen. Nobody ever got past the first level. Joueur Du Grenier reviewed this thing, as well as filmnstuff.
• In the early 80s, Space Invaders inspired many clones of varying quality, but Alien Invaders for VIC-20 is easily the worst of them all. It features slow aliens that can't shoot, A Winner Is You ending, and a length of one minute where your goal is to simply shoot 10 alien ships. That's it. Stuart Ashen demonstrates it here under the gaming sin of being too bloody easy.
• Birdiy [sic] by Mama Top was the only arcade machine that they ever produced. A quick play of the game can show you why it flopped in the Japanese arcade market. And by quick play, we mean you’ll have seen everything in the game in less than 5 minutes. It’s a very simple game where you play as a mama bird tasked with fetching worms on the single screen and feeding them to her babies while pecking monster rats off the tree so they don’t eat the babies. This alone is extremely difficult, even early into the game, as the rats are very persistent predators while you are not nimble enough to keep both of them away from the baby for long without risking starving it to death, and it's very easy to miss being able to scare them off while you go for the worms (you need all of them to win a single level), leading to an easy death. The only major differences after a couple of acts are the enemy speed and a skunk that guards the earthworms on the bottom. Predictably enough for a game that’s been converted from Pac-Man, the monster rats look less like rodents and more like the familiar ghosts with mouths and tails instead of ghost legs, and most of the sound effects are extremely ear-piercing. Again, this was a commercially released arcade game in 1983, yet it has no more than 5 minutes worth of playable content. Crystal Castles was released in the same year, had a real ending, and was far more playable than this. Even Bird Week for the Famicom could be considered an improvement over Birdiy for the slower-paced and easier-to-grasp gameplay. LordBBH tried to play this game for Episode 83 of his MAME Roulette series; his frustration at the game's Fake Difficulty is evident, and he could only stomach clearing one level before giving up.
• Cascade's Cassette 50 - allegedly "50 fantastic games on one cassette" - remains notorious for its craptastic quality over 35 years after its release - virtually all those "fantastic" games were very poor sub-type-in-quality affairs written in BASIC. The games were solicited via newspaper ads, and often written by teenagers paid ludicrously small amounts (e.g. £10 for a game that took 12 hours to write or £65 for 10). The tape itself sold for £10, around the cost of two regular games at the time, so it's likely the blame can be placed on overselling adverts meeting the unfairly raised expectations of penniless schoolkids for its unhappy reputation. Even so, the game is generally considered so bad, it has inspired present-day "crap game" competitions.
• Castle Assault, a budget game for the BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC and Atari 8-Bit Computers, is a pathetically simple-minded Platform Game even by the low standards of its time. The game suffers from bad jumping controls and minimal animation, the obstacles are limited to monsters that jump up and down from pits and platforms that move forward and backward, in a sequence that starts repeating midway through the first single-screen level, which repeats endlessly for anyone who cares to beat it.
• Deathkick, a very amateurish Beat 'em Up programmed in BASIC and commercially released for the Amstrad CPC in that system's first year, is infamous among Amstrad users for its total lack of quality. The character graphics and sound effects are on par with a cheap LCD game, the player character doesn't even get a walking animation, the color usage is garish, the backgrounds are a mess of garbage-looking tiles and "@" characters, and the off-key title screen music (there is no in-game music) actually desyncs after a while. Most enemies have to be defeated by pressing one particular attack button at the right moment, using controls that have nothing in common with any other game for the system. On top of this, there is also Fake Difficulty in the form of dragons that respawn in front of you with no delay unless you kill them with your limited-use Special Attack, and an automatic Game Over at the end of the first level unless you collect a minimum number of points (a requirement which isn't spelled out anywhere in the game itself or its packaging). Xyphoe plays through it in this video with the aid of a self-made walkthrough, and even that frequently fails him due to glitches in the game.
• Like many of its contemporaries in the arcade circuit, Donkey Kong has spawned many console and PC ports of varying quality. The worst of them, in this case, is the IBM PC version by Atarisoft. Among the things that went wrong was its reliance on the CGA color system which restricted the system and the game to two palettes of four onscreen colors at a time, crudely-drawn sprites (including a Donkey Kong which looked more like a werewolf than a monkey), sound design consisting of beeps and clicks and an out-of-tune rendition of "How high can you get?", twitchy gameplay, a keyboard that causes Mario to walk permanently until you press up, down, or the jump key, and overly quick and aggressive fireballs, especially on 100m. The only redeeming factor regarding the palettes is that the infamously eye-searing black-white-cyan-magenta palette was not among them. Still, the fact that the sprites look bad is inexcusable considering lower-resolution consoles (including the Atari VCS with its bad graphics) were able to do them better, and this port stands out as not just the worst Porting Disaster Donkey Kong had to endure, but one of the worst games to ever be made for the IBM PC, in an era where low expectations were to be had for PC-compatible gaming. You can read more about it, and how ever-so-slightly the Apple ][ port was an improvement, here, where the PC port is described as "more annoying than difficult" and "one of few ports to cross that line". Vinesauce's Joel played it during one of his DOS Madness showcases. The Lonely Goomba unsurprisingly ranked this version the lowest out of all the versions of Donkey Kong that have been released.
• As the popular conspiracy theory goes, Coleco owned the home console rights to Nintendo's titles and made deliberately inferior ports for non-Coleco consoles to punish them for not being released as Coleco console exclusives while making Coleco console ports as polished as they could get under the limitations of the time. If that theory is to be believed, then even by those low standards Coleco had for porting to rival consoles, Donkey Kong Jr. for the Atari VCS is horrible beyond belief. Only three stages were ported from the arcade version, the graphics looked bad even by the standards of the VCS (Donkey Kong, in particular, looked more like a chipmunk than a monkey, and the Snapjaws didn't fare any better, resembling staples), the level designs came across as half-assed (even lacking the ability to drop fruits on the Snapjaws in the first stage), and the jumping mechanic was extremely unforgiving. It doesn't even have the saving grace of having an IBM PC version to compare it to, which Donkey Kong for the VCS at least had. The one thing it's got going for it is its faithful recreation of the music from the original arcade version; however, as Atari HQ put it in its brief review, "you play games to play games, not listen to the music". The review also called it "an arcade port at its very worst" and compared it unfavorably to the VCS version of Donkey Kong. You can also read Video Game Critic's review here.
• The fact that EastEnders for the ZX Spectrum is based on a soap opera is the least of its problems. First and foremost, the game used a WASD control scheme, which doesn't sound bad on PC but is a nightmare for anyone playing on the ZX Spectrum, because the buttons are so distant from each other on the keyboard that it requires a lot of finger gymnastics to input your commands. This all goes to waste for a game that is in actuality very boring: all you do is look after plants and cut them so they don't grow too high, do the laundry, check your mailbox for mail you can't even view, feed your baby, buy food in a supermarket, and drink alcohol. Interaction is limited and doesn't try in the least to make it entertaining, and you do these actions on a forever-tightening time limit and increasing high-score that should exist to challenge the player, but instead makes it come across as more and more frustrating. All in all, you get something that magazines called the worst ZX Spectrum game of 1987 and possibly the worst ZX Spectrum game of all time.
• Kit Williams' Masquerade was a Fictional Mystery, Real Prize book that contained clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare. The official winner of the contest, "Ken Thomas" (real name Dugald Thompson), used the hare as collateral to found a software company called Haresoft with his business partner, John Guard,^note Notoriously, Guard was dating Kit Williams' ex-girlfriend, Veronica Robertson, who knew just enough about the hare's location for Thompson to submit a correct solution without solving the puzzle in Masquerade. and released the puzzle game Hareraiser in 1984, the premise being the game itself was the clue to another scavenger hunt with a £30,000 prize. It even revolved around the exact same golden hare as in the book. But where Masquerade was lauded for its story and lavishly detailed illustrations, Hareraiser consisted entirely of a handful of screens with bog-standard graphics, cryptic pieces of text, and zero interactivity. It was released in two parts ("to make it fun", according to Haresoft), Prelude and Finale; they were identical, save for some poorly drawn spiders on a screen or two of the latter. They were both released on almost every popular computer platform in the UK for £8.95 each, at a time when even the most technically advanced games went for no more than £7. The first part got so much bad press from critics and buyers alike that the second part bombed as a result. Haresoft went into liquidation, and the Golden Hare was auctioned off at Sotheby's. Nobody has found an answer to the puzzle, if there even was one—it's generally believed that this was another scam.^note Thompson maintains that the game wasn't a scam but remains evasive regarding the solution; a thorough analysis of the game's code in the 2010s seemed to confirm that there is no solution. Stuart Ashen goes into the convoluted history of it here, concluding by stating that it was less a game and more "some random bunch of tree pictures [received] as part of an iffy get-rich-quick scam from a bunch of cheaters".
• Cinematronics was revered for their innovations in the arcade industry, such as the invention of vector-graphics games and laserdisc-based adventure games, however, they almost went bankrupt thanks to a little-remembered game called Jack the Giantkiller. Instead of the vector games they were known for, they tried to stitch together several popular genres into one raster-based package, whose hardware was apparently licensed (without including documentation for 5,000 boards, therefore requiring reverse-engineering to write operator manuals) from Hara Industries. The game is based on the old fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk, and like Jack, you are required to climb your way to the top of each screen, grab one of four treasures, and climb your way back down, all while hopping between vines and throwing beans at your enemies. You're more likely to fall off and die since the clunky controls and tight paths in each level don't mix. Cinematronics attempted to rectify the issue in the Japanese version by making sure you couldn't fall off the vines, but that somehow made it worse. In the stair levels, pieces of the stairs will randomly disappear or fall apart, and in general, you wouldn't be able to tell where it's safe. One of the funniest things about this game is going back into Jack's house will kill you too! And during the entire game, you are forced to hear Jack's every single step which in this game are tiny high-pitched beeps. Crazyclimber80 tore the game a new one. One commenter on his video said that they saw the game in person back in the '80s and that on one week the machine only made 75 cents. You can play it on the Internet Archive here, if you dare.
• Karate for the Atari 2600 is a near-unplayable Fighting Game with extremely unresponsive controls and almost no chance to win. There is only so much you can do with a digital joystick and a single button, and Atari's first-party joysticks were known to be fragile, so unresponsive controls often led to shredded controllers. The AVGN took a quick look at this game during his Atari Sports review. Aqualung's Game Reviews also tore it apart.
• Pac Kong for the 2600 is an atrocious Donkey Kong knock-off, and itself has numerous clones under different names (Inca Gold, Spider Kong, etc.) The graphics have seizure-inducing flicker worse than the Atari port of Pac-Man, the music is an ear-grating square wave loop of "Turkey in the Straw" or some other nondescript tune, controls are sluggish, making jumps and dodging hazards extremely frustrating, and there is only one repeating level design.
• Renegade 3: The Final Chapter was the sequel to the well received Renegade (the westernised version of Kunio-kun) and its equally well liked sequel Target: Renegade. The game turned a gritty urban Beat 'em Up series into a ludicrous game based on Time Travel. The number and variety of attacks you could perform was gimped, the graphics became a mess, the enemy designs were ludicrous (one enemy resembled Captain Caveman), an unforgiving time limit was imposed on the player and the C64 version bizarrely added a mechanic where your health drained over time but you could regenerate it by killing enemies. Stuart Ashen rips it apart here.
• Sssnake at first glance looks like a standard Atari 2600 game (you play as a circle and try to shoot different animals while avoiding snakes) until you realize that the snakes always follow one pattern and are extremely easy to avoid. This makes the game completely devoid of challenge and removes any satisfaction from scoring points. Watch Classic Game Room dissect it here.
• SQIJ! was released on the Commodore 16, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum. The former two versions are bad on their own, but the Spectrum version cranks the shittiness up to eleven. While "unplayable" is mostly used as a figure of speech, SQIJ! for ZX Spectrum is one of the few cases where this is literally true. Due to a programming bug regarding caps lock ^note The game can only register lowercase input but also forces the Spectrum to be uppercase at all times, therefore failing to register any player input at all., the game can't register the player's input; to play the game, the player must break into the Spectrum's memory and run a POKE command to turn caps keys off. Should the player be knowledgeable enough to do this, they will still be confronted with further unplayability: even when working, controls are massively unresponsive, with considerable input delay; the game runs at an abysmal framerate, which doesn't help the already deficient controls; collision detection is fidgety and alternates between not working at all and detecting objects not even remotely close as colliding; the graphics are hideously drawn and animated and experience constant stuttering, coloring and tearing glitches; and finally, the game itself is prone to crashing randomly at times for no discernable reason. Very few dared to play it properly, so much that the fact that the game has more than one room only became public knowledge in 2016, because you could only escape by shooting every enemy with your (invisible) lasers.
  • SQIJ! was one of the first Spectrum games to attain true infamy for its low quality in the Usenet days. In his book, Stuart Ashen mentions it as the worst game he has ever played, and the comp.sys.sinclair Usenet group named its annual Stylistic Suck competition after it. The game is currently the lowest-rated game on the World of Spectrum Bottom 100, with nary a word of praise to be seen.
  • The game itself is technically illegal to own or distribute - it was written not in machine code (as Spectrum programmers were expected to), but in a commercial game engine called Laser BASIC that compiled into machine code and had many shortcuts regarding graphics and audio. The game was distributed uncompiled at a £2 price tag, with a copy of the entirety of Laser BASIC (a £65 utility) still in it.
  • And to top it off, the song on the cassette's B-side is utterly dreadful, which especially hurts as the other songs written by H.E.X. range from decent to very good.
• Video Chess on the Atari 2600. A first-party Chess game that on the surface is fine, but then you move a piece. Most chess games have an animation to show when the opponent is "thinking" of its next move, and this is no exception. The problem is, the animation that this game chose is to cover the entire screen in randomly-flashing colors, each only for a single frame each, as long as the opponent's move was still processing — while many Atari games, including the much-beloved Yars' Revenge, also had problems with this kind of Sensory Abuse, none were as bad as here due to the amount of time it stayed on screen. This happened every single turn. And due to the low power of the system, it often did take a long time to do that, especially if playing on a higher difficulty level — waiting times of ten hours have been reported on original hardware. Even if you can stomach that, you may have done all that waiting just for the opponent to make an illegal move. And you do have to put up with the computer opponent, because it's single-player only. The only real interesting things about it are its origin (Atari was forced to make a chess game because they put one on the 2600's box and didn't want to be called out for false advertising) and the somewhat clever programming tricks required to make a full chessboard work on an Atari.
• Voyage Into The Unknown on the ZX Spectrum. Released by Mastertronic in 1984, its failure is exacerbated by the many milestones in gaming history on that year alone. Programmed in BASIC, with risible graphics, worse sound, nonsensical references to "time warp chuck out"s and "buke"s, and ludicrously hard space combat sequences that took place on about 10% of the screen. To add insult to injury, the game gave no clue as to how to even start playing; unless you guessed the correct sequence of keys (Engine, Power, Ignition) to take off, you couldn't even start the game proper (such as it was). Contemporary magazines slammed the game, with Crash giving it an overall score of 9% with 2% for playability.

Third Generation (1983-1994)

• The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends for the NES. It has annoying music and the graphics are primitively designed, especially for a late 1992 release. Most enemies are Demonic Spiders and are capable of depleting your entire health bar thanks to a lack of Mercy Invincibility. You'll spend more time fighting the unresponsive controls and navigating the terribly-designed levels (a good example of this is Level 4, where you have to cross a pond with the game's awful jump precision). Beat the game, and "YOU WIN!" is your only reward. The Angry Video Game Nerd takes a good look into this title during his "12 Days of Shitsmas" series.
• Six years before the horrible Amiga adaptation (listed under Fourth Generation), AKIRA received a Famicom adaptation by Taito. While the art style of the anime movie was faithfully recreated, the game was, in essence, a very crappy visual novel where even the slightest deviation from the film's plot will result in a Game Over, necessitating a walkthrough just to make it to the end - an exercise in frustration that will make you want to discard the game and just watch the movie instead.
• Aladdin on the NES was a port of the Genesis, Amiga, and PC versions of the game only released in Europe, and was horribly butchered. There are much fewer levels than even the Game Boy version, the gameplay is choppy as hell, and the graphics are hideously-colored and poorly-scaled copies from the GB port, which is inexcusable seeing as how this came out in 1994, at the end of the NES' lifespan. It's really telling when a pirate version is comparatively better than an officially-licensed game.
• ALF for the Sega Master System takes The Problem with Licensed Games beyond the norm. What would otherwise be a short adventure game (20 minutes at most) can take well over an hour due to Fake Difficulty through convoluted controls, bad programming, and Goddamned Bats which become Demonic Spiders due to Alf being able to take only one hit. The game consists almost entirely of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, both by mistake and by design - the game features a lot of unfair traps, including shop items that exist solely to make you too poor to buy the items you actually need and one, ALF Book, which restarts the game after triggering an Info Dump that ends by informing the player of such, the only time that it is so much as hinted at. ^note In-game, at least. The manual subtly hints at this by telling you the ALF Book "Tells an interesting story that will really take you back to the beginning!" The writing is simply atrocious, loaded with exposition whose existence tears gaping holes in what little of a plot there is, and terrible jokes that aren't even So Unfunny, It's Funny. Here's a review by a former Alf fan who lists even more faults with this game, and here's a complete playthrough by someone who despite having received tips from the game's lead programmer was still forced to use savestates due to how utterly broken the game is. The Angry Video Game Nerd also took a look at it as a part of the Twelve Days of Shitsmas. VGJunk also endured it here. Were they taking lessons from Taito's Takeshi's Challenge?
• Bad Cat, also published in the US as Street Cat, is ostensibly a Track & Field-style Sports Game starring a Totally Radical Funny Animal, but actually plays as a series of five minigames, most of which are practically unplayable due to excruciatingly unresponsive movement and jumping controls. The onscreen contextual messages don't deserve to be called hints. The only reason most players even get past the first stage is that there's no way to get a Game Over, no matter how badly you fail. Here's VGJunk's hot take.
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure is a godawful mess of a video game where the main gameplay consists of randomly jumping into things like bushes/rocks/fences/etc. to find objects to return to people in their proper time. There is no map nor guide to help you (unless you've got Nintendo Power, and even then it's kind of vague) figure out where they are, so you can easily spend an hour jumping into stuff and not find a damn thing. To top it off, the game suffered from poor control: It is in an isometric perspective, ambitious for an NES game admittedly but executed dreadfully. You can't walk on the grass (most of the time) so you have to follow a path, and you can only go faster with this awkward jump; if you get stuck on grass (easy to do since the path has so many turns), it's tedious to get back off, and throwing weapons at enemies is terribly awkward. Plus, to even begin a level, you have to go through a tedious process: flip the pages of the phone book to the famous historical person's phone number, then manually dial the number, then go to a time circuit (which is completely pointless, not to mention confusing, as dialing the last number in most circuits is a major Guide Dang It! in itself which most players would never guess). The Angry Video Game Nerd, who has reviewed many crappy LJN/Acclaim licensed games, opined in his review that Bill & Ted is easily the worst of them all. Even the LJN Defender couldn't really defend this game, despite trying his hardest.
• BMX Ninja contains no actual Ninja or any gameplay worth the budget price it was sold for. The game is a pathetic excuse for an urban Beat 'em Up with incredibly clunky controls and no Life Meter. The stages are repetitive, each one requiring the player to defeat the same number of enemies on a static screen until the progress bar fills up, with the only real change when you reach a new level being the backdrop. The graphics reek of utter laziness, even taking into account the limitations of the systems at the time: the first background's most distinctive feature is a billboard saying "GRAFIX", and one of the most common enemy types looks indistinguishable from the player character.
• Butt Slam!!! is an MS-DOS adult game from 1989 that has gameplay, audio and graphics so simplistic and barebones that it would be bad even for Atari 2600 standards. The "gameplay" is about two players playing as a gay couple consisting of Greg, a man with a Gag Penis; and Fred, a man with a wide anus, taking turns between the two men and trying to have sex. The instruction text is filled with extremely homophobic language but the game itself is so barebones that one just has to play two rounds (that rarely ever last more than a minute) to see all that the game has to offer. It's quite telling that this is the only game made by one-man dev Joe Martniez (credited as JoeWare). Ex-YouTube Pooper Stuart K. Reilly reviews the game here alongside other MS-DOS porn games, saying that it "makes Custer's Revenge look like a modern art masterpiece" and wondering if the game was made by a little kid.
• Dian Shi Ma Li (aka Big TV Mary Bar and Mario Lottery) is a Chinese bootleg game for the NES, starring a badly drawn Mario rip-off (nicknamed Fortran because of the "F" on his cap) with vague slot machine-ish gameplay and incredibly ear-grating sound. The game aims to get as many credits as possible but is made pointless due to how credits are a currency that can only be used for gambling, and the only way to end the game naturally is to run out of them. The minigames don't make any sense, which is unsurprising because the main game doesn't make much sense. The gameplay seems to be based on these gambling machines, and they're no less confusing. Oddly, they're only referred to as "Mario Slot Machines" or just "Mario", even if they aren't Mario-themed. The only reasons to check out this bootleg would be to PUSH START TO RICH, and that its Mario rip-off design would eventually give us the basis of 7 GRAND DAD.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES has slow, plodding gameplay and controls; Everything Trying to Kill You to a ludicrous extent; a completely ineffective weapon as Jekyll and useful-if-you-could-hit-anything weapons as Hyde; a glitch that causes the game to speed up, not slow down, when it's throwing more enemies at you; a gimmick whereby you can lose within seconds of turning into Hyde without a chance to save yourself^note Hyde dies instantly if he appears in the same tile/area/spot that Jekyll appears in before becoming Hyde — more or less, Hyde gets killed by a Temporal Paradox. — these all make for a game that no person can play without feeling like less of a person thereafter. The Angry Video Game Nerd considers it probably the worst game he's ever played that can still be considered a game, and the seriousness of his videos on the matter confirms it. BrainScratch Commentaries played this game for their Bad NES Extravaganza. Egoraptor mentioned this game in his Sequelitis series on Mega Man X, saying that anyone who wants to get into game design should play it as an example of what not to do. The first half of Jeremy Parish's NES Works Episode #121 is dedicated to Jekyll & Hyde and pointing out its many flaws.
• Dragon Ball: Shenron no Nazo is one of the first Dragon Ball games to be released, and let's just say we have come a long way from there to Dragon Ball FighterZ. Brought to America under the title of Dragon Power, the game suffers from an unfair dose of Nintendo Hard, as the player's health bar also doubles as their time limit (meaning the more damage a player takes, the quicker their time goes down). This wouldn't be a problem if enemies didn't shave off chunks of the player's health with each hit. To make matters worse, there are no lives nor saves, so the player would automatically go back to the title screen after they die. Each level begins with a cutscene that is slower than molasses. You can skip them by pressing Select, but good luck finding that out. The music is very repetitive and will restart every time the player comes into another room. It's even possible to encounter a Game-Breaking Bug during the Boss Rabbit level: if the player walks into a room with a carrot, accidentally walks out, and comes back in, the carrot is lost and the player has to reset. That's not even going into the infamous localization — because Dragon Ball was virtually unknown at the time in the United States, rather than just simply not bring it over, they changed the names of the characters, and in some cases like Goku and Master Roshi, altered their sprites. Goku (who oddly enough kept his original name) was changed to look like a generic martial artist, and Roshi (simply called "Hermit") was changed to look like a wizard. The second half of the game was removed for no explained reason (the original version adapted both the Pilaf and 21st Tenkaichi Budokai Arcs). There were some really awkward edits, like with Master Roshi's perverted behavior. His advances towards Bulma were changed to him wanting her sandwich, but it's very clear that Roshi was talking about something perverted. You can watch Team Four Star play it here, where they actually resort to using cheat codes because the game's difficulty was so crushing, and yet still had to Rage Quit due to the aforementioned Game-Breaking Bug. In addition, NES Works covered it alongside the mediocre Ikari Warriors II, Joueur Du Grenier considered it a disgrace to the Dragon Ball franchise, and SomecallmeJohnny was just dumbfounded.
• Though Dragon's Lair received a decent entry (not so much a straight port of the Laserdisc classic as a completely different game) for the Game Boy Color, the same cannot be said of the NES iteration. The movement is unresponsive, with a delay between the button press and Dirk's action (on top of the fact that B jumps in this game). Dirk is rather large, which makes simple jumps difficult. Though Dirk does have a health bar, almost everything kills him in one hit. There is also an elevator shaft that is intended to make winding through the castle seem like one, but it merely makes the game even harder than it needs to be. Adding to the already insane artificial difficulty are Death Traps everywhere, so extra precautions are necessary for the whole game. Add to that an insane final boss fight and a meager "Congratulations" ending, and you have the NES equivalent of a game rage-fueled nightmare. The only positive quality is the fluidity of the graphics. The European version was at least given some additional polish, like increasing the framerate, adding splash screens between levels and introducing a new boss, though this came with the cost of making the game even more unplayably difficult than it was, to begin with. It was reviewed by VGJunk, the AVGN and Aqualung Game Reviews, the latter of whom also called it the worst NES game of all time.
• Felix the Cat by Dragon Co. (released in some areas as Felix the Cat 3,) is an unlicensed NES game created and released by obscure Chinese game company Dragon Co in 1998 (years after the NES' life cycle), and an utterly atrocious platformer. While it's thematically similar to the very good 1992 licensed game by Hudson Soft, it manages to get every aspect of what made it fun wrong. Like many bootleg games, it's very hard for all the wrong reasons: for starters, the game is so cropped that any obstacles can only be avoided by rote—even if you master the stiff controls. Felix's attacks are barely of use, and leave him wide open for attack for great lengths of time. The game's barely even playable until you get powerups, so naturally, the mechanics strip them from you as quickly as humanly possible. None of this is complemented by the level design, full of cheap tricks, fake-outs, and Kaizo Traps, nor the jerky, ugly, graphics, nor the music, bland at best and obnoxious at worst. To top it all off, you get an absolutely pathetic final boss who tries to attack you solely with Collision Damage, and can be killed in seconds if you have powerups on hand. Also, finishing the game brings the player to a screen of Felix hugging his friend Goldie Goose, with the words "The End" hanging over them.
• Ghostbusters is a classic for the ages, but the NES port of the Commodore 64 game is an utter disaster. The game is a dull, frustrating experience that mostly involves driving around the map and to whichever destination you choose (while avoiding apparently drunk drivers, catching ghosts if you have a ghost vacuum, and collecting barrels to avoid running out of fuel), buying stuff from the shop, and capturing ghosts. The music is just the Ghostbusters theme on loop for the entire game, the graphics are ugly, it doesn't use Ghostbusters characters well, and the ghosts used are stock ghosts that don't resemble anything from the movie. Once you finally get inside the "Zuul building" (a task that requires $15,000, by the way), you'll find an extremely difficult segment where you move three of the Ghostbusters by tapping either A or B (or holding down a turbo equivalent to spare your poor thumb) and try to avoid the four ghosts that move slowly and randomly around the map. After that is a 2D shooter-like segment where you have to drain Gozer's health before the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man gets to the top of the building. And your reward for going through that is a plaintext ending in absolutely horrendous English (and a statement of "you have completed a great game"), but at least Americans get an ending; due to a programming error, the Japanese version ends with a blank screen, with "りり" (riri) scrolling up the left of the screen after a minute (though patching in the correct ending via Game Genie shows us that "great" was originally mispelled as "grate"). Plain and simple, the game is an absolutely terrible addition to an otherwise awesome franchise that's about as fun as watching paint dry. As expected, The Angry Video Game Nerd covered this game over two videos. BrainScratch Commentaries also played this game for their Bad NES Extravaganza and NES Works explains how BITS botched the conversion from the C64 to the NES here.
• Human Killing Machine for the Atari ST and other 8-bit and early 16-bit computers was a rip-off of the first Street Fighter game made by Tiertex, the same company who (poorly) ported the same Street Fighter game and Strider to those systems. The game lacks special moves, two-player mode (which is bad in a Fighting Game, a genre that thrives on one-on-one competition), and scrolling. The fighters are all miscellaneous god-awful ethnic stereotypes with occasional cruelty to animals. Also, if you start badly, the game makes it harder for you to win the next fight. Furthermore, the developers made it so all of a given character's frames of animation could be shoehorned into a single screen's worth of space, which has the unfortunate consequence of the Final Boss having only six frames of animation (two walking, two falling, one punching, one kicking). What's worse is that the final boss in certain builds of the Amiga port has its tiles glitched up, which makes you wonder both just how the programmers overlooked this mistake and how Tiertex thought this was good enough to try and convince Capcom to market it as an official sequel to Street Fighter (which was rightfully declined in favor of making their own, genre-defining sequel). Ashens reviewed the Atari ST port here, while Vinny of Vinesauce takes a look at the MS-DOS version here. Matt McMuscles looks at it here for his The Worst Fighting Game series.
• Ikari III: The Rescue was a nigh-unplayable mess in its original arcade form, as SNK de-emphasized the run-and-gun nature of the first two Ikari Warriors games (essentially turning the third game into a beat-'em-up) but kept the rotary controls, making it extremely hard for attacks to connect. Oddly enough, the NES version of Ikari III was better than the NES Porting Disasters of the first two games, as it was a somewhat-decent game on its own. It helps that the NES port didn't bother to simulate the arcade games' rotary controls.
• Intergalactic Cage Match for the Commodore 64 and other systems of the time. Billed as a wrestling game with a Cage Match gimmick, the game had poor graphics, extremely poor (to the point of being near-unusable) controls, and one major fatal flaw in the design - you couldn't knock anyone off the wall of the cage once they'd started climbing. As a result, you had a fighting game where actually fighting was less effective than just running to the nearest wall and climbing it. Professional reviews (where they actually existed) were terrible, with scores of about 10-15 out of 100. Stuart Ashen rips it apart here.
• Jim Henson's Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival for the NES was serviceable, but lackluster; its biggest accomplishment is being a Polished Port of the DOS version. This version of the game was defined mostly by bugs, which ranged from soft-locks and hard crashes to procedural generation making parts of the game pixel-perfect at best and Unintentionally Unwinnable at worst. The latter was made worse by finicky controls, Checkpoint Starvation, and strict win conditions; including only one life (with just a single hit point in the Space Ride level) and a total lack of Mercy Invincibility across all the games. Even worse was the presentation; BGM consisted entirely of grating buzzing and farting sounds, the dialogue was unintentionally condescending and poorly-edited, and the graphics were badly-drawn, hideously-colored, and animated with two frames apiece. The one feature it has that the NES version left out (six distinct player characters) does nothing to improve a game that already had so much wrong with it. Ancient DOS Games takes an in-depth look into the game here, all while having the game crash or soft-lock on him multiple times.
• Karting Grand Prix for the Atari ST is one of the slowest racing games in existence. It's also one of the glitchiest: the game freaks out when a car goes under the bridge and corrupts when a car rides on grass or under shadows. And as a bonus, the sound effect for an engine is one of the most annoying sounds in the world. In conclusion, you have a game that rivals Big Rigs for the title of worst racing game in existence. Ashens demonstrates this game here, and quits after playing it for two minutes.
• Just like Aladdin, The Lion King is a well-regarded game of the 16-bit era. Its port to the NES? Not so much. It was released in 1995 in Europe only and is essentially a worse version of the Game Boy port that preceded it. There are only about half the levels of the other versions, and you never get to play the levels where Simba is an adult, something that even the Game Boy version included. As a result, the game suddenly ends at the "Hakuna Matata" level with the gorilla boss, with no opportunity to avenge the death of Simba's father or anything. On top of that, the graphics are tiny and washed out, feeling more appropriate for a game released at launch, not something from when the system is essentially dead. Like with Aladdin, the pirated version is comparatively better.
• Metal Gear for the MSX is a classic that started one of gaming's most treasured series, and the NES version (which had zero involvement from Hideo Kojima), less so, to say the least. But the 1990 computer ports (made for the MS-DOS and Commodore 64 and based on the NES version) take the "art" of Porting Disaster to new heights. The graphics are heavily inferior to the already downgraded NES version, the Commodore 64 version has Loads and Loads of Loading for the codec conversations. The audio is often nigh-nonexistent for the MS-DOS version (save for some noise in the codec speeches), and if you do have audio, it would be some of the worst audio you will ever hear that you wish it was just muted. The Alert phases are gone, enemies no longer react to getting hit, and enemies can now see you even if you are not in their line-of-sight, making the game outright unplayable. Here is ex-YouTube Pooper Stuart K. Reilly reviewing the Commodore 64 version, while he would later review the even worse MS-DOS version in this video. Interestingly, a similar Amiga version was also planned to be released the same year but it was never released. An unofficial Amiga port would be made in 2021 that would be based on the original MSX version and would be a Polished Port with upgraded visuals and sound, as well as better performance and controls.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) had three game adaptations, which were terrible and part of the reason why Hayao Miyazaki hates video games so much and never agreed to any other adaptation of his studio's films. They are described in detail in this 2012 article. The two shmups, for PC-6001 and MSX, are actually somewhat competent in that, despite being really repetitive and clunky, they at least tried to include themes and scenes from the movie with the limited technology of the time. The adventure game for the PC-88, however, is completely horrible. The graphics are terrible and copy-pasted, Nausicaa has no animation (the sprite doesn't even flip!), and the bare-bones gameplay consists of picking up some stuff and hoping that deadly skulls don't pop up. All in all, this game could be one of the worst licensed games ever. For years, it was believed that this was all there was, with the screenshots on the back of a glider sequence being fake at worst; however, this Twitter thread shows that the hang-glider sequences actually exist and that the game continues with a good illustration of Nausicaa and a stage set in the Sea of Corruption... but the sheer effort put into hacking the decades-old source code shows how unplayably buggy the game is.
• Robobolt for the Commodore 64 is one of the most notably bad games for the system. People that have played it cite amongst its flaws the bad presentation, bad sound effects, very sluggish controls (the bullets that you shoot move so slowly that they can't kill the enemies onscreen), and the fact that there is only one enemy sprite in the entire game. Commodore magazine Zzap!64 gave the game a 3%, the lowest score in the magazine's history (matched only by The Further Adventures of Alice In Videoland), and a reviewer for the Commodore 64 review site Lemon 64 gave the game a zero, the only game reviewed on the site to score lower than a 1 out of 10.
• Scramble Eggs for the MSX is a cheap knockoff of Scramble where you can't move horizontally or drop bombs and the enemies and terrain are boringly designed. The graphics look primitive, but the sound and music are worse.
• Pirated/bootleg video games tend to be horrible for many given reasons, and while Hummer Team usually averts this, Somari falls squarely in it. This game could have been So Bad, It's Good given that it's an unofficial Famicom port of Sonic the Hedgehog starring Mario for no discernible reason, but the poor controls and physics coupled with Fake Difficulty make it a barely-playable mess and the soundtrack makes Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis sound good in comparison.
• Super Maruo is one of the first unlicensed NES games and one of the rarest, but that doesn't mean it's a holy grail. It is actually a pornographic game that has nothing to do with the Mario Bros. The gameplay consists of one screen, where the titular character needs to catch a woman while avoiding the dog that blocks the way, each time he does that, the woman is stripped down until both of you are nude with very crude sex scenes occurring. The reason for the original cartridge version being so rare is that Nintendo of Japan supposedly shut the makers down to prevent it from being released on the Famicom. Given that this was the time when Nintendo had some very draconian guidelines on how developers should release their games on the system, it is safe to say that Super Maruo is one of the reasons why they enforced these rules, especially since Nintendo of Japan themselves refused to allow pornographic games on their consoles for fear that it would tarnish their image.
• Super Monkey Daibouken is an RPG based on Journey to the West in which Sun Wukong and his party make an agonizingly slow journey from China to India through a confusingly-designed overworld with blotchy graphics and invisible exits. It has side-scrolling combat sequences like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but worse in practically every way. Hardcore Gaming 101 rips the game apart here. When Arino played the game on Game Center CX, it took up an entire side-segment of one season, during which the Guide Dang It! was so bad that he resorted to calling viewers (who volunteered by sending their numbers in beforehand) for info on it.
• Super Pitfall was an attempt to update Activision's classic hit Pitfall! for the NES... but they didn't update the right things. The gameplay was sluggish and not enjoyable because of unforgiving amounts of Fake Difficulty stemming from terrible stage design, Trial-and-Error Gameplay that gives zero clue as to what to do, and logic-defying ways of moving between areas (for example, at one point you must jump into a bird enemy that looks no different than any other bird mook in the game). Your character (who looks a bit too much like Luigi) remains a One-Hit-Point Wonder throughout the game and, while he does have a gun, it's near useless until the final level because most of the enemies are waist-high in height and you can't shoot while you duck! The graphics are awful, full of sickening strobing, slowdown, flickering, and bland sprites (waterfalls look like avalanches of blue garbage). The music is the same annoying loop played over and over again until the final level (where it got replaced by another annoying loop). The game was a failure when it was released and is considered among the worst games on the NES. (The obscure PC-88 version isn't so bad: it has a life bar, the ability to shoot while ducking, and Dungeon Shops that make gold useful besides for Scoring Points.) Interestingly, an unofficial mod by nesrocks was made for the game's 30th anniversary which managed to correct many of the game's flaws, such as giving it better graphics and making exploration less cryptic, which really goes to show how much potential the original version squandered. If you're still not convinced, check out Aqualung's full walkthrough of the game, NES Works' review or The Angry Video Game Nerd's review.
• The Terminator on the Nintendo Entertainment System is a terrible attempt at a Terminator video game. It takes the formula typical with bad licensed games and somehow makes it worse. The visuals and gameplay might have been acceptable for an early NES game, but this was a late 1992 release, when the system was in its twilight years. It does not do a good job with following the plot of the source material; with the player controlling Kyle Reese in the future for the first half of the game (not a bad idea in concept, but other Terminator games handled this idea better), before moving to 1984 and taking away your best weapon; leaving the player to resorting to punching random punks, police and dogs, all interspersed by some uncontrollable vehicle levels. The meager amount of lives you can have at maximum (six) and the fact you have no continues in an already difficult game does not help things. The soundtrack gained infamy for being one of the worst on the NES. The ending is just a boring text screen, saying you defeated the T-101^note instead of its actual model, the T-800 and has Kyle Reese surviving, which leaves one wondering if Radical Entertainment even watched the movie. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed this game along with other Terminator games here.
• Transformers: Convoy no Nazo ^note (Transformers: Mystery of Optimus Prime) for the Famicom has Ultra Magnus as a One-Hit-Point Wonder, palette-swapped bosses (including three instances of the Decepticon logo), Trypticon as a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, and an ending that is nothing but text. You have to collect letters that spell out "Rodimus" and then beat the game to play as Rodimus Prime (also a OHPW, and functionally identical to Ultra Magnus); if you beat the game with him, then you get "Congratulation!" and your high score. It's yet another horrible video game that The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed on his show. TJ Omega also tore it a new one in his ''Plastic Addict'' series. Years later, Takara made a mobile game based on Convoy no Nazo that used the game's infamy as a selling point, including the accompanying cartoon featuring an episode discussing how terrible it was.
• Tube Warriors is a 1994 fighting game for the Amiga A1200 released by Dynabyte, the Italian developers of Nippon Safes Inc. and The Big Red Adventure. They should have continued to make adventure games, because this title is terrible in every way possible. The badly-drawn characters with poorly-spelled "Japanese" names are either very generic or plagiarized, like a kid on a robot that seems "inspired" by Captain Commando's Baby Head/Hoover. The backgrounds (despite the parallax effects) and music are drab or unremarkable, and the sound effects are the same whether your character is male or female. But the programming is the absolute worst part: loads and loads of disk swapping for a game where you have to tap the joystick to move the character in the desired direction, collision detection is abysmal, character movement is floaty, the badly-animated special moves are almost impossible to pull off and you can win just by spamming a kick over and over again... To top it all, you can't even choose your character in single player mode (being forced to use the Ryu rip-off), and there are no continues: losing even one match brings you to the beginning again. The only decent things are the animesque cover art and the rendered subway tunnel in the intro, that however never re-appears again. Here's a gameplay video from Theshadowsnose.
• The Uncanny X-Men for NES is often labeled as one of the worst games in the system's library, and for good reason. Outside of its obvious flaws such as terrible music and ugly graphics, with a drab color palette and playable characters that barely resemble the classic superheroes, the game's major issues are in its gameplay. While players can choose between six characters, none of them are any good, with the Button Mashing-based combat causing them to constantly lose health due to the poor range of their attacks, and poor collision detection detection not helping matters by making projectiles useless as well. In single-player mode, the player will be accompanied by an AI-controlled partner who suffers a great deal of Artificial Stupidity by hardly ever attacking the enemies and constantly running into obstacles, not helped by the poor level design. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews it here. Questicle gave it an F- and later named it the third worst game on the system. The Video Game Critic also gave it an F-, the only NES game to get that rating. Seanbaby placed it third on his list of the worst NES games, while PatTheNESPunk gave it 1 star out of 5.
• While the Valis series is generally seen as So Okay, It's Average, it started off on one hell of a wrong foot with the PC-88 original—an absolutely abominable Run-and-Gun that could easily be one of the worst games ever. The game uses a unusual health system where the player can store a hundred health bars, which are used as currency for weapon upgrades. This means you have to grind for anywhere from ten to twenty minutes to get a decent weapon and have enough health to survive Act 3 onward which is a death sentence for a Run-and-Gun. The game is also chock-full of Fake Difficulty due to constantly spawning enemies, horrible controls ^note Yuko has very stiff Jump Physics that make the simplest platform sections a nightmare, large, maze like Cut and Paste Environments ^note The game actually uses an arrow to point you in the correct direction, no Mercy Invincibility and impossibly hard Bullet Hell boss fights. The only positives are the soundtrack and the cinematic cutscenes which predate Ninja Gaiden (NES) by a few years. The game was so bad that Telenet Japan had to remake the game no less than three times to get it right. Hardcore Gaming 101 tore this game to shreds in their article, calling it an unplayable mess. It's surprising that Telenet managed to make a moderately successful franchise out of such a disastrous first installment.
• A Week of Garfield, a piss-poor platformer game developed by Mars and released by Towa Chiki on NES. The graphics are ugly, with backgrounds often consisting of simple rectangles barely representing what they're supposed to and sprites that look like a failed attempt to capture the comic strip's style. The enemies are uninspired, consisting of things like mice, birds, baseballs, spiders, and worms. The sound effects are primitive. It's packed to the brim with Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders. There's no Mercy Invincibility, so the aforementioned bats and spiders can take out all your health in less than a second, made even worse by the game only giving you one life, but you do get infinite continues. Topping all that, in a completely boneheaded game design decision all the items are invisible until you walk past them. This especially becomes a pain at several points when the gameplay grinds to a halt and you're left jumping around the screen like an idiot looking for a key to open the giant door in front of you. This happens multiple times throughout each stage. It was only released in Japan, and it's a good thing it stayed there. The only positive thing about this game is the graphics' use in the Garfield parody comic Square Root of Minus Garfield. See NecroVMX take a look at it here, or watch the Angry Video Game Nerd suffer through it here.
• Where's Waldo? for the NES. The main flaw of the game is appalling graphics, which is inexcusable because the point of the game is to see where Waldo is, which is made worse by having Waldo occasionally wear different colors on higher difficulties, outside of his iconic red stripes. The game also suffers from other forms of Fake Difficulty, including a cursor that moves too quickly for the player to select the square they're trying to, a global time limit that runs down even outside of gameplay sequences (including the interlevel cutscenes where Waldo takes unnecessarily long paths to reach his destination), an hourglass pickup in the cave level that randomly cuts down your remaining time instead of increasing it, a maze level that can become Unintentionally Unwinnable due to a randomly-generated board and features an overly aggressive enemy (Wizard Whitebeard, who teleports unpredictably and drains away your remaining time very rapidly, likely ending the game before you can react), and a slot machine for the final level. The game failed to convince contemporary video game reviewers the purpose of having a Where's Waldo game at all, with Cyril Lachel calling it "pointless", and GameInformer deriding it as "a game for those too lazy to turn a page". The game has not aged well at all since its release, as can be seen in Eric Turner's review. Vinesauce Joel's stream of the game gives a good idea how painful this game is to play on the "Hard" difficulty: upon completing the game, he remarks that he's so stressed that he "can't even celebrate", and compares the adrenaline he felt to after he finished his first fight in high school. The Game Grumps found it agonizing even when playing on easy mode.
• While Winter Games is a cult classic on other systems, the NES version is an infamously bad Porting Disaster. The game has a terrible and barebones menu, the graphics are crap, and the music is ear-grating. The game only lets the player compete in four events (Hot Dog Aerials, Speed Skating, The Bobsled, and Figure Skating) compared to the seven offered by even the Atari 2600 version. The gameplay is sluggish to the point of being unplayable due to its unforgiving amounts of Fake Difficulty stemming from Trial-and-Error Gameplay that gives zero clue as to what to do, and counter-intuitive controls. Worst of all, the game wasn't even developed by Epyx themselves but sub-contracted to a small Japanese developer called Atelier Double. This version was a failure and was panned by both critics and players upon release, and is considered among the worst games available for the NES. It's little wonder why The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed the game for his Christmas episode in 2009 and destroyed the cartridge with fire. NES Works also reviewed it alongside Stadium Events/World Class Track Meat, which shows an interesting contrast in quality in NES sports games.

Fourth Generation (1987-1999)

• The Adventures of Ninja Nanny & Sherrloch Sheltie can be easily described as an edutainment game on drugs that hilariously fails at being educational. The graphics are very crude and look like they're drawn by a bored kid in MS Paint and Powerpoint, the sound design is badly compressed and loud beyond belief, the "scenes" happen via annoyingly small pop-up windows with blurry AVI files, the interactivity is similar to early interactive encyclopedias, which poorly fits the type of game, and features voiceover that sounds like it's recorded in one take with a cheap mic. The story makes no sense whatsoever, changing the setting every second, and whatever explanations are given are through walls of text. Apparently, this is one of two games developed by Silicon Alley, which vanished from existence after making this broken mess. The "game" was presumably made by people who know very little about programming: In fact, there is a separate launcher for every single part of the game, with the first one titled "BEGIN HERE". LGR reviews this, and even he is baffled by its sheer nonsense. Vinny of Vinesauce also streamed it here, and he considered it to be a huge mistake on his end.
• The Amiga adaptation of AKIRA is a heavy contender with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the title of "worst licensed video game of all time", and is certainly one of the◊ worst◊ Amiga◊ games◊ of all time. Players alternate between side-scrolling motorcycle segments and platforming levels with either Kaneda or Tetsuo. The first level, a motorcycling segment, has even less margin for error than the speed bike segments of Battletoads: rumors have it the publisher had to give passwords to reviewers because they couldn't beat the first level. Not that the platforming segments are any better: enemies are damage sponges while the player is about as fragile as wet tissue paper, the third stage requires the player to find keycards to progress which are a chore to find, and the fourth stage is Unintentionally Unwinnable due to a platform you need to traverse across being out of reach.
  • The circumstances behind the game's development makes how bad it is more understandable: one person tried to track down the development team, and almost everyone involved wanted to stay as far away from the development company ICE Software as possible. According to what testimony was given, ICE Software made the infamous sweatshop conditions of Konami look like Club Med in comparison. Attempts to contact the heads of the company (which went belly-up not long after AKIRA's release) were met with profanity-laden resistance. At the end of the day, it's little wonder how AKIRA for the Amiga wound up being so godawful.
• Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt by Tengen was a flaccid attempt at cashing in on Sonic the Hedgehog's popularity, and is one of the worst Sega Genesis platformers ever. The presentation and design is awful: a half-assed attempt to copy Sonic's speed mixed with sloppy level design that can't handle it. The main character spins like Sonic but can only damage enemies by landing directly on top of them, missing the whole point of Sonic's Spin Dash (to kill enemies from any direction while maintaining his speed). Because of this, it is extremely easy to blindly run into enemies, and powerups to increase your speed or jumping make the game even harder to control. Levels have grainy backgrounds, while characters have garish color schemes and choppy animation that looks like something out of MS Paint. There is an inexplicable, heavy-handed environmentalist theme throughout the game, going as far as giving you pointless trivia questions in-between levels. The ending is a literal interpretation of the game's title, followed by more desecration of the environment and all the irony that comes with it. On top of all that is a completely unlikeable, ugly protagonist who often spouts grating digitized catchphrases such as "I'm Awesome!". ScrewAttack did a video on the Top 10 Worst Mascots, and the possum was right at the bottom of the barrel. The HG101 crew gave it the inevitable "Your Weekly Kusoge" treatment. UrinatingTree criticized the game here.
• Batman Forever, a tie-in to the film of the same name from Acclaim is horrible on multiple consoles:
  • The SNES version has frequent loading screens despite being on a 16-bit cartridge. The graphics are so-so, and the music is terribly bland. Worst of all, this game was made with the Mortal Kombat engine even though it's barely a fighting game, and so the controls are completely counter-intuitive ^note For instance, using Batman's Grappling-Hook Pistol requires you to tap Select quickly before pressing Up on the D-Pad, and jumping down between floors entails tapping R just before pressing Down.. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews it here, along with other Batman games both good and bad. BrainScratch Commentaries also played some of it for their Bad SNES Extravaganza marathon. If you want to see more of the game, check out this playthrough by SomecallmeJohnny.
  • There was also a Genesis version which does have some improvements, such as slightly better controls (if you have the six-button controller, that is), no load times, and the ability to control the main villains in the VR simulation mode. The improvements end there, though, as the game is otherwise just as bad as the SNES version, and Probe's sound driver absolutely butchers composer Tim Follin's (yes, that Tim Follin) music. UrinatingTree (aka Schlasser) explains further. Kim Justice examines it in detail here, noting that, while it just barely escaped her updated "Worst Mega Drive Games" list, it's still pretty bad.
  • The game was also released for the Game Boy and Game Gear, with any redeeming qualities the 16-bit versions had being stripped away completely. The already-bland music translates horribly from 16-bit to 8-bit, and graphical limitations have caused much of the game's background detail to vanish, leaving you with an ugly-looking game that makes you feel as though you're in an empty building of nothing as you attempt to play it - and the Game Boy version's more limited color palette did it absolutely no favors, reducing large spaces of background to featureless white voids. The sprites are taken directly from the SNES version, leading to a Batman who barely resembles Batman (the sprite from the 1989 game looks closer by comparison). Finally, the controls, taken directly from the Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat, are a complete mystery to first-time players - not even the manual tells you how to do essential moves, making almost every moment a case of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, and once you do figure out the controls they don't even work 90% of the time, which can lead your average player to not be able to make it past the first screen even if they consult a guide. Small wonder that Batman Forever is commonly listed as the worst portable Batman game of all time.
  • The obscure DOS version, while still not good, polishes things up enough to be considered the definitive version (for whatever that's worth).
• Battlecry, a 1991 arcade game by Home Data, is a mixture of beat-'em-up and fighting game and happens to be horrible at being both. The first half of each level consists of an endless wave of random thugs, and your protagonist has to grab onto a helicopter ladder to get to the boss. This is easier said than done considering that sometimes the ladder is out of reach, while other times you're too busy fighting off thugs to jump (which require holding Up and Guard at the same time, as opposed to just Up or even having its own button). The controls are so unresponsive that even doing something as basic as jumping forward is impossible. The boss fights simply consist of mashing buttons and hoping they don't pull off a random move that can take out a third of your health. The graphics are ugly, and the protagonist on the title screen (a blonde muscular man in red sleeveless clothing) looks nothing like he does in the game (a green-haired man in a blue Speedo). Home Data finished the game in 1989 (and the game would have been just as ugly and dated if released then), but didn't even bother to polish it or make it playable in those two years. VGJunk reviewed it here.
• Bébé's Kids is notorious in the SNES fandom for terrible music, bland gameplay, and a confusing haunted house that acts like a maze that's bound to stop most runs dead in their tracks with its tight time limit coupled with unintuitive means to actually progress. It also has a baffling control scheme in which either you learn how to perform your more powerful moves IMMEDIATELY, or die constantly due to Time Overs because doing anything BUT spamming your most powerful moves means you'll be lucky to defeat non-boss enemies in upwards of thirty-plus hits instead of roughly three or four. It's hard to believe this was made by the same studio that went on to create [PROTOTYPE]. Watch The Nostalgia Critic^note Who was dared to review it by the Angry Video Game Nerd, who was in-turn dared to review Ricky 1, see Horrible.Live Action Films N To Z tear it apart here.
• Best of Best is an obscure fighting game by a Korean company known as SunA. The game features ugly, pillow-shaded sprites of generic characters, often traced off of their inspirations by SNK, with a strange phenomenon of black nipples on the shirtless characters. The whopping four music tracks in the game are all stolen, including "Lambada". The backgrounds are just as ugly as the characters, and downright inexplicable at times, such as a screaming Statue of Liberty traced from a Home Alone 2: Lost in New York poster. The gameplay is unresponsive and features downright stupefying special moves, known as "Arts of Sure Killing". The real kicker? This clunky, primitive fighting game was released in 1994, the same year that other fighting games like Killer Instinct, X-Men: Children of the Atom, the original Darkstalkers, and The King of Fighters '94, which all featured superior graphics, gameplay, and music were also released as well.
• Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball is an early SNES title with an interesting concept, but is undermined by subpar AI, slow characters, and god-awful controls. You're more likely to spend time trying to figure out how to shoot rather than actually trying to win. Dshban manages to do pretty good at it, though. SCXCR did a Five Dollar Gaming review of this game, citing inconsistent game speed, an Atari 2600 control scheme on a system using a controller with multiple buttons, using the rules of association football rather than basketball, and other major flaws. It also happens to be SNES drunk's least favorite game on the Super Nintendo. It doesn't help that this game is just the Amiga game Future Basketball with Bill Laimbeer's name and association on it; while this would explain some things, it's baffling that no attempt was made to reconfigure the controls for the SNES (Amiga joysticks typically had only one "fire" button). Here's a video review in the style of the AVGN.
• Dark Castle was a groundbreaking game for Apple Macintosh computers (being one of the first games to use fully recorded sound effect samples), but it got a pair of terrible ports on the Sega Genesis and Philips CD-i by Electronic Arts and Three-Sixty Games — with the CD-i port being the worse of the two despite being on a more powerful console. The lack of mouse or keypad control in these ports make it difficult for your hero to properly aim his projectiles, and the bad controls are worsened by the hero's habit of stumbling and falling all over the place. It's possible to defeat the final boss without even exploring some of the rooms in the castle ^note Really confident players can simply opt to go through the middle doors to tackle the boss' sanctuary., making almost half of the game superfluous. You can see how much of a failure the game is in this review by UrinatingTree, as well as the Angry Video Game Nerd's review for the Genesis and CD-i versions. Caddicarus later commented that the Genesis version was the second-worst game he ever played (behind only the most movie-based video games released by Phoenix Games), beating out other serious contenders found not just here (including Action 52), but on some other generations' pages as well.
• Dark Tower (not to be confused with Stephen King's The Dark Tower series), an arcade game by The Game Room. The game plays like a shoddy version of Snow Bros, except instead of a snowman you are some sort of pantsless caveman or unkempt nerd hitting monsters with a bat. The graphics are stolen from Ghosts 'n Goblins and Black Tiger, and the music is the fourth stage music of Double Dragon on an endless loop. The game itself is lacking in any variety or challenge, as you simply fight the same four monsters (with the same basic boss every 10 floors) throughout 50 levels. "Beating" the game presents you with no ending and sends you back to the first level, which isn't even any harder. Read an article that chews out the game over at Random Hoohaas.
• The TurboGrafx-16 version of Darkwing Duck suffers terribly from sluggish and delayed controls, poor hit detection, and wonky physics. This makes boss fights harder than they ought to be since the margin for error when it comes to jumping on them is practically microscopic. The platforming also suffers from an unseen time limit: don't take too long trying to make a tough jump, or else you'll have a safe dropped on you, killing you instantly. Do yourself a favor and just play Capcom's NES version instead. If you're really curious about how bad it is, watch the Angry Video Game Nerd's review.
• Deep Blue for the TurboGrafx-16 is often cited as not only one of the worst games on the system, but one of the worst shmups ever released. The graphics are drab, the music can lull you to sleep, the controls are sluggish, the levels are boring (nothing but wave after wave of annoying enemies with a boss at the end), and all three weapons are practically useless. While you can take multiple hits, enemies can still strip all your health away in swarms (getting hit even once strips you of all your speed powerups and reduces your current weapon to its basic level), and you only get one life and no continues to beat the game. The only two ways to replenish health are rare health pickups and Pause Scumming (and the latter may still not be enough). If you do manage to beat the game, all you get for your troubles is a screen that says "NEXT". Watch this review to see it in action.
• Dennis the Menace, based on the 1993 film (so we're already off to a bad start) and released for the SNES and Amiga, is a true menace in its own right. The platforming is obtuse and overly difficult, the objectives of each stage (collect four medals and get to the exit) are byzantine and confusing, most of the weapons you can use are useless, and the difficulty is completely unfair because of Everything Trying to Kill You, up to and including Mr. Wilson, who not only causes you to instantly lose a life if he catches you but also looks disturbingly photorealistic (with some people even stating that he looks like former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein) compared to the cartoony Dennis. Also, each stage is timed, but the timer is not restarted when you lose a life, and if it hits zero, it's an instant Game Over. The auto-scrolling stages are even worse than the normal stages: while most stages are merely open-ended and confusing to navigate, the auto-scrolling stages have practically no margin for error and no checkpoints at all. For mercy, the bosses aren't as hard; they're just tedious as Hell, owing to their sheer durability. And just as the cherry on top of this sundae of suckitude, there are no level select cheats, meaning you have to beat the game in one go. Infamously, certain versions of the Amiga version are unbeatable due to an impassable jump in the last level. The Angry Video Game Nerd couldn't even be bothered to finish the game properly, opting instead to look up screenshots of both the final stages and the ending.
  AVGN: Fuck every single thing about this game, and fuck everyone who made it, fuck everyone who PLAYED it too, like myself!
• Divine Sealing is an unlicensed hentai shmup for the Genesis that is notable for being extremely ugly, generic, and lacking in challenge. Its main gimmick of anime girls stripping themselves for no reason on level completion is too limited (and too badly drawn) to be actually arousing. If you're not prone to photosensitive seizures (as the blue water is inexplicably glowing and blinking due to it trying and failing to look like currents), check out this walkthrough (NSFW).
• In Doom's heyday, many shovelware discs containing additional custom maps were created by low-budget companies to cash in on its popularity. They were invariably huge collections of WADs downloaded online and put on a disc without considerations of quality or permission from their designers. Their only redeeming quality was that they were helpful to some players who didn't have the resources to check out WADs online. A few examples:
  • WizardWorks published D!ZONE, a series of CDs sold containing hundreds of WADs collected from both the BBSes of the time and the early Internet. A large chunk of them are horrible, most of them unfinished, and some won't even load correctly at all. The back of the boxes often show stuff that isn't even in the game. Several YouTube users started a series called The D!Zone Experience to showcase some of the weirder WADs included.
  • Determined to beat these distributors at their own game, id Software included a disc known as Maximum Doom as bonus content to the Master Levels for Doom II. The Master Levels Disc, often accompanied by a book, contains 1,830 amateur WADs mostly for Doom II—with a great number of them being Doom WADs turned into Doom II WADs using a converter that includes Doom II monsters by randomly replacing exactly one monster each per level. A community member named Tarnsman started a series of livestreams on his Twitch account called "The Great Shovelware Extravaganza" in which he plays through Maximum Doom's Doom II content, on which he spent over 60 hours. His experience was full of shoddy design, beautifully bad texture use, and bugs, including an example that defies explanation.^note As this video reveals, this was another Doom WAD converted to one for Doom II, further highlighting the primitive quality of the converter they used
• Dragon Bowl, a sprite hack of the arcade Ninja Gaiden allegedly based on Dragon Ball. It is notable for atrocious music, sound effects stolen from various sources (most notably Street Fighter II), graphics that look like they were drawn by children who'd picked up writing utensils for the first time, Game Breaking Bugs that weren't in the original game, and broken hit detection. It is pathetic when put up against the game it rips off, never mind other brawlers released the same year.
• While the Sega Genesis was home to some of the most memorable Disney-licensed games, the video game adaptation of Fantasia was not one of them. With sloppy programming, awkward controls, and haphazard level design, it falls well below the standards of a typical Disney game, and its tinny music hardly does the film's soundtrack any justice. Jumping is floaty and unresponsive, your Goomba Stomp only works if you're holding down on the D-Pad, your projectiles are too limited in supply and hard to aim to be of any use, enemies pop out of nowhere, and if you reach the end of a level without finding enough hidden musical notes you're sent back to the start. To add insult to injury, Chernabog doesn't even appear as the Final Boss, rendering whatever motivation there was to complete this game moot. It ranked #6 on Mega's "10 Worst Mega Drive Games of All Time", and is reviled by Genesis fans across the net; UrinatingTree sympathizes with them, as do Andrew Dickman and PhantomStrider.
• Guardians of the 'Hood, a Beat 'em Up and Spiritual Successor to Pit-Fighter, features hideously grainy Digitized Sprites of people going at each other with bad hit detection, set to execrable synth music. The 5-button control scheme makes even basic moves pointlessly complicated. There is very little variation in enemy types, and the game is padded out with pointlessly hard one-on-one gym fights that aren't treated as Bonus Stages, and which you MUST win in order to progress - and if you're playing with more than one player at the time? Sucks to be the loser; put in another quarter to get on with the damn game already!
• While the original arcade game of Hard Drivin' was a popular, technically impressive, and fun racing sim, the Sega Genesis port simply could not do it justice in any factor. While the real-time polygon graphics were impressive for their time, especially for an early Genesis game (and with no extra chips or processors used), the single-digit framerate and very sluggish controls make it clear that the Genesis was in way over its head trying to accomplish such a game. Combine that with lousy physics (e.g. the giant loop-de-loop which is very hard to clear; when the car is sent flying in the air via the ramp, it can crash just from not being in the precise position you're supposed to land the car in), handling akin to sliding on ice (it's very easy to crash into other scenery or cars heading in your direction), a car so fragile that one hit will total it and send you back to the start or a checkpoint, and a strict time limit, and the game is nearly unplayable.
• Heavy Nova, a futuristic mecha action game for the Sega Genesis. The single-player campaign is mostly based around boss fights; the levels preceding them use the same game engine and controls as the fighting sections, and their brevity is perhaps for the better because they have some of the worst platforming ever committed to a 2D console. All of the onscreen enemies are a fraction the size of your character and are nearly impossible to hit because your moves are designed to strike enemies your own height. This means that you have one move that can strike anything in the single-player campaign - an awkward kick that requires you to be within pixels of whatever you're trying to strike as they rain Beam Spam down on you from all sides. The game's one-on-one fighting sections are no better - when you jump, all attacks pass through you, meaning you can make yourself completely invincible at will. This has implications for the multiplayer mode and some of the boss battles, with matches consisting of players spending most of their time jumping. Even without this stupid oversight, the different characters you can choose to fight with are completely imbalanced. Some have so few moves that they have unmapped buttons (on a Genesis controller), while others can spam distance attacks and have full suites of super moves. To top it all off, the game is hideous, with graphics that would've been a disappointment on the Sega Master System. The one good thing that can be said about the game is that it has a nice soundtrack (which sounds even better on the Japan-exclusive Sega CD version), but that hardly justifies playing this game. If you want to see more, watch the Continueshow version of the game here.
• Land of the Unicorn is a short MS-DOS edutainment game that certainly fails on the entertainment part. The game revolves around navigating a maze looking for a key to open a door while unscrambling synonyms and antonyms and avoiding trolls who ask for money, and then steal it anyway if you say you don't have enough. The game is extremely basic, with bad controls and eye-searing visuals that look like they were drawn in MS Paint and a simplistic ending featuring seizure-inducing lights. About the only good thing that could be said is the music is catchy, if out of place. Lazy Game Reviews took a look at this game to cap off Edutainment Month 2013, and was not at all amused.
• Last Battle (released in Japan as Fist of the North Star: New Legend of the Savior of Century's End) was one of the launch titles on the Genesis when it was released in the West, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it barely showed off the system's capabilities, and is a crappy and boring game besides. (It also received an Amiga port for no good reason.) Most stages are slow and trodding side-scrolling segments with enemies that are dumb as rocks and die in a single hit. The bosses are also too easy once the player figures out their patterns. The labyrinth-style stages are particularly frustrating, being even longer than the normal stages and a nightmare to navigate (with the sole "saving grace" being that the timer is disabled, so you can wander around lost until you die from sheer attrition due to the endless irritating traps). The only things going for the game are decent-ish graphics and sound, plus the game's plot (which is an adaptation of the manga and anime's later Celestial Emperor and Kaioh story arcs, considered by most to be the weaker parts of the manga) being spoiled in the manual and Opening Scroll, potentially saving you the trouble of playing the game. Levi Buchanan's retrospective review on IGN shows that time has not been kind to this game.
• Legend of Success Joe, a horrible excuse for a boxing game based on the legendary manga/anime Tomorrow's Joe. The gameplay alternates between very primitive Beat 'em Up segments in which Joe fights a few wimpy enemies that die in one punch before fighting bosses that instead refuse to die, and boxing matches based on famous battles of the series. The controls are clunky and unresponsive, the boxing matches are basically just beat-em-up segments that skip straight to the aggravating boss fights, and the music sounds like something out of an early Genesis/Mega Drive game even though this game was produced for one of the most powerful systems of the early 1990s. The graphics aren't much better - an ugly, overly bright color palette, nonexistent animation, and hunchbacked character sprites in a variety of baffling fighting postures. It was one of the few early Neo Geo titles that stayed in Japan, for good reason.
  • One year before Legend, there was an extremely rare arcade Punch-Out!! clone by the same developer, simply called Success Joe. It limits itself to the series' famous battles, but manages to be even worse. Alongside similarly clunky and unresponsive controls, the game features massive but poorly-drawn and choppily-animated sprites with anatomy and perspective issues, voice clips so scratchy that you can hear the noise in the background, and music by someone who clearly didn't know how to write or program music. It tops off with a particularly bizarre case of Not His Sled applied to the most famous and frequently-referenced scene from the manga in that Joe survives his final match and marries his girlfriend, complete with one of the worst versions of Mendelssohn's Wedding March ever. It's safe to say that this game makes Legend look like a masterpiece by comparison. This one-credit playthrough of the Japanese version, recorded on the original hardware, should give you an idea of the game's "quality".
• Lord of the Rings: Book 1, Interplay's attempt at adapting The Fellowship of the Ring to the SNES, quickly and flagrantly broke all the rules established in the books. You Shall Not Pass!? Well, not if the player decides to beat the Big Bad elsewhere first... if the player managed to make it that far, since glitches would often cause the mere act of walking to the next area to be fatal. You could finish the game as two unnamed Hobbit children and Bill the pony. Before the advent of GameFAQs, if you lost the manual, then you were boned - it had all the layouts of the dungeons (which were at least 50 screens long) printed within. It doesn't end there: Cutscenes, even ones that are supposed to take place in castles, are composed of Walls of Text between people standing in some field. Sprites are poorly made - only cloak color differentiates the hobbits from each other, and nobody except Gimli and Gandalf looks any different from the generic NPCs. The cities look like any other part of the world, except they have lazily designed houses in them. And in the end? You fight the Balrog, using the horrendous control scheme which causes you to either control every member of your party at once or let them wander around and die - not that it matters, as the fight is more or less Unwinnable anyway. There are noticeable loading times between areas despite this game being on the SNES. The game's sole redeeming point is its beautiful music... but it only has three tracks, and one of them is reserved for the title screen. Now here's Lost in the Warp Pipe and PeanutButterGamer to tell you about it.
• The Make My Video series was produced to build up the Sega CD's Interactive Movie library quickly without having to shoot original footage. All three games involved "editing" three videos with filters and silly stock clips. Even for the time, it was ridiculously limited. Since the Sega CD had limited video capabilities, the resulting videos were grainy, had a limited color palette, and were displayed on a very small portion of the screen (especially bad since all three videos are played at the same time). The "Kris Kross" release is often cited as the single worst Sega CD game which, considering the amount of crap in the add-on's U.S. library, is saying something. Spoony reviewed all three games for his "FMV Hell" series, as well as Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory, another game made in the same style.
• The Mario franchise was prey to a bevy of educational games, many of which were mediocre at best. The absolute nadir, however, would have to be Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun. It's ridiculously simplistic beyond the point of enjoyability, with all the gameplay built around generic preschool-level minigames that are less fun than an actual preschool class and quite often feel like they're talking down to preschoolers like they're morons. It's clear every word of the voice acting is an individual clip, as each word is emphasized and separated by a brief pause, to unsettling effect. The music is made up of dull and boring remixes of classic Mario songs mixed with preschool nursery rhymes, but framerate issues occasionally cause the music to glitch and change tempo. Finally, the graphics are grainy and makes everyone look off. ^note The shot of Peach in the preschool class is the stuff of nightmares. Antdude takes a look at the game as well as its companions Fun With Numbers and Fun With Letters here. Nintendo Power also took a look at it, noting that while it was on the right track to providing entertainment, the gameplay would become tedious to preschoolers fast without any elements beyond simple minigames.
• The DOS versions of Mega Man and Mega Man 3 had horrible controls and graphics (just look at the Robot Master/stage select screen◊ from the first game), nonexistent music (to go with the frequently-nonexistent sound cards), and terrible level design (the introduction level in the first game is a short, flat path to the Robot Masters' domains where you flee from a nearly-invincible robot guard dog who will get several hits in on you). In Mega Man 3: The Robots are Revolting (which was originally developed as an environmentally-themed game called Eco Man), the Robot Masters are obvious edits of the bosses of the NES Mega Man 2 and 3. It makes you wonder why Capcom allowed an unknown shovelware studio to use their mascot^note The game was made by someone with spare time who asked permission to publish it. Capcom approved it. If you played it on a fast-for-the-time PC, then the first DOS Mega Man would run at uncontrollably fast speeds. Yes, many DOS games were programmed to use the PC's processor clock cycles as an internal timer without an upper limit - the faster the processor ran, the faster the game ran. Games like this that were programmed for an 80286 processor are unplayably fast on modern computers (which are 500 times faster than a baseline 286). But still, that's really not supposed to happen while the game is still on the shelves. The reason there is no DOS Mega Man 2 is because one of the bosses in Mega Man 3 for DOS resembles the Robot Master on the American NES cover of Mega Man 3 (who's supposed to be Spark Man), so they titled it Mega Man 3 and used the same cover. Check out Yuriofwind's Obscure Gaming on the first game here, Vinny from Vinesauce streamed the first game here alongside some other awful DOS games, the AVGN covering both games here, or The D-Pad investigating and playing them both here and here.
• Metal Morph for SNES is a very rare entry for Origin (of Ultima fame) in the field of console action games, and playing it shows why. The game is about a being composed of living metal traveling into a wormhole and being captured by evil aliens who want to replicate his morphing ability to invade our universe. It's actually divided into platform sections, where the hero can turn into living metal a la T2 to avoid being hit and travel into pipes, and third-person space shooter sections making use of the SNES' Mode 7. As this article shows, the former sections are frustrating because of the convoluted level layouts, drab graphics, abundance of unlabeled switches, and the uncanny ability of the enemies to shoot you the exact moment you're out of the mostly-invincible living metal form (and you're also an One-Hit-Point Wonder). The latter sections feature headache-inducing flashing textures for the planets' sky and surfaces, poorly-done scaling effects that make it hard to tell your distance from enemies and other approaching obstacles, and Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups that give no indication of which type they are before you collect them. The controls are bad, the music is bad, the graphics are bad, and the ending shows that some traitor sold the aliens the secret of the metal morphing, making the entire rest of the game pointless. SNESdrunk reviews this turd here.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie received excellent adaptations on the Genesis, SNES, and Game Gear. The Game Boy version, on the other hand, is marred by sloppy hit detection, dodgy jumping mechanics, and a few stages that are so punishingly hard as to border on being practically unbeatable. The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed the game and was absolutely livid with how godawful it was.
• Pit-Fighter on the SNES, a port of the not particularly well regarded to begin with arcade fighter from Atari, may be the poster child for a Porting Disaster. What was originally a rather generic and unmemorable (but totally playable) one-on-one brawler is reduced to a game with graphics that would look terrible on the NES and controls that seem to do whatever they feel like doing regardless of your inputs. It's also missing the weapons and 3 of the characters from the arcade game. Pit Fighter will almost universally occupy one of the top 2 spots in any "Worst SNES games ever" list (with Race Drivin, which is the next entry on this list, taking the other spot in the top 2) and will usually make an appearance on any "Worst video games of all time" list.
• Race Drivin, the sequel to Hard Drivin', got a disastrous port of its own on the SNES. Take everything written about Hard Drivin above and imagine trying to do that on a processer that has less than half the clock speed (the SNES had almost no realtime-rendered 3D games compared to the Genesis for a reason, in fact Race Drivin is a great example of why the Super FX chip needed to be created), what you get is a game that goes from "nearly unplayable" to completely unplayable. It says something that it was completely outclassed by the Game Boy version of the game (Which was actually ported by Argonaut Software who helped developed the Super FX chip the SNES port so desperately needed). See for yourself.
• Read-A-Rama is an obscure edutainment PC game from no-name developer Selena Studios and distributed by Maxis in 1995. One glance could tell you why it fell into obscurity for over 20 years afterward. The game revolves around a genie enlisting your aid to find his lamp that was stolen by a giant, and the ensuing adventure plays out in a board game-like fashion with a few word-based activities each hosted by assorted characters. The problems are as follows: the gameplay is too linear and has the same activities more than once on the board, and even then the full extent of its educational content amounts to basic identifying and unscrambling words and such. Also, the overall setup is unappealing, with many a Flat Character present and accounted for given unimaginative names (e.g. "Thunder Drummer" and "Lightning Dude"), not to mention uncomfortably weird (a vibe especially apparent in the game's atrocious and downright-creepy artwork). Worst of all, once you do reach the end of the game board, there is a random chance of being told the door to the giant's castle is locked, which will send you back to the start of the game board and force you to go through everything a second time. And if you do manage to enter, but fail the Timed Mission within (which consists of clicking on random objects until you find the lamp, and then putting a buggy jigsaw puzzle together), you also have to start the whole game over. But before you can even experience it for yourself, you'll first have to sit through Selena Studio's excessively-long intro (see the folder on "Vanity Plates" for further info). Lazy Game Reviews covered it here and had nothing nice to say about. In fact, he openly suspected a possibility that Maxis might not have actually published it, and Selena could've simply tacked the name onto the box to fool customers...until he was horrified to discover a while after uploading it that they did indeed advertise it at least once, leading him to jokingly say he was no longer a Maxis fan.
• Revengers of Vengeance for the Sega CD (known in Japan simply as Battle Fantasy) sounds ridiculous from the title alone, but was otherwise a seemingly ambitious project: a 2D fighting game that combines elements of JRPGs and vertical shmups? That's something you don't see every day. Sadly, the game doesn't quite work out: it was developed by the same team behind the aforementioned Heavy Nova, and it shows. The core of the game, the 2D fighter, is horrendously glitchy and unbalanced. The RPG mechanics and shmup levels are very basic and lacking in depth. The only thing going for the game is that it looks nice, had decent cutscenes for a Sega CD game, and has good music, but those aren't quite enough to justify playing what is otherwise a very substandard game.
• Rise of the Robots promised a soundtrack by Brian May of Queen... which consisted of a short title tune. The rest of the music was written in-house at Mirage because May didn't get his music in by the deadline. (The techno soundtrack by Richard Joseph was actually praised by a few reviewers - it just wasn't what the game advertised.) The graphics looked utterly astounding, but because the animations were so detailed and fluid there was little wiggle room for gameplay and only a few moves possible per character. Worse, you could plow through the entire game by spamming the same attack over and over again, eliminating the need for any strategy or even learning much beyond the basic controls. Bafflingly for a mid-90s fighting game, the game doesn't allow you to use any of the other characters besides the protagonist in one-player mode, and even in two-player, one of the players has to play the protagonist. The roster is laughably unbalanced despite consisting of a paltry seven characters, and the AI alternates between "dumb as toast" and "predicts your inputs with flawless accuracy". One of the first games, and one of the few from the 2D era, that got excellent reviews on its graphics but poor ratings on everything else. There are some versions of the game are better than others (the 3DO version actually does have music by Brian May, plus the techno soundtrack as an option), while some are worse off (the Amiga and MS-DOS versions have no music, and the Genesis version has worse graphics and sound quality). The game was so bad that it was widely credited for causing the death of many British gaming magazines, due to several magazines giving it fraudulently high scores in the hopes of getting exclusive advance copies (one went so far as to score it higher than Doom II in the same issue!), which effectively destroyed their reputations. Play It Bogart takes a look at the SNES version here, while Kim Justice goes into the history of the game here. Matt McMuscles goes over the the history in his What Happened series, while discussing the flaws of each version in his The Worst Fighting Game series, where it came the closest to beating out Criticom as the worst fighter he's played.
• The Rocketeer received a few video game adaptations, but everyone agrees that the SNES version is the worst one. Most infamous is the game's opening stage, where the player is tasked with beating two airplane races, but constantly crash into obstacles; the trick to win is focusing on the tiny box in the HUD rather than the main screen. This is followed by generic Rail Shooter sections, which feature muddy graphics that make it hard to see the enemies, and Shoot 'Em Up stages with poor control, enemies that can attack you from places you can't get them, and the possibility to destroy power-ups. The game concludes with an overly simplistic fight scene and a "screen of text" ending. ScrewAttack placed the game third on their list of the worst superhero games, while The Angry Video Game Nerd commented that it might be the worst SNES game ever and Video Game Critic gave it an F- rating.
• The SNES version of Space Ace was meant to translate every single level from the Laserdisc original into a platformer. The controls are sluggish and unresponsive; combined with poorly placed hitboxes and fast-scrolling screens, which makes for a frustrating time. It is almost impossible to land your jumps, and missing jumps kill you in most levels. If you want to shoot someone, good luck - there are two buttons to draw your gun, one for each direction. Then there's the Space Maze, painful padding sandwiched between every level, where you have to steer your impossibly fast ship through a bunch of narrow alleys while shooting obstacles. The graphics are ugly at times - the developers did include a few of the cutscenes, but they're so grainy and disjointed that you have to wonder why they bothered. The result is a long, frustrating, poorly-designed mess. JonTron took a look at this game here.
• Spider-Man has spawned many video games, some notable for their good or poor quality. Spider-Man: The Sinister Six, an Adventure Game for the PC from small-time software publisher Byron Preiss Multimedia, slipped the notice of fans everywhere for over 20 years, for good reason. Right out of the gate, the game sports terrible graphics in the form of constantly Off-Model 2D animation against pre-rendered backdrops (inexcusable for a licensed PC game published in 1996, especially considering what came out the same year and before that). The gameplay does nothing to make up for it: in addition to a branching storyline, the game includes puzzle and action segments which (depending on the difficulty chosen at the start) can be ridiculously easy at best or excessively hard at worst^*Early on in the game, choosing the path to follow the police to the city bank leads to a Picross-esque puzzle (on hard mode) and simply clicking on a wrecking ball to destroy a dumpster containing a device (on easy mode). In a particularly ridiculous example, clicking on the hints to decode a message ("Find Smerdyakov or your wife dies.") later on gives a name which the player may not easily know how to spell at first, not helped by both the hint voiceover and Peter Parker pronouncing it differently., not helped by fiddly mouse controls. To top it all off, the branching choices don’t actually affect the plot until the game’s climax, and even then the player can easily pick the wrong paths during said climax, resulting in a bad ending—and the good ending is still insultingly anticlimactic. With nary a single redeeming quality in sight, it's not hard to see why it has spent so long in obscurity before Rerez took a look at it, showing no small amount of exasperation the whole time. And they weren't the only ones who disliked it, either; Matt McMuscles is completely dumbfounded throughout a Let's Play of the game here, and the Latin American Post calls it "Perhaps the worst Spider-Man game ever created" entirely because of its slow, ill-fitting gameplay.
• While the Genesis and Master System versions of Taz-Mania are considered good, or at least passable, the Game Gear version is an atrocious wreck. The graphics are hideous and the controls sluggish and awkward, which only adds to the Fake Difficulty that's already present (the first level involves outrunning a boulder and requires absolute perfection and ends with a Leap of Faith, while the second requires you to know the exact route through a runaway mine cart level or else you'll hit a dead-end and die). The only boss in the game is a serious case of Guide Dang It! (you have to jump up and hit hanging icicles with your spin attack, which for some reason causes fire to shoot out from the floor), and the sound and music...well, just have a listen for yourself.
• Tattoo Assassins is what happened when some people at Data East got the mistaken idea that they could compete with Mortal Kombat with half the budget and one-third of the development time of a typical arcade Fighting Game. The result was nearly unplayable, with poor moves, Artificial Stupidity, and an annoying parrot. The pointlessly hyped story (what with its loose connection to Bob Gale) fell flat. The game was also hyped to feature more Finishing Moves than any other fighting game, but that was because management threw in every idea they could think of regardless of how bad they were. It never went past the beta phase because they couldn't find testers who could bear to play it. If you really want to, you can find more information about this game on I-Mockery or watch Retsupurae riff the arcade mode here and the Fatalities here. For the record, Data East executive Joe Kaminkow defends the game, noting that people are still talking about it all these years later. An insider account of the game's development can be found here.
• Top Banana, originally for the Archimedes in 1991 but ported to the Amiga and Atari ST one year later, is Rainbow Islands if it was purely awful in every aspect. The game is meant to have an environmental theme but it's only elaborated on in the manual, as the trippy intro explains nothing and several of the enemies are hard to interpret. The graphics are painfully ugly: backgrounds look like random tiles jumbled together, while the protagonist looks like an ugly clown. The sound effects are either inappropriate or just plain creepy, such as an "mmm..." that sounds more like a disturbing moan when you pick up items. The controls are slippery and there's no way to control your jump height, so it's easy to bump your head into an enemy (taking damage knocks you off the platform you were on). Other awful mechanics include needing to shoot powerups before you collect them (otherwise you'll take damage) and a radiation mechanic that makes the already bad graphics and controls even worse. The worst part: you have only one life and no continues to beat the game, and all you get for your trouble if you manage to do so is an image.
• The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST versions of Turbo Outrun were a Porting Disaster of epic proportions, with abysmal frame rates and utterly failing to give any sense of movement or speed - the road and scenery seemed to move around your car rather than vice-versa. The ineptitude of the conversion was emphasised both by the fact that the concurrent and similar Lotus series of racing games on the same platforms were light years ahead in quality and that reviewers who’d played the Commodore 64 version as well ranked it higher despite it being a full generation behind in power and graphical ability. See The Pixel Empires take on the debacle here.
• Ultraman has not had a lot of exposure in the West compared to other Toku franchises like Super Sentai/Power Rangers or Kamen Rider^note At least until Tsuburaya won its bid to be the rightful IP owner of the Ultra Series and focusing on a global expansion for the franchise in 2019, along with critical and commercial acclaim of Ultraman Z in the following year., and the SNES game based on Ultraman: Towards the Future, which was a re-skinned version of a game based on the original Ultraman series, does it no favors. For a fighting game, the controls are too stiff, the hitboxes too dissonant, and the Difficulty Spike after the first few stages practically insurmountable, on top of an ending that will make no sense and feel like a smack in the face to anyone who hasn't seen the series the game was based on. The game's biggest problem is the idea of charging and waiting for your super meter to finish off the monster. While this sounds like a cool idea in theory, in practice it means that if you fire your strongest finisher out too soon, you'll have no choice but to wait around while the enemy's health regenerates. If you fire a weak finisher at the end of the match, it'll not affect the monster, and you'll have to wait around yet again while the enemy's health regenerates. SNES Works reviews it here.
• At first glance, The Wacky World of Miniature Golf with Eugene Levy looks at least decent: The graphics and animations are rather fun, and Eugene Levy as the game's host gets the occasional laugh as well. So what propels the game from what could have been one of the few decent titles on the CD-i to horrible levels? Well, you know how in every golf game you rely on the power and aim of your swing and the conditions of your environment to reach the hole? Rather than that tried-and-true formula, the game is almost completely timing-based with no options on the power of your swing or the like due to the game being based around FMV footage. Okay, so you just pay attention to the obstacles for when to swing, right? Nope, the outcome is almost completely random: even if what should have been the correct shot was made, the game arbitrarily decides when to let your ball pass. The game is almost entirely trial and error until you make the correct putt. It's completely mindless, frustrating, and tedious with only 18 holes to play, though that might be a blessing in disguise. See the Game Grumps play it here, with the normally optimistic and chill Danny going completely mental at the game.
• While The Wizard of Oz is a classic still enjoyed by many today, the same cannot be said for its SNES adaptation, which was inexplicably developed and released 50 years after the film itself. The game is a mess of poor level design, ineffective attacks, sometimes inexplicable ways for you to take damage (mice attacking while on the wooden fence despite you not even being on the same level as the fence), levels that require power-ups to finish but don't tell you until it's too late, and alternate characters with useless abilities who don't come back if they die (which is very likely). While not terrible visually, the graphics for stages are very cluttered and often don't make it clear what is and isn't a platform. But what really seals the game's fate is a Game-Breaking Bug that makes it so you can fall through platforms even if you clearly landed on them, which renders the game nearly unplayable. The Angry Video Game Nerd tackled it here and blasted it for its horrendous Fake Difficulty while ThuNoob shared his sentiment.
• Zelda's Adventure is one of the unholy trinity of Legend of Zelda CD-i games created from Nintendo's ill-fated partnership with Phillips, and unlike Link: Faces of Evil or Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, can't even be enjoyed as So Bad, It's Good: it's easily the worst game of the bunch. Unlike the other two games, this one is designed more like the first Legend of Zelda game and the other top-down games as opposed to the 2D side-scrolling style of Zelda II, but not even returning to the series' roots does this game any favors. The graphics are an ugly and blurry mess, the sound design is so poor that the game is incapable of playing music and sound effects together (not that either is any good), Loads and Loads of Loading abounds when traversing the world, the controls are uncooperative to the point of being practically rebellious against the player, and the only way to do well in the game is through trial and error to figure out what item works against which enemy. Perhaps worst of all, the cutscenes aren't even ironically enjoyable like the other Zelda CD-i games, being horrendously-acted live-action scenes that wouldn't even pass muster for public-access cable television. Danny Cowan of 1UP.com absolutely hated it, which speaks volumes since he actually had praise for the other Zelda CD-i titles. It also earned a dishonorable entry in Hardcore Gaming 101's "Your Weekly Kusoge" courtesy of John Sczepaniak, who tried his hardest to redeem its predecessors.

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