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Top Ten Shameful Games
Ant writes "Not necessarily the worst, but the most wrong -- here are 10 of the most seriously flawed titles of all time according to GameSpy."
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I know it's new years, so people are apt to make lists and such. But why all the "worst games" lists? I know I've seen 3 or 4 in the past week.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
They didn't mention the "Lunar Lander" game on a HP-65 pocket calculator??? There was a lame game if there ever was one...
It was Donkey Kong for the Intellivision. Yeah, I'm sure it was worse than the other versions, but hey, I didn't know any better. I played the hell out of that thing. Play control was fine enough for me.
As for Action 52, as the story hints at, there is a pretty funny and interesting story that goes along with the game. Here's a link to the Something Awful Rompit Review of Action 52, and go here
for the Gamefaqs.com reviews page for Action 52. I've rarely laughed as hard as I did reading this stuff.
On a side-note, if you are at all into video games, browsing Gamefaqs for the reviews of really bad games can be a laugh riot sometimes. There are a few people who seem to make it their mission to completely eviscerate the worst offenders of the old cartridge console games. Some of the crappy PSX games get some hilarious reviews, too. For when you've got some surfing time, at least.
9. Mutant League Hockey: following the glorious Mutant League Football.
8. DreamWeb (the first R18 game?). Birds eye view shooting, sex, and gameplay.
7. Second Samarai. Boringly competant.
6. Snaparazzi (game sponsored by a newspaper)
5. Microcosm by Psygnosis.
4. Humans (lemmings ripoff)
3. Epic by Ocean
2. James Pond/Robocod's Aquatic Games
1. Dangerous Streets CD32 edition.
Every kid I knew in the 7th and 8th grade was excited about the prospect of playing Pac Man at home. No more trips to the arcade. No more standing in line. No more scrounging for quarters. Everything was going to be right with the world.
On the day of the game's release, there were lines at the electronics stores, lines at Sears, lines at K-Mart, lines everywhere that sold 2600 stuff. Some places had given out lottery bracelets (like they do at ticketmasters). But there were lines anyway. All these people were waiting to bring the magic of Pac Man home with them.
Then the game came home. What a horrible, horrible dissapointment it was. Ugh. I think that was the beginning of the end for Atari. They pissed off a lot of kids (and parents) with that piece of crap.
This was also about the time that the TRaSh 80 was out, along with the Commodore and Vic machines (I think). Anyway, some of us started getting interested in computer based games after the Pac man debacle. Shortly after that, a number of us left our 2600's behind for the promise of real computers.
Personally, I haven't had a new game console since the 2600. Not because of the Pac Man mess though. I don't see the point of having a dedicated, fixed hardware game platform. A PC does so much more, and the games are generally better than those available on a console.
Huh?
The list was interesting.
Though I am wondering why they could not have a special mention slot for "Extreme PaintBrawl". The damn thing just didn't work, the printed cover was pretty though.
I had a Apple II version of that Pitfall game, it was called "Montazuma's Revenge" but the graphics were the same. We loved the levels and my dad thought the title was just hilarious. (Slang term for having "the runs".)
The problem is, some of the most shameful and horrible games ever made were never released widely, much less heard of by the unwashed masses. In the days when shareware was common and copying was the best available method of distribution, and when programming was a hobby and not strictly a profession for most gamemakers, countless horrors and abominations were spawned which have since been deleted and/or forgotten completely, save for in that special, wonderful, (actually is) floppy disk which they no longer have a drive to read it with underneath the creator's paper stack somewhere near his computer, which he stares at nostalgically when he's depressed. That is where the real shameful games come in.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Okay, maybe this isn't the worst, but it's certainly one of the worst: Sim Box Stacker, also known as Trespasser.
Trespasser involved hours of tedius box stacking, where the boxes were coated with some sort of virtual slimy substance that caused them to slide off of each other and drop to the ground at the slightest nudging. One had to be extremely careful to avoid getting too close to a box, or it would slide down next to you and become embedded in your own body. You would then be forced to trudge around dragging a huge heavy box that had somehow become molded into your hip, or if you turned around to face it and looked down, blended into your giant breasts.
The protagonist of Sim Box Stacker was Giant Breast Girl. Giant Breast Girl had only one arm, a robotic contraption with weak rubber bands controlling the motion and the inability to hang on to things like guns when walking through doors. A typical combat scenario would go something like this:
After two hours of stacking boxes to form yet another set of steps needed to get over the three-foot-high fence, Giant Breast Girl sees a dinosaur. She selects a rifle and grasps it with her flimsy gripping tool, but the end of the rifle catches on the edge of a box and is knocked out of her grasp. The dinosaur edges closer. Giant Breast Girl picks up the rifle and it waves about like a bowling ball on the end of a bamboo pole, eventually comimg to rest aimed in the general direction of the dinosaur. The dinosaur is four feet away by this time. Giant Breast Girl attempts to fire the weapon, and Trespasser's innovative physics engine applies three pounds of trigger force to the weapon, causing it to push backward out of Giant Breast Girl's grip and lodging in her body. Giant Breast Girl now has a rifle butt sticking out of her back and so on and so forth...
The game was the subject of much hearty and satisfying derision on my part, so I kinda liked it. On a truly positive note however, it raised the bar on rendering outdoor landscapes. One of its levels that involved climbing a mountain did a better job of conveying a sense of dizzying height and certain doom if one slipped than any game I've seen since.
I noticed that the NES version of Super Pitfall is on the list way up at number two. Yet a worse version exists, sadly....
And that would be the version that was released for the Tandy Color Computer 3. I never played the NES version but I do own still the CoCo version. I imagine it has all the bad gameplay of the NES version. But I can't imagine the NES version playing as sluggishly as the CoCo version. I mean this game runs slooooooooooow.
(I liked 2600 PacMan)
My dad brought me back Pac-man for the 2600 when he went on a business trip back in the 80's.
I admit I was a bit disappointed because it didn't look exactly like the arcade game, but you know what? I still liked that game a lot. I was like 10, but even then I knew that the 2600 wasn't supposed to be exactly like the arcade, and it was good enough for me. I mean, come on... I played games like Combat and Starship, and that was fun enough back then. There are plenty of other games that were much worse than that.
ET (as was mentioned) and Raiders of the Lost Ark was much much worse.
The worse game of all time: Swordquest Earthworld. From the advertisements in the comic books, it looked awesome! The graphics looked great. Only, once I got it, I had no friggin' idea of how to play the game. The original cartridge came with a comic book that was more interesting than the game.
I never figured out what the point of the game was, and it was so annoying. Being a kid, I kept trying to figure it out, burning hours and hours on that thing. Once, only once did I ever get to level 2, and I had no idea what I did to get to level 2. It sure as hell wasn't from completing all those "tasks" in those rooms.
Plus, how can anyone leave Trespasser off the list of worst gaming travesties? Not only was the game monumentally awful, but it was also accompanied by such stomach churningly over-the-top hype from Seamus "Media Whore" Blackley, that the resulting derision meant that he later felt compelled to 'redeem' himself by attempting to take credit for the Xbox.
Thes rest, as they say, is history...
Some 2600 Roms have been hacked by people who I suppose wanted to expunge some bad memories. Ms. Pacman for the 2600 wasn't at all bad and somebody hacked it into a fairly arcade-faithful Pacman. Since Ms. Pacman was decent to start with, the hacker limited it to one maze that is a good approximation of arcade Pacman's maze. The prizes were fixed in place below the ghosthouse and edited to match arcade Pacman's prizes. Go to Atari Age and check it out.
Several credible jobs were done on reforming space invaders. There is no reason why 2600 Space Invaders couldn't have been more accurate as this proves.
Oh well, anyone who played games in the early eighties knew that crap was rushed out the door. Most of us bought it anyway. Me too. Suckers....
They didn't mention Frogger and Flight Simulator for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 / Sinclair ZX81! Unngh! Man oh man did I hate loading in those games from cassette, hoping the input level wasn't too low or too high, otherwise I wasted 15 minutes attempting to load the programs. Then there was that aweful monocolor BLACK and WHITE ONLY graphics, the membrane keyboard that was SMALLER than my hand, the 4 Megehurts Zilog Z80A. And you couldn't pound on the keyboard too hard during game play, you'd dislodge the 16K RAM Pack from the back expansion port, killing your game, and wasting another 15 minutes loading it back in from cassette. Ah...the good'ol glory days of computing I will tell to my grandchildren.
Otherwise I agree, but I don't think the survival and development of OpenGL has depended on games (or even the PC platform in general) at any time. After all, it still goes on in the Unix workstation world where it spread from (whether SGI is a doomed company or not). I admit I don't know how to factor in Microsoft's membership in the OGL Architecture Review Board... Regardless, of course Carmack has done a major contribution to evangelising OGL for PC games!
As an aside, what's going on with Mesa GL? Anything?