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Top Ten Shameful Games

Posted by michael on from the cowboyneal's-revenge dept.

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."

11 of 455 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of these lately by colmore · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
  2. That's it? by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They didn't mention the "Lunar Lander" game on a HP-65 pocket calculator??? There was a lame game if there ever was one...

  3. I owned one of 'em, and liked it! by analog_line · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. 2600 Pac Man by wideBlueSkies · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Huh?
    1. Re:2600 Pac Man by ClosedSource · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There were technical reasons why the graphics were so bad. If you want to have a game like Pac Man look good on the 2600, you have to insure that only one ghost appears in the same horizontal scan lines as the Pac Man. That's because there are only 2 "high resolution" players (objects) available in a single scan line.

      In order to preserve the Pac Man gameplay, Atari didn't follow that rule and had to multiplex the players. Thus the anoying blinking.

      One of the reasons that games from Activision had much better graphics, was because their games were designed around the limitations of the 2600.

  5. A worse version of Super Pitfall exists! by vistic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)

  6. A pretty arbitrary list by tc · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Does seem to be a somewhat arbitrary list, with a puzzling bias for games on very old systems. Sure, Custer's Revenge is clearly a shameful heap of junk, but some of the other choices seem arbitrary. Impossible Mission on the 2600 is not the only game to have shipped that was inadvertently impossible to beat, and as the article notes, it was otherwise a decent product.

    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.

  7. Donkey Kong Engrish by rigmort · · Score: 4, Interesting
    In The First Quarter, a history of video games, Steven L. Kent claims that the Japanese version translated to "Stubborn Gorilla"; for lack of a better word for stubborn, the word Donkey was used.

    Thes rest, as they say, is history...

  8. 2600 Pacman & Space Invaders could've been bet by dmaxwell · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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....

  9. What about games released for Timex/Sinclair 1000? by alchemist68 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. OpenGL and Microsoft... by Puu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?