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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."

3 of 455 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    --
    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.

  2. 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.