Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
This has already been done here.
The two lists seem to be very similar...
I still haven't found the "any" key.
... otherwise they'd be the number one most shameful game. Taking bets at which community they will buy out and kill next.
Hate me!
You can tell its the xmas / new year break as 'news' becomes 'reporters top ten ...'
There must be *something* going on somewhere?
50% of the games which have been created for PC
Something Awful has:
Game reviews
and
The ROM Pit
Don't say I didn't warn you.
They should have called this article "Top Ten Shameful Games on Consoles No One Under 20 Has Ever Heard Of".
Any shameful game list just HAS to include the disaster called Outpost that was released for the PC in the early 90's. It had a great guide (sold separately) that made the game look great. Too bad most of those features didn't actually make it into the game. What a stinker.
Atari 2600? NES? Coleco? Seems like most of these games are ancient by industry standards. I think that it's kind of beating a dead horse. The industry was in it's infancy, people really were still defining what a video game was - of course there would be some spectacular duds. Goes with the territory.
What about recent titles that were 'shameful'? Would someone from Jerry Falwell's congregation like to chime in?
This list is simply hillarious. For the worst of the worst games (i.e. Custer's Revenge) I was thinking that the screenshot shows a cowboy shooting to the left an Indian to the right. But... the explanation is about pr0n. LOL....
Go straight to this game's explanation.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Does anyone remember this digital trainwreck? Your character is 2 pixels worth of ghostbusting hero and the climax of the game involves you repeatedly pressing a "climb" button to go up 30+ floors to the top of a building to fight StayPuff Marshellow Man. I actually beat the game once, and the win screen was a simple typed message thanking you for playing "this truly awesome game!!!"
After playing this piece of shit I no longer wanted my eyes.
Does anyone really care what Gamespy thinks? I can't help but laugh when I see these articles. Their website has become nothing more than a playground for hive-minded children looking to find this weeks new "cool" words and get fed advertisement driven "content" on the game industry. Their webmasters have a collective gaming experience on par with what you could find at and local Wal-Mart's nintendo kiosks. Check the insightful gameplay guides/tips of any planet site. PlanetQuake and PlanetWarcraft are prime examples; they're both full of laughable advice.
Furthermore, their bullying and underhanded tactics towards the entire industry is damaging everyone (try to use a game finding tool other than Gamespy -- the alternatives don't support as many games, thanks to "exclusive content"). Their entire site, as defined by virtually every hardcore gamer I know, is a complete joke. There are many interesting websites out there dealing with games. Please quit linking to the worst one.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
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?
Seanbaby.com - EGM's Crapstravaganza: The 20 Worst Games of All Time He has a few of the same titles (ET, Superman 64, and Custer's revenge), and, in my opinion, has much funnier reviews. I really enjoyed it, this is just for if anybody else cares for a second list like this.
The next generation model, the SR-71 "Blackbird", left its calculator roots behind, focusing more on high speed and flying really really high in the air.
- Peter
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.
It's not just offensive, it's unplayably bad.
The entire gameplay is on that one screen, moving toward the woman while dodging arrows. The arrows fall in a random, unpredictable, unlearnable pattern. They often appear in volleys that cover too much area for it to be possible to avoid them.
All in all, the perfect choice for the worst game ever.
But why all the "worst games" lists?
The usual hype. But I was surprised by the lack of one hugely important game:
Hunt the Wumpus.
Hunt the Wumpus was apparently an old Unix text-based RPG, which Texas Instruments brought to life on their under-rated but massively overbuilt TI-99/4A home computer in 1980 or so.
The TI-99/4A (and its rare older brother, the TI-99/4) had a 16 bit TMS9900 processor chip (in 1979 and 1981, boys and girls!), a kick-butt video chip (the TMS9918) which had 32 sprites and a video overlay feature. But Texas Instruments, a company which is/was making more chips than Frito-Lay, hobbled the machine by using the video chip's RAM as the console's main memory, bottlenecking the expanded memory down to 8 bits, and creating the single slowest BASIC interpreter ever designed by having it interpreted TWICE (from BASIC to GPL - "Graphics Programming Language" - then to machine language).
With this nasty kludge, they released a graphical version of Hunt The Wumpus. Horrible sound effects, and game play which made you feel like you were drunk and on LSD. Oh, and attempting to add graphics to an old text-only game is doomed to fail, don't even attempt it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"Because of his desire to penetrate the American market, [Shigeru] Yamauchi wanted the game to have an English name. Since Miyamoto spoke only a little English, he used a Japanese-English dictionary to find the correct words for the title. He wanted to name the game after the ape -- "Stubborn Gorilla." Looking throught the dictionary, Miyamoto selected the word Donkey as a synonym for stubborn and the word Kong for gorilla."
Another interesting tidbit from the book:
"Before Namco showed Pac-Man to Midway, one change was made to the game. Pac-Man was originally named Puck-Man, a reference to the puck-like shape of the main character. [Masaya] Nakamura worried about American vandals changing the "P" to an "F." To prevent any such occurence, he changed the name of the game."
"So when you're there in class, learning `his story' Learn a little of your story, the real story" -- Boogie Down Productions, "Part Time Sucker"
Ok, so it looked far worse than the original, but personally I was amazed they managed it at all, given the miserable hardware the 2600 had! The machine was designed to display 2 player sprites, 2 missile sprites, a ball and a playfield which was basically a vertical line, unless the video chip was preloaded each X scanlines. Remember, the machine had 128 BYTES of work RAM and NO graphics RAM, so the entire background and sprites had to be redrawn by the program every frame.
It's no wonder the ghosts flickered, it must have been impossible for the little 8 bit CPU to manage to keep everything on screen all the time at 25pfs...
There's an old article about programming the 2600 here which may open a few eyes!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.