Slashdot Mirror
The 50 Worst Videogame Names of All Time
Game Revolution has a great feature looking at fifty of the worst-named games ever to require a controller. They dig deep here, unearthing gems like 'Yo! Noid!', 'Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!', and 'Huygen's Disclosure'. From the article: "From Dick Butkus to Hootie and the Blowfish to Lake Titicaca, bad names have been with us forever. But thanks to the inevitable collision of reclusive nerds, bizarre artists and painfully unhip marketing execs, the video game industry enjoys some of the worst names of all. The following list was compiled after hours of lively debate, pages of exhausting science and one actual geek fistfight."
It's dated today, but I could swear I "Stumbled" upon this yesterday evening.
It was on Digg last week.
The absolute worst game ever is Pong. Even the name is stupid - as bad as calling a game Stink or Smell. It's meant to be some kind of tennis game. I daren't actually call it tennis though - the rules are completely wrong and there's no attempt to simulate the net. The rendering is stupendously bad - the ball isn't even round, it's a white square! And the bats or rackets are merely white rectangles. Even the scores are written with blocky text.
The controls are about as primitive as you can get - usually a rotary controller that allows you to move your racket up or down in one dimension. The sound effects have to be heard to be believed - they are merely beeps each time a ball is hit. No attempt at any kind of simulation. The physics is completely trivial. There is almost no opportunity for the exercise of any kind of skill.
Of course Pong will have its apologists. People who will say it's as good as the technology allowed it to be. Sure, it was good for its day (which isn't saying much, there was no competition at the time so no motivation to actually do anything good), but objectively it was the worst game ever made. It sold purely because nobody had seen any video game before, not because it had any inherently good qualities. Some engineer scraped together the bare minimum device that could be called a 'game' given the technology that was available. And believe me, it truly is the bare minimum of a game. The graphics make the rendering in every single game in the bottom 50 list look like the best painting of the Renaissance. Pointing a flashlight at a wall and making the spot of light go up and down probably has as much right to be called a video game and it's about as much fun.
And just in case you're too young to have played this game on a console, you can play it online here. I think you'll see I haven't exaggerated one bit.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.