RF Generation Message Board

Well, the title says it all: this topic's gonna be about the worst games ever conceived on any system. And not merely the obvious ones, i.e. those reviewed by the AVGN...no, how about some of the more obscure, or, dare I say it, worse games?
In order to get started, here's a pretty good list of the worst games featured in the German video game magazine Maniac (they did a monthly feature called "Hall of Shame", both in the mag as well as on DVD).
ATARI 2600
Superman
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
E.T.

COMMODORE C64
Vigilante
Double Dragon
Chuck Norris

NES
The Muppets: Chaos at the Carnival
Chubby Cherub
Bible Adventures

SEGA MASTER SYSTEM
RoboCop 3
Back to the Future 2
The Terminator (declared to be one of the hardest games ever)

PC ENGINE
Altered Beast
China Warrior
Darkwing Duck

GAME BOY
Alien 3
Batman Forever
Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat 4

ATARI LYNX
Hard Drivin'
Pitfighter
World Class Soccer

SEGA MEGA DRIVE / GENESIS
Primal Rage
Shaq Fu
Rise of the Robots
Heavy Nova

SUPER NINTENDO
Home Alone 2
Barbie Super Model
Barbie Vacation Adventure
Beethoven's 2nd

NEO GEO
Andro Dunos
Power Spikes II
The Legend of Success Joe
The Super Spy (honorable mention)

PLAYSTATION
Beast Wars
Pax Corpus
Contra: Legacy of War
C: The Contra Adventure

3DO
Sewer Shark
Strahl
Kingdom: The Far Reaches
Way of the Warrior
Virtuoso

ATARI JAGUAR
Club Drive
Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy
Checkered Flag

NINTENDO 64
Earthworm Jim 3D
Mega Man 64
Superman 64

DREAMCAST
Sonic Shuffle
Star Wars: Demolition
Roadster

Well, what do you think of their choices? Do some of these games really rank among the worst on their respective system? And what are your picks for the most misguided attempts at creating a video game? Keep in mind that I mean games that feature flaws such as
- awfully long load times
- horrific camera
- extremely short length
- obscure goals that are anything but self-explanatory
- catastrophic, unresponsive controls
- unbearable music
- game breaking bugs and glitches (I once heard of one in Ren & Stimpy: Time Warp...)
- cheesy, low-quality production values (see: Interactive Movies)
- bad translation
and so forth. So, please, don't bring in quality games a lot of people love to pick on, such as Final Fantasy X-2 (yeah, I hate the "Charlie's Angels" approach and dumb dialogue sequences, too, but it's far from being one of the worst games ever). Pick the bottom of the barrell and share your experience with us - though they may be sad and unfortunate, but hey, gaming as hobby consists of dealing with bad games, too.

Before I go, here are a couple of low-budget games some magazines used to pick on, and rightly so, even though hardly anyone actually knows them:
The Sniper 2 (PlayStation 2; kinda like a low budget Silent Scope with unbearable graphics...)
Eternal Quest (PlayStation 2; low-budget dungeon-crawl featuring some of the most idiotic background-visuals ever)
McFarlane's Evil Prophecy (PlayStation 2)
Groove Rider: Slot Car Thunder (PlayStation 2)
GSG9 / SAS: Anti Terror Force (PlayStation 2)
Beach King Stunt Racer (PlayStation 2)
King's Field 4 (PlayStation 2)
Riding Star (PlayStation)
Young Indiana Jones (Sega Genesis)
Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue (Nintendo 64)
Ubik (PlayStation)
Tiny Toon Adventures: Toonenstein (PlayStation)
Moorhuhn 3 (Game Boy Advance)
every single Army Men game ever conceived (except for maybe Army Men: Air Attack)

Sonic Shuffle is by far the most boring game on the Dreamcast.  I spent 8 hours playing it once, and after the first few it was more of a contest to make it to my Top 5 hated.  The verdict:
Graphics: Beautiful - Hudson Soft did wonders with this license
The rest: Horrible.  Why?  Long loads, and longer gameplay.  Try sitting through one game.  This board game rivals Monopoly in length, and that's with animations turned off.  It tried to be Mario Party and failed.  Eggman tries to f*** you over every other move, and waiting through a long loads just to see the animated result of your move (be it a penalty or reward) means less play, more waiting.

Star Wars: Demolition - Isn't as bad as people make it out to be.  While it is on par with the other Star Wars games of the time, I did enjoy the brief play through it deserved.  Should someone be having a seriously difficult time with it, cheat codes are available to unlock all characters (including a hidden Darth Maul) which should make it an easy clear for anyone.  The gameplay itself wasn't memorable for being good or bad.

Some DC games will surprise you like Expendable and Mickey's Magical Racing Tour, but there are some others truly deserving of the "Worst of" treatment.

For DC here's some on my "Worst" list:
Mortal Kombat Gold
WWF Attitude
South Park: Chef's Luv Shack
Blue Stinger

I also nominate Bubsy 3D for the PS1 to be added to the list.  I'll post more later

You'll probably find most people's answer already over at
http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=6282.0

I will definitely agree with Attitude, smoother graphics and faster loading times doesn't save it, the PS1 version and this really suck.

I personally liked Blue Stinger however.

What about Cave Man Games for the NES. I got it off eBay and couldn't figure out how to play it, and when I did, I always lost.

Shag Fu I heard sucks
Friday the 13th sucked donkey balls on the NES.
Tomb Raider for the Dreamcast was bad too.

This game is not bad at all!

I have been fortunate enough to play none of the games listed so far. 

What is wrong with Mega Man 64? Mega Man Legends is one of my favorite games of all time, and wasn't MM64 just a port?

You know, I've gotten to where I really like the 2600 Superman. It was ahead of its time and it's actually fun when you know how to play it. I would take that one off the worst game list.

P.S. Don't forget about White Men Can't Jump!
Super Pitfall for NES is also pretty awful.

It's a little late or I could probably think of a whole bunch more

@Chainclaw
Well, Mega Man Legends probably isn't a bad game at all, even though opinions are kinda mixed on Mega Man's debut (even though I have to admit that part 2 is a considerable improvement over the first one).
The problem with Mega Man 64 is that it is indeed a simple port...or, to be more precise, a shoddy, rushed port that was 3 years too late. Why? Well, the game came out in 2001, during the last days of the N64, and yet Capcom did not even attempt to adapt analog controls for the game. That's right, you can only use the digi pad...for a game that came out in 2001, when analog controls were already common, that's a pretty sad statement. Because of that, the controls are nightmarish, and the camera doesn't really help within the labyrinths or while trying to target an enemy. The graphics are, amazingly enough, slightly worse than those of the PSX original. While Mega Man Legends featured rather impressive visuals for a 3D PSX game, it was quite pixilated, to be frank. Mega Man 64, however, features washed out and unclear graphics...a German reviewer once described his experience of looking at the game like this: "Looking at Mega Man 64 feels as if you were looking through a glass of milk." Wow, pretty harsh. The game scored 37% in MAN!AC magazine, by the way. The reason it was included in their hall of shame was the fact that they wanted to focus on failed 2D-to-3D experiments, and Mega Man 64 as well as Earthworm Jim 3D are sad examples in this case.

  When you are talking about bad Atari 2600 games, you must always include "Pac-Man",  what a piece of shit!!  I remember when I was a kid and when Pac-man" went on sale, it took about 6 stores till I found a copy and when I played it, I alsmost threw the damn game out the window. 

 

I think for the most part, Pac-Man for the 2600 gets crapped on a bit too much because of all the arcade comparisons. It's obvious that the 2600 could never match the arcade for looks & sounds or even gameplay, the system just never had that kind of capability. I think many just expected arcade quality and were disappointed or mislead in believing the 2600 could give it to them. They had to wait for the much more powerful 5200 to do that.

In all fairness, Pac-Man for the 2600 isn't any worse than say Lock 'n' Chase, Dark Cavern, Lady Bug or many other similar games in comparison. Even 20-25 years later homebrews haven't improved on it so much that it can be faulted to the original programmers. The 2600 just has too many limitations based on it's hardware.

unfortunately the only game of all that list i got.  I thought it was pretty good...I beat it, not much replay value after that though.  Music was meh.

I have Fester's Quest....what a buckload of sh*t

Wayn's World should be on that list.

I always remember Silver Surfer for the NES was the hardest thing ever, just about unplayable.

As far as more recent games, I would probably add NiGHTS: Journey Of Dreams for the Wii. So linear and boring! 

@hXd
Nights: Journey of Dreams?! Wow...I haven't played that one yet, but honestly...would you really put a Sega game in the same league as Super fruitfall, Far Cry Wii or other Wii crap? I mean, Sega might have been going downhill for a couple of years, but come on...they're still better than that. At least Nights has some fantastic musical pieces, and the graphics are damn good for a Wii game.

Fortunately, I've been staying away from bad games ever since I started playing video games in 1993, but there are some stinkers I had the "pleasure" of getting my hands on. How about Space Ace on the SNES, for example? To tell you the truth, I've never been a fan of Don Bluth and his body of work, and his films - especially An American Tail - gave me nightmares as a small kid. Too dark, too realistic, too complicated for a child, despite the fact that he was at least trying to accomplish something other than mere entertainment with his films. As for Space Ace, I never liked the look of the Interactive Movie to begin with. And then, we have a conversion of a playable movie to a "simple" 2D game on the SNES. I tried to play it as a kid - and I stress the word "tried" - and all I can say is that they managed to capture the essence of the FMV game. In other words: it's an unplayable, frustrating mess, a trial and error piece more than anything else. Awful controls, annoying sounds...damn, I hate this game. Quite possibly among the worst SNES games (ironically, a German Nintendo magazine gave Space Ace the lowest rating possible, mark F+, and the only SNES game that received a worse score is Beethoven's 2nd...go figure).

Similarly, I also tried to play Dragon's Lair on the NES, and it has the same problems as Space Ace. At least I managed to make some progress into the castle, at least up to that skeleton king (after trying and dying countless times in each screen...), from then on, I lost my patience and my will to figure out how to beat that sucker...what an awful game...reccomended to the absolute hardcore crowd only...those who have to beat even the shittiest games to prove their worth as a gamer (and my regards to those with enough patience to waste their time on Dragon's Lair...for the love of God, I simply couldn't).

I forgot all about Shaq-Fu until it got a mention on this TNA Spin-Cycle just gone.
http://www.tnawrestling.com/content/view/864/84/

I think Shaq-Fu has way too many haters, and I wasn't surprised to see it on the list. It has been years since I played it, but I use to be a hardcore fighting game nut prior to the death of 32bit gaming, and remember playing it through with each character to see their endings.

I have played far worse games than this one, and especially fighting ones that I wouldn't dream of playing through with each character.

Rise of the Robots springs to mind. You get given the crapest robot of all, and can't pick any of the cool ones. Play a two player game and player one is doomed to be beaten as even then they have no choice, but player two does, they can pick any of the superior robots in the game.

Criticom was also most painful to play, the Japanese title Fist, and Pretty Fighter on SNES would all be much worse titles, and yet Shaq-Fu has this rap of being one of the worst.

Hey now most people here is complaining about

ports
commercial games
Remakes
milked series

You all have to understand that the following above will allways get a bad outcome take for example.


Ports.

Street Fighter II
Sonic Adventure
Beyond Good and Evil PS2


These above got screwed with along with many others just to have the idea of the same game on each system. A port will never be a top dog when released only when the original port is a lesser system and then upgraded to a higher up system.

Like the following

Rocket Knights Gen to SNES
Megaman NES to Gen
Beyond Good and Evil PC to X-Box and GCN
Resident Evil Saturn to PSX to Dreamcast to PS2 to GCN

Then there is commercial games which is basically me taking a comic book, animation, film, book, toys or anything else and transforming into a game.
Like the following below


Any cartoon series you could think of
Phantom 2040
freddy Cugar
2000 leages under the sea.
Water world
The Matrix

The problem with commercial games is that sometimes the source gives a damn about what the game outcome is going to be like. However another problem is the game might have the same name as the source but does something completly diffrent like

Sweet Home
The Haunted House
Dragons Breath
Enter The Dragon: The story of Bruce Lee.

Sometimes the game outcome is it's own thing and is fun by itself. The sad part is that a commercial game might not have the nude scenes in it like
Star Ship Troopers but then agian it might be the sensors fault for this as with Golgo 13.


Remakes is another thing that screws up when it is done wrong especially when art style is not taken for granted like

Final Fantasy
Dragon Quest
Resident Evil
Secret of Mana
Saga series

The problem is that sometimes it is good while other times it is bad and finally if the remakes don't hits you it is the milking of a series.

Final Fantasy VII
Nights
Burning Rangers
Gunstar Heroes
Gaudian Heroes
Tales of Phantasia

Basically a milked series is just a rereleased painted over to look like a new and diffrent game. While I do wish some series would last forever to find out the original people who did the game never worked on the sed series like

Tales Of Phantasia where all the other games was never made by Wolf Team and it can obviously show since theg game does not have that Wolfteam ( Tri-Ace) feeling they give in all of there games.

Bomberman is another example where it stopped being Bomberman uptil the GBC games where on the GBA they just remade the GBC and N64 games along with the past series being presented. However for bomberman fans like me who wants to explore both worlds of Bomberman Quest 2 and 3 which is the same game this is good thing but the point is


WHY SHOULD I BUY A GAME FOR USING THE SAME CHARACTERS. I mean it is okay to have a series of events like for say movies

Once upon a time in China or even Puppet Master..but it gets kinda tiring when the same characters keeps on poping up. I mean how many times does
Cless have to save the day along with Cloud fighting Seproth...When the heck are we going to see a game where Seproth is a good guy ( I think that cell phone card game...hmmm the one where the wear red?? )

The thing is milking is okay when it is a diffrent series but when there is too many uses of the same characters it gets extremly dull.

Then what is even worst is when they cross reference the characters. Like in the recent Tales game where you can practically find all the characters there willing to help you fight whatever force but they make no sense of it.

Cross Overs...

Cross Overs can be a good thing take

Shyguys in Mario World II
Culex in Mario RPG

Even better when it is told that the entire series takes place during the same time like

Far East of Eden 1-4 : Where all adventures take place around the same year.

Fighting games

Cross Overs can be a bad thing take

Kingdom Hearts and milking of Final fantasy games along with Disney series.
You have a whole fan base who is like oh is Sora going to comeback to life.

Personally I like when a series that is fresh to continue with the same characters over and over again.  take

Dragon Quest...  which is still fresh and never have really changed over the years and there is a abundence of intresting characters to do many things with.

Star Ocean II which had a sequel which hinted for more series that spawned Blue Sphere. Blue Sphere is way more intresting knowing that there is the Bio Monsters leader from the original Star Ocean and more to look forward to .
This is why III was kinda iffi.

I just dislike the idea of after a couple of years have passed some how magically starting extending the story like of course.

Final Fantasy VII.....which ended but they made up so much mumbo jumbo that it makes me think we are going to final fight the emporer in FF6 and he is going to be this guy in red cloaks casting Fire, Fire2, Fire3 and of course Omega Flare. I mean why try to get people to buy the same game over and over again for no reason at all. That is terrible and they know since they have not made that remake yet.

I also forget. RESIDENT EVIL... or to be corrected BIOHAZARD eitherway the series is just another good exampling of milking. Shinji said RE4 was going to be a only GCN game and Capcom said differ where he now switched companies and then you have

RE NDS

RE4 Celluar phone

and then Capcom gets another guy to do the same thing with there
mall zombie: Dead before dawn rip-off game.

I mean Capcom stopped being cool after the GCN days where they canned Dead Pheonix leaving PN03 instead....

There is finished

No one's complaining about commercial games, ports or sequels in particular. Ports for example might be disappointing or "meh", but in rare cases among the worst games of all time. Of course, the number of crappy games based on movies or TV shows is staggering, but naturally, there are exceptions.
In other words, it's not about disappointing games due to their source material, legacy or former glory, it's about really, really bad games, and complete nobody-video games can be flops as well.

By the way, I think we can already add Wii music to that list...well, maybe take out our mental marker and remember this stinker. Seriously, what's the point of this game? No score system? Pretending to play an instrument as if you were playing an air guitar without any rhythm involved? Bad midi sound quality? Looking like an idiot while playing? Oh man...how low can Nintendo sink? What happend to them?

Dragon's Lair (NES)

Did anybody even get past the first screen?

:o !!! Someone agrees with me! Except I actually did get past the first screen... eventually.  ;D The second screen is just as hard.

The NES version is the one that starts on a drawbridge, isn't it? You walk along it, trying not to be attacked by a low flying bat, then fall through the drawbridge. If you don't fall through it, you get eaten by a dragon or crocodile. Doesn't the monster keep popping up until you kill the bat? It's been a while since I played it and now I can't because my NES isn't working.


Another crap game I keep mentioning is Ultraman on the SNES. It's a one-on-one beat 'em up. I don't think it has any combos, just kick, punch, and jump.

Wayne Gretzky Hockey on the NES.

Yeah that's the one. Add to all that the fact you move slower than an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping and you have possibly the worst first impression ever.

Bigfoot (NES)

     This game will just about get a horrible review anywhere you go. The controls are crappy in the rally races, and even worse when you get to the side-by-side races! In the rally races, the controls are pretty straightforward (A - Accel. B - Special Weapon; Left/Right - Steering; Up - Nitro). When you get to the side-by-side races, the controller is just too damn hard to use. I swear that the people that made the game (Acclaim), must have thought that they needed to use every damn button on the controller, with the exception of the start and select buttons. You have to use the B button for Gas, and the A button for the Transmission Shifting. At the same time that you are accelerating and shifting, you have to simultaneously press left and right on the d-pad to get the damn monster truck moving!
     Also, between side-by-side races (which consist of Mud Race, Pull-Off, Car Crunch, and 1 drag race in the last race of the game), you have to use the money that you start with and the money that you earn from winning other races and rallies to buy parts for your truck.
     And one of the worst things is what happens with the CPU opponent. When you start the game, you play as the driver of Bigfoot up against a green truck called the Growler. Both the P1 and CPU start with 5000 dollars. If at any point the Growler runs out of money and then crashes in a rally, the game ends for that truck. But, they will automatically put in a new truck that is yellow, called the Charger.
     The shit of that is the fact that they give the truck 5 grand, AND doesnt have to buy any new parts for the other races. Now i got the game, simply cuz im a Monster Truck fan, but i CANNOT play this game for more than 5 minutes before i get pissed off and have to turn it off!
     I have to say that this game has got to be one of the worst games in the NES library. I cannot find even one redeeming quality about it.

Feel free to submit that as a review.  :)

i believe that i will

My Hall of Shame would have Shaq Fu (SNES), Turning Point Fall of Liberty (PC), Last Action Hero (SNES), and Lethal Weapon (SNES).

Indycar Series 2005 (PS2)
Juventus Club Football (PS2)
Kung Fu Master (Game Boy)

Was this game really that bad?  I just picked it up from the flea market for $2 and haven't played it yet.

If you ask my neither Shaq-Fu or Primal Rage are as awful as you would come to believe. Just better know.

I would play either well before Criticom (Saturn/PSone), Fist (Saturn), Pretty Fighter (SNES) or Ultraman (SNES).

Never played the last one but I'll take James' word for it.

for the Playstation:

Hidden and Dangerous (hahaha, a joke)
Silent Iron (along with a shitload of other Phoenix Games-releases)
Perfect Weapon (was really bad and slow)
VIP (really boring, repetitive - played it cause it took ~2hours or so to beat)

Xbox 360:

Star Trek: Legacy (SLOOOOW)

NES:

Dragon's Lair (SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW)

Eighteen Wheeler (GC).  Ugh.  Not quite as bad as Big Rigs, but getting painfully close.