Video Game Hall of Shame

[Darth Sidious]

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)

[OatBob]

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

[Cobra]

You'll probably find most people's answer already over at
http://www.rfgeneration.c...um/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.

[Feechy]

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.

[shaggy]

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

[BadEnoughDude]

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.

This game is not bad at all!

[modest9797]

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

[Chainclaw]

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?

[nester]

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

[Darth Sidious]

@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.

[Ataripitbull]

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)

  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. 

 

[Tan]

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.

[Game Freak]

SUPER NINTENDO
Beethoven's 2nd

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

[Fuyukaze]

Wayn's World should be on that list.

[hXd]

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!