Flop Ten: Ten Worst Games of All Time

No one wants to get home with a brand-new game and find out that it’s actually terrible. With that in mind, we’re looking at the ten worst games of all time. This list is limited to games that received physical releases and were licensed to be released on their console. This is to avoid discussing unfinished or bootlegged games, or mobile shovel-ware. This list instead focuses on games that were intended to be well-received and earnestly tried to be competent video games. Well, sort of.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

Photo Credit: TechSpot

The most recent game on our list also rates the tenth slot. Aliens: Colonial Marines has the unfortunate distinction of being laid low by a typo. Recent developments have shown that this games notoriously terrible (read: nonexistent) enemy AI was not the result of a lack of effort by developer Gearbox. Alien fans modded the game to fix the issues with the game’s AI and found that a typo had rendered the xenomorph enemies useless in a fight. By correcting that one-character typo, the game became not only playable, but excellent. The enemies attack from unconventional angles, fight viciously and are genuinely terrifying. All that because someone made the wrong keystroke.

Superman 64

Photo Credit: Jokes Battle Wikia

Before he went on to star in awful films in the DCEU, Superman was the star of an awful video game for the N64. Superman, more commonly called Superman 64, was an attempt to cash in on the then-popular Superman Animated Series. Sadly, this game is a mess. There is little in the way of polish or care given to any aspect of the game. The protagonist controls poorly, and the bulk of the game involves flying through rings. What little combat the game has is stiff and unfun. Sadly, of Superman’s laundry list of superpowers, starring in good video games is not one of them.

Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis

Photo Credit: Xbox Addict

Speaking of DC characters who simply can’t do anything right, Aquaman’s notorious entry into video gaming is terrible. Similar to Superman’s N64 game, this game is bland and uninspired. You swim from place to place, bumping into invisible walls and trying to fight henchmen (and boredom). However, the combat is unbelievably stiff and slow. This might be forgivable if you ever did anything besides fight boring enemies in boring underwater fist-fights. One wonders if Aquaman has ever been compelling.

Bubsy 3D

Photo Credit: IMDb

The transition to 3D was quite rough on many major franchises. Nintendo made this transition quite well, thanks to their excellent Mario and Zelda games on the N64. However, Bubsy wasn’t so lucky. The 2D-platforming mascot’s first and only 3D entry is questionable at best. Between sluggish controls, awful one-liners and a dizzying camera, this game is nearly-unplayable. The worst part is that you can tell the developers really wanted Bubsy to be a competitor with Mario. If only they’d designed a game to live up to that ambition.

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor

Photo Credit: YouTube

The shining example of why Kinect didn’t work, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor took a decent concept and flushed it down the drain. The Steel Battalion franchise is a unique take on the giant mech genre, wherein the mechs are presented as realistic military technology. They’re generally incredibly deep, engaging simulation-style games. Sadly, this one tried to use Kinect and the Xbox controller in concert and ended up doing both poorly. It’s nearly impossible for the Kinect to read your movements while you’re sitting, and you’re supposed to be seated in the cockpit of your mech. If only the game hadn’t been too ambitious for its own good, it might have been a good entry to the franchise for more casual players.

Link: The Faces of Evil

Photo Credit: IGN

Somehow, Phillips got the rights to make a couple of Zelda games. If you think that sounds like a good idea, you probably bought Superman 64. This game has some of the most cringe-inducing cutscenes and voice “acting” ever seen in a video game. The gameplay is stiff, the backgrounds look awful and exploration is nonexistent. These games are good for one thing: a ton of hilarious memes that popped up using the awful art and animations.

Ride to Hell: Retribution 1%

Photo Credit: Amazon

This game is almost transcendently bad. It’s the video game equivalent of The Room, so absurdly awful that it can’t have occurred on accident. Every moment of gameplay is so absurd and terrible that it makes one wonder if the developers truly thought this would be compelling. Each female character is meant to be bedded, and each biker is a killing machine. Nearly every fight is filled with quick-time events, and each death is just silly in its gore and violence. Of all the games on this list, Ride to Hell is the one that actually merits a playthrough.

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

Photo Credit: Know Your Meme

Produced for about $6 by Stellar Stone, Big Rigs was released in a pre-alpha state. That’s not a statement of quality but a matter of fact. The game features nearly no mechanics and very few textures. Nominally the game is meant to be a racing game, but the enemy doesn’t try to race you. Or move at all. And the game has no collision detection, so you just slide through everything. And when you cross the finish line you see a screen that says, “You’re Winner.” See, this is why you don’t contract a Russian company with three employees to make a game for $6.

Pac-Man: Atari 2600

Photo Credit: YouTube

About as awful as ports get, this version of Pac-Man attempted to capitalize on the popularity of the original arcade cabinet. Atari, in their rush to produce the game and cash in on it, forgot that their system couldn’t handle how complex Pac-Mac was. Go ahead and have a good laugh at that sentence you just read, because the rest of this is more sad than funny. As you can see from the screenshot, the 2600 version looks unlike the original, as the 2600 had so little memory. Ergo, the graphics are little more than different floating squares. Further, the 2600 couldn’t render more than one ghost per frame. This meant that the ghosts flickered as each one was rendered in a separate frame.

Atari was so confident that this port would excel that they produced more copies of it than there were 2600 systems sold at the time. Needless to say, the game bombed. This game and the number one entry on this list contributed to the Great Video Game Crash, and Atari is almost solely to blame.

The Worst of the Worst Games of All Time: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Photo Credit: Super Adventures in Gaming

In the early 80’s Spielberg’s movie E.T. was a big deal. Everyone had seen it and Atari was in a rush to cash in. Atari’s meteoric rise had surprised even them, so they wanted to strike while the iron was hot. They had this tie-in video game rush-ordered, demanding that it be done in 5 weeks. A game of any size can’t be completed in 5 weeks, so as you can imagine, the finished product was absolutely terrible. In fact, referring to it as a “finished” product is misleading, as it is unfinished.

Just like Pac-Man, Atari overproduced the game by millions of units, and ended up dumping ninety percent of them in a landfill in the desert. Between E.T. and Pac-Man, Atari almost killed gaming in its earliest days by overproducing terrible quality games. Atari would go on to sink themselves by the 90’s. Atari is poised to make a comeback to the world of gaming with a new system, the VCS. Here’s hoping they’ve learned their lessons.