Games are wonderful, aren't they?
Wrong. I'm going to let you in on a secret here - games are actually rubbish. We all know it. They're shallow wastes of time devoid of entertainment or intellectual merit. They are a scourge upon our cultural landscape and the cause of all society's ills. They are the things that took our hard-earned money and turned it into a waste of shelf space.
Yes, games are the disease, but you and I are the cure. It is time to strike out the Leisure Suit Larrys in our hearts, banish the Daikatanas from our minds and cleanse the Bass Avengers from our hard drives once and for all. The games that follow are not those you play with morbid fascination, nor those that you gather around with friends to mock. These are the games that tarnish all of us by their presence. They aren't the only offenders by any means, but they are the worst.
These are PC Gamer's Least Wanted. Spit after saying their names...
10. NRA Varmint Hunter
The National Rifle Association get a bad reputation (among liberal pinkos like us, anyway) for championing the weapons that kill thousands of people in America every year. If their detractors knew about NRA Varmint Hunter, they'd realise there are far worse accusations to lay at the NRA's door.
Varmints, if you don't know, are a general breed of small, relatively cute animal, including prairie dogs, groundhogs, and quite possibly fluffy kittens. But even if snuffing out small defenceless animals is your idea of a good time, please keep in mind that you can't even move in Varmint Hunter. You just aim, fire, and watch those little critters get destroyed by a bullet almost as big as they are.
Oh, sure, you can start worrying about how much gunpowder you use, but... they're the size of rats. Shooting fish in a barrel would be more challenging, and more fun.
9. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Big Rigs claimed to offer head-to-head heavy haulage delivery races against AI opponents, and exciting Smokey and the Bandit-style chases between yourself and the police. Unfortunately that was one of those lie thingies. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing actually contained no police, no chases, no cargo, and really not much of anything at all.
Instead, it featured a small number of mostly similar races against a single AI opponent who never, ever moved from the starting line. You could drive through buildings like they didn't exist, climb vertical slopes without slowing down, accelerate infinitely while in reverse (much to the annoyance of Albert Einstein), drive off the edge of the world at will, and sometimes win races as you crossed the line to start the race, not finish it. Every time a race was completed, an ecstatic victory message would appear: "You're Winner!" But no, you weren't.
8. Hopkins FBI
Terrorist mastermind Bernie Berckson dropped two nuclear bombs on California, killing 50,000 people in the process. But despite being given the chair and electrocuted twice, he's now escaped and it's up to you, Hopkins, to bring him to justice once again. We guess. At the very least, it seems to be your job to wander around getting women killed, to aid in bank heists with your utter incompetence, and to accidentally kill your girlfriend with your stupidity. And gun. And then you die and go to heaven.
Then - yes, it keeps going - you can steal some woman's clothes while she's showering, dress in drag, and use the disguise to teleport back to the land of the living. But, uh, then! A secret underwater base! The real plot reveals itself: a device to resurrect people from the dead. If Hopkins FBI wasn't one of the worst games in the world, it would have to be one of the best.
7. Bravo Romeo Delta
Bravo Romeo Delta is anti-fun, non-fun, unfun, and bizarrely proud of it. It is a sugar-free sweet in game form; a good idea, ruined.
It's like Defcon, if Defcon was the most boring game ever made. With four low-res maps and an arsenal of nuclear weapons at your disposal, you are tasked with taking part in a 'limited' nuclear skirmish - to show the other side you're a formidable enemy and world power without causing the conflict to escalate to all-out thermonuclear war. Ignoring the fact that the goal is thus to avoid the fun part, would people really not mind if you chose to nuke just, say, Essex, and not London? Because that would be good information to know.
Of course, when I said those nukes were "at your disposal," I meant "mostly at your disposal." If you try to actually do what you want with them, ie, fire all of them in every direction and at everyone in sight, your command is rejected. Sigh.
I'm sure this is all a terribly realistic simulation of how nuclear conflict would actually pan out, but given the choice between "Everybody dies" and "A reasonable and proportionate number of people die," I'll choose apocalypse every time.
6. Monsters, Inc: Wreck Room Arcade
A series of mini-games, Wreck Room Arcade was given four individual scores and then an average. When that average comes to 3.25%, you know you're in for something special. When one of the mini-games wasn't even good enough to earn a score, you know you'd rather have syphilis than play Wreck Room Arcade.
The first mini-game was fashioned after the famous bowling scene in the film, and involved piloting a ball to the end of an alley and knocking down all the pins. It gets 3%. The second mini bag-of-fun was based upon the famous pinball scene in the film, and involves playing pinball. It gets a slightly worse 2%. The third mini-game is based upon the famous jumping-on-a-see-saw-to-propel-a monster-in-the-air scene in the film. It gets 1%. There are two more mini-games, but you get the idea.
5. Speedy Eggbert
Perhaps the single most heinous fault in game design is allowing the player to be killed and then reincarnated in a position where they immediately die again. Platform games of old were rife with this sin, but by the time Speedy Eggbert was released in 2000, it was long since unforgivable. Did we learn nothing from Superfrog?
Oh, yeah, and this was released in 2000. Sure, we have a soft-spot for old school freeware platformers, but freeware games don't cost £20. They also don't normally look this horrible. With level design consisting almost entirely of blocky, Spectrum-era textures that make it hard to discern background from foreground, this is one of the ugliest platformers we've ever seen. Combined with a deathmatch mode (yes, deathmatch) that's nigh unplayable due to lag (yes, lag) and you've got yourself one hell of a bad game. Naturally, it got a sequel.
To quote our original review: "Egames call it a game for all the family. The Manson family, presumably."
4. Expect No Mercy
The worst film tie-in ever is, appropriately enough, tied into a terrible film of which no one has ever heard. Expect No Mercy is set in the "Virtual Arts Fighting Academy," a school that teaches ninjas and is home to "a deadly group of mercenary assassins willing to kill for a price." As our original review pointed out, these are not to be confused with those non-lethal mercenary assassins who work for free.
Being set in a virtual world is mostly an excuse for poorly digitised characters and horrible backgrounds, but taking its cue from Mortal Kombat, Expect No Mercy also features gruesome finishing movies and three entirely unrelated characters distinguished only by different coloured hats. Best of all - and when I say "best" I mean "worst", obviously - is that, due to crippling bugs, it's actually difficult to even get the characters close enough to hit one another. In a fighting game.
3. Bass Avenger
Fishing mostly involves standing or sitting around for long periods of time while holding a stick, so as a pastime it's a natural choice to turn into a videogame. But have you ever wondered if maybe the fish are planning some kind of revenge? No? Oh.
Bass Avenger is about vengeful bass. The fish, not the low-frequency rumbling emitted by speaker equipment, though that idea would be no less stupid. I digress. The point is it involves throwing beer, pizza or bras onto the shore and trying to lure in fisherman - because presumably all fishermen like getting drunk, eating pizza, and cross-dressing. They like these things so much, in fact, that they're happy to drown to get them. Once you've reeled in your catch, you can either stuff their corpse or throw them back. That's it. It cost £25.
Important note: it's the sequel to Deer Avenger. Can anyone guess what that one was about?
2. Forbes Corporate Warrior
"Business is War!" is the tagline, but they mean it a lot more literally than you'd think. Set in a series of flat, grey rooms, it's your job to beat your competitors by shooting customers with one of numerous business-themed weapons, including Ad Blasters, Price Bombs, Marketing Missiles, Head Hunters or Takeover Torpedoes. No, we're not joking and, judging by the complete lack of humour or irony, neither were the developers.
The clever part was supposed to be picking your weapon based on the demands of your opponent's customers: if they wanted cheap goods, you'd use the Price Slasher to lower prices. A level was only complete when your market share and stock price had gone through the roof, giving new meaning to... Nothing. Absolutely nothing was given new meaning.
Created as a tie-in with Forbes magazine, it's difficult to understand why a respectable publication would allow something like this to hit the shelves. Rest assured that if there's ever a PC Gamer game, one of the guns will fire titles such as this into the sun.
1. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
Put simply, your goal is to get the imaginatively named John and Jane into bed together. Put more complicatedly, it's your job to get them into bed together by looking at amateur photography, listening to terrible voiceovers and making occasional choices that steer the direction of the narrative.
That these choices are few and far between is actually a relief, given that each one only leads to more moronic, insulting, sexist drivel, now with the added knowledge that you caused it. What's that? Jane's boss is offering her a job in return for sexual favours? You turn him down, and cue the 'hilarious' rape scene. Hilarious because it's all so tongue-in-cheek, you see. Hoho.
But wait! There's more! Oh, no there isn't. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is a shallow, hateful waste of a game, and may very well be responsible for having killed the 3DO, interactive fiction, and the whale.
The best trhing about that whole page is that there's a pirates of the caribean ad at the bottom in line with all the other pictures..... i TOTALLy thought that was a prediction you guys were making.
They do sound dreadful! I dont think I would have bought any of them even if they slaped a 20p price tag on them I could buy two packets of space invaders instead!
I actually own one of these - Hopkins FBI -got it with a load of other rubbish games in a compilation thing when I bought a computer. one of them was a gulf war tank game if a remember correctly.
Played it for about 5 minutes, realised it was *almost* as bad as superman 64, which I had the misfortune of playing at a friends - and tried to sell it/give it away and got no takers
I actually kept the issue of PCZone with the review of Hopkins FBI in it. I had never laughed so much from a review before, and it was what made me start properly buying the mag.
I seem to remember them saying that it would be more interesting if they'd sold you a still of a horse p**sing into a bucket.
I own a copy of Big Rigs. I'm convinced that it's actually a work of genius. Seriously. Install the patch, and the AI truck actually moves (though it stops just before the finish line, so you still always win).
It's a game that refuses to let you accept defeat. What could be more positive?
Problem with these is that there are so many crap super budget games released that you could name 100 worse than the worst game on this list.
I've read Gamespy's worst games ever, and Big Rigs was top - i then found a review video of it, it's quit amusing to watch actually, especially when they put it in the super fast reverse that continues ad infinitum.
Anyway, the only thing i ever enjoy about these articles is amusing comments, this was slightly lackin, but hey ho.
Sometimes it's hard to see what motivated design decisions during production of a game. Gord@k is a classic case in point: fail to win the final puzzle against the titular artificially intelligent virus, and the one and only save game you're allowed is immediately deleted. You are forced, in other words, to return to the very start of the game and play through it all over again. Or give up, which seems like the far better solution.
Stupidest Fault Rise of the Robots
The review of Rise of the Robots started with a shocking exclam - this game cost literally thousands of pounds to develop. This was almost as shocking as the graphics, which were shiny in a way we'd never seen before. You have to understand, it looked beautiful, and the buzz around the game was huge. Unfortunately, in the age of floppy disks, high-resolution images and animations don't leave much room for gameplay. Or animations. The entire game could be completed by pushing up, right and kick, and all because there wasn't enough memory to let characters jump. It sold millions.
Most Disappointing Daikatana
Disappointment rarely has much to do with the actual quality of a game. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for example, is often named both last year's best and most disappointing title. With that in mind, please realise that Daikatana isn't as bad as you think it is. Sure, making you fight green frogs in green swamps wasn't the greatest design decision ever made, but no. Daikatana is the most disappointing game ever because for one bright, shiny moment we believed that design was law and that John Romero would make us his bitch. We believed it could be brilliant.
It wasn't.
Worst Translation Midnight Nowhere
There are a lot of games with bad localisation, but it takes something truly special like Midnight Nowhere to make mistranslation into a kind of zen art form. "You get the feeling this receiver couldn't care less about a wall socket." Huh? "He's probably lying here to show off. It's like he's saying, I'm not just wearing my pants out, I've got medical training." Whuh? It's like you're saying English sentences, but one of us is really high. It's you.
Worst Controls Trespasser
"Physics!" is a common cry in the PC Gamer office. Every time a barrel rolls down hill in Half-Life 2, every time a vehicle spins out of control in Battlefield, every time Tom falls over the detritus around his desk. This is always a cry of excited joy, and a long way from the horror that lies at the technology's birth.
Imagine getting really, really drunk, severing the tendons in your wrist, poking out one of your eyes to remove depth perception, and then trying to pick up a mug while balancing on one leg. Welcome to Trespasser. Oh, and the little heart on your cleavage is the health meter.
Worst Mini-Game Monsters, INC: Scream Team Training
Wreck Room's close cousin Scream Team Training deserves a special mention for having the most tenuously linked mini-games ever devised. In 'Parking Lot', players are challenged not to lose all faith in humanity wihle parking the monster's cars in time for work at 9am. Honourable mentions also go to the boringly named 'Canister Storage Room' and 'Paperwork' mini-games, both of which are depressingly self-explantory.
Worst... Just the Worst Big Brother 2
Technically speaking, this is PCG's lowest scoring game of all time, being awarded N/A%. Reviewer Ste Curran explained: "We'll put the same effort into giving it a mark as they've made creating the game." Seems fair. Big Brother 2 isn't so much a game as a crime against nature. One mini-game requires that you remember ringtone sequences. Why? Because it hates you. Another demands that you protect drying laundry from incoming bird excrement, which is a fitting metaphor for our job when it comes to our readers and games like this.
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- Hopkins FBI -got it with a load of other rubbish games in a compilation thing when I bought a computer. one of them was a gulf war tank game if a remember correctly.
