There are a lot of games out there that we wish we never spent our hard earned money on. Unfortunately, sometimes we believe the hype, or we trusted a game would be great because of the developer who made it. But in the end, we’ve all had at least one experience playing a game that makes us feel betrayed or simply ripped off. Here are eight of the worst games ever created.
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Aliens Colonial Marines
Aliens Colonial Marines is the only game in history that was so bad it was met with a lawsuit from disgruntled fans. I won’t comment of if the lawsuit was justified or not, but it says a lot that people wanted to go to that extent to express their frustration with a game they bought the hype for. As with most of the games on this list, AI was a main gripe with the fans and reviewers who played this one. There wasn’t much else going for it that you didn’t experience in virtually any other shooter nor was there any feel of strategy to hunt down the ultimate predator.
Duke Nukem Forever
Duke Nukem Forever is an example of what happens when the hype is far greater than the quality of the game. After spending over a generation of console years in development and constant reassurances that it was being worked on, what we received was an uninspired linear shooter that relied to heavy on the childish remarks and unfunny one-liners that no longer held appeal. It was a game that had too little to compete against other shooters and released a decade too late.
Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis
Anyone who knows comics no doubt raised an eyebrow to Aquaman getting his own video game, and for good reason. Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis‘s only combat mechanics is to kick and punch, that’s it. You swim around, from boss to boss, kicking and punching your way to victory. Given that Aquaman is a superhero, there was a lot of potential for a half-decent game using his abilities to control the sea, but nah. Why do any of that when you can swim around with the same level of combat that a 9 year old has playing ninja.
Daikatana
Daikatana was supposed to be a phenominal game. Its developer was none other than John Romero, a man made famous by his work on such blockbuster games such as Wolfenstein 3d, Quake, Doom and Hexen. With such a selection in his portfolio, one would expect a game that he worked on to be just as successful, right? Wrong. Daikatana sucked. It had a rough start before it even arrived on shelves with a controversial ad that stated Romero would “make you his bitch.” After it arrived, it was met with a swarm of negative reviews for bad AI, bad save game mechanics and antiquated technology compared to rival games of the time. Perhaps it could have been better, but like Apple products, you got a product because of the name, instead of the quality.
BMX XXX
BMX XXX is a game about riding a bike, topless. Why? … Why not? Acclaim Entertainment was trying to make a name for itself during the period this game was created, trying to be that edgy new company that everyone talked about. (Imagine Donald Trump: The Game Publisher) So, in one of their many stunts that backfired horribly, we have BMX XXX. Trying to take advantage of the “sex sells” style of advertising, the technology at the time meant that the 3D graphics of the models didn’t really arouse you, but instead became comic relief.
Superman: The New Adventures
I don’t know what it is about Superman games, but I have yet to see a decent one. Superman: The New Adventures (aka. Superman 64) excels at being terrible. It’s hard to feel as though you’re a nearly immortal godlike superhuman when the draw distance so low that it made my near sighted vision look like a hawk’s, uninspired textures made the city look bland and generic. The flipside was that, at the time, it was the third best selling game on the Nintendo 64. It would be interesting to see how well it would have done if we had the sort of communications and social media back then that we do now.
Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing
It’s pretty bad when you can turn a game about driving a big rig into a train wreck. Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing accomplishes this as if was its intention all along. Just name a bug and chances are it’s found here. A lack of any sort of racing mechanics, AI, features or clipping makes this one of the worst games ever created, or rather, feeling like it was slapped together on a weekend in someone’s garage and released half-finished.
E.T.
Here we have a game so bad that Atari actually buried all of the copies they had in the middle of the desert so it would never see the light of day again. This game was so bad it was attributed to the 80’s video game bubble bursting. But, to be fair, the programmer hired to create this game had a mere 5 weeks to make it from scratch. Nowadays, developers take 5 weeks to decide on the name of a game, let alone create an entire one. Still, it’s bad, very bad.
