TechStuff Classic: The Worst Video Games of All Time (Update)

Recently, a documentary crew went out to the desert to dig up some legendary Atari cartridges. It reminds us of this classic TechStuff episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
John Than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Radio and I love all things tech. It is time
for a classic episode. This episode originally published on May four.

(00:26):
It is titled the Worst Video Games of All Time
parentheses update close parentheses. Um. Obviously, since we've had a
few more contenders, I know some people would probably put
Cyberpunk seven way up there. Uh, depending on your point
of view. They're they're defenders of that game who say

(00:47):
that there's a very good game there that was marred
by a rushed release. Um. And there are others who
disagree with that assessment entirely. So I'm sure I will
have to do yet another update. So maybe at one
point I'll do the Worst video Games of All Time
updated update. But for now, let's listen to this classic
episode from Enjoy. So there's been this longstanding rumor, elevated

(01:13):
to almost myth status in the video game industry, that
that Atari, while it was struggling, dumped thousands of video
games in this New Mexico landfill. Um. The New York
Times even ran a short piece on it in September,
and it's it's a short piece, so I'm just gonna
read it out because it's a really explains the story
and is super indicative of what the industry was doing

(01:34):
at the time. So here we go. With the video
game business gone sour, some manufacturers have been dumping their
excess game cartridges on the market at depressed prices. Now,
Atari Inc. The leading video game manufacturer, has taken dumping
one step further. The company has dumped fourteen truckloads of
discarded game cartridges and other computer equipment at the City
Landfill in Alama Gordon, New Mexico. Guards kept reporters and

(01:57):
spectators away from the area yesterday as workers poured concrete
over the dumped merchandise, and Atari spokesman said the equipment
came from Atari's plant and I'll Passo Texas, which was
used to make video game cartridges but has now been
converted to recycling scrap. Atari lust three and ten point
five million dollars in the second quarter, largely because of
a sharp drop in video game sales. That's yeah, point

(02:21):
five million dollars in a word, that's not that's not
a yearly loss. So yeah, as you can see, this
was a huge deal for Atari, and um, you know,
there are a lot of different things that went into this.
We've covered it before, but just as a quick kind
of refresher, the things that that led to this decision
involved too many games on the market, too many consoles

(02:42):
on the market, so you had you had way too
much product out there, uh, and way too many poor
video games that had been kind of scrapped together really quickly,
right and and and then with the the ET cartridge
in particular, which is often cited as not only the
worst video game of all time but also the reason
for a video game crash. That's that's a little too simplistic,

(03:02):
but it did the big contributor because that license cost
millions of dollars to Atari, and they produced millions of cartridges,
something like five million copies of this game. And they
didn't sell out at all. They had they had millions
left over, So you just had a no wins scenario.
I mean, no one wanted the cartridges. They kept getting

(03:23):
marked down and down and down in the discount bins
at your local toy stores. I mean, I remember these
days because I had an I had ET the Extra
Terrestrial um so, oh, yeah, I've never played. I had
the two games that are constantly referred to as being
the ones that led to the video game crash, where
the the licensed versions of pac Man and ET the

(03:46):
Extra Terrestrial, and there I had both of those, so
I can tell you they both were terrible games. They
were not good representations of their licenses and uh, and
so they both really did contribute. So uh. Anyway, we
had this big myth about the you know, this huge
dumping ground, and there was conflicting information for the longest time,

(04:09):
like is it actually out there or is it is
that just urban legend? Well, and since concrete had been poured,
no one was really sure. It made me think for
a while that maybe the guy who made that decision
at Atari used to work for the mafia. I want
it dead, I want to bury it in the ground.
I want to concrete foundation board over it. How it
how it goes off in my head anyway, I mean,

(04:30):
maybe he just really hated it that much. But yeah,
we ended up discovering very recently as the recording of
this podcast, as it turns out that uh, there was
truth to the yeah myth confirmed. Okay, So in April
hundreds of old Atari games, including the infamously terrible et
We're We're found in this landfill in New Mexico. The

(04:51):
Dick was part of a documentary series. It's being done
by director Zach Penn in affiliation with a couple of
media companies, Fuel Entertainment and Lightbox Entertained, along with Microsoft's
Xbox Entertainment Studios. Yeah, what's what's funny is that Major Nelson,
who is part of Xbox Lives. He's like one of
the kind of a community liaison type guy, so a

(05:14):
lot of information from Microsoft comes through him and then
as communicated to the fans. He was actually on the
dig site too. And uh, I'll talk a little bit
more about that in just a second when we get
to the super silly part of the story. I'm not
sure which part is. Yeah, there's so many, but this
one in particular because it all has to do with
the way the man wears a construction hat. Okay, alright, So,

(05:40):
so some interesting interesting little factoids around this dig. The
AP was out there and they were talking to folks
um and and according to them, James Heller, a former
Atari manager who's also on site for the dig. At
the invitation of the production team, UM said. James Heller
said that he was charged with finding a cheap way
of disposing for seven and twenty eight thousand game cartridges.

(06:03):
That's that's a lot of cartridges. That's more than I
had by by a long shot. Uh. And he said
that after a few local kids scavenged games UM and
he started getting calls from the media about it, that's
when he decided to pour the concrete, right, because otherwise
you have you have a recipe for disaster, and that
kids could be coming out to a landfill get hurt, lawsuits. Yeah.

(06:25):
No one wants e T on top of being the
worst game ever to be the most deadly game to
have caused like tetanus and things like that. Yeah, that
would have been a terrible, terrible, pr nightmare. Yeah. He's
also said that he wasn't aware that there was any
kind of controversy about it, and that he's never come
out on the record about it because no one ever
asked him. Huh. Clearly someone who does not go to

(06:48):
the big video game forums. He's clearly not from the internet. Um. Uh. So,
so the city that houses the landfill is giving up
to the cartridges to the team, and we'll be selling
the rest. So if you like your own, you can
get some real new Mexico dirt packed in with your
your various cartridges. They're they're apparently still playable, some of them,
I mean some of them are crushed. Yeah, I know that.

(07:09):
When they first found it, they tested one out almost
immediately and then said, we're not going to tell you
whether or not it worked. We're going to save that
for the documentary. But but but these are these are hard,
hardwired cartridges. I mean they're not they're not optical disks
or anything like that. So as long as you haven't
had too much detritus get into the cartridge, which we

(07:31):
all know how to solve that problem, yeah, and then
you're good. Yeah, as long as that's not the case,
then it should work. And I understand that there was
another person who was talked to about this whole thing,
a man who may you might say was burdened with
terrible responsibility. Uh So, the ap for for this article

(07:54):
that they did also called eat S game designer one
Howard Scott Warshaw about the entire debak um, and he
said that he actually doesn't mind his game being called
the worst game. Ever, he said that he was only
given five weeks to design, right and test this game
after legal matters held it up in production of for
getting that license and the holiday shopping deadlines began looming.

(08:17):
He said furthermore that it's end I quote a tremendous
honor that, you know, even though it's the worst video
game ever, that's still being talked about. Well, he also
was the guy who made the biggest selling original game
for Atari, which was Yours Revenge. Uh so, Yours Revenge
was a kind of crazy little game where it's almost

(08:38):
impossible to explain. Back then, video games were not nearly
as simple in a way, like even though the the
graphics were simple and the gameplay was simple, the concepts
were really high concept crazy things. And these days, you know,
when you see video games, they tend to be variations
on very similar themes, like it's a sandbox game like

(08:59):
Grand Theft Auto or the Saints Rose series, or it's
a racing game, or it's a gun game like those
are poor and adventure. Right back in the days of
the early arcades, like well, first you play as a
donkey who's out delivering pizzas. What But that was normal
So anyway, Ours Revenge hard to explain it easily, but anyway,

(09:22):
one of the most popular games of atari ever. So
it's kind of interesting that the same guy was behind
both titles. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention,
we're going to we're going to have a nice little
flashback in a minute, but before we do that. Uh,
something else I think is really entertaining is that there's
some conspiracy theories around this, Like there were some things

(09:43):
popping up on the Internet suggesting that perhaps this whole
dig was a manufactured story, and in fact, no one
had gone to New Mexico and no one had actually
found the cartridges because they were never really put there
in the first place, and the whole thing is just
to comple cover up. Yeah, there's like a tari truthuris
now this is great? Yeah. So uh And there was

(10:04):
a picture of Major Nelson, this is what I was
referring to earlier in the podcast, who was at the
site and wearing a hard hat, and the hard hat,
you know, sat pretty high up on his head, which
led some people to say, oh, it's been photoshopped on
top of him. He was clearly this was a picture
of Major Nelson that's been placed so that it's on
a desert background, and he's got this hard hat photoshopped
on because it's not saying flat, you know, snug against

(10:26):
his head. But here's the thing about hard hats. They
actually have like a little kind of harness that sits
on your head and they're raised up over the harness
so that if something does impact the hard hat, there's
that shot. Yeah. So it doesn't kill you, you see,
just having something harding. Yeah, yeah, I mean it doesn't.
It doesn't help you if you were wearing something hard
on your head if the force hitting it is still

(10:48):
enough to cause you injury. So, uh, it's you know,
it may have been that the little harness part was
a little small for Major Nelson's noggin. I don't know,
But I don't know. I'm personally, Yeah, it doesn't I'm
going to call him a fathead. Neither am I. But
but it does mean that I think some people mistakenly,
either mistakenly or perhaps jokingly. It could have been that

(11:08):
they were joking about it being photoshopped and then other
proportion in some way. I know the internet is oh
sure sure. And also some of the very first photos
that came out of the dig site. Um were taken
on you know, low quality cell phones, and I think
that everyone I mean, I mean, I was reluctant to
believe the story until I clicked a few links through

(11:29):
and really checked around about it, because I was like, oh,
that's fake. Yeah, I mean, well, there's so many stories.
I assume that everything on is fake on the internet,
except the hell stuff works where everything is amazing pertly.
But yeah, no, no, I totally understand what you're where
you're coming from on that one. So we wanted to
take this opportunity to actually have a little look back
on an episode that that was recorded years ago, back

(11:52):
in two thousand eleven. Yeah. So so of course Chris
Palette is going to be joining us from the vaults
of history, right. So so this is this is what
some people would call a rerun because we wanted to
talk about the discussion that kind of led into this
whole thing when we asked our listeners. This was the

(12:12):
crowdsourced episode, which we haven't really we haven't done many
of those. We've asked for a listener mail and gotten responses,
and we've done some episodes based upon suggestions, but this
was purely crowdsourced where I put out the question what's
the worst video game of all time? And then we
had our listeners right in and we tabulated all the
votes and it was it was wide open, and this

(12:34):
is the result. Uh and spoiler alert, the video game
that we just talked about being dug Up in the
Desert ends up being number one. So but it's an
entertaining episode. Listen to it, and we'll have a little
bit more to talk about once the episodes over with
some other kind of bad video game wrap up, So enjoy. So, hey, guys,

(13:00):
you know you might remember that Chris and I wanted
to do a crowdsourced episode where we asked our listeners
to submit to us the worst video game of all time.
And uh, we didn't give any real parameters about that.
We said it could be on any platform, it just
had to be a video game. And because of that,
it meant that our listeners could literally, uh nominate any

(13:25):
game ever made. So it's a miracle at all that
we had enough votes for any particular title to have
this this podcast, But we actually have the top ten
or perhaps bottom ten worst video games as voted on
by you the listener so please keep in mind this

(13:46):
is not the opinions of Jonathan and Chris, although maybe
we'll talk about some of the bad games we've played
in the past two This isn't our opinion, this is
your opinion. We're just reporting it. Well, I have to
say that one one person did right in and ask
us why we would bother recording an episode on this,
and uh, the simple answer is because it's fun. Yeah,

(14:10):
this was actually really a lot of fun. It was
a lot of work because we had to collect votes
from multiple sources. We collected votes from email, Facebook, Twitter,
and people left votes on my Google Plus account too,
so um, I actually did separate out all the votes
in a big spreadsheet, so I knew how many votes
came in from which uh particular source and that that

(14:33):
actually was kind of interesting too, just to see, you know,
what our listeners prefer to use in order to get
information to us. That was pretty fascinating. That was not
my intent, by the way, when I came. I came
up with this idea on the spur of the moment
and sprung it on Chris just before we started recording,
and Chris was like, do I have to I have
to record all the votes. I said no, he said,
all right, let's do it. So you know, I'm easy

(14:56):
like that. Let's let's start off with what would be
number ten. But actually it was a tie for ninth place.
So the first two games we're going to talk about
received the same number of votes. And the first one
that we're going to talk about is dragons Layer, the
arcade game specifically, So for those of you who who

(15:19):
missed out on the early eighties and the great arcade
culture of the early eighties, you may not be too
familiar with this game. But it was groundbreaking. Yeah, it was.
It was a an innovative way of presenting a video
game that had not been attempted before Dragon's Layer. Yeah. Yeah.
Previously we were talking about the different well the difference

(15:43):
in in vector and raster graphics, and and you know
there was there were blocky graphics for the most part
at the time, and they had limited animation, limited sound. Yeah. Um,
but but Dragon's Layer actually featured animation from one of
the industry giant animators, Don Bluth, former Disney animator who

(16:07):
has gone on to you know, with his own company,
to do many many other titles. In fact, I have
a Don Bluth title on my iPad? Yeah, which one?
The new version of Tapper features Don Bluth artwork, so yeah,
because he also you may know some of his work
from from movies like The Secrets and the Secret of
Nim Yes, and the Lame Before Time series, Before Time

(16:28):
it was, was it the Five Old Movies too? Yes? Um,
those were Don Bluth films, so somewhere out there, yes,
thank you. So Dragon's Lair was featured animation from Don
Bluth and it was published by Cinematronics. Yeah. Yeah, But
but but how you might say, exactly is this great

(16:49):
leap in graphics and sound? Because the sound was awesome too.
How how is that possible? Because you know, you're looking
at other games like Donkey Kong, which you know I
loved Donkey Kong, but you would not call the epics
advanced or state of the art for the time, but
not now crazy. Yeah, well, they they accomplished this by

(17:10):
using the laser disc video format, which we've talked about before.
So the entire game was on laser disc, and there
was an actual laser disc player inside the cabinet of
this arcade game. Now, the fact that there it was
on laser disc was both its its biggest strength and
its biggest weakness. The weakness is that you couldn't create

(17:33):
too much interactivity for the player and the game. The
You know, you couldn't have complete control over the main
character who do you remember? The guy's name Dirk the Daring,
and he was rescuing a princess Daphne from a dragon
named Singe. And so you couldn't just control Dirk the Daring,

(17:55):
You couldn't just make him run around and jump and stuff. Instead,
what you would do is you would initiate a video sequence.
Because again this is recorded on laser disc. There's only
so many variations of Dirk's movements that can be recorded
on a single laser disc. So what your input into
the arcade machine would translate to is was that the
correct button to press or direction on the joystick to

(18:18):
push in order to trigger the next sequence to further
the storyline. Yeah, so you for example, you might be
having to jump, and you did have to jump at
one point, and if you, you know, move up, that
might be the right thing to do. If you move left,
you die. If you do nothing, you die. If you

(18:39):
if you push the sword button, you die. If you
push Yeah, so in other words, there'll be one correct
response to a particular moment in the story, and sometimes, uh,
there'd be like a little flash that would indicate this
is when you do something. So for a lot of
the game, you're you're just watching, You're just you're you're
watching a movie. And then occasionally in the movie there's

(19:00):
a moment where you have a chance to put in
an input, and if you put in the wrong one,
the movie is over. And so that was probably what
cost a lot of people to vote for Dragons Layers,
that it almost feels like less of a game and
more of a film. It's just a film that you
don't get to see the end of it unless you
happen to shift in your seat at just the right
moment so the film will continue. And also I would

(19:22):
like to point out this was one of the first
games I can remember that cost two credits or fifty
cents to play. And also remember that a lot of
them had two monitors because they were so popular that
people would try and gather and cram around the system.
Because if someone knew how to play it, if someone
had memorized the sequence of movements they had to do

(19:44):
to get through a particular part of the game. You know,
most people didn't have the time or energy or change
to learn all that, so they just like to watch
the game because again, it was like a movie. I
saw a lot of our kades that would put a
second monit he that was mounted on the top of
the cabinet so that you could see what was going

(20:05):
on without having to be right up on whoever is
playing the game. So anyway, that was tied for ninth place. Uh.
And the other one was a game on the Nintendo
Entertainment System which was Back to the Future. And I
have never played this because I didn't own an any s.

(20:25):
From what I read, we're going from beautiful graphics and
and sort of poor gameplay to horrible graphics and gameplay. Yeah,
Back to the Future is just one example of a
licensed title, and by licensed, I mean it's something that
already existed that a video game publisher purchases a license

(20:47):
from the license owner to be able to create a
game based on that. And as far as Back to
the Future goes, the basis was really pretty uh difficult
to spot, especially in that stage. Like in the very
first stage, you are going down a street and the
way the view is it's an over the head view. UM.
The street is laid out so that the top of

(21:10):
the screen is where you're you're headed to the bottom
of the screen is where you are, and you're moving
your your character around Marty McFly. You're moving Marty McFly
down the street. You're trying to avoid enemies and pick
up little alarm clocks. And it's only by picking up
enough alarm clocks that you're allowed to move to the
next stage. And so you're also you also have a timer,

(21:32):
so if you don't pick up enough alarm clocks within
the time limit, then you lose. If you get hit
by an enemy, you lose. If you run into an obstacle,
you lose. UM. You would eventually be able to pick
up a bowling ball, which would let you shoot enemies
because of course you remember that great scene and Back
to the future where Marty McFly picked up a bowling
ball and then shot someone with it. Um, who could

(21:54):
forget that scene that never happened. Uh. And then you
can also get a skateboard, which I least that was
featured in the film. But with the skateboard, what that
would mean is that you would move through the the
you would move through the level faster, which meant the
poor gameplay became excruciating the poor gameplay because you're going
so fast you can't even react. Um. And then if

(22:16):
you got through that, you would hit a mini game.
And some of the mini games included a dinner stage
where you're behind the counter and Biff and his bullies
are coming in after you and you have to throw
milkshakes at them to stop them. But it was really
hard to line up your character so that you were
throwing the milkshake at the right plane in order to
hit the enemy. Like the enemy is coming at you

(22:38):
from the left side of the screen. You're on the
right side of the screen, and you've got a bar
between you and the enemy. You just have to figure
out exactly where, like vertically you need to align yourself,
and you you'd be like, oh, that's clearly, that's it.
That's that's the sweet spot, and you push the button
and the milkshake flies like three ft over the bully's
head and he reaches the bar and throws you against

(22:58):
the wall. Um. It was a little rough. And then
there was another stage where you had to block kisses
that were sent to you from Lorraine because you're playing
Marty McFly and his Marty's mother. You know, he's back
in time and he's met the teenage version of his mom,
and so you would have to block her kisses to you.
And then there was another one where you had to
position a guitar just right so that you were playing

(23:21):
music so that Lorraine and George, your your mom and
dad would actually kiss. And the very final stage involved
driving the DeLorean, the time travel device, through the street
at night, dodging enemies, dodging obstacles, trying to get up
to eighty eight miles per hour um. It looked awful.
Oh and Bob Gayle, who was a screenwriter for Back

(23:43):
to the Future, called it one of the worst games
ever made. Yeah, why do people keep saying this is
there's some problem with gravity in the future. So that
moves us up to our eighth worst game. Do you
wanna unveil what this one is? Well, it certainly has
a tough road to home, yes it does. But it

(24:03):
is extremely popular. It's something you may have seen once
or twice on Facebook, at least once or twice a
minute on Facebook only if you follow people who play this,
And how could you not it's Farmville from Zinga. Now,
Farmville has had a lot of criticism directed toward it.

(24:23):
It's one of those games. It's a it's a freemium game,
and that means that you can play the game for free,
but if you want to have the most advantageous stuff
in the game, you have to pay real money to
get it. Um and which is a perfectly valid business plan.
You know, there's no reason I'm not. I don't want

(24:44):
to say that that's a bad thing to do. I mean,
people should be compensated for the work they do in
order for them to make more work. Otherwise, no one
has any incentive to do anything. You know, well, you
know it's it's got millions of fans, yes, um something
like I once heard a statistic that's something like all
people who use Facebook play this, and I have. You know,

(25:05):
I've played. I played it in some of the other
Zinga games, but I don't It's funny though, I don't
think of it as a game. I think if it
is more of a toy because there's no objective that
you're trying to accomplish to win the game. Basically, you're
trying to if you've never seen or or played it. Um.
The point is to grow your farm. So you know,

(25:26):
at some point you you add little plots of land
on which you can grow your crops, and you can
choose which crops to grow. Um. You know, each time
you plant something, you have several choices to you know,
you could say corn or tomatoes or you know, you know,
potatoes or something else. Um. And each crop costs a

(25:46):
certain amount of money and your you know, your fake
gold money. Actually it's their their dollars, I think coins
farm coins and uh you also it's been a while
since I played. And each crop takes a certain amount
of time to grow, and if you leave the game
for more than that amount of time a reasonable amount
of time. Once it's grown, the crop will wither and die.

(26:07):
So the point is too, I mean, it's not just crops.
You also add you know, a fence around your your garden,
and you add a farmhouse and what kind do you want,
and you know, bales of hay, and you basically you
you add in size to the farm, and you add
different plots, and you upgrade your stuff. And there's also
a social factor where you can interact with your friends

(26:29):
farms and they can interact with yours, which is why
you see like all these notifications pop up on Facebook
until you get fed up with it and block them.
Well yeah, I mean you can visit your friends farm
and fertilizer crops so they grow faster or unwier them
when they've gone back and help them. You can send
them gifts and they can send you gifts, and that
that can be kind of fun. But the thing is, it's,

(26:50):
like Jonathan pointed out, uh, Zinga is really hoping that
you'll invest some actual cash into this and you can
get uh certain kinds of crops or certain kinds of
decorations for your farm if you fork over some real
coin um. And that's kind of annoying for people like
me who are cheap and don't want to give them

(27:11):
any money. And the thing is, at certain point, the
game or software toy, it's like like I said, I
don't like to call it is sort of semi unplayable
because there's a point at which everything to make it
fun you really need to give them money for it
really doesn't change, and it's the point of whe you go, yeah,
you know, I'm really don't want to do this, and

(27:33):
the game also encourages you to try and loop your
friends into the games. Yeah, so yeah, that's that's probably
I'm guessing that's why people voted for it, because it
feels almost invasive, um when you're on Facebook, unless you
you go so far as to block it. And we
had other Facebook games like games that are similar to
this uh nominated as well, but Farmville was the one

(27:54):
that actually got the most votes. And also I think
has been accused of sort of copying earlier game called
farm Town, Yes, that had very similar game mechanics. Some
people would say similarity to the point of identity. But well,
this this model has uh has extended across Facebook and
and other venues as well. I mean, there are some

(28:15):
iPad games um that I've you know, tried out on
my tablet that basically they're the same kinds of things.
Had your friends otherwise you're not going to get very
far in this game. I'm like, I don't know anybody
else who's playing this. Plus I don't want to spam
everybody with email blasts saying joined my game. Yeah. I
mean if Jonathan's playing and I'm playing, then yeah, I'll

(28:37):
send Jonathan a note, Hey, send me a free chicken, right,
But I don't want to send that to everybody on
my list because you know it's annoying. Yes, it would,
So let's move on to our next nomination. Now, this,
this next nomination is interesting because it's a terrible, terrible
game that was designed to be a terrible, terrible game,

(29:00):
and it's called Desert Bus. Now, Desert Bus was actually
a mini game that was part of a larger package
of games for a product that never saw full production.
It was for the Sega c D system. Gosh, barely
remember that the whole system was a failure, not just
this game, but it was a mini game that was

(29:22):
included in Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. Um. A
lot of the stuff that was in Penn and Teller's
Smoke and Mirrors ended up being used in other Penn
and Teller products like Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends and
things like that. But this one idea, which supposedly came
from Eddie goad det Ski, who is a producer in Hollywood. Uh,

(29:44):
this one idea was to create an an ultra realistic
and by that I mean boring game in which you
drive a bus from Tucson in Arizona to Las Vegas,
Nevada in real time, and the buses top speed is
around forty five miles per hour. And there's no scenery,

(30:05):
there's there's no traffic, there are no passengers on the bus.
It's just you driving this bus to Las Vegas and
uh in real time. That takes, by the way, about
eight hours. And if you get all the way to
Las Vegas, you get a point and then you have
to drive back. But what happens if you need to
you know, stop and eat dinner, go to the bathroom.

(30:25):
While the game does not have a pause function, so
the time would just keep going. Also, the bus, you
might say, why don't you just set it up so
that the bus drives automatically, like, you know, just put
something on the up arrow key on the gas pedal. Yeah. Uh, Well,
the bus also has a problem with its suspension and
it pulls to the right, so you have to constantly

(30:50):
adjust the bus so that it will it will be
on the road. Now, there is a port of this
game on the web. You can play a web based
version of Desert Bus if you want to. Now you
might ask why would you want to, Well, some of
it's just kind of like grousing slash bragging rights that
you know you actually bothered to take eight hours of

(31:10):
your life and get this virtual bus from Tucson to
Las Vegas. But another group called Loading Ready Run had
an interesting idea. UM that's a four person comedy group,
and they decided to hold a desert bus marathon session
as a fundraising effort to raise money for the charity

(31:31):
child Child's Play. Child's Plays a charity that gets a
lot of attention particularly around Penny Arcade Expo or Packs
because the Packs guys also hold um auctions for Child's
Play and it's it's providing video games and other kinds
of stuff like that to kids who are in hospitals

(31:52):
and who are recovering or suffering from serious illnesses and
conditions as a nice charity, to do something nice for
the kids. Right. So, these four members of Loading Ready
Run took shifts at driving the desert bus UM they

(32:12):
ended up driving for more than four and a half days.
The first time, which was in two thousand seven, they
drove for around four and a half days and they
scored six points at four and a half days driving
the bus back and forth. Uh And since then they've
held the marathon several more times and have raised more
than four hundred thousand dollars collectively. Yeah for child's play,

(32:37):
which is pretty impressive. Um. But yeah, the game is online,
so if you just do a search for Desert Bus,
you can find a web based version of this game
and play it yourself. Well, we've got more to say
about the worst video games of all time, but until then,
we're gonna have to do a little side quest here.
It looks like our princesses in another castle, so gonna

(33:00):
take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Apparently
our number six game. It's also a game for people
who are into really not happy driving experience. Oh my gosh,
this game is probably it's amazing to me that this

(33:23):
game was ever released because it is. It is as
unfinished a game as I have ever seen. And I've
seen the reviews for this game, like I've seen video
reviews of this game that show the problems, and it's
you can't believe that such a product was ever released
to the public. I guess we should say what it is. Well,
racing games are so popular, and you know that you
can race just about anything in all kinds of video games,

(33:46):
so you would imagine that one that would allow you
to race tractor trailers would be fun, but big rigs
over the road racing for the PC for the PC
isn't It was a two thousand three third person racing games.
So you're outside the truck looking at the truck. Yeah,
and and let's see if we can figure out where
some of the problems of this game may reside, shall we?

(34:09):
What's a racing game in which you don't really race
anyone else? Right? Well, first, the first problem is that
it was build as a game where the object was
that you were transporting illegal goods uh, and you were
being chased by police. So it was built as a
game where you had to drive fast and evade the cops.
What cos right? So when you actually get the game,

(34:30):
it turns out there's nothing has nothing to do with
any of that. Instead, it was supposed to be, at
least once you've got the game going, it was supposed
to be a racing game where you're racing against other competitors,
but the game developer never actually bothered to put artificial
intelligence competitors in there, so they they never leave the
starting line. It's a race where all the other people

(34:53):
racing don't do anything. They just sit there. So you're
you're running and they're behind you and they don't do anything.
Beyond that, though, it gets worse than that. Well, what
about the realistic physics. Yeah, there weren't any Um you
could drive over anything like driving on the road or
driving off the road, or driving through a building. None

(35:14):
of that made any difference. You. You traveled at the
same speed unless you were backing up, in which case
you would accelerate infinitely until you let off the reverse button. Yeah,
I understand why. Again I didn't play this one, but
I understand too that stopping was hyper realistic too, Like
if you had perfect breaks, you just let up on
the accelerator and you stop. Yeah, exactly, you just go
to go to do that. Yeah, there's there's no sense

(35:37):
of momentum or inertia. You just the universe would would
would halt around you. Um, you could drive off the
edge of the map and into gray nothingness. So it
made it kind of a metaphysical philosophical game at that point.
I've done that before, and we've known plenty of metaphysical
philosophical truck drivers, and that's really not a dig. We
really do know quite a few of them. Um, but yeah,

(35:58):
it was just you know, collision detection to speak of. Uh.
There were five tracks listed in the game, only four
of them were playable. I don't know how that would
be a disappointment considering how horrible the game was, Like,
oh great, you mean I can't play this other terrible
track that I would never love? And uh ex plays
Morgan Webb she she refused to rate this game because

(36:23):
ex Play has a rating system of one to five stars.
There's no zero, there's no zero, and she refused to
even give it one star, so she would not review it.
She played it, she just wouldn't give it a review.
So yeah, that's that's pretty bad. So that was a
that was a two thousand three game. But we're gonna
go a little further back for our next one, right right, Yeah,

(36:45):
this is a a port of a very popular arcade game. Um,
and for this is when I've played back on when
I had an Atariet Wall. Actually I still have an
Attar when I had it hooked up the TV, but
I didn't actually own this one. I did, Um, so
shall we Yeah this is fifth place, by the way,

(37:05):
for those of you keeping count, So in fifth place
is pac Man. Yeah, pac Man, so reported the Namco Giant.
It's often called the worst coin op port ever. Donkey
Kong wasn't great, Oh no, not, I don't just agree,
but pac Man was. Honestly, it was terrible. Yeah, At

(37:28):
least Donkey Kong remotely resemble the game that it was
based on. Yeah, pac Man. Some people have said that
if it had not been called pac Man, if it
if it hadn't been referred to as that, and it
had a slightly different appearance for the character that you play,
that people probably wouldn't be quite so hard on it.
Because the puzzle, the mazes were a little challenging to

(37:50):
get through, and you know, the gameplay worked properly, like
you know, you'd press left on the joystick and pac
Man would go left. You know. It wasn't like, you know,
Big Rigs what we just talked about, that a game
that was just pure broken, right. There was no literally
no way to play that game. It end up being
like a weird sandbox game, but it wasn't intended to
be one. Pacman played the way it was supposed to

(38:12):
more or less. It's just that it was such a
poor translation of what a game that people were really
familiar with that it was it could be nothing more
than a disappointment to anyone who bought it. And in fact,
pac Man is one of the titles that people often
will use as an example when they talk about why
the video game industry collapsed in nineteen in North America. Well,

(38:35):
they made so many copies of this anticipating that people
would want to play it at home, but when they
actually got their hands on it and moved, I mean,
pac Man is a game where you actually need reflexes
and you need to pay attention to what's going on
in pac Man on the move so much more slowly,
and the graphics were poor. The sound wasn't as good.
I remember when it came out for the R and

(38:58):
it looked so much better except non centering joystick, which
makes playing in a four direction may is very very difficult.
So that just didn't help anything. Which is such a
huge flop at home, right, Yeah, it was. It was
a terrible, terrible game, And I completely agree with this
being on on a list for bad video games because

(39:21):
it you know, even if you even if you say
that the game play was okay, the effect it had
on the industry was so terrible that by definition it's
a bad video game because it helped bring the industry
to its knees in nine and it wouldn't be until
Nintendo launched the NES in North America that we would
see a recovery of that market. Um. So now next,

(39:43):
we have a tie for third place. You know, normally
we go from fifth to fourth, but we have the
same number of votes came in for our our third
and fourth place, so tie for third. And these two
are more modern. Yeah. We we did an entire episode
about one of these, Duke Newcombe Forever. Now, we did
do a full episode about Duke nukemb Forever. So we're

(40:06):
not going to spend too much time right now talking
about it because now, Grant, when we did the episode,
it was before the game had come out hotly anticipated
for a decade, more than a decade. Yeah, it was round. Yeah,
it was originally announced as a title for the PC.
It was a a sequel to Duke NUKEMB three d um.
It was originally announced inn but it didn't launch until eleven. Yeah,

(40:33):
that's a long time for to wait for a video game, right,
I mean, award right up there with Dao Sex. Yeah,
Wired gave it the Vaporware of the Year award multiple
years in a row. In fact that it got discontinued
from the voting because and then it was brought back
because it wasn't just that it was vaporware. It was
that just when you were prepared to say Duke nukemb

(40:55):
Forever was never going to come out, there would be
some sort of rumble from three D Realms. They would
say no, no, no, no, no, it's really gonna come out.
And then you'd have to say, well, now we have
to put it back on the list, because you know,
we were ready to write it off forever, but they
say it's coming out, So of course they rights to
the game passed into other people's hands. Three Realms collapsed. Yeah,

(41:17):
and they did. Yeah, they finished it. Um. They did
not receive wide acclaim when it launched, a lot of
people panned this game, which of course explains why it's
on our list and how many people voted for it. Um.
A lot of the criticisms about the game said that
it was it just looked dated. It was it was

(41:37):
like a first person shooter designed for the late nineties.
You know, it didn't have the elements that you expect
in the first person shooter today and uh that even
even for one in the nineties, it would have been
great because like in the nineties, you would have a
lot of fast paced action and you would have a
ton of different weapons at your disposal. Duke Knew Them
Forever was more plodding and uh, well, there's no way

(42:03):
for me to word this in a way that's not negative.
It was a slow, slow game. It could be boring
at times, it could be ages between one encounter with
an enemy and another, and you can only carry two
weapons at a time. So it took away some of
the stuff that made those games in the nineties so
much fun and uh, and didn't replace it with anything better.
And also the juvenile humor in the Duke Newcomb series.

(42:25):
I think it may have worn a little thin. It's
just people don't find it as amusing as it used
to be, partially because we've had other games come out
that have much more biting satire and uh, and you know,
they're they're just as edgy as Duke newkemb was, but
they are more relevant. Like the Grand Theft Auto series

(42:46):
is known for its dark humor, the Fallout three series
or the Fallout series in general is known for its
dark humor, and so you get to do Newcomb and
you're just like, well, this feels like you're in a
uh you know, you're in a locker room with a
bunch of really really immature guys, and that that's the
level of humor and it just never gets above that.

(43:07):
And so I think all of those things contributed to
it being ranked on our list. But what about our
next game that's also tied for third place? You think
that a game written by um an Oxford professor of
bioethics might actually rank up there, But Bennett Foddy's game

(43:28):
qw O P or wop um got a lot of
negative votes. Actually, I saw this profiled and wired before
I ever tried to play it. Um, there's a need
little article about him. Uh, and I do mean little.
It's very short, um. But basically, in this game, you
are using the keys Q W O P hence the name,

(43:49):
to move the legs of a runner on a track
ye a runner named quop for a hundreds And that's
important to know. It's not it's supposed to be a
limp runner on the hundred meter dash, and the Q
and W keys control the runners thighs, and the O
n P keys control the runners calves, and you're supposed

(44:09):
to try and coordinate these movements in such a way
as to propel the runner down the hundred meters. By
the way, this runner has apparently no upper buddy control whatsoever,
and if if the runner gets even a little bit
off balance, it's time to tip over. And I have
seen so many people play this game and get negative
scores because they would just start tipping backwards almost instantaneously.

(44:32):
And as soon as you touch the ground, that's where
you're that's that's your score. And uh, and we'll keep
in mind it's a hundred meter dash. Um. I've never
seen anyone complete this in fewer than twenty minutes. But
the furthest I've gotten is twelve point eight meters. Didn't
you send me a video somebody who had finished in
about four minutes. I think they sped it up. What

(44:53):
they what they ended up doing was they used it
so that they made Quop do a split, and then
they just kind of jimmied it. He finally like he
literally inched down a hundred meters and and at fifty
By the way, you are you are you encounter your
first obstacle hurdle, and at a hundred meters there's a
long jump, but you can go through the hurdle like

(45:16):
you don't have to. You don't have to actually jump
the hurdle. You can keep going as long as you're
able to land on your feet or however you're getting across. Um,
you can you can pretty much ignore the hurdle and
the long jump is completely uh optional. Yes, if you
just have to cross that finish line. If you're if
your experience with video game running is track and field

(45:37):
from the nineties where you just had to pound buttons
as fast as you could. Um, you will not win
at this game. This game is. This game is really, really,
really hard, which I think is why it got a
lot of votes. It's it's frustrating, and it seems it
seems after you've played it for about a minute, it
seems completely pointless. Oh, we should say it's web based.

(45:59):
It's a web based so you can find it on
Foddy's side. He wrote this in two thousand and eight
and it's still up, so if you want to give
it a shot, go ahead. It's it's kind of and
it's kind of funny. It also gives you an idea
of how well your brain is controlling your walking movements,
because if you were trying to walk with your you know,
control your own legs with your fingers. You I don't
know that I would do it better, but it takes

(46:20):
a lot of coordination to be able to Like, even
when I got twelve point eight meters, it was mostly luck.
I was timing it just right. But even as I
was playing, I was like, oh, I should have I
should have let up on the calf muscle and continued
on the thigh muscle for a split second longer, and
I would have been able to get a little further.
I can never do that when I'm actually playing. Like,
when I'm actually playing, I'm like, press these two buttons, now,

(46:42):
switch through these two buttons, now switch back to those
two buttons. And that's that's my tactic. It's probably why
I've only gotten twelve points in Maybe you should get
onto a gurp Oh yeah, I've played that one too,
which is his mountain climbing game, and apparently it's very
very similar. It's actually that one I can play really well.
I've gotten pretty far in girp Um. That one makes

(47:03):
more sense to me, I've got better coordination with that one.
But the but yeah, quop is really hard. So um,
you know who's really good at controlling their legs? Who's
the he? But someone who doesn't have to use them?
Is this going into our second place? Yes? Because I mean,
you know, if you can fly, yeah, then why would
you need to use your legs? Yes? Talking about our

(47:25):
second place. Superman the New Superman Adventures. Yeah, also known
as Superman sixty four sixty four It wasn't its official name, right,
It's good that it wasn't Superman the New Batman Adventures.
That would be really confusing. Yeah, like Superman Little Pony
that it would be weird. It might have been a
better game then though. This was released in for the

(47:47):
Nintendo sixty four and probably shouldn't have been. And again
this we're talking about licensed character you know all we
talked about with Back to the Future. There we're gonna
make some money. The history of licensed characters, actually, we're
gonna get to that again very short. The history of
licensed characters in video games is a pretty ugly one.
There are a few games that stand out as being remarkable,

(48:08):
like truly good games that use licensed characters, but the
general rule of thumb is that if it's a licensed
character game, it's it's got a good that the odds
are against it, right, just based on the number of
bad games that use licensed characters. Now, there are other games,
like you know, Arkham Asylum, which are fun. I mean,

(48:29):
that's a Batman game, and that's a lot of fun.
I thought you were going to bring up Golden Eye.
Golden Eye fantastic one of the best games ever made,
also made for the Nintendo sixty four, one of the
top first person shooter games of that era. Fantastic game.
Superman not so much so. The story behind this game,

(48:52):
the actual story in the game, that is, is that
you play the part of Superman who has been tricked,
as he often is, I Lex Luthor to enter into
a virtual representation of Metropolis, and you have to complete
these different tasks and puzzles that Lex sets up for
you in order to escape and beat the tar out

(49:13):
of him. Tank I needed exit. Yeah, so the first
test of your skills involves flying through a series of hoops,
because yeah, I remember his big battle with Doomsday where
he had to fly through about fourteen hoops before. No,

(49:34):
that doesn't make any sense and I jumped through hoops
every day after that, you might have to pick up
a car and throw it, because again that's what Superman
would do in Metropolis. Is that you know, you're thinking,
like you're driving down with your family, You're having a
nice day out. You might be going to go see
the Metropolis Museum of Art, and the next thing you know,
some jerk has just flown over, picked up your car

(49:54):
and thrown at forty blocks. Yeah, that's that will ruin
your whole day. But anyway, so you would also have
to do things I fight famous Superman villains. But the
controls were really sluggish, the gameplay was incredibly repetitive, and
it has been ranked as one of the worst video
games of all time, not just by our listeners, but
by other publications. I mean it has multiple I hesitate

(50:17):
to use the word awards, but multiple notifications of it
being the worst, one of the worst video games, and
in fact, in one ranking I saw, it was ranked
as the number one and our number one was number two. Hey,
we are almost through with our episode about the worst
video games of all time. Hope you're enjoying it. But
before we conclude, let's take another quick break so now

(50:48):
I guess we should move on to what our listeners
have voted. And I'm sure you've already guessed it based
upon what has already been listed. But what yourur listeners
have voted as the worst video game of all time?
And I should point out this received twenty nine percent
of the overall votes we received. And keep in mind,
you could nominate any title at all, and and I'm

(51:11):
I have a small concern. That's because we've mentioned it
as a terrible game, that that you all thought that
we were coaching you to vote for this time, and
we did. We have talked about this game being a
terrible game before, but when when we actually asked for votes,
I made sure we didn't mention any particular title. I
didn't want to change anyone's mind or put in a suggestion.

(51:32):
I'm sure that happened anyway based upon some of the
comments and everything. But our worst video game is of
all time, Chris, do the honors? E T the Extraterrestrial
for the R two game published by Atari in about
ten minutes. Yeah, so keep in mind that Atari went

(51:54):
the route where they were allowing all sorts of developers
to create games for there. It didn't have to be
vetted through Atari, right, Nintendo had the whole certification process.
Atari did not. But this there's no excuse here because
Atari was the publisher behind this game in the first place.

(52:15):
Uh yeah, So then this game, you take the role
of e T. The Extraterrestrial from the beloved Steven Spielberg
documentary of the same name, and your task was to
locate three pieces of an interstellar telephone so that you
could assemble them and phone home, which would summon a

(52:36):
spaceship that would rescue you. Uh. You did this just
like in the movie. I mean, we all remember that
scene in the movie where e T had to walk
into a field of pits, raise his head up, look
for the flash, and descend into the pit to retrieve
a piece of the interstellar phone. I mean you remember
that scene right, as probably no, that scene did not exist.

(52:59):
But in them, you would walk into one of the screens,
actually a couple of the screens would have several pits
on the screen. You push a button which would raise
ET's head and he would do a sound like this,
and then what if you were lucky, one of the
pits would flash, which would indicate that one of the
pieces of the phone was in that pit, and you

(53:20):
would walk over to the pit, fall in, pick up
the piece of phone, and then you would press the
button which would raise ET's head wall and you would
levitate up the pit. Now, most of the game is
an overhead view, but when you were in a pit,
it was a side view like a cut and you
would you would levitate to the top of the pit

(53:40):
and then immediately fall in again because it was really
hard that once you got to the top of the pit,
the screen would change so that you were looking at
the overhead view again and you had to manipulate ET
all over to the edge of the pit so that
you were on the ground again. Right, So you're you
go from a side view to an overhead view. And
I can't tell you how many times I fell down
to pit over and over and over again because I

(54:01):
thought it was clear. But and every time you fall,
and every time you use your powers, you use up energy.
You have a limited amount of energy, and after you
use it all up, you die. Yeah, Well, you have
to find dots, I mean pieces. He had a little
square pixel which would be represent one Reese's pieces, and
you would eat that and that would give you a
little more energy. They would also had doctors who would

(54:23):
walk around and if they found you, they'd pick you
up and move you to a different screen, and you
would lose a little time, or worse, you would find
an FBI guy and he would chase you down and
if he touched you, he would take away your phone
and he had to start over again. And so you
would do this over and over again till you had
the three pieces of phone. Then you could go to
one part of the game, the one section where there's

(54:47):
an icon on the screen that tells you you can
make your phone call here, and you had to find
it because it wasn't always in the same place. You
would make your phone call, and then you had to
make it to a different screen where the space ship
would actually land because apparently you can't make a phone
call at the landing site. Oh no, that'd be too easy.
So then you have to make your way to the
other screen and get in the little spaceship and you

(55:10):
would then start the game over at the same difficulty
level immediately. And this game was awful, terrible, terrible game
so bad that people the word got out about how
disappointed this game was. That people stopped buying it, and

(55:31):
uh Atari had produced thousands of cartridges because the movie
was so successful. So Atari goes out and makes thousands
and thousands of copies of ET. The reviews come in,
people hate it, copies go unsold. Eventually, stores start to
send their unsold copies of ET back to Atari, and

(55:52):
Atari grinds them up and then trucks them out into
New Mexico and aries them. You know, um, you know
what they did with that? What's up? They used it
to pave a road and then you drive this bus
right across the desert and you get one point every
time you run over ET exactly. Yeah, it was, and

(56:14):
then you fall in a pit and then physics in
that game are terrible. But anyway, yeah, so that was.
This was again just like pac Man. This is another
one of those games that was pointed to as being
one of the reasons the video game industry crashed in Now.
You know a lot of the games that came out
for they were these games made by independent developers that

(56:37):
were just terrible. But it was because you know, the
market was flooded with terrible games and Attari was not
helping itself out by publishing some of them itself. Yeah,
I had some of those games too, and I had
and you know, I've mentioned it before. I was actually
surprise that nobody voted for the sword Quest series. But
my guess is that Ataria was in such decline that

(56:57):
none of our listeners actually bought that but me, since
they didn't even finish the last game on the series.
But we didn't. A couple of people did vote for
some games that were patently offensive. We didn't mentioned that before,
and we didn't we weren't including those specifically because we
were talking about games that were just horrible games now

(57:20):
were offensive. These were games that were meant to be enjoyable.
They didn't have an ulterior motive, right right, There are
some of those two. But the games that had an
ulterior motive where the whole purpose was to perpetuate hatred
or to make a joke out of uh inhumane acts,
we didn't include those because really, I mean, first of all,

(57:42):
I refused to give them any more publicity than they've
already had. And second of all, I I was the
spirit of the thing was to think of games that
were meant to be enjoyable, fun, games that just weren't
for one reason, or another. Um, let's talk about some
of the really quickly, because we were already getting pretty
far up there. But we have to talk about some

(58:03):
of the other games that got on got some votes
that I was surprised didn't get more votes. But again,
since you had every single game open to you, you know,
one of those was Aquaman Battle for Atlantis. This game
is nigh unplayable. It again had one of the worst
reviews ever. Explay did an amazing hysterical review of this game. UM.

(58:25):
I think they called it like Power of the Mullet
or something like that in their in their review, but
it was terrible. And games that, um, we're specifically designed
to be marketing tools for for brands, so stuff like
I actually had the kool Aid game for the Oh Yeah,
oh No, and then they had the Avoid the Annoyed

(58:48):
game for Dominoes. There were all the Burger King games
that came out for the Xbox. There was a McDonald's
game as well. We got we got votes for those,
but they were it was usually like one yeah, like
one vote for one of those titles, so there wasn't
a lot of but I think that that deserves mentioned.
Games that are specifically just marketing employs tend to get

(59:10):
hate hated by gamers, which you know, that kind of
makes sense, like gamers won a game that was designed
just to create enjoyment, be fun and challenging, not a
game that's designed to make you want to go out
and buy a pizza. Teenager Ninja Turtles also falls into
that category. I'm just kidding. So and then there were
some of the games that were on the list that

(59:30):
we were a little surprised to see votes for. Uh.
And in some cases, I think it's what people were
voting on games that either they're just tired of seeing
or they don't they are not particularly good at that
game and they find it frustrating, and other people like it,
and that's why they hate it, because it's a game
that they personally just don't get. Um. But some of

(59:51):
those titles include things like Angry Birds, which I think
probably that's a saturation thing, right, It's just because it's everywhere,
people are going to be tired of it. I think
that was farm built. Yeah, Uh, we fit, we fit.
I don't even think if we fit as a game,
And that's why I didn't really like that. That's not
really a game so much I mean, there's a game
element to it, but it's not I don't call it

(01:00:12):
a game. Halo, which I think a lot of people
would argue as one of the better first person shooters
for a console system, keeping in mind that PC based
first person shooters are much more sophisticated and require a
totally different skill set than a console one. I've heard
computer first person shooter players refer to console first person
shooters as kind of dumbing down the whole thing, and

(01:00:34):
I kind of get that, but it's it's a different,
you know, kind of different mode. And I personally love
the Halo series. I can see your Halo. Thank you
Pitfall for the ad. That was a classic title like that,
along with River Radar, two of my favorite DRED titles,
But there were people who didn't like it because it
had a repetitive gameplay activisions early days there Super Mario

(01:00:57):
sixty four another game that got great review US, but
we got some votes for that Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator,
which again I don't really think of as a game.
Flight simulator and flight simulators, by their very nature tend
to be very, very complex, and sometimes overwhelmingly so because
they are trying to be so true to life, and
yet you're using a different interface to control that vehicle

(01:01:21):
than you would if you were in the cockpit, So
there's an extra layer of complexity, you know. So that
the votes also we got some votes for Call of
Duty and Modern Warfare, which that was kind of interesting. Um,
so not everybody agrees obviously on what is the worst
game of all time? Although overwhelmingly ET ran away with

(01:01:42):
this Like it was, there wasn't even close. ET have
way more votes than all the others combined. But like
I said, all the votes that were we received for
everything went to ET galloped everywhere he walked, did you Yes,
it's true, Yeah, that's true. Did you have any game? Well?

(01:02:03):
You mentioned the what was the sword Quest series? That
was a pretty bad There was supposed to be a
contest if he solved all four parts of it, and
the fourth part never came out in the third one
got limited distribution. But I couldn't see the point of
doing what you were supposed to be doing, right, I mean,
I just really couldn't follow the sequence. Yeah, I think
I have to say that out of all the ones

(01:02:24):
I've I've mentioned, e T is probably the the one
I think of as the worst that I've ever personally played.
I've played a lot of really bad games, but I
tend to forget them because I have access to more
games now, so if I play a really bad one,
I just switch and go to a good one so
it doesn't leave as big an impression on me. Back
when I was a kid, my options were somewhat limited,

(01:02:46):
and so I would play a bad game over and
over because it's what I had. Ah, you poor thing.
I know here I am complaining about video games. Poor me,
I have played a game. Um, don't cry for me, Argentina.
Did you enjoy? That was what I told you to do? So, yeah,

(01:03:11):
that was our episode on the worst video Games of
All time. You guys pick some doozies. Maybe someday we'll
do another like follow up to that, because of course,
there have been lots of video games releas since two
thousand eleven, certainly, and some of you may have very
strong opinions, like, wait, there was this other game that
was even worse than all the ones you mentioned, and
you didn't talk about it, so, uh, we might try

(01:03:31):
it again, I said at the time. Maybe we'll do
a more concentrated approach, because when you leave it wide open.
You get you know, five people responding, and a hundred
of them all give a vote for an obscure title.
But that's one vote per obscure title, so they don't
amount to anything. So we'll figure something out. But we

(01:03:52):
want to talk a little bit about some of the
worst video games we've ever played. So, Lauren, you know,
since you weren't available to talk about the video games
of all time, did you have any that you wanted
to add to the discussion? Yeah, okay, So, so there
were two that I've played personally that stand out in
my mind as being particularly terrible. Um. The first is
Back to the Future parts two and three for the

(01:04:16):
n S. That's the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Um and okay,
both of the things that I'm going to mention our
uh film or otherwise, you know, other media titles that
have been ported over, which is never really a recipe for. Yeah,
there's only a few examples of ones like Batman Arkham Asylum,

(01:04:36):
Like that's an example of a great licensed game, but
there's so few of those. Oh yeah, yeah, and okay,
So so this one was developed by Beam Software and
released by l j N and it was rated unforgiving
in game facts. Um, it was. It was just basically
impossible to play. The music was terrible, the graphics were terrible.
There were some parts of it that were just just meaningless. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:04:59):
so let's see other one. The other one is the
X Files game that's for the PC and or the
PS one or PS X. Uh. Yeah, I remember seeing
video reviews of that. I never played it myself. I
want to hear more about your experience here, all right.
So so this one was developed by UM and I
think this is how you pronounce it, Hyperbowl Studios, not hyperbole.

(01:05:22):
Not hyperbole, Yeah, hyper bowl that's how it's spelled. Um.
It was released by Fox Interactive. Makes sense of the
twenty century Foxes doing the X Files in and or nine,
depending on which system you bought it for. Um. So
this was largely an f m v A full and

(01:05:42):
and it wasn't even starring Molder and Scully. Is the problem, Like,
because the actors were busy, you know, doing their TV show,
so they had to get this other dude to kind
of interact very occasionally with Molder and Scully, and the
puzzles were just terrible, Like it wasn't it wasn't thought
out very well in terms of game design. Like I
think the first puzzle in the game was you sit

(01:06:03):
down at your office being you, being this this this
other agent character, and the first thing you have to
figure out is what your computer passport is, as though
you wouldn't know what your own computer I mean, actually,
to be fair, I guess I forget my own passwords
about once a week. But that's still that's I mean,
how you can't be more secure, right, like you know

(01:06:25):
your you know your system secure, when even you are
not aware of what your passworts are. Wow. Yeah, I
was trying to think of any others I want to add,
because again, we recorded that first episode back in two
thousand and eleven, and you know, I've played games since then.
But here's the thing is that the way I tend
to play games these days, I tend to buy them
well after they've had their initial run, simply because I

(01:06:47):
don't have a whole lot of time on my hands.
So I'm often playing a game that came out, you know,
a year earlier earl or somewhere around that time. Uh
still while other games are coming out, and because I
haven't finished that game, I don't just immediately jump on
the other. So like Skyrim, I didn't get that till
almost a year after it had come out, maybe maybe

(01:07:08):
seven or eight months, and people have perhaps vetted the
fact that it's worth your while by the time you purchase,
and yeah, by that time people have played it, I've
seen reviews, I've heard buzz about it, and I've decided
whether or not it's for me. It's very rare when
I'll go out and get a game like the day
it comes out. One of the examples of one where
I did do that was a Grand Theft Auto of five,
and I wouldn't go the worst game of all time

(01:07:30):
or anything close to that. The actual single player experience
is pretty phenomenal if you like those kind of games.
If you don't like those kind of games, obviously, obviously
you're not going. But I really enjoyed the game. I
enjoyed the story, I like the characters. I didn't think
it was necessarily groundbreaking. It wasn't nearly as dark as
Grand Theft Auto four was, but uh, I enjoyed it.

(01:07:54):
But the online part, which was released two weeks after
the game came out, you know, they had a lot
of of promises of what was going to come, and
some of those promises as of the recording of this
podcast have yet to be delivered upon, like being able
to do heists in multiplayer. Heists in the single player
game were fantastic. They were you had to coordinate between

(01:08:16):
three different characters. You could swap between the characters during
the highest each one is doing something specific, really kind
of complicated stuff like you could actually determine which of
two pathways you would want to take, whether you wanted
to go the subtle route or just kick the doors
open exactly. So it was really a fun, dynamic thing
in the single player game. So everyone's really looking forward
to it, but it hasn't come out for multiplayer again

(01:08:38):
as of the recording of this podcast, and that has
been a pretty big disappointment. So the single player fantastic
multiplayer was one of those things where people got tired
of it. In fact, I don't know how many people
are still playing multiplayer. I know there are, but I
don't know how many of them there are because a
lot of people just got they were able to do
everything you could do, and you're like, well, between the

(01:09:00):
promise in the follow through and it was it was
because it was really an ambitious project and just didn't
quite live up to it when it launched. Not to
say that they won't eventually get there. I just wonder
how big a population they'll have once they finally do.
But yeah, I don't have sadly don't have a whole
lot of stories about terrible video games I've played. I mean,

(01:09:20):
even that's not really sad, that's that's kind of okay. Yeah,
that wraps up that classic episode of the worst video
Games of All Time. Something to always keep in mind
is that pretty much every case, no matter how bad
a video game might turn out to be, we should
remember typically there are people who are working very hard

(01:09:40):
on those games, and sometimes stuff just doesn't work out
for any number of reasons. But that doesn't mean that
those people who are working on it were in the
wrong or weren't skilled. Sometimes stuff just doesn't go well.
And uh, I wanted to put that out there because
a lot of the times when I talk about like

(01:10:00):
the worst of all time stuff, it sounds like I'm
slagging off on the people who are responsible for it.
But that's not always you know, merited. Sometimes it is
if people are like running a scam or something. But
in the case where people are genuinely setting out to
do something and they just fall short, I feel like
we should give them a little compassion. So just reminding

(01:10:24):
myself as well as you nice folks out there, that
compassion can go a long way. Well, speaking of compassion,
if you feel like that there's an episode I should
be covering, you know, maybe there's an update I need
to do, maybe there's a technology you want to know
more about, you should reach out to me, but nicely
over on Twitter the handle I use as tech stuff

(01:10:46):
h s W. Now I'll tell to you again really soon.
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

(01:11:09):
H