September 26, 2018 • 42 mins
Back in 2011, we asked listeners what they thought the worst video games of all time were. In this episode, we look at games that received some of the worst reviews since 2011. What makes a bad game so awful?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Johnathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And
before I jump into today's episode topic, I want to
(00:24):
give a couple of corrections that I got to recent episodes,
which is totally valid. You guys are an awesome audience,
and I really appreciate when you reach out too gently.
Remind me that sometimes I get stuff wrong because you
typically do it in a responsible way, which I greatly appreciate,
and I should stress in almost every case, it's where
(00:44):
I have researched something and somewhere between the process of
reading it and taking my notes, my brain has inserted
information that has made it wrong. So the fault lies
on me and I accept that. So first correction in
the Pebble episode, I mentioned that the Pebble Watch, the
original Pebble Watch, had an e paper display, and then
(01:06):
I explained how e ink works. And indeed the two
terms are frequently used interchangeably. You will often find e
paper and ink both talking about the same technology that
one that uses those electro statically charged capsules. However, that
being said, the display that the Pebble the original Pebble
watch had was not a true e ink style e
(01:28):
paper one, even though they referred to it as e paper.
It was actually a low powered l c D screen
called a transflective l c D so it works in
a different way than the ink stuff does. The purpose
of it is very similar, the idea being that you
want to be able to read the screen based upon
(01:48):
available light in the environment as opposed to having a
backlit screen like your typical smartphone. But it works in
a different principles, so thank you for that correction. Secondly,
listener Ben pointed that in the Cambridge Analytica podcasts, I
mentioned a sting operation conducted by the BBC. Small problem
that wasn't the BBC. It was actually Channel four News
(02:10):
in the UK, not a BBC channel. So this one
is just comes down to my stupid American brain, because
my stupid American brain says, oh, it was British television
that means BBC, which is ridiculous. I know there's more
television in the UK than the BBC channels. I'm just
(02:31):
I'm just an ignorant American, So I apologize for that.
And third, there's a software engineer who would absolutely love
it if I stopped saying degrees kelvin because the unit
of kelvin is the kelvin, not the degree. So that's
the correct thing. You want to say, kelvin, not degrees kelvin. Now,
you will frequently see and hear people use the phrase
(02:51):
degrees kelvin, but it's technically wrong until enough people use it,
because that's how language works if it if enough people
use it the wrong way, the wrong way becomes the
right way. So I charge everyone out there to start
saying degrees kelvin because if enough of you do it,
I don't have to worry about saying it the right way.
(03:11):
I'm just kidding. I'll try my best to remember to
be accurate. I appreciate all of those corrections. Now, onto
the topic for today. Way back in two thousand eleven,
my then co host Chris Pellette and I did an
episode about the worst video games of All Time. But
these were titles that were submitted by listeners. We solicited
uh various nominations, and we did it over Facebook and
(03:35):
Twitter and email, and we just asked people nominate what
you think are the worst video games of all time,
and then we taied them all up. And so in
that episode we talked about games that had been considered
bad for various things. Maybe they had missed release dates repeatedly.
Duke Nukem Forever was a famous one and had just
come out that year after more than a decade of
(03:56):
being in development. We also talked about games that were
buried in the desert after too many cartridges had been
made and not enough people wanted to buy a copy,
like E. T. The Extraterrestrial for the A. But what
about the games that have come out since two thousand eleven.
What are some of the most notoriously bad games of
that era. Well, before I jump in and start talking
(04:18):
about specific titles, I do want to say that we
need to keep in mind that real people worked on
these games. They dedicated their time, their effort, their energy
into making a game a reality, and things just didn't
go right. So in some cases, maybe they tackled more
than they could handle and ultimately the game they created
(04:39):
was a disappointment. In other cases, you might have had
executives who are constantly shifting expectations and the development team
was kind of left in the lurch as a result,
and maybe they even had things like a hardline deadline
that had to be the date that the game would ship,
whether the game was ready or not. A lot of
(05:02):
games have suffered from that sort of thing, But I
think in most cases, no one really sets out to
make a crappy game on purpose, And so while the
games I'm going to go through here have a reputation
for being bad, we need to remember they probably did
not start off that way, most of them. Anyway. There
might be a few cynical cash grabs in here that
do not qualify for such consideration. But you game developers
(05:24):
out there who are trying to deliver upon crazy expectations,
both from within a company and from the gaming community
at large, my hat is off to you. You do
incredible work. Now, for this episode, I consulted Metacritic to
look at the games that scored the lowest in aggregated
reviews since the original episode came out in late From
(05:48):
the Metacritic website, here is how they described their methodology quote.
Creating our proprietary meta scores is a complicated process. We
carefully curate a large group of the world's most respected
critics assigned scores to their reviews and apply a weighted
average to summarize the range of their opinions. The result
(06:08):
is a single number that captures the essence of critical
opinion in one meta score. Each movie, game, television show,
an album featured on Metacritic gets a meta score when
we've collected at least four critics reviews end quote. So
in other words, they're aggregating all these different reviews and
then kind of determining where on a score between zero
(06:31):
and one hundred, that review rates the product. So a
zero would be the absolute worst, one would be the
absolute best. For games, anything beneath the score of fifty
is considered generally unfavorable. If it's less than twenty, it
is overwhelming dislike is the nature of those reviews. And
(06:55):
spoiler alert, we have some on this list that dropped
down below twenty. But the first one we're gonna talk about,
number ten, the ten worst video games since the Fall
of two thousand eleven would be flat out three Chaos
and Destruction that came out December two thousand eleven, so
just a few months after we had done our episode,
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and it came out for the PC. The Metacritics score
was twenty three yikes, and this was a car racing game,
and as the name indicates, it was the third such
in a series of games. The original game developer for
the series was a company called Bugbear, but Bugbear developers
were actually busy working on a totally different title, that
(07:39):
of Ridge Racer unbounded. The jab of developing the next
entry in the Flat Out series then fell to a
Dutch video game development studio called Team Six. As a
review on I g N pointed out, this was actually
an early sign of concern because the games that had
come out of Team six lacked something. They had great titles.
(08:01):
I'm definitely intrigued by a game that's titled Calvin Tucker's
Redneck Farm Animals Racing Tournament. What. But the studio developed
a different physics engine for this rather than the previous
one that was used for Flat Out two, and this
one reviewers said was sloppy. It was in direct contradiction
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with earlier games in the series. So in the past
you could drive really aggressively. You could you could kind
of smash your way through opponents. You can nudge them
and knock them off course and and continue on your way.
But in Flat Out three. It seemed like the slightest
contact with anything would result in your car flipping all
over the place. It suddenly looked like you could not
behave in this way, and it wasn't consistent you would.
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You would have what would appear to be a colossal,
disastrous crash on screen, and your car would only suffer
a little bit of damage, or you might just gently
grace up against another car and then suddenly your engine
is smoking. The AI was substandard as well, with computer
controlled racers spending more time crashing into each other than
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trying to race the course. So it sounds pretty much
like all the design decisions going into Flat Out three
created a game that was not fun to play. It
didn't make sense, and was a total departure from earlier
Flat Out games. The lack of consistency or logic really
hurt the game's reception. Team six is still around and
the company primarily focuses on developing racing games. To this day,
(09:31):
I'm not terribly familiar with their work. I don't think
I've played any of their racing games, but as I
understand it, many of those games have received a poor
critical reception, not as bad as Flat Out three, but
not great either. We're talking like Metacritics scores in the thirties,
so I'm not much of a racing game player. I
cannot speak to it personally, but it doesn't sound great.
(09:53):
Number nine is Rambo the video game, which came out
February twenty one, two thousand fourteen, and it came out
for the PlayStation three, the Xbox three, sixty PC, and
Metacritic gave it a score also of twenty three. Now.
In general, video game adaptations of licensed characters frequently show
up on lists about bad games. Now, I talked about
(10:14):
ET the Extraterrestrial that is frequently listed as the worst
game of all time, although it really isn't. But it
is frequently the truth that a game of a licensed
character doesn't turn out well. Now, that's not universally true.
The recent PS four game of Spider Man is pretty
(10:35):
darn fun to play. In my opinion, I think it's
a great game, or at least I've really been enjoying it.
But one cannot say the same for Rambo the video game. Now,
Rambo refers to John Rambo, who's in several movies, the
first being First Blood. He's a Vietnam war veteran in
verse Blood, he returns to America and causes quite the
(10:57):
ruckus going on essentially what it amounts to being a
rampage at one point, and in subsequent films in the series,
Rambo would become the archetypical action hero. He would carry
enormous guns and just mow down antagonists left and right.
That was always like the one man army kind of trope,
and he became the model for all sorts of violent
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excess in the in the eighties and nineties. So what
better character would you use to adapt to a video game?
I mean, he's certainly inspired lots of different video game characters.
So a developer named Tayon and a publisher called Reef
Entertainment were responsible for adapting the material from the first
three Rambo films and publishing them in video game form. Now,
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the actual game style took the form of a rail shooter.
This is a type of game that you might see
in arcades with light guns things like Time Crisis and
the Past. You take through a level is set, and
often even the speed at which you move through the
level is set, and the way that villains or bad
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guys antagonists jump out at you that is set. Everything
is kind of on a script, and it's your job
to just try and do the best you can and
shoot your enemies. Uh. This, however, didn't play on a
system with a light gun. You would either use a
controller or you would use a mouse and keyboard, and
with the mouse in particular, it was reportedly incredibly easy
to make every shot, so there was no challenge, there
(12:24):
was no variety, The gameplay was outdated. Uh, the the
the whole process appeared to be pretty substandard. The one
good thing I saw in the critical reviews was that
they did a pretty good job at replicating the environments
that you would see in the actual Rambo movies, so
that the video game versions of these seem to be
(12:46):
fairly accurate to those. But apart from that, the actual
game was substandard. Well, we've got more bad games to
talk about, but first let's take a quick break to
thank our sponsor. We're up to number eight and number
eight would be Fast and Furious Showdown another licensed property.
(13:09):
This one came out in May two thirteen and came
out for the Xbox three sixty, the PC, the PlayStation
three apparently, the Nintendo three D S and the we
you as well, and it scored on Metacritic a twenty two,
so he's taken a step down. Now. This was published
by Activision, and it was another kind of combination racing
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game and shooting game, and also a licensed game, so
it had a lot going against it. The Fast and
Furious film series is known for a crazy automobile action.
Characters frequently pull off car stunts in those films that
would be impossible in the real world, and everybody in
those movies are They're all incredibly skilled race car driving
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superheroes essentially. So you'd think a video game based off
the series would allow the player to take control of
a car and likewise do impossible feats in a series
of breathtaking missions, but unfortunately, the game's engine wasn't up
to that challenge. The collision detection in the game was
pretty bad. Virtual objects in the game had little mass.
(14:10):
You would have, you know, like enormous obstacles crashed down
in front of you, and your car would just kind
of gently pushed them all the way there. Nothing seemed
to have any weight to it. The level design was uninspired.
The art style was not terribly pleasing from an esthetic
point of view. The cinematic cut scenes weren't much better.
They were they appeared to be of a lower quality
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than other current generation or that current generation cut scenes.
People often said, this looks like it belongs on the
previous generation hardware instead of PS three, less like it
would have been at home on a PS two. The
loading time between missions was incredibly long, and if you
wanted to upgrade your car you could. You could earn
(14:55):
experience in the game and use that experience to create
upgrades for your vehicles or or other features. So let's
say you want to boost your your vehicle's performance so
that you can tackle the next level better, you would
have to actually back out of the game entirely to
the main menu, go into a different option, then make
the changes, then back all the way back out again,
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and then go back in and restart up to where
you were in the game in the within the storyline.
Uh and keep in mind those loading screens were really long,
and the menus also had spelling or grammatical errors in
them which made it look a little amateurish. And most missions,
you could control the driver of a vehicle and a
(15:37):
passenger in the vehicle who was hanging outside of the
window acting as a shooter. They have a gun and
so you can fight off your opponents that are trying
to run you off the road. The AI made very
little sense. The cars did not move like real cars.
The missions were mostly all variations on a common theme
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of running gun and so the lack of variability, the
bad physics, the graphics. All of this contributed to the
low scores and put it on our list of worst
video games is two thousand eleven. Number seven is Afro
Samurai to Revenge of Kuma, which came out in September
two thou fifteen. Came out for the PlayStation four and
(16:19):
the PC. It was supposed to come out for the
Xbox One, but hang on here. Metacritic gave it a
score of twenty one. This is another licensed property. Afro
Samurai is a manga series in Japan, and the series
follows a character named Afro Samurai, and he's out for revenge.
His father was killed in the series, so he's out
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to revenge his his father's death. To avenge his father's death,
I guess I should say, and an earlier video game
adaptation of this story in two thousand nine had received
average to decent reviews. It wasn't considered a blockbuster, but
it was people said, now, so, hey, you know, it's
not not a terrible game. It featured cell shaded animation
(17:04):
as uh kind of a beat him up in a way,
and the player controlled the titular character in his quest
for revenge. So this this is the sequel to that game,
and the sequel was supposed to be the first episode
in a series. So the idea was to release the
sequel in episodic format, and it put the player in
control of a different character named Kuma, and Kuma wears
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a big mascot style bear head. The word Kuma is
Japanese for bear, and Kuma is seeking out Afro Samurai
to seek revenge for Kuma's sisters death, and like some
Facebook relationship status is, it's complicated. So this game did
come out for the PC and for the PS four.
It was going to come out later for the Xbox One,
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but the PCMPS four versions got such bad reviews that
not only was the Xbox One version canceled, ultimately the
publisher actually withdrew through Afro Samurai too, from the Steam
Store and from the PS store. So after getting really
raked over the coals, by critics. The developer said, you
(18:11):
know what we're going to just we're gonna take this down.
So now no more copies are ever going to be sold. Uh.
It was pretty negative reaction to warrant that kind of
a response. Also, I think it makes the fact that
the developer's name was redacted studios somewhat tragically comedic. The
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planned episodic sequels also got scrapped. So what made this
such a bad game? Well, the answer to that question
is a kind of everything. So critics were saying the
voice acting for the game was over the top and cringeworthy,
as the kids used to say, and at times the
sound levels in the game made it really difficult to
hear what was being said because sound effects or music
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was drowning out everything else, and so you're missing out
on valuable and formation, although apparently it was valuable information
that was delivered in this over the top kind of way,
so maybe you were better off in the long run.
The game style was that of a classic beat him up,
kind of like the old side scrolling games of the
early nineties, but this one was with sort of three
dimensional levels, and it also had that cell shaded art
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style of its predecessor. The game had frame rate problems
in which frames would drop and that would result in
a type of skipping effect that made playing the game
really hard and not much fun at all. It's difficult
to time a counter attack if the action is skipping
forward in spurts. You can't really time when you need
to hit a button in order to avoid an oncoming
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attack and counter it. So, according to reviews, the animations
of the character didn't always reflect the commands that they
were sending through the controls. And then there was the camera.
This would be the point of view for the player,
and the camera would shift around and the player could
not control it, so you would be stuck with whatever
the camera angle happened to be, and that would sometimes
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call as the perspective to put the player at a disadvantage. So,
for example, you might be moving through a level, but
the camera angle makes it impossible for you to see
what is directly ahead of you as a character. So
as you're continuing through the level, you suddenly encounter a
pet and fall right into it because you couldn't see
it as a player. But if you were actually the character,
if you were Kuma, you would have seen that pet
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coming from a mile away. So you think about that,
an objective observer would just see someone running toward a
pit for a really long time and then fall in
the pit, and they would think that person couldn't see
or they wanted to go in the pit. I can't
imagine any other outcome. But in fact, the problem was
that as a player, you couldn't see the pit at all,
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just because the perspective. So there are a lot of
problems in this game that ultimately convinced the publisher to
bring it back to cancel it. Number six was Infestation
Survivor Stories, which released in October two thousand twelve for
the PC. Metacritic gave it a score of twenties, so
now we're hitting that threshold of overwhelming dislike. Uh. The
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studio that developed it was Hammer Point Interactive. The man
most frequently associated with this game as a guy named
Saragei Titov, who was one of the developers behind this game,
And it was actually released under a different title originally,
which was The war Z And if you think that
sounds like a zombie game, you win a prize. The
(21:29):
war Z was following on the success of a mod
called day Zy and This mod was for a tactical
shooter called Arma Too, and both Daisy and The war
Z had very similar features. They would put players in
a world dealing with a zombie outbreak, and in both
games players would be in multiplayer maps, meaning you could
(21:52):
encounter other humans as you played, and in both games
you would scavenge for items and weapons and see how
long you could survive. Steam removed the game from the
store not too long after it was released, and Valves
said that adding the game to the store was quote
a mistake end quote. Some gamers probably agreed. Valvo releast
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the statement that said it was working with Titov to
get the build of the game right so that it
would meet expectations. So The war Z was a collaborative
multiplayers survival game, and the game's listing on Steam mentioned
features like the ability to create a friends list to
rent a private server so that you and your friends
could play without fearing the interference of griefers. Um there
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were supposed to be a skill system that would allow
the players to progress in their capabilities. They were supposed
to be up to a hundred people allowed to play
on the same server at the same time, and there
were supposed to be maps that were as big as
four hundred square kilometers, but in actuality, the game didn't
support those features, and that was the the root of
some of the most harsh criticisms. They were saying, the
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game is promising us one thing but delivering something else.
Te Top would say that players had quote unquote misread
those features, implying that there whether uh, these were planned features.
They were going to be in the game, they just
weren't the game yet. They would be released later on
the game's life. In addition, the game featured what some
critics felt were predatory micro transactions that were intended to
(23:20):
coax more money from players. So, for example, if your
character died in the game, you'd get hit with a
four hour cool down period before you could respawn unless
you bought in game currency with real money, and then
you could purchase an instant respawn. So in order to
play the game, you would have to pay again. And
keep in mind, this was already a game where you
(23:42):
were buying it, it wasn't free to play. By a
The game died an inglorious death, and the publisher said
that the servers running the online game had been taken offline,
and the reason given was that the servers had been
hacked and the hackers had stolen cust more information from
the databases, apparently not payment information, but other account information,
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including the user names, of passwords and that kind of stuff.
They had also taken it into their own hands to
ban certain players from the game on their own, and
that was it. That was that for that game. Number
five is Alone in the Dark Illumination, which came out
June two thoft for the PC. The Metacritic score is nineteen.
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The Alone in the Dark series was fostered by Atari,
and it falls in the category of survival horror. In fact,
Alone in the Dark is often cited as the first
title in modern survival horror games. Illumination was the sixth
entry in that series. The developer for that particular game
was Pure FPS, and unlike earlier games, which were single
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player experiences, this one featured online and cooperative play. Up
to four people could play cooperatively at a time, and
it would also become the lowest added game of up
to four would play. But gameplay featured no puzzles. There
was no real story involved. This was mostly done as
a third person shooter survival horror game. Players could only
(25:13):
inflict damage on enemies if those enemies were exposed to light.
The light would make them vulnerable to damage. So your
strategy for every level was exactly the same. You would
run around the levels creating as many light sources as
you could, then you would try to lure enemies into
the light, and then you try to inflict enough damage
to take those enemies down. And level layouts were different,
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but they all had the exact same sequence of events involved,
and the enemies were apparently just kind of mindlessly throwing
themselves in harm's way. They didn't try to avoid the light,
they would just keep coming at you. On top of that,
the game's sound was criticized as being unfinished and barely
even present. There were times where sound effects and music
seemed to be completely absent in the game. There were
(25:57):
a ton of bugs that were affecting gameplay, including ones
that would let enemies attack players through a solid surface
like a wall. Overall, critics said the game was just
unfinished and boring, and so it did not score well.
Where We've got four more games to talk about, and
before I jump into those, let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor number four is Double Dragon to
(26:27):
Wander of the Dragons, which sounds like a really weird
title to me. Came out in April tween for the
Xbox three sixty. This was an Xbox Live arcade game
and probably the lowest rated one of all time. It
got a Metacritics score of seventeen. The Double Dragon games
in general feature two protagonists who punch and kick their
(26:50):
way through swarms of enemies as they progress through levels. Typically,
each level ends with some sort of boss battle, and
there are numeras injuries in this series. I actually remember
playing the original Double Dragon in arcades, but this particular
entry came from a Korean developer called Gravity Games. Critics
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said that the developer, which was mostly known for making
m m O RPG style games not beat them ups,
got the fundamental elements of Double Dragon games all wrong.
Moving the character was awkward, It was slow. It made
it unreasonably difficult to face off against opponents who would
swarm around the player. Reversing a direction was not natural.
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You couldn't just quickly turn around and confront someone who's
coming up behind you. You would actually scoop backwards first
before turning around. So in other words, if someone was
coming up behind you, you would actually move into their
range before you would turn around to face them. The
quasi three D design made it really hard to direct
attacks to specific targets, particularly if you were trying something
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beyond just the basic kick or punch moves. So, for example,
there's an attack in a lot of Double Dragon games
which involves an elbow attack, and it was really important
because it was an attack that you could unleash against
someone who was coming up behind you. So if someone's
coming up behind you really fast and you don't have
time to turn around, you could use this attack to
fend them off. But in this game, the elbow attack
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was much harder to direct. So there might be someone
come up behind you and you're fighting someone in ahead
of you, and you try and do this elbow attack,
but the elbow attack just swings wild with making you know,
no contact. The developers also added in some other new
elements that gamers were not crazy about. There was a
stamina bar that also served more or less as your health,
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so if you got attacked, your stamina would take a hit,
but that would mean you would actually slow down a
little bit, which meant that it was even easier for
enemies to hit you again, so you were getting punished
for being hit. You get hit now it's easier for
you to get hit. Also, if you got knocked down,
then enemies could hit you as you were standing up,
and standing up was an animation. You couldn't do anything
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about it. You couldn't block or dodge or anything. It
was a sequence that would happen automatically, so there's nothing
you can do. There's no way for you to intervene.
And meanwhile, and enemy just knocks you down again. So
it's kind of cheesing effect. You're you're in this constant
process of trying to stand up while enemies are hitting you. Uh,
and then your stamina is all gone. And maybe you
(29:21):
could argue that's realistic in a fight, but it's not
much fun for a video game. They also did something
that blows my mind. They built in a special supermove
ability as well. There were actually quite a few different
supermoves you could do, and the game mechanic was that
you would have a meter that was filling up as
you would build in combos. Let's say you have a
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successful combination where you you land a sequence of attacks
with no gaps, no mistakes, you would start to fill
up this meter. That's not that unusual. A lot of
games have that. And when the meter was full, then
you would be able to unleash one of these special
attacks and potentially cause additional damage to your enemies. Again,
totally makes sense. But the meter did not build up properly.
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Sometimes you would land these combos in the meter didn't
seem to reflect it at all. Sometimes you'll be playing
the game and the meter would just start to drain
for no apparent reason. And in addition, while the game
incorporated this mechanic, it would actually discourage you from using it.
So it gave you this ability. It had all these
different elements to it that were supposed to support this ability,
(30:27):
and it didn't do it very well. But if you
used a special move, even just one time, it would
mean you would get the quote unquote bad ending of
the game should you play it all the way through
it to the end. The only way to get the
good ending would be not to use these special moves.
So it's always fun when a game builds in a
(30:47):
mechanic and then punishes you for actually using it. Yuck.
Number three was Room in the Night Sky, might be
my favorite title among the ones that are on this list.
It came out in March two thousand seventeen, so it's
one of the most recent games. It came out for
the Nintendo Switch and was the lowest rated game on
(31:08):
the Nintendo Switch. Has a Metacritic score of seventeen. This
is the only Nintendo Switch title on our list. And
in the game, you controlled a protagonist, a girl who
would travel on a motorbike. She's magical, so she can
make the motorbike do all sorts of stuff like fly,
and she collects star dust as sort of almost like
(31:28):
an in game currency going through these different stages. Wonder
reviewer called it a racing game in which there are
no opponents, So you're just driving around these environments collecting
star dust until you move through these rings that were
called key stars, and you would unlock a gate that
would lead you to the next stage, and then you
would rinse and repeat. There was no way to die,
(31:49):
there was no way to fail out. You could take
some damage. There was a antagonist character who would occasionally
show up and you would lose star dust if you
took damage, but otherwise you would just keep on going.
You could use that stardust to buy upgrades or new
items in the game, but critics said the art style
(32:09):
was dated. The levels, while they were huge, didn't have
a whole lot to do in them, so they were big,
but there wasn't much there, and that this antagonist that
you would occasionally encounter would usually remain completely out of
sight during a level. The levels were so big and
the antagonist wasn't necessarily moving around very much that you
might not even notice her as you're moving around. And
(32:31):
also you would have a little sidekick on your motorbike
who would automatically attack the bad guy if you did
happen to wander too close, so the odds of you
getting hit were very low anyway. The English version of
the game also had a script that suffered from poor translation.
There's a group called Legends of Localization that created a
(32:51):
video that detailed some of the more egregious examples with screenshots.
The very first one reads night Sky of the Lovely
It is a wonderful night sky where the moon is beautiful,
suitable for you for the first time to fly the sky.
A patch would try to address this issue with a
new translation, but really added just different bad translation to
(33:13):
the game including spelling errors. Number two is a game
called Ride to Hell. Retribution came out in June two
thirteen for the Xbox three, sixty, the PlayStation three, and
the PC. Metacritic gave it a sixteen. As destruct Oid
reported in their review, the first warning that the game
wasn't very good was when the publisher refused to send
(33:35):
out review copies to game critics. You see this in
movies to where film studios will choose not to have
a critic screening, and more frequently than not, this is
typically a sign that the studio behind a property doesn't
have a whole lot of faith that it's going to
do well in critics eyes, and they'd rather skip that
(33:55):
step to try and sell as many units or as
many tickets as possible. Be four bad reviews start to
cannibalize those sales. So that was the bad first sign.
Now in the game, you play as a biker who's
out for revenge common theme and video games. A bike
gang had killed his brother and now he's out to
get them. And the review that I read from Destructori
(34:18):
had stated that the game opened in a very confusing way.
You immediately start off and you are behind a turret.
You're you're controlling a gun turret. And he says that
he failed almost instantly upon spawning in in the game
and had no idea what was going on. Then on
his second attempt, he died almost instantly. Then on his
(34:41):
third attempt he survived, but he had no idea what
he had done differently that led to this new outcome.
So he didn't learn anything, he didn't get better at
the game. It just was different. What's more, then he
got transported into a desert environment and got into a
quick time event that is in the form of a brawl.
(35:01):
So quick time, of course, you're responding to button props
like hit X now or hit A now or move
thumbstick left, But there was no context as to what
was going on. There was no explanation why this was happening.
And then after that the game officially started. Now, apparently
the physics in the game are just playing broken. Sometimes
(35:23):
you'll phase through a surface, like you're riding your bike
and you'll just phase through the ground. UH textures pop
in and out in graphics, so you might look at
a featureless UH surface and then suddenly the images pop
in and you can see what the design is supposed
to be on there, and then they pop out again.
There were major problems with the visuals in general, and
(35:44):
the action sequences were repetitive and uninspired. The game's camera
made moving around environments really frustrating. You could easily get
caught on something and not be able to see what
it was that you were caught on, so you couldn't
fix it, and the control scheme and execution artificially made
the game more difficult, so that was hard to progress,
and it was hard to progress not because the game
(36:06):
was challenging, but because the mechanics of the game were broken.
The story also didn't win any points, and several reviewers
I saw pointed out that there were some really misogynistic
elements in this game, where women exist for no reason
other than to be exploited by the main character, who
is not a nice guy, so didn't seem to have
(36:29):
any real redeeming qualities. Number one according to Metacritics Scores
is Family Party thirty Great Games Obstacle Arcade, which came
out on November two thousand twelve for the Wii U.
Out of the possible one points, it got an eleven,
(36:51):
and this is it the worst reviewed game. According to Metacritic,
it was meant to be a game you would play
with up to three other people on a single console
in the same space. So these sort of games for
the Wii and the Wei you were meant to bring
people together in the same physical location, kind of like
a board game and you have a game night, but
instead of pulling out a copy of Monopoly, you put
(37:12):
one of these inside the Wii or the Wu and
you have yourself a grand old time playing the series
of mini games. And there are tons of different examples
in this genre um and a lot of them belong
to Nintendo's game library. The mini games had no real
cohesive theme to them. Some of them were really uninspired games.
(37:34):
According to Nintendo Life, one of the games would show
a selection of balloons with numbers on it, and then
you'll be told to pick the balloon that has a
specific number, like the number two, which doesn't sound like
much of a game to me. Maybe it's kind of
like musical chairs, I guess, but it's kind of weird, right.
(37:55):
That doesn't seem like there's much satisfaction in that game style.
The game would force play is to use the we
use motion controls, so even though the WU controller has
a D pad on it, you couldn't use the dpad
and most of the mini games instead you were supposed
to jab the controller in whatever direction to get the
results you were supposed to get. So, for example, there
(38:17):
might be a level where you're supposed to guide a
character across a series of platforms through jumping, but the
way you would control jumping is by jabbing the controller
in whatever direction the platforms in forward, left, or right,
and the game mechanics weren't done very well, so you
(38:37):
could be waiving the controller like a crazy person and
nothing's happening, your character is not going anywhere, or you
might jab it to the left but your character jumps
to the right. Uh. It just didn't seem to have
any connection with what you did and what the character
was doing, so that was very frustrating. They also Critics
also said that the sound design was terrible, that the
(38:59):
carrecter design was not great, the host of the games
was a teddy Bear that from what the description I read,
sounded like it would fit better in Five Nights at Freddie's.
It sounded like a true monstrosity, and the lackluster games
were really what doomed this went to last place. The
game was poorly designed, but worse than that reviewers, Essentially,
(39:22):
we're saying, even if the game were well designed, even
if these controls worked great, the actual mini games are
so boring that the game would still be terrible. So
that's not a great review. If you're saying this game
is broken, but even if it weren't broken, it would
still be terrible, that's a bad review, and that's it.
(39:43):
Those are the worst video games according to Metacritic. And
again that's just one source. If you were to ask
anybody who covered video games, they might say, hey, you
didn't talk about that Alien game that literally did not
work until someone went through the source code saw that
one of the settings was wrong, fix the setting, and
(40:03):
now the game works years after it came out. That's true.
I didn't talk about that one. There are a lot
of different examples since two thousand eleven that would probably
fall on a worst video games list. This was just
through the Metacritic approach. I am curious what you guys think,
and I will do another worst video Games episode that's
(40:24):
crowdsourced if you guys like so. If there are specific games,
whether it's for a console, computer, system, or a handheld
system or even a mobile game. If there's a game
you think warrants being put on a worst video game list,
right to me. Give me the subject worst video game
(40:46):
and send that email to text Stuff at how stuff
works dot com. I will gather those together and we'll
do a follow up episode where, once again as chosen
by the listeners of tech Stuff, we will talk about
some of the worst video games of all time. If
you want to also include why you think it's one
of the worst games you've ever played or has ever
(41:07):
been made, that would be great too. Um. Now, in general,
just as a quick rule of thumb, I'm gonna mostly
stick stay away from any games that are like sexual
in nature any of those, because I think a lot
of those are just hastily put together to uh, to
appeal to the more base instincts of certain players. And
(41:33):
we could go through on for hours about the countless
games in those genres that are just terrible. They're either
carbon copies of existing games but with nudity, or they're
just playing terrible excuses for games. So we know those
are terrible. Let's just all agree to that, and let's
look beyond those for the other terrible games. Also, if
(41:56):
you have any suggestions for other types of topics that
have nothing to do with video games, all feel free
to send me a message let me know what you
would like me to cover. Um, you can make that
subject whatever you like. And again, the addresses tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com or you can drop
me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for
both of those is text stuff h s W. Don't forget.
(42:16):
You can head on over to t public dot com
slash tech stuff, pick yourself up some tech stuff merchandise.
Be a super cool person like I am, or more
cool because you probably already are. I mean, let's be honest,
and I accept that that's okay. I appreciate that you
a cool person are listening to me. Thank you, and
don't forget. Follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk
to you again really soon. For more on this and
(42:44):
bathands of other topics because at how stuff works dot
com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Johnathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And
before I jump into today's episode topic, I want to
(00:24):
give a couple of corrections that I got to recent episodes,
which is totally valid. You guys are an awesome audience,
and I really appreciate when you reach out too gently.
Remind me that sometimes I get stuff wrong because you
typically do it in a responsible way, which I greatly appreciate,
and I should stress in almost every case, it's where
(00:44):
I have researched something and somewhere between the process of
reading it and taking my notes, my brain has inserted
information that has made it wrong. So the fault lies
on me and I accept that. So first correction in
the Pebble episode, I mentioned that the Pebble Watch, the
original Pebble Watch, had an e paper display, and then
(01:06):
I explained how e ink works. And indeed the two
terms are frequently used interchangeably. You will often find e
paper and ink both talking about the same technology that
one that uses those electro statically charged capsules. However, that
being said, the display that the Pebble the original Pebble
watch had was not a true e ink style e
(01:28):
paper one, even though they referred to it as e paper.
It was actually a low powered l c D screen
called a transflective l c D so it works in
a different way than the ink stuff does. The purpose
of it is very similar, the idea being that you
want to be able to read the screen based upon
(01:48):
available light in the environment as opposed to having a
backlit screen like your typical smartphone. But it works in
a different principles, so thank you for that correction. Secondly,
listener Ben pointed that in the Cambridge Analytica podcasts, I
mentioned a sting operation conducted by the BBC. Small problem
that wasn't the BBC. It was actually Channel four News
(02:10):
in the UK, not a BBC channel. So this one
is just comes down to my stupid American brain, because
my stupid American brain says, oh, it was British television
that means BBC, which is ridiculous. I know there's more
television in the UK than the BBC channels. I'm just
(02:31):
I'm just an ignorant American, So I apologize for that.
And third, there's a software engineer who would absolutely love
it if I stopped saying degrees kelvin because the unit
of kelvin is the kelvin, not the degree. So that's
the correct thing. You want to say, kelvin, not degrees kelvin. Now,
you will frequently see and hear people use the phrase
(02:51):
degrees kelvin, but it's technically wrong until enough people use it,
because that's how language works if it if enough people
use it the wrong way, the wrong way becomes the
right way. So I charge everyone out there to start
saying degrees kelvin because if enough of you do it,
I don't have to worry about saying it the right way.
(03:11):
I'm just kidding. I'll try my best to remember to
be accurate. I appreciate all of those corrections. Now, onto
the topic for today. Way back in two thousand eleven,
my then co host Chris Pellette and I did an
episode about the worst video games of All Time. But
these were titles that were submitted by listeners. We solicited
uh various nominations, and we did it over Facebook and
(03:35):
Twitter and email, and we just asked people nominate what
you think are the worst video games of all time,
and then we taied them all up. And so in
that episode we talked about games that had been considered
bad for various things. Maybe they had missed release dates repeatedly.
Duke Nukem Forever was a famous one and had just
come out that year after more than a decade of
(03:56):
being in development. We also talked about games that were
buried in the desert after too many cartridges had been
made and not enough people wanted to buy a copy,
like E. T. The Extraterrestrial for the A. But what
about the games that have come out since two thousand eleven.
What are some of the most notoriously bad games of
that era. Well, before I jump in and start talking
(04:18):
about specific titles, I do want to say that we
need to keep in mind that real people worked on
these games. They dedicated their time, their effort, their energy
into making a game a reality, and things just didn't
go right. So in some cases, maybe they tackled more
than they could handle and ultimately the game they created
(04:39):
was a disappointment. In other cases, you might have had
executives who are constantly shifting expectations and the development team
was kind of left in the lurch as a result,
and maybe they even had things like a hardline deadline
that had to be the date that the game would ship,
whether the game was ready or not. A lot of
(05:02):
games have suffered from that sort of thing, But I
think in most cases, no one really sets out to
make a crappy game on purpose, And so while the
games I'm going to go through here have a reputation
for being bad, we need to remember they probably did
not start off that way, most of them. Anyway. There
might be a few cynical cash grabs in here that
do not qualify for such consideration. But you game developers
(05:24):
out there who are trying to deliver upon crazy expectations,
both from within a company and from the gaming community
at large, my hat is off to you. You do
incredible work. Now, for this episode, I consulted Metacritic to
look at the games that scored the lowest in aggregated
reviews since the original episode came out in late From
(05:48):
the Metacritic website, here is how they described their methodology quote.
Creating our proprietary meta scores is a complicated process. We
carefully curate a large group of the world's most respected
critics assigned scores to their reviews and apply a weighted
average to summarize the range of their opinions. The result
(06:08):
is a single number that captures the essence of critical
opinion in one meta score. Each movie, game, television show,
an album featured on Metacritic gets a meta score when
we've collected at least four critics reviews end quote. So
in other words, they're aggregating all these different reviews and
then kind of determining where on a score between zero
(06:31):
and one hundred, that review rates the product. So a
zero would be the absolute worst, one would be the
absolute best. For games, anything beneath the score of fifty
is considered generally unfavorable. If it's less than twenty, it
is overwhelming dislike is the nature of those reviews. And
(06:55):
spoiler alert, we have some on this list that dropped
down below twenty. But the first one we're gonna talk about,
number ten, the ten worst video games since the Fall
of two thousand eleven would be flat out three Chaos
and Destruction that came out December two thousand eleven, so
just a few months after we had done our episode,
(07:17):
and it came out for the PC. The Metacritics score
was twenty three yikes, and this was a car racing game,
and as the name indicates, it was the third such
in a series of games. The original game developer for
the series was a company called Bugbear, but Bugbear developers
were actually busy working on a totally different title, that
(07:39):
of Ridge Racer unbounded. The jab of developing the next
entry in the Flat Out series then fell to a
Dutch video game development studio called Team Six. As a
review on I g N pointed out, this was actually
an early sign of concern because the games that had
come out of Team six lacked something. They had great titles.
(08:01):
I'm definitely intrigued by a game that's titled Calvin Tucker's
Redneck Farm Animals Racing Tournament. What. But the studio developed
a different physics engine for this rather than the previous
one that was used for Flat Out two, and this
one reviewers said was sloppy. It was in direct contradiction
(08:25):
with earlier games in the series. So in the past
you could drive really aggressively. You could you could kind
of smash your way through opponents. You can nudge them
and knock them off course and and continue on your way.
But in Flat Out three. It seemed like the slightest
contact with anything would result in your car flipping all
over the place. It suddenly looked like you could not
behave in this way, and it wasn't consistent you would.
(08:47):
You would have what would appear to be a colossal,
disastrous crash on screen, and your car would only suffer
a little bit of damage, or you might just gently
grace up against another car and then suddenly your engine
is smoking. The AI was substandard as well, with computer
controlled racers spending more time crashing into each other than
(09:08):
trying to race the course. So it sounds pretty much
like all the design decisions going into Flat Out three
created a game that was not fun to play. It
didn't make sense, and was a total departure from earlier
Flat Out games. The lack of consistency or logic really
hurt the game's reception. Team six is still around and
the company primarily focuses on developing racing games. To this day,
(09:31):
I'm not terribly familiar with their work. I don't think
I've played any of their racing games, but as I
understand it, many of those games have received a poor
critical reception, not as bad as Flat Out three, but
not great either. We're talking like Metacritics scores in the thirties,
so I'm not much of a racing game player. I
cannot speak to it personally, but it doesn't sound great.
(09:53):
Number nine is Rambo the video game, which came out
February twenty one, two thousand fourteen, and it came out
for the PlayStation three, the Xbox three, sixty PC, and
Metacritic gave it a score also of twenty three. Now.
In general, video game adaptations of licensed characters frequently show
up on lists about bad games. Now, I talked about
(10:14):
ET the Extraterrestrial that is frequently listed as the worst
game of all time, although it really isn't. But it
is frequently the truth that a game of a licensed
character doesn't turn out well. Now, that's not universally true.
The recent PS four game of Spider Man is pretty
(10:35):
darn fun to play. In my opinion, I think it's
a great game, or at least I've really been enjoying it.
But one cannot say the same for Rambo the video game. Now,
Rambo refers to John Rambo, who's in several movies, the
first being First Blood. He's a Vietnam war veteran in
verse Blood, he returns to America and causes quite the
(10:57):
ruckus going on essentially what it amounts to being a
rampage at one point, and in subsequent films in the series,
Rambo would become the archetypical action hero. He would carry
enormous guns and just mow down antagonists left and right.
That was always like the one man army kind of trope,
and he became the model for all sorts of violent
(11:18):
excess in the in the eighties and nineties. So what
better character would you use to adapt to a video game?
I mean, he's certainly inspired lots of different video game characters.
So a developer named Tayon and a publisher called Reef
Entertainment were responsible for adapting the material from the first
three Rambo films and publishing them in video game form. Now,
(11:39):
the actual game style took the form of a rail shooter.
This is a type of game that you might see
in arcades with light guns things like Time Crisis and
the Past. You take through a level is set, and
often even the speed at which you move through the
level is set, and the way that villains or bad
(12:02):
guys antagonists jump out at you that is set. Everything
is kind of on a script, and it's your job
to just try and do the best you can and
shoot your enemies. Uh. This, however, didn't play on a
system with a light gun. You would either use a
controller or you would use a mouse and keyboard, and
with the mouse in particular, it was reportedly incredibly easy
to make every shot, so there was no challenge, there
(12:24):
was no variety, The gameplay was outdated. Uh, the the
the whole process appeared to be pretty substandard. The one
good thing I saw in the critical reviews was that
they did a pretty good job at replicating the environments
that you would see in the actual Rambo movies, so
that the video game versions of these seem to be
(12:46):
fairly accurate to those. But apart from that, the actual
game was substandard. Well, we've got more bad games to
talk about, but first let's take a quick break to
thank our sponsor. We're up to number eight and number
eight would be Fast and Furious Showdown another licensed property.
(13:09):
This one came out in May two thirteen and came
out for the Xbox three sixty, the PC, the PlayStation
three apparently, the Nintendo three D S and the we
you as well, and it scored on Metacritic a twenty two,
so he's taken a step down. Now. This was published
by Activision, and it was another kind of combination racing
(13:29):
game and shooting game, and also a licensed game, so
it had a lot going against it. The Fast and
Furious film series is known for a crazy automobile action.
Characters frequently pull off car stunts in those films that
would be impossible in the real world, and everybody in
those movies are They're all incredibly skilled race car driving
(13:50):
superheroes essentially. So you'd think a video game based off
the series would allow the player to take control of
a car and likewise do impossible feats in a series
of breathtaking missions, but unfortunately, the game's engine wasn't up
to that challenge. The collision detection in the game was
pretty bad. Virtual objects in the game had little mass.
(14:10):
You would have, you know, like enormous obstacles crashed down
in front of you, and your car would just kind
of gently pushed them all the way there. Nothing seemed
to have any weight to it. The level design was uninspired.
The art style was not terribly pleasing from an esthetic
point of view. The cinematic cut scenes weren't much better.
They were they appeared to be of a lower quality
(14:33):
than other current generation or that current generation cut scenes.
People often said, this looks like it belongs on the
previous generation hardware instead of PS three, less like it
would have been at home on a PS two. The
loading time between missions was incredibly long, and if you
wanted to upgrade your car you could. You could earn
(14:55):
experience in the game and use that experience to create
upgrades for your vehicles or or other features. So let's
say you want to boost your your vehicle's performance so
that you can tackle the next level better, you would
have to actually back out of the game entirely to
the main menu, go into a different option, then make
the changes, then back all the way back out again,
(15:16):
and then go back in and restart up to where
you were in the game in the within the storyline.
Uh and keep in mind those loading screens were really long,
and the menus also had spelling or grammatical errors in
them which made it look a little amateurish. And most missions,
you could control the driver of a vehicle and a
(15:37):
passenger in the vehicle who was hanging outside of the
window acting as a shooter. They have a gun and
so you can fight off your opponents that are trying
to run you off the road. The AI made very
little sense. The cars did not move like real cars.
The missions were mostly all variations on a common theme
(15:58):
of running gun and so the lack of variability, the
bad physics, the graphics. All of this contributed to the
low scores and put it on our list of worst
video games is two thousand eleven. Number seven is Afro
Samurai to Revenge of Kuma, which came out in September
two thou fifteen. Came out for the PlayStation four and
(16:19):
the PC. It was supposed to come out for the
Xbox One, but hang on here. Metacritic gave it a
score of twenty one. This is another licensed property. Afro
Samurai is a manga series in Japan, and the series
follows a character named Afro Samurai, and he's out for revenge.
His father was killed in the series, so he's out
(16:42):
to revenge his his father's death. To avenge his father's death,
I guess I should say, and an earlier video game
adaptation of this story in two thousand nine had received
average to decent reviews. It wasn't considered a blockbuster, but
it was people said, now, so, hey, you know, it's
not not a terrible game. It featured cell shaded animation
(17:04):
as uh kind of a beat him up in a way,
and the player controlled the titular character in his quest
for revenge. So this this is the sequel to that game,
and the sequel was supposed to be the first episode
in a series. So the idea was to release the
sequel in episodic format, and it put the player in
control of a different character named Kuma, and Kuma wears
(17:27):
a big mascot style bear head. The word Kuma is
Japanese for bear, and Kuma is seeking out Afro Samurai
to seek revenge for Kuma's sisters death, and like some
Facebook relationship status is, it's complicated. So this game did
come out for the PC and for the PS four.
It was going to come out later for the Xbox One,
(17:50):
but the PCMPS four versions got such bad reviews that
not only was the Xbox One version canceled, ultimately the
publisher actually withdrew through Afro Samurai too, from the Steam
Store and from the PS store. So after getting really
raked over the coals, by critics. The developer said, you
(18:11):
know what we're going to just we're gonna take this down.
So now no more copies are ever going to be sold. Uh.
It was pretty negative reaction to warrant that kind of
a response. Also, I think it makes the fact that
the developer's name was redacted studios somewhat tragically comedic. The
(18:31):
planned episodic sequels also got scrapped. So what made this
such a bad game? Well, the answer to that question
is a kind of everything. So critics were saying the
voice acting for the game was over the top and cringeworthy,
as the kids used to say, and at times the
sound levels in the game made it really difficult to
hear what was being said because sound effects or music
(18:55):
was drowning out everything else, and so you're missing out
on valuable and formation, although apparently it was valuable information
that was delivered in this over the top kind of way,
so maybe you were better off in the long run.
The game style was that of a classic beat him up,
kind of like the old side scrolling games of the
early nineties, but this one was with sort of three
dimensional levels, and it also had that cell shaded art
(19:17):
style of its predecessor. The game had frame rate problems
in which frames would drop and that would result in
a type of skipping effect that made playing the game
really hard and not much fun at all. It's difficult
to time a counter attack if the action is skipping
forward in spurts. You can't really time when you need
to hit a button in order to avoid an oncoming
(19:37):
attack and counter it. So, according to reviews, the animations
of the character didn't always reflect the commands that they
were sending through the controls. And then there was the camera.
This would be the point of view for the player,
and the camera would shift around and the player could
not control it, so you would be stuck with whatever
the camera angle happened to be, and that would sometimes
(19:59):
call as the perspective to put the player at a disadvantage. So,
for example, you might be moving through a level, but
the camera angle makes it impossible for you to see
what is directly ahead of you as a character. So
as you're continuing through the level, you suddenly encounter a
pet and fall right into it because you couldn't see
it as a player. But if you were actually the character,
if you were Kuma, you would have seen that pet
(20:22):
coming from a mile away. So you think about that,
an objective observer would just see someone running toward a
pit for a really long time and then fall in
the pit, and they would think that person couldn't see
or they wanted to go in the pit. I can't
imagine any other outcome. But in fact, the problem was
that as a player, you couldn't see the pit at all,
(20:43):
just because the perspective. So there are a lot of
problems in this game that ultimately convinced the publisher to
bring it back to cancel it. Number six was Infestation
Survivor Stories, which released in October two thousand twelve for
the PC. Metacritic gave it a score of twenties, so
now we're hitting that threshold of overwhelming dislike. Uh. The
(21:08):
studio that developed it was Hammer Point Interactive. The man
most frequently associated with this game as a guy named
Saragei Titov, who was one of the developers behind this game,
And it was actually released under a different title originally,
which was The war Z And if you think that
sounds like a zombie game, you win a prize. The
(21:29):
war Z was following on the success of a mod
called day Zy and This mod was for a tactical
shooter called Arma Too, and both Daisy and The war
Z had very similar features. They would put players in
a world dealing with a zombie outbreak, and in both
games players would be in multiplayer maps, meaning you could
(21:52):
encounter other humans as you played, and in both games
you would scavenge for items and weapons and see how
long you could survive. Steam removed the game from the
store not too long after it was released, and Valves
said that adding the game to the store was quote
a mistake end quote. Some gamers probably agreed. Valvo releast
(22:12):
the statement that said it was working with Titov to
get the build of the game right so that it
would meet expectations. So The war Z was a collaborative
multiplayers survival game, and the game's listing on Steam mentioned
features like the ability to create a friends list to
rent a private server so that you and your friends
could play without fearing the interference of griefers. Um there
(22:34):
were supposed to be a skill system that would allow
the players to progress in their capabilities. They were supposed
to be up to a hundred people allowed to play
on the same server at the same time, and there
were supposed to be maps that were as big as
four hundred square kilometers, but in actuality, the game didn't
support those features, and that was the the root of
some of the most harsh criticisms. They were saying, the
(22:56):
game is promising us one thing but delivering something else.
Te Top would say that players had quote unquote misread
those features, implying that there whether uh, these were planned features.
They were going to be in the game, they just
weren't the game yet. They would be released later on
the game's life. In addition, the game featured what some
critics felt were predatory micro transactions that were intended to
(23:20):
coax more money from players. So, for example, if your
character died in the game, you'd get hit with a
four hour cool down period before you could respawn unless
you bought in game currency with real money, and then
you could purchase an instant respawn. So in order to
play the game, you would have to pay again. And
keep in mind, this was already a game where you
(23:42):
were buying it, it wasn't free to play. By a
The game died an inglorious death, and the publisher said
that the servers running the online game had been taken offline,
and the reason given was that the servers had been
hacked and the hackers had stolen cust more information from
the databases, apparently not payment information, but other account information,
(24:06):
including the user names, of passwords and that kind of stuff.
They had also taken it into their own hands to
ban certain players from the game on their own, and
that was it. That was that for that game. Number
five is Alone in the Dark Illumination, which came out
June two thoft for the PC. The Metacritic score is nineteen.
(24:27):
The Alone in the Dark series was fostered by Atari,
and it falls in the category of survival horror. In fact,
Alone in the Dark is often cited as the first
title in modern survival horror games. Illumination was the sixth
entry in that series. The developer for that particular game
was Pure FPS, and unlike earlier games, which were single
(24:50):
player experiences, this one featured online and cooperative play. Up
to four people could play cooperatively at a time, and
it would also become the lowest added game of up
to four would play. But gameplay featured no puzzles. There
was no real story involved. This was mostly done as
a third person shooter survival horror game. Players could only
(25:13):
inflict damage on enemies if those enemies were exposed to light.
The light would make them vulnerable to damage. So your
strategy for every level was exactly the same. You would
run around the levels creating as many light sources as
you could, then you would try to lure enemies into
the light, and then you try to inflict enough damage
to take those enemies down. And level layouts were different,
(25:35):
but they all had the exact same sequence of events involved,
and the enemies were apparently just kind of mindlessly throwing
themselves in harm's way. They didn't try to avoid the light,
they would just keep coming at you. On top of that,
the game's sound was criticized as being unfinished and barely
even present. There were times where sound effects and music
seemed to be completely absent in the game. There were
(25:57):
a ton of bugs that were affecting gameplay, including ones
that would let enemies attack players through a solid surface
like a wall. Overall, critics said the game was just
unfinished and boring, and so it did not score well.
Where We've got four more games to talk about, and
before I jump into those, let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor number four is Double Dragon to
(26:27):
Wander of the Dragons, which sounds like a really weird
title to me. Came out in April tween for the
Xbox three sixty. This was an Xbox Live arcade game
and probably the lowest rated one of all time. It
got a Metacritics score of seventeen. The Double Dragon games
in general feature two protagonists who punch and kick their
(26:50):
way through swarms of enemies as they progress through levels. Typically,
each level ends with some sort of boss battle, and
there are numeras injuries in this series. I actually remember
playing the original Double Dragon in arcades, but this particular
entry came from a Korean developer called Gravity Games. Critics
(27:10):
said that the developer, which was mostly known for making
m m O RPG style games not beat them ups,
got the fundamental elements of Double Dragon games all wrong.
Moving the character was awkward, It was slow. It made
it unreasonably difficult to face off against opponents who would
swarm around the player. Reversing a direction was not natural.
(27:33):
You couldn't just quickly turn around and confront someone who's
coming up behind you. You would actually scoop backwards first
before turning around. So in other words, if someone was
coming up behind you, you would actually move into their
range before you would turn around to face them. The
quasi three D design made it really hard to direct
attacks to specific targets, particularly if you were trying something
(27:55):
beyond just the basic kick or punch moves. So, for example,
there's an attack in a lot of Double Dragon games
which involves an elbow attack, and it was really important
because it was an attack that you could unleash against
someone who was coming up behind you. So if someone's
coming up behind you really fast and you don't have
time to turn around, you could use this attack to
fend them off. But in this game, the elbow attack
(28:17):
was much harder to direct. So there might be someone
come up behind you and you're fighting someone in ahead
of you, and you try and do this elbow attack,
but the elbow attack just swings wild with making you know,
no contact. The developers also added in some other new
elements that gamers were not crazy about. There was a
stamina bar that also served more or less as your health,
(28:38):
so if you got attacked, your stamina would take a hit,
but that would mean you would actually slow down a
little bit, which meant that it was even easier for
enemies to hit you again, so you were getting punished
for being hit. You get hit now it's easier for
you to get hit. Also, if you got knocked down,
then enemies could hit you as you were standing up,
and standing up was an animation. You couldn't do anything
(29:00):
about it. You couldn't block or dodge or anything. It
was a sequence that would happen automatically, so there's nothing
you can do. There's no way for you to intervene.
And meanwhile, and enemy just knocks you down again. So
it's kind of cheesing effect. You're you're in this constant
process of trying to stand up while enemies are hitting you. Uh,
and then your stamina is all gone. And maybe you
(29:21):
could argue that's realistic in a fight, but it's not
much fun for a video game. They also did something
that blows my mind. They built in a special supermove
ability as well. There were actually quite a few different
supermoves you could do, and the game mechanic was that
you would have a meter that was filling up as
you would build in combos. Let's say you have a
(29:41):
successful combination where you you land a sequence of attacks
with no gaps, no mistakes, you would start to fill
up this meter. That's not that unusual. A lot of
games have that. And when the meter was full, then
you would be able to unleash one of these special
attacks and potentially cause additional damage to your enemies. Again,
totally makes sense. But the meter did not build up properly.
(30:05):
Sometimes you would land these combos in the meter didn't
seem to reflect it at all. Sometimes you'll be playing
the game and the meter would just start to drain
for no apparent reason. And in addition, while the game
incorporated this mechanic, it would actually discourage you from using it.
So it gave you this ability. It had all these
different elements to it that were supposed to support this ability,
(30:27):
and it didn't do it very well. But if you
used a special move, even just one time, it would
mean you would get the quote unquote bad ending of
the game should you play it all the way through
it to the end. The only way to get the
good ending would be not to use these special moves.
So it's always fun when a game builds in a
(30:47):
mechanic and then punishes you for actually using it. Yuck.
Number three was Room in the Night Sky, might be
my favorite title among the ones that are on this list.
It came out in March two thousand seventeen, so it's
one of the most recent games. It came out for
the Nintendo Switch and was the lowest rated game on
(31:08):
the Nintendo Switch. Has a Metacritic score of seventeen. This
is the only Nintendo Switch title on our list. And
in the game, you controlled a protagonist, a girl who
would travel on a motorbike. She's magical, so she can
make the motorbike do all sorts of stuff like fly,
and she collects star dust as sort of almost like
(31:28):
an in game currency going through these different stages. Wonder
reviewer called it a racing game in which there are
no opponents, So you're just driving around these environments collecting
star dust until you move through these rings that were
called key stars, and you would unlock a gate that
would lead you to the next stage, and then you
would rinse and repeat. There was no way to die,
(31:49):
there was no way to fail out. You could take
some damage. There was a antagonist character who would occasionally
show up and you would lose star dust if you
took damage, but otherwise you would just keep on going.
You could use that stardust to buy upgrades or new
items in the game, but critics said the art style
(32:09):
was dated. The levels, while they were huge, didn't have
a whole lot to do in them, so they were big,
but there wasn't much there, and that this antagonist that
you would occasionally encounter would usually remain completely out of
sight during a level. The levels were so big and
the antagonist wasn't necessarily moving around very much that you
might not even notice her as you're moving around. And
(32:31):
also you would have a little sidekick on your motorbike
who would automatically attack the bad guy if you did
happen to wander too close, so the odds of you
getting hit were very low anyway. The English version of
the game also had a script that suffered from poor translation.
There's a group called Legends of Localization that created a
(32:51):
video that detailed some of the more egregious examples with screenshots.
The very first one reads night Sky of the Lovely
It is a wonderful night sky where the moon is beautiful,
suitable for you for the first time to fly the sky.
A patch would try to address this issue with a
new translation, but really added just different bad translation to
(33:13):
the game including spelling errors. Number two is a game
called Ride to Hell. Retribution came out in June two
thirteen for the Xbox three, sixty, the PlayStation three, and
the PC. Metacritic gave it a sixteen. As destruct Oid
reported in their review, the first warning that the game
wasn't very good was when the publisher refused to send
(33:35):
out review copies to game critics. You see this in
movies to where film studios will choose not to have
a critic screening, and more frequently than not, this is
typically a sign that the studio behind a property doesn't
have a whole lot of faith that it's going to
do well in critics eyes, and they'd rather skip that
(33:55):
step to try and sell as many units or as
many tickets as possible. Be four bad reviews start to
cannibalize those sales. So that was the bad first sign.
Now in the game, you play as a biker who's
out for revenge common theme and video games. A bike
gang had killed his brother and now he's out to
get them. And the review that I read from Destructori
(34:18):
had stated that the game opened in a very confusing way.
You immediately start off and you are behind a turret.
You're you're controlling a gun turret. And he says that
he failed almost instantly upon spawning in in the game
and had no idea what was going on. Then on
his second attempt, he died almost instantly. Then on his
(34:41):
third attempt he survived, but he had no idea what
he had done differently that led to this new outcome.
So he didn't learn anything, he didn't get better at
the game. It just was different. What's more, then he
got transported into a desert environment and got into a
quick time event that is in the form of a brawl.
(35:01):
So quick time, of course, you're responding to button props
like hit X now or hit A now or move
thumbstick left, But there was no context as to what
was going on. There was no explanation why this was happening.
And then after that the game officially started. Now, apparently
the physics in the game are just playing broken. Sometimes
(35:23):
you'll phase through a surface, like you're riding your bike
and you'll just phase through the ground. UH textures pop
in and out in graphics, so you might look at
a featureless UH surface and then suddenly the images pop
in and you can see what the design is supposed
to be on there, and then they pop out again.
There were major problems with the visuals in general, and
(35:44):
the action sequences were repetitive and uninspired. The game's camera
made moving around environments really frustrating. You could easily get
caught on something and not be able to see what
it was that you were caught on, so you couldn't
fix it, and the control scheme and execution artificially made
the game more difficult, so that was hard to progress,
and it was hard to progress not because the game
(36:06):
was challenging, but because the mechanics of the game were broken.
The story also didn't win any points, and several reviewers
I saw pointed out that there were some really misogynistic
elements in this game, where women exist for no reason
other than to be exploited by the main character, who
is not a nice guy, so didn't seem to have
(36:29):
any real redeeming qualities. Number one according to Metacritics Scores
is Family Party thirty Great Games Obstacle Arcade, which came
out on November two thousand twelve for the Wii U.
Out of the possible one points, it got an eleven,
(36:51):
and this is it the worst reviewed game. According to Metacritic,
it was meant to be a game you would play
with up to three other people on a single console
in the same space. So these sort of games for
the Wii and the Wei you were meant to bring
people together in the same physical location, kind of like
a board game and you have a game night, but
instead of pulling out a copy of Monopoly, you put
(37:12):
one of these inside the Wii or the Wu and
you have yourself a grand old time playing the series
of mini games. And there are tons of different examples
in this genre um and a lot of them belong
to Nintendo's game library. The mini games had no real
cohesive theme to them. Some of them were really uninspired games.
(37:34):
According to Nintendo Life, one of the games would show
a selection of balloons with numbers on it, and then
you'll be told to pick the balloon that has a
specific number, like the number two, which doesn't sound like
much of a game to me. Maybe it's kind of
like musical chairs, I guess, but it's kind of weird, right.
(37:55):
That doesn't seem like there's much satisfaction in that game style.
The game would force play is to use the we
use motion controls, so even though the WU controller has
a D pad on it, you couldn't use the dpad
and most of the mini games instead you were supposed
to jab the controller in whatever direction to get the
results you were supposed to get. So, for example, there
(38:17):
might be a level where you're supposed to guide a
character across a series of platforms through jumping, but the
way you would control jumping is by jabbing the controller
in whatever direction the platforms in forward, left, or right,
and the game mechanics weren't done very well, so you
(38:37):
could be waiving the controller like a crazy person and
nothing's happening, your character is not going anywhere, or you
might jab it to the left but your character jumps
to the right. Uh. It just didn't seem to have
any connection with what you did and what the character
was doing, so that was very frustrating. They also Critics
also said that the sound design was terrible, that the
(38:59):
carrecter design was not great, the host of the games
was a teddy Bear that from what the description I read,
sounded like it would fit better in Five Nights at Freddie's.
It sounded like a true monstrosity, and the lackluster games
were really what doomed this went to last place. The
game was poorly designed, but worse than that reviewers, Essentially,
(39:22):
we're saying, even if the game were well designed, even
if these controls worked great, the actual mini games are
so boring that the game would still be terrible. So
that's not a great review. If you're saying this game
is broken, but even if it weren't broken, it would
still be terrible, that's a bad review, and that's it.
(39:43):
Those are the worst video games according to Metacritic. And
again that's just one source. If you were to ask
anybody who covered video games, they might say, hey, you
didn't talk about that Alien game that literally did not
work until someone went through the source code saw that
one of the settings was wrong, fix the setting, and
(40:03):
now the game works years after it came out. That's true.
I didn't talk about that one. There are a lot
of different examples since two thousand eleven that would probably
fall on a worst video games list. This was just
through the Metacritic approach. I am curious what you guys think,
and I will do another worst video Games episode that's
(40:24):
crowdsourced if you guys like so. If there are specific games,
whether it's for a console, computer, system, or a handheld
system or even a mobile game. If there's a game
you think warrants being put on a worst video game list,
right to me. Give me the subject worst video game
(40:46):
and send that email to text Stuff at how stuff
works dot com. I will gather those together and we'll
do a follow up episode where, once again as chosen
by the listeners of tech Stuff, we will talk about
some of the worst video games of all time. If
you want to also include why you think it's one
of the worst games you've ever played or has ever
(41:07):
been made, that would be great too. Um. Now, in general,
just as a quick rule of thumb, I'm gonna mostly
stick stay away from any games that are like sexual
in nature any of those, because I think a lot
of those are just hastily put together to uh, to
appeal to the more base instincts of certain players. And
(41:33):
we could go through on for hours about the countless
games in those genres that are just terrible. They're either
carbon copies of existing games but with nudity, or they're
just playing terrible excuses for games. So we know those
are terrible. Let's just all agree to that, and let's
look beyond those for the other terrible games. Also, if
(41:56):
you have any suggestions for other types of topics that
have nothing to do with video games, all feel free
to send me a message let me know what you
would like me to cover. Um, you can make that
subject whatever you like. And again, the addresses tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com or you can drop
me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for
both of those is text stuff h s W. Don't forget.
(42:16):
You can head on over to t public dot com
slash tech stuff, pick yourself up some tech stuff merchandise.
Be a super cool person like I am, or more
cool because you probably already are. I mean, let's be honest,
and I accept that that's okay. I appreciate that you
a cool person are listening to me. Thank you, and
don't forget. Follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk
to you again really soon. For more on this and
(42:44):
bathands of other topics because at how stuff works dot
com
TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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