Let's face it, PW is a bitter place filled with nothing but pent up resentment after our overlords kicked us out of our homes after years of terrible catastrophes. With this in mind, we need to channel this emotion and use it to tear down the games that wasted our hard earned money or cost us an overnight rental.


WCW Mayhem (Electronic Arts; 1999)

It's Christmas of 1999 and I've just fallen head over heels for Pro Wrestling. It's the television show I've been dying to see, a weekly Mortal Kombat show filled with storylines, backstories and signature moves nothing could be cooler. Naturally I needed the latest video game, and WCW made no secret about WCW Mayhem - after all, they based an entire PPV around it. The game vowed to have commentary, backstage brawls, authentic music, the ability to make your own PPV and the biggest roster to date. It sounded like everything I wanted...then it got delayed until after Christmas. Instead I had to settle for the already out-dated WCW/nWo Revenge which I had already played to death at the video store.

Eventually the game comes out and I'm pumped. I've just watched a healthy dose of syndicated episodes of Thunder and Saturday Night from a couple years ago and I can't wait to play this game. I pick it up and it isn't long until I realise it's a huge piece of shit. Somehow the game looks even worse than WCW/nWo World Tour, the animations are god awful and the controller inputs are crap. It's a complete roll of the dice if I get to hit my moves and it's clear the EA have screwed the pooch. If you ask me, the death of WCW started with this game, once WWF got AKI it was curtains as far as I was concerned.


Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 (TOSE; 1995)

The year is 2002, DBZ has been on the air for over two years and to date, not one single video game had been released. If you wanted to play anything Dragon Ball, you had to go online and download this thing called an emulator and things called roms. However, that was illegal and kids didn't want to have to complete deleting and downloading the game again each day to avoid juvi. Finally it was announced that Ultimate Battle 22 was being released to the west and finally we had a game on our hands. Too bad it was the worst DBZ fighting game of all-time and an absolute chore to play. Despite the name, the game actually has 27 fighters, but most of them were recycled from the Super Nintendo Butoden series.

The problem with the game is that it's a lazy entry in the series. Characters are given very little animation, the pixel characters clash with the rendered backgrounds and the fighters make too much noise. TOSE couldn't have cared less about making a good game, they just wanted to get a DBZ game onto the new platform as quickly as possible.

To make matters worse, the game originally came out in PAL territories around 1996. Considered a rare collectors items, retailers would try to sell the game for $250. I feel sorry for the sap who paid that price, I bought my copy for around $50 and felt ripped off.

For whatever reason, DBZ had a terrible tenure on the PS1 with only one half-decent game being released on the platform (DBZ Legends which also came out for the Saturn). It wouldn't be until the PS2 that the series would find it's feet with the Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi games.

In regards to wrestling. WCW/nWo Thunder was the pits. I remember it being an ugly, awful game that actually slowed done during tag team matches. And on the flipside, in 1999 I fell in love with WWF much like you Big Pete, and one of the first games I bought on my new Playstation 1 was WWF Warzone - slow, chunky, and the control system so incredibly awful. Still, I played it to death until the Smackdown series came out. 

I'll almost state that every WWE Playstation 2 wrestling game that came out after 'Here Comes the Pain' was a major let down. I remember every single year, getting excited by a new WWE game.. then reverting back to HCTP within a few weeks. I found it a much more playable, the stat system was unrivaled by he newer games, and as the PS2 system was living out it's last days, they continued in trying to push the capabilities of the system, only slowing the old girl down. 

Warzone aged badly, but it was great at the time, same with Attitude, I played Attitude into the ground. And for me, EVERY wrestling game after "Here Comes the Pain" was a let down, the second it became SvR, it was never as crisp as any of the preceding games. I get they were pushing for more simulation, but to me, that sucked out all of the fun. HCTP was the perfect balance of just arcadey enough to be a complete riot. It also, in my opinion, had one of the single greatest rosters of all time.

Worst game off the top of my head...Thor: God of Thunder. I know "Game based on a movie sucks? Shocking." but the Green Lantern game managed to be a decent enough, though entirely forgettable affair (I'd buy it for $1). Controlled like shit, ran like shit, looked like shit, it was pure shit. Easily the worst game I've played in the last 10 years, and I played Duke Nukem Forever and Sonic Unleashed.

WWF Warzone was state of the art at the time. Not only were the production values impressive for a wrestling game, but for a sports title in general very few games were as ambitious as it. What really set it a part was the CAW mode and you'd often see magazines cover their own latest creations. The biggest problem with the game were the unresponsive controls. You would have to learn all these complex button inputs and the game would only acknowledge them half the time. The animations were very choppy as well and a lot of the moves paled in comparison to their AKI counterparts.

Still, it was a strong first effort and if the subsequent games had have been great, the series would be well regarded. Instead they tried to rush WWF Attitude out (it was delayed for several months due to the Owen Hart tragedy) and the game didn't fix enough. The same could be said of the ECW games.

What annoyed me the most is that it took me months to give WWF Wrestlemania 2000 a go. I thought the license still belonged to Acclaim and thought Wrestlemania 2000 was some 'World Cup' edition. When I realised the error of my ways, it became one of those games I would rent all the time.

Thank god PS1 owners got the SmackDown games. I never got a chance to play WCW Nitro, Thunder or Backstage Assault but I saw enough videos to realise they were horrible games. For whatever reason, they didn't have a fixed camera angle and everything is on this awkward slant. The animations look sped up and the controls are just as bad as the Acclaim games. The only aspect of the game I liked was the FMVs they would play for entrances.

The problem with trying to list worst games is that I don't play them for very long and so find them impossible to recall years after the fact. The only games that are entering my mind right now are games that I found extremely hard (e.g. Ninja Gaiden), but these games aren'necessarily bad.

Wrestling games have been brought up, which reminds me of some of the horrible experiences I had with the Smackdown vs Raw games. I bought them religiously until 2008 or 2009, but I hadn't properly enjoyed them for years. The gameplay became more and more focused on reversals to the point of absurdity, where the difficulty level was determined by how often the AI reversed, so every match became a sequence of endless reversal chains. Awful.

Pitfighter for the SNES wins this for me. Game was so bad, it was good. I even knew as a 7 year old how awful of a game this was but back when I had an emulator, I would legit run this game again just for the laughs. The awful one repeating track, the piss poor gameplay, the crushingly cruel fighting system that the game randomly will give you a small health regain, the lack of diversity of the 3 characters you pick where one of them bows and gives the AI a free shot to attack.

I don't think anything has topped this for me. At least War Gods for the N64 was playable.......this? No, just no. 

Drakkhen for the SNES gets a nice shutout because that game was just fucking boring beyond belief. BY FAR the most boring game I have ever played. 

The Gears of War series

Not the worst but the most recent I remember that shatter my innocence was Sacred 3.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel was almost everything I wanted action rpg. One of my friends and I preorder sacred 3 in a heartbeat when announced. I think it was the first thing I ever preordered since I normally just go pick up things day one if I really want them.


Sacred 3 was made by a different company and a hack and slash beatem up.

This was also the first game I traded in since I believe we beat it in less then a weak. Sacred 2 you probably won't even beat 3 areas in a week.

Worst wrestling game probably TNA Impact or WWE 2k18. TNA Impact for lack of features and options. WWE 2k18 for being overly buggy. There is a game breaking glitch in nearly every mode of the game plus way to many glitches to be released. And even more so since they probably fix a lot more of the problems in patches but don't.

The Crow: City of Angels. If you thought the movie was bad, it's got nothing on the horrors of this game. Here is fun breakdown from one of my favorite youtubers GoodBad Flicks.  I remember being enraged playing it and with no youtube at the time to get you unstuck, I just gave up.  A very broken and unrefined game.

I didn't really play any bad games. I never had enough money to buy whatever games I wanted, and my parents wouldn't just buy me whatever I wanted, so I just bought popular games so I wouldn't be disappointed when I had the opportunity to buy a game.

However, my uncle gave me a handful of NES games he didn't want anymore way back in the day, and I remember one of the games being atrocious: Dirty Harry.

From wikipedia:

"The game is also notorious for having a room where if Harry enters it, he will be unable to leave it, as the exit is replaced with the words, "Ha, ha, ha!", perhaps as a sadistic trick played by the developers. The only way to escape the room is to reset."

You entered this room pretty early in the game and I probably attempted to figure out the room about 20 times before I gave up and said "this game sucks," not knowing that you could just not go in it. It was years later when I was curious about the game that I found out you could never leave no matter what you did.

One of the first games that springs to my mind would be Xperts for Genesis, I had a cousin that had a Genesis back in the day and this was like the only game they had, it was fucking terrible.

Another really really bad game would be Pro Quarterback for the Genesis, just an awful football game even back in the day when it was new there was Madden 93, NFL Sports Talk 93, Tecmo Super Bowl being remade for Genesis/SNES, and then you had this fucking turd. It's hard for me to really imagine that people paid like $50 for games like this back in the day.

They make pretty good games now but boy oh boy did South Park put out some lousy games that I was unfortunate enough to play.

South Park Rally and Chefs luv shack spring instantly to mind.

I remember being very pissed off trying to play Super Mario RPG.  I just never got it I guess.

Ride to Hell: Retribution is trash, man

I didn't mind South Park Rally. It wouldn't be my first or second pick for kart-racing, but it compliments games like Crash Team Racing & Mario Kart 64 by doing things differently.

Chef's Luv Shack on the other hand is a mystery. It's just a series of flash games, and once you've played through everything within an hour, there's nothing to come back to.

I enjoyed the concept of Simpson's Wrestling, but the game was definitely a cheap knock off. If it didn't come out during my PS1 honey-moon period, I doubt I'd have anything nice to say about it, but I do recall kicking ass with Bumble Bee Man.

vendrell , do you remember anything specifically that pissed you off? I thought the game did an excellent job of teaching players about the JRPG genre while introducing new elements to the mix. How far did you get?

Batman Forever - SNES (Probe Entertainment; 1995)

Back when I originally got my Super Nintendo, I'd usually bring it around to family gatherings so my cousins could get their fix of Super Mario Kart, Killer Instinct and the like. One of my cousin's who I didn't get to see often offered me a short term trade, my copy of Mario All-Stars for his copy of Batman Forever. The logic was sound and he made a very good pitch, since we'd often be at my uncle's who had a NES, we already had access to the original Mario Bros. trilogy. This was a different game and had 2 player co-op. I felt pretty good about the trade, until he started laughing manically.

Batman Forever is one of those games that gives digitized graphics a poor name. So often in those days, if you saw digitized graphics, you'd run for the hill because it would be littered with problems. In Batman Forever, the animations were sluggish, hit detection was barely existent and the control scheme was all over the shop. For at least half a dozen sections, we'd get to this one place in the sewers and would spend ages trying to figure out how to scale it. You couldn't jump it, you couldn't use your co-op guy as support, you couldn't kill a specific enemy, we were lost. Then one day they figured it out while I wasn't in the room. As it went, you had to hold down select and press up on the D-Pad in this one specific area to use a cable to scale it. The game didn't get much better from there and it wasn't long before I got my copy of All-Stars back.

The Adventures of Mighty Max - SNES (WJS Design; 1994)

Based on one of my favourite cartoons of the 1990s, Mighty Max was a poorly made game that took little inspiration from the actual show. The object of the game involves locating relics and throwing them into portals. It sounds simple enough, but te game controls poorly with Max being able to jump 50m off the ground and the level being filled with a bunch of no-name enemies you'd see in other poorly made licensed titles. There's nothing engaging about the game and considering all the ideas the show gave them, this was such a let-down.

Wayne's World - SNES (Gray Matter Inc; 1993)

How do you make a game on Wayne's World? Is it a 2D adventure game? Is it a rhythm game where you've got to bang your head in time with Bohemion Rhapsody? What is it? This is just one of those weird video game spin-offs where one of the characters is sucked into the video game universe and you've got to go and save them. Considering how music oriented the movie was, the game is an assault on your ears that's better off played in mute. The guitar makes an awful sound and since all the enemies are instruments there isn't a second before you're inundated with low-quality sound effects. Then there's the matter of gameplay, long maze-like levels where you're constantly going confined to small spaces, jumping over electral hazards and dealing with instruments. It makes for a linear experience and one that's worth not bothering with, even at a cursory glance.

I've been watching the "Awful Games Done Quick" section of AGDQ 2018 and came across an awful title I remember from my childhood.

Animorphs - Game Boy Colour (2000)
One of many terrible adaptations of the book series/kids TV show that was popular at the time. It's a blatant Pokemon rip off, and not even a good one. I actually think the premise is a decent spin on the Pokemon mechanic. You fight animals encountered in the wild. If you win, you get that animal in your party and can use him in future battles. But not only do you use animals for battling, you need some specific ones to progress the story. For example, right at the start, you need to grab a snake to wriggle through a crack in a wall.

The good stuff ends there. It's a prime example of bad game design. The battling system was clearly not tested very much, because it's far too luck-dependent. You have four moves per animal, but the choice hardly matters. Buffing your stats is almost always a waste of time, it's better to just mash your strongest/most accurate attack and hope that you connect more often than your adversary. There are far too few health items, and to my knowledge no pokemon centre/inn mechanic to replenish the party. Also it suffers from Zelda-esque levels of crypticness. When I played this as a kid I couldn't even get past the first level. I think I figured out the snake through the wall trick after a long time of wandering around clueless, which to be fair isn't too unreasonable to figure out, but there are many more instances of this throughout the remainder of the game. There's also some god awful minigames that are randomly generated and sometimes impossible to beat. I know all this from watching the speedrun, where the runner had the worst luck imaginable and so all these design flaws were brought to the forefront. It was so bad that he had to start a new game after 20 minutes and then stop 75% through the game, after overrunning their estimated time by a couple of minutes.

There's also Animorphs: Shattered Reality - Playstation (2000), which is Crash Bandicoot with everything interesting sucked out of it. It's only run and jump. No spinning or sliding or other tricks. The combat is barely one-dimensional.

I’ve played a lot of games featured on AVGN, but I’ve purposely sought them out so I can’t really count those.

Tenchu on Wii was incredibly disappointing, the motion controls make it unplayable without getting spotted in my experience.

For me it is Force Unleashed on the Playstation.
Being a huge Star wars fan I was hyped for this game... Then they introduced half the enemies to be force immune and the only way to win the game was to hide and spam force lighting.
Then I bought Force Unleashed 2 because I am a glutton for punishment and it was worse.

Loved this game as a kid and a Batman fan.

But my goodness, is nostalgia a strange beauty. Upon playing this game again in my late-twenties, this game really shone itself to be no better than the film it was based on - not to mention it's appalling follow-up film.

Awful muffled sound, clunky controls that rarely connected punches/kicks with enemies, and just generally boring and repetitive.

Nothing else to say, other than stick to Arkham City if you're into Batman.

Batman Dark Tomorrow


Decent story, but horrible combat and gameplay.