#AtoZChallenge Reflections: Dishonorable Mentions

 With the many, many video games that have existed since the 70s there have been some truly great ones but also some stinkers.  So let me mention a few that wound up pretty bad.

ET The Video Game

This one became infamous for not only its terrible gameplay but selling so poorly that thousands of units wound up being hauled to a dump in Alamogordo, New Mexico for internment.  I watched a documentary on that a few years ago where they actually dug up some of the old cartridges for the Atari 2600.

There are plenty of clickbait articles that will probably call this the worst game of all time.  After the success of the ET movie, it was rushed into production.  The programmer basically had about 5 weeks to make a game so it could be on shelves for Christmas.  As you'd expect, the finished product was not very good.  Instead of replicating the movie (at all) you jumped into holes to look for stuff so ET could phone home.  A Federal agent would chase him, I guess.  It was weird and confusing and any kid who got that for Christmas probably wanted to take it back on Boxing Day.

With junk like that, the video game industry soon had a near-fatal crash until the NES came along.

Speaking of...

Friday the 13th

I never tried to play this when I was a kid but it was on one of those fake Gameboy or SNES machines I got from Vine.  This game came out before games like Doom and Mortal Kombat with blood and ripping out spines and stuff.  NES games were pretty bloodless so a game about a serial killer who murders teenagers seems like a pretty bad idea from the start.

The gameplay is more like Legend of Zelda than a fighting game.  You walk around and look for stuff and basically waste a lot of time not murdering people.  You play as some kids and complete important tasks like lighting fireplaces.  The "gameplay" is so ridiculously repetitive, as is the soundtrack, which also for some reason periodically features loud beeps.  Basically you walk down paths and about every two inches zombie things pop up that you throw crap at.  You can go into buildings and blunder around and find Jason, who's wearing a purple tracksuit or something.  

While not as infamous as ET, it was still pretty bad.  Though weirdly none of these "worst of" lists mention it, though most were written by Millennials or Gen Zers who weren't even born when games like this came out.  It was, like ET, a really lame attempt to cash in on a property. 

Speaking of...

Superman 64

This N64 game was based on the animated Superman series--supposedly.  It is on pretty much every list of terrible video games.  Basically the gameplay was difficult and confusing and the graphics were murky, which was explained away with "Kryptonite fog" or that it was a virtual reality simulation.  No matter what, it wound up being pretty awful.

I tried playing it for a few minutes on Retrogames and the controls to make Supes fly were so confusing that I gave up pretty quick.  Of course I didn't have a manual, which might have helped a little bit.  But probably only a little bit.

This wasn't the last time a Superman game disappointed.  The tie-in game for Superman Returns was delayed so it couldn't come out until the fall of 2006, after the movie had already pretty much flopped in theaters.  Was it worth the wait?  Um, no.

Custer's Revenge

My parents wisely never bought this one for the 2600.  This off-brand game features a naked George Custer navigating a battlefield so he can fuck a Native American woman tied to a post.  That was probably cringey back in 1982, let alone in 2024.

Yes, someone really made this and sold it.

Reading a few articles there are some common entries I haven't heard much of:

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

I think we had the first of these games on the old IBM PC.  It was pretty great for teenagers in the early 90s.  This eighth title in the series is apparently notoriously bad.  It's basically like that old guy who still wears a leisure suit and gold chains and stuff and tries to hit on young women at a bar.  The humor and graphics are dated and the story is pretty lame.

Shaq Fu

This 1994 game features Shaquille O'Neal but has nothing to do with basketball.  Instead, it's a fighting game.  Shaq is beamed into another dimension and has to fight his way to a kid and return.  It's a pretty vanilla fighting game with a story that makes little sense.  Just in case you thought Steel or Kazam was the worst thing he ever did.

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

This 1993 game was made for the short-lived 3DO system.  Apparently this "interactive comedy" just used still photos and bad voice-acting as a plumber tries to get laid.  Kind of explains why this system didn't last.

Big Rigs Over the Road Racing

There have been tons of racing games but apparently this is the worst.  You're supposed to haul cargo without getting caught by cops and beat a rival truck, except apparently nothing works except your truck just drives around in vague scenery.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

This game was a victim of its own hype.  Apparently the demos were really great but the finished product was not.  The graphics weren't as good and the gameplay was filled with glitches--or bugs.  Interestingly, a random user examined the code a couple years later and found a typo in the code that caused some of the problems with the alien AI.

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In my A to Z entries I mentioned some games I didn't really like such as Age of Empires II, Super Conflict, or NHL 2005.  Generally I don't think there are a lot of them I bought that I really hated, except maybe if they were in a bundle of other stuff.  Because games are expensive, I couldn't really throw my money at every dumb tie-in game that came out or every hyped-up new game to hit the market.  Mostly I think when I was trying to find something for the Wii other than the Wii Sports games was really when I bought/rented the most stuff that wasn't great.  Like I said, there was just a lot of stuff that didn't really take advantage of the system.  Most I rented but I bought a couple and resold them later.

So I don't think I really had a lot of duds in my library.  Although I did buy my sisters a couple of cheesy Burger King XBox games.  Those were pretty stupid but then they weren't supposed to be real high-class games.

What bad games have you played?