• Top 10 Worst Video Games of All Time

  

  Written by Zeromage 122 Comments
  Last Updated:: July 1, 2009

  Most video games are stupid, especially games made by Sega for some reason. If you’re wondering, yes we are still barking up that same old tree. Anyway I digress. Before I get back to the intro to this our latest and greatest list there are a number of things that need to be addressed. First we never received any Venn diagrams of our Top 10 Worst Fanboys list as requested so hurry up, the t-shirts are still available. Second nobody has offered us vast sums of money so we can sell out, so break out those check books and get on it. Third and lastly, we have yet to receive any suitable applications of our new religion which we have just named OldWizardology. We very specifically said no losers and no poor people. Do not send us your tired huddle masses yearning to breath free, we want well rested small groups who yearn to give us money. That being said our lastest offering is an inspired list about the worst video games ever. These games were so terrible that we would be shocked to find out they actually covered their production costs. Was Shaq ever really that popular, does he really need a video game that isn’t based on basketball? And who would ever be inspired by the career of a paper boy so much that they create a whole game about it? Maybe someone should make a game about sweeping or perhaps sleeping. That might be as entertaining. On the other hand some games are just to terribly conceived that even we don’t know what to make of them or who would ever enjoy them. Here is what we here at OW think are the absolute worst games of all time. And yes there are some Nintendo games on there, you jerks.

  10. Skate or Die (NES)

  Skate or Die? I would rather die then have to play Skate or Die ever again in this life time. The title screen shows some paltry loser who you want to beat on for looking so clownish. The game irritates you even more. You skate around different areas with the same ramps, same couple of maneuvers, and same impossible controller issues. Then when you finish an area you are bombarded with the same loser from the title screen, this time taking up even more space with his massive poaching noggin (who in their right mind would ever have a mo-hawk?) If you’re going to make a game called Skate or Die, how can it be one of the most pedestrian games ever made? Is it supposed to feel cutting edge because I’m looking at some goon with an ugly green mo-hawk? At least show a little bit of blood or anger when failing at these boring courses so that the game can merit the name “Skate or Die”. The same circle of courses proved to be quickly tedious, with little extra to spark any interest in playing further than five minutes, except if you like looking at 8-bit graphics of infirm skaters that may bring images of a “cool dude” flashing the rock hand signal at you when you were doing something cool. I suspect there are some people who like this trash. I should never meet these people, God willing.

  9. Elevator Action (Arcade)

  Pac-Man is a simple game and its one of the greatest games of all time. Donkey Kong and the Original Super Mario Brothers are also simple games that rank as some of the best video gaming experiences of all time. Elevator action is also a very simple game, and is one of the worst games of all time, proving that simplicity doesn’t always equal genius. This game gets repetitive quick. Climb down stairs shooting the same fucking sleuth enemies over and over again. Once in awhile, take an elevator down and shoot the same enemies over and over again. The music is deeply irritating and completely uninspired. It’s easy to fall asleep to this music (not in a good Coastal Mario Kart level), which should not be the case for an action thriller that tries to be “edgy”. There’s really nothing more to be said about this game. You will fall asleep 2 minutes into playing Elevator Action or you will be angry it’s so fucking boring. There’s a line between sheer boredom and sheer genius when it comes to overtly simple games like those listed previously. Pac Man you can play for hours and hours on end with a levels that barely change and enemies that only gradually increase in speed and difficulty level. Elevator Action on the other hand you know almost immediately to be tired and uninspired.

  8. The Three Stooges (NES)

  While most games are bad because the idea of the actual game being played is terrible, or because it is so difficult you can’t get by the first level, “Three Stooges” introduces a new reason why a game can be awful. Three Stooges is basically incomprehensible to play. For the most part you have no idea what you’re doing when you’re playing this game. You press start and you’re taken to an outside street with the three stooges where a Wheel of Fortune wheel comes out of thin air that ostensibly picks what you’re supposed to do in the game. Next you notice you’re in another random place where you have no idea what you’re supposed to do. You’re at a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. There are also what looks like pieces of cat excretion in the soup that you have to eat. Trying to control your spoon proves to be one of the more difficult tasks you will take on in this life. After a couple of minutes of throwing your controller at the screen you hear a sound that sounds like a box fan breaking down which I think is supposed to be one of the 3 stooges getting angry that you didn’t pass a test that you couldn’t control and knew nothing about, and had no idea how you got there, and why your eating soup with ambiguous objects inside. You next may randomly find yourself in a hospital flying down an operating room with a nurse picking up things she’s dropping. You have no idea what you’re picking up though. Once again, trying to control this fiasco proves excessively enigmatic, and once again you will be throwing your controller at the screen.

  This game is so bad, it’s difficult to review any longer. This is a perfect example of what happens when you try to take something from the TV or movie screen and apply it to video gamedom. Creators who want to cash in on screen success pay no attention to the garbage they’re putting out for the video game.
  7. Ghosts n’ Goblins

  A reoccurring theme for the top 10 worst games of all time has been when games have been so difficult that you had to buy a new tv from smashing your controller against it too much. There is no game that exemplifies this upshot from sheer difficulty like Ghosts ‘n Goblins. 1/8th through the first level you’re surrounded by mounds and mounds of enemies. As you’re walking as your character, you’re basically surrounded by a force field of enemies coming at you from every possible angle. Okay, maybe if you had a lot of energy or someone decent armor, you could take the level one onslaught of nefarious enemies. As you walk, you see you do have armor, looks like pretty strong armor, until a weak ass looking bird swoops down, barely hits you, and your armor comes flying off. Not even faux-Halloween armor is this poor. I’m pretty sure that if a bird touched a plastic armor suit that you wore for Halloween, it wouldn’t come flying off. As your worthless armor comes flying off, you’re left with an almost-naked character who is left with nothing on except underwear. Q: Who wears nothing under armor? Am I inept to mid-evil tradition or is there something completely untenable about someone wearing nothing under armor? Your basically left naked running around in the wild with a force field of petulant enemy’s surrounding you at every second. This stultifying game play leads you to give up after 1 to 2 minutes making you feel like shit and making you retire to much more germane games with more sane difficulty levels. When programmers make these games, don’t they realize these most obvious setbacks for the player? Setbacks so large, that they stop playing the game after 5 minutes?

  6. Joust (NES)

  Joust is unbearably boring. Same screen, same enemies, same poor sounds, no music. If one were looking for a legal soporific agent, Joust would be your best treatment. Who could possibly think this idea would keep the attention of the player beyond 30 seconds? When designing this game, who thought that this 1 screen sleep fest would be enough to justify its place in an entire cartridge? At least have a 2nd game packaged along with this garbage. At least have some weak ass side scroller with your jouster (who looks more like a flying ostrich) killing medieval enemies. Speaking of the enemies, what exactly are these things? How come all the players and enemies in “Joust” look like poorly designed birds? In Joust, you’re enveloped with one boring game, controlling something that looks like a bird, fighting against things that may or may not be more birds. Yes, the controls are simple; yes the concept is simple, but so simple that you don’t know why you should be playing this game after 30 seconds. That this ever retained a place in an arcade is beyond me. The sight of this NES cartridge at a used video game store induces the largest of yawns.

  5. Muscle (NES)

  The NES had a myriad of decent wrestling games under its belt including “Pro Wrestling” and “Wrestlemania”. It also held the worst wrestling game ever made, none other than “Muscle”. The biggest reason why Muscle is a terrible game is because of how boring it is. There are no moves, no real characters, and no dialogue. You start off the game by choosing between 9 ostensibly different players, who in reality are all exactly the same, except a slight discrepancy in the color of outfits and shape of face. The game is completely silent. You would think that if a wrestling game is going to be made, at least include some tension and excitement by adding crowd noise and an announcer, albeit an 8 bit incoherent announcer. You get none of this with “Muscle”. You get no music, no crowd noise, 2 or 3 boring moves with no choice of different characters unless your duped into thinking changing masks makes a wrestler completely different. It took about 3 minutes of playing this game to realize that you wasted 3 dollars on renting this soporific excuse for a wrestling game. Bring on “Pro Wrestling” where I can bash “Amazon” on the head with a steel chair and can use a character with a giant star in the middle of his head (Hint: When making games, use your fucking imagination!).

  4. Paperboy (NES)

  When you first see this game, you see the cover with a munificent, happy-go-lucky paperboy delivering papers. You think to yourself, well, a game about being a paper boy can’t be that much fun…but maybe it’s some sort of super-hero paperboy and that’s the reason why he’s so happy on the front cover! The game is opposite of the cover. After you play this game for 10 minutes, you realize the front cover should be a paperboy irritable beyond all bounds and maybe even sticking his middle finger up at the street dancers who have nowhere to dance except right in the middle of the fucking street you have to deliver on.

  It’s 8 o’ clock on a Monday morning and what does the entire neighborhood you deliver to do? They get up 2 hours early to conspire against you and make it impossible to get through half the street before you’re either run over, beat with a spatula, or have a myriad of dogs chasing you. If this game is going to be as difficult as it is, at least have an option of changing routes. At least be able to tell off your boss for giving you such a shitty route where you cant get half way down the street without your life being threatened with people who have nothing better to do than to try to dominate the paper boy. If they really don’t want their paper, then fuck them. Even if you’re able to evade the infinite obstacles towards delivering to 1 house, finding the accuracy to throw a paper into a mailbox is just as tendentious. Most of the time you lose points because your papers gravitate towards breaking the glass of the houses with people who spend their waking lives trying to destroy the paperboy.

  This game is tedious, grossly difficult, and absolutely no fun. To rent a game and not be able to get half way through the first level no matter what you do is lugubrious to say the least. This may be the worst game ever released for a platform system.

  3. Fatal Fury (Sega Genesis)

  Fatal Fury was fun to play for 2 seconds because of how obvious of a rip off it was of Street Fighter. It was the poor man’s Street Fighter, literally and figuratively. The characters were poorly conceived, the after-fight dialogues were a monstrosity of Van Damnesque platitudes, and the final boss was about as scary as a 4th grade trick or treater in a Wonder Woman outfit. Your friend bought this game when he couldn’t afford the real Street Fighter which would go anywhere from $40-$50 dollars. Fatal Fury was a $20 dollar game and it showed. This however did not stop your friend from calling you up and saying “I got this game Fatal Fury that may be better than Street Fighter”, much to your laughter as you realize your friend made a competition out of who had the better video games (These are the people you would often find with books lying around entitled “How to start a conversation and make friends”). Fatal Fury remains one of the more poor attempts at a two player coin-op style fighting game. Combine goofy characters with derivative moves and conspicuous hopes of being “the next Street Fighter”, and you will get this impoverished piece of crap.

  2. Shaq Fu (Sega Genesis)

  Shaq Fu for the Sega Genesis is probably the worst conceived game ever to come out for any platform system. The story line is so abominable that you almost wish that a completely incoherent one was substituted as to give the idea of the storyline being more enigmatic. You are Shaq, somehow in Tokyo, where you are discovered by some zen karate master who says that you have come from some distant planet to save the world (I wonder if Shaq himself ever played this, or maybe even wrote this story line?). After you endure the blatantly uninspired storyline, you have to endure the worst 2 player fighting game of all time. The controlling in this game is incomprehensible. The best thing you can do is just hammer the buttons of your controller with your hands and watch the screen, hoping your capricious hammering of the controller will cause a victory against the most banal of opponents. Looking at the screen doesn’t help the cause either because how dumb it looks to see hackneyed monsters fighting a big dude in basketball shorts. Once you lose because the controlling is so irritating, you have to endure more uninspired dialogue from enemies with 80 times more skill than you have as Shaq. Your opponents can basically throw the elements at you, they can throw fucking planets at you, while you’re left to a high kick and a low kick depending on which buttons your randomly smashing. With a name like “Shaq Fu”, you had to know this game was going to be bad, but you were not in store for how bad it was until you actually played it for yourself.

  1. E.T. (Atari 2600)

  As a child in the 80’s, E.T. was a HUGE part of my life. It was the first, second, and third movie I saw in a theater. It made Reese’s Pieces my favourite candy. It forced me to ride my Star Wars Huffy off of small ledges in hopes of flying my chubby silhouette in front of the moon. Maybe the greatest of all, it took away all fear of aliens I may have had. You could imagine my excitement when my father came home with this game, his face lit up like he was my age, and led me by the hand to the beloved Atari 2600.

  The point of this game is to find pieces of your ship in order to get home. The pieces are located in what can only be described as pits that ET falls into periodically. I have never made it out of the first pit. It’s been rumoured that there are 5 levels of almost identical game play. I’ve heard there are also enemies, and that eating Elliott gives you power ups…I have seen none of these things. I start the game, fall in a hole, and never get out.

  This game single-handedly destroyed Atari and its legacy. They had produced so many cartridges of this game that were never sold they actually had to buy land in New Mexico and create an E.T. landfill in the desert, ouch. They tried to follow on the coat tails of Tron and capitalize on the E.T. brand, but all they ended up doing was starting a long tradition of crappy games based on movies. Thanks E.T., you crushed my childhood and gave me a reason to go outside to play in traffic.

122 Comments

1. #1 Avi says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 10:22 am

   skate or die sucks because It didn’t live up to the name, ‘’skate or die?” guess Zombies Ate My Neighbors sux 2. I also apologize for saying joust sux.
2. #2 Delta says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 12:46 pm

   Avi…..

   They put the Sega Genesis version of FATAL FURY on the list. I dunno though if they mean the game it’s self, or that port of FATAL FURY. It probably does suck compared to the arcade version or the Neo-Geo home version…..which is pretty much just the arcade version.

   Also, which version of NINJA GAIDEN do you mean? The arcade? NES? Or the modern ones for Xbox and Xbox 360? NINJA GAIDEN 2 on 360 is pretty good, but not a huge leap over the Xbox original. I’m on gameplay over graphics, but I take NINJA GAIDEN 2 not having a massively huge improvement in graphics over the original as a problem. Why? Because it was the justification for my biggest problem with NINJA GAIDEN 2. They wanted to show the pretty graphics better, so they pulled the camera in closer, making it unfairly difficult in a lot of places, constantly and consistently getting hit by enemies you can’t see. And the whole fucking reason for them doing it, to show-off the pretty graphics, isn’t even justified as it doesn’t look THAT much better than the first.

   They did improve other things though and it’s still a pretty good game, but I don’t think it’s nearly as good as Itagaki’s ego boasts. Of course I don’t think anything really could be as good as Itagaki thinks it is since that guy thinks he’s Jesus.
3. #3 Avi says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 6:13 pm

   I haven’t played Ninja Gaiden 2, though I’ve heard it’s really good. I’ll accept Fatal Fury. anyways, I liked both the NES and Arcade versions of Ninja Gaiden. I’m not sure which one I preferred.
4. #4 Delta says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 7:28 pm

   I played neither version, I hadn’t even heard of NINJA GAIDEN until the Xbox version came-out and I saw them talk about it on X-PLAY. Oh when I liked X-PLAY. ::sighs:: I miss when G4 was good. I feel so old.
5. #5 Jc says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 1:44 am

   I love ghost an goblin, no matter how hard it is. And it’s hard.really.
6. #6 Sammy says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 6:32 am

   Personally I enjoyed playing paperboy, however the rest of them do suck. The bad part is I remember all those games so I feel ya Delta on the feeling old thing.
7. #7 Delta says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 9:12 pm

   Sammy, I remember playing NARC, STREET FIGHTER II when it came out, FINAL FIGHT, so many games. Though I was a kid when those came-out, but still feel old.
8. #8 Shadow says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 6:13 am

   I once played shaq Fu it sucked ass when the title screen came up i said yeah a basket ball game. but then what the fuck another dimension holy shit i looked at the players. then at night time i burned the game with gasoline
9. #9 Odyssey says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 10:02 am

   Wow, for a second I thought it said “Top 10 Best video Games of All Time”, I read the lost and I was like 0_0 WTF!
10. #10 SergeOfArniVillage says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    Lol, this is a funny list…I especially love the ending line in E.T.’s review! XD Old-Wizard’s sense of humor really is a brand all it’s own…
11. #11 Avi says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 8:59 pm

    omg!
12. #12 Joss says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 4:07 am

    lol, Elevator Action was one of my favourite games when I was at college. It was like a cross between Donkey Kong and Dilbert’s Desktop Games. I got a japanese version of it off a friend so the writing made no sense, but I lost it when my pc essentially exploded and have never been able to find a version which runs as smooth as the japanese version. It was the gameplay which made it so much fun, and which all these inferior western clones lack.
13. #13 Robo Ape says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 4:37 am

    Super Mario 2 needs to be on this list.
14. #14 Delta says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    Joss, how’s it a clone if it’s imported to the U.S.?
15. #15 Azelfknight says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 8:57 pm

    Yes ET is the dumbest, worst, most ungame fun I’ve ever seen.
16. #16 rah says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 5:29 pm

    ghost and goblins was hella fun,if you had unlimited quarters like i had.