Your actual bottom 10/20/25/50/100/200 games - have you ever?

Monster Jam: Crush It! (PlayStation 4, 2016)

An indefensibly poor PS4 game with three boring modes, no multiplayer and ultimately no redeeming features. Everybody involved should have been hit with Theft Offence Charges because it’s criminal that they ever charged money for this. 

FIFA 64 (Nintendo 64, 1997)

Glenn Plant’s (excellent) YouTube video on FIFA 64 described it as “the Jimmy Saville of gaming”. It’s borderline unplayable, being incredibly difficult to control, look at and even, somehow, understand. Even the main menus are total headfuck. 

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (Arcade, 1990)

A lousy and unappealing side-scrolling beat ‘em up by any standard, but it’s the shamelessness of it’s money-grabbing ‘pay to win’ mechanics in the arcade that make me really detest it. I can’t think of a sequel that’s a bigger downgrade from Double Dragon II to this stinking rubbish heap.

Power Punch II (NES, 1992)

A Punch-Out!! Clone that strips away all that’s good and holy about it’s source material. The memorable characters, clever counterattacking and finely-balanced gameplay are all gone, replaced by dropped bollock after dropped bollock. Less Frank Bruno, more Wank Bruno.

Batman Forever (Mega Drive, 1995)

An unremittingly boring and dreadful game from my youth, my only memories of it are how atrocious it was. The visuals are an unacceptable sprite-based mess, the music and sound add no atmosphere at all and the combat is horribly delayed between your button inputs and what happens on the screen. What brutalises it past the point of any redemption is the deeply and thought-provokingly confusing controls. This is the type of utter toilet that has you pressing Up and Select to use your weapons.

Pit-Fighter (SNES, 1991)

Widely recognised as the worst game on the SNES, Pit-Fighter is so comprehensively lacking in any sort of quality and was patently made with no skill or finesse whatsoever. I can’t even suggest you play it for a laugh, it’s an empty husk of a game where there’s nothing to enjoy.

Superman 64 (Nintendo 64, 1999)

A complete and utter calamity that habitually teeters between being hilariously unplayable and just plain broken. It’s a constant battle between the player, the controls and the game’s infinite bugs, glitches and anomalies. Lex Luthor’s Solve My Maze is as impossible as you’ve heard too. I get that it was rushed out well before the developer was ready and that they weren’t allowed time to successfully implement all of their ideas. Even so, this was never shaping up to be anything other than a disaster. It truly is.

Mortal Kombat Mythologies (Nintendo 64, 1997)

You can see N64 Magazine’s review for this on the first page of the “Big Pot Full of Bum” thread, where they ripped it to shreds before ‘awarding’ it 9%. That’s fully justified. You could take all my points about Batman Forever there but add in some utterly savage difficulty and the most tedious plotline ever written. That equation gives you Mortal Kombat Mythologies, the third worst game I’ve ever played. I’ll never, ever have a full N64 collection because there’s no chance I’m paying money for this.

Carmageddon 64 (Nintendo 64, 1999) 

In no way a finished game, this is a University of Oxford lesson plan in how to make a rip-roaring arse of an N64 game. It almost beggars belief with how badly it looks, runs and plays. It’s even more baffling that I was ever looking forward to this coming out. N64 Magazine’s legendary 8% review put paid to that thankfully, but that £1.99 copy that I bought for a laugh years later still honks out the drawer where I keep the rest of my N64 games with its sheer mankiness. No joke, I think the nearby copies of Tetrisphere and V-Rally ’99 caught head lice off it.

Bubsy 3D (PlayStation, 1996) 

Quite honestly none of the Bubsy games are brilliantly made; they’re generally unfair, sloppy and annoying. Yet there was no whiff of a suggestion from Bubsy 1 or 2 that the series was capable of being this bad. Crippled by all-time worst controls and camera work and looking like I made it for a failed Computing Science school portfolio without ever knowing how to turn on a computer, Bubsy 3D is nothing short of a disgrace. I’d say is the worst game I’ve ever played.

WWF Warzone

Sure, it's probably not as bad as the ECW games but then I've not played them. I just remember Warzone being a pile of shite when it was seemingly on the end of 90% reviews. I never understood why, because it was horrible to play and the wrestlers looked like they were taking weightlifting tips from Slenderman. Compared to the methodical, chunky greatness of WCW vs NWO, Warzone (particularly on the N64) just did nothing for me. You had these obscene Street Fighter-like combo commands to try and pull off a move and the wrestlers all moved way too fast. It was as if the 1 v 1 fighting game model was applied to the wrestling genre, and because it had a slick WWF presentation and an innovative Create-A-Wrestler mode, people forgave it. WELL NO, I'm calling it out for what it is - a horrible wrestling game.

Red Dog


I loved the Dreamcast but there was always one game I'd end up having to avoid when buying used Dreamcast games at boot fairs. Red fucking Dog. This was a game that I did end up playing in the early 2000s and it sticks in the memory for being very bland and very empty. It was this brown and grey vehicular combat game, but just very drab. Imagine the warthog sections in Halo, for a full game but you're thrown in a cave with some awkward controls and music lifted from the tapedeck of Superhans. It was reviewed fairly well at the time, but nah, not for me.

Fighting Force 2


The first Fighting Force was really popular in 1997/1998, as deluded parents bought their children the next Streets of Rage. Or at least that's what it felt like, despite the combat being real sluggish in hindsight. I still loved it. But the sequel isn't just bad, it's plain stupid. The best thing about the first Fighting Force was being able to bash up bad guys with your mate, but the second game is a 1-player title that plays more like a third-person shooter. It's basically Headhunter without the snappy gunplay or the snazzy motorbike. It doesn't make ANY sense why this exists and wouldn't be surprised if it was a different project that had the Fighting Force shoehorned onto it. Do not play this trash.

Bullet Witch


Before Bayonetta, there was Bullet Witch. Nobody remembers Bullet Witch though, because it's a third-person action title where you strut through flat, open levels machine-gunning enemies until you inevitably tire and stick Bayonetta in. Except, in 2007 we couldn't. It's not necessarily bad - it's just so boring. There's no character, no challenge, no satisfaction, and WAY too much brown and grey. It looks like a PS2 game rather than a 360 one. If it was actually bad it would probably be more entertaining.

Tangled


AKA the blurriest game ever. I imagine many Disney tie-ins could fill this slot, but Tangled was a game I remember paying at least ten pounds for in CEX for my daughter. And I inevitably played it when she got stuck. Now, Tangled is probably my favourite Disney film, it's amazing. This Wii game, however, is just drivel of the highest order. Run, jump, collect coins for no reason. It had really bad loading times, dodgy motion controls and was a right faff, having to continually switch between Flynn and Rapunzel (because Flynn has a sword for attacking, whilst Rapunzel has hair to swing across gaps). You do get to hit people with a frying pan though. Someone, please mod this with Richie and Eddie from Bottom in it.

Basketball Nightmare


One of the first games I played, this lives long in the memory for all the wrong reasons. Technically unfair and a poor basketball title even for the time, this game made you watch a short cut scene every time you did a shot. EVERY TIME. And there's a lot of shots in this. That's once you'd spent half your day ambling across the court in a straight line, as players randomly moved about without any sort of strategy involved. I guess it was a product of its time, but boy did I used to pull my hair out playing this.

Roblox


Roblox is a weird one. On the one hand it's wildly popular with under 10s, with plenty to do in user-created worlds. On the other hand, it looks like it was programmed on a Shredded Wheat. The user interfaces all overlap each other and it's a game itself, trying to navigate the menus. Once you find somewhere, you potter around doing fairly menial tasks like feeding your pet or decorating your house, which is fine. But the visuals are horrifying. It makes Minecraft look like Ghost of Tsushima. Yet kids love it!

Horse Life


You can spend hours clearing up horse shit in this accurate depiction of Horse Life. A shameless rip-off of Nintendogs that sees you maintaining a horse - you clean it, you can ride it, and you can decorate it. That's your lot. But the worst part is it teases you with RPG elements, like characters on the ranch and competitions to enter, all drawn in a similar manner to Hotel Dusk. Hell, the music is even similar. But it's all a ruse, as you realise you're playing a real horse's arse of a game with sluggish navigation, shaky 3D graphics and what can only be described as a jazzed up Tamagotchi aimed at exploiting young girls who'll never afford a real horse.

WWF Road to Wrestlemania


I don't care who it offends, but GameBoy wrestling games are terrible. I had this travesty on the GBA and there's only so much you can do with a couple of buttons. You just end up punching and kicking your opponent because any sort of move is impossible to pull off. Limited by the tech, it's still a colourful title but unless you want to spend half hour kicking someone in the nads before praying you get a 3-count, you were better off returning to your PS2 or GameCube. Did they ever make a decent portable WWE game? I'd rather play 2K20 than this.

Peppa Pig


Actual dreck and tantamount to fraud that this sold for £40. It's just a bunch of flash games that will entertain your children for all of five minutes. A bit like the show then. But of course, I bought this as it has Peppa Pig in it and I'll admit, I've found myself watching Peppa Pig long after my daughters have left the room. But Christ, calling these "games" is pushing it. One is a dress-up tool, another has you using the Wii pointer to move bread to ducks in a pond. THESE AREN'T EVEN GAMES. It's fucking tech demos for Microsoft Paint.

Paper Mario Sticker Star (3DS, finished)

Almost right Mas!  Truth be told though, I can't genuinely include this in my bottom 10.  It's not a bad game in and of itself, just aggressively mediocre.  That said, PMSS is my most disappointing game.  It's not just that it was got rid of edited Mario characters, or anything approaching a point to the battle system: it's that it set us up for two more games of the same.  The series was sent from the giddy heights of TTYD and the interesting experiment that was SPM into a slump from which (from what people say) it's only starting to recover, and even then with those faults still in place.  Maybe not a bad game, then, but certainly a bad precedent-setter.

Jotun: Valhalla Edition (Switch, <15m)

Here's the game I've given my lowest score to.  Back when Buska did that blinder of a post where he reviewed every Switch game he'd played, I did a weak imitation.  I was giving every game some sort of score, so this got 'Jot-one/10'.  As you'll gather from that timestamp, I'm in no position to make a fair assessment of the game.  I didn't find that the Viking tramping over what felt like the Norwegian Golden Gate Bridge, then wading slooooooowlyyyyyyyyy through a marsh hacking tree roots, was a good start to an adventure about chopping up giant terrifying bosses; or that it not making the save system clear was forgivable when it became clear I'd rage quit away all my progress.  Is Jotun worthy of a 'bottom game' position on the basis of 15 mintues' play, when I didn’t even see one of the bosses the game is all about?  I don't think so.

Stella Glow (3DS, 3-5h)

Finally, here's the only game* I'd give a 'NO' score to.  I was quite enjoying SG up until that point - a decent enough strategy-RPG-lite.  Oh sure, there were creepy bits (you could 'touch witches' hearts' to help them learn new spells, done in a room where they all wait submissively for you in tight white gowns), but coming from the same people who did the Luminous Arc games I was ready for that.  I was not ready for this.  I put the game down soon after meeting Nonoka (whose name I'm pretty sure is a pun) and washed my hands thoroughly.

* It must be said, I used an emulator to play the first part of the original 'NO' game, Doki Doki Majo Shinpan.  I hadn't a clue what was going on until the witch touching began.  It could probably find some room in this list, but I reckon I ought to stick to games I've played on proper machines and in languages I understand - even if schoolgirl-breast-prodding transcends languages in its wrongness.

Tales of the Abyss (3DS, long enough)

This fought off a couple of other 3DS games to claim the number 10 spot, and Rum at least will be unsurprised to see this here.  While I hated the main character and the terribly voiced creature shown above, TotA makes it in here mostly for utterly wasting my time.  It takes an elongated break from a story about things slowly falling into miasma, which was pretty much how I felt playing it, to ask you to be an errand boy for what felt like hours.  Flying back and forward giving object x to person y, over a dull flat overworld in a dull flat story, almost broke me.  The 'talking heads' non-cut-scenes that are basically text boxes you can't fast-forward are the cherry on this particular shit sundae.

Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (GBA, finished)

So I said I couldn't remember the bobbins GBA games I played.  I remember this one because I finished it, despite feeling the entire time in my soul that what I was playing was tripe.  And tripe it was: it might not look quite as bad in motion as it does in that picture, but the rubbish character designs, dubious levels, poor pacing, and absolute waste of what was a brilliant idea (tilt the world!  Genius!  You could only tilt it 15º each way and for that the game could have used the shoulder buttons) shone through like nuclear waste shining into your liver.  I only stuck with it at age 15 because it starred my beloved Yoshi: now I realise that by buying it, I was partly responsible for starting his fall into game score oblivion.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (DS, finished)

Controversial game number 1 perhaps.  Much like TotA, I abhor GSDD for boring me to absolute tears.  It had a grim story with no real ending, landing on a truly unsatisfying cliffhanger.  It had a party that, by the end, felt desperately like it was making up the numbers - leading to moments of unintentional comedy when all eight would have to react to every bit of news.  It had a battle system that, even with this being my first encounter with its Djinn, felt like it added nothing new to RPG battling.  It had an excruciating random battle frequency.  It wasn't all bad, since the game was quite pretty and it had a decently innovative zodiac-themed dungeon; but what was bad was bad enough.

NB: When Moyles did his excellent DS voting thread, I said that Solatorobo: Red the Hunter was my least favourite DS game.  Over time I've almost entirely forgotten about Solatorobo, while GSDD, which I slogged all the way through for no payoff at the end, stinks away in my mind.  Still, big thanks to Jay for preserving my hatred.

The Emperor's New Groove (Game Boy Colour, 15-30m)

This was my sister's.  She went through a period of loving the film.  That love did not extend to this mess of a game - unlike Yoshi, Kuzco actually looks worse in motion.  The level after this, where the best enemies are hands waving brooms at you, was a gloomy jungle that was almost impossible to make out on the screen.  The game was surprisingly hard too, relying on aiming Kuzco's spit arc to trigger switches and relying on Kuzco's lousy jump to dump you unceremoniously into the water.  Could easily be lower down this list, but fortunately I didn't play much of it.

Major Minor's Majestic March (Wii, 10-20m)

PHWOAR WOULD YOU LOOK AT THE VISUALS ON THAT  

It's a measure of the gulf between my worst game and Cappa's that a game he gave me, placing a decent way into my list, didn't make his.  I've dumped on this once before and, while I was definitely trying too hard to be funny (that fourth paragraph ), I'd hope it's still worth reading for the last line alone.  Still one of the best punchlines I've done, sadly.

Picross S (Switch, 15-30m)

While it may not be bad per se, Picross S shows a degree of laziness that would make the executive behind the FIFA Legacy Editions blush.  After playing a Picross E or two on the Wii U, my excitement for the first Picross game on Switch drained out of my bottom when I realised that Jupiter had put in absolutely no effort.  A bunch of picross puzzles where the solution is the only reward, a bunch of Mega Picross puzzles with the exact same set of solutions, and an art team that probably painted every room in their house beige, so interesting is the presentation.  After the first few puzzles numbed my brain, I skipped straight to the last one and solved it with no problems, then deleted Picross S off my Switch and haven't looked at the series since.

The Humans (Game Boy, 15-30m)

Slow, shoddy strategy I was given at a young age because I liked dinosaurs and my parents knew nothing about games.  Slowly send one human to stand with his arms up at the bottom of a small step; slowly send the next human all the way from the start of the level to the step, climbing up the first human, until you reach a second step; do this two more times; smash head into Game Boy; go to hospital with concussion; have a better time than you did playing The Humans.  Even at age 6 or whatever I knew better than to spend too long on this crap.  Also: apparently offensive by today's standards, both to native Americans and to grammar.

1-2-Switch (Switch, ~1h)

Controversial game number 2 perhaps.  Yes the marbles game was absolute magic, and yes Jay shooting himself in the foot was great, and yes it's some fun with friends and booze.  I still think it's a terrible game!  For starters it's a party game that only two people can play at once, which is a shocking idea - and I think it does need to be played at a party, with alcohol, otherwise the sheer cringe of the pre-recorded videos gets to you.  Then there's the highly variable quality of the games themselves.  For every marbles there seem to be several shiters, like the game where you whack a joy-con against your chest to be a gorilla, or that godawful clown one.  Finally, there's the fact that it wasn't a pack-in - in fact it's still going for £40!  £10 would have been overegging the rather rancid pudding.

UnEpic (Wii U, 1-2h)

There's nothing worse than an unfunny game that thinks it's funny - apart from the next game in my list, apparently.  UnEpic leads off with a group of stereotypical overweight lisping nerds playing D&D, into which the 'hero' is sucked, there to make stoner jokes and uncomfortable comments about having sex 'for free' until he blunders into a trap and dies horribly.  The dialogue was dreadful, the visuals were shocking, the controls were dubious, and then I got to a bit where you had to be really patient and careful to avoid triggering about twenty traps in a row.  And it's downloadable, so you can't even use the cart/disc to shovel crap.  Officially worse than Brunswick Pro Bowling.

Alphadia Genesis (Wii U, ~2h)

On another day UnEpic could have got this slot - but I had to read the Wii U vote thread to be reminded that it existed, whereas this is scarred into my memory forever.  Dubious credit, then, must go to Mas, who provided me with the code for my worst game of all time (that I can remember).  Even at the back end of my list of ten, I can't say this is irredeemable, or broken (apart from the bit where the item sound jingle plays over and clashes with the soundtrack): just that it's horribly generic, horribly low-effort, horrible written, has horribly clashing visual styles, and in general is pretty horrible.  I reviewed it for Gintendo, and my pun in the url (I always like to do one of those) sums it up.  Also: it's horrible, like the game.

What's Sonic's redeeming feature? The educational sections at the end of the original cartoon, like the one where he tells you not to touch wild animals (SAID THE HEDGEHOG TO THE FOX)? No, it's the going really fast through stuff. Why don't we add right-angle corners then? Because this is why. I can't believe these guys made Lego Star Wars. Bloody Bloody Bloody Bloody.

We looked at Yoshi eggs from our ground-breaking platform game! And we went for... a puzzler, where, eventually, some things fall down, and I hope you can trap them in the... zzzzzzzzzzzz. It's so boring I don't even worry why any of it is what/where it is. Why is Mario spinning the plates? Why little things in eggs? Why is Yoshi telling you there are no eggs, verbally?

Why have you added this weird shit to Tetris? I just want to play the normal Tetris like everyone wants to. This is probably a long way down this list due to immediate disappointment, rather than it being terrible.

Boooooooooooooriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.

This is a game like a DVD Special Features menu is a game. Well, maybe it can be forgiven for being an "interactive story" if the story's really good. What? It's not? Hooray!
Absolute fucking bollocks. If you're really making a film, the quality of your writing will be held up as such; the plot holes that might exist in New Super Mario Bros. U aren't as forgivable here. Not as bad as Detroit, where David Cage compares the made-up-in-his-story robot protest to the definitely-real-so-best-not-to-remind-people US Civil Rights protests, but I don't think I actually played it. If I did, and can't remember, plonk it here.

Are any of you old enough to remember the repurposing of a load of very old sometimes-problematic comic book characters into a new comic/cartoon/toy line in the late 80s? This is the videogame of that. One of the few old-school games, it was made in 1990 so it counts. It's an absolutely laborious experience, of just getting bombarded with infinitely respawning enemies as you attempt to clamber through what is actually a very small landscape. And you only get to play as (*checks game again*) Flash Gordon, the rest of the squad being assigned to hotkeys to arbitrarily unlock doors and such. Almost definitely one of the licensed games of the 8-bit era, where someone was working on some game idea, the license was bought, and stuff was shoehorned in. Nonsense. You've squandered this particular piece of excellence, peeps.

I only found out recently this had a commercial release. I know it because... oh boy:
Before the days of Unity and Unreal, there were no real publicly available 3D engines. I was really keen to try something in the mid-2000s though, and I came across 3D Game Studio, which was probably the only thing that existed at the time. I couldn't believe it wasn't popular! Surely everyone wants to try making their own games right? Well. It wasn't really fit for purpose. The 3D engine already looked out of date by the time I saw it**, and the scripting system was, thanks to its lack of support, absolutely impenetrable.
It did however come with a demo game, showing off the results of the 3D engine. Here's the Speedrun of it. Just watch that instead. Why not call it Barry Buyer's Remorse in Not Even the Devs Can Make This Work Land. Not featured in the speedrun: the MIDI engine cutting out of its own accord at various times. If you snort at an indie game because the Unity logo comes up at the beginning, please don't - the progress we've made it amazing.
**(no-one look up the current graphics engine of the company I work for for comparison please I think we've announced the replacement so it's fine me saying this I think)

This one's a bit sad actually. The first EGX I went to, this game was being shown off. A spiritual successor to Myst (we didn't have things like Quern or The Witness yet) where you travel round impossible dream-like worlds - but potentially in VR! That was the first game I'd played in VR. Then I felt sick for 2 hours. However, the devs were very friendly, and gave me a discount code for trying it out, so I bought the early access game, knowing I could play it in less-vomity 2D on the PC. However, it never really got finished. There are so many issues with the engine - just horrible glitches that were bad enough in normal-vision, but would proper freak you out with a Vive on your head. I'm getting the queaze just thinking about it now.

Look, we've done this before, I can't do it again.
If I take off the year limit, there are worse games than this - 5 in fact. But they were made when area codes have 4 numbers in, so this is inexcusable.