Well, I think you know the deal by now. This time, instead of talking about the games I enjoyed playing, this section will be about the games that made me consider ritual suicide. No, we’re not talking about Mario Party.
Yet
No, this is about games that I’ve played that were just really, really bad. Now, before you proceed, I will warn you: there will be spoilers concerning these games (though I’m not sure why you would ever want to play these games). There are terrible games that I’ve never played before, therefore they can’t be included. There may be games here that you enjoy (two of these games got high rankings on Metacritic, for example). These are just opinions, so take them as such. Seriously though, they suck. [One final note: almost all of these games are on Nintendo consoles solely because I only played Nintendo consoles. If I had played lots of Xbox or Playstation games, I’m sure there would be some terrible games of those on this list.]
#10: Red Steel (Wii)
Red Steel was one of the launch titles for the Nintendo Wii, developed by Ubisoft. Ubisoft had been known for good games at the time, and continue to develop good games now, so there wasn’t much reason to doubt that they could harness the capabilities of the new Wiimote. The game ran into a problem, though: it tried doing that. The game itself was pretty boring: you’re an American in California marrying an Asian woman when a bunch of other Asians start shooting at you, insulting you as you shoot them all with your guns. You know, fun.
Wait, that isn’t a gun…
Something happens on your way to victory, though: you learn the ways of the katana. Now, if you’d played Killing Floor, you’d know that the katana is a great weapon, mostly for stunlocking Scrakes. Alas, there are no Scrakes here. Instead, you’re forced against your will into swordfights where you attempt to harness the power of terrible Wiimote controls. Spoiler alert: you don’t win this fight. The controls are particularly bad here, meaning there isn’t much else to do than to swing the Wiimote violently until your opponent dies. I only bought this game because it came with No More Heroes, so it wasn’t a complete loss. There was a sequel made, but that one wasn’t very good either. Bad move, Ubisoft.
#9: 1080 Snowboarding (N64)
And here’s one of those games. According to a web archive of Metacritic, this game got an 88 out of 100 (on the current site it has a more sensible 70/100). Why was this game good? I can’t say for certain. All I can say about this game is that you take damage while snowboarding, and if you take enough damage, you lose. It’s not a lot of fun when you’re racing with your friend and you lose because you fell too many times, especially considering the game seems to urge your boarder into falling over every time you try to do a trick. There are much better games out there than this one.
#8: Manhunt 2 (Wii)
As the previous games have proved, even the best companies have some not-so-great titles. This gory game comes straight from Rockstar, a company familiar with controversy. A particular controversy arose when it appeared on the Wii, when concerned parents feared that kids could practice strangling people with the Wiimote and nunchuck. If any of those parents can replicate a strangling with those controls, I will give them a hundred bucks. The controls are awful, with troubles arising not only from attempting to kill people, but from even such trivial things as standing up. There was a moment in the game where a couple of thugs knocked me down, and it was nigh-on impossible to get back up. Needless to say I died. On top of that, there was one more tiny problem.
Actual game footage.
See, Manhunt 2, like some horror games I’ve played, says that the best way to play the game is to have it on the lowest brightness setting. Having never encountered this before, I complied and turned it down to as dark as it could go. I continued to play the game like this until I entered a house to evade the police. I spent anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes exploring that house with no idea of what I was doing. At that point, I had no choice: I had to up the brightness setting. And what did I find? I had been running around in a circle the whole time, unable to see where I was going. Great idea, game. Turns out turning on the lights doesn’t make the game any more fun.
#7: Lux-Pain (DS)
This game is so unfortunate, as it could have been so much more. Being a visual-novel game, there wasn’t much in the way of gameplay, but the story itself had a really great, depressing premise. The main character had to destroy things known as the Silent, which latched onto people and created depressing and even suicidal thoughts. I enjoyed that part… and nothing else. For a game that was basically a book, they seemed to have spent no time actually translating it.
What’s wrong here? I’ll have to thing about it.
When your product basically does one thing, you’d think that you’d try hard on that one thing. Turns out this may not be the case, as these kinds of errors pop up everywhere, in every instance. Add on the fact that the “gameplay” involves tapping on circular things to defeat “bosses”, and you’ve got a game with a good premise, but an extremely disappointing product. This would’ve been better off as an anime.
#6: Resident Evil 2 (N64)
Here’s the big one. If there was ever a game I put here that I felt people would start screaming at me for, it would be this one. Resident Evil 2: the game with an 89/100 on Metacritic. A game people loved then and now. A game that showcased the awesomeness of horror games, and is much better than the horror-less action games that started with Resident Evil 4. Okay, I’m not actually sure anyone really thinks this. Let’s start from the top.
My brother was the one who bought RE2, since we heard that it was such a good game. It wasn’t long, however, before my brother was telling me how he couldn’t even get out of the first screen. Well that’s odd, I thought as I went to the game room and took the controller. The very first thing I did upon playing the game was walk straight into fire. Capcom, in all their infinite wisdom, flipped the controls. I was finally able to walk into the next screen, where they were generous enough to change the camera angle. In a move that may have been unprecedentedly stupid, the camera, which isn’t controllable, is differently angled every time you step out of a frame. The worst ones included a top-down view and one that was on the ground, obscuring your view as zombies came at you from that same angle. There are even screens that, once you run into that part of the game, flip the controls so you run right back where you came from. The controls, particularly the ones controlling the aiming of the gun, were awful, meaning it was more advantageous to run away rather than attempt to get your gun around to shooting something. Plus, this game commits a cardinal sin, a sin that no game should ever repeat.
Where is his beautiful blonde hair?!
In all their infinite wisdom, the developers decided what gamers really wanted was a limited number of saves. So now you only have a limited number of opportunities to save your game, meaning that you potentially will have to go long stretches of the game without a save opportunity. Even worse, the way you save is by putting typewriter tape into the aforementioned typewriter, so you must traverse past hordes of zombies to find a typewriter, then you must pull out a huge roll of tape that takes up precious inventory space just to save your game. With the exception of games without save functions, this is without a doubt the worst possible save structure in video game history. It seems like Capcom is punishing you for not being able to play their entire game without dying in one go. The entire game was just a big misstep on the way to the Resident Evil franchise’s best entry, Resident Evil 4.
As you were.
Save the Daylight 