Part 2: 20 Games That Are Worse Than Atari's "E.T."
Feb 20 '07
The Bottom Line So you really think that "E.T." for the Atari 2600 is the worst game ever made? Have you played these games?
I have returned with Part 2 of my list of 20 games that are far worse than Atari's "E.T.," the game too often cited as being the worst video game ever made. There could be plenty of games that could qualify as being the worst ever, a lot of which probably aren't on this list, and if you were to play ever single game ever created, then who knows...most of the titles I have here might not make the cut. But the point here isn't to necessarily create a list of the worst ever, these are simply just titles of really awful games that I feel are worse than "E.T."
Karate
(Atari 2600)
If this was some kind of early prototype near the dawn of the 2600 age, then maybe I wouldn't be quite so harsh on this game. But the fact is is that this game was released in 1987. As if "The Karate Kid" game for the NES wasn't bad enough, here we have...this. You play as a completely overly large stick figure fighting another overly large stick figure, and both of you look about a notch under stickdeath.com animation. The worse problem is that the game is damn near unplayable! I can't tell if I'm actually hitting the opponent or not, but he can sure hit the hell out of me! No matter where you stand, you cannot hit the other player. You can be right up in his face, and you will not get a hit off. Is it because your arms are too small? Well, they are too small, but that shouldn't matter when you are right in the guy's face! Atari games like "Battle Zone" proved that the Atari 2600 is capable of damn good gaming graphics, and this 1987 game should have known that by then. It's the worst fighting game ever made.
Mario Is Missing
(NES/Super Nintendo)
God I hate this game. It's no wonder Mario skipped out on this one and let the shame fall upon his brother. This game is the "Operation Double 007" of video games, and Luigi is clearly in the Neil Connery position. Why did this game have to be so terrible? It's an interesting premise! Mario goes missing, and Luigi has to find him. That's a great set up. What we have though is Luigi drifting back and forth between a castle maze of doors and pipes, and then for no reason you end up on some downtown street where I can only see one Koopa and if I attempt to jump on him, some kind of gravitation pull sends me in the opposite direction! There are also people in this town, who either walk right by Luigi or are peeking out of a window and probably wondering "how in the hell did Luigi end up headlining a game so pathetically awful as 'Mario Is Missing'?" Obviously this is meant to be some kind of role playing game, but if I want to play a game of that type, I'll stick with "Simon's Quest," and if I want to play a Mario Bros. game, I'll play one of the many great options that sure as hell aren't "Mario Is Missing."
Platoon
(NES)
War is hell. So is this game. In "Platoon," you are a lone soldier wandering aimlessly through what appears to be a Vietnam hedge maze. As if that weren't boring enough, your character is so big and walks so slowly, that it makes it even harder to kill whatever enemy pops out from the trees or in the bushes. Oh yeah, and there's trip wire. There's also no health bar in this game whatsoever, so if you get hit once, just once, you are dead. Your character freezes like a brick and plops down sideways. Well, I guess the getting hit once thing is kind of realistic, but it gets even worse. If the enemy so much as even bumps into you while walking, you are still dead! There's no way to play this game! You have no idea where you are supposed to go with your character, so you just keep going through all of these mazes without any inkling of whether or not you're going in the right direction. You might say that this game is "unwinnable." If that was the game designer's point, then bully for them, they managed to make a game that makes the "Rambo" game look like "Ikari Warriors."
Revolution X
(Super Nintendo)
I kid you not, here is the plot of this game. In the near future (or 1996), an uprising has begun that has taken over the government, and thus has outlawed the arts, such as music namely. It's an arcade style "rail shooting" game along the lines of the "T2" arcade game, and you plow through thousands of identical looking soldiers, all dressed in yellow, and all shooting and dying in the exact same way. But the point isn't to namely overthrow this uprising, no no. You have to kill off your enemies in order to find out the whereabouts of the band members of Aerosmith, because they have been kidnapped. Excuse me, I would rather save the princess, thank you very much. Ugh, imagine an "Omega Man" type 70's game, where you have to rescue Seals & Crofts. That's how ridiculous this game is. You have this rock soundtrack blaring all throughout the levels, only all of it is extremely wretched, and you have to collect CD's along the way. It's just some standard shooter game, made even worse when they decided to make it an Aerosmith commercial. I even read at one point that this was even going to be a "Jurassic Park" game! It's just a stock game that waited for the highest bidder.
River City Ransom II
(Super Nintendo)
First off, it took me a while to figure out what this game is even called. It's all in Japanese, so I had to randomly guess which options to pick in order to get the game started, but if it were a good action game, then I wouldn't have cared about that. The original "River City Ransom" is pretty good, but this one is just tedious as hell. You start out in this way overlong dialogue and story sequence that I cannot understand nor can I even skip past no matter how hard I try. After all of that, it looks like you can finally fight some baddies in a subway station, but when you go to hit one guy, he flies all the way across the screen and his buddies take off running. Wow, my character must be a badass. Too bad after this scene I have to watch the character go into a hotel room and take a nap. Seriously, that's what happens. Come on, I just want to beat up some people! Go to sleep on your own time, you lazy bastard!
Skeet Shoot
(Atari 2600)
This could be the most poorly designed shooting game of all time. It's kind of like the Clay Shooting segment on "Duck Hunt," only in that game you're actually more likely to hit the clay objects. I played this game for about 10 minutes, and in that time, I believe I got one hit on the damn thing. As your character, you can only shoot in three different angles: straight up, sideways, or at a 45 degree angle. But the clay objects can go wherever the hell they want to go, and if it doesn't end up in one of those 3 lines of fire, then it's impossible to hit anything! Sometimes you will get lined up on it, but you'll still miss it because the clay goes about 10 times faster than your bullets. How in the hell is THAT possible? Boggles the mind.
Super Pitfall
(NES)
"Pitfall" is one of the greatest sidescrolling games ever made. It is the godfather of the genre. And best of all, it still holds up to this day. Much like the original "Super Mario Bros.," "Pitfall" will always be a reliable source of entertainment, and just a sheer legend of its kind. So what went wrong with "Super Pitfall"? First of all, putting the word "Super" in the title is just an out and out lie. In this game, Pitfall Harry looks more like Dennis Franz in a mining outfit, and due to the poor game design, the character is no fun to control due to his slow speed, and the graphics look more like the works of a third party non licensed Nintendo game company. Anyway, the fact that they have given Pitfall Harry a gun is one thing, but why give him a gun that shoots slower than a Nerf pistol. And it's always interesting in a game when your character dies and they restart him in a completely different area of the game that you haven't been before. I guess it doesn't matter though, nearly every other ladder just leads to a bed of spikes.
The Superman Games
(Atari 2600, NES, Nintendo 64)
I couldn't choose between these games. There has yet to be a Superman based game that I actually like, but to be fair, I have not played the "Superman Returns" game. In the Atari 2600, the point of the game is to repair a bridge in the city. That's funny, because when I played it, it seemed that the only thing I could do is just aimlessly and not so gracefully fly around what appears to be a city, while a random character shows up that you can't even do anything to. In the Nintendo version, you walk around the city beating various assortment of villains, only if you get shot enough times, you die. That's right, if Superman gets shot, he dies. Do I need to go on any further with that ridiculousness? The 64 version is the one that is often cited for being one of the worst video games ever, although I actually feel the Atari and NES versions are far far worse. Atleast in the 64 version, you know what to do in it, it's just that the character and the graphics are so poor in their complete laziness that you wonder why they didn't just replace Superman with a giant block of wood, because that's what he looks like and that's what it's also like trying to control the character. And what's with the damn rings that you have to fly through? As far as games go, Superman seems to carry the seal that you're probably about to play a really awful game.
Taboo: The Sixth Sense
(NES)
What's this? A video game based on the incest porno film from 1980 starring Kay Parker? Sadly, no. "Taboo" is a tarot card reading game where you enter in a question, and it predicts the future for you. If you thought this was a stupid idea for a game, then you're right. It's also boring as hell. Okay, so right now I am looking at the game. First you have to enter in your name, birthday, and sex. Right, so now that that's out of the way, I am going to enter in the question "Where's Waldo?" and see what happens. After what feels like 5 minutes of shuffling, I get the strength card, and it tells me that my "present position is to overcome a difficult situation at considerable peril." What the hell does that mean? How is that going to help me find Waldo?? That makes it sound like someone is going to shoot me in the back of the head when I get to the Carnival puzzle! Well, with fortune telling like that, it's no wonder they didn't come out with "Taboo 2: Magic 8-Ball." Trust me, stick with a Ouija Board, it's more fun.
Wolfenstein 3-D
(Super Nintendo)
Okay, it was bad enough when the Super Nintendo took out all of the blood and guts from games like "Mortal Kombat" and "Primal Rage," but what they've done here to "Wolfenstein" is just so blasphemous that it makes the game's rip off, "Super Noah's Ark 3-D," seem slightly better by comparison. This is barely even the same game that we were all used to. In an effort to avoid controversy, Nintendo removed all elements of the game that showed that you were fighting the Nazis. Yes, that means Robo-Hitler was taken out of the game as well. With all of that gone, do we even know who we are fighting? Just some random soldiers? Not only that, the blood had all been removed and replaced with what appears to be sweat dripping down the soldiers heads. And the dogs were replaced by mutant rats. Okay, so they took out what they deemed to be controversial, and what we were all left with was a horrendous excuse of a first person shooter game that is so tired and boring that it actually makes playing the NES "Punisher" game seem like a good idea in comparison.
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caligula79
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Member: Brad
Location: Long Beach, CA
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About Me:
Reside in both Long Beach, California and Springfield, Illinois. I'm region-polar.
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