Every gamer has at least a few gaming experiences that they'd rather forget. Most of mine hail from when I was kid. Back when I didn't have the judgment of quality that keeps me from buying dud games now. While many of my picks in games at the time ended up being solid (including the best of Nintendo's first party lineup), I still made more than a few ill-informed purchases. Most often they were based off my interest in a licensed property, or catchy cover art.
While I haven't bought a truly terrible game in years, I still must live with the bad games of my past. I've listed the worst of them below, just so my experiences with these electronic turds can at least be put to use amusing all of you.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2002) Game Boy Advance
This isometric Lord of the Rings RPG's only real claim to fame is being based off the Lord of the Rings books by J.R Tolkien, rather than Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. While faithful to its source material, literary accuracy is pretty much the only thing this game has going for it. From the very start, its basic mechanics are sloppy and unwieldy. Character movement with the D-Pad is often so imprecise that characters walk in directions you don't want them to go. The turn based battle system is overly simplistic, slow, and boring. Most of the soundtrack isn't half bad but can get annoying when the same looping track is played over and over.
Good ole' Sancho Proudfoot at his (her?) best
Despite a few control hiccups, the game's early Shire areas are at least tolerable, if a bit simplistic. This changes when players reach the Old Forest, where the game's penchant for poor level design comes into play. Players are tasked with navigating their party of Hobbits through a literal maze of paths that warp them about the woods randomly. Unlike the Lost Woods of the venerable Zelda franchise, there is really no way to predict which path will lead where,and it's up to dumb luck and trial and error to reach the various locations needed to advance.
Merry and Pippin being groped by a tree.
While navigating the Old Forest is a manageable feat given the right amount of patience, it pales in comparison to the worst this game has to offer. While the mines of Moria are a notorious location in the lore of Middle Earth, its rendition on the Game Boy Advance goes far beyond its reputation. It consists of numerous interconnected, confusing, and repetitive passages. Determining which path is the correct way through the mines requires endless wandering. Most simply lead to dead ends, locked doors, or loop around aimlessly.
Gandalf was right
The level is so vast that it is very easy to run out of health items before reaching the exit. This happened to me on my first play through, and I ended up getting stuck on a group of enemies blocking the path to the exit. Time to restart from the beginning! Add to this the repetitive music looping in the background and you have an experience capable of driving even the most grilled gamer insane.
Now this is what I call thrilling combat.
In conclusion, this is a really frustrating and boring RPG. Truthfully, I do feel a certain degree of fondness for it, if only because I put so much time into trying to beat it. Nostalgia is weird sometimes.
Dragon Ball Z The Collectable Card game (2002) Game Boy Advance
I don't remember how or when I got this game, or why for that matter. Knowing my obsession with Dragon Ball Z at the time, I probably took one look at the box and thought I could at least look forward to Kamehameha-ing some suckers. Oh how wrong I was.
Deal! Draw! Conquer!
What I ended up playing was, as if the title of the game weren't obvious enough, a video game adaptation of the DBZ Collectable Card Game. Starting out I had no knowledge of how to play it and this Game Boy Advance version certainly wasn't going to resolve this. With a nonexistent in-game tutorial and a useless instruction manual, most of my time with this game consisted of me making moves at random. For some reason this didn't get me very far.
I don't think Vegeta is having any fun either
Everything about this dang game was completely untranslatable to me, and this is coming from someone who still knows the rules to YuGiOh! Even if I knew how to play, I doubt I would've had much fun. Everything about the game felt barebones and cheap. I actually ended up selling it at a garage sale to some middle-aged lady who didn't know what she was getting herself into. It remains to this day the only game I've ever sold.
Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) GameCube, Xbox, PS2
Unlike some of the obscure games on my list, most knowledgeable gamers should recognize this game. For all the wrong reasons, of course. Shadow the Hedgehog is widely and rightfully regarded as one of the dumbest games ever made. For some god forsaken reason Sega, in all their wisdom, wanted to make their whimsical Sonic series "edgier." To accomplish this they put the spotlight on Sonic's moody rival, Shadow, and added guns and PG-13 swearing to tradition 3D Sonic gameplay. All of this in an attempt to convince kids that playing as an anthropomorphic hedgehog with a bad attitude was cool. Of course, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
"Shadow...Android....Am I... An Android... Too"
Shadow the Hedgehog's gameplay is a mix of simplistic platforming and bland combat. Eliminating baddies is accomplished either by jump dashing into enemies like in normal Sonic games, or through the laughingly bad third person gunplay. Playing this is how I spent Christmas 2005, people!
"Where's that D*** fourth Chaos Emerald!"
One of the games most talked about features is its morality system and branching storyline. Each mission has a "good", "evil", and"neutral" way to complete it. Each ending leads to a completely different next level and there are many paths that lead to the game's multiple endings. None of this really matters though. No matter what path is taken the story ends up being a convoluted mess of unconnected plot points and bland characterization.
"Find the Computer Room!"
All of this adds up to Shadow the Hedgehog being a very poor video game, even when compared to Sonics' multiple other recent train wrecks. Still, the game's sheer absurdity is great for laughs at least. The constant stream of badly written and voiced dialogue was able to put a smile on my face even as its gameplay was boring me to death.
Prison Tycoon 2 (2006) PC
There is a very good idea behind Prison Tycoon 2's concept. Building and running a virtual prison sounds like a lot of fun on paper. Unfortunately this game has far too many bugs and design hiccups to be worth putting hours into building a prison up to maximum security status. Far too much time is spent in the game manually ordering npcs about, such as sending injured prisoners to the hospital because they're too stupid to go there by themselves. One of the game's main goals, reforming prisoners, requires far too much of this micromanagement to be worthwhile.
To say the least, this game can get pretty hectic
Tycoon games have always lacked the polish of Sid Meier's and Will Wright's triple A simulation games. Prison Tycoon 2 is proof positive of this. I don't know if its developer fixed any of the game's issues in its three sequels since, but they certainly had three sequels worth of improvements to make.