The Worst Video Games of All Time . . . Since 2011

Remind me that sometimes I get stuff wrong because you typically do it in a responsible way, which I greatly appreciate, and I should stress in almost every case, it's where I have researched something and somewhere between the process of reading it and taking my notes, my brain has inserted information that has made it wrong. So the fault lies

on me and I accept that. So first correction in the Pebble episode, I mentioned that the Pebble Watch, the original Pebble Watch, had an e paper display, and then I explained how e ink works. And indeed the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. You will often find e paper and ink both talking about the same technology that

one that uses those electro statically charged capsules. However, that being said, the display that the Pebble the original Pebble watch had was not a true e ink style e paper one, even though they referred to it as e paper. It was actually a low powered l c D screen called a transflective l c D so it works in

a different way than the ink stuff does. The purpose of it is very similar, the idea being that you want to be able to read the screen based upon available light in the environment as opposed to having a backlit screen like your typical smartphone. But it works in a different principles, so thank you for that correction. Secondly, listener Ben pointed that in the Cambridge Analytica podcasts, I mentioned a sting operation conducted by the BBC. Small problem

that wasn't the BBC. It was actually Channel four News in the UK, not a BBC channel. So this one is just comes down to my stupid American brain, because my stupid American brain says, oh, it was British television that means BBC, which is ridiculous. I know there's more television in the UK than the BBC channels. I'm just I'm just an ignorant American, So I apologize for that. And third, there's a software engineer who would absolutely love it if I stopped saying degrees kelvin because the unit

of kelvin is the kelvin, not the degree. So that's the correct thing. You want to say, kelvin, not degrees kelvin. Now, you will frequently see and hear people use the phrase degrees kelvin, but it's technically wrong until enough people use it, because that's how language works if it if enough people use it the wrong way, the wrong way becomes the

right way. So I charge everyone out there to start saying degrees kelvin because if enough of you do it, I don't have to worry about saying it the right way. I'm just kidding. I'll try my best to remember to be accurate. I appreciate all of those corrections. Now, onto the topic for today. Way back in two thousand eleven, my then co host Chris Pellette and I did an episode about the worst video games of All Time. But

these were titles that were submitted by listeners. We solicited uh various nominations, and we did it over Facebook and Twitter and email, and we just asked people nominate what you think are the worst video games of all time, and then we taied them all up. And so in that episode we talked about games that had been considered bad for various things. Maybe they had missed release dates repeatedly. Duke Nukem Forever was a famous one and had just come out that year after more than a decade of

being in development. We also talked about games that were buried in the desert after too many cartridges had been made and not enough people wanted to buy a copy, like E. T. The Extraterrestrial for the A. But what about the games that have come out since two thousand eleven. What are some of the most notoriously bad games of that era. Well, before I jump in and start talking about specific titles, I do want to say that we need to keep in mind that real people worked on

these games. They dedicated their time, their effort, their energy into making a game a reality, and things just didn't go right. So in some cases, maybe they tackled more than they could handle and ultimately the game they created

was a disappointment. In other cases, you might have had executives who are constantly shifting expectations and the development team was kind of left in the lurch as a result, and maybe they even had things like a hardline deadline that had to be the date that the game would ship,

whether the game was ready or not. A lot of games have suffered from that sort of thing, But I think in most cases, no one really sets out to make a crappy game on purpose, And so while the games I'm going to go through here have a reputation for being bad, we need to remember they probably did not start off that way, most of them. Anyway. There might be a few cynical cash grabs in here that

do not qualify for such consideration. But you game developers out there who are trying to deliver upon crazy expectations, both from within a company and from the gaming community at large, my hat is off to you. You do incredible work. Now, for this episode, I consulted Metacritic to look at the games that scored the lowest in aggregated reviews since the original episode came out in late From the Metacritic website, here is how they described their methodology quote.

Creating our proprietary meta scores is a complicated process. We carefully curate a large group of the world's most respected critics assigned scores to their reviews and apply a weighted average to summarize the range of their opinions. The result is a single number that captures the essence of critical opinion in one meta score. Each movie, game, television show, an album featured on Metacritic gets a meta score when

we've collected at least four critics reviews end quote. So in other words, they're aggregating all these different reviews and then kind of determining where on a score between zero and one hundred, that review rates the product. So a zero would be the absolute worst, one would be the absolute best. For games, anything beneath the score of fifty is considered generally unfavorable. If it's less than twenty, it

is overwhelming dislike is the nature of those reviews. And spoiler alert, we have some on this list that dropped down below twenty. But the first one we're gonna talk about, number ten, the ten worst video games since the Fall of two thousand eleven would be flat out three Chaos and Destruction that came out December two thousand eleven, so just a few months after we had done our episode,

and it came out for the PC. The Metacritics score was twenty three yikes, and this was a car racing game, and as the name indicates, it was the third such in a series of games. The original game developer for the series was a company called Bugbear, but Bugbear developers were actually busy working on a totally different title, that of Ridge Racer unbounded. The jab of developing the next entry in the Flat Out series then fell to a

Dutch video game development studio called Team Six. As a review on I g N pointed out, this was actually an early sign of concern because the games that had come out of Team six lacked something. They had great titles. I'm definitely intrigued by a game that's titled Calvin Tucker's Redneck Farm Animals Racing Tournament. What. But the studio developed a different physics engine for this rather than the previous one that was used for Flat Out two, and this

one reviewers said was sloppy. It was in direct contradiction with earlier games in the series. So in the past you could drive really aggressively. You could you could kind of smash your way through opponents. You can nudge them and knock them off course and and continue on your way. But in Flat Out three. It seemed like the slightest contact with anything would result in your car flipping all

over the place. It suddenly looked like you could not behave in this way, and it wasn't consistent you would. You would have what would appear to be a colossal, disastrous crash on screen, and your car would only suffer a little bit of damage, or you might just gently grace up against another car and then suddenly your engine is smoking. The AI was substandard as well, with computer controlled racers spending more time crashing into each other than

trying to race the course. So it sounds pretty much like all the design decisions going into Flat Out three created a game that was not fun to play. It didn't make sense, and was a total departure from earlier Flat Out games. The lack of consistency or logic really hurt the game's reception. Team six is still around and the company primarily focuses on developing racing games. To this day,

I'm not terribly familiar with their work. I don't think I've played any of their racing games, but as I understand it, many of those games have received a poor critical reception, not as bad as Flat Out three, but not great either. We're talking like Metacritics scores in the thirties, so I'm not much of a racing game player. I cannot speak to it personally, but it doesn't sound great.

Number nine is Rambo the video game, which came out February twenty one, two thousand fourteen, and it came out for the PlayStation three, the Xbox three, sixty PC, and Metacritic gave it a score also of twenty three. Now. In general, video game adaptations of licensed characters frequently show up on lists about bad games. Now, I talked about ET the Extraterrestrial that is frequently listed as the worst

game of all time, although it really isn't. But it is frequently the truth that a game of a licensed character doesn't turn out well. Now, that's not universally true. The recent PS four game of Spider Man is pretty darn fun to play. In my opinion, I think it's a great game, or at least I've really been enjoying it. But one cannot say the same for Rambo the video game. Now, Rambo refers to John Rambo, who's in several movies, the

first being First Blood. He's a Vietnam war veteran in verse Blood, he returns to America and causes quite the ruckus going on essentially what it amounts to being a rampage at one point, and in subsequent films in the series, Rambo would become the archetypical action hero. He would carry enormous guns and just mow down antagonists left and right. That was always like the one man army kind of trope, and he became the model for all sorts of violent

excess in the in the eighties and nineties. So what better character would you use to adapt to a video game? I mean, he's certainly inspired lots of different video game characters. So a developer named Tayon and a publisher called Reef Entertainment were responsible for adapting the material from the first three Rambo films and publishing them in video game form. Now, the actual game style took the form of a rail shooter.

This is a type of game that you might see in arcades with light guns things like Time Crisis and the Past. You take through a level is set, and often even the speed at which you move through the level is set, and the way that villains or bad guys antagonists jump out at you that is set. Everything is kind of on a script, and it's your job to just try and do the best you can and shoot your enemies. Uh. This, however, didn't play on a

system with a light gun. You would either use a controller or you would use a mouse and keyboard, and with the mouse in particular, it was reportedly incredibly easy to make every shot, so there was no challenge, there was no variety, The gameplay was outdated. Uh, the the

the whole process appeared to be pretty substandard. The one good thing I saw in the critical reviews was that they did a pretty good job at replicating the environments that you would see in the actual Rambo movies, so that the video game versions of these seem to be fairly accurate to those. But apart from that, the actual game was substandard. Well, we've got more bad games to talk about, but first let's take a quick break to

thank our sponsor. We're up to number eight and number eight would be Fast and Furious Showdown another licensed property. This one came out in May two thirteen and came out for the Xbox three sixty, the PC, the PlayStation three apparently, the Nintendo three D S and the we you as well, and it scored on Metacritic a twenty two, so he's taken a step down. Now. This was published by Activision, and it was another kind of combination racing game and shooting game, and also a licensed game, so

it had a lot going against it. The Fast and Furious film series is known for a crazy automobile action. Characters frequently pull off car stunts in those films that would be impossible in the real world, and everybody in those movies are They're all incredibly skilled race car driving

superheroes essentially. So you'd think a video game based off the series would allow the player to take control of a car and likewise do impossible feats in a series of breathtaking missions, but unfortunately, the game's engine wasn't up to that challenge. The collision detection in the game was pretty bad. Virtual objects in the game had little mass. You would have, you know, like enormous obstacles crashed down in front of you, and your car would just kind

of gently pushed them all the way there. Nothing seemed to have any weight to it. The level design was uninspired. The art style was not terribly pleasing from an esthetic point of view. The cinematic cut scenes weren't much better. They were they appeared to be of a lower quality than other current generation or that current generation cut scenes. People often said, this looks like it belongs on the previous generation hardware instead of PS three, less like it

would have been at home on a PS two. The loading time between missions was incredibly long, and if you wanted to upgrade your car you could. You could earn experience in the game and use that experience to create

upgrades for your vehicles or or other features. So let's say you want to boost your your vehicle's performance so that you can tackle the next level better, you would have to actually back out of the game entirely to the main menu, go into a different option, then make the changes, then back all the way back out again, and then go back in and restart up to where you were in the game in the within the storyline.

Uh and keep in mind those loading screens were really long, and the menus also had spelling or grammatical errors in them which made it look a little amateurish. And most missions, you could control the driver of a vehicle and a passenger in the vehicle who was hanging outside of the window acting as a shooter. They have a gun and so you can fight off your opponents that are trying to run you off the road. The AI made very little sense. The cars did not move like real cars.

The missions were mostly all variations on a common theme of running gun and so the lack of variability, the bad physics, the graphics. All of this contributed to the low scores and put it on our list of worst video games is two thousand eleven. Number seven is Afro Samurai to Revenge of Kuma, which came out in September two thou fifteen. Came out for the PlayStation four and the PC. It was supposed to come out for the Xbox One, but hang on here. Metacritic gave it a

score of twenty one. This is another licensed property. Afro Samurai is a manga series in Japan, and the series follows a character named Afro Samurai, and he's out for revenge. His father was killed in the series, so he's out to revenge his his father's death. To avenge his father's death, I guess I should say, and an earlier video game adaptation of this story in two thousand nine had received

average to decent reviews. It wasn't considered a blockbuster, but it was people said, now, so, hey, you know, it's not not a terrible game. It featured cell shaded animation as uh kind of a beat him up in a way, and the player controlled the titular character in his quest for revenge. So this this is the sequel to that game, and the sequel was supposed to be the first episode

in a series. So the idea was to release the sequel in episodic format, and it put the player in control of a different character named Kuma, and Kuma wears a big mascot style bear head. The word Kuma is Japanese for bear, and Kuma is seeking out Afro Samurai to seek revenge for Kuma's sisters death, and like some Facebook relationship status is, it's complicated. So this game did come out for the PC and for the PS four.

It was going to come out later for the Xbox One, but the PCMPS four versions got such bad reviews that not only was the Xbox One version canceled, ultimately the publisher actually withdrew through Afro Samurai too, from the Steam Store and from the PS store. So after getting really raked over the coals, by critics. The developer said, you know what we're going to just we're gonna take this down.

So now no more copies are ever going to be sold. Uh. It was pretty negative reaction to warrant that kind of a response. Also, I think it makes the fact that the developer's name was redacted studios somewhat tragically comedic. The planned episodic sequels also got scrapped. So what made this such a bad game? Well, the answer to that question

is a kind of everything. So critics were saying the voice acting for the game was over the top and cringeworthy, as the kids used to say, and at times the sound levels in the game made it really difficult to hear what was being said because sound effects or music was drowning out everything else, and so you're missing out on valuable and formation, although apparently it was valuable information that was delivered in this over the top kind of way, so maybe you were better off in the long run.

The game style was that of a classic beat him up, kind of like the old side scrolling games of the early nineties, but this one was with sort of three dimensional levels, and it also had that cell shaded art style of its predecessor. The game had frame rate problems in which frames would drop and that would result in a type of skipping effect that made playing the game really hard and not much fun at all. It's difficult to time a counter attack if the action is skipping

forward in spurts. You can't really time when you need to hit a button in order to avoid an oncoming attack and counter it. So, according to reviews, the animations of the character didn't always reflect the commands that they were sending through the controls. And then there was the camera.

This would be the point of view for the player, and the camera would shift around and the player could not control it, so you would be stuck with whatever the camera angle happened to be, and that would sometimes call as the perspective to put the player at a disadvantage. So, for example, you might be moving through a level, but the camera angle makes it impossible for you to see

what is directly ahead of you as a character. So as you're continuing through the level, you suddenly encounter a pet and fall right into it because you couldn't see it as a player. But if you were actually the character, if you were Kuma, you would have seen that pet coming from a mile away. So you think about that, an objective observer would just see someone running toward a pit for a really long time and then fall in the pit, and they would think that person couldn't see

or they wanted to go in the pit. I can't imagine any other outcome. But in fact, the problem was that as a player, you couldn't see the pit at all, just because the perspective. So there are a lot of problems in this game that ultimately convinced the publisher to bring it back to cancel it. Number six was Infestation Survivor Stories, which released in October two thousand twelve for the PC. Metacritic gave it a score of twenties, so

now we're hitting that threshold of overwhelming dislike. Uh. The studio that developed it was Hammer Point Interactive. The man most frequently associated with this game as a guy named Saragei Titov, who was one of the developers behind this game, And it was actually released under a different title originally, which was The war Z And if you think that

sounds like a zombie game, you win a prize. The war Z was following on the success of a mod called day Zy and This mod was for a tactical shooter called Arma Too, and both Daisy and The war Z had very similar features. They would put players in a world dealing with a zombie outbreak, and in both games players would be in multiplayer maps, meaning you could encounter other humans as you played, and in both games you would scavenge for items and weapons and see how

long you could survive. Steam removed the game from the store not too long after it was released, and Valves said that adding the game to the store was quote a mistake end quote. Some gamers probably agreed. Valvo releast the statement that said it was working with Titov to get the build of the game right so that it

would meet expectations. So The war Z was a collaborative multiplayers survival game, and the game's listing on Steam mentioned features like the ability to create a friends list to rent a private server so that you and your friends could play without fearing the interference of griefers. Um there were supposed to be a skill system that would allow

the players to progress in their capabilities. They were supposed to be up to a hundred people allowed to play on the same server at the same time, and there were supposed to be maps that were as big as four hundred square kilometers, but in actuality, the game didn't support those features, and that was the the root of some of the most harsh criticisms. They were saying, the game is promising us one thing but delivering something else.

Te Top would say that players had quote unquote misread those features, implying that there whether uh, these were planned features. They were going to be in the game, they just weren't the game yet. They would be released later on the game's life. In addition, the game featured what some critics felt were predatory micro transactions that were intended to

coax more money from players. So, for example, if your character died in the game, you'd get hit with a four hour cool down period before you could respawn unless you bought in game currency with real money, and then you could purchase an instant respawn. So in order to play the game, you would have to pay again. And keep in mind, this was already a game where you

were buying it, it wasn't free to play. By a The game died an inglorious death, and the publisher said that the servers running the online game had been taken offline, and the reason given was that the servers had been hacked and the hackers had stolen cust more information from the databases, apparently not payment information, but other account information, including the user names, of passwords and that kind of stuff.

They had also taken it into their own hands to ban certain players from the game on their own, and that was it. That was that for that game. Number five is Alone in the Dark Illumination, which came out June two thoft for the PC. The Metacritic score is nineteen. The Alone in the Dark series was fostered by Atari, and it falls in the category of survival horror. In fact, Alone in the Dark is often cited as the first title in modern survival horror games. Illumination was the sixth

entry in that series. The developer for that particular game was Pure FPS, and unlike earlier games, which were single player experiences, this one featured online and cooperative play. Up to four people could play cooperatively at a time, and it would also become the lowest added game of up to four would play. But gameplay featured no puzzles. There was no real story involved. This was mostly done as

a third person shooter survival horror game. Players could only inflict damage on enemies if those enemies were exposed to light. The light would make them vulnerable to damage. So your strategy for every level was exactly the same. You would run around the levels creating as many light sources as you could, then you would try to lure enemies into the light, and then you try to inflict enough damage

to take those enemies down. And level layouts were different, but they all had the exact same sequence of events involved, and the enemies were apparently just kind of mindlessly throwing themselves in harm's way. They didn't try to avoid the light, they would just keep coming at you. On top of that, the game's sound was criticized as being unfinished and barely even present. There were times where sound effects and music

seemed to be completely absent in the game. There were a ton of bugs that were affecting gameplay, including ones that would let enemies attack players through a solid surface like a wall. Overall, critics said the game was just unfinished and boring, and so it did not score well. Where We've got four more games to talk about, and before I jump into those, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor number four is Double Dragon to Wander of the Dragons, which sounds like a really weird

title to me. Came out in April tween for the Xbox three sixty. This was an Xbox Live arcade game and probably the lowest rated one of all time. It got a Metacritics score of seventeen. The Double Dragon games in general feature two protagonists who punch and kick their way through swarms of enemies as they progress through levels. Typically, each level ends with some sort of boss battle, and

there are numeras injuries in this series. I actually remember playing the original Double Dragon in arcades, but this particular entry came from a Korean developer called Gravity Games. Critics said that the developer, which was mostly known for making m m O RPG style games not beat them ups, got the fundamental elements of Double Dragon games all wrong. Moving the character was awkward, It was slow. It made it unreasonably difficult to face off against opponents who would

swarm around the player. Reversing a direction was not natural. You couldn't just quickly turn around and confront someone who's coming up behind you. You would actually scoop backwards first before turning around. So in other words, if someone was coming up behind you, you would actually move into their range before you would turn around to face them. The quasi three D design made it really hard to direct attacks to specific targets, particularly if you were trying something

beyond just the basic kick or punch moves. So, for example, there's an attack in a lot of Double Dragon games which involves an elbow attack, and it was really important because it was an attack that you could unleash against someone who was coming up behind you. So if someone's coming up behind you really fast and you don't have time to turn around, you could use this attack to fend them off. But in this game, the elbow attack

was much harder to direct. So there might be someone come up behind you and you're fighting someone in ahead of you, and you try and do this elbow attack, but the elbow attack just swings wild with making you know, no contact. The developers also added in some other new

elements that gamers were not crazy about. There was a stamina bar that also served more or less as your health, so if you got attacked, your stamina would take a hit, but that would mean you would actually slow down a little bit, which meant that it was even easier for enemies to hit you again, so you were getting punished for being hit. You get hit now it's easier for you to get hit. Also, if you got knocked down, then enemies could hit you as you were standing up,

and standing up was an animation. You couldn't do anything about it. You couldn't block or dodge or anything. It was a sequence that would happen automatically, so there's nothing you can do. There's no way for you to intervene. And meanwhile, and enemy just knocks you down again. So it's kind of cheesing effect. You're you're in this constant process of trying to stand up while enemies are hitting you. Uh,

and then your stamina is all gone. And maybe you could argue that's realistic in a fight, but it's not much fun for a video game. They also did something that blows my mind. They built in a special supermove ability as well. There were actually quite a few different supermoves you could do, and the game mechanic was that you would have a meter that was filling up as

you would build in combos. Let's say you have a successful combination where you you land a sequence of attacks with no gaps, no mistakes, you would start to fill up this meter. That's not that unusual. A lot of games have that. And when the meter was full, then you would be able to unleash one of these special attacks and potentially cause additional damage to your enemies. Again, totally makes sense. But the meter did not build up properly.

Sometimes you would land these combos in the meter didn't seem to reflect it at all. Sometimes you'll be playing the game and the meter would just start to drain for no apparent reason. And in addition, while the game incorporated this mechanic, it would actually discourage you from using it. So it gave you this ability. It had all these different elements to it that were supposed to support this ability,

and it didn't do it very well. But if you used a special move, even just one time, it would mean you would get the quote unquote bad ending of the game should you play it all the way through it to the end. The only way to get the good ending would be not to use these special moves. So it's always fun when a game builds in a mechanic and then punishes you for actually using it. Yuck. Number three was Room in the Night Sky, might be my favorite title among the ones that are on this list.

It came out in March two thousand seventeen, so it's one of the most recent games. It came out for the Nintendo Switch and was the lowest rated game on the Nintendo Switch. Has a Metacritic score of seventeen. This is the only Nintendo Switch title on our list. And in the game, you controlled a protagonist, a girl who would travel on a motorbike. She's magical, so she can make the motorbike do all sorts of stuff like fly, and she collects star dust as sort of almost like

an in game currency going through these different stages. Wonder reviewer called it a racing game in which there are no opponents, So you're just driving around these environments collecting star dust until you move through these rings that were called key stars, and you would unlock a gate that would lead you to the next stage, and then you would rinse and repeat. There was no way to die, there was no way to fail out. You could take

some damage. There was a antagonist character who would occasionally show up and you would lose star dust if you took damage, but otherwise you would just keep on going. You could use that stardust to buy upgrades or new items in the game, but critics said the art style

was dated. The levels, while they were huge, didn't have a whole lot to do in them, so they were big, but there wasn't much there, and that this antagonist that you would occasionally encounter would usually remain completely out of sight during a level. The levels were so big and the antagonist wasn't necessarily moving around very much that you

might not even notice her as you're moving around. And also you would have a little sidekick on your motorbike who would automatically attack the bad guy if you did happen to wander too close, so the odds of you getting hit were very low anyway. The English version of the game also had a script that suffered from poor translation. There's a group called Legends of Localization that created a video that detailed some of the more egregious examples with screenshots.

The very first one reads night Sky of the Lovely It is a wonderful night sky where the moon is beautiful, suitable for you for the first time to fly the sky. A patch would try to address this issue with a new translation, but really added just different bad translation to the game including spelling errors. Number two is a game called Ride to Hell. Retribution came out in June two thirteen for the Xbox three, sixty, the PlayStation three, and

the PC. Metacritic gave it a sixteen. As destruct Oid reported in their review, the first warning that the game wasn't very good was when the publisher refused to send

out review copies to game critics. You see this in movies to where film studios will choose not to have a critic screening, and more frequently than not, this is typically a sign that the studio behind a property doesn't have a whole lot of faith that it's going to do well in critics eyes, and they'd rather skip that step to try and sell as many units or as many tickets as possible. Be four bad reviews start to cannibalize those sales. So that was the bad first sign.

Now in the game, you play as a biker who's out for revenge common theme and video games. A bike gang had killed his brother and now he's out to get them. And the review that I read from Destructori had stated that the game opened in a very confusing way. You immediately start off and you are behind a turret. You're you're controlling a gun turret. And he says that he failed almost instantly upon spawning in in the game and had no idea what was going on. Then on

his second attempt, he died almost instantly. Then on his third attempt he survived, but he had no idea what he had done differently that led to this new outcome. So he didn't learn anything, he didn't get better at the game. It just was different. What's more, then he got transported into a desert environment and got into a quick time event that is in the form of a brawl.

So quick time, of course, you're responding to button props like hit X now or hit A now or move thumbstick left, But there was no context as to what was going on. There was no explanation why this was happening. And then after that the game officially started. Now, apparently the physics in the game are just playing broken. Sometimes you'll phase through a surface, like you're riding your bike

and you'll just phase through the ground. UH textures pop in and out in graphics, so you might look at a featureless UH surface and then suddenly the images pop in and you can see what the design is supposed to be on there, and then they pop out again. There were major problems with the visuals in general, and the action sequences were repetitive and uninspired. The game's camera

made moving around environments really frustrating. You could easily get caught on something and not be able to see what it was that you were caught on, so you couldn't fix it, and the control scheme and execution artificially made the game more difficult, so that was hard to progress, and it was hard to progress not because the game was challenging, but because the mechanics of the game were broken.

The story also didn't win any points, and several reviewers I saw pointed out that there were some really misogynistic elements in this game, where women exist for no reason other than to be exploited by the main character, who is not a nice guy, so didn't seem to have

any real redeeming qualities. Number one according to Metacritics Scores is Family Party thirty Great Games Obstacle Arcade, which came out on November two thousand twelve for the Wii U. Out of the possible one points, it got an eleven, and this is it the worst reviewed game. According to Metacritic, it was meant to be a game you would play with up to three other people on a single console

in the same space. So these sort of games for the Wii and the Wei you were meant to bring people together in the same physical location, kind of like a board game and you have a game night, but instead of pulling out a copy of Monopoly, you put one of these inside the Wii or the Wu and you have yourself a grand old time playing the series of mini games. And there are tons of different examples in this genre um and a lot of them belong to Nintendo's game library. The mini games had no real

cohesive theme to them. Some of them were really uninspired games. According to Nintendo Life, one of the games would show a selection of balloons with numbers on it, and then you'll be told to pick the balloon that has a specific number, like the number two, which doesn't sound like much of a game to me. Maybe it's kind of like musical chairs, I guess, but it's kind of weird, right. That doesn't seem like there's much satisfaction in that game style.

The game would force play is to use the we use motion controls, so even though the WU controller has a D pad on it, you couldn't use the dpad and most of the mini games instead you were supposed to jab the controller in whatever direction to get the

results you were supposed to get. So, for example, there might be a level where you're supposed to guide a character across a series of platforms through jumping, but the way you would control jumping is by jabbing the controller in whatever direction the platforms in forward, left, or right, and the game mechanics weren't done very well, so you could be waiving the controller like a crazy person and nothing's happening, your character is not going anywhere, or you

might jab it to the left but your character jumps to the right. Uh. It just didn't seem to have any connection with what you did and what the character was doing, so that was very frustrating. They also Critics also said that the sound design was terrible, that the carrecter design was not great, the host of the games was a teddy Bear that from what the description I read, sounded like it would fit better in Five Nights at Freddie's. It sounded like a true monstrosity, and the lackluster games

were really what doomed this went to last place. The game was poorly designed, but worse than that reviewers, Essentially, we're saying, even if the game were well designed, even if these controls worked great, the actual mini games are so boring that the game would still be terrible. So that's not a great review. If you're saying this game is broken, but even if it weren't broken, it would still be terrible, that's a bad review, and that's it.

Those are the worst video games according to Metacritic. And again that's just one source. If you were to ask anybody who covered video games, they might say, hey, you didn't talk about that Alien game that literally did not work until someone went through the source code saw that one of the settings was wrong, fix the setting, and now the game works years after it came out. That's true.

I didn't talk about that one. There are a lot of different examples since two thousand eleven that would probably fall on a worst video games list. This was just through the Metacritic approach. I am curious what you guys think, and I will do another worst video Games episode that's crowdsourced if you guys like so. If there are specific games, whether it's for a console, computer, system, or a handheld

system or even a mobile game. If there's a game you think warrants being put on a worst video game list, right to me. Give me the subject worst video game and send that email to text Stuff at how stuff works dot com. I will gather those together and we'll do a follow up episode where, once again as chosen by the listeners of tech Stuff, we will talk about

some of the worst video games of all time. If you want to also include why you think it's one of the worst games you've ever played or has ever been made, that would be great too. Um. Now, in general, just as a quick rule of thumb, I'm gonna mostly stick stay away from any games that are like sexual in nature any of those, because I think a lot of those are just hastily put together to uh, to

appeal to the more base instincts of certain players. And we could go through on for hours about the countless games in those genres that are just terrible. They're either carbon copies of existing games but with nudity, or they're just playing terrible excuses for games. So we know those are terrible. Let's just all agree to that, and let's

look beyond those for the other terrible games. Also, if you have any suggestions for other types of topics that have nothing to do with video games, all feel free to send me a message let me know what you would like me to cover. Um, you can make that subject whatever you like. And again, the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text stuff h s W. Don't forget.

You can head on over to t public dot com slash tech stuff, pick yourself up some tech stuff merchandise. Be a super cool person like I am, or more cool because you probably already are. I mean, let's be honest, and I accept that that's okay. I appreciate that you a cool person are listening to me. Thank you, and don't forget. Follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and bathands of other topics because at how stuff works dot com