The Worst Video Games of All Time

this way? Oh man, you had to use that one, yes, So hey, guys, you know you might remember from the fact that we had pre roll in front of every single podcast up to this point that Chris and I wanted to do a crowdsourced episode where we asked our listeners to submit to us the worst video game of all time. And uh, we didn't get of any real parameters about that. We said it could be on any platform,

it just had to be a video game. And because of that, it meant that our listeners could literally, uh nominate any game ever made. So it's a miracle at all that we had enough votes for any particular title to have this this podcast, But we actually have the top ten or perhaps bottom ten worst video games, as

voted on by you, the listener. So please keep in mind this is not the opinions of Jonathan and Chris, although maybe we'll talk about some of the bad games we've played in the past two This isn't our opinion. This is your opinion. We're just reporting it. Well, I have to say that one one person did right in and ask us why we would bother recording an episode on this, and uh, the simple answer is because it's fun. Yeah, for us, this was actually really a lot of fun.

It was a lot of work because we had to collect votes from multiple sources. We collected votes from email, Facebook, Twitter, and people left votes on my Google Plus account too, So um, I actually did separate out all the votes in a big spreadsheet, so I knew how many votes came in from which, uh particular source and that that actually was kind of interesting too, just to see, you know, what our listeners prefer to use in order to get

information to us. That was pretty fascinating. That was not my intent, by the way, when I came I came up with this idea on the spur of the moment and sprung it on Chris just before we started recording, and Chris was like, do I have to do I have to record all the votes? I said, no, it's all right, let's do it. So you know, I'm easy like that. Let's let's start off with what would be number ten. But actually it was a tie for ninth place. So the first two games we're gonna talk about received

the same number of votes. And the first one that we're going to talk about is dragons Lair the arcade game specifically, So for those of you who, uh who missed out on the early eighties and the great arcade culture of the early eighties, you may not be too familiar with this game. But it was groundbreaking, Yeah, it was. It was a an innovative way of presenting a video game that had not been attempted before Dragon's Layer. Yep. Yeah.

Previously we were talking about the different the difference in in vector and raster graphics, and and you know there was there were blocky graphics for the most part at the time, and they had limited animation, limited sound, um. But but Dragon's Layer actually featured uh animation from one of the industry giant animators, Don Bluth, former Disney animator UM who has gone on to you know, with his own company to do many many other titles. In fact,

I have Don Luth title on my iPad. Yeah, which one. The new version of Tapper features Don Bluth artwork, so yeah, because he also you may know some of his work from from movies like The Secrets from the Secret of Nim Yes, and Before Time series, Before Time it was was it the Five Old Movies too? Yes? Um, those were Don Blue films, so somewhere out there, yes, thank you. So Dragon's Lair was featured animation from Don Bluth and

it was published by Cinematronics. Yeah. Yeah, But but but how you might say, exactly is this great leap in graphics and sound? Because the sound was awesome too. How how is that possible? Because you know, you're looking at other games like Donkey Kong, which you know I loved Donkey Kong, but you would not call the graphics advanced or state of the art. Well for the time, they were, but not now crazy. Yeah. Well they they accomplished this by using the laser disc vide format, which we've talked

about before. So the entire game was on laser disc and there was an actual laser disc player inside the cabinet. Of this Arcade game. Now, the fact that there it was on laser disc was both it's its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The weakness is that you couldn't create too much interactivity for the player and the game. The you know, you couldn't have complete control over the

main character who do you remember? The guy's name Dirk the Daring, and he was rescuing a princess Daphne from a dragon named Singe. And so you couldn't just control Dirk the Daring, You couldn't just make him run around and jump and stuff. Instead, what you would do is you would initiate a video sequence, because again this is recorded on laser disc. There's only so many variations of Dirk's movements that can be recorded on a single laser disc.

So what your input into the Cade machine would translate to is was that the correct button to press or direction on the joystick to push in order to trigger the next sequence to further the storyline. Yeah, So you, for example, you might be having to jump, and you did have to jump at one point, and if you, you know, move up, that might be the right thing to do. If you move left, you die. If you do nothing, you die if you if you push the

sword button, you die if you push yeah. So in other words, there'll be one correct response to a particular moment in the story, and sometimes, uh there'd be like a little flash that would indicate this is when you do something. So for a lot of the game, you're you're just watching, You're just you're you're watching a movie. And then occasionally in the movie there's a moment where you have a chance to put in an input, and if you put in the wrong one, the movie's over.

And so that was probably what costs a lot of people to vote for Dragons Layers, that it almost feels like less of a game and more of a film. It's just a film that you don't get to see the end of it unless you happen to shift in your seat at just the right moment so the film will continue. And also I would like to point out this was one of the first games I can remember

that cost two credits or fifty cents to play. And also remember that a lot of them had two monitors because they were so popular that people would try and gather and cram around the system. Because if someone knew how to play it, if someone had memorized the sequence of movements they had to do to get through a particular part of the game. You know, most people didn't have the time or energy or change to learn all that, so they just like to watch the game because again

it was like a movie. I saw a lot of our kids that would put a second monitor that was mounted on the top of the cabinet so that you could see what was going on without having to be right up on whoever is playing the game. So anyway, that was tied for ninth play uh. And the other one was a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System which

was Back to the Future. And I have never played this because I didn't own an any s. From what I read, we're going from beautiful graphics and and and sort of poor gameplay too, horrible graphics and yeah, Back to the Future is just one example of a licensed title, and by licensed, I mean it's something that already existed that a video game publisher purchases a license from the license owner to be able to create a game based

on that. And as far as Back to the Future goes, the basis was really pretty uh difficult to spot, especially in that first stage, like in the very first stage, you are going down a street and the way the view is it's an over the head view. UM. The street is laid out so that the top of the screen is where you're headed to the bottom of the screen is where you are, and you're moving your your character around Marty McFly. You're moving Marty McFly down the street.

You're trying to avoid enemies and pick up little alarm clocks. And it's only by picking up enough alarm clocks that you're allowed to move to the next stage. And so you're also you also have a timer, so if you don't pick up enough alarm clocks within the time limit, then you lose. If you get hit by an enemy,

you lose. If you run into an obstacle, you lose. UM. You would eventually be able to pick up a bowling ball, which would let you shoot enemies, because of course, you remember that great scene and back to the future where Marty McFly picked up a bowling ball and then shot someone with it. Um, who can forget that scene that never happened? Uh. And then you can also get a skateboard,

which at least that was featured in the film. But with a skateboard what that would mean is that you would move through the the you would move through the level faster, which meant the poor gameplay became excruciatingly poor gameplay because you're going so fast you can't even react. Um. And then if you got through that, you would hit a mini game. And some of the mini games included a dinner stage where you're behind the counter and Biff and his bullies are coming in after you and you

have to throw milkshakes at them to stop them. But it was really hard to line up your character so that you were throwing the milkshake at the right plane in order to hit the enemy. Like the enemy is coming at you from the left side of the screen. You're on the right side of the screen, and you've got a bar between you and the enemy. You just have to figure out exactly where, like vertically you need to align yourself, and you you'd be like, oh, that's clearly,

that's it. That's that's the sweet spot, and you push the button and the milkshake flies like three ft over the bully's head and he reaches the bar and throws you against the wall. Um. It was a little rough. And then there was another stage where you had to block kisses that were sent to you from Lorraine because you're playing Marty McFly and his Marty's mother. You know, he's back in time and he's met the teenage version of his mom, and so you would have to block

her kisses to you. And then there was another one where you had to position a guitar just right so that you were playing music so that Lorraine and George, your your mom and dad would actually kiss. And the very final stage involved driving the DeLorean, the time travel device, through the street at night, dodging enemies, dodging obstacles, trying to get up to eighty eight miles per hour. Um. It looked awful. Oh and Bob Gayle, who was a screenwriter for Back to the Future, called it one of

the worst games ever made. Heavy Yeah, yeah, Why do people keep saying, is there some problem with gravity in the future? So that moves us up to our eighth worst game? Do you wanna unveil what this one is? Well, it certainly has a tough road to home, yes it does. But it is extremely popular. It's something you may have seen once or twice on Facebook, at least once or twice a minute on Facebook only if you follow people who play this, and how could you not. It's Farmville

from Zinga. Farmville has had a lot of criticism directed toward it. It's one of those games. It's a it's a freemium game, yes it is, and that means that you can play the game for free. But if you want to have the most advantageous stuff in the game, you have to pay real money to get it. Um and say, which is a perfectly valid business plan. You know, there's no reason I'm not. I don't want to say that that's a bad thing to do. I mean, people should be compensated for the work they do in order

for them to make more work. Otherwise, no one has any incentive to do anything. You know, well, you know it's it's got millions of fans, yes, um, something like. I once heard a statistic that something like ten of all people who use Facebook play this. And I have. I played, I played it in some of the other Zinga games, but I don't It's funny though, I don't think of it as a game. I think if it is more of a boy because there's no objective that

you're trying to accomplish to win the game. Basically, you're trying to if you've never seen or or played it. Um, the point is to grow your farm. So you know, at some point you you uh add little plots of land on which you can grow your crops, and you can choose which crops to grow. Um. You know, each time you plant something, you have several choices to you know, you could say corn or tomatoes or you know, you know,

potatoes or something else. Um. And each crop costs a certain amount of money and your you know, your fake gold money. Actually it's their their dollars. I think farm coins, farm coins and uh. You also it's been a while since I played. And each crop takes a certain amount of time to grow, and if you leave the game for more than that amount of time a reasonable amount of time, once it's grown, the crop will wither and die. So the point is to I mean, it's not just crops.

You also add you know, a fence around your your garden, and you add a farmhouse and what kind do you want, and you know, bales of hay, and you basically you you add in size to the farm, and you add different plots, and you upgrade your stuff. And there's also a social factor where you can interact with your friends farms and they can interact with yours, which is why you see like all these notifications pop up on Facebook until you get fed up with it and block them.

Well yeah, I mean you can visit your friends farm and fertilizer crops so they grow faster or unwier them when they've gone bad and stuff help them. You can send them gifts and they can send you gifts, and that that can be kind of fun. But the thing is, it's, like Jonathan pointed out, uh, Zinga is really hoping that you'll invest some actual cash into this and you can get uh, certain kinds of crops or certain kinds of decorations for your farm if you fork over some real

coin um. And that's kind of annoying for people like me who are cheap and don't want to give them

any money. And the thing is, at a certain point, the game or software toy, it's like, like I said, you don't like to call it, it's sort of semi unplayable because there's a point at which everything to make it fun you really need to give them money for it really doesn't change, and it's the point of where you go, yeah, you know, I'm really don't want to do this, and the game also encourages you to try

and loop your friends into the games. Yeah, so yeah, that's that's probably I'm guessing that's why people voted for it, because it feels almost invasive, um when you're on Facebook, unless you you go so far as to block it. And we had other Facebook games, like games that are similar to this uh nominated as well, but Farmville was the one that actually got the most votes. And also I think has been accused of sort of copying earlier game called farm Town that had very similar game mechanics.

Some people would say similarity to the point of identity. But well, this this model has uh has extended across Facebook and and other venues as well. I mean, there are some iPad games um that I've you know, tried out on my tablet that basically they're the same kinds of things at your friends Otherwise you're not going to get very far in this game. I'm like, I don't know anybody else who's playing this. Plus I don't want to spam everybody with email blasts saying join my game. Yeah.

I mean, if Jonathan's playing and I'm playing, then yeah, I'll send Jonathan a note, Hey, send me a free chicken. But I don't want to send that to everybody on my list because you know it's annoying. Yes, it would, So let's move on to our next nomination. Now, this, this next nomination is interesting because it's a terrible, terrible game that was designed to be a terrible, terrible game.

And it's called Desert Bus. Now, Desert Bus was actually a mini game that was part of a larger package of games for a product that never saw full production. It was for the Sega c D system. Gosh, barely remember that the whole system was a failure. Not just this game, um, but it was a mini game that

was included in Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. Um. A lot of the stuff that was in Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors ended up being used in other Penn and Teller products like Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends and things like that. But this one idea, which supposedly came from Eddie goad det Ski, who is a producer

in Hollywood. Uh, this one idea is to create an and ultra realistic and by that I mean boring game in which you drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in real time, and the buses top speed is around forty five miles per hour. And there's no scenery, there's there's no traffic, there are no passengers on the bus. It's just you driving this bus to Las Vegas. And in real time, that takes, by the way,

about eight hours. And if you get all the way to Las Vegas, you get a point and then you have to drive back. Well, but what happens if you need to, you know, stop and eat dinner, go to the bathroom. Well, the game does not have a pause function, so the time would just keep going. I mean also the bus, you might say, why don't you just set it up so that the bus drives automatically, like, you know,

just put something on the up arrow key on the pedal. Yeah. Uh, Well, the bus also has a problem with its suspension and it pulls to the right, so you have to constantly adjust the bus so that it will it will be on the road. Now, there is a port of this game on the web. You can play a web based

version of Desert Bus if you want to. Now, you might ask, why would you want to, well, some of it's just kind of like grousing slash bragging rights that you know, you actually bothered to take eight hours of your life and get this virtual bus from Tucson to Las Vegas. But another group called Loading Ready Run had an interesting idea. UM that's a four person comedy group, and they decided to hold a desert bus marathon session as a fundraising effort to raise money for the charity

child Child's Play. Child's Plays a charity that gets a lot of attention particularly around Penny Arcade Expo or Packs because the Packs guys also hold um auctions for Child's Play and it's it's providing video games and other kinds of stuff like that to kids who are in hospitals and who are recovering or suffering from serious illnesses and conditions as a nice charity to do something nice for

the kids. Right. So, these four members of Loading Ready Run took shifts at driving the desert bus UM they ended up driving for more than four and a half days. The first time, which was in two thousand seven, they drove for around four and a half days and they scored six points that four and a half days driving the bus back and forth. Uh. And since then they've held the marathon several more times and have raised more than four hundred thousand dollars collectively. That's impressive. Yeah for

child's play, which is pretty impressive. Um. But yeah, the game is online, so if you just do a search for Desert Bus, you can find a web based version of this game and play it yourself. Should you hate yourself? Apparently our number six game. It's also a game for people who are into really not happy driving experience. Oh my gosh, this game is probably it's amazing to me that this game was ever released, because it is. It is as unfinished a game as I have ever seen.

And I've seen the reviews for this game, like I've seen video reviews of this and show the problems, and it's you can't believe that such a product was ever released to the public. I guess we should say what it is. Well, racing games are so popular, and you know that you can race just about anything in all kinds of video games, so you would imagine that one that would allow you to race tractor trailers would be fun.

But big rigs over the road racing for the PC isn't It was a two thousand three third person racing game. So you're outside the truck, looking at the truck, and let's see if we can figure out where some of the problems of this game may reside. Shall we? What's

a racing game in which you don't really race anyone else? Right? Well, first, the first problem is that it was build as a game where the object was that you were transporting illegal goods uh and you were being chased by police, So it was built as a game where you had to drive fast and evade the cops. What cops? Right, So when you actually get the game, it turns up there's

nothing has nothing to do with any of that. Instead, it was supposed to be, at least once you've got the game going, it was supposed to be a racing game where you're racing against other competitors. But um, the game developer never actually bothered to put artificial intelligence competitors in there, so they they never leave the starting line. It's a race where all the other people racing don't do anything. They just sit there. So you're you're running

and and they're behind you and they don't do anything. Um. Beyond that, though, it gets worse than that, well what about the realistic physics. Yeah, there weren't any Um you could drive over anything like driving on the road or driving off the road, or driving through a building. None of that made any difference. You You traveled at the same speed unless you were backing up, in which case you would accelerate infinitely until you let off the the

reverse button. Yeah, I understand why. Again I didn't play this one, but I understand too that stopping was hyper realistic too, Like if you had perfect breaks, you just let up on the accelerator and you stop. Yeah, exactly, you just go to go to antrust that. Yeah, there's there's no sense of momentum or inertia. You just the universe would would would halt around you. Um, you could drive off the edge of the map and into gray nothingness. So it made it kind of a metaphysical philosophical game

at that point. Before and we've known plenty of metaphysical philosophical truck drivers and that's really not a dig. We really do know quite a few of them. Um. But yeah, it was just you know, no collision detection to speak of. Uh. There were five tracks listed in the game, only four of them were playable. I don't know how that would be a disappointment considering how horrible the game was, Like, oh great, you mean I can't play this other terrible

track that I would never love? And uh ex plays Morgan Webb she she refused to rate this game because Explay has a rating system of one to five stars. There's no zero, there's no zero, and she refused Steven give it one star, so she would not review it. She played it, she just wouldn't give it a review. So yeah, that's that's pretty bad. So that was a

that was a two thousand three game. But we're gonna go a little further back for the next one, right right, Yeah, this is a a port of a very popular arcade game, um and for and this is when I've played back on when I had an atarit wack. I still have an atar when I had it hooked up TV, but I didn't actually own this one. Um so shall we? Yeah? This is fifth place, by the way, for those of you keeping cow so in fifth place is pac Man. Yeah, pac Man, so reported the Namco Giant. It's often called

the worst coin up port. Ever, Donkey Kong wasn't great. Oh no, I'm not. I don't disagree, but pac Man was Honestly, it was terrible. Yeah, at least Donkey Kong remoly resemble the game that it was based on, pac Man.

Some people have said that if it had not been called pac Man, if it if it hadn't been referred to as that and it had a slightly different appearance for the character that you play, that people probably wouldn't be quite so hard on it because the puzzle, the mazes were a little challenging to get through, and you know, the gameplay worked properly, like you know, you'd press left on the joystick and pac Man would go left. You know, it wasn't like you know, Big Rigs what we just

talked about. That was a game that was just pure broken, right. There was no literally no way to play that game. It ended up being like a weird sandbox game, but it wasn't intended to be one. Pac Man played the way it was supposed to more or less. It's just that it was such a poor translation of what of a game that people were really familiar with that it was. It could be nothing more than a disappointment to anyone

who bought it. And in fact, pac Man is one of the titles that people often will use as an example when they talked about the video game industry collapsed

in nine in North America. Well, it made so many copies of this, anticipating that people would want to play it at home, but when they actually got their hands on it and moved, I mean, pac Man is a game where you actually need reflexes and you need to pay attention to what's going on in Pactman on the move so much more slowly, and the graphics were poor.

The sound wasn't as good. I remember when it came out for the R and it looked so much better except a non centering joystick, which makes playing in a four direction mays very very difficult. So that just didn't help anything. It was just such a huge flop at home, right, Yeah,

it was. It was a terrible, terrible game. And uh, I completely agree with this being on on a list for bad video games because it you know, even if you even if you say that the game play was okay, the effect it had in the industry was so terrible that by definition it's a bad video game because it helped bring the industry to its knees in Night three, and it wouldn't be until Nintendo launched the NES in

North America that we would see a recovery of that market. Um. So now next we have a tie for third place. You know, normally we go from fifth to fourth, but we have the same number of votes came in for our our third and fourth place, so tie for third and these two are more modern. Yeah. Uh. We we did an entire episode about one of these, Duke newkembe Forever. Now, we did do a full episode about Duke Nukem Forever.

So we're not going to spend too much time right now talking about it because now granted when we did the episode, it was before the game had come out hotly anticipated for a decade, more than a decade. Yeah. Yeah, it was originally announced as a title for the PC. It was a a a sequel to Duke NUKEMB three d um. It was originally announced in nine seven, but it didn't launch until twenty eleven. Yeah, that's a long time for to wait for a video game, right. I

got vaporware awards right up there with Dao Sex. Yeah. Wired gave it the Vaporware of the Year award multiple years in a row. In fact that it got discontinued from the voting because and then it was brought back because it wasn't just that it was vaporware. It was that just when you were prepared to say Duke Nukem Forever was never going to come out, there would be some sort of rumble from Three D Realms that would say no, no, no, no, no, it's really gonna come out.

And then you'd have to say, well, now we have to put it back on the list, because you know, we were ready to write it off forever, but they say it's coming out, So of course they the rights to the game passed into other people's hands. Three D Realms collapsed. Yeah, and they did. Yeah, they they finished it. Um. They did not receive wide acclaim when it launched, a lot of people panned this game, which of course explains why it it's on our list and how many people

vote did for it. Um. A lot of the criticisms about the game said that it was it just looked dated. It was it was like a first person shooter designed for the late nineties. You know, it didn't have the elements that you expect in the first person shooter today. And uh that even even for one in the nineties. It would have been great because, like in the nineties, you would have a lot of fast paced action and you would have a ton of different weapons at your disposal.

Duke knukem Forever was more plodding and uh, well, there's no way for me to word this in a way that's not negative. It was a slow, slow game. It could be boring at ties, it could be ages between one encounter with an enemy and another, and you could only carry two weapons at a time. So it took away some of the stuff that made those games in the nineties so much fun and uh, and didn't replace it with anything better. And also the juvenile humor in the Duke nukemb series, I think it may have worn

a little thin. It's just people don't find it as amusing as you is to be, partially because we've had other games come out that have much more biting satire and uh, and you know, they're they're just as edgy as Duke Newcomb was, but they are more relevant. Like the Grand Theft Auto series is known for its dark humor.

The Fallout three series or the Fallout series in general is known for its dark humor, and so you get to do Newcomb and you're just like, well, this feels like you're in a uh, you know, you're in a locker room with a bunch of really really immature guys, and that that's the level of humor and it just never gets above that. And so I think all of those things contributed to it being ranked on our list. But what about our next game that's also tied for

third place? You think that a game written by um an Oxford professor of bioethics might actually rank up there, But Bennett Foddy's game Q W O P or wop um got a lot of negative votes. Actually, I saw this profiled and wired before I ever tried to play it. Um, there's a neat little article about him. Uh, and I do mean little. It's very short, um, But basically, in this game, you are using the keys Q W O P hence the name, to move the legs of a runner on a track. Yeah, runner named quop for a

hundred meter dash. And that's important to know. It's not it's supposed to be Olympic runner on the hundred meter dash, and the Q and W keys control the runners thighs and the O n P keys control the runners calves. And you're supposed to try and coordinate these movements in such a way as to propel the runner down the hundred meters. By the way, this runner has apparently no upper body control whatsoever, And if if the runner gets even a little bit off balance, it's time to tip over.

And I have seen so many people play this game and get negative scores because they would just start tip backwards almost instantaneously. And as soon as you touch the ground, that's where you're that's that's your score. And uh, and we keep in mind it's a hundred meter dash. Um. I've never seen anyone complete this in fewer than twenty minutes. But the furthest I've gotten is twelve point eight ms. Didn't you send me a video of somebody who had

finished in about four minutes. I think they sped it up. What they what they ended up doing was they used it so that they made Quop do a split, and then they just kind of jimmied it till he finally like he literally inched down a hundred meters. And and at fifty, by the way, you are you aren't you encounter your first obstacle, a hurdle, And at a hundred meters. There's a long jump, but you can go through the hurdle like you don't have to. You don't have to

actually jump the hurdle. You can keep going as long as you're able to land on your feet or however you're getting across. Um, you can. You can pretty much ignore the hurdle and the long jump is completely uh optional. Yes, if you just have to cross that finish line. If you're if your experience with video game running is track and field from the nineties, where you just had to pound buttons as fast as you could. Um, you will

not win at this game. This game is This game is really, really, really hard, which I think is why it got a lot of votes. It's it's frustrating and it seems it seems after you've played it for about a minute, it seems completely pointless. Oh, we should say it's web based. It's a web based game, so you can find it on Foddy's side. He wrote this in two thousand and eight and it's still up, so if you want to give it a shot, go ahead. It's

it's kind of and it's kind of funny. It also gives you an idea of how well your brain is controlling your walking movements, because if you were trying to walk with your you know, control your own legs with your fingers. You I don't know that I would do any better, but it takes a lot of coordination to be able to Like, even when I got twelve point eight meters, it was mostly luck. I was timing it

just right. But even as I was playing, I was like, oh, I should have I should have let up on the calf muscle and continued on the thigh muscle for a split second longer, and I would have been able to get a little further. I can never do that when I'm actually playing. Like, when I'm actually playing, I'm like, press these two buttons, now, switch through these two buttons, now switch back to those two buttons. And that's that's my tactic. It's probably why I have only gotten twelve

in Maybe you should get onto a girp Oh. Yeah, I've played that one too, which is his mountain climbing game, and apparently it's very very similar. It's actually that one I can play really well. I've gotten pretty far in girp Um. That one makes more sense to me, and I've got better coordination with that one. But the but yeah, quop is really hard. So um, you know who's really good at controlling their legs? Who's the but someone who doesn't have to use them? Is this going into our

second place? Yes, because I mean, you know, if you can fly, yeah, then why would you need to use your legs? Yes, I'm talking about our second place. Superman the New Superman Adventures yea, also known as Superman sixty four. It's good that it wasn't Superman the New Batman Adventures that are like Superman NI Little Pony, that it would be weird. It might have been a better game than though. This was released in for the Nintendo sixty four and

probably shouldn't have been. And again this we're talking about licensed character you know all we talked about with Back to the Future. Then we're gonna make some money. The history of licensed characters, Actually, we're gonna get to that again very shortly. The history of licensed characters in video

games is a pretty ugly one. There are a few games that stand out as being remarkable, like truly good games that use licensed characters, but the general rule of thumb is that if it's a licensed character game, it's it's gott a good the odds are against it, right, just based on the number of bad games that use licensed characters. Now, there are other games like you know, Arkham Asylum, which are fun. I mean, that's a Batman game and a lot of fun. I thought you were

going to bring up Golden Eye. Golden Eye fantastic one of the best games ever made, also made for the Nintendo sixty four, one of the top first person shooter games of that era. Fantastic games. Superman not so much so.

The story behind this game, the actual story in the game, that is, is that you play the part of Superman who has been tricked, as he often is, by Lex Luthor to enter into a virtual representation of Metropolis, and you have to complete these different tasks and puzzles that Lex sets up for you in order to escape and

beat the tar out of him. Tank I needed exit. Yeah, So the first test of your skills involves flying through a series of hoops because span Yeah, I remember his topic battle with Doomsday where he had to lie through about fourteen hoops before to No, that doesn't make any sense, and I jumped through hoops every day after that. You might have to pick up a car and throw it because again, that's what Superman would do in Metropolis. Is that you know, you're thinking, like you're driving down with

your family, You're having a nice day out. You might be gonna go see the Metropolis Museum of Art, and the next thing you know, some jerk has just flown over, picked up your car and thrown at forty blocks. Yeah, that's that will ruin your whole day. But anyway, so you would also have to do things like fight famous Superman villains. But the controls were really sluggish, the gameplay was incredibly repetitive, and it has been ranked as one of the worst video games of all time, not just

by our listeners, but by other publications. I mean it has multiple I hesitate to use the word awards, but multiple notifications of it being the worst, one of the worst video games. And in fact, in one ranking I saw it was ranked as the number one and our number one was number two. So now I guess we should move on to what our listeners have voted. And I'm sure you've already guessed it based upon what has already been listed, but what yourur listeners have voted as

the worst video game of all time? And I should point out this received twenty nine percent of the overall votes we received. And keep in mind, you could nominate any title at all. And and I'm I have a small concern. That's because we've mentioned it as a terrible game, that that you all thought that we were coaching you to vote for this time. We did. We have talked about this game being a terrible game before, but when when we actually asked for votes, I made sure we

didn't mention any particular title. I didn't want to change anyone's mind or put in a suggestion. I'm sure that happened anyway, based upon some of the comments and everything. But our worst video game is of all time, Chris do the honors e T. The Extraterrestrial for the R N two game published by Atari in about ten minutes. Yeah, so keep in mind that Atari went the route where they were allowing all sorts of developers to create games for they they didn't have to be vetted through Atari.

Yeah right, Nintendo had the whole certification process. Atari did not. But this there's no excuse here because Atari was the publisher behind this game in the first place. Yes, uh yeah, So then this game, you take the role of e T. The Extraterrestrial from the beloved Steven Spielberg documentary of the same name, And your task was to locate three pieces of an interstellar telephone so that you could assemble them and phone home, which would summon a spaceship that would

rescue you. Uh. You did this just like in the movie. I mean, we all remember that scene in the movie where Et had to walk into a field of pits, raise his head up, look for the flash, and descend into the pit to retrieve a piece of the interstellar phone. I mean you remember that scene right as probably no, that scene did not exist. But in the game, you would walk into one of the screens, actually a couple of the screens would have several pits on the screen.

You push a button which would raise ET's head and he would do a sound like this wrong. And then one, if you were lucky, one of the pits would flash, which would indicate that one of the pieces of the phone was in that pit, and you would walk over to the pit, fall in, pick up the piece of phone, and then you would press the button which would raise

ET's head warm and you would levitate up the pit. Now, most of the game is an overhead view but when you were in a pit, it was a side view like a cut, and you would you would levitate to the top of the pit and then immediately fall in again because it was really hard that once you got to the top of the pit, the screen would change so that you were looking at the overhead view again, and you had to manipulate et all over to the edge of the pit so that you were on the

ground again. Right, so you're on you go from a side view to an overhead view. And I can't tell you how many times I fell down a pit over and over and over again because I thought it was clear. But and every time you fall, and every time you use your powers, you use up energy. You have a limited amount of energy, and after you use it all up, you die. Yeah, well, you have to find dots, mean

pieces pieces. He had a little square pixel which would be represent one Reese's pieces, and you would eat that and that would give you a little more energy. They would also had doctors who would walk around and if they found you, they'd pick you up and move you to a different screen and you would lose a little time. Or worse, you would find an FBI guy and he would chase you down, and if he touched you, he would take away your phone and he had to start

over again. And so you would do this over and over again til you had the three pieces of phone. Then you could go to one part of the game, the one section where there's an icon on the screen that tells you you can make your phone call here, and you had to find it because it wasn't always in the same place. You would make your phone call, and then you had to make it to a different screen where the spaceship would actually land because apparently you

can't make a phone call at the landing site. Oh no, that'd be too easy. So then you have to make your way to the other screen and get in the little spaceship and you would then start the game over at the same difficulty level immediately. And this game was awful, terrible, terrible game, so bad that people the word got out about how disappointed this game was that people stopped buying it. And uh Attari had produced thousands of cartridges because the

movie was so successful. So Attari goes out and makes thousands and thousands of copies of ET. The reviews come in, people hate it, copies go unsold. Eventually, store start to send their unsold copies of ET back to Atari, and Atari grinds them up and then trucks them out into New Mexico and buries them. You know, um, you know what they did with that? What's up? They used it to pave a road and then you drive this bus right across the desert and you get one point every

time you run over ET. Yeah, it was, and then you fall in a pit and then physics in that game are terrible. But anyway, Yeah, so that was. This was again just like pac Man. This is another one of those games that was pointed to as being one of the reasons the video game industry crashed in Now. You know, a lot of the games that came out for the AD were these games made by independent developers

that were just terrible. But it was because, you know, the market was flooded with terrible games and Attari was not helping itself out by publishing some of them itself. Yeah. I had some of those games too, And I had and you know, I've mentioned it before. I was actually a surprise that nobody voted for the sword Quest series. But my guess is that a Torii was in such decline that none of our listeners actually bought that, but me since they didn't even finish the last game on

the series. But we didn't. A couple of people did vote for some games that were patently offensive. We didn't mention that before, and we didn't we weren't including those specifically because we were talking about games that were just horrible games now that were offensive, and these were games that were meant to be enjoyable. They didn't have an

ulterior motive, right, there are some of those two. But the games that had an ulterior motive where the whole purpose was to perpetuate hatred or to make a joke out of uh, inhumane acts, we didn't include those because really, I mean, first of all, I refused to give them any more publicity than they've already had. And second of all, I I was the spirit of the thing was to think of games that were meant to be enjoyable, fun

games that just weren't for one reason or another. Um, let's talk about some of the really quickly, because we're we've we're already getting pretty far up there, but we have to talk about some of the other games that got on got some votes that I was surprised didn't get more votes, but again, since you had every single game open to you, you know, one of those was Aquaman Battle for Atlantis. This game is nigh unplayable. It again had one of the worst reviews ever. Explay did

an amazing hysterical review of this game. Um I think they called it like Power of the Mullet or something like that in their in their review, but it was terrible. And games that, um, we're specifically designed to be marketing tools for for brands, so stuff like I actually had the kool Aid game for the Yeah oh no, and then they had the Avoid the Annoyed game for Dominoes. There were all the Burger kaing games that came out for the Xbox. There was a McDonald's game as well.

We got we got votes for those, but they were it was usually one like one vote for one of those titles, so there wasn't a lot of but I think that that deserves mentioned. Games that are specifically just marketing ploys tend to get hate hated by gamers, which you know, that kind of makes sense, like gamers won a game that was designed just to create enjoyment, be fun and challenging, not a game that's designed to make you want to go out and buy a pizza. Teenager

Ninja Turtles also falls into that category. I'm just kidding. So and then there were some of the games that were on the list that we we were a little surprised to see votes for. Uh. And in some cases, I think it's what people were voting on games that either they're just tired of seeing or they don't they are not particularly good at that game and they find it frustrating, and other people like it, and that's why they hate it, because it's a game that they personally

just don't get. Um. But some of those titles include things like Angry Birds, which I think probably that's a saturation thing, right, it's just because it's everywhere, people are going to be tired of it. Yeah, Uh, we fit, we fit. I don't even think if we fit as a game, you know. That's why I didn't really like that.

That's not really a game so much. I mean, there's a game element to it, but it's not I don't call the game Halo, which I think a lot of people would argue is one of the better first person shooters for a console system, keeping in mind that PC based first person shooters are much more sophisticated and require

a totally different skill set than a console one. I've heard computer first person shooter players refer to console first person shooters as kind of dumbing down the whole thing, and I kind of get that, but it's it's a different, you know, kind of different mode. And I personally love the Halo series. I can see your Halo Thank you. Pitfall for the at that was like a classic title like that, along with River Raid or two of my

favorite titles. But there were people who didn't like it because it had a repetitive gameplay early days there Super

Mario sixty four another game that got great reviews. But we got some votes for that Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, which again I don't really think of as a game a flight simulator, and flight simulators, by their very nature tend to be very very complex, and sometimes overwhelmingly so, because they are trying to be so true to life, and yet you're using a different interface to control that vehicle than you would if you were in the cockpit,

so there's an extra layer of complexity, you know. So that got the votes. Also, we got some votes for a Call of Duty and Modern Warfare which that was kind of interesting. Um so not everybody agrees obviously on what is the worst game of all time? Although overwhelmingly ET ran away with this like it was there wasn't even close. ET have way any more votes than all the others combined. But like I said, of all the votes that were we received for everything went to ET.

He galloped everywhere he walked. Did you yes, it's yeah, that's true. Did you have any game? Well? You mentioned the what was the series? That was a pretty There was supposed to be a contest if he solved all four parts of it, and the fourth part never came out. In the third one got limited distribution. But I couldn't see the point of doing what you were supposed to be doing, right, I mean, I just really couldn't follow

the sequence. Yeah, I think I have to say that out of all the ones I've I've mentioned, e T is probably the the one I think of as the worst that I've ever personally played. I played a lot of really bad games, but I tend to forget them because I have access to more games now, So if I play a really bad one, I just switch and go to a good one so it doesn't leave as big an impression on me. Back when I was a kid, my options were somewhat limited, and so I would play

a add game over and over because it's what I had. Ah. I know here I am complaining about video games. Poor me, You play a game. Um, yeah, don't cry for me, Argentina. Al Right, guys, well this wraps up our first crowdsourced episode of tech Stup. We'll probably do more of these in the future. Maybe we'll do one in the best video Game of All Time, but we'll also probably look at other elements, things that have nothing to do with video games at all. Will ask your opinion and we'll

report the results. We might actually guide it a little more in the future, just so that way. Um, you know, you don't have such a wide field to choose from because with with with such a huge number of options, it is hard to tabulate votes. We had a lot of things that only had one vote because you know, it was an obscure game that one person knew about and it's a truly terrible game, so it had merit for this list, but not enough people knew about to

vote for it. So we might narrow it down a little bit next time, just to make things easier on everybody me. If you have suggestions for any episodes you would like to hear as a crowd sourced episode, something that you think would be really interesting and you kind of you're curious what other tech stuff listeners have to say about it. Let us know. Send us an email. Our address is text stuff at how stuff works dot com,

or let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled, There is text stuff H. S W and Chris and I will tell you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived down at it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you