While it’s easy and inexpensive to find “so bad, they’re good” movies, it’s a bit harder to do this in the realm of gaming. Games cost significantly more than films and there’s much more time involved. Most players don’t want to sift through the rough to find the diamonds, but I’m a bit of a masochist when it comes to bad media. For this reason, I’ve made a small list of 5 Horrible Games That Are Worth Playing Anyway.
When I say that these games are so bad that they’re actually good, you have to remember that this means their execution is laughable in a sad way, not that they are campy storylines with good gameplay. Only play these if you want to laugh at glitches and poor game mechanics, not yell slurs over XBOX Live about them.
5) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Believe it or not, there was a time where people did not know that games based off of movies are inherently poopoo. When this game was in development, people were hype as hell. Stores ordered so many copies.
How many copies did they order?
Stores ordered so many copies of this game that when it flopped, several trucks worth of crushed ET boxes and games were supposedly left in a landfill in New Mexico.
This game is usually ranked in the top three for worst games lists. It is largely thought to have had a large part in causing the video game industry crisis of nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-three.
More like Extra Turd-restrial.
Due to its historical value and infamy, this game is worth a ROM run just to see with your own eyes and hands how awful it is. It’s nigh unplayable, so, it’s not worth anything more than that.
4) The Scourge Project: Episode 1 and 2
Are you a generic enough dude to sit through a five hour campaign full of bugs and bland gameplay? If so, the Scourge Project: Episode 1 and 2 might be up your alley.
One year, my friend bought our group a few cheap games off of Steam sales for us to play. He got this one because of how bad he had heard it was. He had heard correctly.
I want to say the game plays like Gears of War if it had been made for the Nintendo 64. It’s clunky, graphically bland, and filled with a lot of bugs. My computer hated it so much I had a stick of RAM die in the middle of a co-op mission.
Nonetheless, this game is worth playing if you can get a copy for yourself and three friends. It’s fun to play through an awful game together just to rip it apart.
3) Duke Nukem Forever
When I was in the single digits of age, I got a chance to play Duke Nukem on the Nintendo 64 with my favorite older cousin. It was a hip game filled with cool looking monsters, swear words, and bodacious babes.
Fast forward a decade or so later, fans of the series are still waiting on Duke Nukem Forever. Although quite a bit older and only a little bit more mature, I still bought into the hype for its release.
When it finally came out and turned out to be a mediocre game with outdated gameplay mechanics and an even more outdated sense of humor, its reviews were pretty bad, especially among fans of the series.
This game is worth playing if you want to see how a sequel should not be played. Heck, if you go in expecting the absolute worst, you might even be entertained legitimately at a couple of parts in the game. Then again, probably not.
2) Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero
In the 1990s, Mortal Kombat was a pretty big franchise. It was a succesful fighting game series and spawned a cartoon and two films. For the team at MIdway, the next logical step was to make an action-adventure game set in the universe with everyone’s favorite ice ninja: Sub-Zero.
Unfortunately for Midway, the game was a mess. It was filled with live action cut scenes that looked horribly cheesy (as they always do,) the combat was like a watered down version of the fighting game, and it was, flat out, not a good game.
Fortunately for the players, the cheesy cutscenes make this game well worth it. The dialogue is awkward, the costumes are awful, and you’ll constantly be waiting for one of the actors to pull out their genitals because of the porn-level acting. Thankfully (or disappointingly, depending on how bad you want to see blue ninja dong), it never happens.
1) Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)
What E.T. was for the Atari 2600 and Superman 64 was for the N64, Sonic ’06 is for the PS3 and Xbox 360. This game is lacking in every department: sound, graphics, plot, and gameplay.
The environments and NPCs would look more at home in a generic Japanese RPG than they do with Sonic and his crew. The sound is mind numbingly repetitive with characters constantly spouting the same two or three phrases throughout every level.
The storyline is like a 12-year-old’s poorly written fan fiction. As in, poorly written even for a 12-year-old fan fiction author.
Sonic, Shadow, and new oh-so-original character Silver the Hedgehog are all playable characters whose stories interlock with time travel, chaos emeralds, and some human princess for some wacky shenanigans.
What Glenn Beck thinks will happen when gays marry.
It is really hard to describe just how surreal the game is. Everything looks like a Final Fantasy rip-off except for the anthropomorphic characters. That combined with the convoluted storyline makes it hard to watch a single cutscene without cracking up.
The gameplay is the worst part of the game. It’s like a (much more) heavily bugged version of Sonic Adventure 2. Sometimes your character doesn’t respond or even does the opposite of what you input. It’s like they did not playtest the game whatsoever.
All in all, this game is definitely worth a playthrough. If not, you can always gift it to your least favorite person.
