When it comes to video games,
the worst thing you can do is release something that's
forgettable.
A good game? Well, sure,
that's the intent, but if it goes horribly wrong sometimes
you'll catch a saving grace and the attention of the
masses by producing something that's so bad people want to
play it regardless. Morbid curiosity is definitely a thing,
after all, and if your bad video game has a
unique selling point,
then bully for you. You may have just made history
not as you intended,
but it's notoriety all the same.
Most of the titles on this list are never going
to be anyone's favorite,
but they're at least worth that look of morbid curiosity.
I'm cypherwhatculture.com, and these are 10 terrible Video Games You
Should play Anyway
#10 Shadow the Hedgehog. In
2005, Sega decided to cash in on the popularity of
Sonic's broody bro Shadow the Edge Lord and give him
his own spin off.
How would they separate it from any other Sonic game?
Well, why not slap a gun into his hands and
see what happens?
I'm sure we can all agree that that idea was
staring us in the face this whole time.
Shadow the Hedgehog isn't the most broken of the Sonic
games,
that's for sure, but it definitely broke any semblance of
sanity the series had at that point.
Shadow, his one and only titular release?
Firing a variety of firearms,
driving in tanks, and cursing like an angsty teen.
This one is worth playing for a couple of reasons.
First of all, the game has a really cool system
of morality based objectives you can pick from on the
fly in each stage.
It plots out a course through the game's many stages
based on these choices,
meaning there are a lot of different possible playthroughs,
and that's genuinely impressive. Mostly though,
you need to play Shadow the Hedgehog just to understand
how absolutely nuts it is.
If you can make it through the opening cutscene with
Shadow Sneering with an automatic rifle in his hands without
laughing,
well, you're made of sterner stuff than me
#9 shakfu. Shakfu sort of cultivated its own legend around
its lack of quality.
Even though it wasn't very mediocre being released following the
home debuts of Super Street Fighter Two and Mortal Kombat
2,
it never stood a chance.
So hated was Basketball, Star Shack's foray into video games,
that a group of players decided to do something about
it and made it their goal to spread the gospel
of destroying as many physical copies of the game as
possible. Shakfu has spent so long being included in every
list of the worst games of all time that people
seem to be groomed into instinctively shuddering when they near
the name. It may well be terrible,
but it's not the black hole of creativity that the
legend makes it sound as a consistent visual design and
is decently well animated.
So props for that, but admittedly that doesn't save it
from being slow,
shallow, and absolutely paling in comparison to its peers.
Regardless, it's now part of the great tapestry of gaming
because of its extreme reaction,
so in many ways it's worth taking a look at
just for that alone.
Plus, if you can get your hands on a copy,
you can oppose the Destroy Shakfu regime and preserve this
odd piece of gaming history
#8 South Park. South Park,
at the height of its popularity,
was a juggernaut for merchandising and tie insurance.
As such, South Park needed to have a game out,
and it needed to have it out fast.
Using the Churok engine of all things.
South Park's first video game outing was a straightforward first
person shooter that contained much of the series character and
potty mouth sensibility.
The reality of the situation is that since it was
so rushed out into public hands,
South Park is ugly and limited in its scope.
Levels are monotonous, as is replaying the whole thing if
you die due to a lack of checkpoints and the
game has a serious lack of music and voice over
On top of this, the ghastly short draw distance to
try and hide its blemishes made it unbelievably boring to
look at.
All that said, the South Park game is as inventive
as the show and its sense of humour definitely offers
a few chuckles.
Whilst the campaign is forgettable,
South Park did ship with multiplayer which allows players to
concentrate most on what the game did best,
which was its variety of silly weaponry.
From toilet plunger firearms to the cow launcher.
There is definitely still fun to be had in selecting
your favorite foul mouth kid and embarrassing your friends by
pelting them with yellow snowballs.
Ah, you
#7, Goat Simulator. This one is a little different in
that the beauty of Goat Simulator is that,
being a spoof of the growing SIM genre,
it was intentionally made a little badly.
Developer Coffee Stain Studios had no qualms allowing physics glitches
and such to get through the code,
to provide the kind of entertainment that we all get
from watching a game world appear to fall apart.
Nothing about Goat Simulator should be right.
There's no story, no set objective,
nothing of the sort. Its physics don't make sense,
its presentation is a mess.
And yet it was destined to go viral on the
face of video gaming.
With all of its glorious AAA successes,
Goat Simulator is the cheeky pimple that cropped up overnight.
Want to become the world's best skateboarding goat?
Would you rather ingest sugar cubes and get psychedelic?
Perhaps you're more into sneaking up on people and pushing
them to their doom.
All of these and so much more are at your
fingertips in the game's ridiculous open world.
It was never going to win any fancy schmancy awards,
but Goat Simulator reminds us that all video games don't
always have to be cinematic or high art.
Sometimes it's just enough that they make us smile,
and terrorizing a town as a demonic goat sounds like
something that could make just about anyone smile.
Number six Pepsi Man. The guys down at Pepsi headquarters
back in
1999 must have had a very wonderful,
idealized view of things. With their mascot,
superhero Pepsi Man, all crises can be averted.
One such crisis is stopping a riot breaking out because
of angry consumers upset about a late Pepsi delivery.
Even though, come to think of it,
Pepsi Man's gameplay shows cans of the drink just lying
around all over the roads in various real life cities.
Well, that seems like an accident waiting to happen.
Pepsi Man is a cheap,
licensed product design more to sell you fizzy drinks than
to blow you away with its deep gameplay.
As such, don't expect more than alternating level to level
between running away and running towards the camera and trying
your hardest to avoid obstacles that come out of absolutely
nowhere. Also, don't think too hard about the fact that
the citizens of this world have built an entire city
called Pepsi City as a shrine to their beloved soft
drink. The gameplay may be boring,
but it's also ridiculous that it's pretty hard to hate.
It's debatable whether Pepsi Man's live action cutscenes and strange
portrayal of American culture is meant to be funny,
but there's definitely laughs to be had at the lunacy
of it's all
#5 Resident Evil Gaiden. Did you know that at one
stage Resident Evil was being ported to the Gameboy Colour?
That project didn't ever finish because the task at hand
was too great for the hardware,
but it didn't stop Capcom from wanting to drop their
horror series into the hugely popular handheld gaming space Resident
Evil Gaiden is often pointed and laughed at from a
distance, and perhaps quite rightfully so.
It's a strange mix of top down exploration and of
all things,
a first person timing based battle system that's got more
in common with the likes of Undertale than modern Rezi.
The music is either plot is nonsense and the game
has a God awful save system that chooses for you
when to save your progress,
but it has this undeniable charm to it as well.
The fixed camera Resident Evil formula of the time was
never going to work on a Game Boy,
so props to Studio M4 for coming up with a
different approach.
Better yet, it's one that surprisingly manages to retain some
classic resi staples in trying to run past enemies to
conserve your limited ammo and backtracking to areas with your
new key. That's about where the similarities of the core
series end.
But very few gaming franchises that are still going strong
to today have curious Quite like Resident Evil Gaiden
#450 Cent Blood on the Sand
$0.50 Bulletproof was an absolute travesty of an action title
that not only did nothing we hadn't seen before,
but it barely got the essentials correct either.
So how exactly Mr. Curtis Jackson got a sequel is
beyond belief.
50 Cent Blood on the Sand is again an almost
completely generic affair that uses all the most popular tricks
in gaming of the time.
Vehicular combat, a ton of guns,
chest, high walls and of course,
slow motion. Bullet time action.
It's storyline time was no less shallow than its gameplay
either.
Essentially, boiling down to that bitch has got my money
charming the most offensive thing about Blood on the Sand.
However, it's actually rather fun.
It's pompous and stupid, but there is joy to be
had in the ridiculousness of playing as $0.50 slow MO
mowing down terrace in the Middle East.
These kinds of cover based shooters were a dime a
dozen for a long time,
but only one of them allows you to activate gangster
fire,
team with AG unit and listen to original music that
$0.50 had written just for the game.
Oh, it did do one thing.
Unique You can get extra point from taunting your opponents
with profanity after they die,
and these can be traded in for new swear words.
You know what? I take it all back.
This is a surefire 10 out of
10 #3 Ark Survival Evolved
The survival genre is at its best when it can
get its hooks into you and 100 hours fly by
without you realizing it.
Who amongst us hasn't suddenly had the oh,
it's 3:00 AM moment when we played Minecraft?
Ark Survival Evolved takes the relatively calming and straightforward nature
of Minecraft and throws it out to sea.
It's realistic demands and deep mechanics require gamers to play
carefully and plan ahead as they attempt to survive a
world that is currently populated by over
150 different, largely dangerous and often prehistoric creatures.
ARK is not an easy game to get into.
It doesn't embrace new players from a game play perspective
and all the fact that the game was absolutely busted.
All the classics are here,
unreliable AI pathfinding, awful collision detection,
and horrendous lag. At this stage,
the bugs are so deeply embedded into the game that
most of them are never coming out.
The reason you should play it well,
Ark is a damn fine cooperative experience whether you're fighting
against the dinosaurs or the game itself.
After all, misery breeds company,
and while some of the bugs are frustrating,
many weird occurrences offer unique gameplay experiences.
Remember that time I climbed A Saber Tooth tiger into
the sky?
Is not something you can say about many games
#2. Darkened Sky Darkened Sky is about as average a
game as you can get.
A 2002 third person adventure title that stars Hero Sky
exploring A fantastical setting,
looking to restore magic light and rainbows to her world.
It's action is bland, it's puzzles are horribly cryptic,
and it's platforming is painful.
Still, it's got a very kooky sense of humour.
Lead characters often quit sarcastically between each other and the
4th wall is broken so many times that it might
as well not be there any other reason to play
it. With most video games that are licensed,
like the aforementioned Pepsi Man,
you know pretty much immediately.
But Darkened Sky, the rogue that it is,
doesn't have the company logos emblazoned on the box,
nor does it really hurry to reveal the truth that
it is in fact a licensed product.
In one of gaming's most surreal moments,
Darkened Sky goes from a relatively blase action adventure into
a total head screw when Sky bends down to pick
a Skittle up off the ground.
Yes, a Skittle. The dark secret of Darkened Sky is
the moment you realize that the magic system in the
game is all based on brightly coloured candy.
It doesn't make Dark I can Sky any more,
an exciting gameplay experience, but I can't think of any
other games where your spells are powered by sweets,
so it's got that going for it
and #1 Big Rigs over the road racing.
If you can think of it,
you can probably do it in Big Rigs as long
as it contains driving through every obstacle in the game
unharmed,
accelerating up totally vertical Cliff faces without slowing down,
and even sinking into the ground.
For whatever reason, Game Mill appears to have decided that
Pre Alpha was good enough for this
2003 PC racing title and sent it out into the
world to find its own way.
What it found was anger,
befuddlement, and the title of one of the worst games
of all time.
Still, many gamers were so stunned by the thing that
they couldn't help but love it.
Considering your one opponent doesn't leave the start line,
it's hard to play big rigs as intended,
even when trying to ignore the glitches.
Thus, the only fun to be had is driving through
buildings,
falling through bridges, and speeding over mountain sides.
If there was ever a crown made for so bad
it's good,
then Big Rig deserves that.
The throne and the scepter you can't help but feel
sorry for.
The thing rushed out of the before it was done,
scared, confused, and ugly. I almost feel bad for calling
it terrible,
as what we have barely constitutes a game.
Whatever you call it, you absolutely need to experience big
rigs over the road racing at least once,
and that's the list. Let us know what you thought
of this video down in the comments below,
and any other video games that you can think of
that count as terrible,
but it's still worth playing for whatever reason.
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And have a good week.