07-21-2011, 08:09 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-21-2011, 10:46 PM by DavidCaruso.)
To be fair, the thread is titled "your top 10 worst games," (EDIT: not anymore!) and it's not a rigorous attempt to form an intelligent set of criteria and pick out which games are "the top 10 worst;" if someone avoids shovelware at all costs then some of these lists might in fact be the worst games they've ever played. Though yeah, maybe it should be renamed to something more specific like "most disappointing" or "most hated" (the distinction here from "worst" is that you can hate them for reasons like the ones in Rokkan's post).
More on topic: I've always tried to avoid bad games if I can help it too (since there are way too many masterpieces in the past which I still haven't gotten around to playing), so I can't say I've honestly played many games that are outright awful, except when I was little and more easily fooled by marketing. So with that in mind, some contenders would be Sonic Battle (got this in my stage where I would ask my parents for anything if it had the word Sonic on it (even if it was a broken fighting game where the main strategy was button-mashing and occasionally retreating to charge up a special attack meter, while some of the most horrible music ever heard through the tinny GBA speakers played)), Hey, You! Pikachu (a game where Pikachu goes on a series of mundane quests like fishing or, on his "Daring Days," maybe hitting a pinata, all the while mishearing everything you tell him; eventually if you were 10 like I was when I first played it you just started experimenting to see what happens when you curse at him; unrelated but the TV commercial for the game is the epitome of 1990s advertising), Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) (do I even need to say anything about this one?), a few movie tie-in shovelware handheld games (e.g. the Harry Potter GBA games, which were basically completely by-the-numbers JRPGs with a Hogwarts theme draped over, facilitating fetch quests for half the game (I didn't mind at the time because I was 10 here too)). If this was "most hated" or "most disappointing" I'd add, among other games: Sonic 4, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Mega Man 10, New Super Mario Bros., Super Paper Mario, and a bunch of JRPGs which everyone else probably loves, e.g. Earthbound (not Mother 3 though, that game owns and is the best JRPG I've ever played).
More on topic: I've always tried to avoid bad games if I can help it too (since there are way too many masterpieces in the past which I still haven't gotten around to playing), so I can't say I've honestly played many games that are outright awful, except when I was little and more easily fooled by marketing. So with that in mind, some contenders would be Sonic Battle (got this in my stage where I would ask my parents for anything if it had the word Sonic on it (even if it was a broken fighting game where the main strategy was button-mashing and occasionally retreating to charge up a special attack meter, while some of the most horrible music ever heard through the tinny GBA speakers played)), Hey, You! Pikachu (a game where Pikachu goes on a series of mundane quests like fishing or, on his "Daring Days," maybe hitting a pinata, all the while mishearing everything you tell him; eventually if you were 10 like I was when I first played it you just started experimenting to see what happens when you curse at him; unrelated but the TV commercial for the game is the epitome of 1990s advertising), Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) (do I even need to say anything about this one?), a few movie tie-in shovelware handheld games (e.g. the Harry Potter GBA games, which were basically completely by-the-numbers JRPGs with a Hogwarts theme draped over, facilitating fetch quests for half the game (I didn't mind at the time because I was 10 here too)). If this was "most hated" or "most disappointing" I'd add, among other games: Sonic 4, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Mega Man 10, New Super Mario Bros., Super Paper Mario, and a bunch of JRPGs which everyone else probably loves, e.g. Earthbound (not Mother 3 though, that game owns and is the best JRPG I've ever played).