A lot of this may seem familiar to those who've read the older lists from
the first version of this article. For the most part, my most hated games
haven't changed, but for the sake of the article, I've done a few different
write-ups on games that were previously on the list. So, here we go!
10 - FarCry (PC)
I think everyone is entitled one "spite" entry and this one
is mine. I hated it because it kicked my ass for two days in a row, okay?
There. Are you fucking happy, Kjil? I HATE IT BECAUSE I SUCK AT IT
DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER NOW THAT I'VE SAID IT?
Oh, and enemies that can see you 10,000 miles across a fucking map and swarm
to kill you 3 seconds later. Excellent design that I just can't appreciate.
BULL. FUCKING. SHIT!
At least it's pretty.
9 - Super Mario 64 (N64)
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, she did NOT just go there!
Tell ya what, girlfriend, yes she did and this isn't just here for the sole purpose of stirring up you little Nintendo fanboy shits (though you are incredibly fun to incite.) If you think I'm mean, wait till you read another fella who placed this game on their list as well and gave it the ass whooping it so rightly deserves.
What a disappointment. What a load. A new Mario game was supposed to be something warm and magical once upon a time. But ever since this game, I've seen it about the same as I do when I hear about another
Sonic The Hedgehog game is being released. Well, maybe that's a bit too harsh. Who cares, though?
A great camera and wonderful controls are what landed this game on the list. Some people (Kidtendo[REDACTED]s) will say, "waaahhhhh but it was the first of its type, surely you can overlook some minor annoyance!" I guess I could, if like someone else says on this list, that games even bothered to improve how a fucking 3D camera works since this game was released. Strive for mediocrity. Here at SMPS, we do.
8 - LUNAR: Dragon Song (DS)
I've already said my piece about this game
in the past, and everything technically bad about it is covered there. It's
sorta like the creators of this game and Monolith Soft were having a contest while developing
Lunar: DS and
Xenosaga Episode II to determine who could try and
fuck up the whole "sensible RPG" thing. Both games go so far above and
beyond the call of duty fucking around with shit that they collapse under the
weight of their big and brainy creators who just HAAAAAD to be so different
from the norm that it ended up more pretentious and stupid than anything
else. Certainly not FUN.
Putting that aside, LUNAR: DS should have been a great game because it's part
of a series that has been nothing but great. The original and remade
LUNAR games were fantastic little pieces of RPG goodness. They
had simple stories with likeable characters, simple yet challenging
battle systems, and (fuck you, Japmo-[REDACTED]-purists) some of the
best localization I've seen.
Lunar: DS had a lot to live up to and I honestly
just don't get what the fuck they were thinking here both by putting it
on the DS and releasing such a turd with such a respectable name attatched
to it.
With how much I've bitched and moaned about this game, I think Pat summed
it up much better than I ever could have:
"The only time we complain more than when we don't get a sequel to a popular game is usually when we do get one."
7 - Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (PS2)
"I'm in ur Strategy gaems makin' u pedo!"
|
That's right, Pat. I went there. I'm not sorry.
At first glance,
Disgaea has all the makings of a great strategy RPG.
Great characters, engrossing story with unique concepts and a smashing
localization full of real laugh out loud moments and dialog, and a lot of
good ideas in the battle system itself. It's one of the more
sophisticated SRPGs I've had the honor of dorking around with since
Final Fantasy Tactics (which I still consider the best of
the genre.) I've always felt that I should like this game and every
few months I find myself booting it up and losing myself for a few days
then remembering exactly why I keep putting it back in the closet.
DO YOU LIKE GRINDAN GAEMS?
Well, my friend, Disgaea is probably for you. EEEEEVERYTHING in Disgaea
is one tedious grind after another. And not the good kind of grind where
you can sit back for a few hours, gain a few levels, and soldier on.
No, that'd be too simple. Want higher levels and a miniscule chance of
surviving the next fight? Go grind out five to ten twenty minute
battles. And you pretty much have to since the game is really more about
brute forcing your way through enemy ranks rather than strategizing.
The item world, though a neat concept, is another bane of the game's
existence as well. You fight INSIDE YOUR ITEMS fighting battles floor
by floor (10+ floors in ALL cases, as high as probably 50) only to
level up items and find masters inside them for added benefits. The
problem? These items will be useless in two hours once more of the
game opens up. It just all feels entirely pointless in the end.
I feel kinda strange putting this game here. There are moments when the
game does shine, but ultimately it's a huge letdown. If I was 10-12 years
old and found this game, you can bet your ass I'd have maxed everything.
I had that kind of time. But this grind-fest shit just isn't for me
anymore. I guess it works for some people seeing as how Nippon Ichi has
released about 134,000 games with the same engine with more and more
grinding mechanics. At least it works for somebody.
Also, NIS/Atlus only release 100 copies of their games domestically,
and then sell the rest on Amazon/eBay for $100+. True story.
Prove me wrong.
6 - Chrono Cross (PSX)
Alright,
Chrono Cross might not be a truly horrible game by any means. It and
Half-Life 2 both suffer the same stigma of being sequels to ground-breaking
and amazing games and simply not delivering the kind of experience that one would
expect in a follow-up to a masterpiece. It doesn't make them bad, it makes them
very disappointing.
Chrono Cross is a fairly decent game with some great visuals, an interesting
element system that tied into the combat, and a fantastic musical score. The story
was about fuck-stupid about 88% of the time and I hate every god damn character that
wants to join my party if I so much as look at them, but it did provide me with
enough entertainment to warrant finishing it up.
It's simply here because Square was trotting around town with their balls in a couple
of wheel barrows one day and decided to slap the
Chrono label onto the game
for absolutely no reason. It has almost fuck-nothing to do with the original, save
a few references here and there, so I don't really get why people get all bent out
of shape when people such as myself who loved the original find this game so
offensive and disappointing.
5 - Alundra 2 (PS2)
I don't exactly remember much about this game actually. It's like I've
somehow deleted all the memories associated with playing it, or while
I was playing it I was lost in some kind of coma or trance. I do
remember that it was bad. Fucking awful to be honest, but I can't
remember the exact reasons why.
Alundra 2 wants you to think that it's the sequel to a vastly superior
action/RPG'ish Zelda clone that came out on the PSX three years earlier
in 1997, but it's not. It's kind of like how Square-Enix shits out
1800 games a year now and has to throw the Final Fantasy name on it
somewhere in order steal more money from their dedicated flock of
sheeple, only to a lesser extent.
But forget the game. Sometimes it's not even the game itself, but the
horrible, grotesque, and truly evil stories that surround it that can
make it bad and very worthy of being on this list.
It all started when a friend of mine picked up
Alundra 2 on a
trip to the mall one evening. The very next day he brought it to my
place and kindly gave it to me. Now, I didn't think anything about
this at first, I just thought maybe it just wasn't his cuppa tea and
the evening went on as usual. Later that night, after four hours of
playtime, I realized I'd just been punked hardcore. That fucker....
just shovelware'd me.
And this is where the vicious cycle began. I wasn't the only one who
was gonna be duped here, so a day or so later, I passed the game on
to another friend. A few hours later I get a phone call asking,
"What the fuck are you trying to do to me?" He then tried
the same trick of passing the game off to another friend, but it was
too late and he was trapped. Word had already gotten around the group
about just how bad this game really was and that we were now inflicting
it on one another as cruel and unusual punishment.
Undaunted, that friend then tried to have the last laugh on us by taking
it to GameStop. In his words, "Even if they give me 50 cents for it,
I'm better off that what you fuckers tried to do to me." But GameStop
would have none of that. They wouldn't even take the fucking game off
his hands FOR FREE!
We never heard much about the game for a few months after that. We thought
Alundra 2 was floating around a Columbus area landfill somewhere until
it resurfaced at a friend's birthday party as the world's worst birthday
present.
This group of friends has been inflicting
Alundra 2 on one another
ever since. Birthday presents, Christmas presents, FUCKING WEDDING PRESENTS!
Absolutely nothing is safe and it just won't go away or stop hurting people.
I find myself currently in posession of the game as the victim of a far
too evil FedEx package prank. I will continue the cycle very soon.
I suspect that when one of us dies someone's going to try and drop that
shit into a casket as the ULTIMATE fucking burn, but I think this game
is so resilient, that it'll STILL come back to haunt each and every one
of us till the endtimes.
4 - Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (SNES)
BOY OH BOY! YES! YES! YES! OH MY GOD! ROCK THE FUCK ON!
TWO of the greatest NES games in one awesome package, upgraded to 16-bit with
awesome new graphics and sound! They did it! They Super Mario All-Stars'd
Ninja Fucking Gaiden! Oh, and it's got Ninja Gaiden III too. Okay.
Well, that's what my reaction SHOULD have been, but it wasn't. Wanna know
why? Because this collection is DICK. DICK, DICK, DICK, DICK, DICK!
DICK!
Instead of being the awesome Super Mario All-Stars type remake that this
should have been, they somehow found a way to take their own games and
DICK them all up the ass in some way.
The Ninja Gaiden series was chock full of great visuals, amazing audio,
and last but not least, the hardcore action platforming gameplay. How
could you possibly DICK that up? The work's already done for DICK's
sake! Just slap a new coat of paint on it, spiffy up the tunes a
bit and voila! YOU GOT GOLD, SON!
But amazingly, they did. They DICKED it right up. Across the board,
the visuals are pretty damn sub-par and seem to lose all the crispness
and charm of their
8-BIT ORIGINALS for all 3 games. Somehow,
everything in Ninja Gaiden II has a snotty green hue to it. The audio
department is ABYSMAL. All of the music has been completely butchered
and most of the time sounds NOTHING like it did before. The tunes also
got dragged through that shitty SNES reverb making shitty tunes sound
amazingly shittier. The sound effects will force you to play with the
sound turned down as they're mixed about 175 times higher than the music.
Ninja Gaidne Trilogy also boasts the honor of having the single
most ear-shatteringly annoying sound effect ever in a videogame, trumping
even the NES' version of
Bad Dudes' voice samples.
Don't
believe me? Just click here. No I will not apologize for it, either.
PICK UP A POWERUP! THAT'S RIGHT! GO AHEAD! With that shit firing off on almost
every fucking power-up, rest assured
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy probably boasts the
most difficult versions of these games because you'll probably be like me and
avoid the fucking things at all costs.
Gameplay-wise, Ninja Gaiden I and II are...okay, I guess. They still feel
relatively the same, if not a little too tight. But wow, did they really
feel like DICKING ALL OVER Ninja Gaiden III. As if the game wasn't shitty
and sub-par enough, they pelted the little [REDACTED] with a few more rocks
just because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Ninja Gaiden III is literally unplayable about 80% of the time on
this collection. The very moment there's more than 2 sprites on screen
at once, the game's framerate immediately crawls down into the single
digits making poor Ryu feel like you're controlling him underwater.
The game begins running so slowly that it stops even responding to input
from the controller. Enjoy getting DICKED as you drop down that hole you
were running to jump over as the game simply just can't keep up enough
to register that you pressed the jump button anyway.
Below is an example of just how shitty
Ninja Gaiden III plays
here. I'll admit, I may have exaggerated a few of the videos on that
Top 10 Fuck You Moments article when trying to demonstrate some things,
but nothing here like that. I'm honestly TRYING to play this game the
way it's meant to be played, but it just won't let me. Those missed
jumps, and endless sword swings after enemies are already dead are just
the game catching up to the buttons I pressed seconds before. I'd have
recorded my hands playing this too if I had the proper equipment just
to demonstrate this fact.
Yes, I forgot to record sound. No, I don't care.
DICKS!
3 - Xenosaga Episode II:
Jenseits von Gut und Böse (PS2)
I was really torn between putting this or the original
Xenogears
here. It was a fairly long procedure of weighing out which one pissed
me off more and for what reasons. While that doesn't exhonerate
Xenogears
of the crimes it committed, I think the time I spent with it was
ultimately more rewarding and less frustrating for a handbag of different
reasons.
Xenogears itself isn't a HORRIBLE game. It's just insanely frustrating
for a lot of stupid reasons.
It's marred by bad gameplay design and what looks to be a case of
"Woops! There went the budgets!" near the end of the game.
Xenogears fanboys will be quick to tell me that it's just trying
to be artsy fartsy, but fuck off. The dickhead that thought those insane
platforming elements would be fun should have his ears stuffed with
dicks and shit while someone pisses in his eyes as he tries to navigate
through the Tower of Babel. Who knows, he might have better luck than
anyone else has ever had. Maybe that's the trick. Dungeon design was
incredibly lame, Gear-based dungeons were even worse thanks to FUCK FUEL
LIMITS, and god damn 1 hour of clicking through text before a boss
fight only to lose it after and have to sit through all that shit
again... Free pass to fuuuuuuun city!
Even with all those frustrations,
Xenogears managed to save its
ass from landing on this list. That must mean
Xenosaga Episode II
is a real big pile of poopy. But why would that be the case?
Episode
I was pretty swish. Well...
The
Xenosaga series hit an unfortunate turn of luck when it came to
this game. The departure of several key members of Monolith Soft's staff
and I believe a severely slashed budget nearly killed production of this
game it seems. A series of games that was originally meant to span six
chapters would soon find itself in doubt as to whether they'd even reach
the third chapter when this game was shat out. They did get the chance
to wrap the series up with Episode III, but Episode II is a blemish that
those wanting to have the full
Xenosaga experience will have to
endure if you're a completionist (or a stark-raving lunatic) such as
myself.
Xenosaga Episode II is such a disappointment because it not only
fails to live up to the standards established by the first game, it tries
so damn hard to avoid using any of its good ideas and straying as far away
from RPG convention and common sense as possible that it's a bit
staggering at times. And for what? Almost everywhere
that the first game succeeded, this one seems to have intentionally side
tracked away from for the mere sake of calling itself different. It's like that
annoying little goth kid that sits alone at lunch in High School,
USA, flipping his hair and
calling the other RPGs facists and conformists. I'm not against breaking
convention and being different. I'm really not. But try to make
some god damn sense if you're going to do it.
It's no doubt that the
Xenosaga series is meant to be pretentious,
but there's a fine line between being pretentious and being down-right
fucking stupid. Or maybe derivative is a better word. Nah, let's just
go with what it really is: "not very fucking fun."
I still can't wrap my head around the omission of character specific
skill sets. Every character learns the same skills from the same skill
tree and there are only maybe ten of them worth having out of the
entire lot so every character ends up being a clone aside from the
attributes of their attacks. And the only way to get to the good skills is
to buy all the shitty ones in order to afford opening the class levels
that have the good skills. It seems so incredibly unnecessary.
The battle system received a nice little beefing up and the break system
is actually pretty fun, but the problem is that stupid little fodder
shit battles can end up being as long as five minutes. Yes! Give me a
challenge, but balance your shit. Even the easiest of normal encounters
can find you burning through your stocks of items and precious EP like
every damn fight is a boss battle.
Shops and equipment? All gone as well. In order to keep your group stocked
with items to stay healthy, you need to grind and grind and grind the enemy
type that drops the item you want in order to keep your head above water.
Then you run into that whole thing where enemies are god damn brutal, so you
may end up consuming the items you're farming for the purpose of more farming
which kinda defeats the purpose.
Then there's the atrocious re-designs of some of the main cast. Shion
and KOS-MOS ended up getting the blunt of the Fugly Hammer treatment.
I like the direction they tried to take with the real/anime look hybrid.
MOMO, chaos, and Jr. look considerably cooler than they did before, but
everyone else looks...off for some reason.
Then there's the
Global Samaritan Campaign which is a series of 36 glorified fetch quests
sprinkled with a timed puzzle or two here or there. The rewards are
good for completing a lot of these sidequests, but the problem is
that they're some of the most mundane and boring tasks ever programmed
into a game. Most of them involve running back and forth between
2-3 locations for 45 minutes to an hour to complete with nothing else
to do in-between. Combined, I spent as much if not more time on these stupid shits than
time advancing through the actual storyline.
What little good there is to this game (the boss fights and
story) gets completely buried under all
the bullshitty gameplay decisions and crap production values. This game's
primary crime is the fact that it's a stinking turd laying in between
two very good RPGs that deserve the praise they get.
Since the boss fights and story are really the only good reasons to play
this game, I've decided to be a pal. I can only give you one of the above
but
this will save you
from ever having to play the game if you wanna just jump from Episode I to
III.
I'll be writing up all three
Xenosaga games in Pat-esque fashion
sometime the future, so this is but a preview of what to expect when we
reach this chapter.
2 - Phantasy Star Universe (PC)
About three years ago, I wrote the following statement in a review of
Ninja Gaiden III. Strangely, I find that word-for-word it fits
amazingly well for this pile of shit too when I replace
Ninja Gaiden
III with
Phantasy Star Universe:
"
Ninja Gaiden Phantasy Star had gone shitty. Not completely hopeless and unplayable shitty, but the kinda shitty where you know it's shitty, but don't wanna admit how shitty it is, so you ignore the shitty. So you keep playing anyway, digging deeper and deeper into the shitty until the smell of the shitty is so bad that everyone around you says "MY GOD YOU SMELL LIKE SHITTY, YOU MUST HAVE BEEN PLAYING NINJA GAIDEN III Phantasy Star Universe." Alas, I had been. Swimming in a pool of shitty, hopelessly trying to make the shitty not seem so shitty. But shitty's smell doesn't go away. It just gets shittier and shittier."
What a honkin' piece of shit this game turned out to be. It wouldn't be
so bad had I not wasted around six years of my life playing its predecessor
across THREE DIFFERENT FORMATS and had Sega not began hyping the game
THREE FUCKING YEARS before it was to be released.
Three years for what? This pile of garbage? I want to know HOW it took
them THREE YEARS to release a game with so little content and so many cut
corners. It's like they spent three years DELIBERATELY picking and choosing
from the myriad of SHITTY and STUPID MMO conventions and tossing them all
in completely missing the fucking point that PSU IS NOT AN MMO SUCK MY
DICK!
Talking about this game literally shoots my blood pressure up to dangerous levels. I begin
feeling dizzy, I get a headache and I'm told that there's a vein in the middle of
my forehead that looks like it's about to burst. It's really the
most disappointing game ever for me, but I won't even give it the number one
spot on this list, because FUCK YOU, SEGA. You aren't number one
anything. You are a gigantic number TWO.
And I am fucking sick of talking about you, so
go read someone else talking about
it.
1 - ???
"This doesn't look stupid at all."
|
I had to make a small judgement call here. Disappointing or overwhelmingly
shitty. Which one really chaps my ass more? I've spent an eternity it seems
bitching about shitty games over the site's three year history, and no matter what
I say, I don't think that a game that's an insult to gaming as a whole can
compare to that letdown one feels when they've been waiting and waiting
and waiting for another sequel or installment of one of their most
beloved franchises and it lets loose the ball like they'd had their
arms buttered up while running on a 100 yard oil slick.
On the flip-side of things, I could have easily placed the PSX's
C: The Contra Adventure here if I was aiming to go on and on about
a game that almost singlehandedly lopped off the head of an entire
franchise and went against everything that it stood for. It's a game so
laughably bad, it's almost unbelievable and so completely unplayable that
I don't even understand how it got released. People tell me, they say,
"POLLY LOL SUPERMAN 64 IS A HORRIBLE GAME AND ITS THE WORST EVER!"
and to some extent I might agree. I have played it and it's quite
the atrocity deserving of much of the shit that gets thrown at it. But,
C: The Contra Adventure holds deeper meaning for me. It's not
a let down, it's almost like Konami felt that getting up on a series' death
bed, pulling down their pants and letting loose with their most
righteous number one and two at the same time just for a laugh would be
a great way to please gamers. Before
C: The Contra Adventure, we had
Contra: Legacy of War,
which wasn't even developed by Konami, but by Appaloosa Interactive, a
comapny that had previous success with the
Ecco The Dolphin
games. Long story short,
Legacy of War was shit. Partly because they
dared go beyond that 2nd dimension into 3D and because... it was SHIT. At the time
we, the Contra Tardcore, had no reason to really expect that
Crap: The Contra Abortion would be anything better since
Konami was off snorting coke off an underage hooker's tits and various
other things with all that money Kojima reeled
in after the release of
Metal Gear Solid and let Appaloosa have
the reins again. Cocaine is a hell of a drug, Rick James. Yes it
fucking is.
Contra III was different. There was a lot to look forward to in
this series making the leap to 16-bit. A couple arcade games, two
great NES games, and a GameBoy masterpiece. What could possibly go
wrong? To the gaming public at large, I guess not much. Everybody I know and
any list of great games you ever see seems to have it affixed somewhere near
the top praising it up like you would that slutty prom date in hopes of getting
a little bit of hand action at the very least. But I still
hold to my original statements made concerning this game three years ago
when I wrote that
Contra III: The Alien Wars is...
Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated.
Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated.
Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated. Overrated.
Are you getting my point yet? Contra III: The Alien Wars is perhaps one of the most overrated
action titles for the SNES. Why people can actually call this game so amazing and ground-breaking
I'll never know. I think I'm the only person in the world that sees the game for what it is:
A completely rushed and unfinished, sloppy mess of a game.
Yes, Contra III does have a bright spot or two , but in order for this game not to be a disappointment, it needed to AT THE VERY LEAST
to live up to the lofty standards set by Contra and Super C on the NES, and it just didn't.
When I first ripped it out of the packaging, I was ready for the whole new generation of run and fucking
gun to continue. And it all started out okay. The first stage was typical Contra-fare, I was running
and gunning through a wrecked city dispatching alien fuckfaces left and right. I even got to ride in a
neato tank! "Cool fucking shit!" I thought. The end of level boss picked up right where Super C left off.
It was big, mean, and absolutely fucking nasty. God damn was I happy.
Then stage 2 started. I was disappointed to see an overhead stage, because they were never really my
favorite, but they weren't terrible...until now. The control for these stages is absolutely horrible.
You use the L and R buttons to turn your guy around and the D-Pad to strafe. Horrible. You're also
forced to navigate over tiny pieces of land to cross large gaps. Many shitty deaths ahoy. Even
worse is that the overhead stages are like mazes. You have to seek out 5 specific targets in each
overhead stage before you can fight the boss. This really slows down gameplay and in a Contra game,
that's a big no-no.
Stages 3 and 4 pick up the pace once again bringing back the 2D shooty goodness. Stage 3 is the single
brightest moment in the game. You're spilling some yummy alien blood all over an industrial complex
that ends in one of the coolest boss fights I'd ever seen. The vehicular combat you play through in
Stage 4 was a great idea, but this is where the game completely begins to fall apart. This is when
the game begins relying on cheap kills and unavoidable attacks to drain you of all your lives and
continues.
Stage 5 is another shitty overhead stage that manages to be even more annoying than the first by adding
in the element of shifting sand that can push you into enemies and off ledges. And Stage 6 is merely
a longer version of Super C's Alien's Lair in which you fight all the original Contra end bosses.
Contra III had potential to be so much more, but I feel it was merely rushed in order to make it out
in time to be close to the SNES launch. Six stages, two of which are actually any good or original,
really neutered weapons, and amazingly cheap bosses who have unavoidable and unfair attacks. This
game should have been at least 2 Stages longer. The whole game feels like an empty shell of what
it should have been.
Contra: Hard Corps for the Genesis completely redeemed this failure, and even the lesser-known
Operation C for GameBoy managed to do a better job of being a good Contra game than this.
Kill yourselves.
