Rhete's Top 10 Worst Games of All-Time
by Rhete

I am a man with a lot of rage. I also tend to have a spotty memory, especially with the painful memories of these games I've tried to forget, so bare with me. My list focuses more on games that were really disappointing, rather than them being technically terrible games, though there are a few of those too.

First up, are two dishonorable mentions. These are games so bad that I only played them for about twenty minutes, they're so bad they don't even get a spot on my 10 worst list! Talk about kicking someone while they're down.


Dishonorable Mention #1
SaGa Frontier (PSX)

It's Square! They made all those other awesome RPGs! What could go wrong? Apparently, everything. My memories of this game feel like a bad dream, a nightmare that you try to forget but lingers in the back of your mind. Just horrible. Horrible


Dishonorable Mention #2
Advance Guardian Heroes (GBA)

HOW DID THEY FUCK THIS GAME UP SO BAD? Guardians Heroes is one of my favorite games ever, and my favorite beat em up for sure, but this sequel was just total trash.


#10 Wii Play (Take a guess)

"Hey, Wii Sports was great, this will be great too!"

I know that this is just a remote with a free game, but honestly, this thing really is a piece of crap. Wii Play features "games" like "point at the screen" and "turn the remote sideways". While Wii Sports will make you think the Wii is revolutionary, Wii Play will make you feel like it is a cheap gimmick system for easily amused kids. It really takes a lot for one game to make you think less of an entire console as a whole.










#9. Resident Evil 3 (PSX)

"Hey, RE2 was great, this will be great too!"

Resident Evil 3 wasn't really a bad game, but it was a disappointment, and it didn't bring anything new to the table. It's biggest feature was that the Nemesis character would chase you through rooms at points. Gee, just like Mr X did in the second playthrough of RE2. The whole thing just feels like a copy of RE2, same city, same timeframe, heck I'm pretty sure you even go to the same police station at one point. A few months later Code Veronica would come out for Dreamcast and bring a whole lot more new to the table, including fully 3D backgrounds instead of prerendered ones. Veronica was much more deserving of the 3 name, while this should've just been called Resident Evil: Nemesis or something. Another thing to note is that this is the only RE game I started and never finished. There's one part where you have to actually fight and beat the Nemesis, and man fuck that shit, I tried forever and just gave up.


#8. Conkers Bad Fur Day (N64)

"Hey, Banjo-Kazooie... well that wasn't very good either."

It's Mario 64! But with swears, and humor, and guns! What could posibly go wrong? Well I guess they were so busy cramming the N64 cart full with voice acting, they forgot to include a game with it. This is the only game I've completely beaten the day I got it. It's like, a 5 hour game or something. Its insanely short. I replayed the better sections the same day, then returned it to the store. To make matters worse, this game was later ported to X-Box, but nothing was added to the single player game, except bleeps. Yeah, they ADDED bleeps, to a Nintendo game. How F***ed up is that?













#7. Final Fantasy 8 (PSX)

Back in the day, when a Final Fantasy game came out, it meant something. Nintendo, or Square, whoever, made sure only the very best in the series came to america. This resulted in of the first six games, only the first, fourth, and sixth came to America. I don't think we were missing much to be honest. When Sony got ahold of the series though, they changed things up and released Final Fantasy 7, the fourth game to come out in America with its original title intact. Which made a whole lot of people go "what the heck happened to four five and six!?"

I'm sure to anyone reading this, this is common knowledge. My point is that FF8 was the first in the series to be released in america that wasn't revolutionary. It didn't just have to compete with FF7, it had to compete with possibly the strongest lineage in video game history. FF8 was pretty much guaranteed to be a disappointment.

What it did feature though, was a tedious as hell drawing magic system, a totally broken junction system, and the weirdest, stupidest storyline in a video game, ever, "omg liek we all grew up at the same orphanage but then forgot lol!" The entire game felt like you were just playing to reach the next CG, as those were the only good thing in the game, but a game shouldn't have to rely on pretty cinematics to keep you playing like this one did.


#6. Xenogears (PSX)

"Hey, FF7 was great, this will be great too!"

Remember when Square was awesome? Post FF7, square was on top of the developing world. For the first time since early NES, they began to make games besides RPGs. And what games they'd make! Ehrgeiz, Bushido Blade, Einhander, Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve, Final Fantasy Tactics... Square was awesome. They could do no wrong. Except for one thing, they forgot how to make RPGs. First was SaGa Frontier, the worst RPG ever. Then came Xenogears and later FF8, and it was apparent square couldn't make RPGs anymore.

So about Xenogears. All of my friends loved it. "Jeremy you gotta play Xenogears, it's so awesome" But I'd also heard a lot of bad about the game, so I resisted. After a few years though, maybe around 2001, I broke and finally decided to check it out, after finding the game for sale cheap. Wish I hadn't done that. As an RPG, Xenogears isn't terrible, but its not great either. The combo system is different but really seems to boil down to spamming the strongest combo over and over, but then be forced to use some weaker combo 50 times to learn a stronger one. The magic system... I can't remember it at all. Was there one? The mech battles were terrible, lol fuel. Talk about the most annoying crap ever. Well, except for the PLATFORMING IN AN RPG. Seriously whoever thought of the tower of babel part needs to be shot, I love having to make precise jumps in an RPG, only to fall down a floor when you miss over and over again.

But where Xenogears really fails is the story. This game is so. fucking. long. It's gotta be the longest RPG ever. All the promises in the world of "best ending ever" were meaningless if the 80 hour journey to get there felt like a chore. No game should put you through 20 minutes of button mashing to get through character dialogue, only to throw a boss as you afterwards, and have the boss kick your ass and make you do it all over again. Xenogears does this several times, and eventually after putting in countless hours over years, I finally gave up for good before even reaching the second disc.


#5. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES)

"Hey, FF2 was great, this will be great too!"

Oh hey another Square game, perhaps I'm being too harsh on them? Don't get me wrong, I used to like Square! FF4, 6, and Chrono Trigger would all be on my top games ever list if I wrote one, but it's those kind of expectations that make the duds that much painful, when you're expecting greatness and find yourself with shit. And FF Mystic Quest is shit. It was designed as a beginners RPG specifically aimed at Americans. In Japan it was called "Final Fantasy USA". That should pretty much give you an idea of how bad this game is, I can't even remember much else, with my brain blocking out bad memories and all. Avoid at all costs.










#4. Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy (Jaguar)

"Oh my god, I just bought the wrong console."

The Jaguar is probably the king of false promises and blantent lies in advertising. It claimed to be 64 bit, when in reality it was barely 32 bit. It was the early 90s and gamers hadn't been exposed to the soon to come practice of not actually using game footage in commericials. It would be several years before FF7 would come out and, with commercials composed entirely of cutscenes, teach gamers you can't always trust what you see.

So back to the Jaguar, and Trevor McFur in particular. The magazine ads for this game actually looked good. Beautiful backgrounds in a shoot-em-up, looks awesome! In practice, the game actually looked like total shit. The backgrounds that looked so good in print, turned out to be single layer CGs that scrolled by at a leisurely pace, with no animation whatsoever. The game looked incredibly lifeless. The player, enemies and bosses stick out like sore thumbs. Here's a video to show you what I mean, the game looks just so damn flat. And shitty.

Watching that you may also notice... there is no music in this game. Even worse this wasn't the only Jaguar game I got at launch that didn't have music. I thought the system was broken at first, but the games they were putting out were just so half assed, and designed as if only to look good in screenshots for magazines, they just didnt bother with music past the title screen.


#3. Yoshi's Story (N64)

"Hey, Yoshi's Island was great, this will be great too!"

A terrible sequel to a classic. Even Nintendo pretends this one didn't happen.

This is pretty much a textbook example of a terrible game on its own, that also is the sequel to a classic. The resulting disappointment from such a combo can be devastating, which is why this game gets such a high spot.





And now for the rage to really begin