Games That Should Never Have Been Made

Shaq Fu (Megadrive/SNES/GBA)

In the early to mid 90’s, one-on-one fighting games were at the height of their popularity. Also wildly popular was basketball, and the almost hero-worship of iconic basketball players. Few were as revered as Shaquille ‘O Neil, known colloquially as Shaq – so a fighting game featuring the lank baller would be just the ticket, right?

Just as you’d expect – and par for the course for fighting games that didn’t start with “Street Fighter” it was awful. It had a nonsensical plot that had O’Neal mistakenly wandering in to a Kung Fu dojo, being taken to an alternate dimension, and emancipating  a boy from an evil, kung-fu fighting mummy. Worse, it’s hit detection – important in fighting games – was awful.

The game is so bad in fact, that there’s a group of people looking to buy game, for the sole purpose of destroying it.

GI Joe (2009) (PS3, Xbox 360)

Lazygamer’s Nick loves videogames. He’s able to play just about any game, and find within it some redeeming qualities. Know then, that if he says something like “G.I Joe is absolutely, positively atrocious,” that the only redemption it’ll get is by using the disc it came on to slay whoever produced this garbage. You can read the full, albeit brief review here.

Rogue Warrior (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)

Richard Marcinko was a real-life Navy Seal who – according to his own biography – was instrumental in slowing the escalation of the cold war. If that’s true, he deserves a better game than this mess, quite frankly the worst game I’ve played on current HD consoles.

It’s a mind-numbingly generic and boring first person shooter whose only  redeeming thing about it that playing the whole game takes less than three hours. When the game’s most memorable qualities are from expletive-laden voice-over work courtesy of Mickey Rourke, you know you have a problem. Gamervision put it succinctly saying “The very fact that there’s an attempt to charge $60 is insulting. Save your money, spend it on anything else, and forget Rogue Warrior ever existed.”

Wheelspin

The Wii is known for it’s revolutionary control system. it’s also known for being home to shovelware, and a host of games that just get its imprecise controls wrong. None is more demonstrative of this than Wheelspin. Weelspin is a futuristic sci-fi racer that has the dubious honour of having the worst controls in any game you’ll ever play. Like Mario Kart, your vehicle is controlled through motions. Unlike Mario Kart, pretty much anything you do will cause your vehicle to spin out and crash. Also unlike Mario Kart, there is no way to change the maddening control scheme.

The game features 8 player split-screen multiplayer. How, on a system that only support 4 controllers? Each secondary player can use the nunchuck to control their vehicles, that’s how! Considering the nunchuck has an analogue stick, you’d expect that to be the input method, right? Wrong! you get to use the nunchuck’s sub-par, imprecise motion control – tilting up and down to accelerate and brake, and left and right to steer. It’s hard to believe this game went through any Q&A, because any sane tester would have told the developers exactly where to stick their wiimotes.

ET : The Game

If ever there was a game that served as the poster for rushed development, poor design and bad planning – it would be ET, for the Atari 2600. It is notorious for just how bad it is, that 30 years later it is still regarded as the worst game ever made, and one of the games responsible for Atari’s downfall – and ultimately, the videogame crash of 1983.

So many copies were unsold that Atari had to dump them in a landfill in the Nevada desert. Of course, that’s what happens when you make more copies of a rubbish game than there are systems capable of playing it.

Your task in the game is to collect pieces of your ship so that you may return home. The reality is that all you’ll do is fall in holes, get stuck, become frustrated, and throw the game at your passing neighbours.

Those are just a few of the many games I wish had never been made. What would make it on to your list?

Last Updated: February 22, 2010