Horrible / Video Game Companies and Developers

One wonders how these companies managed to release multiple games period, never mind multiple irredeemably terrible ones.

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A-C

• Active Enterprises is best known for creating Action 52, a compilation of 52 abysmal-quality "games" for the NES that cost $200 at the time of its release. In his review, The Angry Video Game Nerd calculated that each of the 52 games would cost around $4^note In 1991, the average NES game cost around $40 (and games for the just-released SNES were $60-80), making the $200 price tag for Action 52 a bargain in theory. However, the games are so poor-quality that they are barely worth downloading for free. Some of the common issues among the games were repetitive music that was annoying and graphics that made many of the games hard to play and hard to look at. There is inconsistent difficulty among the games (some were extremely difficult, while others were simple) and obtuse controls. The games are riddled with glitches and bugs because the developers had no time to playtest any of them; graphics are occasionally scrambled, you can survive pitfalls in most platformers by repeatedly attacking, Chill Out's music has an inconsistent tempo due to lag, Lollipop's music completely and hopelessly breaks on the last level, and game crashes are common. In the case of two games, they may not even load at all - trying to play them at all on some cartridges causes the game to crash, making even the title of this compilation questionable. The game's cartridge is so poorly manufactured that it produces a burning plastic smell if played for extended periods. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo rejected the game after being submitted, so it was sold unofficially through magazine advertising. Active Enterprises not only expected to profit off this game collection, they also had plans to make one of the games (Cheetahmen, a very poorly-made side-scrolling Beat 'em Up) into a Cash-Cow Franchise like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, including a line of action figures and a Saturday-morning cartoon. If you want to know why this was such a trainwreck, miiyouandmii2's video details this compilation's troubled history.
  • Micro Mike is considered to be the worst of the bunch, being almost unplayable. It has only three stages, but with claustrophobic level design and poor enemy placements, combined with the player character's fast movement, dying in only one hit, and bullets being able to appear behind the player during boss fights, tool assistance is practically required to beat it.
  • Meong is barebones even when compared to the other games: The only goal is to navigate an "A-52" icon across a featureless tile puzzle to the end screen. The problem is that several of these tiles are traps, which only reveal themselves after a few seconds of standing (the result being that as you move, you'll often appear to die to nothing) - but standing still on the same tile will also kill you inexplicably. So the way to beat the game involves shuffling back and forth, waiting to see where the traps are before proceeding.
  • Hambo's Adventures is a Donkey Kong inspired game that gives you one life, with any margin for error relying on 1-ups. That wouldn't be so bad if the titular porker wasn't a One-Hit-Point Wonder and/or the enemy placement was set, but as it is, the game is entirely too reliant on luck. As Stuart Ashen has demonstrated, you can game over in less than half a second. Judging by the babyish music and the anthropomorphic main character, and the lack of any indication that it's a Deconstruction, it appears to be intended for very young children; if that's the case, Active Enterprises seriously misjudged the skill and patience of the target audience, as Fake Difficulty is frustrating enough for an adult, let alone the poor kid whose ignorant, inattentive parents didn't bother to research the game they got for their youngster.
  • Cheetahmen 2, the unreleased sequel, was programmed into cartridges while still unfinished (presumably they were prototypes). It had the same clunky Action 52 jumping, waves of nigh-undodgeable Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders, the inability to crouch or shoot while jumping, and a game-breaking glitch which makes Level 4 unbeatable. Even if you use a Game Genie or hacked ROM (or you do what the AVGN did and slightly tilt the cartridge a little bit) to skip to the last two levels, there's No Ending programmed. People like Vinny also noted that in the NES Cheetahmen game for Action 52, if you go down a certain hole that takes you to a "Level 9" (which is just a room that holds a 1-Up and an exit in either direction) and then go to the right door, it takes you to a "Level 10" that's unplayable thanks to a Game-Breaking Bug. It's likely a thing that was originally cut due to strict deadlines, but to Vinny it was the first time he ever saw a game corrupt itself.
  • While Active Enteprises ultimately went bust before they could release Cheetahmen 2, the company and the title would see an unlikely resurrection two decades later with Cheetahmen 2: The Lost Levels, which was touted as a remake that was "broken, but now complete" — all the Game Breaking Bugs were allegedly ironed out. And its Kickstarter campaign got it a big budget for an indie game. Wanna guess how many bugs they fixed from the original Cheetahmen? None of them. You can still die by jumping and survive bottomless pits. All they did was add more bugs, which now make the game completely unplayable.
• Arcane Raise is a "company" that downright abuses the ease-of-use of various Game Maker programs to churn out games with as little effort as possible. All their games have been removed from Steam, except for the first Arcane Raise game to showcase how low-effort their products are.
  • The Arcane Raise series, made using RPG Maker, is a shining example of how to not use the engine. The store description promises "a hardcore game created through passion and dedication", but it's anything but that; the graphics, music, and sound effects are stock assets, the plot and characterization (when they even exist) are weak, the Random Encounters are overly frequent, and combat is bland and unbalanced, especially when you can get money effortlessly to kit out your characters quickly. The games also features zero-effort achievements (completing the tutorial grants you access to a long hallway that grants one achievement for each tile) to appeal to lazy achievement hunters who only care about having as many achievements as possible or spelling funny messages in their achievement showcases. The games' worst sin, however, is that it sells characters and items as separate DLC that are more expensive than the base game, just to squeeze more money out of people unfortunate enough to buy these games. Given that many far superior titles are available for free elsewhere, there is no reason to buy these. Videos by DustedUp and Graeldon showcase all of the first game's flaws.
  • Glitch Simulator 2018 is probably the first game in history to be horrible because it's not an Obvious Beta. The title and Steam description suggest that it's a game deliberately filled with glitches that must be exploited to win, which may sound like an interesting premise, but the game doesn't deliver on that promise at all - instead, what you get is an extremely generic First-Person Shooter made using the "Game Guru" engine, using only the default assets said engine comes with. The game contains a single map filled with a few zombies and assassins that you can kill with a small selection of bland weapons, and a handful of buildings that cannot be entered. The game had so little effort put into it that reviewer IAmPattyJack recreated the entire game in only 12 minutes and distributed it for free. Also in the series are Suicide Simulator and ISIS Simulator, which are similar FPS games with offensive premises shoehorned in solely to get a couple of extra sales from the morbidly curious.
  • ZAMBI 2 KIL represents everything that can go wrong with RPG Maker games: stock graphics and sound, no story whatsoever beyond "Kill the Zambis", and drawn-out, mindless combat make for one stinker of a game. Although your heroes have a few special moves, many of them are completely useless: characters can buff magic defense, inflict silence or a Status-Buff Dispel, and cast various elemental spells, which means nothing, as there's only one enemy type who only uses basic physical attacks. Currency and the item and equipment menus are also pointless, as there are no shops or treasure chests in the game's single map. The Stylistic Suck might have been worth a few chuckles if the game was free, but slapping a price tag on it makes it come off as nothing more than an insulting cash grab instead. There's also Downloadable Content that costs 10 times the price of the main game and supposedly does nothing but double the number of enemies.
• Atlantean Interactive Games was a short-lived publisher that only released a few games, most of which were not well-received.
  • Catfight's sole redeeming quality was featuring an all-female cast in a Fighting Game (although, contrary to what its developers claimed on the game box, it wasn't the first - there were two Japan-only fighting games with an all-female roster: Pretty Fighter for the Super Famicom and its Sega Saturn follow-up Pretty Fighter X). Never mind that the controls didn't work, the game (for the PC only) ran at a framerate measurable in the single digits, the voice recording and acting are both garbage, and the AI didn't know how to do anything but block.
  • Island Peril (not to be confused with Isle of the Dead), a 1995 First-Person Shooter developed for MS-DOS, is a shoddy, sleazy, and buggy Doom clone that goes as far as to steal sprites from Doom; what isn't stolen is a wildly inconsistent mix of digitized actors and ugly MS Paint-like art. The basic gameplay is seriously harmed by control issues, with slippery and inconsistent player movement along with an archaic control scheme that cannot be rebound to different keys. Saving the game only saves what level you are currently on; you restart the level from scratch when you load a save, which is a serious issue when the game is prone to crashing. Other technical issues include enemies regularly walking into death traps, the player phasing out of the level boundaries, or being unable to hit enemies while aiming up or down. FMV cutscenes occasionally play during the game, most of which are bad attempts at humor that indulge in island stereotypes and sexual innuendo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the only game that developer Electric Fantasies released. Brutalmoose did a review of the game, and Civvie 11 offers a deeper dive into its faults.
  • Mirage, developed by The Dream Designers and released for the PC in 1995 (a 3DO port was planned, but never released) is ostensibly a point-and-click adventure game about one Lieutenant Shooter searching for his kidnapped wife, Jenny, in a surreal distortion of the Old West. "Ostensibly", because in practice it's an obtuse, incoherent mess. You see, Mirage is an adaptation of a 1994 pornographic film, Shame (itself well-regarded within erotica circles), but very little effort was made to actually translate (the non-adult parts of) the plot—what you get instead is a series of bizarre scenes that are almost wholly disconnected from one another, puzzles and item locations that require you to be clairvoyant, and low-rez clips from Shame that barely work as a narrative in the context of Mirage. The game is notorious for numerous cheap deaths, for actions such as lingering in the wrong room, picking up every note you find like you're supposed to and getting the one that ends with the villain shooting you, and looking at a wanted poster. Between that and the complete lack of direction, Mirage is a fever dream of the worst sort. The Obscuritory has a review that goes over its issues in more detail; it also stumped Stuart Ashen so badly that he needed a walkthrough to complete it.
• Atomic Fabric is a G2A scam front hosting numerous shovelware games that have severely plagiarized or recycled assets. All of their games cost over 2,000 USD on Steam and have abnormally high, bot-inflated ratings, which would seem odd and impractical if they were scamming people on Steam itself, but they aren't; the scam actually happens at G2A, where random steam keys bundles containing huge amounts of Shovelware were sold to trick unsuspecting customers from obtaining mediocre games masquerading as high quality games and preventing the victims from refunding them, and raising the price this high prevents any other comments from lowering the high rating of their games due to an exploit. Furthermore, since the keys remain even if the games themselves are taken down from Steam itself, unsuspecting customers on G2A can still be scammed even if the games are taken down. Of course, every single one of these games are borderline unplayable and infested with Game-Breaking Bugs. Watch fireb0rn cover some of the games listed below here.
  • Fly Fly Tuk Tuk is an obstacle course game where you drive through obstacle courses with a tuk tuk, which is so horrible that it would make Superman 64 look like a masterpiece. The game's main menu is a poorly-made 3D jpeg title screen with the English text "AMAZING CHALLENGE", and it only gets worse from there. Controls are bizzare and wonky, the player can often fly away from the course, clip though floors or get stuck randomly, gravity does not seem to exist as the player's vehicle can drift up to the top of the sky, slowly float back to the surface and drop onto the ground completely unscathed, the collision detection of various objects are ridiculous as one can get knocked off the edge of the goal (and potentially out of the game) despite being several centimeters away from the floor, and on top of that there is no driver on the tuk tuk's front seat.
  • The Smash Cars Tournament is another obstacle course game where the player has to drive a car past moving walls. The car goes at a random distance once you click on it, so completing a stage is based on RNG, and one mistake causes an instant game over, treating you to a game over screen where the stage music continues to play just to annoy you more and you have to go back to the start of the game again. Just like Fly Fly Tuk Tuk, the collision detection is horrible enough that you can get a game over even if your car lands several inches away from the walls.
  • The King's Castle is a disgustingly unfair tower defense game. The minimalist and downright lazy main menu is only the least of your worries. The "character designs" amount to poorly drawn stick figures and the game's UI is infested with factual and grammar errors, such as a picture of a warrior with two swords being labeled as a "Ninja" and the description of the first stage being "Steppe bordring [sic] the Orc Clan". Gameplay is downright atrocious and frustrating, being infested with Fake Difficulty and taking Early Game Hell to logical extremes; the AI of your units are as smart as a thumbtack and would often ignore your commands to do their own thing, enemies are flat-out overpowered, moving way faster than your units, take forever to kill, and have a nasty tendency to rush straight to your castle and obliterate it in seconds even if they are in the middle of fighting your units, and there is a bug where an enemy will rush directly past your castle at extreme speeds and instantly destroy it, causing a game over. The game over screen provides a "tip" that reads "[sic] Tip: upgrade army", which is not only grammatically incorrect, but is also completely useless, as it's impossible for you to have any cash to upgrade anything given you're likely to be hard-walled on the first-level where you won't have anything to spend on. To add insult to injury, clearing the first level gives you a measly 50 coins, which amounts to nothing when the cheapest advanced units cost 8,000 coins and the cheapest upgrade costs 100 coins, meaning that you'll have to play another annoying level and potentially get stuck in frustration before you can afford your first upgrade, and buying advanced units are nigh-on impossible.
  • The Hidden Ghost is a puzzle game where you play as a Bedsheet Ghost and scare people holding torches to death. It's very easy to die as the torches have absurd collision ranges, and a single touch will result in a game over. The game over screen has a photo of your ghost being stuck on top of the retry button that shows up after a few seconds, so if you do not click the button in time, you have to go back to the main menu and play from stage 1. There's even a glitch where you can get a game over right after you killed the patrolling people! Also, while there are more than 25 levels, the layout stops updating past level 25, so you'll run into the exact same pattern endlessly until you get so bored or annoyed that you quit past that point.
  • The Last Hope: Atomic Bomb - Crypto War is an FPS game with an absolutely bizarre Excuse Plot where an ongoing struggle between mobsters, terrorists and President John Trump has shifted its focus towards cryptocurrency to locate the cryptocurrency farm and your goal is to end the senseless war once and for all. Putting that aside, the game is an incomprehensible mess — the gameplay is bland and pretty much sums up as "shoot enemies to death", the "music" changes volume according to the camera angle, the entire screen is foggy and blurry, likely to hide that the developers did not bother to add any textures to the assets, and because the screen is so dim and foggy, you can be killed by enemies out of nowhere and it's easy to get lost, there are only three levels with the final level having no enemies, and after you exit the third level, the game ends and the save game/load game buttons on the menu that shows up don't work.
• Blast! Entertainment was a joint-venture between Mastertronic Group in the United Kingdom and Disky Communications in the Netherlands. They exclusively focused on publishing licensed games based on movies, cartoons, TV shows, etc. for absurdly low prices. While not all of the contract developers they hired were awful, all of the games those companies did for Blast were, which is why people should thank Sony for making sure those titles were exclusive to Europe. All the below games (and many others made by the same company) were covered by Vinny from Vinesauce on his Shovelware Showcase here.
  • Their Beverly Hills Cop game is a completely failed attempt at an FPS with generic and dull environments, stiff animations, sloppy shooting mechanics, lack of voice acting, countless glitches, and everything is covered in graphics and sound so dated that they're practically ancient (despite being released in 2006). The stealth segments are damn near impossible due to a combination of detection leading to an instant Game Over and enemies capable of seeing you from a mile away. In addition, the developers couldn't afford Eddie Murphy's likeness (Axel Foley is now a bald white man who looks closer to Bruce Willis than Eddie Murphy), and the game isn't even available in the US (where the real-life Beverly Hills is) since Blast's titles were only released in PAL regions (not that American gamers would want to play it anyway). The only decent thing is the music, which does a good job emulating the feel of a Harold Faltermeyer song...but even then there's very little of it, with most levels having no music at all. The developers, Atomic Planet Entertainment, would later develop another horrible FPS called Daemon Summoner, which suffers from all the same problems as this game. Watch Vinny of Vinesauce play it as part of his Shovelware Showcase (and losing it) here. He later completed the game in its entirety here as his last incentive for Vinesauce's 2018 PCRF Charity streams. Everything is covered in this two-part video, though Giant Bomb takes a few swings at it as well. Joueur du Grenier also tackled it in his Xbox/PS2 video.
  • Little Britain: The Video Game, which was hailed by many UK critics as the worst game on the PS2, is a compilation of a few awful mini-games which were blatant ripoffs at best and pointless at worst. Anything you need to know about it is summed up nicely by Tennings. Call Me Kevin suffers for his art here before giving up at the second level. On top of all this, one of said mini-games, centered around the character of Dafydd ("the only gay in the village"), got the game indexed by Germany's BPjM^note Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien, or Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons and thus effectively banned there due to its homophobic overtones^note Ironically, Dafydd's actor Matt Lucas is himself gay..
    Kevin: I lived through GirlsGoGames.com, but I can't live through this! This is what will defeat me!
  • Their version of Home Alone for the PS2 has very unintuitive gameplay, horribly outdated graphics that make the game look like it came out on the Nintendo 64, very repetitive level design, and an extremely loose connection with the film. JonTron took a look at it in his Home Alone video game journey here. In fact, the Angry Video Game Nerd refused to even acknowledge it in his 2018 Christmas special (where he reviewed all the other Home Alone games alongside Macaulay Culkin himself) not because it sucked, but because it was just that disjointed from the classic duology and outdated (it was released in 2006, four years after the Continuity Reboot fourth movie).
  • One rather strange situation had Blast collaborate with Data Design Interactive (as seen below) to create An American Tail game. Released in 2007 for the PlayStation 2 only to Europe (ironically enough), Australia, and New Zealand, the game features a mishmash of other styles of video games that loosely connect to the story at hand, all of which were reskinned from DDI's other titles. The first level (and bonus level) has Fievel running around in a bubble with Super Monkey Ball-styled controls (taken from the game Habitrail Hampster Ball), only done in a more nauseating manner that could make even the most stable of gamers feel sick to their stomachs just looking at it in action. The game's other levels don't help matters much either, varying from too easy to way too hard in almost random intervals, and with the option to skip levels you could beat the game in around 40 minutes if you wanted to, like Vinny did in his stream. Combine that with only three total cutscenes lifted directly from the movie, none of which include the ending with Fievel reuniting with his family properly, and you can see why had Folding Ideas not talked about it here, this game would have been best left forgotten as well.
  • Casper and The Ghostly Trio is yet another collaboration between Blast and Data Design Interactive, and is a reskin of DDI's other platforming games like Ninjabread Man and Anubis II, complete with the same faults: horrible graphics, boring and repetitive gameplay and incredibly stiff camera.
  • Data Design also created a game based on Casper's Scare School, which is just a Mission-Pack Sequel to Casper and The Ghostly Trio, and runs on the same game engine. The only difference is the style of gameplay, where the missions involve collecting items before the time runs out and racing against other characters, neither of which are particularly fun or well made, due to the poor controls. ProtonJon sees just how terrible it gets in a Fortune Cookie stream here.
• The Code Monkeys was a company known for collaborating with Dingo Pictures to release games centered around Dingo Pictures films (exclusively for PlayStation). These games were nothing more than a mediocre activity center with puzzles and paint programs involved ^note The company constantly recycles the base for their games, as well as watching the film they were based on. Normally, companies who make these type of games would not be here because most of them aren't horrible, but what made them so notorious is the fact that Dingo Pictures makes shoddy knockoffs of more successful movies, and they have their own spot on the Animated Films subpage. Go look them up on YouTube and witness them for yourself.
  • Caddicarus took a look at Dalmatians 3, and he considers it the worst game he's ever played, even worse than Coronation Street: The Mystery of the Missing Hotpot Recipe. It's not hard to see why, either: The game takes every notorious aspect of shovelware and somehow ratchets it up to new levels of horrible. The box art is meant to look like part of Disney's 101 Dalmatians series, but features characters who never show up in the game at all. Instead, the main feature is a 45-minute video that is so badly written, animated, and voiced that it makes the Zelda CD-i trilogy look good in comparison. The rest of the game consists of mind-numbingly easy minigames without an ounce of creativity in them. To top it all off, the game is so poorly coded that it takes quite a while to load even the language-selection screen, and it spins so fast inside a PS2 that the game can never play again if left on for too long. If you're wondering, "too long" in this case more-or-less refers to watching the entire movie. There have been reported cases of PS2 consoles being completely bricked upon attempting to play one of their games. To quote a YouTube comment:
    "I actually own Animal Soccer World and let me tell you it's a piece of shit. We actually had to get a new PS2 because of it - our first one stopped working after I played it for the first time."
  • The Simpsons Skateboarding: A third-rate knockoff of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games. The game has terrible controls, with the spin command sometimes being ignored and grinds being ridiculously easy. Even with full upgrades, the boards are difficult to maneuver and move ridiculously slow. Not helping is the lack of special tricks beyond basic ones. The game also suffers from poor level design, with amateur blocky designs and unappealing graphics throughout each map. In a few cases, certain areas, such as bodies of water and power plant workers, go completely untextured. The characters themselves, while staying true to the show, have uncanny proportions that often result in the joints between their limbs being visible. The game also suffers from a vast amount of Welcome to Corneria from various NPCs, some of whom don't even have lines, as well as Kent Brockman saying the same few lines after performing tricks. Caddicarus gives the game a bashing here and here, and Square Eyed Jak suffers through the whole experience here. It was also ranked as the second worst Simpsons game of all time by Triple Jump, behind only the just as awful The Simpsons Wrestling. Nightbane Games (a YouTuber best known for playing The Simpsons Hit & Run mods) has a playthrough of the game pointing out some of the worst aspects. Particularly, he ended up rage-quitting for a few months after playing through Krustylu Studios, due to an objective that involves performing tricks in front of cameras placed ridiculously far away from each other in four minutes.
  • Shrek: Treasure Hunt: A minigame collection with horrible graphics, repetitive music, awful controls, and mediocre-at-best minigames. This game got a bashing from Caddicarus' sister, Professor Juice, here, before getting cut in half by Caddy himself when talking about the weird, off-putting world of Dreamworks video games.

D-G

• Data Design Interactive used to be a fairly decent, if polarizing, company and unlike many companies, they have their own engine, GODS^note Game Oriented Development System, the first version of it dating all the way back to 1990. However, from 2005 onwards they got a reputation as an infamous shovelware developer whose games were released on the Wii in North America, with very few differences between them. Watch Rerez chronicle and analyze the company's shallow cash grab practices in a special episode of "Just Bad Games" here. Scott The Woz also dedicated a special Christmas episode to the company and its downfall.
  • Nickelodeon Party Blast. While most of Nickelodeon's games are Cult Classics for the ages, this party game is not. On top of having rather poor Nintendo 64-level graphics for the systems it was on (Xbox and GameCube; a PlayStation 2 port was planned, but cancelled), Loads and Loads of Loading, and almost no voice acting whatsoever (aside from host CatDog) beyond generic grunting sounds from the eight playable characters, the minigames feature terrible controls, boring gameplay, annoying sound effects (which are bound to be playing constantly during the game), and are painfully easy to win. PeanutButterGamer (who placed this game 3rd on his "Top 10 Worst Party Games" list) demonstrates a food fight minigame where he won all of the rounds (except a boss fight) by hardly doing anything. Watch Brandon of Cartoon Review rip this game to shreds here.
  • Action Girlz Racing, one of DDI's several half-hearted racing games. No sense of speed, floaty controls and physics that wouldn't pass muster in a Flash game, terrible level design that only spotlights the awful driving mechanics, misleading item/power-up placement (some levels have items placed in dead-end pathways branching off the track seemingly just to waste the player's time), and a forced Totally Radical attitude. The back of the box for the PS2 version^note At least the French version thereof falsely claims the game was made "by girls, for girls", actually hiding an entirely male team using female-sounding pseudonyms. NeverChris said that pandering garbage like this is the reason why girls are stereotyped as not liking video games. It was only the third game in IGN's history to get a rating of less than 1.0 (it got a 0.8), and was called the worst game of 2008. PeanutButterGamer called this the second-worst game ever released on the Wii in his Top Ten WORST Wii Games video (being beaten only by Ninjabread Man, also by Data Design), and Space Hamster was inclined to agree when he played the game with PBG on their gameplay channel PB And Jeff.
  • DDI attempted to remake Zool but Zoo Digital Publishing (who held the rights to the original games) weren't impressed with the demo builds and refused to license it. DDI responded by recycling the prototypes into five separate Obvious Betas with different visual themes but the same gameplay and level design: Ninjabread Man, Anubis II, Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland, Rock and Roll Adventures, and Casper and The Ghostly Trio ^note (which was only released on PlayStation 2 {while the others had Wii versions} by the aforementioned Blast! Entertainment). All of them share the same issues: ugly graphics even for the early Wii era, chugging framerate despite this, shallow gameplay amounting to little more than repetitions of "collect eight things," a host of bugs and glitches (to the point that it's actually possible to skip large sections of the game by jumping out of bounds), motion controls that barely function, Hitbox Dissonance out the whazoo, and very little actual content, usually consisting of a handful of levels that can be beaten in five minutes and no story whatsoever.
  • Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing (originally unsubtly titled Barry Hatter and the Sorcerer's Broomstick), is an atrocious attempt at a "flight racer" with poor controls, with the Wii version being nigh-unplayable due to being entirely motion-controlled. Said motion controls are implemented in the most baffling way: you adjust your flight direction by tilting the Nunchuck controller, which only has a rudimentary motion sensor, while you attack by waving the Wiimote, which has more precise motion detection that would've been better for movement (said precision also means that your attacks often fail to register if you aren't spot-on with your motion). Every single level is actually the exact same Hogwarts lookalike with Superman 64-esque rings positioned slightly differently. The AI is nonexistent, as the NPC racers all move along the same predetermined path, and the tutorial fails to teach the player anything ^note (you have to get Billy to fly down a rectangular corridor toward a round goal, with no instruction other than that). On top of all the other problems it has, it recycles music from Ninjabread Man (which was released in 2005 while Billy was first released in 2006) which, while not terrible music, is not appropriate for either game. PeanutButterGamer played this game alongside other shovelware Wii games in a Twitch stream (highlights from his playthrough of it can be found here), and found it so bad on so many levels that he felt that he needed to go back to his Top Ten Worst Wii Games list and put it above the aforementioned Action Girlz Racing.
  • The Tonka Licensed Games from the late 90s have a small Cult Classic status from people who fondly recalled playing them as young children, but Tonka Space Station, released in 2000 for PC and the PlayStation, tells a different tale. While the visuals are pretty decent for the time, the metagame suffers a drastic case of Uncertain Audience, way too complicated for the game's target audience to understand, yet wrapped in minigames that would quickly bore anyone older than seven. Despite being billed for "ages 5 and up", the game proper is a strategy game in which you have to play minigames to raise very nondescript bar graphs up as high as you can, an element that is given zero explanation anywhere outside the game manual, behind walls and walls of text no 5-year-old should reasonably be expected to comprehend. And while the expectation is that the player is supposed to play an equal balance of all the games to raise the graphs high, the reality is because you also have to deal with resources that drain very quickly and can only be recovered in two of the eight minigames, you will be playing those two to kingdom come while the others only get played once or twice. The end goal of the game is to rank all the way up, which requires superfluous amounts of Level Grinding inexcusable for a children's game, and you can be demoted if you don't do well enough (and heaven help you if the "Boss Module" mission appears, because your rank may go down even if you complete said mission), which is a very strange design choice for a Tonka game. IGN gave the game a 3/10, calling it "a prime model for what's wrong with kid's games", with most user scores being similarly critical.
• Delta 4 Interactive (D4i) was a British development house that mainly developed text-adventure games for home computers. In The '90s however, with publisher On-Line Entertainment, they created some particularly terrible point-and-click adventure games that were only available for the short-lived Commodore Amiga CDTV and Microsoft DOS.
  • The Town with No Name was released on Amiga's CDTV platform as well as the Amiga CD32 and has been described by The Angry Video Game Nerd as "like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, but worse." While the hideous graphics and animation that resemble a particularly crappy early-2000s Flash cartoon combined with the similarly wretched (and sometimes drowned out by hilariously tinny-sounding music) voice acting qualify as So Bad, It's Good, the gameplay itself consists of little more than navigating menus and clicking on points of interest at intermittent points (with most of the things you can do in those buildings being completely inconsequential, since you need only enter and exit buildings to progress the minimalist and craptastic story). Plot progression is based on winning duels against bandits, with one bandit requiring you to play cards against him, beat him, then shoot him before he can shoot you, none of which is made readily apparent. There are no save points or checkpoints at all; if you die, you have to start over from the very beginning, making the game an absolute nightmare to play through, and is frankly not worth enduring even for the hilariously awful cutscenes. Delta 4 Interactive folded not long after this game's release, and the game's developers regret making it. You can watch how messed up it is right here. Retsupurae also tore the game apart. Interestingly, Brutal Moose would have considered this So Bad, It's Good instead if it weren't for the fact that it can be very tedious as well with one-hit kills that make you start over at the very start of the game, as displayed in his review here.
  • Psycho Killer (not to be confused with the Talking Heads song of the same name) is a point-and-click horror adventure where you "move" by clicking on three arrow keys on the bottom-left side of the screen. While The Town With No Name had comedy to lessen the horrible effect, this takes itself seriously with a boring and annoying British narrator, terrible sounds, gameplay that has you wandering aimlessly until something happens, and poor-quality filtered pictures and scenes (which, admittedly, isn't as insane as Plumbers Don't Wear Ties) that don't even take up the entire disk memory. ^note (Psycho Killer takes up about 74 MB of space. The Town With No Name in comparison takes up 422 MB.) Sure, there might not have been enough memory needed in 1992 for some companies to truly take advantage of CD technology, but other companies at least tried to fill the disc up to at least 100 MB of content. It especially doesn't help that in the review Brutal Moose did for the DOS version, he completed the game in nine minutes and nine seconds, 5:23 of which involved him being stuck on loading screens. It fails as a horror game because there's no atmosphere to keep gameplay tense (and the aforementioned load times certainly do not help), the player character monologues everything in a flat, uninterested voice, and the killer just flat out isn't scary. Indeed, death scenes either involve him running towards you like a cartoon character or him spouting a terrible one-liner in his faux-Darth Vader voice as he has you cornered. A sequel was planned but never materialized due to Delta 4 Interactive closing its doors. Like The Town with No Name, Psycho Killer also received the Retsupurae treatment.
  • Chaos in Andromeda: Eyes of the Eagle is an even more obscure game by the same publisher (though unlike the previous two, D4i had nothing to do with this one). While it's a "full blown" cRPG unlike the two aforementioned games, it suffers a lot from poor development foresight with unintuitive mechanics, Guide Dang It! moments galore, a party system which is useless since all the party members you can acquire are Action Bombs which you have to control manually even out of combat (meaning you will move four times slower with a full party), and a ton of ways to make the game impossible, including a fascinatingly bad reverse Beef Gate that prevents you from backtracking and getting items you would need to proceed but left in a previous area. See a review by the cRPG Addict here.
• Digital Homicide Studios ^note (also known by aliases Imminent Uprising, ECC Games {for "Every Click Counts"}, Game Portal Publishing, Micro Strategic Game Design, and Loot Toot Games) was an indie studio run by two brothers, James and Robert Romine, notorious for flooding the Steam store with low-quality games containing assets that were either cobbled together from a Unity template or plagiarized from other games. The studio also had a hostile attitude toward any sort of criticism, attempting to sue James Sterling for almost $11 million over their highly-negative video of The Slaughtering Grounds. They later tried to sue about 100 other Steam users critical of their products for $18 million (evidence here), even attempting to subpoena Valve for the defendants' personal details, which resulted in Valve cutting ties with them and delisting all of their games. James Sterling described the entire legal debacle in a February 2017 Jimquisition video.
  • The Slaughtering Grounds, the game that drew Sterling's attention in the first place, was an abysmal 2014 zombie FPS with numerous bugs such as a plane flying sideways (with sound desynced, to boot), a hugely inconsistent and ugly (and sometimes stolen) art style with both mummies and zombies in the same vicinity for no adequately explained reason, intensely irritating looped music, and inexplicable design decisions like picking up ammo only replenishing your currently equipped gun. The game's provision of ammo is also stingy at best, which can leave you helpless against a conga line of zombies that you can't outrun. When the game was first released, the first official screenshot on the Steam page was of Digital Homicide's release page for the game on Steam, with an arrow pointing to a resubmission reason that one of them had filled in, revealing that they knowingly released the game in an unfinished state without the Early Access program.
  • Temper Tantrum was a game in which Little Johnny destroys the interior of his house over being sent to bed. The graphics are eye-searing, the enemies don't belong in the same universe as Johnny or the interiors (because, predictably, the assets are stolen), the controls are terrible, the camera swings around and clips through walls because you can't control it, the music sounds like something out of a Popcorn Arcade game, and destroying multiple objects results in the same annoying sound effect over and over again. The duo went on to release Temper Tantrum 2, which is the same thing but with one or two new levels at most, with none of the flaws corrected.
  • Paranormal Psychosis: For starters, the graphics look terrible, the text in the controls list and the mission information have typos, and walking speed is tremendously slow with no sprint option. No ammo counter or even a proper HUD is supplied, so there is no way to know how many bullets are left unless the player counted the total bullets in a previous playthrough and are counting the bullets used in the current playthrough. Upon each death, the player is sent back to the start, with no ability to save the game; this allows the werewolf that spawns nearby to spawncamp the player if they are unlucky enough to attract the werewolf to the spawn point. The game is rife with clipping issues. Finally, the game has annoying critters that jump on the player's screen many times during play.
• disfact's early Touhou Project fangames (which were actually sold for money, unlike most fangames) were not up to snuff:
  • Resurrection of Heaven's Liquor. Enemy fire is an afterthought at best—a damning flaw for a Bullet Hell shooter, let alone one based on the franchise most famous for them. The music (especially Stage 1) isn't up to anybody's standards, much less Zun's. Its characters are broken and have worse artwork than even the first few games; one of them (Aya, if you're wondering) is both a playable character and the final boss. And you originally had to pay ¥300 for it, when much better fangames were available for free (disfact did later release it for free on the developer's site). Its lone saving grace is the inclusion of the original games' Extra Bosses as player characters and including the vengeful spirit Mima^note Spoiler-tagged due to being a surprise character in the main games as an Extra Boss. Here's a complete Let's Play from a member of the Maidens of the Kaleidoscope forum.
  • Astronomical Few Minute is a slight improvement — the characters are no long broken. But most of its predecessor's flaws are still there, like the bad music and questionable firing patterns. On top of that, the two playable characters (Eirin and Utsuho) only get three stages each. While they do have different routes, only the bosses differ — the stages themselves are the same. And for some reason, in the final stage you'll face Aya (again) and whichever playable character you didn't choose. This one cost ¥500 before being Rereleased for Free.
• Dragon Co. was a Chinese developer who mostly developed games for hire from the Famicom and Mega Drive, and most of their games fit this trope quite well:
  • Starting with their Famicom titles, their Felix the Cat game was a Porting Disaster of the Hudson Soft game of the same name, which was released on the same console six years earlier. The physics are shoddily programmed, the controls are poor and choppy, the story makes no sense, and the music is a beepy mess. It's also worth noting that all of their Famicom games use the same engine.

H-M

• In the late 90s, Activision had a subsidiary called Head Games. They released several games under the "Extreme" label (including two sequels to Extreme Paintbrawl) that were simply horrible.
  • According to a letter to the editors of PC Gamer— (which gave it 6%, the worst score up to that time), the original Extreme Paintbrawl was produced in two weeks on a rushed schedule. Among many other mistakes, it has one of the worst examples of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard that one could ever find. What's funny about this is that it was originally shipped without any AI at all. If you wanted to play against any bots that would do anything more than run into a wall, then you had to download the patch when it came out a month later. As for the music—specifically and particularly the complete chaos that is Track 6—YouTube commenters have described it roughly as power metal for people with ADHD, or a better fit for a game called "EXTREME BARNYARD BRUTALITY 3000" — though, that particular track may come across as So Bad, It's Good to some.
  • Extreme Boards & Blades is considered by Lazy Game Reviews to be the worst game he has ever played, worse than Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. It has unusable controls, awful graphics, an annoying soundtrack laughably described as ska and a few barebones game modes. It gets nothing right, not even the cover which misspells its sponsor (Mountain Dew) in the description while the logo is right above it.
  • Extreme Wintersports is a truly unplayable mess. It suffers from most of the same flaws as Boards and Blades, except replace the boards and blades with skis, snowmobiles and snowboards, add in bland voiceovers, in conjunction with terrible framerate that Lazy Game Reviews (who broke into a laughing fit when he first played the game and noticed the abysmal framerate before cranking down the graphics options to make it somewhat more playable) described as "being measured in seconds per frame", even on high-end hardware of the time. To top it all off, most, if not all of the game's assets were plagiarized from Snow Wave Avalanche, which came out a year prior. Despite coming out a year after that game and adding in snowmobiles and skiing, the game runs far worse than its "predecessor" and feels like an Obvious Beta.
• Killjoy Games is a developer of only two of the worst games Steam ever had to offer. As Dark Lord Jadow 1 put it, “There has never existed a more accurate name for a company!”
  • Air Control (the Steam one, not the iOS one) was supposedly a flight simulator where the player switches between the pilot and the flight attendant. It's easily one of the most buggy, unstable, and unfinished pieces of software on this entire site. Instructions overlap each other, buttons often have to be clicked multiple times to register, the mouse cursor and first-person camera are both run at the same time (resulting in your character waving his head around as you try and close out of dialogue boxes)... the list goes on. It's so lazily programmed that at one point the game tells you how to work around a bug, in-game. The game somehow forgets to clear global variables when you exit to the main menu, which means if you try and switch from "casual" to "realistic" mid-session the game will crash and you have to force quit from the task manager! The developers responded to negative reviews pointing out how often the game crashes with single-sentence rebuttals like "Your computer isn't strong enough." And to top it all off, almost all the art assets are stolen without credit, up to and including a safety instruction video from a real-life airline company! It's so bad, it was "rewarded" with Gamespot's third-ever 1/10 score. Air Control was considered so abysmal that many believed its existence to be a satirical joke, a deliberately unplayable trainwreck created to demonstrate how easy it can be to deceive people foolish enough to not preview video games via video before making the decision to buy them. Markiplier suffered through it, Dark Lord Jadow 1 had more than a few things to say about it, and James Sterling also talks about it here.
  • Zen Fish Sim follows in the footsteps of the aforementioned Air Control by being irredeemably broken in all aspects. The "gameplay" merely consists of advancing through extremely linear levels (which have no collision detection with the scenery), and getting booted back to the main menu at the end. Said main menu also doubles as the main way of experiencing the game's narm-filled and poorly-written story (one scene shows fish burning to death). Add to this copyrighted music used without permission, tons of factual innacuracies when one of the game's selling points is "you can learn about the wide variety of the creatures of the ocean" (one level is a gallery of different marine creatures, and clicking on the "sperm whale" button brings up a sea urchin), and a $10 asking price, and you have one of the worst things to come to Steam ever... well, "had", since the publisher yanked the game from the service almost as quickly as it spawned.
• Lightning Games Studios is a Brazilian indie studio disguised as a Japanese indie studio. It makes games using stolen assets and with no attention to gameplay at all. Much of their library is prominently credited to a mysterious man called Gilson B. Pontes; it is currently unknown if he is real or a pseudonym, but it's fairly telling when one game's opening sequence has over ten individual credits for him. The flaws are so consistent between games that James Sterling eventually coined the term "Gilsonlike" to describe them.
  • Solbrain: Knight of Darkness (no relation to the Cult Classic tokusatsu series Tokkyuu Shirei Solbrain) is a horrible third-person hack-and-slash game made by Lightning Games Studios before Gilson B. Pontes splattered his name everywhere on their games where you can only wander aimlessly around a barren landscape and fight waves of enemies, with no dialogue or character interaction whatsoever. If you can bear the pain of playing through it, you have to go through the whole game in one sitting, as there's no save function. This Kotaku article notes that not only does Solbrain consist of enough asset thievery to rival Limbo of the Lost, but the same developer had previously released multiple shovelware games on the short-lived PlayStation Mobile platform (for PS Vita and Android), with all of the same problems as the PS4 release. Cornshaq was one of the very few people who were unfortunate enough to play this game before its removal, and he without question thought it was 2016's worst video game.
  • Spear of Destiny: The Kaiseki (not to be confused with the Wolfenstein game), the first Lightning Games Studios release to (copiously) credit Gilson B. Pontes, is even worse, consisting of trudging through a faux Wide-Open Sandbox to gather a series of relics in search of the titular Spear of Destiny. The game's interface and mechanics are very reminiscent of Dark Souls, but poorly balanced - blocking doesn't work as intended, and the basic enemies take out large chunks of health with a single hit. You also have no way to heal, so eventually the combat will whittle down your health to nothing, and the lack of mid-level checkpoints has you losing a lot of progress with each death. Gameplay boils down to a cycle of traveling to the next MacGuffin and getting thrust into forced combat with the next enemy. Going off the beaten path gives no benefit except the discovery that Pontes forgot to program the water to behave differently from solid ground. If you somehow manage to beat the game, there's No Ending; it just goes straight to the credits. Here's a playthrough from James Sterling, and a full playthrough.
  • Sword of Fortress: The Onomuzim and Samael: The Legacy of Ophiuchus, the latter released as far as 2019, shows that Lightning Game Studios "isn't giving up" making such crap, which suffers the same problems as the Kaiseki above, and both also respectively reviewed by James . Caddicarus covers these and Spear of Destiny: The Kaiseki here, noting they were the most expensive games of the collection of games he covered there, and calling Pontes "the Tommy Wiseau of video games," as much for his myriad credits for the games as it is for his utter incompetence as a game developer.
  • Shadow the Ronin: The Revenge to the Samurai and Taishogun: Rise of Emperor, both released in The New '20s for the Playstation 4, continue to be more of the same garbage that first started from the Spear of Destiny. Any sort of improvements given to these two games are really minor by comparison, and even then, they show some similar problems from previous games can always come back anyway for some unknown, God-forsaken reason. However, these games also showed how Gilson can be rather vindictive as a person if he's angered enough by someone's reviews, as James Sterling went from sheer bewilderment from what Gilson's done to almost praising Gilson's efforts of improvement to accepting the madness that Gilson provided to being genuinely pissed off at Gilson for trying to remove their channel with an almost clever method of copyright takedowns against Sterling's YouTube channel (to the point of having a second video talking about it) to calling Gilson a pathetic coward for their actions in 2021.
  • Ashigaru: The Last Shogun^note which, by the way, is an egregious Word Salad Title that betrays a total lack of research; it's like calling a game set in the German Empire Einjährig-Freiwilliger: The Last Kaiser. Or, in this case, The Last Fuhrer, as the heroic faction is led by Takeda Shingen and the villainous faction is led by Tokugawa Ieyasu; Shingen died years before the Tokugawa Shogunate was founded. has all the flaws of previous "Gilsonlikes", but has one extra that makes the combat shallower while amplifying the Fake Difficulty: no dodge or block buttons. It was in James Sterling's video on this game that they coined the word "Gilsonlike", as it sufficiently demonstrates that each of Pontes' offerings is just as inept as past and likely future offerings, and the one change Ashigaru offered from previous games was detrimental to the gameplay. Pontes once again filed a copyright claim against them, but with significantly less catastrophic results and with the video soon restored.
    James Sterling: How do you take a game that's already threadbare and bereft of content or features and somehow scale it back? How did Gilson find corners in his game to cut?! You can't cut corners on a fucking sphere!
• Ludia is a Canadian game developer formerly owned by Fremantle Media, whose goal was to make video games on the Wii based on every popular American game show (except Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, both of which have their games made by parent company Sony). They distribute through Ubisoft, which also ports the games to other consoles and iOS devices. One problem: they don't know anything about the game shows they're trying to emulate. These games also use their own proprietary avatar system, not Miis; had they taken advantage of the existing infrastructure, maybe the rest of the games would've been better. They also have a serious case of bad timing, releasing their Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? game the week before the actual show changed formats. Notably, every single one of the following games in this section have all been subject to a "Quick Look" video by Giant Bomb, in which the guys more or less tear each one apart; links are listed with each game.
  • The $1,000,000 Pyramid uses the classic (1982-91) logo, but the game itself is an adaptation of the 2002-04 revival. The opponent AI is almost nonexistent, maybe scoring more than one point per subject. Gameplay is slow, which is bad since on-air Pyramid is traditionally very fast-paced. The Winner's Circle has no shots of the big pyramid while you're playing, and gives you $1,000,000 every time you clear it. Game show fan Tim "Loogaroo" Connolly tears it a new one here, the Wiiviewer expresses his disappointment here, and here's the Giant Bomb Quick Look.
  • Family Feud 2012, unlike the others, is an Xbox 360 game and uses the console's avatars rather than its own, but still manages to be equally bad. The fictional host, "Sparky Whitmore", is dreadful to say the least; the onscreen keyboard practically gives you the correct answers with its predictive text (if it doesn't show up in the choices after two letters, it's not going to be correct); there's long gaps between every action; the avatar animations look wooden; and the parser is worse than the broken one in the SNES version (it somehow interprets "Bike" as "Horseback"). Here's the Giant Bomb Quick Look.
  • The Hollywood Squares was another victim. There are only four actual celebrities in the grid (Martin Mull, Kathy Griffin, Brad Garrett, and Jeffrey Tambor), and they all take center square which means you only play with one at a time. This leaves the rest of the squares filled with generic people, which removes half the point of the original game show. But most of the magic of the original show was in the celebrities giving joke answers, aka "Zingers", and then responding with their actual answer. In the video game, you're only given straight answers; no Zingers at all (aside from the four aforementioned celebs, whose Zingers are seen with their actual answers in video clips from the series taken from at least seven years prior). With neither celebs nor Zingers, you're simply crossing trivia with Tic-Tac-Toe and might as well play Tic-Tac-Dough at that rate. Here's the Quick Look by Giant Bomb, and here's the Wiiviewer's review. Game Grumps also inadvertently showcased another massive flaw in the game when they ended up playing it twice (the second time having forgotten that they'd already played the game): A viewer was quick to point out that they got the exact same questions in the exact same order both times.
  • Press Your Luck 2010. The avatars move in a rather uncanny way; the Big Board cycles between three static formats, one of which has no Whammies; there's no prizes but a generic "trip" that Big Bucks will direct to in Round 1 and massively breaks Move One Space; the AI routinely answers questions wrong; and both the music and sound effects are inaccurate. What makes this game truly belong here is that a Ludia representative asked the fans for input and "Dismantle" (as some call it) forced C&D orders on superior fan games. The DS version was worse, with unskippable Whammy animations and a Big Board that was horrendous in layout (all over the place) and appearance (the cash values were plain white text on ever-changing colors). Fremantle, it seems, has no clean copy of the original PYL theme music in their archives, as evidenced by this game and the more recent Facebook app. Their solution was "Flash", a piece of stock music otherwise known as the show's 1983 pilot theme, which sounds vaguely similar to that used on the series. The PS3 version fixed the sounds and had its own version of the series' theme music, plus added a bunch of actual prizes, but still managed to be lackluster overall. Here's the Giant Bomb Quick Look, and Loogaroo points out nearly every way it did disservice to the classic show here.
  • The Price Is Right (2008 and 2010) has a simple Game-Breaker - a limited prize pool, about 50 Showcases, and a bad randomizer, along with a rather poor Showcase Showdown wheel that seems to favor the AI frequently. It turns the game show game into "Memory": play it for a few hours, write down every prize's price, and memorize the list (or Google for said list) and remember when that prize or Showcase comes up in any game. Other Price video games at least randomize prizes so they don't appear in one sole game every time with some digit randomization to throw off memorizers. The games can't even be arsed to use the then-current set, with the first game giving the overwhelming impression of having been delayed for two years. One major problem with the 2010 version is that Three Strikes Mode no longer gives a Strike for losing at the Showcase Showdown (which had been a big criticism with the 2008 game), which means that you can go on forever by having a price list. Here's Giant Bomb's Quick Look at the 2010 version.
• Micro Genius has three known games under their belts:
  • Aladdin II, which is worse than the official NES port of Aladdin, which was already bad to begin with. (Thankfully, there was a half-decent, if cut-down, port by Super Game.) The Game Over screen makes this game look even worse. Just take a look at it.◊ Kakeyo Silverton provided some commentary on this horrible trainwreck of a game.
  • Thunder Warrior. Repetitive level design, low enemy variety, clunky controls, and a difficult-to-aim projectile attack don't help with the large amount of Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders you face. It seems to pirate some of its content from other games, such as the map screen from Castlevania and the HUD from Super Mario Bros. 3. Catchy music, though.
• Mystique, an offshoot of porn studio Caballero Home Video specializing in, well, you guessed it, pornographic video games for the Atari 2600. They were pure Fetish Retardant - making porn on a system that can't even make dragons◊ not look like blocky, green ducks isn't a great idea, and the games themselves featured scenarios that ranged from absurd to decidedly unsexy. It doesn't help that they all had bare-bones, repetitive gameplay. The company went bankrupt following The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, but their library was bought by Playaround (see below). Here's a complete list of their games — they're all horribly exploitative and have all been hugely controversial. Mystique's raunchy antics have mostly accounted for why Atari tightened up security on their 7800 by requiring all licensed developers to have their games digitally signed by Atari, as they were concerned about pornographers exploiting the 7800's more advanced graphical capabilities.
  • The plot of Custer's Revenge is as follows - General George Armstrong Custer, depicted as a man wearing nothing but a cavalry hat, boots, and a bandanna while sporting a visible erection, must dodge falling arrows and randomly appearing cacti in order to reach the other side of the screen, where he intends to rape ^note (the game's designer insists she's a "willing participant") a naked, well-endowed Native American woman bound to a post. The only "noteworthy" part of the game (its early use of nudity) is done in by its extremely low resolution and color depth, and the publishers picked this game to use the real graphics on the packaging. There's also the offensive premise of General Custer raping a Native American woman, or that you shouldn't bother with graphics this blocky for this purpose. The AVGN played all of these games mentioned above as a part of a video he did on Atari Porn Games, with Custer's Revenge talked about first. However, as Seanbaby best put it:
    Custer: Gentlemen, today's operation will be a unique one. We will go deep into injun territory with a full entourage of cavalry, establish a tight perimeter, have the infantry remove my pants and underpants, and then I will attempt to force sex on an Indian girl under heavy enemy fire. Are there any objections?
    Custer's Military Adviser: Yes, general. Several.
  • Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em, a game where you control two nude women who move back and forth across the bottom of a building on screen, catching semen from a masturbating man who is hiding on top for points. Every time you get 69 points, you will get an extra life.

N-Z

• Ninja Pig Studios would have been just another bog-standard Wii U eShop Shovelware developer - one with a considerable fanbase, at that - if not for its rampant and continuous plagiarism. While unoriginal shovelware is nothing new, Ninja Pig takes it one step farther by using copyrighted assets without permission in their paid games. The fans of their games tend to be young and, thus, not know and/or care about this, but from those who do know they have received a large amount of scathing criticism. The games themselves aren't very good either.
  • IQ Test: A $5 game that completely ripped off a free mobile game called The Moron Test, right down to its lined-paper background and rubber ducky motif, as GameTrailers' Kyle Bosman found out in this video.
  • Meme Run, which is an endless runner game with scores of "dank" memes (including copyrighted assets ripped right from sources like Google Images and Reddit) bombarding the player. Most of them are outright obnoxious (the screen shakes a lot, and there are power-ups that clutter the screen with nonsense and may trigger annoying sound effects like a loud "wombo combo" shout) and get repeated a lot - for a game titled Meme Run, there's actually very little variety in the memes. The gameplay itself is unpolished and gets repetitive fast. Meme Run eventually became one of the few games to ever be removed from the eShop for its aforementioned unauthorized use of copyrighted assets. Making its case all the more complicated, Carlos Ramirez, creator of the "Trollface" image (one of the stolen assets) politely asked Ninja Pig to give him credit, but Ninja Pig flat-out ignored him.
  • Bigley's Revenge ^note (based on a Super Smash Bros. fandom inside joke about how Ridley is too big to be a viable playable character (an inside joke that was killed once Ridley did become playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate), specifically a version of the meme from Miiverse known as Bigley). The game is a First-Person Shooter that looks like something an amateur would do in a few hours in Unity, and simply consists of shooting at various characters that attack from different directions. The only map is a small square platform with purchasable guns in the middle, and like Meme Run there are lots of obnoxious loud sound effects.
• Taiwanese company NTDEC, short for the NinTenDo Electronic Company, which predictably got them sued by Nintendo.
  • One of their works was Fighting Hero, a horrible knockoff of the already dubious Street Fighter. The game has some of the worst controls in any fighting game, as they're incredibly unresponsive and button mashing is rendered useless because the player will constantly interrupt his attacks while doing so. The computer opponents are also ridiculously hard as they'll block most of your attacks.
  • They also ended up making the games on the Caltron 6-in-1 cartridge (Caltron being an alias for NTDEC) and while the games on it aren't awful, they're mostly just mediocre clones of other games. After Caltron released the game, it became defunct and sold the game to Myriad. And it, as well, suffered the same fate. The AVGN examined the cartridge in his third Bible Games video and concluded that one of the games in particular, supposedly based off of Adam and Eve, was a direct clone of Balloon Fight (and by extension, Joust).
• Panzer Gaming Studios has built up a reputation as one of Steam’s most offensive scammers. Despite founder Jason Welge having a B.A. in Video Game Art & Design from Westwood College Online and at one point earning a $10,000 grant from the state of Wisconsin, Panzer’s entire library consists of recycled Unreal Engine 4 assets poorly optimized to have nothing but lackluster framerates and excessive motion blur. Liam Lambert of Gizorama calls Welge "Steam's Weirdest Scam Artist", given his supposed enthusiasm and love of gaming despite repeated denials, failed Kickstarters, and other offenses such as the following:
  • Left To Rot was a zombie-apocalypse game which, even with the title, made the developer's intentions clear. The project was an ambitious^note (supposedly going to be an FPS-RPG hybrid) failed Kickstarter Campaign complete with an awkward pitch of Welge expressing his love for games in front of Gears of War and Megan Fox posters. The trailer also included the project’s alpha build, complete with a framerate of 3 FPS. Retsupurae riffed on this pitch here.
  • Built from recycled assets from Left To Rot, Time Ramesside (also known as A New Reckoning) is plagued with Game Breaking Bugs from the very first level, including but not limited to absurdly overpowered enemies ^note (enemies seemingly cannot be killed by any number of bullets and randomly teleport directly to the player character's location), clipping issues, and many crashes. The graphics are dated, highly inconsistent, and at worst incomplete and buggy, and slowdowns are frequent. Level design and general gameplay are equally patchwork, and misspellings abound, even in the trailer itself. Even worse, the game is full of stolen material: Unchanged store-bought Unreal Engine assets make up much of the environment, causing the inconsistent graphics, the intro video is lifted from an Unreal 4 tech demo (logo and all), and at one point music ripped from the Django Unchained trailer used without permission. This video shows off some of the bugs of this game. Funhaus have also played this here, as has James Sterling here, the latter saying that it has somehow become worse'' after coming out of Early Access.
  • The supposed sequel to Time Ramesside. X-17, received even more attention due to being declared worse. Complete with the same stolen assets, low framerates, and blur, the game was seen as an ugly, chugging, confusing mess involving an invasion by a race of nude aliens, a different race of aliens (i.e. more stolen Unreal assets) most likely stuck to level geometry, and random civilian models with eyes and jaws freakishly poking out of their faces. The game itself says in its credits that it’s a “Pre-Early Access” build, despite it being sold for $17 on Steam as of this writing. Many players effectively came to the same conclusion around its release, including James Sterling, whose video rightfully asks “What In The Absolute Fuck?” AllShamNoWow's playthrough shows even more cringeworthy anomalies: a level spending two minutes in unexplained slow-motion (with stolen music from James Blunt), baby dolls with M-16's on their back as enemies, a lead character voiced through text-to-speech, and several dance sequences set to copyrighted music, like the leads doing the Twist and Chicken Dance, and random Nazi Zombies doing Thriller.
• Phoenix Games (no relation to the tabletop game publisher with the same name) released a few Minigame Games from Aqua Pacific that were not based around Dingo's movies, as with those ones, they were bad in their own right. On top of being horrendously buggy and badly performing like the Dingo-based games and doing absolutely nothing to improve them, they also included movies that do nothing to improve the experience beyond a good laugh. On top of having mediocre animation for the time that they were released, they are poorly written, horribly voiced (many simply having a single (very bored) man doing all of the voices), and full of awkwardly-written dialogue and dull characters. Like Dingo's games they were also presented as video game adaptations of Disney movies (via covers featuring hideously malformed CGI versions of the Disney versions of the included story). Some of the most notorious examples include:
  • Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys. Here we have a shameless rip-off of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and it doesn't even do that right; the dwarves are replaced with generic boys, one of them having Blackface. Aside from that, the story itself is very dull, with little conflict aside from the inevitable poison apple (a problem that's resolved in the span of a minute). Tennings has ripped this movie apart in this review, as has Caddicarus, with the latter review saying in terms of overall effort put onto a PS2 disc in 2007^note the game for the disc uses only 300Mb out of 4.7Gb of data, or around 6.4% of data that could have been used for something better, it's the worst "game" he's ever seen for it. Moreover, it is actually a bad PS2 port of an obscure early 2000s educational Polish PC game (you could tell by the animated cursor is still present in the PS2 port) called "Królewna Śnieżka" made by Longsoft Multimedia as part of their Familijny CD-Romek series whose original PC version made it to the Czech Republic as well.
  • Their take on Peter Pan is extremely lazy even by their standards. The obligatory cartoon is a complete mess. The narration and all the voice-overs (including the girls) are done by only one man who narrates in the most monotone voice imaginable and makes no effort to make anyone sound distinct from each other. Additionally, the voice-over is horribly dubbed in, leading to multiple instances of characters moving their mouths without actually saying anything. The plot introduces multiple elements that go nowhere, skips from one plot point to the other like it's on a sugar rush, the moral of the story is tacked-on and makes no sense in relation to the story, and the showdown with Captain Hook is an absolute joke. Caddicarus also reviewed this short, alongside Alex of I Hate Everything, here.
  • Pinocchio is their take on...well, the title should make it obvious. Much like their take on Peter Pan, the obligatory cartoon is almost hilarious in its ineptness. The stilted dialogue is once again all done by one man who sounds just as bored as the one in Peter Pan (his voice for the Blue Fairy has to be seen (or rather heard) to be believed). The dialogue is often hokey, with such gems as "Ooohkay, giiiirls and boooooiis!", "Here you little dibble, give my wig back!", and "Now I'm turning donkey!" The opening and closing narration is pretentious and makes no sense. The songs are awful and often have unintelligible lyrics (especially the opening songs sung by the toys). Pinocchio himself isn't a sympathetic character in the slightest, behaving like a Spoiled Brat almost the entire time outside of occasional and very forced acts of kindness. Most glaring is that in the end, he doesn't even stay a real boy; the Blue Fairy turns Pinocchio into a real boy, but then he voluntarily chooses to stay a puppet for no explained reason (he just says that "puppet's just the most"). To top it all off, the cartoon ends very abruptly as though it ran out of time to tell the story: After Pinocchio leaves the Blue Fairy, the rest of Pinocchio's story is simply summarized in a song that lasts less than a minute. In the end, the entire game, cartoon included, is a horrible mess if it isn't just considered a hilariously awful romp. As with most of the other of these "games" on this list, Caddicarus has also reviewed this one.
• Rainmaker Software (no relation to Rainmaker Entertainment, thankfully) is a fairly infamous developer, probably because they only ever made two '90s FPS games for DOS that definitely belong here.
  • Isle of the Dead is a strong contender for the worst FPS of all time. For starters, it's filled with flat and uninteresting levels and horrendously drawn 2D enemy sprites even by the standards of early first-person shooters. Right from the start, the game bombards you with enemies which can tear you to pieces in seconds and respawn right after you leave the room. From there, you've got maze-like stages, enemies that are ridiculously annoying to kill, Pixel Hunt sections where huge chunks of interesting scenery (like a crashed plane with multiple crushed bodies scattered about) are deemed "irrelevant", as well as a complete lack of mercy invincibility or damage indicators (meaning you'll die at seemingly random). The graphics and sound are horrible - with nothing to tell parts of the map apart, navigation becomes far too difficult. There are some static screens where you interact (similar to adventure games), but in these you are often clueless about what you are supposed to do and can easily miss crucial items. To top it all off, quitting the game is referred to as "the coward's way out" and punishes you with a graphic depiction of a shotgun suicide. The sad part is that the game is supposed to have point-and-click adventure elements as well, which sounds like a great idea in theory. But the game could not decide which genre to pick, thus making a complete mess of a game. And the ending is a "The End... Or Is It?"-style Sequel Hook that will never come to life. Brutalmoose says more about it here.
  • Nerves of Steel, is an even worse FPS with less interesting levels (mostly square grey rooms and corridors with no discernable details), even worse graphics, consisting of muddy textures are so dark and blurry you can't begin to make out what they're meant to represent, and a complete inability to do doors in-engine. In other words... you just have to walk into the wall and hope for the best, since door effects were beyond the engine's capabilities, being little more than walls with no collision detection. The main menu is a laggy, frustrating slog; enemies don't walk so much as snap between tiles with no regard for the level layout, meaning they can go right through walls as they shoot at you; and the story is a rather childish and brain-dead "kill the leader of North Korea for 'MURICA" affair.
• Even if we don't go into its ties to the Neo-Nazi group National Alliance, there's no denying that Resistance Records cannot make a game to save its life. Its entire output (all FPS games) has been compared unfavorably to Daikatana. None of its games seem to have ever passed the beta phase at best.
  • Ethnic Cleansing, where you play one of three generic white nationalists (including a Captain Ersatz of Timothy McVeigh) slaughtering his way through hordes of racist caricatures in order to stop a Jewish plot to Take Over the World. The game's untextured graphics look worse than games made six years prior, its unconfigurable controls map SZXC as the move buttons instead of WASD, its setup was discredited when Half-Life came out, and its draw distance is ridiculously short. The collision detection is very off, and the AI is only slightly above shooting-gallery level. The one weapon (an assault rifle that looks like a drunk carved an M-16 out of concrete) has no recoil, and there's only one non-boss enemy type, which is reskinned three times. There's only two levels, only one of which actually works, and the game ends on an A Winner Is You note. The game crashes often, several functions (including the save system and the options) do nothing, and the sound is very poorly coded.
  • They then made a couple of spiritual successors: White Law and the two-part ZOG's Nightmare. They're not much better than the original - some basic touchups (more weapons, graphics that take less squinting to deem passable) in exchange for a load time of nearly two minutes (sometimes more) between levels, unbelievably pitiful framerates, and various game breaking bugs.
• Sabec LTD is a regular on the Nintendo Switch, making mostly basic instrument simulators or board games, like Piano, Chess, and a calculator. Their action games often perform poorly, like Neverlast, yet most of them cost 10 dollars when they aren't on sale, even the calculator. Some people, like Mini Nindie Review or Ant Dude would even say that paying 2 dollars is too much for them.
  • When it comes to their actual games, Sabec was hired to create a remake of the classic 1982 Popeye arcade game, which upon release was widely regarded as an absolute joke. Gameplay is much like the original arcade game, only on a 3D plane, but the similarities, and the fun, stop there. The objects Olive Oyl throws spawn infinitely and there is no penalty for missing any, you have to go out of your way to avoid being one-shoted by Bluto/Brutus and other enemies and obstacles, and spinach constantly respawns, draining much of the challenge from the original game. The only real challenge comes from Bluto and the vulture steadily getting faster and teleporting next to you whenever the camera isn't on them, which will eventually combine to end your game - not helped by you having only three lives, no checkpoints or save options, and no way to earn more lives. The presentation is very barebones and bland, and there are only three maps in the whole game^note (the most done to make them seem distinct from each other is adding different weather conditions, which cause the framerate to curl into a ball and cry), all of which are derived from a pre-built Unity asset pack. The seesaw level from the original game is also completely excluded, and no other Popeye characters appear aside from some of Olive's relatives and a completely generic "witch" character that's supposed to be the Sea Hag. Lastly, the graphics look on par with a late PlayStation game at best (it bears mentioning that this game came out in 2021), there are strange glitches^note For example, swimming in the water or even just suspending and then re-entering the game can inexplicably cause Popeye to instantly lose a life and it costs a whopping $12.99 (in NTSC regions) for what amounts to just three levels of Popeye monotonously plodding around grabbing things over and over again. Lacking the spirit and fun of either the original arcade game or the Popeye series itself, the game sank like a pirate ship; its only lasting legacy being its absolutely ludicrous death animations and being "from the creators of such classics as Calculator". Jim Sterling took a look at the game and found it so awful and joyless that they thought it was either an Ashcan Copy or was simply made by people with no passion for Popeye. The Wiiviewr, after hearing so many awful things about the game, reviewed it in March 2022, and he found it so bad he named it the worst Switch game he reviewed that year. JohnRiggs also played the game and afterward could do nothing but lament the fifteen bucks he sank into it, and one of the game's developers threatened legal action against him for "slander". The game was also one of several that AntDude discovered on his second round of exploring eShop shovelware and he is baffled that King Features Syndicate was okay with how the game turned out. Angry Joe listed it as one of his worst games of 2021, as did James Sterling. Lastly, Rerez gave it a spotlight as part of their "Just Bad Games" series.
  • Zomb may well be the worst game Sabec ever created. It's a first-person shooter with simplistic graphics and Minecraft-like character designs. But the presentation is nothing compared to the god-awful controls. If you use a Pro Controller, you use the left stick to move back and forth... and turn! Meaning you need to use the right stick to strafe, and you can't even look up or down, which is a death sentence in a game where frequent headshots are needed and the zombies can climb up walls. X changes your weapons, and ZR shoots your current weapon, and that's fine, but then you find out that B throws bombs, and instead of being set to the plus button like the vast majority of games, pausing is set to the Y Button! And while you question who in their right mind would program such controls, you just follow the arrow leading to the next ammo crate and collect more survival assets. It's impossible to win because the game only ends when you die, and you're most likely to die very quickly because the turning speed is terrible. A player tested to see how long it took to make a full rotation, and it took 8 seconds... at the start of the game. The more zombies that are in the world, the slower you turn, further adding to the unfair odds against you. In the end, you'll be swarmed, and there's nothing you can do to avoid death. So if the coins you get from killing zombies do anything, you're not likely to find out what it is. In the end, players are better off trying to survive a real zombie pandemic. It truly needs to be played to be believed, but Mini Nindie Review can tell you more about it, if you're curious.
• Sintax, a pirate GBC/GBA developer, had games that varied from pretty good to awful on GBC and awful to soul-crushing on GBA. Their historical interest is largely due to the fact that they have extremely professional and nasty encryption that resists dumping, so they couldn't be emulated until years after their release. The problem with that is that occasionally it fails to run on original hardware.
  • Donkey Kong 5: The Journey of Over Time and Space (Yes, that's the actual title) is one of their worst GBC games, being a recreation of Super Mario Bros. in a worse platforming engine, with music ripped from Pokémon Pinball. There's about half a second of lag to every player movement, and they forgot to make blocks breakable (one of the key components of a Mario-like), leading to softlocks because you need to make yourself small to pass but no enemies are visible. As if that weren't bad enough, they released a title screen hack as Super Marrio Sunshine (sic), with an added bug that touching the flagpole anywhere above the bottom is an instant Game Over!
  • Pokémon Platinum, and its engine-mates Super II Sonik and The Incredibles, are somehow cursed with a worse platforming engine than the above. Add to that a character select which is pointless as all characters play identically, level design based on fumbling through identical mazes, and an energy meter which doesn't actually do anything, and you get an Obvious Alpha.
  • Digimon Adventure, is a port of the SNES game which was hacked from Pocket Monster, but clearly shoved out in a pre-alpha state. It's clogged with bugs and collision errors, and game mechanics from the original like transformation and bosses taking any damage don't exist. They then proceeded to reskin the game again and again, with different characters and environments, level order switched, and all the same bugs, using titles like Crash Advance IV, Sonic 3 Fighter Sonic, or Super Mario DX.
• Team 6 Game Studios has such a poor track record that you could put almost any of their games on here. They seem to mostly work on racing games, and almost none of them are even passable let alone good. Some particularly atrocious examples include:
  • European Street Racing fails in many ways - blocky-looking cars that neither drive nor sound like high-powered vehicles, laughably stupid computer driver AI, and a physics engine that causes cars and other objects to bounce off walls like pinballs. Someone went so far as to explain the "ESR" acronym as Extremely Shitty Racing. See it in action.
  • FlatOut 3: Chaos and Destruction. Not helmed by series creator Bugbear Entertainment, it was stealthily released during the 2011 holiday season and the few that played it were treated to a mess of broken physics, missing features, overdone bloom effects (later toned down in a patch), and other inept oversights, such as an online mode that wouldn't end a game if one of the players got disconnected (which happens often) or a reset function which would make the car face the wrong way. This video on the game by Lewis Brindley, Simon Lane, and Tinman of the Yogscast should give you an idea. Rev from Vinesauce looked into the game himself, noting that it's considered the worst game that's on Steam (at the time of his video; has since been replaced with fellow awful contender eFootball 2022 found in the ninth generation and then War of the Three Kingdoms for broken cash exploitation), and it shows. Rerez also tears it apart in their Just Bad Games series here, eventually discovering that FlatOut 3 not only made their game with FlatOut for the Nintendo Wii as their main base, but utilized modified assets from their other Wii racing games like Speed, Glacier 3: The Meltdown, and Monster Trucks Mayhem as parts of their modes for their PC game. Not only that, but they recycled those same assets yet again for an Android mobile phone game called FlatOut Stuntman, as Rerez later discovered in the 10 worst games they played (that no one else realistically would) under their Just Bad Games series. Interestingly, this game didn't quite prove to be a Franchise Killer, as FlatOut 4: Total Insanity was released in 2017 by another developer, Kylotonn (mostly known for developing the WRC games until EA snatched the rights from them in 2023) to So Okay, It's Average reception.
  • Super Street: The Game was released in September 2018 after a slight delay. This game tries to be a modern homage to many beloved arcade racers of the 90s and 2000s, but fails in almost every single aspect possible and comes off as more of an insult rather than a homage. Right off the bat, you are only allowed to pick from eight fictional cars. And if that wasn't enough, there are cars that appear in official artwork for the game that you never actually get to drive or even see in the actual gameplay, including the car seen on the cover of the game! You can't even buy another car to add to your garage: you are only allowed to keep that one car you chose for the entirety of the game. You can't even change your transmission to manual. The driving mechanics are horrible: you can barely even drift at all, and sometimes you can't even take a turn before crashing into an obstacle. Your car feels like it was made out of glass: even bumping into a guardrail can cause your car to crash as if you hit a brick wall at high speed. The opponents constantly wreck taking corners and pose no challenge whatsoever, making racing gameplay a repetitive breeze. As you progress through the game, women will join your team, and are completely useless as they're really only there to attract players for looks, as they don't really do anything to help you and your team. The races have no life to them. They all feel repetitive no matter what the mode is. Even the environment feels worn out. Really, the only good aspect of the entire game is the customization: with a whopping 500 car parts to choose from, you can customize almost everything from the interior and exterior to the performance of your car. And to top it all off, this game is sold for $50, which is daylight robbery considering its quality and content. It got a 2/10 from GameSpew and PCInvasion, the latter calling it shovelware to the fullest degree.
• Tec Toy was responsible for importing the Sega consoles and games to Brazil, and became a well-known name in that region. Unfortunately, when tasked with making a game themselves, it usually didn't end well.
  • 20 em 1 (20 in 1), a pack-in game for the Sega Master System III Compact, is a collection of simple minigames, none of them good. Some are recycled (Games 15 and 20 are the same ball-bouncing game with different graphics), the same simple repetitive tune plays throughout all the games, the Start button on the console is to go back to the title screen, the graphics are simplistic for the Master System, winning just starts the game again but with less time, the side-scrolling games and collecting games can be beaten by just holding Right and pressing the 1 button, Game 4 has very unresponsive and confusing controls, and getting hit too much does nothing but make you lose points. Some have considered it the Brazilian Action 52 (above). LGR reviews it here.
  • Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau (translates into Woody Woodpecker's Vexing Vacation), for the Sega Genesis and Sega Master System, is infamous both for its sloppy design and for being extremely hard for all the wrong reasons. The levels are poorly designed (sometimes blatantly copy-pasted) and absolutely relentless in enemy placement, but the real issue is the very stiff controls combined with some of the worst hit detection you'll ever find in a game - nine times out of ten, you'll get hurt by the enemies and boss fights more than you can dish it out on them with your near-useless short-range peck attack. The graphics are abysmal and look like they were drawn in MS Paint, and the sound work is lazy and annoying (for example, the sound of Woody's laugh plays every time he grabs any item). Also, playing on Hard Mode makes the game's experience even more miserable since Woody has no Mercy Invincibility in it.
• The Taiwanese company Thin Chen Enterprises (aka Sachen, Joy Van, and Commin, but mostly known as Sachen nevertheless) was one of the biggest unlicensed Shovelware developers of the time. They also made many bootleg Porting Disasters of arcade and 16-bit console games, and created their own NES hardware clone, the Q-Boy (considered by some to be much better than their games). Several of their games were published in America by Color Dreams, Bunch Games (both of which were already mentioned above), or occasionally American Video Entertainment. Their works include:
  • Little Red Hood, an unlicensed NES game whose only notable contribution was its inspiration for an AVGN episode. Right from the get-go, this game takes Guide Dang It! and Luck-Based Mission to ridiculous levels: In order to complete most levels, you have to roam around kicking trees and collecting fruit until a staircase appears, then go down into the secret room and collect a randomly appearing key, then go back out and find a different staircase which also appears at random. The requirements to get the staircases and keys to appear vary from level to level, with no attempt on the game's part to explain them - for instance, Level 8 requires the player to first purchase a specific set of items before the staircase will even appear. All the while, you have to deal with finicky jumping controls, a bland and repetitive presentation, enemies who respawn immediately after being defeated, and eventually an ending barely more interesting than a generic "congratulations!" ending. The one review for this game on GameFAQs gave it a 1.0/10, and it's not hard to see why.
  • Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, a side-scrolling action platformer which rivals Cheetahmen II in glitchy awfulness. The game received a -50 score from Something Awful, with the reviewer bitterly regretting that the rating system didn't allow anything lower (their scale goes from 0 to -50), and was the subject of an AVGN episode.
  • Rocman X was a Mega Man knockoff complete with stolen title-screen art. It featured a superhero with a boomerang who could also fly for short distances by charging the fire button (which is used to charge the Mega Buster in real MM games). It's nearly unplayable because of clunky controls, a lack of special weapons, and shoddy programming. You can sometimes walk on the Bottomless Pits in Stage 3. Rocman X was ported to the Game Boy Color as Thunder Blast Man, where the first boss fight was Unwinnable due to a Game-Breaking Bug. Here's some footage, courtesy of some poor, unfortunate Canadian.
  • Silent Assault is a poor-man's Contra/Rush'n Attack clone where you could shoot vertically and horizontally, but not diagonally. It had near-useless weapon upgrades. It was also buggy and included a bug that prevented you from precision-jumping in the otherwise piss-easy boss fights, making some of them nearly impossible. What makes it even worse is that the multicart version (included on Super Cartridge Version 3) is Unintentionally Unwinnable due to a bug on Level 7 where a moving platform needed to cross a river doesn't spawn.
• The Chinese company Waixing, who mainly developed bootleg Famicom games.
  • Super Contra 7. It's likely a hack of either Contra or Super C, as the engine and sound effects seem to be directly taken from the latter, but features ear-bleedingly bad music. It also features stolen graphics from other games, such as taking the background for the first stage from Mighty Final Fight, as well as a later stage featuring an enemy taken from Shatterhand. The game is very short, being 5 stages long and can be beaten within 15 minutes. The boss hitboxes are messed up ^note (for example, the first boss can only be damaged in a specific spot while he's moving horizontally, except when he moves along the ground level), and there are other glitches throughout. The score counter is broken for both players and stays at zero, and some powerups are inconsistent from the other Contra games ^note (for example, the R powerup gives the player an extra life instead of increasing the firing rate of the player's weapon while the Smart Bomb powerup is a P instead of an Eagle). Watch this 2-player TAS destroy the game here. James Rolfe and Mike Matei also take a look into this game here.
• Speaking of pirate game companies, Yong Yong (aka Makon Soft) is probably the least competent of the lot. Their games library consists entirely of horribly-made adaptations of popular franchises for the Game Boy/Game Boy Color, including Mario, Sonic, and Pokémon. All of their games suffer from poor controls, frequent glitches, and music that borders on Sensory Abuse.
  • Sonic 3D Blast 5 somehow manages to be worse than the Somari hack of the same name, with poor level design and having almost nothing to do with the official Sonic games. Space Hamster notes further that the volume on the game is ear-shatteringly loud without proper software to help lower the volume down to a respectable level and claims it's even worse than their re-release mentioned below. A year or two later, Yong Yong re-released it as Sonic Adventure 7 on the Game Boy Color. The soundtrack and intro stills were changed, the levels were switched around to look original, and an eye-bleedingly-bad color palette was added. This was recycled again as Pokémon Jade, which added stills from characters from the anime that never appear in the game itself, a horrendous title screen in Comic Sans MS, and even worse ear-bleeding music, if you could believe it. Worst of all, completing the first level crashes the game, making it Unintentionally Unwinnable.
  • Rockman 8 is a Porting Disaster of the game it's named after. The bosses are completely screwed up (e.g. selecting Grenade Man on the menu actually picks "Tengv Man" with Spark Man's sprite, and the boss itself is actually a car), the stages are mismatched (Clown Man's alleged level has the looks of Frost Man's stage, for example), Rockman/Megaman often falls through moving platforms, one of the bosses constantly resets the game, and shooting too many enemies in a level causes all of the enemies and moving platforms to disappear. The last point alone makes the game almost unplayable without save states, so combining all of that with No Ending makes one of the most infuriating games ever made. Demonstrated in all its weirdness here.
  • Super Mario 3 Special, Yong Yong's paltry attempt to port Super Mario Bros. 3 to the Game Boy Color. The result was similar to their other games: an almost unplayable mess that made the original game look like a complete joke. Only 5 levels were ported from the original game, the powerups did nothing other than give you extra hit points, and the fourth level is impossible to complete. To counter this, the map screen can be used to skip straight to Level 5. To add insult to injury, this particular game was rereleased as Pokémon Diamond. Like Pokémon Jade, it added completely pointless intro stills from the anime, removed the map screen... and started the game on Level 4. In other words, you get about 3 minutes worth of terrible platforming, if that. Yes, they really were this incompetent.
  • They also made Pokémon Adventure, a supposedly original platformer starring Pikachu just like so many other pirate games based off the franchise. It has an intro which features seemingly random Pokédex entries for no discernible reason. Several of the enemies were reused from their other games despite being from completely different franchises, some of the graphics were stolen from Bonk's Adventure, and most of Level 4 could be skipped by running across the top of the level.
  • Their Digimon games are an improvement, but barely. The graphics are no longer eye-bleedingly bad and the games themselves were actually playable to a certain extent. That said, they still fit this trope because they still have all of the other problems that the rest of their games have.

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