Adam has already championed Metacritic’s best games of 2009, but what about the worst games of this year? By cleverly altering the site’s search criteria we were able to find the very worst that 2009 had to offer. Warning: the following ten games suck balls.
In 10th place is ATV Quad Kings (33%, Zoo) a lame and fuzzy racer which was somehow worse than Popcorn Arcade’s “Monster Trux” games. The game at 9th position is a Wii game too – CID: The Dummy (31%, Oxygen). This was knocking around the release schedules for ages and under different names (it was once known as Crash Dummy Vs The Evil D-Troit) suggesting that the developers had trouble pitching the idea to publishers. Oxygen folded a few months back: the quality of the game clearly didn’t help.
8th place goes to a quite a new release – Rogue Warrior (30%, Bethesda Softworks) on Xbox 360. It was developed by Rebellion, who also did the 2000 AD Rogue Warrior game…but this is a different rogue warrior. He’s a human and not a blue mutant, for starters. Oddly, Rebellion are responsible for the 7th worst game on the list – ShellShock 2: Blood Trails (30%, Eidos Interactive). The original ShellShock was done by Killzone 2 developers Guerrilla and wasn’t too bad. This sequel was simply bad.
At 6th we have the PSP-exclusive Dragon Ball: Evolution (28%, Namco Bandai Games) based on the live action movie. Dragon Ball fans will usually buy anything with the brand stamped all over it, but this was so appalling that it even flopped in Japan. At 5th place is Bigfoot: Collision Course (26%, Zoo) on DS which has nothing to do with the big hairy chap and everything to do with cramming a shoddy racing game onto a DS cart. According to the review on GameSpot the whole thing could be beaten in just two hours and there was no multiplayer modes to speak of.
Picking on a Hannah Montana game feels a bit like picking on the fat kid at school; it’s very easy to do. I mean, would any Xbox 360 website really risk their credibility and give Hannah Montana: The Movie (25%, Disney Interactive Studios) a glowing review? It’s questionable. I bet some people at least rented it for the easy Gamerpoints though.
In 3rd place is a game I’ve never even heard of – The Island of Dr. Frankenstein (24%, Storm City Games) on Wii. I’m guessing it’s a US-only release and if that’s so then let’s hope it stays that way. At second is another recent release – the Xbox Live Arcade game NBA Unrivaled (24%, Tecmo) which leaves us with the worst game of the year – Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust with a piss poor 17% average review score. It’s a game so bad that rather than sully their good name Codemasters set up a new label (FunSta) to publish it under. I tried to finish it for the purposes of review but the game’s blatantly unfinished state makes some sections close to impossible. Even if you picked this up for a fiver you’d feel cheated.