The “Not Necessarily Worst Games I’ve Played, But They’re Close” Games
The following games are not all bad. In fact a lot of them have charm, but they just can’t stand up to most games. Here they are:
500) Sonic Heroes
Don’t get me started.
499) The Berenstain Bears™: Camping Adventure
It’s a very unoffensive game that has some simple variety and is a well deserved part of the SEGA Jr. collection, but besides good idle animations it is just bland.
498) Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures
This game belongs in an art museum, but I don’t ever want to play the role of someone suggesting to Pac-Man how to live his life again.
497) Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
What sucks is that this game shouldn’t be bad. It takes good ideas from the NES Battletoads and either iterates on them or explores further. However, the SNES era included a lot of HUGE sprites where you can only see like two feet in front of you because they wanted to show off a lot of detail in the characters. It’s very hard to react to instant-death walls and spikes like this.
496) Battletoads (2020)
While it may be more fun with friends ultimately this game is really bad and it made one of my favorite video game characters wear a cartoonishly-dirty diaper.
495) Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I
A cardinal sin of a Sonic game is no good jams, and this game has no good jams.
494) Heart Star
I don’t like playing phone games with a touch-screen D-pad, but while this game was cute and fine it only stands out because of where it is. It doesn’t stand out when compared to 99% of other platformers.
493) Uncharted: Golden Abyss
The portable Uncharted game suffered in this format because it is much harder to appreciate a beautiful world on a tiny screen especially when you’re rubbing the back of the PS Vita for the gameplay. It never gripped me and I never finished it.
492) Hidden Game by Mom 2
This series requires players to figure out where Mom hid the DS. I played all three on my phone and they are fun little puzzles that you can’t really redo and it isn’t particularly thrilling. Most of the puzzles trick you into doing the wrong thing and then you play it again and do the right thing.
491) Hidden Game by Mom
The original game in the series edges out the second game just because of the final level. In HGbM2 you eventually become Dad and hide your child’s game. That’s not the correct lesson. HGbM1’s final level finds you, the child, succeeding in outwitting Mom and locking her out of the house. Eventually, you grow older and you miss your family after not seeing them for a thousand days. You can choose to live the life of the Gamer or you can choose to see your Mom and the rest of the family. It’s a powerful ending.
490) Hidden Game by Mom 3
Most is best. This has more quality and more quantity so it’s just the best one. It lacks a beautiful ending, but I guess I’d rather them surprise me and putting E.T. in the game surprised me.
489) Pokémon: Magikarp Jump
I had fun mindlessly feeding my Magikarp during a 3 hour wait at a doctor’s office and for about three months straight after even if it was a very hollow experience.
488) Captain Skyhawk
It’s a neat game, but a lot of the levels are basically the same thing over and over.
487) NARC (Arcade)
The very premise of it all is laughable and that adds to the charm. It goes a few levels too long, but being two gun-wielding officers who are using the most excessive force ever against the worst neighborhood in history is kinda fun. Fighting Mr. Big’s final form is an experience everyone should have.
486) Super Mario Run
If it was just a regular Mario game I would get all the red coins with no sweat so again the phone aspect of the game is the real culprit here.
485) Donkey Kong Land 2
A big step forward for the Donkey Kong Land series after the absolutely atrocious first game. It is, however, still a horrible version of a game I love dearly. It’s like slapping my child.
484) Barnstorming
This a very shallow Atari 2600 game where you fly through barns, but I like it
483) Mickey’s Ultimate Challenge
The ultimate challenge includes spelling a six letter word, matching two of the same picture, and remembering the order in which you saw something.
482) MegaMan X6
I don’t have any real memories of this game even though I played it. It really came across to me as excessive and uninteresting.
481) Rocket Knight
What have they done to my boy? Well, in the vain of making new versions of old games that feel plastic and hollow like Sonic 4, this game also bears the sin of not emulating the right game. At least it is a LITTLE better than the Sparkster games.
480) Earthworm Jim
Even if Jim was at one point considered a face of video games this game still feels terrible to play. His legacy is being called trash in Donkey Kong Country 2 and being playable in ClayFighters.
479) Sonic Battle
It was better than it should be given fighting games on a portable console don’t usually work out.
478) Pac-Man World
This competent 3D platformer plays fine for the most part, but I found some boss fights to be frustrating purely because of the camera and controls. Still need to look into playing the sequels.
477) 1,000,000
I think I came to this mobile game late because I remembered people gushing about this and You Must Build A Boat years ago. When I finally played it like last year I just didn’t get it. It’s a fine match 3 game, but I felt a game you played because you were supposed to. That’s no way to live.
476) World of Goo
This is a fun enough game, but maybe my attention span is shot because I’ve tried to play this a few times and I just absolutely don’t care after like twenty minutes. I made decent enough progress once, but I think this is a rare “better as a phone game” case and I’ll put that to the test one day.
475) Mortal Kombat: Deception
This is the game that made me stop caring about Mortal Kombat for a long time. I just wasn’t on board with the new style of MK, but at least Deadly Alliance was fresh and interesting.
474) Kirby’s Pinball Land
This game is evil and despite trying for like ten hours I could not come close to defeating it. It’s so pleasant looking too, but the ball never obeys. The mirror never lies. This is the true nightmare in Dream Land.
473) Knack
While a good way to show off that the PS4 could render so many little bits flying around that make up the titular Knack the game itself was nothing to brag about. I’ve acquired so many power-up gems from Knack’s Quest but I don’t care enough to use them. I own the sequel and have yet to ever consider playing it.
472) Family Feud (Genesis)
Sometimes you put in gibberish and it tells you that you’re correct.
471) Contra: Shattered Soldier
A more refined individual with better Contra skills would maybe tell you this is one of the best in the series. To me it just didn’t feel good to play. Even completing the game on Easy felt like a chore so I guess I’m just not a Shattered Soldier kind of guy.
470) Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance
I liked the decision to introduce a lot of new combatants to the mix as they jumped formally into a 3D fighting arena. The crypt was cool and I liked that music video or Cooking with Scorpion video. The game itself is just okay. It was cool back when it came out.
469) Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II
When Episode I came out I was more naïve about Sonic and even then felt like that game was just okay at the start and bleh as you continue. Having played Episode II as an older, more jaded Sonic fan managed to leave a great first impression. It felt amazing at first, but that excitement eventually tumbled down the same road. It is better than its predecessor but not by much.
468) Monsters (Probably) Kidnapped My Princess
One of the only PS minis I bought. The premise is entirely to race to the top of a vertical platforming area. No enemies or anything that could hurt you, really. All you had to do was catch the monster who (probably) kidnapped the princess. You could get bonus points for stepping on every single platform that gave you something to work for. I really enjoyed it, but ultimately it’s a shallow experience (like only 6 levels that can all be done in 10 minutes?) that when I had to push the limits of movement to get 100% completion I began to find fault in how it handled. Still a neat distraction.
467) Pac-Man™ and the Ghostly Adventures
The bad guy’s name is Betrayus and I am pretty sure at some point someone trusts this guy.
466) Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric
Eggman loses a fight, struggles to escape, turns to Sonic and says “Nice scarf, loser,” as he flies away.
465) The Lion King
Game hard, and not in a good way. Things just don’t behave the way you would want. I swear you can’t see things coming at you sometimes and rocks just fall on your head at random and you can get hit so easily. Based on a great movie, though.
464) Battletoads in Ragnarok’s World
There is this game and another game called Battletoads on the GameBoy. You would think the latter would be a port of Battletoads, but you’re wrong. This onebis the port, and it’s a bad port. Things just feel wrong and being condensed onto a little GameBoy doesn’t help.
463) Countdown Vampires
There is a lot of charm in this game even if it is an absolute mess. Some of the puzzles are things I have solved multiple times in multiple playthroughs and I still don’t really understand why they work the way that they do.
462) River City Ransom
Bunch of kids killing each other. It’s an important game, but while its successors have made smart changes the original is a bit crusty. Barf.
461) StarFox Command
This game goes full 2000s Sonic. There are so many animal friends that you can’t keep track of them all and all of their relationships are all over the place. The gameplay is literally just “what if we made every level like the All Ranged Mode sections in StarFox 64?” This sounds great, but they messed it up somehow. Also, Fox and Falco enter a knockoff of F-Zero for some reason.
460) Star Wars Episode 1: Racer
Meanwhile this racer has some good progression and interesting characters / tracks, but I just don’t care. I’ve played a lot of this as a kid and I was like yeah okay, but as an adult I have no patience (aka talent) to play this.
459) Sonic Riders
I’M GONNA HIT YOU is the very first four words of the game. It controls awful but has cool new characters and is somehow more of an All Stars SEGA game than Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing Transformed.
458) Battletoads (Genesis)
It is a port of the NES game but for some reason it plays very different. Maybe they made it floatier to accommodate for the larger sprites. In any case they get every aspect of the original game wrong.
457) The Ship
You are being hunted by one person as you hunt another person and must do so without being seen. This sounds cool but it just isn’t very compelling. This is not my first choice for an imposter-sort of game.
456) Twisted Metal: Head On
This PS2 port of the PSP game combines Twisted Metal Black and the original games to create this lukeworm title.
455) Battletoads (Arcade)
This game decided that the Battletoads needed to have more of an edge. With this in mind you can grab your opponent by the balls and punch their dick.
454) Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
I was originally going to put Underground here, but then I realized I actually only played enough of that game to do like three races and hear Get Low like a million times (which is really when I come to NSFU for). Hot Pursuit then blazed forward in my mind and I played this game all the time with my brother when we got it. I really just wanted to either chase criminals as the cops or run away from the cops as a criminal, and in two player I think you could do both, have the other player chase you and it was so much fun. The actual meat and potatoes of the game? Who knows, but I loved the hot pursuit mode.
453) Hello Kitty World
This NES game that was originally Balloon Kid is a simple platformer that is still quite delightful. Just not particularly exciting.
452) Final Fantasy
The original game in the franchise is an important game. However, the designs of dungeons, vague hints on what to do, and a very vanilla battle system means you should only play it for historical context.
451) Mushroom Wars
If you like RTS games but wanted something simple enough to play on a console then this indie game was a good choice. You can build a few different kinds of mushrooms, send percentages of your army at opponents with the buttons on the controller, and play with 4 people locally which is easy since the entire game happens on one screen.
450) Yoshi Story
I loved this game when I had it because there was something so cool about the branching paths and getting the black or white Yoshis. I tried it again recently and I don’t know what I saw in it, really. It’s a cute art style and the music is okay, but I’ll pass.
449) Pokemon Pinball
This was a game full of fun mini-games and brought the mania of catching them all from Pokémon. Pinball is something I wish I was good at.Sadly, it just frustrates me.
448) Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)
This game almost deleted my entire PS3.
447) Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3
While Budokai Tenkaichi 3 has more characters and came with a DVD of “the best fights” which were almost all from GT, it tried too hard with Wii motion controls.
446) Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing Transformed
Took a great game and slashed the roster to make room for Danica Patrick and Yogscast. I don’t like the planes or boats. The progression system is bad and they brought it forward to Team Sonic Racing so this game is worse for worsening other games.
445) Mario Party 6
Of all 11 games to hit consoles this is the only one I’ve not owned. I think something about the change in format and use of the microphone turned me off. It it’s okay to be worst of the Mario Party series because there’s plenty more to do it better.
444) Monster Rancher
My brother threw this game across the room once and I don’t remember why. I probably I deserved it. The premise of putting music CDs into my PS1 to create a monster was really cool, but I don’t know if it was very good beyond seeing what kind of monsters I’d get.
443) Helltaker
It’s a good song and neat little puzzles, but solving those puzzles just to get a coin flip essentially on how to convince the demons to join your harem feels dumb. I’d play a full game made by this developer. I like the in-game sprites bopping around a lot.
442) Home Alone (Genesis)
You get 20 minutes to rig traps in the neighborhood’s homes and try to manually thwart the Wet Bandits. It’s not always clear how to make useful traps/weapons, and Kevin McCallister has a massive hurtbox especially when Joe Pesci hits you with the okizeme.
441) Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2
This is the best DBZ arena fighter. They’re all bad, but this is the best one.
440) Contra Rebirth
Konami’s WiiWare title was a nice way to revisit the franchise even if the game lacked style which is saying something for a game that was overly selfaware. It was ultimately a bland experience.
439) Shadow the Hedgehog
The game requires ten separate playthroughs which include the same beginning branches to get to ten different degrees of good (save the world), neutral (beat up a military general to settle a feud), and bad (attempt to assassinate Noodle Reagan) for endings before you get to do the final boss which means anything you could have found charming as a Sonic fan gets pushed on you repeatedly until you can truly see how bad it is.
438) Dungeon Defenders
It is like a tower defense game where minions rush into an arena and you must defend the home base. The RPG elements make it a fun experience, but gets tedious pretty quickly.
437) NightSky
Pleasant marble rolling game. I am bad at puzzles and figured this game out pretty quickly.
436) Mario Party 9
I bought this game and went to a friend’s place. We were gonna play it but one of my friends didn’t like the look of it. I don’t remember why he chucked it but it broke the plastic case for the game. That kinda set the tone for Mario Party 9.
435) Wii Play
If we were evaluating the value of games then this goes way higher because it came with a Wiimote. It has some good minigames including Tanks, but it’s more of a novelty to further show off neat things you can do with a Wii.
434) Sonic Spinball
Earlier I mentioned being frustrated by pinball, but spinball lets you move around because you’re Sonic. The two of the four levels are incredibly frustrating, but the style of this game as well as its minigames are great. The options music is my guilty pleasure.
433) Lethal Enforcers
My very first light-gun shooting game. I liked having a large plastic pistol to plug into my SEGA Genesis, but looking back on it the game was just eh.
432) Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
This game is the epitome of Wii light-gun games to me. It works pretty well and does a good job of helping you relive parts of the Resident Evil lore. I think the Light Gun experience is better reserved for brief arcade experiences, but this was fine.
431) Earthworm Jim HD
This was never a good game, but the HD version makes it look real nice and throws it into widescreen and it can be 4-player co-op. EWJ never needed these things, but it makes it more enjoyable. The charm of the original definitely doesn’t apply to me anymore, but once upon a time it was pretty funny I guess.
430) Hylics
This is such a cool game. It’s like claymation and really weird and probably has some kind of deep meaning, but really I just found it to be really strange. It isn’t a very friendly game or even a good game at all to me, but it’s really neat.
429) Raw Danger
This game is pretty hilarious (a man is falling and you can either help him up, ignore him, or pluck the hat off his head and stare into his eyes as he plummets), but it also leaves a lot to be desired gameplay wise. It’s ambitious, but it’s not for me. Seriously though you should watch some Raw Danger gameplay.
428) Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble
To be honest it is here mostly because I don’t remember it but I know it’s a decent game trapped on the GameGear. No one said this was a good list.
427) Battletoads (GB)
This game is presented as a port of the NES Battletoads, but it is an entirely new game. The levels are pretty interesting and when you get a handle of how to efficiently attack enemies you can really get to some interesting levels. It’s still cheap like the original game, and it suffers as a GB title, but it was a pleasant surprise.
426) Pokemon Stadium
I really liked being able to see the pocket monsters on the big screen. Doing battles with rental Pokémon is fun. The minigames range from good to really bad, but I’d play all of them anyway. Less of a spectacle these days.
425) Jackbox Party Pack
It’s a great series especially when you have a full group of eight people, but most of the games in this pack are either not good, executed poorly, or were obsolete even by the time Party Pack 2 came out.
424) OverBlood
This game is awful and that’s why it’s great. Most of this fun is in the cutscenes, but some of the terrible logic and horrible graphics make it kinda special. Even so, I can’t put it any higher than this. It’s at most six hours long though if you need a laugh.
423) Tiny Toon Adventures
Early stages are fun, and I enjoy the uniqueness of running away from Elmyra. It’s a nice little platformer, but it doesn’t have the legs to hold up over the length of a full game.
422) The Simpsons (Arcade)
This is one of those arcade games that a lot of people my age know from their childhood. It isn’t particularly great, but it feels good enough and it is simple enough to be something you remember fondly. However, it’s just a bit too long of an arcade beat’em up game.
421) Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team
And the ultimate team they are, but Double Dragon wasn’t built for the cheap nonsense of Battletoads so when it rears its head in level 3 the game ultimately becomes much less desirable. Incredible first two levels though.
420) Marble Madness
A brief, but fun experience. The controls aren’t as tight as I’d like for them to be. Perhaps that’s part of the madness.
419) Mario Party 10
It would be as bad as Mario party 9, but there is a mode where one person plays as Bowser in a 1v5 board game mode. It’s a fun addition to the otherwise less than ideal style of Mario Party where you’re all in the car. During regular games you can see Bowser in jail on the Wii U touchpad until all numbers have been rolled and he BUSTS LOOSE FROM THE TABLET ONTO THE TV. I miss the Wii U.
418) Wario Land: Shake-It
The graphics are beautiful, but I did not enjoy shaking it. It could be that I was just done with motion control stuff by this point, but it just felt okay to me as a game.
417) Twisted Metal (2012)
The idea of only focusing on three characters from a franchise with a huge roster was bold to me. Really dive into these messed up drivers. I liked the cutscenes and the death races, but in general a lot of the personality of Twisted Metal leans on that colorful cast and without it I was left with an okay destruction game that I feel has been done better by its predecessors.
416) Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite
It’s truly a shame, because this is a good game. I just can’t help but slam it down here for multiple reasons. The music overall doesn’t grab me and the graphics aren’t great which are like a death sentence for a fighting game, but they’re fine. That’s really my only gripes, but because of terrible press leading up to it and those graphics people didn’t give it a chance and I never really played it with anyone. If I can’t play a fighting game with someone I know then I don’t really want to play it much. The mechanics are kinda interesting, but I’m out of my depth with it. I like watching it and I loved the absolutely absurd story where Thanos sucks Ryu’s darkness and I can only imagine if there was a sequel he would do a raging demon.
415) Sonic Generations
This is not the savior people claim it to be. The 2D sections feel completely wrong and after about 5 or so levels the stages begin to reflect the poorer quality of the games they are based on with tons of instant-death holes as the main offender. I didn’t care for the missions, but I did like the revisiting of classic boss fights. It’s a better game for the fact that you can play Sonic 1 in it.
414) Steamworld Dig
I beat it in one sitting, but all I really did was dig a hole a bunch. That’s not bad, because it was cathartic in a way, but I don’t see how this launched like 10 more games.
413) Gauntlet Legends
This is functionally a fine game that I played on the Nintendo 64 as a kid. Looking back on it the game just feels a bit sloppy and the fun doesn’t last very long beyond the tedious gameplay.
412) Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland
I didn’t realize I didn’t like Kirby games before SuperStar until I played this GBA remake. This is my teenager brain reacting to it, but I found it very ho-hum and not being able to fly infinitely was really disappointing.
EDIT: I was told you can float forever, but that means I remember it controlling or feeling really badly and it felt like I couldn’t. I’d slide it back a number or three for this, but I’ll leave it here.
411) Donkey Kong Land 3
It’s based on the worst of the trilogy, but it is actually a quality version of what it is trying to be. The first DK Land game is horrible, and the second one isn’t much better. This one actually feels like Donkey Kong Country 3, at least.
410) Hunter: The Reckoning
This game is very 2000s, but it is also very mediocre. I have a lot of fun playing it with friends and I like the way it handles combat, but it’s a very flawed thing especially when it comes to narrative which is a real shame when you consider the game is based on a book.
409) Pode
This is a lovely game that I played with my wife, but it was definitely a frustrating game. There were times we both had absolutely no idea what to do and since it isn’t a very popular game it was hard to find the solution online so its not-very clear solutions provided frequent roadblocks. I think I clipped through and abused mechanics a lot to bypass a lot of puzzles but maybe it was intentional? Who knows. Cute game, though.
408) Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom
It’s an arcade game where you beat up tons of enemies. The D&D ones are neat because you can level up and equip your character who you pick a class for. I personally find it a lot of detail for a beat em up and it’s really just an okay game. I have no love for D&D however.
407) Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara
This game tidies up the action a bit and while I can’t really put my thumb on why it’s just slightly better than Tower of Doom is really is.
406) Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped
The Crash Bandicoot games effectively died after this game. They tried to keep innovating and that’s great but what they came up with was not fun and I wish they kept the action simple and tight like the first two games.
405) Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy
I didn’t really like the Simon Says part of the gameplay, but also this story is a wild ride is worth watching the game. I mean playing it is okay too I guess.
404) Resident Evil 6
They literally go Call of Duty in portions of the game. The trappings of what made RE4 a hit and made RE5 a fun co-op game have disappeared for the most part, though Wesker Jr. and running from the big man is decent enough. Lousy plot and action.
403) Sonic Advance
The jump to the GBA wasn’t a bad one, but it is the beginning of level design for Sonic games where in lieu of well crafted sections they just put a hole for you to fall in and die instantly over and over.
402) Part Time U.F.O.
I haven’t played the Switch version, but I imagine it’s amazing. This is one of the better phone games, but it’s also very light on substance and grabbing things with your touch-screen controlled claw isn’t great.
401) X-Men (Arcade)
Six players makes this immediately really cool, but the voice lines and fun fights really help. Plus it isn’t an overly long experience.
Next on the list: #400 through #301 that I kind of like and would probably play again maybe unless it’s DotA 2.
Table of Contents:
• Introduction
• #500-#401
• #400-#301
• #300-#201
• #200–#101
• #100–#11
• The Bottom Ten Games
• The Top Ten Games
