As promised!
Dawn of Mana
May be unduly weighted because the memory is still fresh, but this is one of the few games I've played recently that are simply without any redeeming quality. No, I take that back, the soundtrack is excellent. ...hold on.
Dawn of Mana Samurai Legend Musashi
I honestly had to deliberate on which one of these were worse, because they're both equally atrocious messes. Dawn of Mana is either better or worse for having a faint glimmer of something special buried under a mountain of bad ideas, but SML is just boring, bad, stupid, ugly, and not even fun to listen to (unless you can't get enough of amateur-hour voice acting). I went with Dawn of Mana for mercilessly burying the dagger into the heart of a franchise already on life support, but at least I got a decent OST out of it. Musashi gave me nothing and broke the fire button on my controller.
Wild ARMs 2
Like most games on this list, WA2 is fun in the beginning. For the first hour.
It's a 40 hour game. The battle system is a terrible idea, the game balance is ridiculously broken (most of the game you can play with your eyes closed until you get to Kanon, who's powerful enough to one-shot most of your party... and there are a couple other bosses like that too, but completely at random and out of nowhere.) The story was incomprehensible, the characters were bundles of character flaws loosely held together by generic anime designs, the graphics are enough to melt a Nazi's face off, the dungeon layouts are headache-inducing, the puzzles are gratuitous, and I just fucking hated every second of it. Both my roommate and I played through and beat it as some sort of twisted "fuck you" to whoever made a game so deserving of being quit on halfway, and then in celebration squeezed limes directly into our eyes.
Execution
You know
some indie game had to make this list, and while Passage was tempting for being about as interactive as a hand buzzer and as poignant as a textbook, Execution deserves a special mention for being so...
Badly executed.In case you're not familiar with it,
Execution is a short little "game" (in the same way that clicking
this link to view a graphical representation of my slow descent into asshole game journalism is a "game") which presents you with a dude tied to a post and the option to
shoot the fucker with your mouse. No explanation is given as to what this guy did to get tied to a post in the middle of a basement or why you're the one who's gotta Old Yeller his ass. The "gimmick" is that if you go ahead and execute the only action available to you within the confines of the game rules, the guy dies and you lose, because KILLING VIDEO GAME CHARACTERS IS WRONG. And if you reload the game and try again, HE'S STILL DEAD AND YOU STILL LOSE BECAUSE YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Literally, the game tells you that YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. If you "do the right thing" though and just refuse to participate in this terrible attempt at a Milgram's Experiment, you get told in no uncertain terms that "YOU WON. CONGRATULATIONS." You have always the option of changing your mind, going back and killing the badly guy drawn
forever though.
The point the author is trying to make here is about as subtle as when I forcefully ram my penis into my girlfriend's mouth, but it's utter bullshit. First of all, the "right thing" to do in this case apparently involves taking the coward's route: putting the gun down, closing your eyes, walking away from it all and
leaving the man tied to a post in the basement of whoever put him there in the first place. There's no option to save the man, and this is where it
really breaks down: attempting to do anything but leave the man's death on anybody's conscience but your own will get him killed and you chastised. The first time I "played" the game, I spent some time clicking around, taking note of how the bullets fell in relation to the mouse, and then, very very carefully, tried to shoot the rope. This didn't work of course. The shot was spot on, but the game reacted by causing the man to erupt into fountains of blood all over his body and told me that MY ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. There are only two choices in this game: actively be a dick, or be a dick via abject cowardice. It's an extraordinarily liberal message. And while it tries to prove that games can matter, what it ends up doing is demonstrating
exactly why games are impossible to take seriously.
Hydlide
Hydlide is a game so terminally dull, repetitive, obtuse, and bland that even the AVGN couldn't manage to care enough to really trash it. Just take everything you hate about 8-bit NES games and put it in one box. Cheap instant deaths? Check. Puzzles that don't even begin to follow any sort of logic? Check. An extremely irritating single BGM track that loops forever? Oh hell god damn yes check. Ripping hardcore off Dragon Warrior? Double check. Level grinding? You
literally can't leave the first screen without grinding check. Waiting around for HP to refill? Check. A completely inexplicable "battle" system? Just play it, check. Poor inventory and menu systems? Yep, yep, check. Password system instead of battery backup? Check. And in the end, is there no actual ending? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha yes check. I have no idea why the fuck anybody would ever play Hydlide, except as some sort of "What never to do, ever, seriously this is objectively the worst game" case study.
World of Warcraft
Am I trolling here? Maybe a little. But most games, no matter how bad they are, they really can't do much more than frustrate or disappoint you, maybe make you waste a bit of money. No matter how well or how badly designed it is, a video game can't actually
do anything to you that you don't let it. Except one.
World of Warcraft will take your friends, seduce your family, decimate your love life and if you let it,
it will imprison you.Ignoring the question of whether or not it is really a good game (it really isn't), WoW is a game that can manage to frustrate you
even if you don't play it. Dare I say even
especially if you don't play it. When I meet someone I think can be a buddy, and I find out they're into WoW, at this point I just shake my head and walk away. I don't want to be there when that person starts prioritizing dailies over their personal lives. I don't want to have to compete with a group of forty giant talking cows for attention.
EverQuest may have started the trend, but EverQuest only mainly attracted douchebags. World of Warcraft has taken perfectly good people, and it has
ruined them. You can defend the game all you want, but you know for a fact that this is true. Everybody does.
If you can find some enjoyment from that game, and play it responsibly, then good for you. On behalf of all those who can't, and who can't, I'm gonna have to say
fuck World of Warcraft.
