OMGJeremy

Fifty Of The Worst Games We’ve Ever Played Pt.2: Mortal Kombat Crashes N’ Burns

Hey kids, we’re back for week two of the fifty worst games we’ve ever played. Looks like we’re starting to make a little headway this week, as some real piles of shit hit the list. You know things start to hit the shitter when Mortal Kombat spin-offs and more Jaguar games make the list. I suppose that I should mention we did have a few rules for this list. The most important being that no shovelware, or free games be included. Hell, if we included shovelware, this list would be Wii exclusive. We are also trying to stay away from the games that everyone already knows sucks (Sorry, no Atari E.T.), but sometimes it just can’t be avoided. Anyway, let’s get the shitvan rolling for this week, and start things off right with the absolutely atrocious:

Mortal Kombat Special Forces (PSX) – Jeremy

Those expecting to see Sub-Zero Mythologies on this list may be a bit disappointed. That’s mainly because its follow-up, Special Forces, is so much more offending than anything Mythologies attempted to do. While it can be argued that Mythologies isn’t terrible, no one can deny that Special Forces is a nonstop pile of shit from beginning to end. Abandoning the side-scrolling brawler gameplay of Mythologies, Special Forces went all out 3/4 overhead shooter. That wouldn’t be a bad thing by itself, but when you apply that with a development budget that seemed to barely go over a few hundred bucks, you get a game that plays just as cheap and bad as it looks. Thankfully, this was the last MK side story game Midway would force onto the public, allowing us to heave a sigh of relief in the process.

X-Perts (Genesis) – Billy

Eternal Champions was probably the most underrated fighting game available for the Genesis, and in my opinion was very strong competition to Mortal Kombat. But much like MK, Champions would fall victim to thinking that they could take their popularity (however small it was), and make a successful action game out of it. Shadow, a female assassin from EC, stars in this side scrolling beat-em-up that has all of the necessary ingredients to make a shitty game… right down to those pre-rendered 3D characters made famous in other games such as Batman Forever. Your character’s movement makes Robocop look like a nimble 10 year old ballet dancer, but fortunately the enemy AI in turn makes you look like a contortionist. One of my favorite details is the fact that punching and kicking enemies draws a small bit of blood, but shooting the hell out of them with your machine gun doesn’t draw the first drop. Thankfully this game remains relatively unknown and was restricted to the darkest and dustiest corner of video-stores across the country.

Crash N’ Burn (3DO) – Jeremy

Crash N’ Burn was an awesome tech demo for the launch of the 3DO, showing off some damn impressive graphics for its time. Beyond the graphics though, the game itself was absolutely terrible. You picked from a roster of stereotypical Mad Max-like characters, strapped into your super shiny cg car, and blasted off down a road with gameplay that was no more complicated than those kids toys that had you steering a plastic car left and right over a motorized paper background that scrolled beneath the car. That’s really all Crash N’ Burn was, with the added bonus of being able to shoot weapons that never seemed to do anything at other cars. Hey, at least it looked cool, right?

Trevor Mcfur (Jaguar) – Jeremy

We often hear of rushed games these days, but few times has there ever been a more embarrassing rush job than the Jaguar’s launch title Travor McFur In The Crescent Galaxy. With the launch of the Jaguar imminent, Atari must have noticed that they were only going to have just a handful of games to release on launch day, one of which just happened to be the game being packed in WITH the Jaguar. So in a panic, it looks like Travor Mcfur was chosen to beef up the slim selection of launch day titles. Problem was, it wasn’t finished. At all. While the graphics were okay, the game didn’t even have any music finished for the stages. Making the constant silence worse was the fact that It also lacked finished sound effects, with the same few sounds used over and over throughout the course of the game. Oh, and it’s not really fun at all.

Troy Aikmen Football (Jaguar) – Jeremy

One of the few sports titles thrown into the list. But with good reason, at least. Troy Aikmen Football is probably the worst football game ever made. Thankfully only a few people ever played it, as it saw its release at a time when even most Jaguar owners were trying to forget the Jaguar existed. The game doesn’t look bad. But the gameplay is by far the worst thing ever committed to a digital football game. The trouble began once the ball is hiked, with what follows being an explosion of seizure-inducing players flickering all over the screen, At times, warping completely across/through players just to finish a move that should have never registered in the first place. The best football games require skill, and being able to read the formations of your opponents to play well. This game required luck that your players wouldn’t suddenly vanish from the field if you pressed the wrong button. Troy Aikmen’s Football is a travesty, and a stake through the heart of the dozen or so Jaguar hanger-ons that bought it.

Motal Kombat (SNES) – Jeremy

What happens when you take the hottest arcade game in years, then port it to the most popular system of the time? Amazing success, right? Wrong. MK on the SNES is a sad shadow of its arcade, and even Genesis counterparts. While I could live without the blood and fatalities, it was the dismantling of the original gameplay that sealed it. The worst atrocity being that a good majority of the arcade game’s combos simply did not work. It also seemed that most of the original game’s timing had been strangely altered, creating a game that played nothing like what every kid in the US had been playing in the arcades for months. Its only high mark being that the graphics were the best of any port. Too bad nobody cared, since we were all playing the far superior Genesis version.

Race Drivin’ (SNES, Genesis) – Jeremy

There are some games that should simply never have been ported to home consoles, either because of complexity, or technology limitations. Both of these apply to Atari’s Race Drivin’, which was one of the most technologically amazing arcade games of its time. Featuring a full sit-down cabinet, and amazingly fluid 3D graphics, it could stop people dead in their tracks at any arcade. Then someone got the awesome idea to port it to systems that had maybe 1/100th the power of the arcade. What you ended up with was a game that barely pushed two frames per second at times, creating something that looked more like a picture book than the amazing racing game you stood slack-jawed at in the arcade. Unplayable, and a damn good reason why not every arcade game needed to be ported to consoles.

Back to the Future II (SMS) – Billy

Back to the Future never had it good when it came to video-game translations. So it is no small accomplishment when I state that this Master System version of the 2nd movie is probably the worst of the worst when it comes to BttF games. The game seems to try to get across some of the more popular scenes from the film, and if you close your eyes and imagine hard enough then some of the characters on-screen actually look like their film counterparts. The game consists of a Paperboy-esque hoverboard run, where you dodge such dangerous obstacles as another person on a hoverboard or TWO people on hoverboards. You also get a door-opening puzzle stage, a beat-em-up stage, ANOTHER hoverboard stage, and a goddamned SLIDE PUZZLE stage. When a whole stage of a game is a slide puzzle, you know you’re knee deep in the brown stuff.

Gotcha! The Sport (NES) – Jeremy P

Most of the light gun games for the NES were pretty bad, if you really thought about it. Even Duck Hunt, which I consider an NES classic, is really “shoot two ducks over and over and over while wishing you could shoot the damn dog.”  As a result, I could probably pad out this list with ten or so bad games that use the Zapper, but instead I’ll just jump to the worst light gun game on the system, Gotcha! The Sport. It was based on the Gotcha! toy guns, which were kids versions of paintball guns. As a result, you’d assume this would be an action packed paintball simulation, correct? Nope — instead you get a boring Capture the Flag game where you just walk right, shoot a flag, walk left, and shoot anything else that moves. This might seem fun for a few minutes, but when you combine an overly large target to shoot at, terrible repetitive music, and three unimaginative repeating levels, you are left with a completely uninteresting light gun game that somehow ends up far worse than shooting at two ducks.

The Uncanny X-Men (NES) – Jeremy P

Most licensed games for the NES were sort of depressing failures, but we didn’t expect much as children those days. Sure, the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure game was a complete mess than didn’t make sense, but it still managed to be fun– or at least what I considered fun in those days. So imagine my amazement when I saw there was a new game based on the X-Men, possibly the best comic ever (when you’re a 10 year old). And you get to play as Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Iceman, and *gasp* Wolverine?! Well, I might not have understood why my pants suddenly got wet then, but I do now. That could have been the most amazing game ever.

Instead it was hands down my worst NES game purchase. I’m sure there have to be worse games, but this one is my biggest gaming disappointments ever. The reality of the X-Men game for the NES is a poorly designed top-view action game, where your tri-colored blob runs through an ugly landscape, hitting other ugly monsters / mutants / robots / insurance salesmen, and trying to dodge insanely difficult gates and electric shocks that instantly kill you. Apparently at the end of each level, you get to an insanely hard boss fight, and then you get to run back to the start of the stage before the level explodes. Thankfully, you’ll probably have thrown your cartridge into a bathtub full of mayonnaise after dying to a fucking gate your 40th or 50th time.

We’ve still got a lot of room left in the toilet, so check back next week for 20-30!