It’s been a while since we looked at the games the lie at the bottom of the trash heap, the games that stores couldn’t give away even if they tried, the games that grandparents seem to always be attracted to like moths to a flame for birthday and Christmas gifts.
Today we are winding the clock back to the year 2010 to take a look at the worst rated games of the year. So, put on your nostalgia goggles and fire up your lawnmower sounding Xbox 360 and George Forman PS3, because here are the worst games from 2010 based on their critic ratings!
- . Blood Drive – Xbox 360 (40%)
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We figured Blood Drive was a sequel to the early Xbox game Blood Wake, but instead it’s a racing/combat game ala Twisted Metal except it isn’t very good. You take on five other racers in a series of seven events across a number of badly designed maps. The event list isn’t very deep and only made worse as most events are variations of other events. It’s not a great start, but at points you can’t event start a game with the bugs present.
You’ll often find yourself spawning in weird areas on the map, something dozens of feet in the air, getting suck in the environment, enemies rthat spawn on top/right behind of you, and getting event items is almost impossible at times as they don’t register. All that said, Blood Drive does have all the components of a video game minus one: being any fun.
Look, it’s not often that a video game actively doesn’t want you playing it but here we are. Blood Drive isn’t a video game, it’s like being stuck at home on a sick day and being forced to do homework all day long. The best thing reviewers could say was that the game might have been worth it if it was a digital release, and its price was cut in half.
- . Dead Or Alive Paradise – PSP (38%)
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We get a portable console to make this year’s list early and it just happened to the Sony PSP. We would have sworn that the Nintendo DS would see it before the PSP as it was Nintendo’s little shovelware machine on its last legs. And more so you wouldn’t expect to see Dead or Alive make this list. The DOA fighting game series might be overshadowed by the big players, but it’s still a well-loved series that tends to review pretty well.
But Dead or Alive Paradise isn’t a fighting game at all. Sure, that’s not weird as the DOA series has never been afraid to play into the sexy nature of its fighters with side story games full of minigames meant to titillate its horny audience. Still, those sexy romps tend to get fair reviews as, at the very least, they are fun games with lots to do for lonely boys.
Dead or Alive Paradise is an insult to fighting game fans and horny 16-year-old boys alike. The girls feature extremely low polygon counts making them more creepy than sexy, it features only a few minigames that include volleyball, pool-hopping, card games, slots and a creepy stalker photo mode. Even for 2010 you should have saved your money and just get on Google to get your animated lady fix.
- . Quantum Theory – Xbox 360 (37%)
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Not to be confused with the much better Quantum Break, Quantum Theory is a major AAA release from Tecmo that everyone almost instantly forgot about. The game says a lot about the Japanese gaming market at the time as it was starting to lose serious ground to Western developers in terms of gameplay advancements and sales. That and the Xbox 360 wasn’t working in Japan.
Tecmo essentially tried to copy Gears of War with Quantum Theory and their lack of understanding of the mostly Western shooter genre meant the game was always going to come off as a cheap imitation. Think of it like those cheap movie licensed games that look to clone some other popular games and copy paste it over their IP.
The game was so bland and generic that one publication called Quantum Theory “a disgrace to the video game industry.” Being a bad video game would be one thing, but being a bad video game that’s a bad clone of another series is a sword through the heart and made it so that Tecmo would go back to making the sorts of games it knows best instead of Gear of War Japan Edition.
- . Dead Space Ignition – Xbox 360 (35%)
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Dead Space is an awesome horror that that just got a remake that hit all the right notes. But while EA did right by Dead Space, it didn’t do right by trying to milk what seemed like their only original franchise in ages that sold well into the ground, almost until it was, funny enough, dead. Dead Space Ignition was one such move as it’s barely a game to begin with.
The game is set just before the events of Dead Space 2 and will last you about an hour or so of total gametime. The game takes place through comic book panels where at points you are allowed to interreact and play one of three hacking minigames. It’s barely a game that served only to provide players with some new suit for the main game, make hacking easier, and access to some special rooms.
Reading the comic book would have been scarier, especially with the wobbly “animated” comic panels the game uses to oftentimes comical effects. You pick choices on what to do (more like see) next and repeat until it’s over. It’s barely even a visual novel as those have better stories, better gameplay, and much better art. The game was bundled as a pre-order bonus for Dead Space 2, but that’s annoying as hiding story behind a paywall for those who didn’t pre-order feels really shady.
- . Kung Ku Rider – PS3 (36%)
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If we’ve learned one thing putting this list together is that if a console releases any sort of motion peripheral, stay as far away as humanly possible. Kung Fu Rider shows that not even Sony was immune from trying to siphon off of that causal market that made the Nintendo Wii a money printing machine with far less powerful and expensive hardware than its compatriots.
If you thought the Kinect was broken, Kung Fu Rider says “hold my beer” as it makes the PS3 Eye Toy look like a barely functioning device that works worse than the PS2 version from years earlier and the Move controllers look like knock-off Wii Remotes that light up pretty with pretty colors.
What we have is a racing game that sees you stuck on an office chair (or similar) and uses a single Move controller that you shake up and down to speed up. Rotating the controller moves left and right, and flicking it makes you jump. Now read that last sentences and figure out the glaring issue. That’s right, you speed up with the same motion to jump meaning you’ll be doing both at random defeating the technical aspect of any of the racing. Just roll you own office chair down your driveway to have a better experience.
- . Kick-Ass: The Game – PS3 (33%)
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I know, it’s shocking to see a movie licensed video game make this list. Kick-Ass: The Game is the game based on the Kick-Ass motion picture. Even in 2010 that sort of title feels like a relic of another age. Pretty sure being on a video game console makes it a video game, but we are no marketing expert here.
Another thing is that Kick-Ass: The Game is one of many beat-’em-ups to make this list. Seems like that sort of gameplay type is the go-to for quick movie tie-in games that are underfunded and built with a hard deadline. Critics panned the game for its repetitive nature, buggy performance, high digital-only price, and lack of any heart.
It’s hard to find anyone that had any fun with this title but one YouTube comment on the games trailer did say that: “I had no Idea the developers were still making games for the PS2,” unknowingly highlighting just how notoriously hard it was for developers to make small digital only games for the PS3. It at the very least as a two-player mode to share the pain with friends, for whatever that’s worth.
- . Megamind: Ultimate Showdown – Xbox 360 (33%)
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Megamind was a fine film that’s mostly known for being a meme in today’s day and age, but upon it’s theatrical release it was big enough to manage to get itself a video game adaptation. As with most move-based tie-in games though, Megamind: Ultimate Showdown is mostly a stinker only there to snag a few bucks from parents whose kid’s loved the film.
The game actually looks pretty great, but at this point in the lifecycle of the Xbox 360 all games looked great. The game itself is nothing but a mindless shooter that’s nearly impossible to lose while playing. You simply press shoot and you will win the game without any problem. It’s a shame because the game mimics the fun look of the film it’s based on, but its gameplay is designed only to keep children busy so parents can do their taxes in peace.
Megamind: Ultimate Showdown is the most paint-by-numbers video game of all time. The only reason people picked this one up back in the day was because it quickly dropped to clearance sale prices, and they could easily farm it for Xbox Achievements. It’s so lackluster that the trailer posted 12 years ago doesn’t even have a single comment on it, so go leave it some love for the Megamind.
- . Fighters Uncaged – Xbox 360 (32%)
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The Microsoft Kinect was a barely functioning piece of technology created only to show up Nintendo, but only served to leave Microsoft with egg all over their face. Fighters Uncaged did nothing to bring Nintendo fans over the Xbox and did quite a lot to show that full-motion camera controllers don’t work all that well.
You are the controller is the pitch for the Kinect and this title, but the human body just makes for a poor substitute to thumbsticks and buttons. Because this was “new” technology the game forces you into a boring and slow tutorial that explains how to move your arms and legs like the screen shows. The only problem is that Fighters Uncaged can’t really detect anything that you do, at least not very well.
Fighters Uncaged is not a video game in the traditional sense, let alone a fighting game. It’s more like a Vegas game of chance. You see a command on the screen and try to imitate it and hope the dice of destiny sees it fit to let you pull off the move. Most people probably won’t even play the game as intended as getting out of the unskippable tutorial is a nightmare. And if you do, you’re greeted with a measly six opponents to flail away at.
- . Dream Chronicle – PS3 (31%)
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Hidden object/Myst-like adventure games are such a strange thing to us today. If you go down any big-box retailer you’ll see that PC games have almost enterally gone digital, but that the physical releases that do grace shelves are almost all hidden object games. Who is buying these things and how do we get in on the scam, er, action?
Dream Chronicles is one such hidden object/adventure game that hit the PS3, but one that critics panned across the board. Most reviewers simply wondered how this type of game survived in the modern age of 2010. I’m sure they’d all be furious to find out their continued popularity over a decade later across all platforms.
The game plays like a lot like Myst, only removed of anything interesting and looking less impressive. You move from static screen to static screen moving a painfully slow cursor across the screen and selecting objects. The game would work fine on iPad or PC with quicker controls, much like they still do today, but on console it’s nothing but a boring, bland, and slow experience that will send you to dreamland.
- . Deca Sports Freedom – Xbox 360 (26%)
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Not to be outdone with providing the Nintendo Wii with a crap minigame collection that makes Wii Sports look like the greatest video game ever made, the team behind Deca Sports figured it could garner new fans on the Xbox 360 with Deca Sports Freedom. This makes sense as they had already annoyed Wii fans and were running out of suckers, er, customers on that platform.
Deca Sports Freedom has the distinct pleasure of being the only non-Nintendo game in the series. It’s essentially the same as the Wii games that came before it, using almost the identical game layout, but instead of waggling a Wii Remote, you now wiggle your entire body with the Xbox 360’s Kinect motion sensor. The trailer did the game no favors as it featured bored actors alongside barely working gameplay.
If you thought the game didn’t function all that well with an actual video game controller, then you better watch out because Deca Sports Freedom on the Kinect was even less responsive and even less fun than it’s Wii predecessors. The only thing Deca Sports Freedom did do well was to get kids to give up on the Kinect and go outside to play some real sports.
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