Bad video games have been a fact of life forever… and I should know, I’ve reviewed more than my fair share of them. But I’m left wondering — who ended up with these stinkers?
I’ve been doing some tidying and sorting of late, which has meant delving into my collection of retro games.
In that collection, I have many fine titles, some true sparkling gems of the retro world — and no, they’re not all the ones that now have annoyingly high price tags to them.
Also read:
Why Retro Gaming Matters For Every Gamer
However, because I worked for a rather long time as a freelance journalist including for a number of gaming sites and publications, I also still have… some of the less excellent titles.
Look, you read the headline, you know they’re stinkers.
The baby ogre with its finger up its nose is having WAY more fun than you will with this game.
For those after a short practical lesson in journalism (and it’s observationally even more true for the skerricks of gaming journalism that are left, or at least the ones that are worth paying any attention to, anyway…) the reality of being a freelancer (or the new cadet hire, or whatever, not that I’ve heard of anyone hiring cadet gaming journalists in… decades…) is that you get paid to do the jobs that need doing.
Sometimes that’s because of a time crunch, or a staff member on leave, or away sick…
But sometimes, it’s simply because the people with the staff jobs have a task they simply don’t want to do.
Nobody wanted to save the animals. Honestly, not even me.
Enter the freelancer (in this case me), ready and willing to review games that pretty much everyone knows aren’t going to be… great… in return for cold, hard cash.
Not that much cold, hard cash — gaming journalism has always paid incredibly badly — but it all counts when you’ve got rent to pay, you know?
It amazes me that nobody in marketing thought
“Hang on a minute… what other meanings might this title have?”
Not only that, but they didn’t notice at least THREE TIMES.
In some ways I shouldn’t complain — writing about kusoge sure beats breaking my back doing manual labour or something — but that wasn’t the key thought that went through my mind when I was unearthing all these not-quite-gems.
The “FREE” charm bracelet had a lot more charm than this cynical pile of dreck.
It was this thought: These games in particular are so very specifically focused at a younger gamer market… which means that in most cases, it’s not going to be the kids who were buying them, because kids are not, typically speaking, cashed up.
They were purchased by parents, grandparents, that kind of thing.
For the record, I didn’t only review DS games back in the day.
It’s just that I found my stash of DS games, that’s all.
And… they kept on coming, so presumably somebody bought them.
I only had to review them, and I got paid for it, but some kids ended up with these in their birthday or seasonal gift offerings… and that must have sucked.
Was that you? I’m genuinely curious to find folks who might have had to suffer in a much more extended way than I did, because, with one exception, I’ve never gone back to these since I reviewed them.
That exception? This particular “gem”, because it’s a game I can hate-play any time I like. Which still isn’t often, but it’s more than any other…
THE PAIN! THE PAIN! (Amazingly, for this one, you can still read my full review here.
I like it less now than I did then.)
So, I return to my question: Did you suffer through any notably AWFUL games — they don’t have to be DS ones — when you were a young’un… and if so, what were they? Let me know below!
About the Author
Monsters vs Aliens for the Nintendo DS was the game that taught me that games could be bad when I was 7. I just thought all games were good because I had only played good games, and I liked the movie, so I thought I would like the game. Very very wrong.