The 50 worst games of all time
We do this because we love (to hate).
20. Girl Fight
The reasons behind Girl Fight's creation become wildly apparent from the moment the game begins. This wasn't made to be a finely-tuned, balanced fighting game with an all-female cast; this is meant to be a T&A show, filled to the brim with the worst stereotypes imaginable. We'd give the game the tiniest ounce of credit if the fighting was at all balanced, but that's hardly the case here.
This seems to be made by people who enjoy 3D fighters but don't know how to make them. It tries to be like Tekken, Dead or Alive, and other big time franchises, but its oversimplified controls and lack of a decent story framing the action drops it down a lot of pegs. If you were looking for balance in your all-female fighters, check out Skullgirls and leave this girl fight alone.
19. Elf Bowling 1 & 2
Packed with a whopping five-minutes of gameplay, Elf Bowling is the epitome of cash-grab ports and an unforgivable chapter in Nintendo's shovelware history. Forgetting that the original Elf Bowling and its sequel were both available free on PCs for years before its commercial release, and the DS release charged around $20 for the exact same experience, the game itself stunk more than Santa's sack after the Christmas rush.
Elf Bowling's core experience consisted of knocking over the fat man's elves with bowling balls or shuffleboard pucks, and surviving the urge to punch a wall every time one of the perky-eared idiots cracked wise about your performance. Objectively, we can see how's Elf Bowling's crass design made it a popular time-killer on PC. But as a retail DS game? That's the biggest insult of them all.
18. Batman: Dark Tomorrow
The battle is won, Ras Al Ghul is defeated. The ending cinematic rolls and Al Ghul's bombs detonate, killing 1/3 of the human race. Wait, what?!
Oh, right, for the best ending there's a signal Batman must disarm before beating Al Ghul, but not once throughout Batman: Dark Tomorrow is the player informed of this. The game also suffer from terrible combat mechanics and a camera that makes Epic Mickeys look like cinematography genius, but this unknown task is simply unforgivable.
17. Infestation: Survivor Stories
Day Z has itself quite a following, using ultra-difficult survival gameplay and an always-dangerous world to pull players in and keep them there. Infestation: Survivor Stories, which you may recognize as The War Z, tried to create some competition for the mod, but instead create a monster worse than any shambling dead present in the game.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
First the game releases without some of its most advertised features included. Next, once those issues were fixed, the game was plagued with awful controls, bland visuals, and players who instantly hacked the game to their advantage. Worst of all, the free-to-play aspect has some of the most heinous microtransactions we've ever seen. Paying real money for in-game supplies like ammo and weapons, without any other ways to gain these items, tells us gamers should all be conscientious objectors to this war.
16. The Guy Game
Representing a new low in the cheaply produced games with cheaply rendered nudity genre, The Guy Game proved there was a limit to how many douchetastic hoops gamers would jump through to see a little flesh. Never mind the fact that The Guy Game offered roughly 1/1000th of what the internet could in mere seconds at the time. Top Heavy Studios stashed its buxom treasures behind a Flash-O-Meter that forced players to wade through a parade of busty morons, multiple layers of censorship, and a thick swamp of shame in order to finally view prizes you could have probably earned in real life with half the effort.
Not since the days of scrambled porn and dial-up internet has a piece of software made us work so hard for such mediocre adult material. If you'll excuse us, we need to take a long, hot shower.
15. Catfight
The original Mortal Kombat uses digitized actors to craft its characters, creating a 'we're fighting with real people' visual style that fans understandably loved. Other titles tried to copy this approach, most of them with very little success. Way down on the list of failures is the PC-exclusive Catfight, also known as the Ultimate Femme Fatale Fighting Game, a release that is anything but ultimate.
Slow combat, over-sexualized characters (seriously, no one wears a pair of pants, it's all body suits or spandex that'd make Cammy blush), and some of the worst hit detection we've ever seen in a fighting game make this one truly bad game. We don't even know what the developers were trying to achieve, because we fail to see who would even find this arousing. We're sorry we even brought it to your attention.
14. Blackwater
Quick! Make a list obvious things you need in a modern video game shooter and well see if they're in 505 Studios POS Blackwater. Checkpoints? Nope, gotta start over. Lots of enemies to fight? No again, unless you think five means lots. Immersive environments? Well, they would have been during the Commodore 64 era. Well-implemented Kinect technology? Wait, you're just being silly.
None of the things it tries to do are executed remotely well, and its since become one of the very worst games GR has ever reviewed. We suppose you could make a drinking game out of this with your friends, but that would mean that you would have to plug in a controller and play this hack-job normally (though equally badly). Why the hell would anybody do that? you may wonder. What you should be asking is, Why the hell did anybody publish this?
13. Mortal Kombat Advance
The Mortal Kombat franchise has seen a lot of ups and downs over the years, but nothing like the vomit that wound up on the Gameboy Advance in 2001. Essentially a port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, MK Advance did feature all of the characters from the famed arcade fighter, just neutered by cutting the amounts of attacks in half and looking like your cat peed just inside the your GBAs screen.
It's also off-the-chart difficult. Even in the novice list of AI opponents, the rough, unresponsive controls won't stand up to the relentless computer-controlled enemies. Seriously. It's a mess.
12. Friday the 13th
We love the term death simulator. Mostly because it's bandied around by talking heads that have no idea what it means. The one and only time that it can actually be used with accuracy, though, is LJN's god awful Friday the 13th for the NES. Why? Because you will die, you will die often, and you won't even know why you're dying. Then you come to your senses and stop playing it. Demons Souls and Dark Souls found a way to make this fun years later. Friday the 13th found a way to make this a precursor to pulmonary embolisms.
Loosely following the plot of the first film (loosely meaning barely), you take control of the counseling staff of Camp Crystal Lake so you can well nobody was ever quite sure. You can kill Jason (whom will always come back), or you can survive for three days/nights which is damn near impossible. To describe this game any more than just saying that its a steaming pile of crap seems tedious. So just take it as face value.
11. Drake of the 99 Dragons
Thank the gaming gods for Uncharted and Nathan Drake, as he returned honor to the name Drake after this original Xbox title smeared it through the dirt. 99 Dragons has a great concept for a silly action game; an undead assassin from Hong Kong must save the world from evil using martial arts powers bestowed by his master. But it's all downhill from there.
The story makes zero sense, with an ending as unsatisfying as the NES one screen then credits days. The camera is awful; half the time you can't see what you're shooting at. Worst of all the combat is glacially slow and the visuals are flavorless, leaving nothing for any player to enjoy. What were trying to say is this: if you're playing this game I feel bad for you son, it's got 99 dragons but it's got no fun.
12DOVE was first founded in 1999, and since then has been dedicated to delivering video game-related news, reviews, previews, features, and more. Since late 2014, the website has been the online home of Total Film, SFX, Edge, and PLAY magazines, with comics site Newsarama joining the fold in 2020. Our aim as the global GamesRadar Staff team is to take you closer to the games, movies, TV shows, and comics that you love. We want to upgrade your downtime, and help you make the most of your time, money, and skills. We always aim to entertain, inform, and inspire through our mix of content - which includes news, reviews, features, tips, buying guides, and videos.