Showbiz
Louis Dor
Nov 21, 2015
Video games have successfully made the transition from a niche entertainment industry to a cultural cornerstone over a couple of decades.
One such example is Fallout 4, by Bethesda, which has been released to incredible hype and universal acclaim.
The ability of clusters of pixels to enthrall us, delight us and bring us to tears in unparralleled interactivity is staggering.
Yet we still get releases which simply baffle as to why anyone would play them... So let's take a brief look at some of the most perplexingly dull, rubbish games you can buy today:
1. Professional Farmer 2016:
Ignoring the fact that this game's purpose is to simulate a day job which people are paid to do, this is how it was marketed in the trailer:
If that doesn't prompt a pre-order, we don't know what will.
2. Train Simulator 2015:
This release is a similar kettle of fish, but with this simulator you can manage rail networks, rather than simple farms.
A bit of an upgrade, and we suppose there's the upside of flooring it round Europe with a high-speed train. That could be fun - we caveat this entry with "unless you exclusively cause mass pile ups".
Playing the game to run efficient transport solutions, however, seems more of a route to a migraine than entertainment.
All aboard for self-loathing!
3. King James Bible for Game Boy:
This entry from 1994 should probably get some credit for beating the kindle to the concept of e-books, but still. Pokémon is a cartridge away and isn't available in paper form.
Perhaps even more staggering is what it currently sells for:
4. Sakura Swim Club:
This is barely a game. It's a click through cartoon story set in Japan, in which you play a character who is oh it doesn't even matter.
You wander round a school and have conversations with impossibly large breasted female classmates who inevitably trip over in predictable and convoluted ways to reveal more of their bodies.
This pornographic excuse for a game is best summarised by this Steam review:
5. Bad Rats:
This is a physics puzzle game which was released in 2009. The objective was to use rats to get revenge on cats, by killing them.
The game touted "realistic physics", which were all broken, and included poor level design and a Middle Eastern explosive rat.
Repeat: This was 2009.
As one review states:
6. Rugby World Cup 2011:
It hurts that rugby remains a sport that doesn't take easily to video gaming. The budgets that small studios usually have to take on a genre of such niche appeal mean that the sport has never really been done justice in pixels.
In 2011, things could have changed.
A rugby world cup in New Zealand and a more mainstream gaming industry? Fans were on tenterhooks for an appropriate accompanying video game, hopefully a commercial and critical success.
Instead, we were treated to one of the most broken and repetitive games ever made.
It is so slow at the breakdown, so closed to any improvisation, so bunched, so unlike anything that real rugby encourages, that it disappoints pretty much everyone who buys it.
Open plea: Please, someone, make a good rugby franchise.
7. The Graveyard:
The game is five minutes long and consists entirely of the player following a woman into the graveyard, sitting on a bench and listening to a song and her story.
The developers say in the Steam description that they were shooting more for art than gameplay:
It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with poetry and storytelling but without words.
Riiiight.
The graphics, story and feel of the game are so underdeveloped and poor, you leave it feeling a little robbed of your £3.99.
8. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
The films aren't great, but all those explosions and transformers in game form must be awesome right?
Wrong. The controls are clunky, the fighting is repetitive and there's little option for the player to be creative in when to transform (which is basically the entire reason the transformers are, or were, cool).
The EuroGamer review sums it up adeptly:
It's never much fun, but nor is it wonky enough to be terrible. It's simply there, a forgettable distraction.
9. Rock'em Sock'em Robots:
A truly baffling Game Boy Advance game.
You tap buttons to defeat your opponent, with none of the mechanical satisfaction of the head springing up in real life.
What is the actual point?
10. Charlie's Angels:
This universally panned film tie-in was a beat them up game with almost no plot or gameplay of value - even in comparisons to the film it was unfavourably seen.
In addition, all the playable characters spend the majority of the time in swimsuits, because.
It was a different time to be alive.
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