The Worst Games I Have Played

Recently I was asked, “What is the worst game you have played”. The question took me for surprise. I have been playing video games for what feels to be all my life (30+) and I am sure I have played some pretty bad games, but it took me a moment to think of any answer. I have always have limited resources, and now time, to play games, so I have always felt that the games buy and play tend to be generally safe bets. Still, I want to take the opportunity to review all the games I have played in this latest console generation, to see if my feeling is correct, and if I do tend to play only “good” games.

So lets get this out of the way, there is no way of objectively saying if a game is good or bad. Even the worst of games have their fans. You can potentially make an argument that sales is an objective way of judging the quality of a game, but to me, that is a reflection of a game’s success. What I will be using to judge the quality of a game is average review score. Specifically, I will use GameRankings.com, which aggregates review scores.

Although I occasionally play PC games, the bulk of my gaming has occurred on my 360. So I have pulled all the games I have played on my 360, and looked up the average score, according to GameRankings. The following are the highlights:

Based on review scores, I could say that I do only play good games. The worst game only scored a 70, which is not bad but average. This exercise however left me wondering how many games are actually “bad” or have we reached a point where we only have average to good games.

@arg3n7um: Well, the notion of an average game earning 7.0 scores on the net has been around for a long time, for better or worse. I think that's one reason why I like GB's five-star scale: a game's either trash, ok if you like the genre, generally good, above average, or exceptional. Shades of grey can be factored in there, but getting too much more granular than that leads to a lot of complications.

There is such a thing as an objectively bad game. If it is just straight up unplayable because of technical faults that's just a poor piece or software period. Now, if someone is willing to put up with that jank and can squeeze some enjoyment out of it that is their prerogative.

The problem with the question of, “What is the worst game you have played” is that you've more than likely completely forgotten about the worst game you've ever played, it came and went and not a single shit was given so the question becomes more of, "what was the most disappointing game you've ever played".

I dunno what the worst game i've ever played is but i'm pretty sure it came from of of those 1000 Games On One CD disks they would sell on the $10 rack...ya, know, "indie games".

These are horrible people.

Oh, there definitely are bad games out there. It's just that people don't talk about them (even if they talk about blockbuster games as outright horrible when that's very rarely the case).