I previously threw this game onto this list as an example that I despise Activision and their money-grabbing business ethics. I wasn't exactly ethical in my denomination of this game, so I'll start anew. I shall also point out that this is coming from a gamer who quite thoroughly enjoyed the first two games, despite some of their faults. Modern Warfare 3 is, for all intents and purposes, a game made SOLELY to garner dough from the fans of the previous entries, and it definitely shows. Not a single element was disturbed in the game's third outing; I tried to play multiplayer after completing the storyline and found out that it was essentially Modern Warfare 2 copy-pasted, starting weapons and all. The story didn't explain much at all; sure, it ties up loose ends with what happened to Makarov after the events of the second game, but the the story was, at MANY points, stalling for time to showcase set-piece moments, such as the airplane level and the 'emotional' scene, which I won't spoil even though I feel obligated to because it's INCREDIBLY forced. The only worthwhile contribution this game brought to the table was the survival mode added to Special Ops, which is often undermined by the shoddily-reused multiplayer. I was willing to give Modern Warfare 3 a chance, even after the dull E3 showing, but in the time I rented it I simply can't say that it delivered. I had to brute force myself into completing the shallow campaign mode, and the mutliplayer was the exact same as MW2. Modern Warfare 3 isn't a horrendous game, but it wasn't necessary either, only serving to profit Activision's budget, and that is why I despise it.

Jak was one of the most classic games of its generation, mainly because of its evolving from a pure platformer to a open world, GTA-esque platformer hybrid. Every second of the Jak games was filled with outrageously funny dialogue and neat gameplay... then some guy in the production department said "Screw this, we don't want quality anymore" and decided to turn Jak into a Burnout clone. The racing is half-decent, but this isn't Jak at all. Sure, most of Jak 3 was spent driving around in a plethora of different vehicles, but those were the boring mechanics of the game, and they somehow decided to branch off of that and make it into a buggy racer that almost outright killed the franchise. The same director I mentioned above must have gone on to make Uncharted. Ba-zing! (kidding, kidding)

Speaking of classic platformers turned into stupid vehicle-based games, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts is another betrayal of my trust from one of my most beloved companies, Rare. Before I can elaborate, let's look back at our favorite bear and bird duo's history one more time. Banjo and Kazooie got their big breakthrough on the Nintendo 64 with their self-titled game, and they hit it big time with outstanding level design and creative, humorous dialogue. It was highly touted as one of the greatest platformers of its time, rivaling that of Super Mario 64. After that, Rare did what many thought was unthinkable and crafted the perfect sequel, Banjo-Tooie, which not only buffed the landscape size tenfold, but added an arsenal of new moves, even more silly characters and more ways to play. It's arguably Rare's greatest game to date, and one of the greatest 3D platformers in history. A few years later, however, Rareware was sold to Microsoft, a company who broke into the gaming market with the invention of the Xbox. It is a sad tale that many fans of the original company still cannot accept, because even though Rare still attempted to make quality titles, some members of the team often meddled with their development and ended up forcing them to swap genres vigorously to keep up with the ever-changing gaming industry. One of the affected IPs, unfortunately, was Banjo-Kazooie, whose image was brutally butchered with their most recent (and, most likely, final) addition to the franchise, Nuts and Bolts. Let me be extremely clear on something: Nuts and Bolts is FAR from a terrible game. The LittleBigPlanet-style vehicle editor and the expansive levels were a nice touch, and the controls aren't that bad. But think to yourself for a minute: is this really Banjo-Kazooie? You know, the game that had you traveling ON FOOT, collecting Jiggies, notes, and other items while solving puzzles and defeating bosses? ON FOOT?! Since when the hell did we ask for VEHICLES, Microsoft?! We wanted more 3D platforming, not some LittleBigPlanet vehicle knockoff with awkward physics and GTA-style missions! If Nuts and Bolts was released under the moniker of some other obscure character from Diddy Kong Racing, such as Bumper the Badger (Shit, he would be the PERFECT FUCKING CHARACTER for this game! He looks just like a mechanic!), I would accept it as a proper and, quite frankly, astounding Rare game, but they decided to throw in Banjo-Kazooie, a duo with a past that had hardly ANYTHING to do with vehicles besides Diddy Kong Racing. Thus, as much as people would disagree, I'm cementing this flawed gem on my list. Rest in Peace, Rareware. You were good, maybe even the best, but now, you're just another shovelware developer.

I shouldn't even have to say anything for this one. I played a little bit of Red Faction: Guerrilla, and it was pretty damn good. The destruction physics were amazing, the multiplayer was pretty decent, and it all and all really felt like a decent open-world Volition game. Now, imagine if they took Guerrilla, stripped it of its sandbox gameplay, made it into a gritty third-person shooter and completely ignored pretty much every aspect of what made Guerrilla good. Congratulations! You have Red Faction: Armageddon, a shameless space marine shooter that doesn't even bother to try to improve upon Guerrilla's success. Way to go, THQ.

Destroy All Humans!, despite a few technical hiccups every now and then, was an extremely addicting sandbox game that placed you in control of Crypto, a mind-bending alien with a stash of devastating weaponry. Once the series hit the 3rd main entry, though (let's be honest, Big Willy Unleashed never happened, but at least that was kind of a spin-off), everything just felt... off. What little environments there were just looked way too similar to each other, the physics were screwed with even more, and the whole experience felt lackluster compared to that of DAH! 1 and 2. Poor sales pretty much spelled doom for the franchise, not to mention Pandemic's untimely demise. What a tragic end to such an underrated gem.

Wow, the PlayStation mascots have been through some rough bumps, haven't they? Anyways, Ratchet and Clank could very well have been my favorite platforming series of all time, even crowning the title against Mario or Banjo-Kazooie. Unfortunately, in Deadlocked, Insomniac seemed to have forgotten about the 'platforming' aspects of past games and decided to shovel out a gladiator-style, tournament-oriented third person shooter. Sure, there's still some elements of platforming thrown in, but the hub world is barely 25 meters long. There's no exploration in this game at all; if you try and go outside the mission boundaries, you fail, and that's something that past games in the series didn't force on you. While not the most outlandish of sequel disappointments, I definitely didn't get much enjoyment out of it. Fortunately, Insomniac seemed to have learned from their mistake, and never brought the series to a point like this again (although one could argue that All 4 One changed up the game quite a bit), so that's a relief.

Spyro is a tough case for me. While his games weren't very lengthy, I can safely say they brought a lot of cool mechanics to the table for its time, like the ability to glide and breathe different elements. Year of the Dragon was pretty much the peak of excellence for Spyro, and then it went all downhill from there, starting off with this mess. It's not that Enter the Dragonfly doesn't portray all of the aspects of its ancestors, but that it feels like it was released in its damn Alpha stage. The levels were unique and interesting to explore, but the loading times were downright excruciating and, half of the time, entire sections of levels failed to load properly, or even load altogether, resulting in a blank void. It really sucks, too; this game has so much promise and has a pretty deep amount of content, but the technical aspects weighed it down so much that it turns it into a frustrating test of patience. I can only hope that Spyro recovered well after the garbage-fest that was The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning.

Okay, so Ratchet and Jak have already occupied space on this shameful list, but both of those games combined couldn't reach the level of disgrace that this mediocre, broken tie-in somehow managed to receive. This game is supposed to be a herald of pure concentrated awesome; finally, all three of the Playstation platformer mascots come together to battle tyranny, solve treacherous schemes, and save the universe from imminent doom, but, in a crazy design decision, Insomniac, Naughty Dog, and Sucker Punch forfeited their franchises to a group called Nihilistic Software, who had no previous experience with the series at all. As you can see, what was supposed to be the greatest game of all time resulted in the most disappointing, distraught Playstation Move game on the market. From what I can gather, parts of each of the characters worlds have been separated from their dimensions and brought together into one, and the dynamic trio must forge an alliance and fight their way to restoring order and balance to their distinct universes. How could this not be awesome? Well, a good start would be that the controls outright refuse to work properly half the time. The in-game combat mechanics and the motion sensibility seem to each forget that the other exists from time to time, ending up with you wildly flailing your controller in a feeble attempt to hit something. The kicker, though, comes in to play when you find out that you can barely do anything but move throughout the tiny game world and hit/shoot wave after wave of generic enemies. There's no exploration, no sidequests or collectables, not even a jump button! The most fun you'll get out of this trash heap are the miniature minigame events, and even those get old pretty quick. Although it's more of a spin-off than a sequel, it primed itself with its own story line, so I consider it a half-sequel-that-never-happened-canonically...? Whatever, I really don't care; it sucks nuts, and it doesn't even deserve the honor of being a coaster on my coffee table.

Rampage wasn't exactly a top tier game to begin with, but it managed to blend gross-out humor and old gargantuan-monster tropes with an adequate array of moves and a decent multiplayer system, despite the repetitive level design and the cheap difficulty. Total Destruction pretty much squandered what very little hope I had left for the future of Rampage. The fast-paced action of the first few console iterations was slowed down tenfold, the level design got even more bland, and the controls felt busted compared to the original (I played the Wii version, so I'm basing my thoughts off of that, although I'm sure the PS2 version has a somewhat less awful control scheme). I really only gave this game a minor chance because of its stellar cast of characters, which was also bogged down by having absurdly-random unlock conditions. Unsurprisingly, Total Destruction managed to totally destroy the franchise, fading George and the rest of the misfit mega-mutants away into obscurity, and also contributing toward Midway's bankruptcy and eventual shutdown.

FlatOut was also another title that struggled to get critical acclaim, yet provided hours of ragdoll-torturing entertainment for me and my relatives. Sure, the regular races were somewhat uninspired and mundane, but the stretchy, hysterical physics had me laughing until the cows came home, especially with the extra stunt-based minigames. A proper third game was something I hoped would be fulfilled, and it eventually was, except they replaced the 'proper' part with 'disgraceful'. Development for the project switched from Bugbear to Team 6, infamous for making European Street Racing, a game that nearly matched Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing in quality. As you can see, the marriage of Team 6 and FlatOut was indeed an ugly one. FlatOut 3 was plagued with glitches and even blander locales than the previous game, if you can believe that. Cars frequently implant themselves in the ground, fall through the map, explode for no reason, and do just about anything but run properly. The stunts were even ruined, too! After ejecting, your character flies randomly throughout the level, instead of being somewhat controllable after the ejection. The stunts have nearly no correlation to their titles; the 'golf course' is just a loop-the-loop long jump minigame. This game is so terrible that attempting to find something good out of it is like trying to find a 10-carat diamond ring in a Toys 'R Us. Shame on you, Team 6, just shame on you.

Okay, when I did a review of this game, I'll admit, I was absolutely pent up with frustration and had to blow off steam by writing a long, angry play-by-play of Pokemon Channel. Yes, I'm pathetic, and I I will admit, I was quite harsh on the game overall since I did have some fun with it as a kid, but it still doesn't hold a candle to Hey You Pikachu!, the game it was based off of. Hey You Pikachu! wasn't groundbreaking, but the activity variety and the voice commands drove it home. Here, going outside is hardly ever required, and the television takes up most of your time. While most of the channels are at least somewhat entertaining, some get old rather quick, and the only reward you get for playing through the game is a crummy Pichu Bros. short that, as I said before, could have easily been shoehorned in as a bonus feature on one of the millions of Pokemon films on the market. I expected so much more from Pokemon Channel (although, come to think of it, I don't know why) but it managed to remove a lot of what Hey You Pikachu! enjoyable, which I didn't think was possible.

Mortal Kombat was one of the first games that dared to tread the sacred waters of hardcore violence, and it gained a massive reputation for it. As a fighting game, personally, I'd say the series as a whole is fairly average, but Armageddon doesn't deserve that title. But how on Earth could Armageddon be a bad game? It's essentially Mortal Kombat Deception with EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER that could have possibly been dug out of the series roots (including, but not limited to, a giant dragon and a guy IN A MOTION CAPTURE SUIT) and boasted an advanced kustomization system which allowed you to make your own kombatant if you were upset with the already massive roster. Hell, it even allowed you to perform custom fatalities. How could they screw this up? Well, I could just start by saying that this game, in every other aspect, is just Mortal Kombat Deception repeated over again, except this rendition might as well be called Kombat Party, with all the damn mini-games they decides to throw in. I mean, come on, Motor Kombat? Did I really, at any point, ask you guys to include a Mario Kart clone into Mortal freakin' Kombat? There's also a story mode revolving around some whatsit named Taven who has to stop his brother Daegon from doing dastardly things to Outworld and Earthrealm, and neither of these two characters were introduced in the Mortal Kombat canon before at all, which makes it seem completely unnecessary. Even the custom fatalities themselves suck; you press buttons and your character slowly rips apart your opponent move by move with the elegance of a Rockem' Sockem' Robot. None of the characters have any kind of distinct finisher moves during these fatalities, which means the few custom fatalities you can perform are pre-scripted for every character in the game, which comes off as incredibly lazy and unappealing. Yes, coming up with distinct fatalities for 62 separate characters would be quite taxing, but it would at least show a semblance of effort. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe shortly followed, which was pretty much the polar opposite of Armageddon... yet it sucked as well, since the violence was meddled with due to the DC Heroes' 'Thou shalt not kill' rule, and the gore of the previous games was nearly non-existent. Thankfully, Warner Brothers and Netherrealm Studios managed to clean house with the excellent Mortal Kombat 9. I just hope it doesn't stray into foul territory anymore, lest the fate of Ed Boon and his cohorts get washed down the toilet again.

In retrospect, I can't call the entire Army Men series 'great,' since the games were plagued with unwieldy mechanics that didn't age as well as some of the other games of its time. However, I commend Army Men because their developer, 3DO, did everything they could to include the franchise within the boundaries of as many genres that they could muster. They've made top-down shooters, third-person shooters, platformer-shooter hybrids, flight combat, and real-time strategy. I remember eventually persuading my parents to find me a copy of the PS2 re-release of Sarge's Heroes 2, another one of my childhood favorites. The game was as great as I remembered (possibly even better considering the full voice-acting by Jim Cummings and company, as well as CGI cutscenes), but there was a trailer depicting a sequel to the saga that detailed the environment in a gritty, hellish setting. Words fail to describe how stoked I was for this game, and words also fail to describe how teeth-gratingly piss-poor the game turned out to be. The graphics, which looked attractive in the cutscenes, suddenly metamorphosed into a polygonal mess of awful textures and callous, stiff-looking models. The gameplay also took a hit; the platforming controls are nearly as stiff as the characters, the scenery recurs so often that you'll swear you're playing the same scenes three times in a row, and the camera is a bigger bother than its predecessors. 3DO also felt the need to include an incredibly out-of-place, tragic story element in which an explosive detonates at a treaty signing between the Tan and Green armies, killing off THE ENTIRE GREEN ARMY (including all of Bravo squad and Sarge's love interest Vikki) in one scene. It sounds like a major spoiler, but it isn't; this scene literally happens in the FIRST TEN MINUTES of the game, and while I'm all up for a shocking, dramatic plot twist, it means that Sarge constantly talks to himself like a kleptomaniac for the rest of the game in a dirty, Jason Statham-esque voice, and its novelty wears off very quickly. You see, part of Army Men's early success was with its cast; despite being all the same color, they managed to diverge from one another in their characterizations, what with Thick being the dumb muscle of the group and Colonel Grimm a sophisticated veteran. Now that we've killed them all off for no reason other than to add a fundamentally emotional motive for Sarge's one-man apocalypse revenge scheme, all we have left is the boring, deep-voiced commando who isn't even voiced by the great Jim Cummings anymore. I wish that 3DO thought a little more before diving headfirst into the dramatic plot line set up, but they didn't, and, much to my dismay, 3DO has croaked, meaning my chances for a true Sarge's Heroes sequel are about zilch to kaput.

Okay, okay, so Dead Rising 2: Case West is technically not a sequel, it's a canon expansion, but in any case I was severely distraught by the lack of content I received when I purchased it. While there were some rough patches on Dead Rising 2's presentation, it held together quite nicely, offering a slew of weaponized obstacles and outfits while stitching its plot threads securely. It even improved the survivor AI, which was the most common complaint of its older counterpart. It isn't godawful, but Dead Rising 2: Cast West didn't have nearly as many enticing elements that its parent game evoked. Joining Chuck Greene in his quest to find the cure for his daughter's terminal zombification this time around is none other than the enigmatic protagonist of the first game, Frank West, and the only lead they know of is a nearby Zombrex production facility. Most of the game is spent inside this facility, unlike the past outings which took place in massive, spacious malls, so the exploration feels a little claustrophobic at times. There are two things that bother me the most about this game: You can't play as Frank West in offline single-player (utterly defeating the purpose of having Frank West in the game at all) and being ludicrously short, about on par with Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, a game that came out BEFORE DEAD RISING 2 WAS EVEN RELEASED, and that was FIVE DOLLARS CHEAPER. Seriously, if you can't choose between playing as Chuck Greene or Frank West, then you should have just stuck with the core game's 'clone-Chuck' feature. It seems like I'm rambling on for nothing about this whole character diversity dilemma, but Frank West has his own moveset separate to that of Chuck, and you can only unlock certain Combo Cards by playing as Frank West, which can ONLY BE DONE IN EFFING ONLINE CO-OP, preventing offline completionists from getting one-hundred percent completion. Also, if I pay for a 15-dollar expansion story when the previous one was only 10, it better have more content in it, and I really fail to see the difference between this and Dead Rising 2: Case Zero in terms of content and length. Sure, there's new combo cards, but there aren't a whole lot, and only maybe two or three of them are of practical use. This game didn't turn out to be the amazing team-up I thought it would, with missing features, a minuscule campaign, and a disappointing pay-off. To top it off, it won't even let you import your character's stats from Dead Rising 2, although that's not a huge hassle since you start at level 40, whereas the highest you can go is 50, but I still wish I could have started the game off as my fully-leveled manly-man Chuck.

"Hey guys! Remember how we have this really cool game called The Sims? It's a large virtual toybox where you can create a city and its people, construct homes, and live the Simian Dream!...um, with primates excluded, of course. This game is a huge hit, so why not make a version that even your children will enjoy? But wait a minute! The Sims has all sorts of nasty features like dying, paying rent, going to work, childbearing, and actually committing yourself to becoming a strong craftsman in a variety of fields, and we don't want THAT seeping into the growing minds of our young ones! Let's just remove everything that made The Sims fun, turn the game into a glorified LEGO workshop, and ship it out to the public! Ah, I can smell the stacks of money being deposited into our budget right now!" Alright, I'm overreacting again, but if a made-up title can summarize this game, it would be The Sims: Kawaii Preschool Edition. I rented this thinking I would get at the very least an intriguing kid version of The Sims, but what amounts to what I actually got was a level editor and one of the most hopelessly dull collectathons I had ever seen, even moreso than Donkey Kong 64! All you do in this game is construct buildings and props and look for more stuff to construct more buildings and props, and while some might argue that it's not as bad a premise as I make it out to be, I've got news for you: believe it or not, The Sims isn't just about building things! I didn't expect to die, pay taxes or make whoopie with anyone in this game, but I thought it would at least let me live a normal life, getting by with a job as a grocery store manager with a wife and two kids while also participating in community events. But nope, you gotta build the flower shop owner a bed so she can use her unnecessary sleep animation, and you have to give the goth kid a dark throne so she can lament over her poor miserable career in MySims whilist taking a dump. The camera goes all over the place when you're moving, making it hard to see where you're going half the time, and hardly any of the extra environments are worth going to unless you actually want to build more houses for the constantly-growing population of your town. I like building things, despite having nearly no creativity whatsoever, but if you're going to make a life simulator and remove all of the "life" aspects of your game, you're better off just playing Creative Mode on Minecraft or something.

I'm sorry if this comes off as arrogant, but I think it's safe to say that a large portion of the internet is against rap. At many points in my life, I had succumbed to this anti-rap facade as well, although I've been generally more kind towards every genre of music lately. However, even if you have a distaste for rap, the Def Jam fighting games were some of the greatest wrestling games ever created, hands down. Not only was there an abnormally large roster of artists and fighters to choose from, but the moves were incredibly over-the-top, especially the Blazin' moves, which looked more akin to freakin' Street Fighter's Ultra Combos. Its brutal image, tight controls, and superb character count won it over with the critics, but like many other oncoming series, EA managed to dissect and assimilate everything that was fantastic about the past few games, instead giving us this pile of vomit. The new combat was sluggish and simplified beyond belief, and the fights had nothing to do with wrestling anymore. It can basically be described as a low-budget Blaxploitation fight scene; all you do is punch your opponent and throw him into the environmental hazards which, half the time, look better than the actual bouts. The roster is still going strong, but when the characters are being outclassed in detail by the BACKGROUND DESIGN, your game has failed. It should also be noted that this game wasn't made by AKI Corp, which pretty much doomed it to failure from launch.

When gaming went 3D, a lot of game series had to change their core gameplay they were well-associated with had to be revamped to abide with the times. Unfortunately, plenty of them absolutely flopped, not the least of which being the atrocious Bubsy 3D game, which I would have definitely slapped on this list by now had I not experienced Bubsy 1 or 2 previously (don't worry, I'm saving a very special spot for it). Earthworm Jim 3D isn't quite as far up on the awful scale as Bubsy is, but it still smacked right into the polygon ceiling. Simply moving forward is an extreme exercise in itself, as the camera has a hard time not swaying in every direction, and the jump physics make you fall so fast that it's seems like a miracle if Jim can make it across a crack in a side walk. To make matters worse, the game is FILLED, to the ABSOLUTE BRIM, with deceptively difficult platforming and shooting sections that are absolute HELL on your hands, and this is all during the first ten minutes of the game. The only positive reinforcement this game has going for it is its slapstick humor; it has you collecting golden cow udders and traversing through Jim's own psyche for the entirety of the game. Jim's trademark wackiness, however, didn't save him from dooming his third entry from mediocrity.

Sonic the Hedgehog was widely recognized as the company-oriented arch-nemesis of Mario for over a decade, taking the SEGA Genesis's 'blast processing' to a whole new level of amazing. The original Sonic trilogy was widely praised by its generation, and Sonic appeared to dodge the polygon ceiling quite nicely with the Sonic Adventure games. After that, however, America's favorite hedgehog tripped up a little when Sonic Heroes came out, which scored average reviews and slightly worsened some of Adventure's biggest problems. Sonic '06, as it is widely called, was touted as being his most epic adventure yet, even landing a few cover stories. The graphics were apparently improved, the controls were tightened up, and fans got on the edge of their seats. The payload that we were promised, however, turned out to be a half-finished landfill of loading screens, pointless sidequests, and a rubbish control scheme. And when I say loading screens, I MEAN it; the game is OVERCLOCKED with 16 second load times that occur at every conceivable moment, whether it's loading a new level, a new cutscene, or ONE SINGLE FUCKING TEXT BOX OF DIALOGUE THAT ISN'T EVEN VOICED. The final amount of loading the game totals out to if you beat it without dying is, and I SWEAR I'm not making this up, TWO AND A HALF HOURS. So, yes, I could essentially rent a movie from Netflix, watch the ENTIRE THING, and it could STILL not measure up to the total amount of loading this game throws at you. And this is provided that you don't fail at all, which is also a hard thing to do considering the game's erratic camera and frighteningly-bad controls keep you from accomplishing simple tasks. Don't even get me started on the plot, either; there's so many useless and uninteresting characters added to this snoozefest that it would make the cast of Saved By The Bell look like The Sopranos. This sequel is just so offensively awful. It's as if SEGA invented a time machine, took Sonic and themselves back to the 90's and just hurled him at the polygon ceiling with full force. Fortunately, he's back on his feet, as evidenced by Sonic Colors and Generations, and I hope he doesn't have to relive anything as bulimic and degrading as Sonic '06 anytime soon.

Not many people know that Turok was originally based off of an under-the-radar comic series that debuted in the 1950s. It detailed the trials and tribulations of a Native American survivalist who was trapped with his friend in a valley filled with dinosaurs. Eventually, in the 90s, the story branched off into complex, mythological plots dealing with ethereal forces and cyborg dinosaurs (and no, trust me, I'm not kidding at that last part). For some reason, this garnered the attention of Acclaim, who went on to develop Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for the Nintendo 64, which were both outstanding first-person shooters adorned with audacious musical scores and frantic gameplay. After the third installment, however, the series dipped into a grave state of peril, starting with Evolution. Apparently, Acclaim forgot that the Gamecube had more accelerated hardware than the Nintendo 64, since the characters and graphics look like human popsicles. Oh, but that's far from the worst part; the game is rather linear compared to the previous installment, and the loading screens take longer to finish up than the above mentioned Sonic '06 (although, give them credit, at least they weren't EVERYWHERE). But I know you, you're willing to forgive all of these silly mistakes and enjoy the game as it is, right? Well, my friend, welcome to the final circle, the mechanic that will make you cringe at the mere thought of Turok Evolution: THE FLYING STAGES. Dear sweet rolls of the Last Supper, there is NOTHING redeemable about these flying stages. To start, the controls are REVERSED by default, and if you so much as brush up against ANY wall, you and your pet pterodactyl detonate in a shower of bloodied chunks instantaneously. And that's not even accounting the sheer onslaught of enemies you have to face off against, all while riding on a drunken pterodactyl with a dreadful sense of direction. Yeah, fun. Did I mention that nearly HALF OF THIS GAME'S STAGES revolve around this idiotic mechanic? Well, now I did. Acclaim was destroyed shortly after this game's release (although it wasn't Evolution's fault at all; Dave Mirra sued the company over putting his likeness into the porn-infused BMX XXX, Acclaim lost, and they paid the piper for it) and Turok was essentially doomed, until the 2008 release of the simply-titled Turok. We'll get to that one later, but for now...

...we tackle this monstrosity. Now, I've seen some terrible platformers in my time, most of them being shoveled NES movie tie-ins that hardly correlate with the movie's plot at all. However, that being said, I would GLADLY, WITHOUT HESITATION, pick ANY OTHER PLATFORMER in the HISTORY of PLATFORMERS to play, no matter HOW BAD it is, than Bubsy 3D: Furrbitten Planet. For those of you uneducated in Bubsy's past, he got his start on the Super Nintendo and SEGA Genesis, being Accolade Inc's answer to big name personas like Sonic the Hedgehog. Whether or not Bubsy's first couple outings were up to the standard of most platformers back in its heyday is a question not many will agree upon, but almost everybody in the known world has come to the unanimous decision that Bubsy 3D is the absolute video game equivalent of a jar of tapeworms, no exceptions. And guess what? I'm not any different! Bubsy 3D is what happens when you take the WIRE FRAME LAYOUTS of a shitty beta Mario 64 test area and throw it into your game as a full-fledged level. The environments are HORRENDOUS by the PSX's standard, and Bubsy and his animations are so choppy that they distill dark images into your own subconscious. Not even the controls were configured to be remotely close to playable; you can only travel forwards and backwards at one time. Not sideways, not diagonal, just straight forwards and backwards, with MAYBE the game giving you courtesy by letting you turn EVER SO SLIGHTLY while you run. Pushing the analog to the right will simply make Bubsy turn right instead of moving, something that should never, and I mean NEVER, be implemented in a 3D platformer. The platforming itself is awkward and clumsy; there's no real explanation as to what the platforms floating in the sky are, they're just floating rectangular prisms without a definite texture. The goal of this game is to collect atoms and traverse through the twisting turns and obstacles, but with how outright ABYSMAL this game's controls and graphics are, the only true way to win at Bubsy 3D is to leave it out of your Playstation, set it on fire, then hurl it into a quarry. You can say what you will about Bubsy 1 and 2, but 3D is nothing but the fecal scrapings inside the anus of an elephant, and deserves EVERY OUNCE of hatred it gets.

Duke Nukem was the patriarch of all ass-kicking back in his heyday, spewing out corny one-liners and using an arsenal of boisterous weaponry to dispose of his alien nemeses. It's hard to find a gamer these days who has never heard the phrase "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all out of gum" or the eponymous "Ball of Steel" line. Back in the 90's, people couldn't get enough of the Duke, so yet another game was teased under the moniker "Duke Nukem Forever." And by 'teased,' I also mean that the game industry teased us with this game's release date. Duke Nukem Forever is the ultimate example of Vaporware; the game was cancelled and un-cancelled multiple times during development, and by the time it finally saw the light of day, it had been 14 years since its unveiling. So yeah, by that point in time, all expectations are off, and from the looks of the finished product, I can't believe a game like THIS took 14 years to develop. Duke Nukem Forever looks like a PS2 launch title, for God's sake, and while people are willing to forgive the fact that it would have originally been on the PS2/Xbox, there's no excuse as to why Gearbox couldn't polish the visuals when they opted to finish the game. Hell, half the time, I was actually going through the game at a modest pace, and the game's graphics were STILL LOADING. So yes, I couldn't even look at this game's ugly visuals without standing still for ten seconds until they finally show up. This game also desecrated on the features that made the original fun by adding more generic FPS abilities such as automatic health restoration and limiting how many guns you can hold at once. If you're going to make your game Duke Nukem, make it Duke Nukem, not Call of Duty or Halo with Duke Nukem skins. The lowbrow humor also transitions very poorly, and most of Duke Nukem's one-liners aren't even that memorable this time around. There's a decent multiplayer mode, but if you're looking for the next big breakthrough in first person shooters on the market, Duke Nukem Forever couldn't be further away from it.

And so we get to the final nail in Turok's coffin, the next-gen reboot with the same name (and, oddly enough, it's the only title in the franchise that sports just the name 'Turok' with no subtitle). So many things could have gone right with this game, but unfortunately, Propaganda Games thought the best way to innovate the series is to make it the EXACT SAME THING as every other first person shooter on the market at its time. I'm not joking, there was a game BEFORE Duke Nukem Forever that traded in all of its unique features for a bland interface we've already seen before HUNDREDS of times, regenerating health and all. The plot is basically Jurassic Gears of Halo, and it pretty much obliterates whatever ties it had with the original comic or the older games. You play as, get this, a GENERIC SPACE MARINE! And, hey, what do you know, the ship you're flying into space on GETS ATTACKED AND SHOT DOWN! And, oh, what's this, there's an EVIL GUY in the space marine's back story THAT YOU USED TO BE FRIENDS WITH! Ooh, this game just has originally OOZING from all of its hairy, smelly pores. Really, not even the dinosaurs, the main highlight of the original games, make this game any less unoriginal, because all they do is force a stupid quick time event on you whenever they latch on to your arm or do something else. I'm sick and tired of all of these game companies thinking they need to abandon the roots of the old first person shooters just to satisfy the common gamer, because you don't. Look at Mario, for Christ's sake. He's still doing great, and not a whole lot has changed about him other than the fact that he's traveled through space, so why wouldn't Duke Nukem or Turok share the same luck?

Kinect, Kinect, Kinect... Why do I even bother with you anymore? The thought of hands-free, VR gaming is quite frankly astounding, but clearly nobody at Microsoft or its partners know how to program the damn thing at all, sans maybe Harmonix and Double Fine. What's the point of even purchasing a Kinect? The damn thing costs nearly as much as a Nintendo 3DS, and there's only about, what, three or four non-shovelware games that are worth playing for it? And one of them is a Sesame Street game? Pfft, count me out. Wait, what's that? SEGA has plans for a sequel to Sonic Riders? And it's on the Kinect? Well, it's tempting, because Sonic Riders, while not exactly the best spin-off in Sonic's repertoire, took the premise of racing hoverboards and turned it into a reality, and while it isn't his most ironed-out side game, it still holds up quite well. However, through vigorous examination and experiments, I can precisely conclude that it is impossible to finish a race without fault in its misbegotten Kinect sequel, Sonic Free Riders. It's sad, too; the rest of the game is built quite nicely, with an array of tracks that branch off into multiple shortcuts, a plethora of extra modes and characters, and decent graphics, but there's one glaring flaw that throws this game off into nearly unplayable territory: the steering is, in all intents, broken. I don't blame SEGA's programming team on this, believe it or not; you spend each race faced sideways, as if you're riding a skateboard (which reminds me of another game I'll have to include on this list...), and to turn around corners, you have to lean your body backwards or forwards. The problem with this is that the Kinect is downright AWFUL at detecting when your body shifts at an angle, and thus most of your time in Sonic Free Riders is spent careening into walls helplessly. As much as I don't want to harp on this game, the dreadful Kinect programming is pretty much forcing me to include it on this list. Sorry, Sonic. If it makes you feel any better, I thought Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing was really good.

Speaking of awful peripherals, anyone here grow up playing the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games? Aw yeah, I know I did. Before THPS came to be, the only marginally famous skating game was Skate or Die, and its popularity slowly faded away into obscurity. Lo and behold, the masterminds at Neversoft and Activision (back in the good ol' days before Modern Warfare 3) revived the skating scene with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, a game that had you choose your favorite skateboarder and shred a whole variety of places, from a shopping mall to a school to even a downhill jam (which is also consecutively the name of another incredibly awkward spin-off in the franchise, but at least it wasn't terrible). The series then spawned damn near ten-thousand sequels, each slowly but surely adding new features to the formula (and, staggeringly, the ability to WALK). So by the tenth outing, it seems Neversoft has, in a weird twist of events, left the building, and so Activision teamed up with the newly-formed Robomodo to invent Tony Hawk RIDE, a game that uses a skateboard controller instead of regular button input to control your rider. Sounds neat, right? Well, does anyone remember the game Ollie King? If you don't, it was another relatively unknown, arcade-based skateboard game made by the same branch of SEGA that developed the Jet Set Radio series. Remember how there were railings situated between the play area so you didn't fall off? Imagine that, but without railings, and that's Tony Hawk RIDE. You need an INCREDIBLE sense of balance to even stay on the fucking thing, let alone do tricks. Even if you do manage to position yourself on the board for more than 5 seconds, the controls are still abominable. Just trying to grind a rail is a frustrating mess of timing and perfect execution. To do a grab move in midair, you have to lean over and grab certain areas of the board, and good luck doing that without toppling over and breaking your face. Again, this had potential to be a welcome addition to the series, but, sadly, you'd be better off attempting to skateboard on a broken door frame without wheels.

When Pac-Man was first conceived, the premise of his debut was simple; Pac-Man was an almost pie-shaped creature who made a living feasting on pellets, while attempting to swerve and avoid the ghosts that resided within the walls of the labyrinth in which he was confined. At the time, it could have been considered the most revolutionary game ever made, with detailed sprites and frantically strategic gameplay. Then came the age of the home consoles, starting off with the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which, suffice to say, is the single most broken iteration of Pac-Man on the market, and possibly one of the worst of the Atari 2600, rivaling that of fucking E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and THAT game was widely considered the worst video game ever created. Ouch. This, however, didn't stop Namco from limping toward the Nintendo Entertainment System, which birthed a fairly substandard revision that was LEAGUES better than its older, deformed Atari brother. Cut to a few years later, and we're in the 16-bit age, where gaming began to evolve and unfold even more. Let me just say this: if gaming as we knew it was evolving, then Pac-Man must have DEVOLVED when Namco decided to develop Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures. First things first, this game, and I swear I am not shitting you, is an adventure game. Not an action-platformer game like Strider or Sonic the Hedgehog, but an ADVENTURE GAME. AN ADVENTURE GAME STARRING PAC-MAN. ON A CONSOLE. And Namco has the absolute GALL to call this a sequel? Are you kidding me?! Ah, well. Maybe the game won't be so bad. Let's go ahead and start it up... Okay, I see Pac-Man leaving his house, now I just go ahead and press left on the D-pad and wait WAIT WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?! PAC-MAN'S GOING RIGHT! WHAT THE SHIT?!? TURN AROUND YOU FUCKING - *CRASH* - SERIOUSLY?! HE RAN RIGHT, TRIPPED OVER A SKATEBOARD, AND DIED! This... this is just... I cannot believe this. You don't actively control Pac-Man?! What the slap-happy shit were the developers THINKING?! No, instead you control a stupid cursor which you use to shoot at objects in the environment, attracting Pac-Man's attention. I understand that Namco is trying to innovate here, but... why?!? Imagine if in The Secret of Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood just decided to mosey on over and pick a fight with every random stranger he meets unless you smacked him with a rubber chicken every 2 seconds. That's how Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures controls. Even when you finally figure out how to progress, the game's pacing is equivalent to dial-up. Pac-Man moves at an insultingly slow speed, and he never stops for anything. If you shoot him, he fidgets around for a moment and turns in the opposite direction, which makes hitting vital items and obstacles a voracious chore. While still not as atrocious as the Atari Pac-Man port, The New Adventures stretches the fabric of the word 'sequel' to such great lengths that I almost don't want to put it on this list. But it's official, as denounced by the title, so here it lies in a smoldering heap of shame at number 25 on this list.

I understand that I'm going to get pelted with negative feedback for this addition to my ever-growing list, but I'll explain. I didn't play a whole lot of Prototype 1, and instead decided to watch my brother play through most of the story. Prototype is actually a spiritual successor to a licensed game called The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction: In it, you control the hooded, infected amnesiac called Alex Mercer, who has a virus that can shape-shift his arm into a weaponized appendage, as well as being able to consume people whole (and their memories and appearance). I couldn't understand much of the plot, but this game has a veraciously cathartic gameplay standard. Who wouldn't have fun consuming armed Blackwatch guards (who, by the way, are the antagonists), accusing one of their own as being a traitor, watching them get shot on sight, then eating the rest of their distracted comrades? Yahtzee once said that, and it definitely applies to most of Prototype's replayability. Being an Activision game, though, I found the story to be... lackluster. It just never engaged me, which is why I decided to stop playing through the first game. If I was so annoyed at the first game's story being loathsome, I don't know how the hell I could have survived the atrocious writing of Prototype 2. Everything else about the game is alright, it's just, the writing is so incredibly cliched, I don't even know where to begin... Okay, you play as a sergeant in the U.S. Marines named James Heller, who is, ironically, mad as hell about Alex Mercer supposedly... killing his... wife and children oh COME ON, Activision! Really? This is the greatest you can do as far as setting up the emotional narrative for our hero, is offing his family offscreen? Do you know how many movies and video games have done that already? It's the most worn out cliche in human history! And guess what, James Heller gets infected by Alex Mercer a little later on. Big surprise, but... no, I'm not done with the fucking family business here. Okay, so, literally the entire background story for James Heller's family lasts a whopping two minutes in the opening cutscene until both are unceremoniously whacked for the sake of making us feel bad for James Heller. Guess what, Radical? It doesn't work! You know why? Well, if the fact that James sounds like a furious gorilla who stubbed his toe on a tree stump doesn't get you, either the flood of fuck words or his ability to CONSUME PEOPLE ALIVE, AS WELL AS THEIR MEMORIES AND APPEARANCE should. This is NOT a sympathetic hero. You CANNOT make a sympathetic hero out of a guy whose arm can morph into a big fucking sword anytime he wants it to. You CANNOT make an emotional character OUT OF A VICIOUS CANNIBAL. I cannot stress this enough, if you want to make Heller a sympathetic and reliable person, then he can't be infected with the Blacklight virus. So, virtually, it's impossible to make Heller into a "good guy," yet the developers of this game tried to make him into one anyways, as opposed to the "solely-evil" Alex Mercer, who is now the villain (even though *SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER* he is essentially the virus in human form, and even it despises what an awful man Alex Mercer was before he became the virus and it actively tries to save NYC *SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER* so making Alex the villain here makes no fucking sense whatsoever), and BOY, could they have failed any harder. The gameplay is still mindless fun, although the story is pretty short and Mercer cannot shut his stupid mouth for five seconds, but another thing that bites me in the ass is how the Blackwatch are set up to be the villains in this game. Activision and Radical don't just force it upon you that Blackwatch is the villain, they make them the most blatantly dickish, insensitive group of people on the face of the Earth, to the point where the writers decided to add more emphasis on their evil deeds by gunning down ENTIRE DWELLINGS of normal, uninfected civilians and SHOOTING AN AUTISTIC CHILD-you know what, they're not even trying anymore. This is the most anvilicious you can get: this is like taking a submarine with a crane installed to the bottom of the ocean, picking up the fucking Titanic, and dropping it on our fucking heads. THIS is how lazy Radical and Activision are. Oh, and they say the word "fuck" about as many times as the Angry Video Game Nerd. And that's a lot of fucks, which is exactly how I would describe this game's writing. It's the dumbest of the dumb, like a ball-peen hammer being swung directly into your temple, a blow that should kill you but instead renders you a mentally-challenged psychopath until the end of your days. Don't get me wrong, as far as gameplay goes, I'd still say it's alright (although the shield ability just breaks the game wide open), but the writing in this game almost stoops to Modern Warfare 3's standards.

Ghostbusters had a pretty crappy report card when it came to video games up until the 21st century, where the release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game for pretty much all systems caught the eyes of many a gamer. To the fans' fortune, the licensed title turned out to be quite a gem, scoring pretty good reviews across the board and signifying the comeback of licensed franchises. The game played like a third-person shooter, and apparently brought back most of the Ghostbusters actors to reprise their roles. Naturally, since the game was a hit, you'd want to follow it up with something memorable, right? Well, if reviews are anything to be believed, Sanctum of Slime has easily slipped off the top of many a gamer's tongue. To start off, the narrative takes FOREVER to explain and drones on with little to no sound to back it up, as well as crudely-drawn comic scenes that would make Linkara vomit. The gameplay, once you get to it, turns out to be not that much better. The first thing you'll notice, according to the handy Quick Look on the game via Giant Bomb, is that the actors clearly didn't want to waste their time with this pile of offal. There's NO voice acting at all; the dialogue is entirely compromised of boxes of text. When you control your Ghostbuster, he runs frantically around the room from an overhead perspective, shooting a stream of ghost-trapping energy. You would think since this is a Ghostbusters game and there are four players all playing as Ghostbusters that you wouldn't be able to cross the streams, just like in the movies, but nope, that bit of logic has been thrown straight out the window, just so you don't get frustrated while dying a hundred deaths. That's only a minor complaint, though. My big complaint is with the sheer repetitive nature and dismal strategy that this game has you utilize to complete it. Ghosts appear, use your tractor beam to zap them, rinse, lather, repeat. That's it, I've spoiled the entire game for you. Boss ghosts aren't much different, except you have to execute a tedious and monochromatic quick time event in order to complete the stage. Is this truly a sequel to the above average Ghostbusters game we've already experienced? Maybe, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like it at all. This game arrived, saw nothing, and ended up kicking nobody's ass.

A lot of you will look at me like I'm retarded when I say this, but I didn't grow up playing the Ultima games. Hell, I never even TOUCHED an Ultima game in my life. So why do I know about this series' existence? The Spoony One. If you aren't familiar with him, he's a game critic that hosts his own self-titled website and mocks shitty movies and other media. This includes the ENTIRE Ultima series, even the Ultima Underworld games which were spin-off first person dungeon crawlers. For those of you who are in the same boat as me, Ultima was a great series until VIII happened, which had tiresome combat, a more convoluted and deprived plot than any of its predecessors, and an ASTONISHING amount of unwelcome features, including booby trapped treasure chests (which account for about 99% OF THE CHESTS IN THE GAME), and absolutely DREADFUL platforming sections which downright never fucking worked. The game had to be sent in, patched, and re-released just because of the platforming. And guess what? Ultima IX is far, FAAAAR worse than VIII will ever be. Why? Well, the plot, which was already pretty screwed to begin with, essentially DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE. That's right, the barren, hellish waste that Britannia had become at the end of the last game? Doesn't exist! In its place, The Guardian apparently summons giant pillars that harness dark energy... or some shit like that. The plot's so bad I don't even remember it, and from the time of this writing I watched Spoony's first video on it TWO MINUTES AGO. But that's not even the brunt of this putrid pile of excrete - once you start the game, oh hey, YOU'RE NOT IN BRITANNIA! By the Gods, this game breaks so many rules of continuation that it develops an entirely new medium of shit, the shit that someone puts back in their asshole, shits out again, and sticks in a trash heap. Everything looks blocky and uninspired; most of the game is just patches of gray with a bit of green thrown in every now and then. The gameplay is worse than most MMOs, the dialogue is worse than the plot to Fifty Shades of Gray (ba-zing!), and the Avatar is a fucking ponce who can't remember right from left! This game defecated on the entire series, and it's not surprising considering EA was at the helm and decided to fuck everything up. AGAIN. Go fuck your soulless self, EA.

I have never played the Cooking Mama games, which is yet another series I can add to the perpetually growing list of "Game series I haven't played yet make me feel compelled to complain about them anyways." From what I saw, however, the game got pretty average to on-par reviews, with its easy-to-pick-up gameplay and its varied minigames being its selling point. Naturally, like most other activity games such as Backyard Baseball, the developers intended to shift gears and bring the Mama to many different styles of gameplay, and so we eventually got Babysitting Mama, a game I'm surprised people can actually play without triggering a dozen warning screens. Why did I say that last part? Well, in case you haven't noticed, shaking a baby is insensibly cruel and I propose anyone who does it get a brick smashed on their face. However, Babysitting Mama LOVES to reinforce this rule. You could be halfway through pretty much any minigame, doing great, and yet the slightest twist will make you move the baby just enough that the game will helpfully remind you to "DON'T SHAKE THE BABY!!!!!!" And then the game oh-so-helpfully RESTARTS THE CHALLENGE ALL OVER AGAIN. This could just be another problem with the Wii's programming, but no, I'm not willing to forgive Babysitting Mama for deleting all of my hard work and effort just because I slightly readjusted the doll in my hands because it was getting uncomfortable. Besides that fact, it's hard to even tell if the baby you're taking care of is happy or sad, because it's facial expressions for being sad and being happy look EXACTLY THE SAME. When you can't even tell if you're playing the game right, that's pretty messed up, especially in a game that has you take control of a baby. Oh, who am I kidding? All of you probably thought this game would be bad from the very beginning, and, to be honest, even getting past the baby-shaking penalties, the game is incredibly bland. Your only reward for beating more challenges is unlocking other palette-swapped babies, and really, that's nothing to call home about. With lazy motion programming and monotonous gameplay features, you're much better off just sticking with cooking, because this game won't get you any better at babysitting.