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Throne of Bhaal is unequivocally worse than any other part of the original Baldur's Gate saga: it's an immensely difficult game, and it's high demands of the player throttle much of the role playing potential in every other Baldur's Gate game. Still, it finishes up the Baldur's Gate narrative in a *very* satisfying way, managing to comprehensively conclude a broad and infinitely-faceted narrative that, really, could've been about basically anything the player wanted it to be about. While I found myself pretty dissapointed with the moment-to-moment gameplay in Throne of Bhaal, I was very impressed with its bigger narrative choices.
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I'll come clean: I SUPER don't get why anyone cares about or likes the Gauntlet series. Take D&D, remove literally every narrative and mechanical element from it, and then just go to town with melee combat, arcade beat 'em up style. Like...why?? Why do that?? Why not just play an original arcade beat 'em up with its own unique identity, like Double Dragon, or the TMNT games, or the X-Men beat 'em ups, or whatever? Why generic high fantasy?
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Look: Runescape was the every man's World of Warcraft, and I get that. It was genuinely incredible that an MMO of this scale was developed in the early 2000s using a pre market saturation, free-to-play monetization system. But here's the thing: I genuinely dislike World of Warcraft. Frankly, not even just on a basic taste level, not even in a 'I just happen to dislike this thing!' level. Like, I don't get why people like it *when they're explaining why it's good to me*. When I think of the reasons I play video games, none of them are natural qualities to that flavor of MMO ecosystem. So the free version...the version of World of Warcraft with a sliver of the scale, a fraction of the features and basically none of the depth of lore....really not a winning combo, for me.
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Mario Party games are hell. I get that that's a feature not a bug, but the *only* possible context in which these games are a good time is if you have at least two other players who are only *sort of* invested in what's going on. If you have four players who are all *completely* invested? Nightmare. Too much random bullshit in a Mario Party game for that. You're gonna have a bad time. Have just two people? Weirdly depressing. It would be like playing backyard games like disc golf or cornhole but on a random Tuesday night with just one friend. Bad vibes! By yourself? God. Let's not even go there. So, three-four partially invested people and Mario Party 3 is basically a good time. That's a LOT of qualifiers, I know, but there you have it. These games are weird and shitty. Them's the breaks.
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The Wrath of Cortex takes the classic Crash Bandicoot titles, adds a PS2-powered layer of technology over top of them, and then sucks the charm right out of them like a wilderness survivalist sucking the poison out of a snake bite. For fans of the original titles like I was - and especially following the chaotic, sort of clunky minigame collection, Crash Bash - The Wrath of Cortex's non-commital, gentler version of the Crash formula was more or less confirmation that, yeah, it was fine to stop paying attention to Crash Bandicoot games from now on.
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So Tarzan Untamed, like The Mummy Returns, is a three-quarters-assed video game, albeit with a unique tactical advantage: it's a 2D platformer with 3D visuals, similar to Kirby 64, Goemon's Great Adventure, or Toomba. Games in this genre have the visual dynamism of 3D titles but with the mechanical precision of 2D titles, which can be pretty fun. Tarzan Untamed is measurably worse than the other games in the genre, sure, but I imagine there were plenty of kids who got a PS2 alongside a copy of this game and were happy with it.
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This was a clunk 2D beat 'em up. There's a fuckin' ZILLION of these clunky 2D beat 'em ups on the GameBoy. I feel like Spider-Man games should be...zippy, you know? There wasn't anything *wrong* with Mysterio's Menace, per se, it was just an unimaginative kinda thing.
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The Mummy Returns - not a GREAT game by any stretch, but you know what? Not exactly a half-assed movie tie-in, either. Compared to the hordes of Hollywood-themed beat 'em ups that were released in the era, at least this one had an action-adventure element to it, and that's something. Sometimes, devs working on licensed games used to be granted the resources to put a good three-quarters of their ass into video game movie adaptations. It's fine.
(just kidding by the way - I can only imagine how much labor goes into even the most broken of movie tie-ins)
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This was the one Madden game I ever bought. I'm ambivalent about football, but I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. It's kinda fun to see some of the simulation-y, managerial aspects of the NFL play out in a season, but...alright, I'll just go ahead and be honest again, same with Gauntlet: Dark Legacy - why not just play a competitive title better suited to video games? I genuinely do not understand how or why people like Madden games, especially from this era.
In the abstract, having two football fans take their favorite teams and try to outperform each other with goofy football tactics sounds kinda fun, but at the end of the day, when you're playing a Madden game, you're doing very little for an *excruciatingly small* amount of time. On offense, you're holding the left stick back, picking a guy, hitting the throw button, and then holding the left stick forward until somebody tackles you. On defense, you switch to the player closest to the ball and hold the stick in their direction. Over and over. In 5-15 second bursts.
If the player had no control over the players on the field at all, and if those players had their own specific stats and traits on the field, then I could see it. I know they make Football Management sims here and there, maybe I'd prefer those. Either way, I literally do not understand why you wouldn't play any other sports game. Even in, like, FIFA I could see it - there's a lot more to think about, spatially, as a soccer player than a football player, and the dynamics of that are sometimes interesting to work with. But football? Just...slamming guys into other guys. I dunno.
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Conker's Bad Fur Day is *measurably* worse than even the most blatant shovelware 3D platformer of the Nintendo era. Just a shrieking, farting globule of British poop humor. "BRO can you IMAGINE if in Banjo-Tooie there were TITS???" uh huh! I can. I have seen South Park parody children's television before. Bottom of the barrel stuff.
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This $50 video game was a longform, interactive advertisement for Universal Studios Theme Park. It consisted of a dozen or so trashy minigames with no real central structure - no plot, or system of rewards, or customizable hub area or something to tie the whole game together. It was just like, 'here you go! Here's a bunch of trash. Tell your parents to bring you to Universal theme park.'
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The reason why this unremembered Football game in this now-defunct NFL series is so far down this list is because my friend had a copy of it when we were in school and we used to play it specifically to find glitches in it. Just trying to crash the game, find dumb little bugs during the post-play slow-mo cams, stuff like that. We played the training camp minigames more than anything because, well, they were fucking awful and we were weird kids who liked to see awful things.
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This is the worst traditional 2D fighting game I've ever played, and on top of it being that, it also lacked multiplayer. It was a single-player only fighting game that featured the world's worst 2D fighter mechanics. That's *pretty* bad!
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