Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors
Otogi: Myth of Demons was my favorite game from last generation. I loved everything about it: the beautiful graphics, the inspired character designs, the blistering difficulty of its over-the-top battles. You can imagine my disappointment, then, when Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors came out and trashed everything that was good about Otogi. Beautifully artistic graphics? They were dumped in favor of art design that looked like doodles a middle school kid would draw in his notebook. Original, cool characters? Not here—the six new avatars in Otogi 2 were culled from uninspired anime designs that failed to impress. The challenge of the first game was gutted in favor of easier and more limited combat that only a five year old could call enjoyable. All you had to do was stand in front of an enemy and hold the X button, pummeling it until it decided to move two feet to the right and allow you to continue pummeling it until it died. After finishing this game, I was filled with contempt for From Software, the developer of the Otogi games. Someone on the team must have set out with the goal of intentionally disappointing the original game’s fans.
—Ismail Muhammad
Gears of War
Gears of War scored amazing reviews everywhere. But while the graphics are technically amazing, they’re greyer than a politician’s morals. The characters look like NFL players, and appear to take as many steroids, too. The tight overhead camera always zooms in at the wrong place at the wrong time, leading to claustrophobic firefights. Granted, the game mechanics are absolutely great—pop up, shoot, duck, and evade. But don’t get me started on the chainsaw, the game’s infamously gory weapon. Jonathan Mo, a fellow Spectator video games writer, told me about the “chainsaw effect” in online play—a horrific event in which players form lines, chainsawing each other again and again as if they were in a cafeteria line. Using the chainsaw slows down time as you watch an “amazing kill” in which one player saws the other in half. In the time that it takes for this to happen, a queue forms behind the chainsawer so that after the first one is over, the next one in line saws the player before him. Yeah, chainsaws are so “cool”—this only reinforces the stereotype that all gamers are Monster-chugging Xbox-playing fratboys saying “bro... that was so sick.” Dudes, if you really want chainsaw action, watch American Psycho!
—Bo Xu
The Darkness
One of my favorite Xbox games was the cult-hit The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay by developer Starbreeze. I was pretty excited for Starbreeze’s 2007 Xbox 360 game The Darkness because it looked like it would build upon the elements that made Riddick great—but it sucked more than I could ever imagine. Jackie, the playable character, ran slower than a 90-year-old woman running backwards up a hill, and all his special powers were equally cumbersome and frustrating. To make matters worse, Starbreeze thought it was making a movie instead of a game, so it added a number of nauseating cinematic camera angles that makes you feel more like you’re trapped inside Jackie’s head than like you’re playing as the mobster. And what’s up with Jackie’s hair, by the way? Does he use motor oil to slick it back? I’ve never seen hair so perfectly flat and shiny. To mask the game’s ridiculous loading times, Jackie delivers a monologue on every loading screen in which he talks about some aspect of New York City that he likes—in one, he mentions how he loves the smell of the subway, which smells like urine and spaghetti. Appetizing, no? This game is complete trash.
—Kevin Ciok
NRA Gun Club
What better way for an evil conservative troupe to convince people that they actually need to own their own deadly firearms than to create a video game? But apparently our gun-happy hillbilly comrades over at the National Rifle Association failed to realize that massacring cuddly panda bears with machetes in front of a crowd of kindergarteners would most likely have been a more convincing mode of ideological persuasion than the abomination that is NRA Gun Club for PlayStation 2.
Not only do the game’s graphics make my shiny HDTV look like someone projectile vomited all over it, but the actual gameplay, which consists of dully capping away at an endless stream of targets and shooting ranges, actually made me want to punch my kitten in the face. That’s right—this game’s crappiness actually corrupted my soul and made me hate kittens. Factor in a comically short playtime of around 45 minutes and some of the most painfully inaccurate controls ever coded into an interactive entertainment product, and you truly have one terrible game to rule all terrible games.
NRA Gun Club’s mind-bending atrocity knows no limits and can even destroy true love. Indeed, my not-too-bright ex-girlfriend bought me this game, and despite her feeble attempt to rationalize the purchase as an attempt to be “hip” and get me a cool new shooting video game, I dumped her soon after receiving it.
—Joe Saia