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Top Ten Shameful Games
Not necessarily the worst, but the most wrong -- here are 10 of the most seriously flawed titles of all time.
By William Cassidy | Dec. 31, 2002

Steel yourself for some of the most shameful, pain-inducing video games out there. Are these the worst games of all time? Well, that depends on your definition of "worst." Is it worse for a game to be boring, offensive, poorly designed, or simply stupid? It's hard to say, and there are plenty of games out there that fit one or more of those descriptions. It doesn't take much to be simply a bad game, but to be truly shameful, a game has to have something more… or maybe less. If the game makes you wince, it probably has that special something.

Maybe it has to do with expectations. Let's face it -- you expect some games to be bad. If they aren't, you're pleasantly surprised; if they are, you quickly put them away and forget about them. But the truly shameful games have something fundamentally wrong with them that makes them stick out as examples of flawed game design, even if they do manage to include a few redeeming factors. So, these 10 titles may not be the WORST of all time, but they are far, far from being the best. Now, on with the list!

10. Impossible Mission (Atari 7800)

I guess they took the title too seriously.

I know what you're thinking: "But Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64 and Apple II was a GREAT game! How dare you lump it in with the rest of this garbage!" And you have a point -- IM WAS a great game on those systems, and it almost was on the 7800, except for one little tidbit: this mission really is impossible. It seems the U.S. releases of this game contain a programming glitch where some of the final pieces of the puzzle are hidden in an area where you cannot find them. This huge oversight renders the rest of the game moot and reduces an otherwise enjoyable game to a pointless exercise, making it one of the most shameful QA blunders in all of video gaming.

9. Donkey Kong (Intellivision)

Arcade Donkey Kong kinda looks like this, if viewed from a few thousand feet.

Coleco pulled off quite a coup when they licensed Nintendo's Donkey Kong. Atari usually nabbed the rights to the mega-hits, so DK became Coleco's big chance to show how superior their new ColecoVision game console really was. And just to prove it, Coleco released horrible versions of the game for the competing Atari 2600 and Intellivision machines. The 2600 port's deficiencies are easier to forgive. However, there can be no forgiving the awful mess that was Donkey Kong on the powerful Intellivision. The game gives new meaning to the phrase "lack of detail" by rendering everything in oversized pixels and painting all objects a single color. Donkey Kong occupies the wrong side of the screen, and he's green, for God's sake! The sound effects are terrible, play control is worse, and only two out of the four levels from the arcade are included. Nobody knows for certain if the powers at Coleco intentionally ruined the game just to make the ColecoVision port look good, but if so, they were shrewd but slimy. If not, they were just inept. Either way, Intellivision Donkey Kong is a game to regret.

8. Bebe's Kids (Super NES)

Don't let the amusement park setting fool you… there's no amusement to be found in Bebe's Kids.

You know, it was tough choosing just 10 games for this feature. I had a long list of mediocre and stupid titles like Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, Shaq-Fu, Kasumi Ninja, Sssnake, and a whole bunch of other flotsam I'd prefer not to think about. But I couldn't pick them all, so to choose, I scoured the Internet to see which title most frequently appeared next to the phrase "worst game ever." The "winner" was Bebe's Kids, a piece of 16-bit garbage you may have missed, but only if you were lucky.

As gamers know all too well, a game based on a movie is usually bad news. It gets worse when the movie isn't very popular. And it gets downright pathetic when the game doesn't come out for over a year after the unpopular film leaves theaters. Somehow Radical Entertainment decided to press on anyway, adapting the 1992 animated feature Bebe's Kids into a dull and depressing side-scrolling bore'em-up. Boasting incredibly repetitive, nonsensical gameplay and a childish appearance ("they look like they were made in Microsoft Paint" seems to be a common comment about the graphics), Bebe's Kids may not be the Worst Game Ever, but it'll do until the real one comes along.

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