When you play through over 200 games in a single year you are bound to see both peaks and valleys. I will talk plenty about the peaks in a separate article – and I had considered including these stinkers there, but they really deserve to be lambasted without messing up the beauty of the excellent games released this year. Note that this isn’t just about low score – though almost all of these scored badly. I also hate plenty of other games for other reasons … and features attached to certain games. And other stuff. But that is a different story … so on to the lousy games!
I have limited myself to ten games … because I found more than twenty games that I had rated lower than 2 / 5 (40%) in the last year. So I left out things like Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade (PC) and SWAT: Target Liberty (PSP), which were just lousy games and instead things in similar genres that were truly egregious. I have also added a special award for a game that wasn’t terrible, but …

Adult GamerDad Age Seal
Pocket Pool (PSP) – summed up by ‘bad pool, gratuitous images’. You play pool to unlock stuff … mainly softcore pron images and new tables and halls. But nothing impacts gameplay in any real way, and even the options you can select such as ball speed only serve to highlight the terrible physics engine being used. The game is shameful … it is as if in the design review someone said “wow, this is terrible, what should we DO?!?!”, and someone else replied “boobies” … and the rest is history. Quite possibly the worst game I suffered through this year.

Soldier of Fortune: Payback (PC, XBOX360, PS3) – I am a huge Raven software fan and have played Soldier of Fortune II more than 25 times since its’ release. So I was anticipating Payback … even knowing Raven wasn’t at the helm. But this game is infantile in the way it implements things – the location damage is a joke, and the sloppy gameplay feels older than the original game. It wouldn’t be bad if it was really cheap like the ‘World War II Combat’ series from Groove Games, but this is full priced, making it bad AND insulting.

Scarface: Money. Power. Respect. (PSP) – there are plenty of cliches that amount to ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’. That seems to have been the approach here – tease with scenes from the movie, interject strong language and drug references, and then use a lite-city-builder-turn-based-strategy-combo game as the core of the experience. Unfortunately, when the first movie scene ends you are excited for the game, but after that you are disappointed to have to return to the crappy game.

14+ GamerDad Age Seal
Empire Earth III (PC) – there was no need to make this game. The first game was good, as was the second – and that game left no real room for a sequel. But that didn’t stop this mess – and it seems that the uncertainty about where to go with the franchise infected every corner of the game. In a year with so many greatRTS games and also some bad ones, this one stands out for being really awful.

Spectral Souls: Resurrection of the Ethereal Empires (PSP) – in these heady days of Jeanne d’Arc, Disgaea and even Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSP, it is hard to remember that for nearly two and a half years every strategy game released for the PSP really sucked. This is one of the worst – and suffered from some of the most abysmal loading times I have ever seen on a system where load screens are a constant problem.

10+ GamerDad Age Seal
Valhalla Knights (PSP) – yet another ‘great on paper, terrible in reality’ games, this one featured every known RPG cliche, characters with loads of words but no … um, character, an awful story and an even worse combat system.

The Settlers (DS) – as I started my review “Long load times, awful controls, poor frame rate. Sounds like the litany of complaints I’ve made about many PSP games over the past two years, only this time I’m making those same complaints about a DS game.” This game was great on the PC, but completely abysmal in this careless translation. Definitely the Worst Port of the Year and neck-and-neck with Pocket Pool for Worst Game!

Final Fantasy II Anniversary Edition (PSP) – take a game that has been re-released before, including on a reasonably priced two-for-one GBA collection with a load of bonus features, add some nifty new graphics and nothing else, and re-release it yet again as a full priced PSP game that fails to address any of the many failings that have made this the nadir of the series for many? I call that insulting …

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (DS, GBA, MAC, PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, XBOX360) – loved the book, really enjoyed the movie … WANTED to like the game. Indeed, I have now played it on five of the nine platforms and can confirm that it is lousy on each and every one. The biggest disappointment is the Wii – wand play should be *much* better than this.

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Battleship – Trouble – Sorry – Connect 4 (DS) – imagine this: playing Sorry against your family while on a road trip. Sounds great, right? Then buy four copies of this – because the only multiplayer is multi-card. The lack of ‘hot seat’, where you take turns holding the DS, is such a basic and fundamental flaw that it kills this game – because solo matches of *anything* in this collection are dreadful.

Special Award – the “We Hate Windows Gamers Award”
Halo 2 / XBox Live for Windows – somewhere between the gameplay that felt like 2001, the requirements for Vista and steep hardware requirements, the need to PAY for a XBOX Live Gold account to play with the existing fanbase … and the fact that nearly a year later XBOX Live is still THE WORST game service available on the PC … and the only one making you pay to access a full range of features. Microsoft is playing Spin City with all of the numbers and details around Vista … but the bottom line is this: they had an opportunity to not only sell PR folks with Games for Windows but to actually get gamers back on board. Instead they have shown that the GfW thing is just a revenue stream safeguard while they continue to try to push PC gamers to adopt the XBOX.

Whew … now that I have all THAT out of my system I can get back to finishing up my ‘best of 2007’ list. And just as a preview, this whole end of the year review has produced something exciting – a third article! I am quite excited about this one, but am going to hold back for a bit … I’ll deliver my ‘best of 2007’ list in a few days, and then the final article a few days after that.

Tags: Misc