The Remaining 45 Games (of 90) To Be Automatically Dismissed
Metal Gear Solid

Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Dey tuk our jobs! (Durk de durr!)
TheMadSpin: If Uwe Boll, Paul W.S. Anderson and Alexander Witt got together to make a Metal Gear Solid film, even they couldn’t make it more ridiculous than Hideo Kojima has. The man is a genius when it comes to gameplay and character design, but then he screws it all up by trying to send us a message.
If Double Dragon taught us anything, it’s that we don’t really need a reason to kill stuff and save the day. We just need someone to punch our woman and drag her off.
Seriously Hideo, “Metal Gear Solid 4: Gimme Back My Biatch”…think about it.
Fatsquatch: My brain can process large amounts of dialogue in my entertainment choices, but this game’s relentless blathering proved to be entirely too much. After a few hours of play, I suffered a mild aneurysm and couldn’t move my left arm for nearly three weeks.
StarFox

Oh, Slippy Toad, are you ever NOT about to die?
TheMadSpin: Somewhere, the “FX” chip and “Blast” processors are snowboarding away with our money, laughing all the way.
Fatsquatch: The biggest problem with StarFox is that damn incompetent frog, Slippy Toad. Whether the action is light or heavy, he’s always about to get his ass handed to him, and you’re constantly having to help him out. Now I don’t know if there is really such a thing as a mentally challenged frog, but I think it’s safe to say that Slippy is a prime candidate for there being proof of a “special” toad. How he managed to live long enough to join an elite military force without being run over by a car, ending up in French cuisine, getting mauled by a lawn mower, or working for the WB is beyond me.
RoyalRanger: Actually, ‘Squatch, I think that Falco Lombardi is an even bigger problem than Slippy Toad. Slippy may be incompetent, but at least he respects his fellow combatants. Falco, however, practically tells you to go to hell every time you get in his way. You could have just saved his life, and he’ll just yell at you for not letting him fight his own battles. If there’s any character in StarFox who has some serious personal issues, it’s Falco.
Brad Hates Games: Forget about Slippy Toad, if Falco says “Rock Me Amadeus” one more time, I’ll shoot him down myself.
Metal Slug 2

“Perhaps I should lay off the Krispy Kremes and stick with the MREs?”
TheMadSpin: Remember when this game was called Contra and came out 20 years ago?
Warcraft II

There appears to be a
full moon out tonight.
TheMadSpin: I don’t have a whole lot of venom for this game, but Warcraft III was better. That’s really all you need to know.
Populous

Zombie Yul Brynner!
TheMadSpin: You know, for all the mighty powers you get in Populous, I never really felt that mighty. You actually lose power early in the game while waiting for people to do your bidding. By contrast, I always get the sense that Samus could probably kick my ass by the time she gets the magma suit and the freeze beam, and she’s no god.
Fatsquatch: Despite being an avid PC gamer, my only experience with Populous was on the SNES not long after the system launched. Now, its been a few years and I can’t remember the specifics, but I do clearly recall that this game had me bored out of my mind, and if it had not been a rental, I probably would have taken a dump on it.
Planescape: Torment

The book in this image
pretty much says it all.
Chrono Trigger

Chrono checks out the 22’s
on his freshly pimped ride.
Brad Hates Games: The ‘Prehistoric Fortress’ was reason enough to throw this game out; walk two steps, fight unavoidable “optional” battle with rock lizards, use lightning attack, repeat for four hours. No thanks.
RoyalRanger: The first half of the game was a creative time traveling adventure full of crazy paradoxes. Okay, I can accept that. The second half of the game was a plain, ordinary RPG full of mystical floating cities and stereotypical end-of-the-world scenarios. No thanks.
TheMadSpin: I see what Brad is saying. If you figure out the weakness of any creature or boss, it becomes Rock/Paper/Scissors vs. a psychic. I remember being boggled by a boss for days, and then once I figured it out, it took me only two rounds to completely destroy him. I also thought it was amazing that even in a non-Final Fantasy title, Square was able to insert the old, “Your main enemy isn’t really your main enemy,” cliché that we all know and love.
Resident Evil

“You can’t shoot me. I’m the master of unlocking!”
(Brad is looking over the list of remaining games, and notices Resident Evil is still on the list)
Fatsquatch: Brad, have you found anything interesting?
Brad Hates Games: Yes, but I can’t write very well.
‘Squatch: How about eliminating Resident Evil by yourself? I have a pen here.
Brad: Oh, do you? Well then I’ll try to write using the pen.
‘Squatch: Wait.
(Fatsquatch tosses the pen to Brad. Brad begins to write, but once he starts, the pen runs dry!)
Brad: Hey, what’s going on?
(Camera pans to Fatsquatch )
‘Squatch: Now I’ve done it! Sorry, Brad, wait. I’ll go and get another pen.
(He exits. Camera pans back to Brad)
Brad: ‘Squatch? Fatsquatch!
(Brad waits. Camera pans to Fatsquatch, who returns to the room. Camera pans back to Brad.)
‘Squatch: Hey, are you there, Brad? Grab the pen!
(Camera pans back to Fatsquatch, who throws it to Brad. Brad crosses Resident Evil off the list)
‘Squatch: I’m sorry, Brad.
Brad: I didn’t know THAT was going to happen.
‘Squatch: Sorry. I was really careless.
Brad: Are you okay, ‘Squatch? Maybe you’re getting tired.
‘Squatch: No, I’m alright. Don’t worry. (pause) Brad, I’ve found something!
(Brad walks over and takes it from him)
Brad: Thank you. I’ll take this then.
TheMadSpin: This game is far inferior to later iterations of the series, and it took them until the “greatest hits” version of the Director’s Cut to add analogue support.
I also think that the recent labor dispute between the game industry and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) could have swung in SAG’s favor if they’d just played some tapes of the dialogue in this game.
Fatsquatch: Few games are as much of a pain in the ass as Resident Evil. Your character can only carry a few items, even though you typically need about seventeen different things in order to unlock one damn door. The game’s length is based heavily on this required item collecting (and the associated backtracking), and I suspect that if you could carry every item that you found, the game would really only last 45 minutes. Factor in the sluggish controls, limited ammo and horrendous voice-acting, and you have a title that could very well be the poster child for bad game design.
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

“I wanna kill people. I wanna rip their stomachs out and eats their churdren. BLARGH!!!”
Brad Hates Games: I’ll forgive the fact that the star of the game turned out to be a psychotic, wife-beating, cannibalistic rapist (nobody knew how crazy Mike Tyson was when the game originally came out). What I can’t get over is all the blatant racial/ethnic stereotypes present in this game. The alcoholic Russian who drinks “soda” between rounds? The French guy who can’t win a fight? The Pacific Islander named “King Hippo” who’s so fat he can’t even get up when you knock him down? And don’t even get me started on Mr. Sandman. Most surprisingly, there’s even a slanty-eyed Japanese guy who just blurts out the names of Japanese cities and companies for no apparent reason. Very enlightened there, Nintendo. Why don’t you just toss in a fat American cowboy while you’re at it?
RoyalRanger: Besides, Super Punch-Out!! was more fun.
TheMadSpin: I remember Tyson being really hard to beat…until I started head butting him.
Fatsquatch: I like how Nintendo repackaged this game only as Punch Out (sans Tyson), after Iron Mike went loco and started raping people. Which, by the way, prompted a wave of “OMG! MY MIKE TYSON PUNCH OUT GAME IS GONNA BE A COLLECTOR’S ITEM!”
Years later, you can still easily by a copy for a couple of bucks.
Warlords

Behold! I am a Lord…of WAR!!
TheMadSpin: I remember there being a big Warlords I and II push at LAN parties (yeah, I attended them) and I couldn’t figure out why. Even the sequel, a vast improvement over the first, was so inferior to every other game in the genre that it made me sick. They didn’t even bother to be graphics whores. It was like playing chess on an etch-a-sketch.
Fatsquatch: Oh my god, I LOVE Warlords! You guys have no idea how many quarters I dropped into this game back in the day, or how many hours of intense multiplayer action my friends and I had with this game on the Atari 2600.
(Brad whispers something to Fatsquatch)
Wait, this is a different Warlords? Oh, well then…This game SUCKS!!
Command & Conquer: Red Alert

The Reds attack at dawn: Where’s Patrick Swayze when you need him?
Battlefield 1942

“How can I best help my team? I know! I’ll crash into that building!”
TheMadSpin: Not only does this game pretty much look like garbage (even on maxed out computers), but it also features nothing for those of us who don’t dig multiplayer. I’d like to think of the greatest game of all-time as something that I’d take with me on a deserted island, and I wouldn’t imagine I’d have high-speed internet there.
Xenogears

Ummmmm… What?
TheMadSpin: They took a multi-part narrative and dropped you right in the middle. Confusing, right? Well, to make matters worse, they hired the same monkeys that are always writing Shakespeare to translate it. As a final nod to making things as confusing as possible, the game would occasionally stop suddenly to make you watch hand-drawn anime for a little bit, completely taking you out of the action. I also happen to think your buddy Dan was an oompa-loompa.
Deus Ex

“When I asked for a light I didn’t mean this! OH GOD! AHHHHH!”
TheMadSpin: This game had so much potential — until they chose the Verizon guy to voice the main character. That’s right, the protagonist is the very same man that makes you hate yourself every time you say the phrase, “Can you hear me now?”
Diablo II

Hours and hours of left-clicking fun!
TheMadSpin: Diablo II is sort of like that Hanson song, Mmm-bop; you hate it and it hates you, but you still sing along when it comes on the radio. Sure you try to stop, but it won’t let you.
Halo

Is this Doom? Quake? Unreal? Duke Nukem? No, wait! Those are headcrabs, so this must be Half-Life, right? No?
Wake me up when they start making original games again.
TheMadSpin: No matter what some will tell you, this isn’t even one of the top 40 games for the Xbox, let alone the greatest game ever. When you move this piece of crap from the Xbox to the PC it goes from amazing to third tier.
It’s just a first-person shooter people, and it’s not nearly as good as Half-Life 2.
Wipeout XL

Nintendo’s F-Zero in 3D
Brad Hates Games: To be fair, Wipeout XL featured the instrumental version of Firestarter, which means that it didn’t get tiresome for at least five days. You know what the game really needed though? More ads for Red Bull; it’s not like there wasn’t one of those every 10 seconds.
TheMadSpin: Ohhh, the game you guys are talking about is Red Bull Racing! I wondered why I didn’t know what you were going on about.
River City Ransom

“Barf”, eh? You’ve got that right.
RoyalRanger: Come to think of it, this game is a very poor role model for children. I’m not talking about all of the violence, stealing, and destruction of property. I’m talking about gluttony. Think about it, what do Ryan and Alex do with all the money that they steal from the gang members? They take a trip to a restaurant and stuff their faces. One minute, these two are out beating the stuffing out of other people; the next minute, Alex is asking Ryan to pass the ketchup, and the rolls, and the sushi, and another hamburger. Meanwhile, Ryan is trying to reach for the soda while he stuffs an entire platter into his mouth — dish and all — before asking for an extra order of fries to take with him. People are so quick to place the blame on McDonalds for making their children fat. Maybe they should start looking at the more subtle influences that are afoot here. Is this game really just another beat-em-up, or is it a triple-thick milkshake commercial in disguise?
TheMadSpin: I’ll go you one better RR…I say this game glorifies bulimia. Buckets and buckets of binge eating followed by vomiting? I rest my case.
Fatsquatch: That’s a pretty good theory, ‘Spin, but I’ve played as much RCR as the next guy, and here I am about to top out at an even 500 pounds. Now, I do indeed say “Barf!” every time I have to blow chunks, but the problem is that I don’t spew very often at all. *shrugs*
Brad Hates Games: Honestly, is there anything I could write here that would be any funnier than the box art for this game? Judo chop!
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2

Look! It’s more of the same crap from the previous game! *yawn*
TheMadSpin: This game pisses me off because it had this amazing soundtrack full of catchy tunes. I hold Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 totally responsible for this atrocious Dub Pistols album I bought in 2000.
Brad Hates Games: Speaking of the soundtrack, nothing screams “skateboarding” like Anthrax and Public Enemy together on the same song. Especially when that song was almost ten years old when the game came out. Sure, the first Tony Hawk game might have been filled with really bad pop-punk and ska tunes, but at least that’s the kind of garbage skateboarders actually listen to.
RoyalRanger: Well, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I always just mute the music.
Final Fantasy VII

Candy-ass gamers everywhere actually cried during this scene. LOLLERZ!
(I think I just sent millions of fanboys into one simultaneous temper tantrum.)
Brad Hates Games: Hey look, it’s another RPG on the PlayStation that features pre-rendered backgrounds, bad-looking polygonal characters, orchestral sounding MIDI tunes, and FMV clips at every major plot point. The story is good for a while, but then trainwrecks near the end and becomes insane. Character development is limited and there is a random battle every ten seconds. Is it Final Fantasy VII? VIII? IX? Chrono Cross? Legend of Mana? Saga Frontier? Vagrant Story? Legend of Dragoon? Parasite Eve? Somebody help me out, I can’t tell any of these damn games apart anymore.
TheMadSpin: A lot of people will try to convince you that Final Fantasy VII is the best Final Fantasy game ever. It’s not. Get over it.
Oh and Brad, it’s not just any RPG on PlayStation that features pre-rendered backgrounds, bad-looking polygonal characters, orchestral sounding MIDI tunes, and FMV clips at every major plot point…it was the first! If anything, I’d say we could also blame Final Fantasy VII for Legend of Dragoon.
RoyalRanger: I still remember the first and only time I played this game in my first PlayStation console. The game would always skip during the cut-scenes and would sometime freeze, leaving me to start from my last save point. One particular cut-scene froze about six times before I finally got through it. Then, I found out that the game console was partially at fault because the CD reader was too old and out of whack to keep up with the information on the FFVII disc, even though no other game disc caused the console to react this way. Because of this one game, I had to fork out money to replace my used PlayStation. Thanks for nothing, Final Fantasy VII.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Link brings TEH RAWK to Men at Work’s 80’s smash, Down Under.
TheMadSpin: Let’s face this terrible truth once and for all: Nintendo has been making the same Zelda game for the last ten years, and it all started with Ocarina of Time. In OoT you hunt for chickens; in Wind Waker you hunt for pigs. In OoT you play the ocarina; in Wind Waker you conduct. In OoT you ride around on your horse; in Wind Waker you cruise on a ship. The overall changes to gameplay are almost always minor. I think that’s why Nintendo went with such a huge graphical change to Wind Waker. They wanted to make sure they distracted everyone from realizing they were playing the same damn game they did the last time. We were all so excited that cel-shading didn’t ruin the game, that we never stopped to consider that we were playing OoT with a boat.
Monkey Island II: LeChuck’s Revenge

“Stop the jokes, you’re killing me! No really, STOP IT.”
Syndicate

Ya gotta love the colors here. Looks like that stuff they use when somebody pukes in school.
Galaga

Anybody got some bug spray?
RoyalRanger: What a waste of time and money. Does anybody ever say to themselves, “You know, I can really go for a round of Galaga right now”? Like Loog said, there’s nothing spectacular about this game. This is more or less one of those games that you play only when you have nothing better to do. “Look, I’m tired of playing Cruis’n Indonesia, Marvel vs. Tyco, and Metal Slug 17, so I might as well just hit that old Galaga cabinet over there.”
Contra

A rip-off of H.R. Giger’s “Alien” creature spits jumbo shrimp at one of Contra’s badasses.
TheMadSpin: In retrospect, this game wasn’t really that great, and thanks to the idiotic shared screen for two players, it actually caused a rift between my friends and me. For instance, if one of my friends was a jerk and took all the power ups, I’d just wait until he got to a tricky jump and then I’d pull the old, “hold the screen back” trick so that he plummeted to his doom. Sure, I didn’t have the power-up, but now he didn’t either. That’s teamwork right there.
RoyalRanger: I never found Contra to be particularly challenging. I had always been told that it was extremely difficult, but I put those reports to rest when I actually bought the game. Within just a few days of my purchase, I had destroyed the final boss for the first time. That’s supposed to be difficult? I’ve purchased games that have taken me weeks or months to master. I even have a few games that I still haven’t beaten after years of trying. But this game took me less than one week to complete? The difficulty in Contra isn’t all that it’s hyped up to be.
Brad Hates Games: Two soldiers against a gigantic alien invasion force? Look, the next time there’s a global crisis and Finland says “Hey, don’t even worry about this one guys, we’ve already sent our entire army to take care of the problem,” the rest of the world really ought to ask a couple of follow-up questions.
Tetris

“Hello Cleveland! Are you ready to RAWK?!”
RoyalRanger: I think it’s clear that Tetris wasn’t created solely to train the Soviets to spread their communist agenda. This game was also created to deliver subliminal anti-capitalist messages to the world. Because capitalism is an economic theory based on the principal of accumulating capital, we’re going to assume that each set of blocks in Tetris represents a certain amount of capital. The harder you try to collect and organize your capital, the more of it disappears, likely to the hands of an evil, oppressive rich person. However, if you accumulate too much capital, you lose the game because you’ve now just become an evil, oppressive rich person yourself. This game was clearly created with an agenda in mind. I’m surprised that the United States government has allowed Tetris to slip past their radar for so long.
Loogaroo: You know, the whole “OMG THIS GAME IS SO ADDICTIVE” thing was kinda lost on me. I never really played this game for more that 15-20 minutes at a time, and most of it was spent restarting the game over and over until I had a semi-decent score after about 50 lines. In my case, they may as well have called the game “Resetris”.
TheMadSpin: Screw all the conspiracy theories. All I know is that after a considerably long Tetris spree a few years ago, I had a dream that I played for days and days on end without ever getting the much needed “straight” block. Of course, then I realized it wasn’t a dream. Any game that takes that much pride in ruining a well-built plan by withholding needed blocks is…wow, I guess that does sound a little like communism.
Shining Force

Surely there are better
ways to clean the floor.
Dragon Warrior

Players will face the most terrifying of beasts in Dragon Warrior.
Brad Hates Games: Perhaps the most infuriating thing about this game is that it can’t differentiate between a person, treasure chest, or door, so it makes you choose all of your interactions off of the same menu. C’mon Dragon Warrior, do you really think I wanted to talk to that treasure chest or use the King as a stairway? And what could I possibly hope to accomplish by searching the door for treasure? “Fortune smiles upon thee, Brad. Thou hast found the doorknob!”
TheMadSpin: There’s a little something that only we hardcore Dragon Warrior players know. I couldn’t tell you where I learned it (it was probably some secrets guide written in the late 80’s or early 90’s), but it’s both very true and very stupid. The name of your character in Dragon Warrior affects what your stats will be. When thinking about this I decided to check on Gamefaqs, and sure enough, there’s a guide to explain how the formula works. Ironically, the game rewards people who are so unoriginal, that they go with “Erdrick” as their character’s name (it has one of the best growth rates).
Penalizing someone for having the name “Hedwick” is just a little redundant to me.
Half-Life

Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo as Half-Life protagonist, Gordon Freeman.
StarCraft

The “Zerg” — Yet another game character ripping off H.R. Giger.
- “As you progress threw [sic] a game more and more units become available to you and same goes with buildings.”
- “There is also a pre-made campaign and a lot of pre-made levels.”
- “Whenever you click on a character in the game, they will say something in their own voice.”
- “Background music is not annoying and doesn’t make you want to throw the computer out the window.”
- “The game even tells you when you are being attacked.”
Wow! A premade campaign with a lot of levels? Background music that won’t make me throw the computer out the window? Like I couldn’t find all those things in just about any RTS game. Thanks for nothing, StarCraft.
TheMadSpin: This is where all the real cheaters went when they got tired of hacking in Counter-Strike. I didn’t mind losing game after game to superior Koreans when the game launched there, but I do mind all the toddlers that decided to exploit the most obvious flaw in the ladder system. If you have the technology, you can set up games against an alias, win enough games to get ladder-qualified, and then beat up on tons of people who are inferior to you in order to improve your ladder rank. This is why you can log on and find unlikely records like 900,000 – 2.
Mario Kart 64

Winning in Mario Kart 64 often has more to do with which power-ups you get, as opposed to how well you run the courses.
RoyalRanger: What was wrong with the original Super Mario Kart, anyway?
Fatsquatch: I’ll tell you what was wrong with it…it didn’t have blurry mip-mapped graphics. Mario Kart 64 took care of that.
TheMadSpin: Everything on the N64 had blurry mip-mapped graphics because that’s what players wanted, and Nintendo knows what players want! Players want a crappy catch-up mode and inferior rehashes of our favorite titles. Players want a company to prey on our need for nostalgia. If only I had been able to link up my Gameboy Color to Mario Kart 64. Players like to link things together because otherwise we’d spend our money on food.
Goldeneye 007

An exciting scene from
David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
TheMadSpin: Have you ever hated something just because someone stupid liked it? I remember someone saying that Goldeneye revolutionized multiplayer gaming, and from then on I decided that I must hate that person and any game he tried to push on me. You see, Quake: Team Fortress revolutionized multiplayer gaming before Goldeneye was even released. And Quake II (which came out shortly after Goldeneye) was already a bigger and better multiplayer experience: You could have far more players competing at once, and since it was a PC game, the FPS play was far more suited. Plus, screw that guy!
Street Fighter II

A parked car is about the only thing that slow-ass Zangief can beat up.
TheMadSpin: Like Loog, I wish I could destroy the prototype for Street Fighter II, but not to eliminate games like Mortal Kombat or Primal Rage. I just want to eliminate the 45 special editions of Street Fighter II that appeared in its wake.
Brad Hates Games: Each character in Street Fighter II had his own ending that showed what happened to them as a result of winning the tournament. For example, Ryu went on to look for a new challenge, Guile avenged his friend’s death, and Ken got married. If you beat the game with M. Bison, he conquers the world, but the game never explains how. It just demands that you accept the idea that winning this martial arts tournament is somehow the key to his global domination. Well, I’m sorry Capcom; I can believe that mastery of Yoga has given Dhalsim the ability to make his limbs double in length, and that Chun Li can turn herself into a human helicopter, but Bison’s ending is asking me to suspend my disbelief just a little too much.
Tecmo Super Bowl

Yeah, it might suck, but at least Tecmo Super Bowl has big BUTTS.
Brad Hates Games: I’d really like to know who this QB BILLS is supposed to be, because I’ve never seen Jim Kelly throw a football 100 yards and hit Andre Reed in stride. Then again, I’ve also never seen Tom Tupa punt the ball out of the stadium, or Haywood Jeffries jump 40 feet in the air to make a catch. Also, I’m pretty sure that if Christian Okoye broke a tackle by flinging Deion Sanders all the way into the crowd, I would have seen it on Sportscenter or something. Especially if, during the same play, Deion managed to climb back onto the field, become 10 times faster than he had been, and catch Okoye before he scored a touchdown, only to be tossed into the stands again. But the thing that always really bothered me about this game was the way my players would automatically get worse every week, so that the same QB BILLS who was throwing those perfect passes in week one could do nothing other than throw the ball right to opposing players in the Super Bowl. Oh wait…actually, that part is pretty realistic.
TheMadSpin: Stat tracking sort of loses its novelty flare when your running back starts out the season averaging 80 yards a carry, and by the end he’s picking up -5 yards thanks to blitz after blitz. You see, in Tecmo Super Bowl, you had to guess the same play as your opponent to get a blitz. Early in the season the computer hardly ever guesses and you can dominate. By the end of the season the computer basically reads your mind. Even if it doesn’t choose the play, I dare you to use a flea flicker. You’ll be demolished about 5 seconds before the pitch and watch them pick up your ever bouncing fumble and carry it to the end zone.
This title is actually the game that led to the first and only time I threw an entire console against the wall. I’ve done it to control pads plenty of times, but this was my only “console toss”. The game itself broke into pieces, but my NES was fine. Later, I would jam the cartridge (sans casing) into my game genie, just so that I could play it again. It still pissed me off then too.
Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

Looks like someone’s got
a case of the “Mondays”!
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

Dudes, just go AROUND the towers.
Super Mario 62

Mario’s craving Doritos soooo badly.
Fatsquatch: Yeah, for real. Can we finally put the brakes on the nearly 10-year old bandwagon and just admit that Mario 64 isn’t all that its been hyped up to be? With its constant backtracking of levels, areas filled with anger-inducing jumps, and an over-animated Mario who’s simply quite irritating to control, Mario 64 is clearly overrated. I didn’t think this game was “all that” back in ’96, and after spending 10 painful minutes with the retread on the Nintendo DS, I think even less of it now.
TheMadSpin: I never really liked the original iteration of this title, but I wanted to give it another try, so I picked up the Nintendo DS version. Not only was I still frustrated by the camera and control, but I spent more time playing the mini games than I did on the adventure itself. I popped in the N64 version just to compare the two, and the camera and control were only marginally better.
Just because this was the first blockbuster 3-D game out there doesn’t mean it was that good. It just made fewer mistakes than any other had before. That’s not saying much, especially all these years later.
Star Wars: TIE Fighter

Ummm, ever hear of skin lotion?
Tomb Raider

Sharp boobies = TEH SEXY!
Loogaroo: I can only think of one reason why this game became so popular. Well, two really, but people tend not to refer to them individually.
Fatsquatch: Tomb Raider? More like BOOB Raider! OMFGROLFBBQ!!!
Ahem… *sigh* I got nothing.
Soul Calibur

Misturugi’s nips have apparently been tucked.
By the way, I just realized that this was the only Dreamcast game on our Top 100 list. Nice legacy, Sega!
Fatsquatch: My first few days with Soul Calibur was spent solo, studying the various moves for Yoshimitsu and preparing myself to do battle with friends. At the end of my training session, I had a pretty good handle on Yoshi’s abilities, and I just knew that I would easily be able to defeat my friends, who hadn’t spent much time — if any at all — with the game.
So, when I finally came face-to-face with an old gaming bud who had never played a single minute of the game before, I was eager to show off Yoshi’s badass repertoire (at his expense of course). As it turned out, knowledge of my character’s various moves proved to be no match for my opponent’s wild button-mashing, and I lost. After that happened a few more times, I said “@!%# it”, chose Kilik, and adopted a button-mashing technique of my own, all to great effect.
Those kinds of game-design issues are gold, Jerry. GOLD!!
TheMadSpin: Soul Calibur was never a great fighting game, it was just a really smooth and pretty fighting game. This was one of the many attempts by Dreamcast fanatics to glorify a fairly pedestrian game. The only truly groundbreaking fighting game for the Dreamcast was Power Stone.
NHL Hockey ’94

Gotta love that funky
aquamarine colored ice.
TheMadSpin: I think pretending NHL ’94 is the best hockey sim ever made is about as laughable as Steve Yzerman’s recent complaints about the rule changes in the NHL. Sometimes change is for the better, even if you have to work a little harder to make it better.
Fatsquatch: Everybody knows that Konami’s Blades of Steel on the NES is the best hockey game ever produced. NHL ’94 can bite my rotund arse. I mean, come on!!
Ms. Pac-Man

Can you feel the love tonight?
But are we supposed to reward this sort of practice? Shouldn’t things like more than one maze layout and bonus fruit that actually moves around the maze have been implemented in the original version, instead of put in a second version that the company could then make another mint on? PC gamers from hither and yon complain every time a company comes out with a game that’s not fully debugged and then releases patches ad infinitum to fix the mistakes they were too lazy/rushed to correct from the get-go. If Ms. Pac-Man went any further, we’d essentially be tolerating that sort of thing.
Brad Hates Games: I remember hearing about how empowered women felt by this game because it was called “Ms.” Pac-Man, not “Mrs.” Pac-Man or “Miss” Pac-Man. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but actually, that would-be symbol of girl power is really just “Mr.” Pac-Man in some lipstick. What kind of message does this send to young women anyway? That you’re going to spend your entire life being ruthlessly pursued and beaten into submission by those who intend you harm? Every so often you’ll become empowered and be able to turn the tables on them, but these moments are always brief and end abruptly? That the goal of their lives should just be to mindlessly consume as much as possible? What a horrible thing to be teaching to little girls. Thanks for setting the women’s rights movement back 50 years, Ms. Pac-Man.
RoyalRanger: Brad, you forgot to mention the fact that Ms. Pac-Man has the word “man” in her name. If this game really wanted to empower women, it should have been named “Ms. Pac-Woman” or “Ms. Pac” or “Ms. Otto”.
Fatsquatch: Ms. Pac-Man empowered women? Hmmmm…I got something totally different out of it, as I found Ms. Pac-Man to be HOT. Seriously, look at those luscious red lips and the cute little “beauty mark” at the corner of her mouth and tell me that you don’t get turned on.
Sexiest…Video…Game…Character…EVAR.
Grand Theft Auto III

Don’t lose your head! *yuk yuk yuk*
TheMadSpin: I really can’t buy into the political issues, and ultra-violent content is a matter of preference. Still, there’s a reason that this title will never be considered as one of the top 10 games of all-time, no matter how much it has inspired the industry: The targeting. The targeting system is perhaps one of the worst in gaming, and it also happens to be the one issue that Rockstar still hasn’t fixed. I say bring on the violence, bring on the mayhem, and bring on the crime — I’m adult enough to choose both in game and out, but know this: in a game where you have to resort to violence as often as you do, it had better not be a chore.
Brad Hates Games:
Dispatcher: 911. What is your emergency?
Woman: Oh god! There’s this man, he’s up on a rooftop with a rifle, and he’s just shooting people at random! You have to do something!
Dispatcher: Can you describe him please?
Woman: Um…well, he kind of looks like the Fonz from Happy Days, but with green pants. Please, hurry! He’s throwing grenades now!
Dispatcher: Alright, police are on their way. I want you to stay on the line with me until they arrive. Ok?
Woman: Ok. Oh wait, never mind. He just fell into 3 feet of water and drowned.
Suikoden II

Wake up, dumb arse!
TheMadSpin: My copy of Suikoden II has appreciated quite a bit over the years. It’s now worth $150 on eBay, when I paid only $30 for it (new) at Walmart. That, and it being a pretty enjoyable game would make you think that I’d have nothing bad to say about this little hidden gem. Problem is, this game screwed me over and basically stole 40+ hours from my life.
You see, for all the good Konami did in translating this title, they forgot to code the transfer of saved Suikoden I data to your Suikoden II game. When you beat Suikoden I and load it up into Suikoden II, you can use the hero from Suikoden I in your party, and he is theoretically supposed to keep the same name that he had in the first title. The problem is, there was a bug that only replaced the capital letters in the hero’s name in Suikoden II. His name was ‘McDohl’, so when I put in ‘Steve’, the game only replaced the ‘S’ and my character’s name was ‘ScDohl’. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it pretty much ruined Suikoden II for me and drove me crazy throughout the entire stretch of the game.
Gran Turismo 2

In 1st place, but only by .01 seconds.
TheMadSpin: I think any racing game, whose MSRP is more than the real-life value of some of its unlockable cars, has really got to stop bragging about how many cars it has to offer. Sorry, Sony, but I don’t really want to race around in a 1971 Ford Pinto.
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