Elimin8 3.18.10: The Worst 8 Games I Paid For

Posted by Josh Boykin on 03.18.2010

From Two Worlds and Fortress to Mega Man Battle Network: Battle Chip Challenge and Dissidia: Final Fantasy, 411’s Josh Boykin counts down the worst 8 games he ever paid for! See which games made the list and why!

Another Thursday, and another weekly dose of Elimin8, the countdown where I take 8 of something terrible and bring it up in public, like the awkward guy at the party who always reminds you how much worse your life could be compared to what it is...you've never run into that guy? Oh, well, then be thankful.

This week I've decided to delve into a personal topic and cover some ground that's been untouched before: my purchasing history. We've all done it at least once: bought a game, then 15 minutes after playing tried to convince ourselves that the game's actually good, or that we just need to give it more of a chance. But no, it's just a bad game, and in many cases (particularly if you buy your games new), money down the drain that we never get back. In memory of all the flushed dollars I've spent over the years, this week I present:


Elimin8: The Worst 8 Games I've Ever Spent Money On


8. Fortress (GBA)



I don't think that there's any real way to make this game look interesting or fun. Sure, there are plenty of different time period/stages to play on, but that doesn't make up for the frustratingly boring gameplay. It's like Tetris, but not fun. And I don't care how many face-lacking cavemen you shove in, it's not funny either. It's just sad.

Why I Paid For It (get it? It's a play on words...both why I purchased it and why I suffered...) : My friend and I were at a game shop and there were two copies of the game new for $5 apiece. With the GBA still being relatively new hardware at the time, we didn't have a lot to play on the system, and thought it would be a good time to play using our trusty new GBA Link Cable. We were wrong. Or, should I say, I was wrong. Because I was the one who conned us into making this terrible purchase with promises of epic multi-player mayhem. I'm sure the back of the box said something like that.

Could It Have Been Worth My Money?: The purchase might've been worthwhile if they'd A) Had single-cart multiplayer so we each didn't have to buy a copy of this crap to play each other, or B) touched up the graphics and made the gameplay more fluid. All playing the game made me do was wish that I was playing outright Tetris, and cost me $5 dollars I'd never see returned. When I eventually turned it in to Gamestop, I think they gave me $.75 for it. I don't blame them.


7. Mega Man Battle Network: Battle Chip Challenge (GBA)



Yeah, so I'm one of those lameasses who's clung to the Mega Man Battle Network series like duct tape on the sticky side of another piece of duct tape. Even though the series "jumped the shark" back at MMBN 4, even though each game is basically just a reiteration of the last one, I still buy them. When I heard Battle Chip Challenge was coming out as a spin-off of the series, I was really excited. I bought the game on launch day. Yet another gaming foible.

Why I Paid For It:: Completion of the series, in all its forms, was a necessity for me. Never mind that this game took the action-oriented gameplay of the previous Battle Network titles and threw in some random "you make a chart and we'll do the rest" battle mechanic, I didn't care. I NEEDED MY MEGAMAN FIX. But the lack of any real player-game interaction, and the lack-luster story made the game a total flop.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: Well, I played the hell out of it, with multiple characters, but no, it really couldn't end up being worth my cash, or time. I was just a sad, lonely series devotee... ::sniffles:: In case you couldn't tell from the video, you don't actually PLAY much of the game. You create a program deck, then sit back and watch as the game randomly chooses chips for your character to use in battle. I mean, people said gamers were lazy before...hell, I could have been making sandwiches while playing this game and still been completely functional. The only input the user had was to hit the L or R button to "slot in" a surprise chip to throw the other player off-balance. Bad, bad game.

6. Gunpey DS



I'm a sucker for music games, hands down. I like the fusion of music and gaming in any form, so when I heard about Gunpey, I was pretty excited at the idea of a music-puzzler. I didn't have a PSP at the time, so the puzzle-music fusion Lumines was never something I got to own. Gunpey was going to have both a PSP and a DS version, so I ventured out to pick to game up for my faithful dual-screen handheld.

Why I Paid For the Game: I found it for $10 at Wal-Mart, and I figured I couldn't go wrong with a price like that. The Gunpey series was a big hit in Japan, and so I figured the DS iteration would be a blast. But the blurry visuals, and awkward gameplay style just didn't mesh on the DS. Add in the massive superiority of the PSP version (better music, better visuals...overall just better), and owning the game just felt like an insult.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: If I'd bought it for the PSP, I'm sure it would have been. But some games just shouldn't be ported to the DS if they're going to be poor-quality ports, and this was one of those games. Considering it didn't even sell that well here in the states, it probably wasn't even worth the costs of translation and import.

5. Dissidia: Final Fantasy (NES)



The idea of pitting Cloud against Sephiroth (or, even better, Squall) in wide, sweeping landscapes with tons of dodging and epic explosions... Dissidia vowed to fulfill all of my wildest Final Fantasy dreams by giving me a 20+ character roster of big-name FF characters to pit against each other in heated combat. I picked up the game and tossed it into my PSP the second I got back to my room. The entire time I played the game, I fought against this nagging in the back of my head that said, "Turn the thing off, you know you don't like it that much." I brushed that off for over 40 hours before I could finally admit to myself I just plain didn't like the game.

Why I Paid For the Game: As you can see in the video, it's pretty gorgeous. And as an avid Final Fantasy fan, I loved the sweeping, all-encompassing story that the title promised. I expected a story and development worthy of the Final Fantasy title, but, alas, I was wrong. The story was pretty bland (at best), and the voice acting in the cutscenes was TERRIBLE. With no option to switch over to Japanese audio (how am I supposed to know if Japanese voice acting is bad?), I had to suffer through the overly-emo Cloud and exceptionally brooding Squall decipher "a reason to fight" and all this other crap that wasn't worth hearing from the other characters. The short fights in between the long cutscenes just weren't enough to make the game worthwhile.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: Definitely, with just a few small tweaks. Write a better storyline. Get decent voice actors (Chaos' voice actor was good, but then, he's Keith David, a silver-screen actor). And bring less micro-management into the gameplay...you spend so much time in the menus managing the equipped items on each character and the move-set they happen to be using that the game feels tedious. I applaud the number of items and the different modes, but it's like they tried to straddle the RPG/fighter line and left out all of what makes both genres good in their own rights.


4. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (NDS)



For those of you who like Bejeweled and like RPG-lite titles, Puzzle Quest: The Challenge of the Warlords would allow you to die happy. Odds are you've been exposed to the jewel-movement/battle hybrid, and if you were like you, you pumped WAY TOO MANY hours into that game creating new weapons, training mounts, and grinding your character to epic proportions. If you were like me, the idea of Galactrix, essentially Puzzle Quest In Space made your mouth water. Too bad it didn't work out in the long run.

Why I Paid For the Game: Well, for one, it was on sale. Even though I'd read the reviews and heard the negative comments about its story and new six-sided puzzle gameplay mechanic, I figured I wouldn't mind it so much since the game was on sale. But, being a stickler for RPG stories, I was more disappointed in Galactrix's story than I expected. The character you play is kinda, well, a jackass, and I try not to be a jackass on a regular basis. And, just like the reviews said, the introduction of the six-sided gameplay made chaining combos feel almost impossible to plan, resulting in either a sort of confused happiness when I got big combos, or massive piss-ivity when the computer got big combos. Overall, there just wasn't enough in the game to keep me coming back to it.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: Well, as odd as it sounds, if they'd just made a closer clone of the original Puzzle Quest, I'm sure I would have been happier with it. The idea of adding mechanics, like piloting your own ship and hiring a crew, is a lot of fun, but at the end of the day it still needed to feel like a casual, pick-up-and-play-for-an-hour title. Galactrix didn't do that, and that's why it flopped.


3. Cacoma Knight in Bizyland (SNES)



I don't know how much money I spent on this game over my childhood. Well, I suppose that most times it wasn't me directly, as my parents were the one renting the game. But even if I only had to use money out of my own pocket once for this game to enter my house for 5 days at a time, it was far too much for me to sacrifice. And yes, I didn't even buy this game outright; just renting the game multiple times was scarring enough.

Why I Paid For the Game: I had a little sister, one who wanted to be able to play games with me. The idea of controlling the actions of a party member in Final Fantasy II when in battle was not enticing to her, so she got to choose a game we would be able to really play TOGETHER. She, being a 7-year-old girl, chose the one with the prettiest box.


Yeah, she picked this one.

And so I was continually subjected to the boring, repetitive, co-op mind-numbing this title provided. I think I can pretty solidly say that at least half of the times we walked out of the local video store we had a copy of that game with us...there was a reason it was always at the store. It sucked.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: Not really. Sure, the game had co-op gameplay, but so did Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety, a game we played and enjoyed much more. Cacoma Knight also had no password system (that we knew of at the time), so every time we turned the system off, I knew we'd have to start all over again. Give me a save system, please. ::sigh::


2. Two Worlds (X360)



The box was shiny. It drew me in. The collector's edition of Two Worlds came complete with art, an extensive instruction manual, and tools to play a Two Worlds table-top RPG. And it was $20. That was all it took for me to purchase the game. Looking at the back of the box, the game itself looked interesting enough... open-world roaming and typical knight-like swordplay, with some multi-player tossed in. Couldn't hurt, right?

Why I Paid For the Game: Well, like my sister, I chose the one with the prettiest box. And I figured that it looked like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, so it must have been as good. I mean, come on...they packaged it with a guide to play a table-top RPG! It had to be awesome, right? Sure enough, I was mistaken, pulled in by the bonus inserts. The game was glitchy, shallow, and all-too-obviously an Oblivion rip-off. The multi-player was shotty, and overall a waste of my time. And my disappointment in the game made me not want to play the table-top game at all. Total fail.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: Only if it had actually been Oblivion in that packaging. Bethesda Softworks got the formula for medieval open-world RPGs right, and there's no amount of inserts or price-discounting that make a sub-par product measure up to the bar that Oblivion set. Thankfully I was able to pawn that game off on someone else and get my money back...


1. Unlimited SaGa (PS2)



At a point in my life, I was under the impression that SquareEnix could do no wrong. So when I saw Unlimited SaGa on sale, I jumped on the opportunity. I'd heard good things about the SaGa series, and was sure I'd love playing the title. Oh, if only this had taken place at a time where I had mobile internet, a time where I could have looked up reviews before buying games...I popped the game into my PS2 and was exposed to a new, board-game-esque world that was, well, RIDICULOUSLY BAD.

Why I Paid For the Game: I love when games move in new directions and take risks (part of why I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy XIII), so the idea of an RPG/board game fusion seemed a little interesting. Or, at least, it did on the back of the box. The allure of multiple characters and multiple endings also drew my eye, so I couldn't resist. Too bad the game itself was a shambles of great music and terrible gameplay. The battle theme is memorable, and the combat-wheel mechanic is interesting, but walking around on the game's board/map was like walking through an Iraqi minefield; every other turn would poison your characters or take half their health or some other piece of nonsense. The fights moved from ridiculously easy to impossible within the span of a couple steps, and the overall presentation of the game felt uninspired and uninviting. I spent more time swearing and cursing SquareEnix for producing that game than I'd ever expected to get out of a board game. Then again, that's what I get for simply buying a game because SquareEnix was on the cover...won't make that mistake again.

Could This Have Been Worth My Money?: RPGs can be done many, many ways. Unlimited SaGa was an example of how to NOT do one. If you're going to make a board-game RPG, fully explain the mechanics to your player, perhaps through a tutorial or something. Make sure that if you're going to put impossible monsters on the first or second map, that you not make it seem completely random whether or not the player encounters those monsters. Make a game that is comprehendible, and, oh, enjoyable to play. That'd be a nice combination.



There, my worst 8 game purchases Elimin8ed. And those are some bad ones... But now you know some of the crap that shames my shelves. Now you should check out 411 Twitter links:

Josh Boykin
http://www.twitter.com/411mania
http://www.twitter.com/411games

Check back next Thursday for a new Elimin8. What games did you buy and regret? What should be next weeks countdown? Comment your suggestions, or send them to [e-mail]. Until next week!

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