The Hall of Shame 02.14.08: Data Design Interactive

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 02.14.2008

Bringing you the worst of games at a budget price!

It's one thing if you've created a really bad game. It's another thing when you create multiple bad games. It's even worse if you've created multiple bad games, and they are all the EXACT same game! Unfortunately, that's what one company in the UK is doing right now. At first I was just going to induct a few games they've recently made, but after doing some deeper research about them, I've decided that they are so horrible of a company that I'm inducting them into the Hall of Shame. That's right, an ENTIRE COMPANY is getting inducted. That company is Data Design Interactive.



As I said before, I was only going to induct a few games from this company, of which I dubbed the "Data Design Trilogy". This would be about three games that were horrible and actually the same thing re-released under different names. There were originally released on the PS2 in the UK, but were brought to the US on the Wii. These were the three offenders in question:

Ninjabread Man

The more and more I look into this game, the more I keep confusing it for one of those freeware games you would get off download.com or something. Now, if Ninjabread Man was like that, then it'd probably wouldn't be so bad. But instead it's one of the worst Wii games ever.

Anubis II

I'm not sure if this is really supposed to be called "Anubis 2" or "Anubis the 2nd". Calling it "Anubis 2" would be completely wrong because there was never an Anubis 1 (unless you count Ninjabread Man), and why would they need to call it "Anubis the 2nd" when just leaving the name "Anubis" would work just as well? As you'll later find out, Data Design likes to lie to it's customers.

Rock 'N Roll Adventures

You play as a caricature of the king of Rock 'n Roll called Elviz, and it's basically a direct clone of the last two games mentioned. Outside of that, there's not much info about Rock 'N Roll Adventures.

The story of all three games are hardly explained. The most you're going to know about what's going on is what you read on either the box or the instruction manual. Basically, you're going around collecting stuff for some reason. Once you collect all the stuff in one level, you go to the next one and collect more stuff. After you collect all the stuff, you beat the game and unlock a couple extra modes where you can collect stuff again in different ways, such as in a time limit. You don't even fight any kind of bosses. You just run around, jump on about a million platforms, collect the stuff you need, and that's it. I guess I could be more specific about what stuff you're supposed to collect, but you know what, if Data Design can't put any real effort into these games, I shouldn't put any real effort in describing them. Beating these games will take you about as long as it takes to read this entire article.

The Wii has been bashed by many for having games that look to have the same graphics as the Gamecube. These games don't even qualify for having Gamecube graphics, because they look more like the kind of graphics you would find on a PlayStation or Nintendo 64 game. The Wii has also been questioned if the controller would actually be any good. The controls in this game barely even work. Jumping requires flicking the nunchuk up and swinging your melee weapon requires swinging the remote, but more then half the time it won't respond. Considering you have to jump on platforms A LOT in these games, unresponsive jumps is just unacceptable. Then there's the camera, which just absolutely sucks and the only control you have is instantly bringing it behind you.

Now, those were supposed to be the three games inducted this week, until I've discovered the company made even more horrible games. Companies that seem to be making the same game with little added features isn't new. In fact, a lot of big name companies get accused of that all the time (see EA Sport, Capcom). But Data Design doesn't even try. What Data Design is doing is basically taking a crappy game, sell it for $20, then attempt to copy and paste everything in that game and call it something else, and also attempt to sell that for $20. So far, according to the list of games listed on their site, they've done this 23 times. To be fair, not all of them are crappy action platformers. Some are copy and pasted kart racing games, and one game stars a Harry Potter-wannabe. Even worse, they even go so far as to number a couple of them as sequels even those there was no first game to begin with. I thought "Anubis II" was bad enough, but they also created a game called "Rig Racer 2". Nowhere on that site does it list a Rig Racer 1. That "2" is basically another trick into making people think that it was a sequel to a game, then it must've been a good one. If you even want proof that all the games they make a clones of themselves, you can check out the video on this page.

You know what all this reminds me of? Action 52. That had 52 of the most atrocious games I've ever played, and Active Entertainment, the people behind that game, tried to sell it for $200, tricking unassuming customers into thinking they were getting 52 brand new games for less than $4 each. Now, imagine if Active decided instead to sell each game on the Action 52 individually and sold them for a budget price of $10. If somebody was dumb enough to buy a lot of these $10 games, that would've been an even bigger rip-off.

In fact, I'm starting to believe I know what happened to Active Entertainment. After Action 52 and The Cheetahmen "franchise" bombed horribly, the people behind that company ran away to the UK, thinking perhaps they can trick the people overseas into buying crappy games. They would eventually create the company Data Design and, just like they did at Active Entertainment, they would create really crappy games for low prices and attempt to create new characters to build franchises out of. This is likely not to be true, but the publisher bringing this garbage to the US is called Conspiracy Entertainment. And this one foul conspiracy.


Can Ninjabread Man pick up where The Cheetahmen left off?

Now here's where things get really saddening. Believe it or not, Data Design Interactive announced a sequel to Ninjabread Man. That's right. Instead of just creating yet another clone with a different name to unleash on the unsuspecting public, they're going to create an actual continuation of the series. Does this mean that so many people have actually BOUGHT the game?! God help us all.

On a side note, every time I see one of those video game college commercials, I think of two things. One, the line "Tighten up the graphics!" makes no damn sense. Two, they try to pass it off like you're going to make the next Mario, but odds are you're going to get stuck making crap like Data Design does.

And just like they're thanked in the credits of Ninjabread Man, this article is dedicated to the "hard working" team at that pulled together and made that piece of shit, along with the other games they made by pressing control-C and control-V over and over again. Thanks!