Since I own a PS3, I moseyed over to Metacritic and found, by ranking, the three worst games on disc in PS3 history: "Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust," "Rogue Warrior," and "Vampire Rain: Altered Species." I decided to play them all, back-to-back, in a single day. By the end I had aching thumbs, bleeding eyes, and a tortured brain. Listen now to my tale of gaming woe.
Finding the Games
Every time I've done a marathon, there's some game that was my bete noir, impossible to find, proof that the free market does work. This time was no exception. Amazingly, my local Blockbuster had "Vampire Rain" and "Leisure Suit Larry" available to rent ... but no "Rogue Warrior." It had been rented. Apparently, one guy has been continuously renting this game since 2009.
A quick visit to the store next door had no results. I went to my local GameStop, nothing. Finally, in sheer desperation, I went online and found a copy, only for it to be broken. Or so I thought (more on that later).
"Vampire Rain: Altered Species" Metascore: 30 Genre: "Stealth" Plot: Some guy who looks like Sam Fisher has to sneak past vampires. What It Really Is: "Metal Gear Solid" meets "Twilight"
Before starting this game, like many games, I had to install it. OK. That will take, what, a few minutes?
A sandwich and a beer later, it still wasn't done installing. Finally, after a second beer and a few pages of War and Peace, the game finished installing. I'm still confused as to what, precisely, it took twenty minutes to install on my PS3. It sure wasn't anything to do with the graphics:
I'm not 100% sure this wasn't just a PS2 game they ported over.
Either way, the idea is that you, as a badass incredible operative with a firearm and attitude, are completely unable to kill a vampire, so you've got to sneak past them or else they kill you in two hits.
That's it. That's the game. Occasionally you fight what the game insists are "bosses," but as these "bosses" take far more hits to kill you than the average vampire, they can't be bosses. The vampires you avoid instead of shooting in the face, those are the bosses!
The main problem with this game is that it's insanely difficult. And not in a pleasant, challenging, lateral thinking kind of way. More like trying not get raped in prison: that kind of difficult. There's one path through each level and the game makes you stick to it. Stray, and it WILL kill you, violently.
I found this more annoying than anything else. I've been gaming since the 8-bit era, where game designers were not out to amuse you, but to collect your delicious tears as you threw your controller at walls, pets, and friends out of sheer frustration. That said, if they were going to be insistent on the game being so rigid and focused on one path, it would be nice if the controls, you know, worked.
Six hours later, I had to wonder how the marathon could possibly go downhill from here.
"Rogue Warrior" Metascore: 27 Genre: FPS Plot: Right-wing loony kills all of North Korea. AMERICA, F**K YEAH! What It Really Is: That comic book where Sean Hannity paid to be an action hero, only as a terrible video game.
As I mentioned, I bought this game, used, for five dollars off Craigslist. I put the game in, started playing, and almost immediately ran into, well, this:
So I called the guy and told him I wanted my five bucks back. He told me to look up "Rogue Warrior Glitch" on Youtube.
The game wasn't broken; at least, not in the sense that it was scratched up. It turns out that North Korean soldier corpses have a fuzzy understanding of the fact that two objects can't occupy the same space in the Rogue Warrior universe. In fact, this happens a lot:
Admittedly, this is the quality we've come to expect from the "Rogue Warrior" franchise. For those unfamiliar, the "Rogue Warrior" is Richard Marcinko, an actual Navy SEAL who, depending on who you ask, was either unjustly framed for defrauding the government, or actually defrauded the government. Either way, he mostly makes a living talking about how awesome Richard Marcinko is, selling novels about how Richard Marcinko ends all threats to America with his knife, and then putting his likeness into a crappy game with Mickey Rourke doing the dialogue.
The real-life Dick.
For all the crap Rogue Warrior gets, it's not really bad so much as just ... really boring and lame. It's like the mall cop who constantly claims to be "former Special Ops," but made into a video game. This entire game is like being locked in a room with that guy, especially during the abundant moments of profanity. Richard Marcinko, according to this game, is completely unable to get through a sentence without saying "Frost." If this game is to be believed, he greets people with "Nice to Frost-ing meet you!" and opens polite chit-chat with "What lovely Frost-ing weather we're having!" Then he stabs you in the eye.
On the bright side, it was short, taking me about four hours to finish, since I skipped anything that wasn't gameplay where possible, and pretty much just shot everything. Which was actually pretty difficult to do, as Richard Marcinko is unable to hit a target with a firearm from more than five yards away. Maybe he was the best bureaucrat in the Navy SEALs?
But even this pales in comparison to...
"Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust" Metascore: 17 Genre: "Adventure" Plot: Some guy tries to get laid in a movie studio by playing minigames. This works, for some reason. What It Really Is: A Wii game that tries to be sexy and fails miserably.
Games and sex have a long history of not working well. Whenever a game has tried to go sexytime, it's always been a disaster. At best, you've got Commander Shepard scoring awkwardly in "Mass Effect":
And at worst you've got...well...this. A game so bad, even Hitler didn't like it:
The main problem with this game is that it didn't feature nudity, instead deciding to make up the difference with swearing and the all-star cast.
Which brings us to the second problem: if a game makes a big deal of its voice cast, instead of its gameplay, it probably stinks.
So, it's a "sexy" game with no "sexy" content, a lot of B-list celebrities (is there anything Carmen Electra or Jay Mohr won't do for money?), and a franchise that has been out of gas for a while. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, a lot. The problem is this game wants to do everything: stealth sections, shooting, casual gaming, platforming, probably there was a cooking minigame I missed. And it does absolutely nothing well. It's basically a bundle of crappy Flash games offering up movie parodies that were last relevant five years ago. (A Brokeback Mountain parody? Really?)
Not helping things is the fact that, if you approach a wall, the game's camera falls in love with it, which is nice for the happy couple but makes seeing where you're going pretty much impossible, a problem we'd thought had been resolved somewhere around the end of the first PlayStation era.
What I Learned
I've been gaming since the second grade, which means I've had a controller in my hand for almost two-thirds of my life. When I was a kid, a lot of games were glitchy, badly designed, badly programmed, and frustrating. As technology advanced, I saw games becoming a storytelling medium that rivaled film or novels, with games like "Portal 2" and "Shadow of the Colossus."
I didn't realize that glitchy and badly designed games were still around, they had just gone to the bargain bin. The only thing that's changed is that you still have to pay twenty bucks to play them.
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