Top 10 worst computer games ever

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Posted on 21 May 2010 at 12:47

While there are plenty of great games and quite a large portion of titles that are simply alright, there are fortunately very few completely irredeemable and atrocious titles. So, when they crop up, they're something to almost admire with their strange attraction. Here's our top ten of the worst computer games that we think have ever been made.

10. Singles: Flirt up your life

Having seen the success of The Sims, developer Rotobee decided that the genre needed one extra thing: full-on pixelated love making. Yep, in a desperate bid to entice a generation of gamers craftily downloading Lara Croft nude patches, this game had you take over the lives of a couple of flat mates as you try and get them into bed together.

Moving on from gentle flirting, you can rapidly progress to forcing your unwitting computer puppets into undressing and then doing the dirty with each other. Along the way you have to fulfil the flatmates' needs, although this is largely pointless, as they can't, for example, starve to death when they're hungry.

The upshot is that it's largely pointless titillation involving computer characters. The Sims is far smarter, cleverer and much more fun.

9. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Possibly the owner of one of the world's worst acronyms (Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was the much-hyped and long-overdue game set in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

When released it was either loved and praised for its open world to explore or, quite rightly, ridiculed for being rubbish. For starters, you start the game with a pistol that's completely ineffective at killing anything, while you can wiped out by your enemies' far superior fire power. Then, inventory management's a nightmare and you soon find yourself laden with hundreds of weapons, when all you need is a bullet (this was also originally a line from Alanis Morisette's Ironic).

Even more annoying is when you're in the middle of a battle and quickly rob a corpse of its goodies, only to find yourself over-encumbered, at which point you are unable to move. Accessing the inventory to drop some stuff doesn't pause the game, so you inevitably die. Yes, real life doesn't pause when you open your bag, but if you were being shot you'd a) move incredibly quickly no matter how much you were carrying and b) probably drop your back-pack if it was that heavy.

Then, there's the stupid energy bar: deplete this by jumping too much and you suddenly become too exhausted to walk. Statue-like, again, you'll soon be wiped out by enemy soldiers. This is so ridiculous that we wanted to smash our computer and throw it out of the window: jumping doesn't make people too tired to move.

Then there are the bugs, such as stealing the flash mission before killing all of the bad guys means that the game refuses to tell you what to do next. There's some invisible mutants later on, but by then you'll be too annoyed or bored to continue playing.