Posted on 11/09/2006 1:40:15 PM PST by AppyPappy
The Worst Game of All Time
1. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, 1982) Platform: Atari 2600
About a third of the people I quizzed came up with this title almost instantly, and it's not hard to see why. No matter how you rate it, E.T. was a misbegotten product that deserved to be buried. (And, as things turned out, it was. More on that in a minute.)
How, you may wonder, does someone screw up the one-two punch of the year's most popular movie and the number one video game console? Through a combination of poor planning and unbridled optimism. Warner Communications, then Atari's parent company, sealed the deal to make a video game adaptation of the blockbuster movie in the summer of 1982, aiming to have the cartridge out for the Christmas shopping season. (Remember the TV ad, with E.T. in a Santa outfit? No? You can refresh your memory.) The result was a severely compressed development schedule, giving programmer Howard Scott Warshaw a mere five weeks to pull the game together.
(Excerpt) Read more at tech.msn.com ...
Oh, come on now. No NHL 93 by EA? That was a great game.
Not a hockey fan! :)
Pac-man Atari 2600 was terrible. I played it maybe a couple of teams and never again.
I wore out two controllers over the years, and rolled the counter on Missile Command, an awesome port. Asteroids and Space invaders on the 2600 were also both great.
Starcraft and Civ 3, Mario and Street Fighter.
I honestly think Starcraft might be the best game ever.
Tempest was an awesome game. Unique.
Where's Black and White? The whole "UI-less" thing sure sounded good in interviews with the designer but when it came time to cast a spell by making an inwardly spiraling square with your cursor instead of the spell that needed an inwardly spiraling circle the idea proved to be downright idiotic. The only really cool part about Black and White was leaving it to run on its own all day then seeing what your monkey had taught itself to do. You know when the best thing to do with a game is to not actually play it you've made a truly terrible game.
you have to include Half-Life 1 on your best list
That's Adventure. It's a total classic. It may be bad by today's standards, but it really laid the foundation for the genre.
I agree!
Galaga is still my all time favorite coin op, the best Space Invaders clone ever.
very good for its time. :)
Adventure and Haunted House just weren't my cup of tea.
Castle Wolfenstein and The Ultima series for Comodore64 and Atari(computers) were very good.
I loved Missle Command. I moved to it after Space Invaders and Asteroids.
E.T. required reading the manual. If one read the manual, it was a decent game. Not great, but hardly among the worst ten. I can easily come up with ten games worse than E.T.
As for Smurf: RIGC, it's a kid's game. There's not a whole lot there, but it's better than many other games of that style (common overseas; less common here) such as "Bobby Geht Nach Haus" (Bobby Goes Home).
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