Electronic Gaming Monthly's Worst Reviewed Games of 1996

Battle Monsters

#5

When it's 1996 and you feel like you absolutely must release a fighting game, I don't blame developers for throwing ideas at the wall in hopes of having something stick. And when your idea is to get a bunch of famous monsters together to fight it out, I can see why people might be excited. But boy oh boy was Battle Monsters a misfire. And it's not just bad, but also tacky. At least, that's the word Sushi X kept using in his review. "Who forgot to tell Acclaim that the Saturn is a 32-bit machine?"

"I guess some people have been searching for a cure for happiness," starts Dan Hsu. He was not impressed with the gameplay, characters or graphics, which he said were worse than Way of the Warrior. Shawn Smith agreed: "From the "intro" sequence all the way to the cheesy gameplay, Battle Monsters screams BAD. I thought these lame digitized fighters died with the 3DO?" Nobody was impressed with this mess, which is why Battle Monster managed to average a pitiful 3.5 out of 10. But here's a depressing fact, it wasn't the worst fighting game of the year, as you'll soon see.

Strike Point

#4

Longtime fans of these EGM countdowns will remember the bad old days when 8-bit flight sims would fill the list. If you thought we were getting a reprieve from that torture in the 32-bit era, then let me introduce you to Strike Point for the PlayStation. "This is a pretty lousy game," starts Shawn. "The graphics were decent, but nothing spectacular by any means." And that's coming from a guy who only kind of disliked it.

Dan hated the game, pondering this thought: "I would like to know just how games like Strike Point make it as far as the store shelves. The opening cinema is sadly the only good part of the game." Believe or not, Sushi X hated it even more, giving the PS1 game a 2. "Let's get this over with, folks: I found one interesting point about Strike Point: You can change the color of your helicopter. Yup, that's it. I had to look at the back and see if this game was originally an NES game and was a spectacular 32-bit port." Oof. With all these bad scores, Strike Point averaged a sad 3.5 out of 10.

Bubsy 3D

#3

Bubsy 3D is the reason why Bubsy the Bobcat has a bad name. Sure, the other games didn't help, this first (and only) 3D outing turned the middling mascot character into an internet joke. Looking back at the reviews published in Electronic Gaming Monthly, it's easy to see why everybody turned on the bobcat. At a time when everybody was being blown away by Super Mario 64, Bubsy 3D was the postercat for what not to do.

"No!" yells Sushi X. "This is not how you treat a perfectly good mascot." Crispin was just as harsh, complaining that the graphics are too plain, the gameplay is bad and the animation is too choppy. "Only the marginally likeable two-player mode saves Bubsy 3D from a lower score." The bad gameplay seemed to be the one thing uniting all of the reviews, even Dan's higher-than-expected 4.5 take. "Bubsy is very hard to control in three dimensions. You can run around, but maneuver quickly? Forget about it." Bubsy 3D is a bad game, which is why nobody should be surprised that it averaged a lame 3.25 out of 10.

Lobo

#2

When Street Fighter II blew up, you started to see other companies wanting to get a piece of the action. And when those games became hits, even more jumped in. 1996 was peak saturation for also-ran fighting games, and Lobo by Ocean was one of the worst offenders. It's a gritty comic book adaptation from a studio best known for making terrible platformers based on blockbuster movies. To say that Ocean was in over their head would be an understatement (and maybe a little too on the nose).

"Lobo is such a cool comic book hero, I feel like it is just a shame he appeared on a half-developed fighting game like this," notes a frustrated Sushi-X. "The title has only a handful of fighters and suffers from some crippling design problems," such as "the fact that you can only play as Lobo in one-player mode." Crispin warned that you should "keep your distance from this bottom-of-the-barrel fighting game." And Dan complained that it's "not that fun," no matter if you're playing with the original 3-button pad or the new 6-button controller. Nothing could save Lobo from earning a laughable average of 2.9 out of 10.

Killer Instinct

#1

When we look back at the kinds of games that normally end up being the worst reviewed titles of the year, we start to notice a trend. In 1989 it was Friday the 13th, followed by games like Total Recall and Cliffhanger. And when it wasn't crappy movie games, it's third-party crash that failed to take advantage of the hardware. But this year is different, because 1996 marks the first time a Nintendo-published game topped the Worst list.

The game in question is Killer Instinct on the Game Boy, a questionable port that nobody liked. It's one thing to port the 64-bit fighting game to the Super NES, but the outdated Game Boy was one very rickety bridge too far. "Nintendo really butchered this game when they converted it over to the Game Boy," starts Andrew. He complained that the "graphics are pixelized beyond reasonable limits" and that you "can't differentiate between weak and strong hits, making many special moves impossible to do." Mark agreed, arguing that "the character animations are a joke, the graphics are hideous and the sound is much more pleasant turned off." Even with Mike and Sushi X giving the game a pair of generous 3s, Killer Instinct still only managed to average an awful 2.5 out of 10. This was not only the worst game of 1996, but the worst reviewed Nintendo game of all time.