Electronic Gaming Monthly's Worst Reviewed Games of 2003

RoboCop

#5

If you watched me count down the best-reviewed games of 2003, then you would have heard me talk about how rare it is for a game based on a movie franchise to show up on one of those lists. That is definitely not the case when it comes to Electronic Gaming Monthly's worst-reviewed games. In fact, this is one of those rare episodes where every single game we're going to discuss today has a connection to a movie, TV, comic or some other licensed property. And to start things off, we need to talk about the terrible RoboCop game that was somehow even worse than accidentally getting shot up by ED-209. I would definitely not buy that for a dollar.

Crispin hated the game, complaining that RoboCop "suffers more major malfunctions than an AIBO robodog run through a dishwasher." His biggest complaint? "It's plain ol' poorly assembled. Although the levels are the grimy kind of neo-urban setting we saw in the flicks, they feel slapped together. Even with RoboCop's "advanced" sensors, I still got lost and resorted to trial and error." Greg was baffled by this game: "You have the right to remain silent, dumbfounded at the thought of having spent so much for so little. You have the right to shoot crates, pull levers and collect keycards until boredom becomes your new best friend." With an average score of 2.8 out of 10, I think it's safe to say that the Xbox has a cancer. That cancer is RoboCop.

Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick

#4

The Evil Dead franchise was in a dark place in 2003. It had been more than a decade since Army of Darkness hit theaters and both the movie reboot and TV show were still at least eleven years off. Fans of the cult classic were desperate for Bruce Campbell to put the "S" back in S-Mart any way he could, even if that meant being a polygonal character in a video game. To prove this, we only need to look at 2001's Evil Dead: Hail to the King, which may have received middling scores, but apparently sold well enough to warrant the release of A Fistful of Boomstick, a sequel so bad that not even Bruce's quips can save it from the deadites.

Shawn put it this way: "Playing Boomstick is more excruciating than having your sphincter sewn shut and being force-fed prunes. Honestly, I would have paid to NOT play this game." He hated counter intuitive puzzles, the overlong levels, the bad gameplay and the constant cheap shots. Greg followed that up with even more complaints: "Hero Ash, normally a kick-ass brawler, has been turned into a mere errand boy in the frustrating Boomstick. He has to perform numerous dull fetch quests, but since none of the game's environments has a map, you'll have no solid idea where to go. Ammo and health packs are limited, too, ensuring Ash is only suited for either running away or dying." I may have found Evil Dead beautiful once, but with an average score of 2.7 out of 10, it got really ugly.

Shrek Super Party

#3

This may seem trivial, but I really hate the name Shrek Super Party. It's not because Shrek games are generally pretty generic (though, they are) or that Mario Party clones tend to suck (though, they do), but rather that it sounds like something created by an SEO generator. I mean, Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick may be a terrible game, but at least it shows that the developers know something about the license. Were they worried that people might be confused if they called it Shrek Fairytale Party? Promising the audience a "super" party only sets the game up for failure. And based on EGM's review, customers might have a case against TDK Interactive for false advertising.

CJ brought up a point I've long suspected: "It must be really hard to do a party game right, because no one outside Nintendo has been able to make a good one. Super Party might be the worst offender so far, and proves yet again that any game bearing the Shrek license stinks like the green Ogre's breath." EGM's editor hated everything about this game, from the "dull, poorly constructed" minigames to the "clunky system of interconnected paths" to the fact that "moving around the board is practically pointless." He concluded that it's unbalanced and not worth RSVPing for this party. The poorly-named Shrek Super Party scores a very ugly 2 out of 10.

Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22

#2

What did I just say about making promises in your title? With a name like Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22, it needs to not just be a solid battle or an exciting battle, but rather the "ultimate" battle. There can be no battle better than this battle. It has to be "Rumble in the Jungle" levels of great, which is simply too high a bar for an anime fighting game to achieve. What makes this Dragon Ball Z game even worse is that it doesn't just fall short of its ambitious title, but it might actually be one of the worst fighting games of all time. The ultimate bad fighting game, you might say.

Thankfully, CJ is here to give us a history lesson: "Ultimate Battle 22 is a first-generation PS1 DBZ brawler originally released in Japan in 1995 ... and it's also a steaming turd. I'm pretty sure DBZ creator Akira Toriyama could take a dump in a bag and sell it to you for the same price and you'd get more entertainment value out of it." If that's too much poop for you, then here's what Shoe had to say: "Poor graphics, strategy-less gameplay, an unbalanced fighting system and moves that work only 50 percent of the time ... these things do not make for a good fighting game." The only good thing the editors could say about the game was that you could turn it off, which makes it the ultimate game to score a 1.8 out of 10.

Batman: Dark Tomorrow

#1

After bat-nipples and Arnold Schwarzenegger's ice puns, you might think that the Dark Knight hit his lowest point in Batman & Robin. Of course, you would be wrong, because only a few years later, our hero starred in Batman: Dark Tomorrow, the worst-reviewed game of 2003. What makes this outing so much worse than the rest? Joe breaks it down this way: "[Batman: Dark Tomorrow] is not just regular bad, it's SUPER bad. To start, its wonky controls and faulty camera actually makes you long to play Resident Evil. Imagine Mr. Freeze blasting your feet with his freeze gun, then doing it again as soon as you break free, without giving you even a fraction of a second to run. Now, imagine him doing that eight times in a row. If that sounds fun to you ... you're wrong."

Greg somehow hated the game even more than Joe, finding himself baffled "that a decent story featuring a bunch of the Caped Crusader's coolest villains could be so screwed up by clunky, repetitive gameplay that it lacks even one redeeming quality." He called the game the "most unplayable game I've ever encountered ... and I've played some real crap." It's true. We don't have enough time to go through it here, but Greg Stewart was assigned a lot of the games nobody else wanted to play. By the way, that's a valuable talent to have if you're an aspiring game critic. I recommend it. What is impossible to recommend is Batman: Dark Tomorrow, which somehow managed to screw-up even worse than the DCEU. With an average score of 1.5 out of 10, these are indeed dark days.