The year is 2005 and Doom proved that audiences were not yet ready for first-person movies. This was also the year when Kathy Griffin documented her life on the D-list, Hurricane Katrina left most of New Orleans flooded and The Pussycat Dolls scratched their way into the top 10 with a Tori Alamaze cover. But we're not here to wish for hotter girlfriends, because don't cha know we're counting down Electronic Gaming Monthly's worst reviewed games of 2005. Let's make the place sizzle like a summertime cookout!
GunGriffon: Allied Strike
#5
If you watched me count down the best reviewed games of 2005, then you might remember when I said that, for the first time in close to a decade, no game earned a perfect average of 10 out of 10. This might give you the impression that review scores were down this year, but that was not the case. The truth is, 2005 averaged a score of 7 out of 10, which is only a tenth of a point away from tying the all-time high of 7.1. As a result of the generally higher scores, you see some of the more middling titles making their way into the worst-reviewed list. A perfect example of this is GunGriffon: Allied Strike on the Xbox, which would not have made it onto a countdown like this in any other year. With an average score of 3.5 out of 10, it's only the 187th worst reviewed game in EGM's history, far from the usual dreck we normally talk about. If it had only come out in 2004 or 2006, it would merely be a bad game and not one of the worst.
Jon D zeroes right in on the problem: "Allied Strike would be a mess even if the Xbox didn't already host a few very capable, if not exemplary, mech games for comparison. Choose a polygonal, drab walking tank from a lineup of increasingly more polygonal, drab tanks and outfit it with your pick of a small handful of stunningly similar guns. Then take it out for a spin in the field where the norm is a vast brown, tan or green landscape dotted with vague elevation changes and 2D trees and fences you can walk right through (no, not over ... through)." Kevin liked it enough to give it a 5, but wondered: "What's the point, especially when your friends are tearing it up with MechAssault 2 on Xbox Live?" On a system full of high-profile mech games, GunGriffon: Allied Strike is the worst.
Sprung
#4
When we look at the history, it shows that Electronic Gaming Monthly was slow to warm up to the types of genres you wouldn't normally associate with consoles. You saw this when they reviewed point and click adventure games, government simulators and even board games. Now, thanks to Sprung, you can add dating sim to that list. While the idea of flirting with virtual characters may be a little more common these days, it wasn't the kind of thing the EGM editors were used to reviewing in 2005. And as a result, the scores were decidedly mixed.
Shane applauded UbiSoft for taking the initiative to wade into the untested waters of the "dating game" genre, but ultimately found Sprung to be more frustrating than fun. "In most levels, there's only one dialogue path that doesn't end in Game Over, so Sprung quickly turns into repetitive guesswork. It's an interesting experiment for the Teen People crowd, but one that begs for improvements." Crispin wasn't even that charitable, giving the game a 1 out of 10 and arguing that the game constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment." "Let's hope future anthropologists never dig up Sprung, lest they deduce that 21st century dating involved put-down contests, rote memorization of conversations, and the exchanging of dead fish and lint brushes. Worse, they'll get the impression that we bought any awful game that launched alongside a new system." With an average score of 3.3, Electronic Gaming Monthly ended up swiping left on Sprung.
Smart Bomb
#3
Between 1989 and 2009, Electronic Gaming Monthly reviewed a total of 134 puzzle games spanning two dozen different consoles. They may have disappeared lines, popped bubbles and Chu Chu Rocketed, but in all that time, they didn't play a puzzler worse than Smart Bomb. That's right, with an average score of 2.8 out of 10, this completely forgettable PSP release is officially EGM's worst reviewed puzzle game of all time.
To Christian, the game wasn't merely bad, but was actually depressing. "Even if it were done well, its unambitious collection of logic puzzles would still be stale. But the painfully restrictive time limits and sluggish control pushes it well beyond my tolerance, while the die-and-retry gameplay only makes it worse." Shane concluded that the makers of Smart Bomb are just trolling you: "The developers have even engineered shocking new methods of making the game less enjoyable -- First, you can actually die in the menu while choosing your next puzzle, thanks to an ever-present countdown timer. Next, the tortuous boss encounters boil down to vague trial-and-error defusing with strict time limits ... prepare to replay these levels a few times." He concluded that PSP owners should stick with Lumines, which is sound advice. With an average score of 2.8 out of 10, Smart Bomb isn't just a terrible puzzle games, it's the very bottom of the barrel.
Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory
#2
Despite having a stellar launch line-up, there were signs early on that the PlayStation Portable might be a dumping ground for terrible games. You got a taste of that with Smart Bomb, but Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory is the main course. With an average score of 2.3 out of 10, this offensively repetitive action game is the magazine's lowest-scoring PSP game. And I don't mean the lowest-scoring of 2005, but rather of all time. In fact, out of 112 reviews, EGM has Rengoku and Smart Bomb as the system's two worst games. Looks like this was a year full of dubious honors.
Dana tried to get to the bottom of what made this game so terrible: "There are a lot of things to dislike about Rengoku, but I'll start with the fact that it seems like it was developed for PS2 and then ported to the PSP with no thought for how the two systems differ. The scale is so small that it's hard to see your opponents, and the details of your robot are lost in the mostly dark, repetitive environments." Speaking of repetitive, the game's monotony was Shane's principal complaint: "One of Halo's designers once said that a great game is actually the same 15 seconds or so of gameplay over and over. Apparently when they created Rengoku, a dull, clunky "action" title so repetitive that you almost get the feeling the developers at Hudson Soft took Halo's designer literally." He concluded his review by agreeing with one of the game's villains, who said: "Everything that happens in this tower is pointless. Nothing but endless destruction and warfare." With self-aware writing like that, Hudson had to see the low scores coming. Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory landed on the PSP with a thud and an average score of 2.3 out of 10.
Ping Pals
#1
We've talked about a lot of bad games in this series, but none of them are worse than Ping Pals on the Nintendo DS. In fact, this is not only Electronic Gaming Monthly's worst reviewed game of 2005, but it's also their lowest scoring game of all time. It's a game so bad that two different critics gave it zeroes. So bad that it rated lower than a game that was ripped off the shelves after only a few months for having underage nudity. That's right, a game this bad can only be Ping Pals, a first-generation Nintendo DS release that is so absolutely terrible that some of the EGM editors questioned if it's even a game.
Let's go ahead and let Shane explain why Ping Pals deserves the lowest score possible: "What's next on THQ's DS agenda ... Clock? Seriously, Ping Pals attempts to replace Nintendo's own packed-in-for-free PictoChat but fails to offer any incentive for users to choose it over what they already have. Bratz-style avatars feel pointless, and the multiplayer "games" could easily be duplicated by creative PictoChatters. An abysmal failure." Kevin expounded on the problem by arguing that the built-in PictoChat is actually better than this standalone game: "The text window's bigger, the keys are easier to press and you can tap out messages with the control pad, a feature strangely missing in publisher THQ's game." Like Shane and Kevin, Bryan was confused why THQ would even release a chat program when one comes installed on the DS. That said, he notes that "even if Nintendo's chat program weren't a freebie, I wouldn't consider picking up a copy of Ping Pals: The interface is inferior, the minigames are worthless, and what's the fun in messaging A.I. friends?" This is one of those rare times when Kevin's 1.5 out of 10 would be considered a high score. With zeroes being flung around left and right, Ping Pals averages the embarrassingly low score of 0.5, making it Electronic Gaming Monthly's worst reviewed game of all time.
