The Worst Video Games of All Time

Alien Colonial Marines

While compelling teasers and trailers advertised Aliens: Colonial Marines as a haunting horror-FPS, the resulting game was anything but. Forced thrills, basic controls, and mundane enemy AI made Alien: Colonial Marines one of the most disappointing games in recent memory.

The aliens never swarm in packs like they do in the films. They never fight with any finesse and instead just hurl themselves at you as you blast them away with your insanely overpowered shotgun. In fact, the game was so bad that it spawned an actual lawsuit from disappointed players. The thrilling trailer, the gorgeous visuals, the Ridley Scott consulting, and it all just petered out like a wet fart.

Bomberman Act Zero

Bomberman: Act Zero was such a horrendous reimagining of the cute NES bomb maker that Konami has forever distanced themselves from the game. Horrendous controls and agonizing loading times make a fast-paced puzzle game like Bomberman feel like a joyless void. The game also replaced Bomberman's bright and opulent animation with a musty fecal color palette that just looks horrendous. Act Zero has been forever deemed a failure by Bomberman enthusiasts, but luckily the series has since bounced back.

The Guy Game

Where to begin with The Guy Game? Vapid gameplay that only loosely camouflaged the game's blatant misogyny, the player's main objective was to serve as a judge on a real-time game show where drunk young girls are asked to answer tough questions while on Spring Break. The higher the player progresses, the more uncensored their breasts become when they inevitably answer incorrectly. Luckily, the game was quickly shelved after it was revealed that one of the girls was underage.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

The queasy looks and unnecessarily explicit dialogue of Leisure Suit Larry have made almost every player squirm since its launch in 1987. But somehow, Box Office Bust takes an already established failure and somehow sinks it further into depravity.

The game offers sexist dialogue and offensive jokes that are just not funny, and the overlying mechanics are clunky and oftentimes just don't work. It's crazy this series went on for as long as it did, considering that each game was racier and more problematic than the last.

Hatred

Grotesquely violent and thematically controversial, Hatred was also just an agonizing bore to play, making the problematic nature surrounding its release even louder and more troublesome. Players start as a mass-murdering psychopath who "hates this world and the human worms feasting on its carcass." The goal? Embark on a "genocide crusade" and kill everyone you see. Families, cops, anyone you see is fair game.

Not to mention the murderer's health is regenerated after they perform incendiary 1-on-1 executions. Needless to say, the game was gory and appalling, and lawsuits and bans soon rang out to try and halt its release. But with all of that aside, the game was also nauseating and not that fun of an isometric shooter.

Ride To Hell: Retribution

It's weird because Ride to Hell: Retribution actually looked pretty promising. Set in the late 1960s, the story follows Jake Conway as he returns home from Vietnam and copes with PTSD while trying to lead a life of normalcy. It was also run on Unreal Engine 3, so graphically, the gameplay looked promising. But any sprinkle of fun is quickly dissipated as Ride to Hell: Retribution drags on.

Its characters are irredeemably sexist and toxic, and the game's horrendous voice acting, buggy gameplay, and one-dimensional characters are draining to watch. A lot of times, enemy AI will just die for no reason. Sometimes the sound will just cut out and never return. No one asked for a game this broken, this shallow, or this decrepit, but Eutechynx made one anyway.

Shaq Fu

This laughable fighting game designed by Shaquille O'Neal has been an incessant gag in the gaming community for over two decades. As funny as the premise is–following a pixelated Shaq as he fights across "The Second Dimension" to rescue a boy named Rezu from an evil mummy named Sett Ra – the gameplay just doesn't translate into much fun. The mechanics surprisingly work well enough, but the repetitive level design and a half-baked story still ensured this game was a dud.

Custer's Revenge

Speaking of fecal matter, 1982's Custer's Revenge, whose characters were so pictorially opaque they resembled floating turds, was a crudely constructed and extremely problematic game that should never have existed. Players star as General Custer as he attempts to rape a Native American woman tied to a pole. Published under the "Swedish Erotica" label, the grotesque game wasn't meant as a political statement but rather as a source of titillation. Yep, the game was meant to be soft porn.

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

This raunchy dating sim wasn't anything more than a glorified slideshow. The gameplay is null, the production value piss-poor, and players merely perform a choose-your-own-adventure story with two insipid characters named John and Jane. To make matters worse, it was initially advertised as a full-motion game. It has since been panned as one of the worst games of all time.

Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing

Hailed as one of the worst games of all time, Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing is so treacherous its glitches and piss-poor game mechanics feel almost intentional. Players must haul cargo across the United States, and in turn avoid cops as they race other fellow truckers. But the game is so "blatantly unfinished," as Gamespot said, that there are almost no enjoyable moments at all.

There is no cargo, there are no cops, there isn't even a coherent goal laid out at any point during a playthrough. To call it a "playthrough" is generous. The truck you're supposed to be racing against never even moves past the starting line, and the gameplay itself is so glitchy that it's frankly unplayable. No game in modern history has even come close to being as terrible as Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.