5) Speedy Eggbert
Perhaps the single most heinous fault in game design is allowing the player to be killed and then reincarnated in a position where they immediately die again. Platform games of old were rife with this sin, but by the time Speedy Eggbert was released, it was long since unforgivable.
Oh, yeah, and this was released in 2000. Sure, we have a soft-spot for old school freeware platformers, but freeware games don’t cost $40. They also don’t normally look this horrible. With level design consisting almost entirely of blocky, textures that make it hard to discern background from foreground, this is one of the ugliest platformers we’ve ever seen. Combined with a deathmatch mode (yes, deathmatch) that’s nigh unplayable due to lag (yes, lag) and you’ve got yourself one hell of a bad game. Naturally, it got a sequel.
4) Expect No Mercy
The worst film tie-in ever is, appropriately enough, tied into a terrible film of which no one has ever heard. Expect No Mercy is set in the “Virtual Arts Fighting Academy,” a school that teaches ninjas and is home to “a deadly group of mercenary assassins willing to kill for a price.” These are not to be confused with those non-lethal mercenary assassins who work for free.
Being set in a virtual world is mostly an excuse for poorly digitized characters and horrible backgrounds, but taking its cue from Mortal Kombat, Expect No Mercy also features gruesome finishing movies and three entirely unrelated characters distinguished only by different colored hats. Best of all - and when we say “best” we mean “worst” - is that, due to crippling bugs, it’s actually difficult to even get the characters close enough to hit one another. In a fighting game.
