16 years is a long time in video games, considering the medium has only really been around since the seventies. When Microsoft launched the Xbox in 2001, people thought it would never be able to compete with Sony and Nintendo but, after three versions of the console, Microsoft has definitely made itself a titan of the gaming world.
But a console needs software and the Xbox hasn’t been shy about what games get released on its service. From the original Xbox, to the 360, to the One, there are tons of terrible, lazy, unfinished games that you’ve probably never even heard of, let alone played. Microsoft would definitely prefer you go on being ignorant of these games but I’m here to shine a light on the dark, seedy underbelly of the Xbox lineup. Ranging across all three systems and including Xbox Live Arcade titles, these are in no particular order or ranking, but have been pulled from the bottom of the Xbox Metacritic pages. We’ve got games from publishers that never released another title to major studios who really should have known better. There are some big celebrity names attached to a few of these too, proving that success at the box office is no guarantee of good taste. (Though, in some of these cases, that’s no surprise.)
It also deserves to be said that I know making a video game is a lot of work and shouldn’t be taken lightly, so I don’t mean any disrespect to the people who worked hard on these titles. That said, off we go!
25 Just Look At The Box For 10 Hours Instead
I was always curious about this game because the art style on the box looks like a mix between Samurai Jack and Batman: The Animated Series, the two best action cartoons of all time. But Bruce Timm this is not: Drake is one of the unfortunate casualties of the early-2000s struggle with making third person action games. Reviews of Drake say that while it’s mechanic of holding two different weapons in each hand that can target or fire independently is cool, it just doesn’t work.
This is pretty egregious as Max Payne had already been out for two years when this was released. It doesn’t help that the story is apparently complete nonsense, despite the developers creating and releasing a comic book to help tell the story, a tactic Hollywood would use a few years later to trick people into seeing Jumper and Cowboys & Aliens.
24 Game About Bad Bikers Is Bad
From what I can gather based on the many, many Let’s Plays I’ve watched of Ride To Hell, someone wanted to make a Sons of Anarchy game so they wrote “Sons of Anarchy game” on a napkin and tried to jam it into a USB drive.
The subtitle, Retribution, even hints that this is some kind of installment in an ongoing franchise. What, you may ask as you stare into the box marked to $1.99 in the bin near the digital cameras at Walmart, does our be-mulleted hero seek retribution from? Does he achieve it? Was there a game before this one titled Oopsey A Big Mistake? Was there planned to be a sequel Ride to Loblaws: Regrocering in which, having found Retribution, our hero merely lives his life in peace?
23 Remember When Batman Games Were So, So Bad?
It’s easy to forget the time before Batman: Arkham Asylum completely reinvented video game superheroes while simultaneously launching a major franchise with a fresh take on 50-year-old characters. There’s a reason Arkham was such a revelation: Batman games until then had been almost universally terrible.
Batman: Dark Tomorrow is the nadir of bad Batman games. Its design is bad, the controls are bad, the camera is another victim of the early-00s third person camera virus. This is a Batman game where you have to stop and handcuff everyone you knock out. This is a brawler with no blocking. You, as Batman, fight giant rats in the sewers. Do you have to handcuff the rats? I don’t know, and I never will. At least it’s better than Superman 64.
22 Tony Hawk 5ucks
After ten years away, the Tony Hawk franchise came back in a big way in 2015 and “a big way” I mean “It was rushed, buggy mess that almost ruined all your good memories of the franchise.”
The skateboard boom of the late nineties has a lot to owe to Tony Hawk Professional) Skater, the man, and maybe even more to Tony Hawk Pro Skater, the video game. Everyone I knew was obsessed with this thing and even more so by its sequel, the combination of combo chasing, fun environments, and the fluidity of the movement was incredibly addictive. I didn’t even like skateboarding: all the guys I knew who skated were jerks. But man did I ever like this game! THPS 5 is a disaster and was received as such by consumers, it’s so bad that Tony Hawk severed ties with Activision to make a new game.
21 Loveable Creep’s Nephew Is Just A Creep
Leisure Suit Larry was the Cinemax of the old point-and-click adventure game craze of the 90s. And ’edgier’ alternative to Monkey Island and Space Quest, the Larry games weren’t actually edgy- they were like pre-teen boys giggling over cable TV stuff late at night on a Saturday, where the lure of ladies was a sacred promise whispered into lunch bags at recess.
The reboot of the Larry series started with LSL: Magna Cum Laude (get it?) and was… not well received. An inexplicable sequel was rushed out the door by Team 17, who make the Worms games, and seems to be completely aware of how bad it is. Self-aware irony and obvious references to body parts aren’t funny on their own and a protagonist who is a huge creep in the movie industry makes this one even worse now than it was when it was released 9 years ago.
20 The Game You Can Only Buy At Toys R Us
Straight up: IGN said this game “…may just be the worst first-party game in console history.” Ouch, not much room to breathe there, Sneakers. So, you’re this mouse and you’re trying to steal food back from… rats? Who stole your food? Right away I’ve got a note for this plot: why not be stealing food from humans? It’s like we’re seeing the sequel to the original game, where the food was stolen from humans.
Anyway, I’m not here to story edit this terrible video game that was only available at a single retailer. You’re not just constrained by the story: you actually play this game on a track, like a train, and can only move back and forth on it. OH! So how about a game where you’re a toy train filled with food, and you have to avoid the mice so they don’t steal you food?
19 The Game Even Vin Diesel Said No To
Listen: there’s going to be a lot of movie games on this list. Young readers may not appreciate the relatively sparse offering of movie games in general, let alone terrible ones, but in the 00s, every movie got a game regardless of its appropriateness for gameness. Fast & Furious: Showdown takes the anthology route: putting the action scenes from all the FF movies up to 2013 in one game.
Now, I’m not here to argue that the Fast and/or Furious franchise isn’t the greatest action franchise of all time. But there are plenty of underground street racing games with ridiculous action set pieces. I’m not saying I don’t want a level where I drag a giant vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, but you gotta do it right. And if notorious media hog Vin Diesel says no to having his likeness in your game, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your venture.
18 China’s First Xbox Live Game
Imagine you’re a game developer in the People’s Republic of China. You’ve got all these great ideas for games that fit the strenuous media censorship rules of your country but no one will ever see them outside of Asia. You get the amazing opportunity to develop a game for Xbox Live so you pool all your resources and pitch… this.
Crazy Mouse is a pretty literal title, all things considered. I suppose you would go nuts if you were forced to run through 32 puzzle mazes in a poorly coded, generic video game from China. Maybe if this was an exploration of the psychological toll of constant testing and observation it would be interesting, but it’s basically a mashup of Pacman and Bomberman, but without the tight controls.
17 I Wanted To Destroy Something Beautiful
The Fight Club video game is either the greatest example of an entire team of people missing the point of a book and a movie, or a super long-game joke on the people who missed the point of the book and the movie.
On paper, a game with the same disdain for toxic masculinity and materialism conveyed in video game tropes is not a bad idea. It could have had the same narrative impact as the revelation in BioShock, especially if the violence was as impactful as the fights in the game. Instead, you get a clumsy Virtua Fighter knock-off with none of the technical complication or character creativity. The inclusion of an unlockable Fred Durst deepens the possibility that this game is aware of how vapid it is and was developed as a form of satire, but it never lets you in on the joke.
16 Rugby’s FIFA This Is Not
I don’t know anything about rugby. I know it’s got handsome sweaters and more brutality, but the players wear almost no protection at all. It’s like football, American football, but with more kicking and pushing. Every review of this video game I read spent a lot of time explaining what rugby was so that it could more easily explain why this rugby video game is bad. I still don’t really understand how rugby works, but I do understand why this game is bad.
Rugby is very much a team sport, but this game seems to put all the attention on the player. The game basically stops if the player isn’t doing anything, you never get penalized, (you can tackle anyone you want for any reason) and it’s really easy to win, even on the higher difficulties.
15 You Know What Cart Racing Is Missing? Heart Problems
Everyone loves Mario Kart! It single-handedly invented a whole genre and still sells like crazy. Kart racing games, spelled with a ‘k’ because they were originally conceived as a Mortal Kombat spin-off, (This is not true) were a very common sight in the 90s and 00s, almost as a sort of kid-friendly parallel to all the movie tie-in games.
Pulse Racer on the original Xbox has some cool ideas- you can use a shield to protect yourself but you can’t steer while it’s deployed, you can use a beam to take tight corners without slowing down, you have a variable boost. That speed control is important, because if you go to fast your character has a heart attack and dies. W-why would they do this? Why make a racing game that ends you for going fast?!
14 Woody Allen Kart Racer X
Oh yeah, this is what I was talking about. What must have been part of a multi-level marketing strategy that was created entirely independent of the film it’s based on. Part of the bizarre Pixar/Dreamworks battle, in which both CGI studios release films that look the same form a distance but are vastly different, (read: one is made by Pixar and the other is terrible) Antz is 100% a Woody Allen movie, not a kid-friendly romp ripe for a cutesy video game adaptation.
But here’s Antz Extreme Racing, inexplicably released four years after the film, to rope in… who? Who is this game for? I’ll admit that as a film fan the idea of a kart racing game starring Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, and Gene Hackman is very appealing, I just wish they appeared as themselves, not their bizarre allegorical bug characters.
13 Making A Hitman Clone Is Hard, You Guys
I was excited to see this game exists in the real world, as I’ve often spotted it in the bargain bins at EB Games but had never heard anything about it outside of the mall. Alekhine’s Gun is a blatant Hitman rip-off with a cool story: you play as a KGB-turned-CIA assassin in the Cold War, with flashbacks to World War 2. It’s got all the hallmarks of the Hitman series: big maps, disguises, AI guards with patrol patterns, but nothing works the way it should.
I’m sure this is a case of the developers biting off more than they can chew. The story has such an interesting framework but the execution is very poor and the gameplay is half-baked. It’s a shame but not a surprise, even the makers of Hitman have been refining the formula for years and don’t always nail it themselves.
12 Kinect Fighter Is Just As Awkward As It Sounds
I was careful not to flood this list with Kinect games but I easily could have. The failed IR camera peripheral, which Microsoft officially killed in 2017, was their clumsy attempt to steal some of that sweet, family-friendly Wii money from Nintendo. As far as I know, having never owned one, the thing never worked despite some pretty interesting ideas.
Fighter Within is a good idea for a video game made in the year 2050, where VR tech works and everyone lives in large, uncluttered apartments with no coffee tables to smash your feet into or wandering cats/toddlers to boot across the room. The idea of a video game that has you traveling the world and taking on the masters of different dojos in one-on-one fights is awesome, but the reality of the Kinect lets the concept down, hard.
11 Kids These Days Like Gangsta Games, Right?
There’s really no reason why Crime Life: Gang Wars is at the top of this list- this isn’t a ranking or anything. Crime Life is an avatar of a terrible time in video games: the aftermath of the Grand Theft Auto craze. The market was flooded with me-too games about crime, drugs, guns, and cars. I don’t even know that Crime Life: Gang Wars is the worst of all these titles, but it sure makes a good case for itself.
Gang Wars, presumably part of an imagined series called Crime Life that never saw fruition, is a brawler like The Warriors or another game that is good. This is a game about violent crime made by people who have never faced actual gangsters, let along real crime. All the characters are stereotypes, all the gang names end in the letter ‘z’, and the hip-hop is European.
10 Don’t Be Fooled Into Thinking This Is A New Rock N Roll Racing
Pretty sneaky ‘EnjoyUp Games.’ Trying to pass off your poorly coded, ugly, slippery top-down isometric racing game as a quality product by giving it almost the exact same title as a beloved SNES game made by the guys who would go on to create Starcraft.
Rock N’ Racing Off Road/Grand Prix is technically two games, but are really the same game with different skins and models. Slippery controls guide your, admittedly adorable, tiny cars across winding tracks. It was very difficult to find reviews of this game but they all made the same complaint: the cars so slow. What is this, Pulse Racer? What’s with racing games that can’t even make their cars fast? I’m not asking for much from my racing games. Has cars. Is fast. That’s it. What is the issue here, EnjoyUp Games?
9 You Know What Mario Party Is Missing? SpongeBob
Ah, party games, so hard to get right and so, so very easy to get wrong. Even the pinnacle of the genre, Mario Party, is notoriously hit and miss. Some games are classic, others are controller-throwing, relationship-destroying nightmares of blistered palms and wrecked buttons. But man do they sell!
So here’s Nickelodeon with this trite entry in the party game genre- one of the worst reviewed games of the original Xbox, according to metacritic. The base game doesn’t sound too bad: a Mario Party rip-off starring 90s and 00s cartoon characters (bonus points for Invader ZIM!) but the controls and mechanics are atrocious. Plus, translating 2d characters lovingly sketched from every angle before being fully animated into full 3d polygonal actors never works. After staring into the cold, dead orbs of his eyes, you’ll never think Tommy Pickles is cute ever again.
8 You Should Get That Road Rash Checked Out
Oh man, remember Road Rash? The choppy, digital-graphics-having, motorcycle brawling game? It was like someone took the minigames from Full Throttle and just made a whole franchise out of it.
Wait, what’s this one called? Road RAGE? Okay, maybe it’s a spiritual sequel by the original developers like how Arkane makes… no? It’s, just a similar game, with a similar name, but it’s way, way worse than the original? Again, I have to ask, who is this for? Road Rash isn’t exactly a household name, and the last one came out in 2003. There is a reboot, Road Redemption, but it is kind of a rogue-like so at least it has its own ideas. This thing is just a bad copy of a fifteen-year-old game that wasn’t all that original, to begin with.
7 This Is What Your Parents Think Video Games Are
Just look at that art! Crypt of the Serpent King looks like a game made up by NCIS to explain why kids are suddenly dying in VR or something. This is like what the Cenobites from Hellraiser use to tempt teens into selling their souls. I couldn’t come up with a more generic concept for a video game if I had a hundred years, and I definitely won’t be able to now that I know Crypt of the Serpent King exists. This game has superseded every concept of what generic fantasy video game means to me.
You want crypts? Buddy, how about some randomly generated dungeons for you? You want skeletons with leather straps? Boom, they don’t have pants but they have armor. You want giant snakes? They’re here for you 24/7!
6 The Least Exciting Car Ever Gets A Videogame
The Toyota Yaris is a midsize compact car manufactured by Toyota. It was introduced in 1999 and replaced the Starlet, a car I have never heard of. The Yaris and the Echo are interchangeable, and models will use one name or the other depending on the region and year it was made. The name “Yaris” comes from “Charites,” the Greek goddesses of charm and beauty.
Someone made a whole game about this car. In 2007. It was free. I’ve watched some YouTube videos of the game and there doesn’t seem to be a sound effect for the engine. They put a laser gun on a robot arm that sticks out of the hood. The thing looks like a sequel to Hover. It feels like it was made by accident. It was pulled from the Xbox Live Arcade store after a year and that’s all you need to know about it.
