Some games are so bad they're GREAT.
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00:00 When it comes to video games, the worst thing you can do is release something that's forgettable.
00:04 A good game, well, sure, that's the intent. But if it goes horribly wrong,
00:08 sometimes you'll catch a saving grace and the attention of the masses by producing something
00:11 that's so bad people want to play it regardless. Morbid curiosity is definitely a thing after all,
00:17 and if your bad video game has a unique selling point, then bully for you,
00:20 you may have just made history. Not as you intended, but it's notoriety all the same.
00:25 Most of the titles on this list are never going to be anyone's favourite,
00:27 but they're at least worth that look of morbid curiosity. I'm SciForWhatCulture.com,
00:32 and these are 10 terrible video games you should play anyway.
00:35 10. Shadow the Hedgehog
00:38 In 2005, Sega decided to cash in on the popularity of Sonic's broody bro Shadow the Edgelord and
00:43 give him his own spin-off. How would they separate it from any other Sonic game? Well,
00:47 why not slap a gun into his hands and see what happens? I'm sure we can all agree that that
00:50 idea was staring us in the face this whole time. Shadow the Hedgehog isn't the most broken of the
00:54 Sonic games, that's for sure, but it definitely broke any semblance of sanity the series had at
00:58 that point. Shadow spends his one and only titular release firing a variety of firearms,
01:03 driving in tanks and cursing like an angsty teen. This one is worth playing for a couple of reasons.
01:07 First of all, the game has a really cool system of morality-based objectives you can pick from
01:11 on the fly in each stage. It plots out a course through the game's many stages based on these
01:15 choices, meaning there are a lot of different possible playthroughs and that's genuinely
01:18 impressive. Mostly though, you need to play Shadow the Hedgehog just to understand how
01:22 absolutely nuts it is. If you can make it through the opening cutscene with Shadow sneering with an
01:26 automatic rifle in his hands without laughing, well, you're made of sterner stuff than me.
01:30 Number 9 - Shaq Fu
01:32 Shaq Fu sort of cultivated its own legend around its lack of quality. Even if it wasn't very
01:37 mediocre, being released following the home debuts of Super Street Fighter II and Mortal
01:41 Kombat II, it never stood a chance. So hated was basketball star Shaq's foray into video games that
01:46 a group of players decided to do something about it and made it their goal to spread the gospel of
01:50 destroying as many physical copies of the game as possible. Shaq Fu has spent so long being included
01:55 in every list of the worst games of all time that people seem to be groomed into instinctively
01:59 shuddering when they hear the name. It may well be terrible, but it's not the black hole of
02:02 creativity that the legend makes it sound. It has a consistent visual design and is decently well
02:07 animated, so props for that, but admittedly that doesn't save it from being slow, shallow and
02:11 absolutely paling in comparison to its peers. Regardless, it's now part of the great tapestry
02:15 of gaming because of its extreme reaction, so in many ways it's worth taking a look at just for
02:20 that alone. Plus, if you can get your hands on a copy, you can oppose the "destroy Shaq Fu" regime
02:24 and preserve this odd piece of gaming history.
02:27 Number 8 - South Park
02:29 South Park, at the height of its popularity, was a juggernaut for merchandising and tie-ins. As
02:34 such, South Park needed to have a game out, and it needed to have it out fast. Using the Churok
02:39 engine of all things, South Park's first video game outing was a straightforward first-person
02:43 shooter that contained much of the series' character and potty-mouth sensibility. The
02:47 reality of the situation is that, since it was so rushed out into public hands, South Park is ugly
02:51 and limited in its scope. Levels are monotonous, as is replaying the whole thing if you die due
02:56 to a lack of checkpoints, and the game has a serious lack of music and voiceover variety.
03:00 On top of this, the ghastly short draw distance to try and hide its blemishes made it unbelievably
03:04 boring to look at. All that said, the South Park game is as inventive as the show, and its sense
03:09 of humour definitely offers a few chuckles. Whilst the campaign is forgettable, South Park did ship
03:13 with multiplayer, which allows players to concentrate most on what the game did best,
03:17 which was its variety of silly weaponry, from toilet plunger firearms to the cow launcher.
03:21 There is definitely still fun to be had in selecting your favourite foul-mouthed kid and
03:25 embarrassing your friends by pelting them with yellow snowballs. Ah, youth.
03:29 7. Goat Simulator
03:32 This one is a little different in that the beauty of Goat Simulator is that,
03:36 being a spoof of the growing sim genre, it was intentionally made a little badly.
03:40 Developer Coffee Stain Studios had no qualms allowing physics glitches and such to get
03:44 through the code to provide the kind of entertainment that we all get from watching
03:47 a game world appear to fall apart. Nothing about Goat Simulator should be right. There's no story,
03:52 no set objective, nothing of the sort, its physics don't make sense, its presentation is a mess,
03:56 and yet it was destined to go viral. On the great face of video gaming,
04:00 with all of its glorious AAA successes, Goat Simulator is the cheeky pimple that cropped
04:04 up overnight. Want to become the world's best skateboarding goat? Would you rather ingest sugar
04:09 cubes and get psychedelic? Perhaps you're more into sneaking up on people and pushing them to
04:12 their doom. All of these and so much more are at your fingertips in the game's ridiculous open
04:17 world. It was never going to win any fancy-schmancy awards, but Goat Simulator reminds us that all
04:21 video games don't always have to be cinematic or high art. Sometimes it's just enough that they
04:25 make us smile, and terrorising a town as a demonic goat sounds like something that could make just
04:29 about anyone smile. 6. Pepsi Man
04:33 The guys down at Pepsi headquarters back in 1999 must have had a very wonderful,
04:37 idealised view of things. With their mascot, superhero Pepsi Man, all crises can be averted.
04:43 One such crisis is stopping a riot breaking out because of angry consumers upset about a late
04:48 Pepsi delivery, even though, come to think of it, Pepsi Man's gameplay shows cans of the drink just
04:52 lying around all over the roads in various real-life cities. Well, that seems like an
04:56 accident waiting to happen. Pepsi Man is a cheap, licensed product designed more to sell you fizzy
05:00 drinks than to blow you away with its deep gameplay. As such, don't expect more than
05:04 alternating level-to-level between running away and running towards the camera, and trying your
05:08 hardest to avoid obstacles that come out of absolutely nowhere. Also, don't think too hard
05:12 about the fact that the citizens of this world have built an entire city called Pepsi City as a
05:16 shrine to their beloved soft drink. The gameplay may be boring, but it's also ridiculous that it's
05:20 pretty hard to hate. It's debatable whether Pepsi Man's live-action cutscenes and strange
05:24 portrayal of American culture is meant to be funny, but there's definitely laughs to be had
05:28 at the lunacy of it all. 5. Resident Evil Gaiden
05:32 Did you know that at one stage, Resident Evil was being ported to the Game Boy Color? That project
05:37 didn't ever finish because the task at hand was too great for the hardware, but it didn't stop
05:41 Capcom from wanting to drop their horror series into the hugely popular handheld gaming space.
05:45 Resident Evil Gaiden is often pointed and laughed at from a distance, and perhaps quite rightfully
05:50 so. It's a strange mix of top-down exploration and, of all things, a first-person timing-based
05:55 battle system that's got more in common with the likes of Undertale than modern Resi. The music is
05:59 tinny, the plot is nonsense, and the game has a god-awful save system that chooses for you when
06:04 to save your progress. But it has this undeniable charm to it as well. The fixed-camera Resident
06:09 Evil formula of the time was never going to work on a Game Boy, so props to Studio M4 for coming
06:14 up with a different approach. Better yet, it's one that surprisingly manages to retain some classic
06:18 Resi staples in trying to run past enemies to conserve your limited ammo and backtracking to
06:23 areas with your new key. That's about where the similarities to the core series end, but very few
06:27 gaming franchises that are still going strong today have curios quite like Resident Evil Gaiden.
06:32 #4 - 50 Cent - Blood on the Sand
06:36 50 Cent Bulletproof was an absolute travesty of an action title that not only did nothing we
06:40 hadn't seen before, but it barely got the essentials correct either. So how exactly Mr.
06:44 Curtis Jackson got a sequel is beyond belief. 50 Cent - Blood on the Sand is, again, an almost
06:49 completely generic affair that uses all the most popular tricks in gaming of the time - vehicular
06:54 combat, a ton of guns, chest-high walls, and of course, slow-motion bullet-time action. Its
06:59 storyline was no less shallow than its gameplay either, essentially boiling down to "that bitch
07:03 has got my money". Charming. The most offensive thing about Blood on the Sand, however,
07:08 it's actually rather fun. It's pompous and stupid, but there is joy to be had in the
07:12 ridiculousness of playing as 50 Cent slow-mo mowing down terrorists in the Middle East.
07:16 These kinds of cover-based shooters were a dime a dozen for a long time, but only one of them
07:20 allows you to activate gangster fire, team with a G-unit, and listen to original music that 50
07:25 Cent had written just for the game. Oh, it did do one thing unique - you can get extra points from
07:30 taunting your opponents with profanity after they die, and these can be traded in for new
07:34 swear words. You know what, I take it all back. This is a surefire 10 out of 10.
07:38 Number 3 - ARK - Survival Evolved The survival genre is at its best when it
07:43 can get its hooks into you and 100 hours fly by without you realising it. Who amongst us hasn't
07:48 suddenly had the "oh, it's 3am" moment when we played Minecraft? ARK - Survival Evolved takes
07:52 the relatively calming and straightforward nature of Minecraft and throws it out to sea.
07:56 Its realistic demands and deep mechanics require gamers to play carefully and plan ahead as they
08:01 attempt a survival world that is currently populated by over 150 different, largely
08:05 dangerous and often prehistoric creatures. ARK is not an easy game to get into. It doesn't
08:10 embrace new players from a gameplay perspective, nor the fact that the game is absolutely busted.
08:15 All the classics are here - unreliable AI pathfinding, awful collision detection and
08:19 horrendous lag. At this stage, the bugs are so deeply embedded into the game that most of them
08:23 are never coming out. The reason you should play it? Well, ARK is a damn fine cooperative experience,
08:27 whether you're fighting against the dinosaurs or the game itself. After all, misery breeds
08:32 company and while some of the bugs are frustrating, many weird occurrences offer unique gameplay
08:36 experiences. Remember that time I climbed a saber-toothed tiger into the sky? It's not
08:40 something you can say about many games. 2. Darkened Sky
08:44 Darkened Sky is about as average a game as you can get. A 2002 third-person adventure title that
08:51 stars hero Sky exploring a fantastical setting looking to restore magic, light and rainbows to
08:56 her world. Its action is bland, its puzzles are horribly cryptic and its platforming is painful.
09:02 Still, it's got a very kooky sense of humour, lead characters often quip sarcastically between
09:06 each other and the fourth wall is broken so many times that it might as well not be there.
09:10 Any other reason to play it? Well, with most video games that are licensed, like the
09:13 aforementioned Pepsi Man, you know pretty much immediately. But Darkened Sky, the rogue that it
09:18 is, doesn't have the company logos emblazoned on the box, nor does it really hurry to reveal the
09:22 truth that it is in fact a licensed product. In one of gaming's most surreal moments, Darkened Sky
09:26 goes from a relatively blase action adventure into a total headscrew when Sky bends down to
09:31 pick a skittle up off the ground. Yes, a skittle. The dark secret of Darkened Sky is the moment you
09:37 realise that the magic system in the game is all based on brightly coloured candy. It doesn't make
09:41 Darkened Sky any more an exciting gameplay experience, but I can't think of any other
09:45 games where your spells are powered by sweets, so it's got that going for it.
09:49 And number one, Big Rigs - Over the Road Racing
09:52 If you can think of it, you can probably do it in Big Rigs, as long as it contains driving
09:56 through every obstacle in the game unharmed, accelerating up totally vertical cliff faces
10:01 without slowing down, and even sinking into the ground. For whatever reason, Game Mill appears
10:05 to have decided that Pre-Alpha was good enough for this 2003 PC racing title and sent it out
10:11 into the world to find its own way. What it found was anger, befuddlement, and the title of one of
10:16 the worst games of all time. Still, many gamers were so stunned by the thing that they couldn't
10:20 help but love it. Considering your one opponent doesn't leave the start line, it's hard to play
10:24 Big Rigs as intended, even when trying to ignore the glitches. Thus, the only fun to be had is
10:29 driving through buildings, falling through bridges, and speeding over mountainsides.
10:33 If there was ever a crown made for "so bad it's good", then Big Rig deserves that,
10:37 the throne, and the scepter. You can't help but feel sorry for the thing, rushed out of the door
10:41 before it was done. Scared, confused, and ugly. I almost feel bad for calling it terrible, as what
10:47 we have barely constitutes a game. Whatever you call it, you absolutely need to experience Big
10:51 Rigs over the road racing at least once. And that's the list. Let us know what you
10:56 thought of this video down in the comments below, and any other video games that you
11:00 can think of that count as terrible, but are still worth playing for whatever reason.
11:04 Make sure to like and share this video, subscribe to the channel for more, and hit the notification
11:08 bell. I've been Sy from WhatCulture, and have a good week.