Worst video game

[Randy]

What is the worst video game you've ever played?
What made it suck so bad?

Least favorite video game in your collection?

 

[Death]

Shrek: Fairytale Freakdown and Shrek Smash 'N Crash Racing for the Game Boy Advance. It's crazy that the two worst games I've ever played are Shrek ones.

 

[Nebulous]

The worst video game I have in my collection is "Spy Games: Elevator Mission" for the wii

Found this review on it:

Spoiler

http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/02/13/spy-games-elevator-mission-review

It's been a long time since I've played a new first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64, but that's the closest thing that comes to mind when you're in the middle of a round of Spy Games: Elevator Mission. It's so ugly, so clunky and so repetitively bland in every aspect that it really does feel like you've been thrown 10 years into the past in the development of console FPS experiences. It's like somebody ported a 10% complete version of GoldenEye to the Wii. It's terrible.

And it's terrible right from the start – there's no question as to the lack of quality of what you're about to experience right from the title screen and intro sequence to the storyline, which generically states that "a secret organization is hiding secret disks." Oooh, secretive. Guess I should be intrigued.

Your nameless, vanilla secret agent avatar starts the Elevator Mission mission on the roof of a 50-story building, and is tasked to descend through the skyscraper one floor at a time, fighting terrorists and recovering five hidden data disks along the way. OK, fair enough. But immediately any scrap of potential the concept could have had is thrown out the window, because of the game's severely lacking control, crippled graphics and looping, boring sound.

Oh look, two of the same enemy. Don't feel bad about killing them – there are 50 more clones of the same guy where they came from.​

The control is the worst offender, as it makes some excessively odd choices in mapping functions to the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. Aiming your gun's targeting cursor is handled with the Remote's pointer functionality, and that actually works fairly well. But movement is stiff and stilted – you can only walk directly forward and backward or turn with the analog stick. Strafing demands that you hold down the C Button while pushing the stick. Jumping is possible, but you have to hold down the Z Button and then push the stick. Crouching is some other combination of button press and stick push, but it hardly matters at all – none of it effectively saves you from damage and it's often easiest to just run through corridors filled with foes and hope for the best.

Corridor filled with "foe," singular, might be more appropriate though – because it's always the exact same enemy, over and over again. Spy Games starts you off against the same generic guy in sunglasses and a black suit, as countless clones of him pour forth from the hotel room doors to oppose you. Later on the suit turns white, but it's actually the same guy again – with the same animations and behavior pattern. In fact, save for a handful of palette swaps and how many hits it takes to take them down, it seems like every single enemy in Spy Games is the very same one.

Repetitiveness plagues the environments as well, as every hallway you run down looks the same as the last – the pattern on the walls changes every 10 floors or so, but within those groups of 10 it's all identical. That makes roughly five total environment texture sets in the entire game.

Want more great news? The weapons are boring and nonsensically powered – you begin the game with a pistol blessed with infinite ammo, which you'd think would be the weakest weapon of all. But it actually ends up being the strongest – though you can later pick up a machine gun or shotgun, neither are as effective as the basic, shrimpy 9mm. It's ridiculous.

The one potentially redeeming aspect of Spy Games: Elevator Mission is that its level layouts are randomly generated. The point of the "Elevator" subtitle is to emphasize the importance placed on traveling up and down to different floors in the 50-story building, searching for the hidden data disks the terrorists are holding. And it is a bit interesting that the progression from one floor to the next isn't linear – you'll often have to go down three floors, search for a new elevator, go back up two, search around again, go down four more, et cetera. The lack of linearity gives the game some distinctiveness and sense of tension, as it's possible to miss the disk you were supposed to collect, forcing you to backtrack.

The random level generation also means that if you start over from the beginning again and play a fresh save file on Spy Games, the progression through the building and layout of each floor will be unique every time. "Unique" meaning where hallways turn, where collectibles are and the like – not unique in the look, which will always be the same repeated textures again and again.

THE VERDICT
Spy Games: Elevator Mission is a budget-priced Wii shooter that plays out like an N64 shooter that you shouldn't have had to pay for at all. It's certainly not worth 30 dollars, as its control, graphics, sound and any other aspect you can name are all found lacking. There's a chance that you and a friend could have some small amount of fun with the game as a rental, just to see how poor it really is and have a good laugh at its expense – but overall you'd be better off playing something like Elevator Action rather than waste your time with Elevator Mission.

 

[Sinon]

for the wii

That explains it. The Wii has the highest amount of shovelware on any system, so it's no surprise the most crappy games are on that.

 

[Nebulous]

for the wii

That explains it. The Wii has the highest amount of shovelware on any system, so it's no surprise the most crappy games are on that.

Heh. That's probably why I mainly use it as a netflix machine.