SpawnStaff Picks: Top 5 Worst Gaming Experiences

We have all played those games that we absolutely loved. We play them for hours, days, months, and its all we talk about to our friends. In the gaming world the good stuff gets much more praise than the bad stuff.

There is two sides of the spectrum when it comes to gaming experiences, being good or just plain terrible. Terrible games exist on all platforms and we have all played them at one point in time.

The SpawnFirst staff decided to get together to compile our top 5 worst gaming experiences and share them with you all. Below we examine in detail what games made the list and why they are not worthy of your time.

Rudolf Van Wyk – Aliens: Colonial Marines

For me, what comes to mind as the worst game I ever played, is Aliens: Colonial Marines. The game is not so much terrible as disappointing, but it is still pretty darn bad. Heck, I saw some critics give the game scores as low as 20% or 2.5 out of 10. Sad to say, what was supposed to be a game that was appealing in its sounds and visuals, ended up having better trailers at E3. It was also supposed to run consistently with the Alien film franchise, and instead left more questions than answers.

Although its purpose was served in being very nostalgic with Hadley’s Hope in particular, and the original sounds of weapons like the iconic Pulse Rifle, it simply does too many things wrong to dish out any particular elements that will make up for it and add reply value. In all honesty, when I first played the game, it was a mixture of annoyance and liking the gameplay. There is pretty much no tutorial for basic in-game controls, so some of the stuff, like accessing one’s entire weapon arsenal, I only discovered in my second or third play through. But that could have been my fault as well, since I’m so scatterbrained.

To add to that was a rather old fashioned key binding. In the majority of FPS games nowadays, when you sprint, you only press Shift once for that sprinting session. In Colonial Marines, you have to hold Shift in, and your supposedly highly trained and super fit Colonial Marine can sprint for no more than about 10 seconds at most before wheezing like a thirsty dog with its tongue wagging.

Although, as much of a letdown this game is, it’s definitely worth a play through. Hopefully Sega can just learn from their past mistakes in this failure of a franchise, and not transform the upcoming Alien Isolation into yet another Aliens: Colonial Marines.

 Laura Chandler – Left Behind: Eternal Forces

A huge religious event that is always on the back burners of every hardcore Christian’s mind is the rapture. For those of you who know little to nothing of the rapture, let me sum it up as best as I can. All the good Christian believers will be delivered from Earth to heaven while everyone else is left behind. The key words here are “left behind”. This is where it gets good. A Christian writer monopolized on the idea of the rapture and all the people that believe in it by creating a book series called Left Behind. The book wasn’t enough and a video game adaptation was created.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces hit the shelves of video game stores everywhere, ready to be popped into our systems and hopefully save a few souls. The premise of the game is pretty simple; you play as a person left behind, a “bad” Christian who wishes to be raptured. You, and a few other left behind Christians, form a coalition and try to convert all the non-believers. Violence is not necessary when trying to convert people, so instead of whacking them over the head with the holy bible, you talk to hostile heretics and try to convince them to be a Christian. The point of a video game is to step into another world and do whatever you want.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces isn’t just bad, it’s hilariously bad. The “kill or convert” attitude of the Christians in the game is ridiculous. It’s clear their target audience is those who are perpetually stuck in the 1950’s.

Your character is plopped right into the middle of a city, the map is blacked out, and gang members endlessly chase you. Occasionally, random passerby’s complaining about the neighborhood going downhill or rock music being evil will stop you. There’s no real reason as to why the non-believers are constantly trying to kill you. The entire game is pretty much just running around trying to convert heathens while avoiding being killed by the evil gang members. If you really have to, you may use violence against the terribly evil people, but your spirit drops. Which means, if you use too much violence you’re not going to make it to heaven.

 Zachary Waller – Contrast

Contrast was one of those games that proves you can only go so far with a great idea and nice art direction, and no I’m not just saying this because I played it recently and it is fresh in my head. It’s easily one of the buggiest games I’ve ever played. I lost track of the number of times I got stuck in an animation, stuck against a wall, fell through the game world, among other things.

There was also numerous times where the game just didn’t work properly. I remember vividly near the end of the game where you had to shine a light on an orb to open a door. I did just that and nothing ever happened. I know this was the right thing to do because I turned to a YouTube play-though; so I had to restart the entire level. The controls, specifically the jump and dash, were also insanely unresponsive.

Honestly, I’m not really sure why I finished it. Contrast, for lack of a better description, was just broken.

 Keegan Roser - Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions

The title says it all and definitely explains my feelings for this game. I was lost the whole on some planet and had no idea what was going on. Capcom is responsible for bringing this game to us and we all know that they are more than capable of developing some killer titles. They just dropped the ball on this one and the bad part is that this game was followed by two more titles.

The game starts you off on some frozen tundra planet and gives you little to no direction. I didn’t know where to go or what to do and was completely lost. Lost Planet takes place on the fictional planet of E.D.N III and after war, global warming, and pollution the planet has become to hostile for humans. Taking place in the year T.C. -80 the megacorporation names Neo-Venus Construction plans to colonize E.D.N III but soon comes to find that the ice covered planet is inhabited by aggressive and territorial insectoid alien monsters named Akrid. You play as Wayne Holden, a soldier who attempts to overthrow NEVEC, 150 years after a brutal war between the Akrid and Humans.

Now I don’t know about you but that is a terrible plot line. It is a disaster and I found myself asking Google for the answers around every corner of the game because I was so lost. The story makes no sense, the gameplay made no sense, and the game as a whole just made no sense.

Overall this game was a disaster and I had a terrible time playing it. Stay away from any of the 3 titles released by Capcom.

Buddy Acker - Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage

The first truly terrible game I can remember playing was Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage. I was 13 when it released back in 2001 and was experiencing an RPG high after playing stuff like Vagrant Story and Skies of Arcadia. I walked into my local Video Hut one day and spotted a copy of Aidyn Chronicles. It had “mage” in the title, so I thought, Cool, I’ll probably like this.

Boy, was I wrong. The first thing I noticed was the awful graphics. Aidyn Chronicles is uglier and buggier than most N64 games. The dark story is transformed into an absolute joke by the laughable cutscenes. But the visuals and story were the least of the game’s problems.

Aidyn Chronicles is inexplicably boring. Its nonsense combat system, which mixes together several combat systems from other games, is really just a cover-up for the fact that players will be mashing the A button constantly. Most of the time characters start each enemy encounter separated from one another for some reason, which causes every battle to be a mess of unpredictability. Describing the gameplay in Aidyn Chroniclesmakes it sound like it’s merely bad, but it’s unbelievably, indescribably dreadful in actuality.

So yeah, Aidyn Chronicles is definitely one of the worst games, if not the worst game, I’ve ever played. For a more modern reference, it’s at a Ride to Hell: Retribution level of awfulness. I’ve disliked many, but have despised very few games in my lifetime. I despise Aidyn Chronicles. So of course now I’m just going to have to buy it on Amazon.

There are other games that were worthy of this list but they are much to plentiful for this list. What was some of your worst gaming experiences? What consoles were they on? Any upcoming titles you predict to be awful? Let us know in the comments below.