This is a tricky one. I can’t remember all the bad games that I’ve played in my time but there are a few that spring to mind.
Orphen: Scion of Sorcery is one of my top contenders along with Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness and The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night are just some of the dire games that I’ve played and are definitely in my Top 10 list of “Why the hell did I buy that game?”
So why these three? Well mainly down to the shocking control system, being riddled with bugs and hair ripping annoying sounds. I’m a big fan of the Tomb Raider and Spyro games and it’s just a shame that some of the worst games I’ve ever played are from a couple of franchises that I love.
The Legend of Spyro trilogy was good in my opinion bar ‘The Eternal Night’ as I found the controls to be a complete step back from ‘A New Beginning’, which was a nice change of direction for the purple dragon. The originals are still classics to me and sat proudly on my shelf still. But with The Eternal Night, I was forever swearing at the TV at how annoying the game was.
It wasn’t that it was a particularly difficult game, it was that the controls were that bad. Try and do one thing and you’d end up with the camera shifting around as with a mind of its own and causing you to go all over the place and a lot of the times, to your death.
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness was Lara Croft’s first venture onto the PS2 and a game I was eagerly awaiting and was majorly disappointed. The storyline was ok, but the number of bugs throughout the game was beyond a joke.
Climbing on top of a crate shouldn’t result in Lara falling to her death for no reason with her constantly screaming as though she’s falling into a dark abyss. There were countless other bugs in the game which led me to take the game back to the shop and get my money back because it became completely unplayable – I just hope the new Tomb Raider games are much better in future.
But for the truly worst game I’ve played, I think I’m going to have to choose Orphen: Scion of Sorcery on PS2 as my worst game to date. The constant sound of “Bolt of Lighting…Bolt…Bolt…Bolt of Lightn…..Bolt of Lightning’ was enough to drive me to the edge of my sanity.
Each time you threw a magic spell at your enemy, you had that annoying voice shouting everything he did. It was a few years ago that I played the game but it holds nothing but bad memories from my time as a gamer and is the dark spot of my many years glued to a screen bashing the crap out of my controller.
It wasn’t a massive game and probably for this reason. It’s a game I bought when I’d not long bought my PS2 because I thought the cover art of the game looked good.
I won’t be making that mistake again. I’m sure that there are a few more games that I’ve missed off this post, but thankfully I think I make a good judgement with my games 95% of the time and try to stick to the ‘Good’ to ‘Amazing’ games, rather than the ‘Fair’ to ‘Tragic’ category.
Do you agree with the games that I’ve listed above? Or are you seething with anger that I could possibly call a Tomb Raider game beyond abysmal? Why not tell us what the worst game you’ve ever played is in the comments below.
Danny ‘Ender’ Martin has been part of the Zath team from pretty much the very beginning since he met Zath himself at Leeds Met University whilst studying Business IT. He’s an avid gamer and a big film buff. Danny graduated from the University of Bradford with a degree in Computer Animation and SFX and now currently works at one of the biggest UK games developers, which will hopefully see some of his ideas hit the gaming world.
