Top 100 Worst NES Games, #10-1

10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Advance Communication Company, 1989)

Another game that doesn't seem to have been purposed as a playable adventure at all, but instead simply made as some sort of stress test for gamers' sanity.  The game alternates between two modes - as Jekyll, you  must move very, very slowly through a town full of people and animals who all seem to be interested in making you utterly miserable, whether dropping bombs at your feet, shooting you with slingshots, dropping turds on your head or just constantly assaulting you with musical notes and making it nearly impossible to pass.  When your sanity finally gets depleted, you become Mr. Hyde and must shoot away at zombies and brain-monsters to restore your sanity before you reach the point in the stage Jekyll reached - if that happens, you get struck by lightning for an immediate game over.  The concept is interesting in a way, but trying to play it is absolutely miserable and frustrating beyond belief, particularly when you can't even muster the patience to get through the first level.  I guess even that wasn't good enough for Japanese gamers, though, so the US version removes some levels and replaces them with stages be recycled wholesale from earlier in the game.  So if you hated that level the first time, be prepared to endure it again!

9. Bokosuka Wars (ASCII, 1985 in Japan)

A game as notorious as it is misunderstood, Bokosuka Wars presents itself as an Ys or Zelda styled adventure game, but is actually more of a crude real time strategy title.  You move your main character around the map, attempting to build an army by touching trees to turn them into soldiers of two different types, and use them to battle enemies.  Unfortunately, there's no real strategy to any of these battles - when two units collide, the game just rolls a die, and you have a roughly even chance of seeing the enemy or your own unit die (and if  your main character dies, it's an instant game over).  You can upgrade units and make them slightly stronger if they win enough battles in a row, but even that doesn't help much when you're so hopelessly outnumbered and combat just boils down to a single roll of the dice.  Also definitely not helping its case is the harsh music, which is roughly ten seconds long and loops endlessly throughout each and every battle.  Come on guys, Super Mario Bros managed to have some distinct, catchy tunes that didn't drive you crazy 30 seconds in, and that came out the same year!

8. Where's Waldo (Bethesda Softworks, 1991)

The single most shameful game ever released by Bethesda Softworks.  How do you mess up a simple concept like Where's Waldo?  By making all of the graphics so tiny and indecipherable that you can't even find Waldo!  I did not doctor that screenshot in any way - you're fully expected to find a tiny sprite of Waldo that looks exactly the same as every other tiny indistinguishable sprite on the screen.  They also attempt to mix things up with some minigames like finding Waldo in the dark (just as fun as it sounds), navigating a maze of subway tunnels (ditto) and a slot machine for the final level, but when the core concept of the game is so fundamentally broken, adding more tedium on top only makes it pretty much unbearable.  Not to mention that once you figure out all the spots on each screen where Waldo can appear, you can literally complete the game in under three minutes (about 70% of which is just watching him slowly plod from place to place on the map screen.  And no, you can't skip it.).  All I can say is that thank god Bethesda used the money from this turd to move their efforts upward to much bigger and better things.

7. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (Radical Entertainment, 1992)

It's the old formula once again.  Classic cartoon meets terrible developer and produces a slipshod video game.  Rocky and Bullwinkle is definitely one of the worst offenders though, simply for how putrid and nonsensical its design is.  Game crashing bugs, lousy hit detection, the fact that you can't attack enemies without losing health (counterintuitiveness at its finest) and nonsensical mechanics (only Bullwinkle can go up stairs?) make it a mess.  The fact that it's extremely short, lacks in anything that made the carton memorable and has looping shrill music tracks and such drab, uninspired visuals makes the whole experience pretty much satanic.  That's all bad enough, but then you also consider that the game is this late in the NES' lifespan and yet is this awful, and Rocky and Bullwinkle's existence becomes completely inexcusable.  As is the fact that Radical Entertainment is still around today after producing such insipid garbage as this, the Terminator, Wayne's World and Bebe's Kids in their early days.

6. The Mutant Virus: Crisis in a Computer World (Rocket Science Productions, 1992)

A title that left me scarred for life; I'd never even heard of it until the early 2000s, but I saw it in a K-Mart bargain bin for $10, so I figured "why not" and plunked down the cash.  Then I went home to play it and... oh lord oh lord, what a mess.  The Mutant Virus is simply broken as a concept, essentially taking Conway's Game of Life and attempting to work it into an action setting.  To that end, you shoot the little "viruses" to convert them to your color and hopefully create a chain reaction to crowd out the bad viruses, eventually clearing the board so you can move on.  The problem is that this just doesn't work - it doesn't take long before the purple side just starts overwhelming you with such massive numbers that you can't manage to get a foothold at all without collecting a ton of powerups (but good surviving long enough for that!) or going through a lot of tedious trial and error to figure out the exact right spots to shoot at before you get overrun.  Also not helping are the sluggish controls with floaty physics that make even getting around, let alone lining up shots, much harder than it should be.  An interesting concept but a terrible execution, the Mutant Virus is a game that I and many others should have just left collecting dust.

5. Secret Scout in the Temple of Demise (Color Dreams, 1991) 

What do you do after you've made one bad game?  Color Dreams' answer is apparently "take that same bad game and make it ten times worse"!  That's my theory after seeing Secret Scout, at least, a game which takes the core engine of Operation Secret Storm, changes a few graphics and then inexplicably has a spike fly at the back of your head every three seconds as you fight, making surviving the first section of the first stage, let alone the entire game, a near impossibility.  Then you dogpile on the usual Color Dreams staples of confusing level layouts, ear-shredding sound effects and music and clumsy hit detection, and you just have an experience that's plain infuriating in its awfulness.  Oh, and in stark contrast to the pro-America message of its predecessor, this game literally has you kicking bald eagles to death; that's lovely.  Color Dreams made a lot of awful crap, but this is the worst of it in my book.

4. Hoshi wo Miru Hito (Another, 1987)

Regarded by all who have played it as one of the worst RPGs ever made, if not the very worst. There's a good reason for that, too, as Hoshi wo Miru Hito is not just bad - it's fundamentally broken in every respect.  Your character's movement is excruciatingly slow.  Enemies are ludicrously overpowered (throwing spells that completely disable party members with a 100% success rate at you from the outset).  You start with no money or equipment and simply have to hope and pray you survive long enough to afford a weapon.  The first weapon available is actually weaker than your bare fists, all but dooming you if you buy it.  Exiting any town or dungeon puts you right back at the beginning of the game rather than, say, just outside the area you exited.  But the most unforgivable flaw has to be its save system, which loses points for being password-based (rather than battery backup) and also for being non-functional as it does not save your progress at all - no matter how far you got in the game, every password puts you back at the start with none of your experience points or levels.  All this from a game that came out a full year after Dragon Quest and the same year as the genre-defining Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star.  Hoshi Wo Miro Hito is simply inexcusable.  Yet somehow the game is also a cult classic, inspiring numerous bug-fixing patches and even an entire fan remake.  Japan is crazy, what can I say.

3. Karate Champ (Data East, 1986)

Karate Champ was a pretty popular arcade game in the early 1980s, providing some decent one-on-one fighting action in both single player vs CPU and two-player variants, and even some surprisingly fluid animation for its era.  But when it came time to make a home port, Data East completely botched it.  Gone were the fluid graphics, smooth gameplay and clever minigames.  What remained was an absolute nightmare plagued by incredibly unresponsive controls and nonexistent collision detection that made every match feel like two blindfolded monkeys swinging sticks at each other while shoulder-deep in mud.  Then the victor gets jars flung at his head that he attempts to bat down (the only minigame in this version) before the next match begins.  There were a lot of lousy arcade ports on the NES, but the fact that this one is not just bad, but virtually unplayble, and created by the same company that made the original game... that is an absolute travesty.  In fact, this may just be the worst one-on-one fighting game ever made, and that is saying something considering the sheer volume of awfulness that genre has brought us!

2. Action 52 (Active Enterprises, 1991)

A game notorious among NES collectors the world over, Action 52 is an original multicart created by a short-lived company based in Florida.  However, while most Multicarts just take a ton of existing copyrighted games and put them together on one cartridge, Action 52 actualy has 52 original games.  Unfortunately, every single one of them is irredeemable garbage, mixing terrible music, hideous visuals, and some of the most broken controls in video game history (particularly the common jumping controls, which lock your left-right movement as the jump button is pressed, requiring you to tap the button and then quickly move left or right to clear a gap).  Each one also has a plethora of glitches and crashes, and some games don't even work at all on the actual NES hardware, forcing you to track down an obscure emulator just to sate your curiosity about just how awful every last title on the cartridge truly is.  Still, for all its faults, you have to at least admire the sheer arrogance of the development team behind it.  I mean, these guys literally thought that Cheetahmen was good enough to become the next big media franchise to rival TMNT and they even had plans to compete directly with Nintendo and Sega...

1. X-Men (Unknown developer, 1989)

It's extremely rare that one finds a game with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  Even the very worst games out there have at least something to point to and say "well, at least that was okay" - a decent music track, a clever idea with a poor execution, or even some ironic amusement at the sheer ineptitude of its design and the hubris of its developers (see previous entry on this list).  X-Men on the NES, however, is one example of a game completely without merit.  Ugly, cluttered and uninspired visuals, ghastly music, sound effects consisting of nothing but square waves and white noise, the worst kind of mindless overhead shooter gameplay, unclear objectives, confusing level layouts, bad AI and a useless HUD that requires you to pause the game to see your remaining health (not that it matters much anyway since there is no recovery time after a hit, meaning any given enemy can knock you dead in a second).  Not to mention the complete waste of a license that lends itself perfectly to video game adaptations.  Oh, and you can't even complete the game without inputting a very obscure cheat code.  There's not even any ironic entertainment value here; the game is so bland and effortless in every respect that it's as if the developers were actively going out of their way to make sure it was completely unsalvageable, and for that reason it is my pick for the very worst NES game ever created.  Who greased whose palms at Nintendo to get the Seal of Quality on this turd?  We may never know, but perhaps it's for the best that they remain anonymous.

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Top 100 Worst NES Games, #20-11

20. NFL (Atlus, 1989)

I'm not really a sports guy, but even I can admit there are some pretty good sports games on the NES - Tecmo Super Bowl in particular being a legendary one that still has a huge fan following to this day.  Easily the worst I know of is the blandly-titled NFL, developed by Atlus and published by good old LJN.  The game is just uninspired and ugly to look at, with horrendously slow gameplay, choppy animation and the barest minimum of sound design (with a constant blast of white noise standing in for a cheering crowd).  But the biggest idiot move of all was the fact that there's no onscreen play selection; hell, it's not even in the manual.  All the plays were listed on a poster that came in the game's box, which made it much easier to lose.  It was at least notable for being one of the very first video games to actually use the NFL license, but when even the Atari 2600 has more enjoyable football games, it's all a bit moot.

19. Swamp Thing (Imagineering, 1992)

When you go from licensing hot properties like the Simpsons and Ghostbusters to a low-tier comic book character like Swamp Thing, you know your game company is in trouble.  Moreso when the already clumsy gameplay of the Simpsons titles somehow gets even more tedious, and any of the clever ideas that made them redeemable get tossed out in favor of stiff platforming and repetitive combat with the same small handful of monsters.  Slow, plodding, overly difficult and backed by annoying recycled sound effects and uninspired music, Swamp Thing is another bad platformer on a platform that brought us some of the finest examples of the genre.  Imagineering's games were generally bad, but I dare say this is the worst thing they ever released.

18. Dirty Harry (Gray Matter, 1990)

Mindscape brings us another licensed turkey, once again taking a book/film franchise with some solid video game potential and botching it on every front.  Sluggish controls, cheap enemies, lousy hit detection and levels that seem to be intentionally designed to be as obnoxious as possible.  The first stage alone is a gargantuan maze of buildings and sewers that you can potentially get lost in for hours, dying to death traps and gun-toting goons that assault you every five steps.  That's bad enough, but then you throw in illogical puzzles (you have to wear a white suit to get past that goon, otherwise he'll just punch you across the room!), a soundtrack comprised of ear-grating noise and the fact that you can only input a password to save at the end of the level (meaning losing your last life means losing all of your progress on stages that can take well over an hour to complete) and you have a very miserable experience.  The only highlights are some decent digitized voices on the title screen and during the ending.

17. Athena (Micronics, 1987)

Micronics again?  More like Migraines, because that's what their games inevitably give to you with the sheer ineptitude of their design.  They threw out halfassed ports without a care throughout most of the 80s - Ikari Warriors, Ghosts n' Goblins, Ghostbusters, and now Athena.  Loosely based on the arcade game by SNK, the game is a sidescrolling adventure that, frankly sucks on every level.  Stiff controls, a jump height that seems to be completely random, and harsh random note music combine to make Athena a thoroughly unpleasant bout of gaming to try and sit through.  But the most unforgivable sin of all is that, like a Week of Garfield, you have absolutely no post-hit invincibility, so any enemy can and will drain your health to nothing in under a second.  And considering you're constantly swarmed by the damn things, it's a miracle if you ever make it past the first stage.  The NES had plenty of great classic platformers, but Athena is definitely not one.

16. King Neptune's Adventure (Color Dreams, 1990)

I'm not going out of my way to pick on Color Dreams; I'm really not.  But when you put out such large and consistently terrible waves of games that you make LJN look like Capcom in comparison, it doesn't really give me much of a choice.  King Neptune's Adventure is not only among their worst, but it's so bad that it's nearly unplayable.  In addition to garish visuals with backgrounds that constantly flash psychedelic colors (epileptics be warned) and harsh sound effects and random note music, you have two impotent attacks that your enemies seem to actively avoid, stages that seem to drag on forever and incredibly broken screen scrolling that requires you to be at the very edge of the viewable area, all but ensuring that you're going to run into every enemy you come across.  It all culminates in you getting killed long before ever accomplishing much of anything, which isn't the mark of anything resembling a quality game.

15. Color a Dinosaur (Farsight Technologies, 1993) 

Why would you even make a coloring book game on a system that can only support 8 on-screen colors at a time?  Not only that, the game doesn't even seem to ever use all eight colors at once, just giving you three or four to work with in various patterns to kinda sorta give the illusion of multiple colors.  Then you add in janky music on the menus and the cursor rigidly being locked to specific points on the screen to color in, and you really must question what the point of even making this game was when Mario Paint was released in the same year.  ...Oh, right, to cash in on that.  There's really not much else to even say about it, it's just shovelware in its purest form.  But when it's brought to us by the company that produced the Genesis version of Action 52, are you really surprised?

14. Metal Mech: Man and Machine (Sculptured Software, 1991) 

Sculptured Software (a company that brought us such gems as Day Dreamin' Davey and Captain Novolin) tries their best to horn in on the success of Blaster Master.  Unfortunately, this was their best even after three years of technological improvement.  A game with choppy controls and cheap enemies swarming you every three seconds, with your bullets being so small and rigidly locked into directions perpendicular to your mech's cockpit that they're guaranteed to never hit anything.  You'll also frequently have to leave your mech behind to accomplish objectives on foot, but frustratingly, it can still take damage even when you're not in it.  And it will, since enemies never stop swarming and attacking even when you're elsewhere.  It'll be a miracle if you can survive long enough to see past the first few screens of the game, let alone complete a stage.  Metal Mech is overall simply plodding, ugly and frustrating.  If you want this same concept but done well, then do yourself a favor and play the real deal - Blaster Master - instead.

13. Hokuto no Ken (Toei, 1986 in Japan) 

Everyone with a passing interest in anime and manga has at least heard of Fist of the North Star, the classic tale of a martial artist named Kenshiro wandering the post-apocalyptic landscape and making hooligans explode with superpowered martial arts.  Unfortunately, while Hokuto no Ken's manga and anime outings stand as staples of the action genre to this day, its video game adaptations remain some of the worst ever devised.  Probably the most well-known and infamous is the 1986 Famicom release, which features lousy visuals (looking like corrupted graphics you'd see on an NES with corroded connectors) and levels that seem to loop endlessly.  Which they do, unless you know to follow Lin via the extremely intuitive method of standing in doorways and pressing Up+A+B.  That's all fine and good, but after the first few levels she begins to lead you astray, making level navigation a matter of complete guesswork.  Pair that with constantly swarming enemies that never cut you a break and cheap bosses that can whittle your health bar away in no time flat, and you have a true disaster in the realm of gaming.  Not even being able to explode enemies with your fists (in a surprisingly gory display for an NES title) could make the experience tolerable.

12. Ganso Saiyuki: Super Monkey Daibouken (Techno Quest, 1986 in Japan)

A game based on the classic Chinese tale "Journey to the West", which you'd think would lend itself well to video game adaptations; alas, there are very few of them that are any good.  Super Monkey Daibouken in particular is regarded as one of the very worst games on the Famicom, and it certainly isn't hard to see why once you start playing.  80% of the game is slowly trudging across a huge, bland world map with very few points of interest, taking passages to other equally nondescript portions of the map and trying to make your way to the end.  Throughout, you're taken to Zelda II style sidescrolling combat sequences (pictured), though with none of that game's polish or entertainment factor - movement is stiff and awkward and hit detection is almost nonexistent, making winning these segments a matter of pure luck.  Oh, and you're in a constant race against time too, as running out of food or water makes your health drop rapidly until you die.  It's also one of the few Famicom games to prominently feature load times, showing just how much of a poorly optimized piece of crap it really is.  Ganso Saiyuki is regarded as a legendary kusoge among Japanese gamers, and it's not hard to see why after playing it for any length of time.

11. Robodemons (Color Dreams, 1989) 

Yep, it's Color Dreams again, and yep, their games just seem to get worse and worse.  Robodemons is a blend of their usual broken platforming engine and quite possibly the worst standalone shmup ever made.  In the latter regard is the fact that you are such a massive target, but your weapon is a small, awkward to use boomerang that can only have one hsot onscreen at a time and takes several hits to bring down anything (especially the bosses, who are all but guaranteed to take you down before you can do enough damage to defeat them).  The platforming stages are no better either, with hordes of tiny enemies that always seem to appear just outside of your weapon's range and are all but guaranteed to hit you.  Garnish with the usual suspects of grating music and harsh buzzes for every sound effect, and you have another bomb from a company that consistently made nothing but.

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Top 100 Worst NES Games, #30-21

30. Raid 2020 (Color Dreams, 1989)

Color Dreams attempts to copy a classic arcade game (NARC), but once again, their ineptitude at game design overshadows their efforts and prevents it from being any fun.  Every enemy you encounter takes multiple hits to kill, sound effects are harsh and ear-piercing, it has that infamous random-note music that seems to permate a lot of terrible NES titles.  But the worst thing of all are its unintuitive controls - rather than simply moving up and down when one presses up or down, you move diagonally parallel to the lines on the ground.  Which doesn't sound bad at first, but the frustration quickly rises when you try to line up a shot on an enemy and end up waltzing right into a landmine for an instant kill, or just get clipped into another enemy's sprite and watch your health deplete at a staggering rate.  Trust me, it's not fun.  If you want to play a good game in this style, then do yourself a favor and play NARC instead; you'll have a much better time.

29. Deathbots (Odyssey Software, 1991)

Another game that probably suckered more than a few gamers in, particularly with its absolutely metal box art and aesthetic that overall resembles a classic arcade game (Gauntlet).  Then you learn that American Video published it, and, well, it's all downhill from there.  Deathbots is a terminally repetitive, slow-paced series of endless shootouts with identical, plodding robotic enemies, with each and every one of them taking multiple hits to put down.  Worst, the game sees fit to limit the amount of ammo any given weapon you carry can hold, forcing you to frequently run around with no way to fight back until you find some more weapons to use.  Enemies also attack in such huge numbers and with such persistence that just one room can drain more than half your life bar, to say nothing of the rest of the stage you have to slog through.  Conceptually awesome but terribly executed, Robodemons is a complete waste.  Just play the game it obviously draws its inspiration from and forget this crap.

28. Peter Pan and the Pirates (Equilibrium, 1991) 

Based on a Fox cartoon from the early 1990s that I recall honestly being pretty good, but as with most licensed properties, its leap to the realm of gaming was... lacking, to say the least.  The level design is thoughtless and generic (and even recycles several stages wholesale just to make the game longer) and you can lose all of your health in an instant thanks to the lack of post-hit invulnerability and the fact that enemies will literally drop from the sky with absolutely no warning to get at you, or have a long-ranged attack that all but requires you to take several hits in order to get in close enough to attack them. You do at least have Pan's power of flight, but controlling it is awkward and unintuitive - you must hold Up and then press A, which causes you'll continuously move in one direction  until you press a different one.  Oh, and you only have a limited supply of flight power and you can't attack at all until you've landed again.  And of course, no bad NES game is complete without short, annoying songs on a constant loop throughout the entire adventure.  Just another lousy, uninspired licensed cash-in.

27. Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six (Bits Studios, 1992)

Spider-Man is a character that lends himself well to video games - swinging on webs, fighting bad guys with acrobatics and web-powers, and of course having a colorful cast of villains who all prove to be a worthy match for him in spite of his abilities.  Unfortunately, Bits botched that up when it came time to make an NES game, and in that regard, the main problem is the controls.  They tried to give Spidey all of his familiar abilities, but on a controller with only two buttons, they did it in just about the most asinine way possible.  That means that swinging on webs, punching enemies, performing jump kicks, throwing web balls, and doing various heights of jump are all mapped to two buttons, and controlling it is a frustrating ordeal of figuring out what pattern and length of time you need to tap buttons in to do each move (and not forget it in the heat of the moment when batting foes).  Then you consider that the game gives you one life, one health bar, one continue and no easy way to recover energy (not even finishing a stage causes it to be refilled), and you have a perfect example of how not to handle a superhero game.

26. Back to the Future II and III (Beam Software, 1990) 

The original Back to the Future on NES is one of the platform's most despised games for its utter waste of a license and uninspired gameplay, so how do you do even worse than that?  Well, Beam Software found a way.  Much like Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure, it takes a great concept and makes it into a dull scavenger hunt that goes on for far too long.  You travel about numerous similar maps bopping enemies and entering "puzzle rooms" to collect items, then you must take the item somewhere else on the map, unscramble a word and select the proper item to return it.  If you try to place the wrong item, you lose the item and have to go back and get it again.  Oh, and you have to do this about forty-five times in order to finish the game, and there's absolutely no save feature to keep track of your progress.  Tedious beyond belief, and a complete mockery of a classic film franchise...

25. Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum (Beam Software, 1990) 

With a title that corny, you just know the game's going to be a bomb.  When Beam Software is at the helm, that fate is all but assured.  The game is a hybrid of a puzzle game and a platformer that does neither one well.  Taking place within a huge maze (the titular asylum), the game alternates between overhead block-pushing puzzle rooms (the laziest of game design puzzles) and sidescrolling platforming levels replete with awkward physics, slow movement and the uninspired goal of just having you collect items in order to open a door and reach a new section of the maze.  But of course, they also had to punctuate it with some ear-bleedingly bad sound design and putrid visuals - Beam Software seems to have a propensity for picking out the gaudiest color palettes the NES could produce, and nowhere is that more evident than in Dash Galaxy.  Lots of bright yellows clashing with grays and dark browns...


24. Tag Team Wrestling (SAS Sakata, 1986) 

The NES certainly had a lot of mediocre-to-awful wrestling games, but Tag Team Pro Wrestling is arguably the worst of them all.  Each and every hit you land in this game (assuming you can land any owing to the crummy hit detection) brings up a prompt to attack, and, depending on the number of times you press the B button during that three-count, you do one of your special moves.  Much more intuitive than, say, using the D-pad and the attack button in tandem and actively taking part in the actions your character performs.  The tag team mechanic also works against the game rather than with it, as you can whittle your opponent down to virtually nothing, only to have him tag in his partner who is at full health, and while he's sitting on the sidelines, he's regaining health as well, causing matches to drag on for nearly forever.  It all snowballs into a tedious experience that you barely play and can barely stand to sit through a single match of, let alone the 35 you need to complete the game.  But, if nothing else, this game did at least bring us a pop culture icon in the form of Strong Bad.

23. Best of the Best: Championship Karate (Loriciel, 1992) 

Best of the Best is a prime example of a game trying to do something a platform just isn't capable of - in this case, having realistic, fluid animation on its characters, something the limited capabilities of the NES did not lend themselves to at all.  Still, they tried, and while the result is impressive in a way, it does not make for a particularly good game.  Instead, the game just turns into a frustrating affair of throwing dozens of punches and kicks and hoping in vain they hit your opponent before you get hit yourself, with absolutely no indication as to where either character is vulnerable and where their attacks can theoretically land.  Even Flying Dragon and Flying Warriors - games which came out years prior - at least gave some indication as to your character's weak points and gave you options to avoid them.  Characters also slowly regain health over the course of the match, which only makes for a more frustrating experience as you're seemingly unable to do any lasting damage at all.  Best of the Best is a lousy fighter on every front, and seeing as Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were already out at the time of its release, I doubt much of its target audience would have been clamoring to play it anyway.

22. A Week of Garfield (Mars Corp, 1989 in Japan)

A Japanese-exclusive game based on an American comic strip is pretty strange, but it never getting an overseas release is also pretty unusual.  Or maybe not once you consider the quality of the game itself.  A Week of Garfield is an arduous task, having you traverse uninspired levels full of tiny enemies that can drain all of your health in an instant.  You do have some special weapons to fend them off, as well as an extremely short-ranged kick (which can also be done in mid-air and will still damage enemies despite having no animations there), but when just one enemy can deplete your entire health bar in under a second and you get one life to complete the entire game, it really doesn't make a lot of a difference.  Oh, and did I mention that items are all hidden from view by default and you have to walk or jump over them to make them appear?  Or that this also applies to the key you need to open the door to finish the level? Well, I did now.  And now you see why this game never made its way overseas.

Oh, and the in-game timer counts up, rather than down...

21. Tagin' Dragon (Sachen, 1990)

Tagin' Dragon sounds like a simple enough concept on paper - the player controls a dragon and defeats other dragons by biting their tails.  Ultimately nothing too special, but something that, executed well, could lend itself to some simple but addictive arcade-styled action.  But sloppy hit detection, sluggish controls and ugly graphics quickly drag the concept down, turning it into an exercise in pure frustration that isn't worth anyone's time time, even as a momentary diversion.  But when it's from the brilliant minds that brought us Master Chu and Little Red Hood, what else would you expect?  And as a true testament to its quality, guess who published it?  Yep, our old buddies at Bunch Games, aka Color Dreams aka Wisdom Tree.

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Spoony Plays Ultima VII Part 2: The Serpent Isle, Part 5

We fart around on Monk Isle for a bit to get the rest of the game spoiled foreshadowed for us, finally get our spellbook and then we get to visit the first part of the Silver Seed.



No item updates this time.

Off camera stuff: Did some training with Tsandar at the keep, and bought the Vibrate spell from Elissa (which will prove very useful later).

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Here's a screencap of the vision that Draxta wants to show you, since it flashes by too quickly to get a good look in-game:

...It appears to be Petra the automaton running through some rain and smoke while the Avatar watches.

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I located Shamino after losing him in the Silver Seed:

He was at the healer's, but didn't reactivate properly for some reason.  Ah well, one orange potion and he was good to go again.

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Finally, the Silver Seed is also home to two well-known bugs (which I won't be using since they're somewhat game breaking).

• If you kill Surok the healer, then die (attacking Isstanar is a good way to get killed quickly), his dialog will not activate properly, but you will enter "Buddha Mode" and be unable to drop below 1 HP, effectively becoming immortal.  However, this effect will wear off as soon as you leave the Silver Seed.
• The pillars in the main hall in Seprent's Fang will take you to the Test of Purity in the dungeon Furnace.  A bit of a plot-breaker, but if you don't feel like completing the Silver Seed and don't want to wait a full week for the amulet to recharge, there you go.  (Oh, and since you haven't "officially" left the Silver Seed, it also allows you to carry your immortality from the previous bug over to the rest of the game, if you're feeling particularly evil).

Top 100 Worst NES Games, #40-31

40. Power Punch II (Beam Software, 1992)

Power Punch II is a bit of a strange case, being intended as an unofficial "sequel" to Punch-Out where Mike Tyson would fight aliens after having defeated everyone on Earth.  Yes, it's silly.  But of course, this came at a time when Tyson's legal problems were beginning to become prominent, and Beam Software, not wanting to associate their brand with such a controversial figure, quickly reworked the graphics and text to star a more generic protagonist named "Mark Tyler".  One would hope that being a quasi-sequel to a popular game would drive them to keep up the quality standard of the original but... nope. The controls are off, the hit detection clumsy, and your opponents so ridiculously strong that every fight just boils down to pixel-perfect dodges and perfectly timed punch combos that doesn't feel fun or rewarding, just arduous.  How ironic that only a year later Beam would release Shadowrun, which is not only considered to be their crowning achievement, but a classic SNES RPG to boot.

39. Wally Bear and the NO!  Gang (American Game Cartridges, 1992)

American Video was another in the early 90s mostly known for, well, shovelware.  They brought us such classics as Solitaire, Puzzle (a slide puzzle game), Trolls on Treasure Island and Mermaids of Atlantis (a generic puzzler later released with edited graphics as one of the infamous Panesian porn games).  They also published quite a few lackluster titles from American Game Cartridges, including the lousy anti-drug themed Wally Bear and the NO! Gang.  Obviously based on the well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective "Just Say No" campaign from the 80s and 90s, and it makes about as compelling as a gaming experience as you'd think.  Go through generic level full of enemies (whom you defeat with awkwardly-thrown frisbees), traverse platforms with clumsy physics (unsurprising since you're on a skateboard), get a short speech about the evils of drugs and booze, eventually finish the game.  Contending with generic and ugly visuals and ear-piercingly shrill music certainly doesn't help its case either.

38. Baby Boomer (Color Dreams, 1989)

How do you mess up a Zapper game?  Color Dreams found a way.  And with their debut title, no less!  It's another escort mission game, having you (using either the Zapper or a reticle controlled via the D-pad and A button) to protect a baby from all sorts of hazards.  Like improvised explosives, rats, snakes and cats, every single one of which wants this baby to die a horrendous death.  Making matters worse are constant pitfalls (which you must bridge by shooting a cloud to drop an ice path... yeah) and, in later levels, the baby literally venturing through a graveyard, Hell and the ever-annoying maze of doors with rooms that all look the same. That's bad enough, but it's not always clear what you need to shoot or why in order to clear a path, and the lovely random-note music turns the whole ordeal into a head-splitting migraine very quickly.  It's a bit ironic that a game with such a dark theme would come from a company later known for their Christian offerings...

37. Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road (SNK, 1988)

I didn't think such a thing was possible given the exceedingly low quality of the first game and the fact that this port was handled by SNK themselves, but Ikari Warriors 2 is somehow even worse than its predecessor.  How is that possible?  Well, take the same incredibly unresponsive controls, make your character twice as large a target, have enemies swarm you constantly and take multiple hits to kill, and give the player one life to complete the entire game on, that's how!  ...Yes, you do at least get a health bar, but when any single enemy can just clip into your sprite and drain all of your health while you're completely helpless to stop them, it really don't make much of a difference, now does it?  Even the substantially improved visuals (honestly not bad for 1988), some decent digitized voices and the addition of an inventory system that allowed for a larger variety of weapons couldn't prevent this game from being almost unplayable.  All I can say is that thankfully SNK upped their game over the next few years with offerings like Crystalis and the many excellent fighting games on their AES hardware. They learned their lesson with this franchise as well, turning the NES port of the third game into a much more playable, if very average, overhead beat-em-up instead.

36. Klash Ball (Sofel, 1991)

Futuristic sports games are definitely an interesting concept, but sadly are rarely realized well in the world of gaming; for every Base Wars you get two or three lousy games like Klash Ball - a lousy port of SpeedBall from several computer systems of the time.  The idea is pretty sound on paper - get the ball into your opponent's goal while avoiding traps and collecting powerups that give you an edge (electrifying the ball so your opponent can't pick it up, teleporting the ball to your teammates, etc), but it's ruined by the game's weird, choppy movement and the extremely braindead AI - you can easily  win every game by getting an easy lead with a rush to the goal and then trapping an opponent in the corner to run down the clock.  Oy.  If you want a decent experience from Sofel on the NES, go for Casino Kid instead.  Hell, even Wall Street Kid is more worthy of your time than this lame port!

35. Captain Planet and the Planeteers (Chris Gray Enterprises, 1992)

Ah Captain Planet.  Another media franchise born from an ultimately ill-advised attempt to shoehorn education and activism into dumb action cartoons.  You'd think it would at least have the stuff of a decent video game with its protagonists who use magical powers to summon an elemental-themed superhero, but nope, they completely threw away that idea here.  Instead, make way for a slow, generic side-scrolling shmup where you're given a limited supply of four different types of ammunition, each of which fires in an extremely slow and/or awkward pattern, to take out enemies.  Kind of runs counterintuitive to every other game in the genre, no?  Well, add on levels that drag on for far too long and repetitious waves of the same three enemies over and over again and you've got this game in a nutshell.  But the concept really goes to waste in the even-numbered levels, where you control Captain Planet himself and must fly around punching enemies and using elemental powers to traverse obstacles.  Unfortunately, your powers and your health both run off the same health bar, and both using them and taking hits will drain it in few seconds, so these levels turn into an exercise in both frustration and attrition.  Oh, and the slightest touch against standing slime, oil, etc. will kill you dead, instantly.  A decent idea that gets squandered due to an empty, imagination-less execution.

34. Hydlide (T&E Soft, 1989)

Hydlide honestly wasn't a terrible game for its time; it was one of the first action-RPGs ever released on Japanese computers, and had quite a bit of longevity and content for a game that ultimately took up less than 40 kilobytes of space.  The big problem was that its time was in 1984 and it ultimately didn't get published in North America until 1989 - five years after its original debut and two years after the vastly superior Legend of Zelda.  So everyone who saw a screenshot or two and expected another Zelda-esque adventure ended up being extremely disappointed.  Also not helping Hydlide's case was a heavy emphasis on grinding and  touch-based combat make it a chore to play, essentially boiling the entire process down into long bouts of enemy bopping interlaced with a lot of savescumming.  So while it was a pioneer for the genre, Hydlide's only value nowadays is as a curious footnote for RPG fans who want to see where the (much better) Ys and Zelda franchises drew inspiration from.

33. Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival (Mind's Eye, 1990)

Who grew up in the 80s and 90s and doesn't remember the Muppets?  Nobody, really.  They were huge, spawning a TV variety show, an animated series, several shorts that aired on Nickelodeon and even numerous feature films.  Naturally, their popularity also lent to a video game adaptation, and as is common with licensed NES games, it's honestly pretty awful.  The game is divided into five minigames, with Kermit riding a raft down a river, Fozzie navigating a maze in search of items, Animal driving a bumper car through an obstacle course and Gonzo flying a spaceship around in a segment that resembles a scrolling version of Asteroids.  Then at the end, Kermit enters a platformer-style stage to confront the game's villain. Sound like fun?  Well, it isn't, mostly because all of these stages are terminally repetitious and go on for far, far too long, wearing out any novelty value they may have had.  They're all technically competent, but they lack any kind of lasting appeal or variety, and when just one of them can go on for upwards of twenty minutes, it doesn't take long at all for you to get completely sick of them.  Especially not with such harsh music and uninspired visuals permeating each and every one.  Even as a kid with no standards, I knew this game was a bust within minutes of starting it up.

32. Ghostbusters (Micronics, 1986)

In the 80s, Activision produced a Ghostbusters game for the Commodore 64, which made waves for both being pretty good and for taking more of a management/simulation approach to its design instead of just being a generic action title.  You literally had to build up your franchise by catching ghosts and buying new gear in order to become a more efficient ghost buster.  The NES version, however, was less well received - the textbook definition of a game receiving an ill-advised "upgrade" on top of a lackluster porting job.  The whole "franchise building" aspect was nullified by the addition of two new segments - a button-mashing climbing-up-the-Zuul-building segment that seems to stretch on forever, and a shoot-em-up segment for the final battle.  Both end up turning the whole thing into a tedious grindfest to afford enough equipment just to survive the final gauntlet, and failure at any point meant you lose all of your progress and get to start over from scratch.  Which, considering you can spend upwards of an hour gathering enough money to buy necessary equipment just for one attempt, wasn't a particularly appealing option.  And yes, the game is also notorious for its poor English, to the point where the ending text was featured in the (much better) 2009 Ghostbusters game as a joke.

31. Pesterminator: The Western Exterminator (Color Dreams, 1990)

You know a game is bad when even the title makes you cringe with its awfulness.  Moreso when it's made by Color Dreams.  But the cringe trifecta becomes complete once you discover it's actually based on the mascot of a pest control company (which has also seen use in many other venues).  But hey, even corporate icons have had a surprisingly decent game to their name here and there, so maybe Pesterminator won't be all that bad, you think as your mind races to games like Yo! Noid and Cool Spot for the 16-bit systems.  Then you remember that Color Dreams is at the helm, which means that the game is just a boring exercise in walking from room to room, smashing each and every bug you come across with your character's mallet, and them moving on to the next stage where you do it all over again.  Complete the package with excessively loud sound effects and a garish color palette that makes the whole experience an extended exercise in torment, and Pesterminator is a lousy game based on a lousy concept.

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Top 100 Worst NES Games, #50-41

50. Deadly Towers (Lenar, 1987)

One of the first Japanese RPGs to be released in North America, and like Hydlide, it's another example of a game that was passable in its day but which has not withstood the test of time whatsoever.  As in many old RPGs there is a very heavy emphasis on grinding in order to earn money and upgrade gear, and the sheer size and number of enemies in each tower you had to traverse was downright staggering, requiring you to either have an impeccable memory or make maps.  Death also came very easily, with enemies able to deplete your health in only a few hits and you easily being able to fall off the tower to an instant death in almost every room, only exacerbated by the fact that you frequently had to exit rooms via very narrow pathways with nothing stopping you from slipping right off.  There's a lot of content and longevity for a 1987 release, but with the advent of far more refined and playable action-adventure games like Zelda, Crystalis and Rygar, Deadly Towers was destined to be left in the dust.

49. Castle of Deceit (Bunch Games, 1990)

It's our old friends Color Dreams/Bunch Games/Wisdom Tree again, and they've brought us another lousy gaming experience in Castle of Deceit.  While the game's visuals are decent, everything else is just very off-putting.  Your awkward attack (a single shot that travels slowly and can only have one instance onscreen at a time), countless cheap shots from enemies who all take multiple hits to kill, your incredibly awkward jumping and slippery walking.  And of course, what game is complete without bad music, ear-piercing sound effects and uninspired find-the-key level design?   Ah yes, and the last stage of the game is one of those famous mazes of identical looking rooms, and you know how much I love those.  Ill-advised on every front, Castle of Deceit is just one more reason why Color Dreams should have exited the gaming industry at the first opportunity.

48. The Terminator (Radical Entertainment, 1992)

Yep, we've got another bad licensed game here from two companies known for producing much of the same.  Programmed by Radical Entertainment and published by Mindscape, that is.  One would think that a license like the Terminator would be pretty easy to adapt to video game form, but they once again found a way to screw it up with sloppy hit detection and an awkward aiming system that requires you to both be on the ground and holding a button to aim, then pressing a direction and another button to fire.  That's bad already, but then they throw in some extremely ill-advised puzzles just to make the experience pretty much unbearable.  And by that, I mean that to escape the police station, you have to find a box, then somehow know to carry it with you and throw it in just the right spot in a pit of fire to give yourself a platform to jump across it.  Discounting that none of the other fire in the level is an instant death and that the matching scene from the film did not have the building on fire.  Then you come to the factory where you have to hunt keys and crush the Terminator in a steel press to match the end of the film, notwithstanding that you've been gunning him down every five seconds throughout the entire stage.  Terminator is an exercise in asininity no matter how you cut it and a prime example of bad licensed schlock to boot.

47. Ikari Warriors (Micronics, 1987)

Ikari Warriors honestly wasn't a bad game in the arcades, making use of an experimental "rotary joystick" to allow your character to move and fire in two different directions simultaneously, and providing a bit of good, if repetitive, shoot-em-up fun.  The NES port, however, is proof that excess leads to ruin.  In attempting to emulate the rotary control of the arcade, your character now just slowly steps in rotation to orient his shots, making dodging attacks all but impossible, especially later on when enemies and explosions being to swarm the screen.  Levels are excessively long and tedious, taking upwards of fifteen minutes apiece to complete, and they are laden with countless cheap deaths due to extremely fast enemies and bullets, shots that appear with no warning, and mines lain on every blind spot imaginable (whenever you see a bridge or overhang you have to pass under, there's probably a mine there).  But perhaps its most inexcusable flaw is the fact that you can get stuck behind scenery and unable to advance, forcing you to reset and lose all of your progress; in a game with levels this long and monotonous, that is simply inexcusable.  Commando came out on the NES the previous year and is a far better experience, so just play that one instead.

46. Ultima: Warriors of Destiny (Origin Systems, 1991)

 Just about everyone with an interest in old-school Computer RPGs will tell you that Ultima is one of the best franchises there is, and among them, Ultima 5 is definitely one of its finest.  Not only did it effectively portray a world under heavy oppression by a corrupted king, but it also featured some extremely deep puzzle-solving, challenging dungeons and battles that were truly large in scale, making it a very difficult, though ultimately rewarding, experience.  The NES, version, on the other hand, is a total insult, bogging down the gameplay, having much worse visuals and animation and a single 30-second music track that loops endlessly, making the entire experience almost insufferable.  An intolerable mockery one of the finest CRPGs ever made, which is baffling because it's made by the same company that developed the original game!  Even moreso when you consider that the two previous Ultima games' ports (Exodus and Quest of the Avatar) were honestly pretty good, staying faithful to the PC versions in design while also making them a bit more accessible to the generally younger console base.  If you want the real Ultima 5 experience, then track down one of the computer versions instead and skip this turd.

45. Dragon's Lair (MotiveTime, 1990)

Another arcade hit in its day which the technology of home consoles simply wasn't up to the task of reproducing.  In the arcades, Dragon's Lair was an animated adventure that ran off of a laserdisc, having the player make choices and react quickly to on-screen hazards, and while it mostly came down to trial and error with a dash of random chance, the brilliant animation by Don Bluth made it an engrossing experience nonetheless.  So how do you convert that to the NES?  ...Well, you can't, really.  So instead MotiveSoft opted for more of a trial-and-error based platformer, having you avoid hazards, defeat enemies with thrown weapons and fight the occasional boss battle.  Which would be fine if it were well handled like, say, Out of This World, but they dropped the ball here by having the controls be extremely delayed - to the tune of you pressing a button, waiting almost a full second, and then your character responds.  That alone makes the game almost unbearable, but then you add in one-hit deaths from things as mundane as getting hit by a rock or touching a tiny spider, and you have a recipe for pure frustration.  Some fluid animation and large sprites for the NES can't save this one from being a miserable experience.

(And before I get a thousand e-mails about it: Yes, the PAL version does have a much higher framerate and more responsive controls.)

44. Wayne's World (Radical Entertainment, 1993)

Our third entry on this page from Radical Entertainment, and once again, it's a late NES release that completely squanders a perfectly good license.  ...Granted, I don't know what a good video game based on Wayne's World might look like, but I can guess that it wouldn't look anything like this.  A platformer with drab graphics and bad music, with levels simply littered in TVs and signs reading "No way!" and "Way!" just to remind you in the laziest way possible that this is a Wayne's World game.  That's bad enough, but then come the stages where you have to play as Wayne and kill things with his terrible kick that has a ridiculously small window to damage enemies and takes roughly a quarter of a second to start up, meaning every single attack you throw has to be perfectly timed or you take damage (and likely die since enemies tend to swarm you).  There was clearly no thought behind this game's design at all - it's just another bad licensed game churned by the lowest bidder to make a quick buck.

43. Robocop 2 (Painting by Numbers, 1992)

Another title brought to us by Painting by Numbers and published by Ocean, and once again, it's a rotten experience.  The original Robocop on NES was no masterpiece, but it was at least playable, if extremely difficult, and stayed relatively true to its source material.  No such luck here, as Robocop 2 is another lousy platformer with all the hallmarks of bad PbN/Ocean games - Gaudy visuals, uninspired levels and frustrating gameplay compounded by awful physics.  You move as if every platform is covered in grease, and  Robocop himself has some of the most awkward momentum I've seen in any video game - he moves at a snail's pace for roughly half a second, then suddenly gains a burst of momentum, causing him to move twice as fast and jump twice as far.  And yes, you will need to master this in order to get past even the first stage.  But worst of all, this game is the worst kind of tedious scavenger-hunt bullshit, having you find a quota of illegal Nuke in each stage (much of which is often hidden in secret areas), and if you fail to do so more than twice in a single playthrough, it's game over and you get to start from the beginning.  Did I mention you can't scroll the screen left either, so there's no backtracking to go find any you may have missed?  ...Yeah.   Simply and inexcusably terrible.  Take a cue from how bad the movie was and avoid this stinker.

42. Defenders of Dynatron City (Lucasfilm Games, 1992)

Lucasarts was big in the 90s, bringing us many iconic adventure titles that continue to be regarded as classics to this day (including Maniac Mansion, one of my all time favorites in the genre).  Among their failed experiments, though, was Defenders of Dynatron City.  Clearly intended to become a media franchise, the game starred a team of six original superheroes defending Dynatron City from the evil Dr. Mayhem, even spawning a cartoon pilot and a six issue comic book series.  However, it stalled and died due to the game quite frankly sucking out loud.  It's a repetitive affair of walking from screen to screen fighting repetitive waves of enemies, with poor hit detection making destroying them far more of a chore than it really should be.  Once a screen's cleared, you just walk out an exit and onto another portion of the map to repeat the process all over again, and that's pretty much the entire game - no variety and hell, not even a two-player mode, which is a key part of these kind of beat-em-up adventures.  The only highlights were the eye for detail in the city backgrounds and the fact that your characters could pick up and hurl cars around to clobber enemies, which is a nice touch for a superhero game.

41. Winter Games (Action Graphics, 1987)

Winter Games was quite a popular game on various computer platforms, featuring impressive graphics, smooth animation and having a fair bit of variety with multiple events to play (which varied from version to version).  When it finally got made for the NES, though, all the magic was gone.  The animation was choppier, the smooth controls were gone, and the music was downright wretched, taking several recognizable tunes and making them screechy and tinny-sounding.  Hell, even the Atari 2600 version was better than this - it had twice as many events as the NES port did, and all of them looked and played better!  That's just sad, man.  At least the NES versions of California Games and World Games fared considerably better; they actually got two competent developers (Milton Bradley and Rare) to work on those, so they look, sound and play a lot nicer than Winter Games.

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