All pain no pleasure

Abhik Sen
Last Updated : Feb 14 2014 | 9:58 PM IST
Are you missing Flappy Bird? I'm not, despite an iPhone preloaded with Flappy Bird being sold on eBay for about $100,000. Call me old-fashioned but I never quite liked it. We all have our favourites and our pet peeves. And for every good game that comes out of developers' studios, there are probably five or six stinkers they have produced. Here's a list of the top five video games that we feel shouldn't have been inflicted on humankind, in no particular order.

CHARLIE'S ANGELS
Simple logic says what applies to hot-blooded male viewers applies to male gamers as well - to see lissome lasses in action. But what the developers forgot was that hardcore gamers won't fall for a stupidly-made game. The game has all the stinkers - repetitive fighting, very bad physics, crazy camera movements, and the utterly constipated grunts of the Angels when they take a hit or two

PRINCE OF PERSIA WARRIOR WITHIN
The Prince was Persian only in name - he seemed more an aggressive American man, aggressive and obnoxious. The game was a gore fest with skimpily dressed female characters. Even the background score changed from Arabian to rock. I haven't gone back to the franchise since

RA.ONE: THE GAME
The PS3 version of the game, which I tried out at a friend's place, was buggy, had bad audio and no subtitles to add to the misery. The developers seemed to have just ported the PS2 game, which I had experienced at a store. The game didn't even explain which button did what and the camera didn't zoom in on the action. I'm yet to come across a gamer who has completed this game

POSTAL III
The first game was enjoyable just for its element of shock. Gamers loved the open-world setting of the second game as well. But in the third installment, Russian developers Akella threw out all that was good in the past two games, replacing them with repetitive linear missions, zero artificial intelligence and atrocious fights. It didn't help that the game crashed frequently and took ages to load.

E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL
A disclaimer: I haven't had the pleasure of playing this game.But this game has consistently topped worst games' lists for more than 30 years. Released in 1982 for the Atari system, the game involves ET trying to escape from scientists and jumping into pits to collect parts of his telephone. Of the 5 million cartridges produced, most came back to Atari

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First Published: Feb 14 2014 | 9:23 PM IST

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