Groan Home
I owned E.T. for the Atari 2600. Like many kids at the time, I was suckered into that little son of a bitches web of lies and begged my parents to waste perfectly good money on one of the worst games conceived by man. Don’t ask me how I did it but I did manage to beat the game.
Beating a game back in the day usually meant a hearty pixelated “Congratulations” or “Good Job, Sport!” awaited you only to have the fleeting moment pass as the title screen reloaded to remind you that these games never end.
Never.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is another Atari 2600 game that haunts me to this day.
Brian
Commenters: Which games linger in your mind as something so horrible, the idea of returning to it (or being forced to in some Saw-like scenario) keeps you awake at night?
The Smurfs for Colecovision
I didn’t own E.T., but I most definitely owned Raiders. I can’t begin to count how many days I spent screaming at Indy as he plummeted in to a gorge ON PURPOSE.
LABYRITH for Sega genesis…. it was the most painful game i played. and i had to get an achievement for it on the sonics ultimate genesis collection x__x i swore NEVER to touch that game again. and another painful game i still have for some reason is SUB TERRANIA for Sega Genesis. i NEVER understood that game and would die within the first 5 seconds everytime i played it there is a couple more but they should be wiped from the memories of existance… *shivers*
Blaster Master for the NES.
I know ONE person who has beaten it and I’m still convinced it was witchcraft of some sort.
Top Gun on NES. No matter if you managed to avoid flying into an endless blue sky until your fuel ran out, not one person over several years of playing ever landed the plane on the aircraft carrier. Crash and burn in the ocean at the end of level one, every single time. I’m not even sure there was a level two.
I know it’s a way late comment but I saw this and just had to reply. I did beat this game, if by beat you mean “Fly over the entire level and waist the last enemy with missiles.” The landings and refuels were a bitch though. The landing sequence to this game is still how I remember my left from my right. Weird huh?
Nice! Had me laughing out loud (or LOLing if you will.)
Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival for the NES. ‘Nuf said.
I agree with the first comment, “The Smurfs for Colecovision”. That game was next to impossible yet for some reason, in my youth, I found myself playing it over and over and over again.
Rosh, not only have I landed the plane, I have YouTube footage of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxL7IegkZn8
Consider yourself owned by a girl. <3
That E.T. cartridge is probably worth some money now as a unique novelty, since the game was so bad, the company destroyed millions of the unsold cartridges. (5 million of them, according to Snopes.com)
Swordquest – Earthworld for Atari 2600. It actually had a grand prize (to win all 4 games) of a silver bladed, gold handled sword. My brain still hurts thinking about all the combinations and permutations of item placement required to unlock all 12 clues (of which you only need 5). Then again, maybe I missed something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest
@Mr. Anaglyph: Holy fucking shit someone else who played those games. Where have you been? Man, I still hear the sound from room changes in my nightmares. On the upside, at least all of the games came with a comic.
Where’s Waldo.
Had someone on Twitter suggest that to me when I was doing a “Horrible Games” article on an old version of my site.
You could never find him because he was NEVER THERE!
Halloween for the Atari 2600. Crappy graphics, even for the Atari, and the f#*% kids you were supposed to protect ran straight at Michael Myers every time…damn, I get pissed just thinking about that game.
The Batman game for NES definitely made me want to nail my dick to the floor on multiple occasions.
Blaster Master for sure. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one. And I’ll second the comment on Top Gun. Landing that plane was about a 3720 to 1 long shot
I’m not sure if I loved or hated ET, but I know I had an odd fascination with it. I think I knew it was a terrible game, but I still played it at least once a week with self-imposed challenges (get rescued with 1 “hit point” left, have both bad guys on screen when the ship arrived, etc).
The point of Earthworld went over my head, so I just saw it as a game with no real point. Once I reached the hub level, I visited each room and declared the game over. I borrowed the equally frustrating Fireworld from my cousin…about 25 years ago. I should probably return it soon…
Yeah so its more of a modern game but a few years back there was this game damnation really cool premise at least from the opening cutscene but it was just awful and broken and evil.
I used to love playing my Atari 2600. I think my favorite thing to do in ET was to do all the things to make the ship come down, get to the spot and then die where the ship lands. It freaks it out and it just lands on top of you and sits there. You can wiggle back and forth but no rescue for you.
Also Raiders of the Lost Ark took forever to figure out how to win. How did we ever make it out of that generation of games with our sanity?
My video game bane was called Haunted House. The developer was a genius because all they had to program was blackness and a pair of eyes. It wasnt even scary!!
The only game I really ever hated was some Sherlock Holmes game for the Turbo Graphics 16 CD combo suite. It had Masterpiece theater live action scenes that seldom made sense, and you navigated London by perusing a phone book filled with thousands of dead ends. I beat the first case only by process of elimination! Never beat the other two cases that were loaded with it.
E.T.: We didn’t have the manual, so had no idea what we were even supposed to be doing.
Swordquest – Earthworld: I don’t think I ever got past the first 3 rooms in that game.
Raiders: Actually, beat it many times (never to full lift to Ark, unfortunately). The damn trying-to-parachute-into-the-hole-without-the-&^$%&-branch-removing-your-chute was the part I hated the most.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES, god damn electric seaweed
The only time I was handed the controller to pass a game. I could get through that electric seaweed like no one else
Flipper for Sega Geniese, i could never get past the first wall, fricken game wasted hours of my friends and i trying to figure it out.