10 Worst Video Game Launch Titles Ever

Our first entry on our list of the 10 Worst Video Game Launch Titles Ever is Genji: Days of the Blade. What's that? You don't know what Genji: Days of the Blade is? Well we have three words that will jog your memory: Giant, Enemy, Crab. Yes, this was the game that spawned a thousand memes when the PS3 was first unveiled. The game itself was a wholly forgettable action title, but it's internet meme infamy cost Sony several points with the gaming public during the early days of the overpriced PS3.

Night Trap was a game that had so many things wrong with it. It was part of the FMV hell generation of the Sega CD. It had enough violence that it caused scandal among parents and politicians. It had… weird… vampire… things that didn’t really make much sense. Frankly, it just wasn’t a very good game as much as it was a hilarious spectacle. Some people still enjoy Night Trap, but mostly for nostalgia reasons. It could be said that a lot of Night Trap’s scandalous nature was what contributed to the eventual fall of the Sega CD.

Perfect Dark Zero wasn’t a horrible game… but it wasn’t Perfect Dark. For those of you who remember, Perfect Dark was a Rare made game that was essentially Goldeneye without the James Bond license. But Perfect Dark Zero came out at a time when Halo was the first person shooter IP du jour, and it came out on the console that would then host the next Halo title. Simply put, it wasn’t enough to satisfy a new generation of headshot addicted teabaggers.

Yep. The Smurf’s had a video game for the Colecovision, and it was horrible. Its graphics were horrible, its controls were horrible, its story (whatever story there was back in the Colecovision days), was horrible. Nothing about this game was good. It essentially existed as a way to try and sell the Colecovision using the Smurf’s brand name, and that’s it.

When the Xbox 360 came out, one of the first questions that was asked was, “Who is our mascot?” This was back in the day when mascot games like Jak and Daxter reigned supreme, so a mascot of some sort was pretty key to a console’s image. Thus, we had Kameo, a shapeshifting demon girl that tried to fill in the void for the Xbox. Unfortunately, Kameo was originally designed to be a Gamecube game and it showed. Kameo wasn’t particularly bad, but there was no real reason to buy it when your other launch title choice was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Besides, Master Chief was all the mascot Microsoft ever needed.

Remember the NES game, Kung-Fu? Well, China Warrior was pretty much the same thing, except with slightly better graphics. Unfortunately, these “better graphics” also gave you a much larger hit-box, which made you absurdly hard to control. You were some sort of muscle jacked hybrid of Bruce Lee and Kenshrio from Fist of the North Star, but your punches held as much weight as a q-tip hitting a roll of toilet paper. The Turbografix-16 was the console that gave us Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. It could have done much better than China Warrior, and that’s why it’s on our list of the 10 Worst Video Game Launch Titles ever.

Hey look, another crappy Sega CD full motion video game. Who would have thought this would make the list? Sewer Shark was a first person shooter that tried to use pre-rendered FMV backgrounds as a way to make gamers go “ooooooh.” Really, all it made gamers do was throw down their Sega controllers in frustration as they couldn’t tell how close hazards were to the screen. Some people say that this is one of the best Sega CD launch games in existence; we say it’s one of the worst launch titles we have ever seen.

Edutainment! Before you start saying, “well duh, of course educational games are going to suck,” let us remind you about games like Oregon Trail, Typing of the Dead, and Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego? Donkey Kong Jr. Math, on the other hand? The NES already had Donkey Kong Jr., so why in the world would anyone want to play this?

Believe it or not, someone, somewhere, thought that Street Fighter: The Movie was the greatest thing to happen to video game based cinema, and so Capcom hired a third party developer to make a video game, based on the movie, based on the video game. You could imagine how horrible it was. Maybe it was because the game shamelessly tried to cash in on photo realistic Mortal Kombat style graphics, or maybe it was because Ken’s actor actually refused to say Japanese terms like Shoryuken, or maybe it was because one of the character’s supers was literally just running screaming while shirtless. Street Fighter: The Movie was never really considered a timeless PlayStation classic.

The Make My Video series was one of the stupidest ideas ever farted out of the video game think tank. Released in the days when everyone wanted to exploit full motion video, the premise of these games was to make your very own music video to one of the cool hit songs of the time. However, all you could really do was switch between the real music video, some stock footage of nothing particularly interesting happening, and some winamp style visualizations. There’s also no way to win the game. All you do is fiddle around with the video clips, watch your poorly edited film school project, and then it ends. We could not fathom a universe in which this would be the killer app that sold the Sega CD, and that’s why this is at the top of our list of 10 Worst Video Game Launch Titles Ever.