The Worst PS1 Games? | Sean Seanson

[Music] hi everybody I'm Shan shanson son Sean and do you know what I love God video games but you know what I also love bad video games maybe they aren't that much fun to play through but they sure can be fun to watch and learn about in fact I'd say a huge part of why I'm so into Retro Gaming or even just video gaming as a whole is the incredible amount of content across the web that's dedicated to the joy of bad video games in the mid 2000s I immediately got hooked on old episodes of Classic Game Room The Angry Video Game Nerd and for all the cool kids out there 1up.com's broken pixel series which is still some of the funniest gaming content ever put on the internet you can make your video say whatever you want to say you can pop up the muscle or play up the mush you can make it tough or put in the fluff you can suck on a dog or smooch on a mu and I mean to this day some of the best performing content on this website is dead dedicated to Bad Games whether it's top 10 lists angry reviews or highly scripted comedy videos these games in their own way have given us quite a lot of Joy over the years even if they are you know supposedly an affront to humanity now personally as somebody who's ingested a lot of this style of content over the years my big takeaway from these videos is that while they're often very funny to watch they rarely made me want to try any of the games on display now I know what you're thinking why would I want to try them they're clearly not fun right well yeah in most cases that is quite true but a lot of the time the entertainment value of these videos rely on using the subject matter as a punching bag of sorts flaws are often highlighted and exaggerated in the name of comedy and while they make for a funny video it often doesn't really make for the fairest critique of the game at hand I suppose a good example of this would be games like ET on the Atari 2600 and Friday the 13th on the Nintendo entertainment system which for the longest time had awful reputations but I've kind of seen a rehabilitation of sorts over the years as more people took the time to fully explore their gameplay and mechanic showing that these games are sometimes just misunderstood or even ahead of their time in some ways and this got me thinking because a lot of these games over time naturally build a reputation for being some of the worst on the respective consoles and this reputation is often one that's very hard to shake to the point where if you think of the worst games on a particular platform a lot of your choices are probably going to be the games that you've heard are very bad but you've never actually played because they're bad right I mean why would you in an Endless Sea of video games full of Classics and hidden gems just waiting to be discovered who in the right mind is going to spend their precious free time playing these supposed awful video games well good news everybody the answer is me a dumb idiot so today we're going to take a look at what are often considered the five worst video games to ever grace the original PlayStation and find out once and for all if they truly deserve the reputation as the worst the console has to offer and it starts right now now before we reveal the games we'll be looking at today the reason I deci Ed to make this video in the first place is that throughout my time here on YouTube I've had the pleasure of playing quite a lot of PlayStation games some of which you've likely heard of and many you've probably never heard of and while plenty of these games have gone on to become some of my all-time favorites on the console there are also plenty that left a rather strong impression due to how awful they were I mean some of these are going to be etched in the back of my mind until the day I die let me tell you and one of the things that struck me is that a lot of these bad games games are often completely unknown to a wider gaming audience mostly down to the fact a lot of them were exclusive to Japan and pal regions and uh also didn't sell very much to the point where I've reviewed certain PlayStation games that at the time didn't have a single YouTube review or Long play available on the platform and for a console as big and influential as the PlayStation that's kind of crazy to think about there are still games out here that are practically unknown but some sometimes when you begin to play them for yourself you start realizing why they're unknown quite quickly and instead wish you could just banish them off to the shadow round I guess what I'm trying to say is the games that have this lofty reputation for being the worst a console has to offer might not actually be the worst after all there could be something way worse out there that just completely passed you by or should I say pass the content creators by it's something a lot of people from uh not North America will probably resonate with because from my own experiences a lot of very popular content creators on YouTube are from North America and a lot of their opinions and experiences don't necessarily reflect the global gaming landscape when you see a top 10 list or a worst games ranking often times Japanese and pal releases are just completely absent from these lists and while of course there is nothing wrong with that because at the end of the day these videos and articles are somebody's personal opinion over time a lot of these opinions started becoming the Baseline for many people's opinions out there in our modern world it's very easy for Content creators and websites to just crank out an algorithm friendly list about bad video games to the point where these lists now just seem to be paring the same few select games with the most Baseline critiques possible the graphics are bad the control is bad the sound is bad Etc but you know not much else now what got me interested in this topic beyond the lack of Japanese and pal titles is that many of the games games that also have this reputation for being quite bad ended up being pretty enjoyable when I actually sat down to play them for example there's a game that often gets highlighted in worst PlayStation list called chaos break which by no means is amazing but it's a campy fun little horror title and I can't really imagine how anybody could consider it one of the console's worst games I mean it's got dual laser tonas and it lets your roundhouse kick parasites I mean come on now and on the other hand there's also cases of some really bad games that are simultaneously kind of amazing and ambitious even with their flaws one example would be Batman and Robin which is by far one of the worst controlling games on the console but it also features a fully rendered 3D open world with multiple playable characters a realtime mission system vehicle transportation and cool Batman detective gameplay I mean the process of playing this thing is absolutely awful but it is incredibly fascinating to see this even be attempted so early in the system's life cycle and it kind of makes it worthwhile in its own way like it's bad but at least it's trying to do something quite bold and different while on the other hand we have something like Batman Beyond which on the surface looks and plays better than Batman or Robin but ends up having some of the most soulless and dull combat ever seen in a beat them up and if you combine that with awful enemy balance and just outright Bland and uninspired levels and visuals I'd personally consider this a worse game than Batman and Robin because it offers nothing new and falls at even the most basic hurdles a bad game can be funny fascinating and even impressive at times and that's what makes a good bad game in my opinion whereas something that's neither any fun to play nor excites the mind yeah that's worst game material for me so with that being said I'm going to tell you the five worst games that I've personally played on the Sony PlayStation and we're going to use that as our Baseline for today's video Tonga Legend of Faith dreams to reality is no good the Raven project and my number one pick ubic now if you don't know much about these games and there's a good chance you don't I've reviewed each of them in full on this channel at one point or another either in a dedicated video or as part of my obscure and forgotten PlayStation game series and the big thing to note with these games is that they are all exclusive to the pal region and they also either a port of a PC game or a brand new game based on an existing PC game also three of them come from the same Dev studio called cryo interactive my one and only now these are games I consider aggressively unfun to play at their best they're simply quite boring and at their worse their horrible broken messes that will send even the most calm uncollected person into a state of existential crisis now some of you might remember some other bad cryo games that I've played over the years like Pax Corpus which is a reskinned Aon flux game and a video game based on the cult classic '90s movie Virus which sees you fight Yakuza in a hotel for some reason now these games are most certainly bad but the difference here was that I could find fun in these games in spite of their bad elements to the point where I actually look back at my time at these titles quite funly even if I don't necessarily want to play them again these two are examples of bad games I think somebody could love whereas my top five worst games I'd have a hard time imagining anybody would be able to siphon some fun out of them unless it's for the joy of the viewing public of course and despite my opinions on these five games they aren't actually the topic of today's video because what struck me is that in all the conversations all the Articles all the videos talking about the worst games the PlayStation has to offer these five games almost never appear in that discourse is it because they're just two unknown or is it just because it's my personal opinion and people don't agree with me in the slightest maybe it's a mixture of both but at least in my mind there's a chance the games we've been calling the worst all these years really might not deserve that title and since I've avoided playing a lot of these supposed worst PlayStation games over the years because of their reputation well I think now is the time to try them and find out for myself because at the end of the day you can only truly know a game if you've played it firsthand and while I'm not exactly looking to absolve these games of their sins or anything because look I'm sure they are in fact quite bad I at least think going into them with the intent of having a good time and taking them at face value should at least make for an interesting dissection of what constitutes a game being called the very worst a console has to offer now my original plan to get a de facto consensus on the console's worst games at least by reputation was to make a spreadsheet chronicling as many worst PS1 games list as I could find articles YouTube videos Tik Tok Twitter whatever it didn't matter who it was from or how many games it featured my plan was to track each game included in these lists and then assign them a score based on their placement if a game was Fe featured in ranked third or lower it got one point if a game was ranked second it got two points and if the game was ranked as the worst on the console it got three points and if we do this enough times eventually we should have a pretty accurate top 10 at least I hope so anyway now while my plan was solid there's just one issue I severely overestimated the number of PS1 specific worst game articles and videos out there sure there are plenty available and they seem quite popular All Things Considered but I was really hoping for a large pool of data to pull from and unfortunately not only was there not enough but a lot of these lists were uh quite suspect and if anything just diluted the quality of the overall data and look I'm not going to name names here but one article features Jersey Devil Toro's Last Hope and gex's 3D as some of the worst games on the console and I probably don't need to tell you how insane that is so unfortunately my plan to do this video with 10 games didn't really work out all that well and in retrospect having to play 10 of these games to completion back to back was a terrible idea but the good news is that from the range of Articles and videos that were available a deao top five did happen to appear five games that not only featured heavily across these lists but collectively in rather High positions too so in the end we kind of got the data we were looking for either way now you can probably guess a lot of these games based on reputation alone and I'm sure the thumbnail gave at least one of them away but we're going to reveal each of them one by one as the video goes on because we all love a bit of mystery don't we but just for clarity some of the Heavy Hitters that missed out on this top five include Kiss Pinball VIP starring Pamela Anderson celebrity de match The Fifth Element Mary K and asley Magical Mystery Mall Hooter's road trip and The Crow City of Angels so if you're hoping to see any of these games feature tread the video unfortunately you're going to have to wait for another day although one might appear a little bit later for uh reasons but something important to note about this selection of bad games that didn't make the cut is that they are all licensed video games based on an existing property and this is something I want you to keep in the back of your mind as this video goes on also in case you're wondering no Phoenix or Midas games appear in this list either both because none of them made the C and they're also overtly trash as well like most of them are copy and paste Activity Center games or simple copy and paste arcade titles that in no way tried to hide what they are which is low budget shovelware and if you bought one of these games back in the day well let's just say it was a learning experience to get you prepped for the later days of the PS2 and Wii although personally I'm still a sucker for nice cats I mean what can I say I'm only human all righty so with that all explained it's time to cease my incessant waffling and get into the meat of the video the top five worst games list and to kick things off we have what is often considered the worst firstperson shooter on the console and it might not be for the reasons you'd [Music] expect making its way to the PlayStation in the second half of 99 we have the very first South Park game a game I'm sure a lot of you are very familiar with now this entry on our list is a pretty unique case because while s Park the video game certainly isn't known for being very good it's not necessarily the game play that's earned it its reputation as being one of the worst on the console as it's mostly down to the quality of the port which is uh a little rough I guess you could say now if you weren't around for it sou Park just kind of exploded onto the scene out of nowhere this weird animated show with a unique look and a primous opening that definitely wasn't for kids but kids definitely watched anyway it was a cultural phenomenon shops were full of toys wrestlers were coming out in South Park gear it was pretty crazy and for me even taking Nostalgia out of the question I've always preferred the earliest seasons of s Park where the series focused a lot more on unique little stories that didn't really rely as heavily on current events and gimmicks I guess you could say although I'm not going to pretend like I didn't watch some of the later episodes like Critter Christmas and Make Love Not Warcraft over and over but these early years of sou Park are still my absolute favorite so naturally given the show's incredible rise in popularity the Old Jank Masters themselves acclaimed entertainment were quick to pick up the video game rights and while you may not think a first shooter would be the way to go we were in the middle of the golden age of console firstperson Shooters mostly thanks to a certain Golden Eye of sorts and in my opinion a claim's best development Studio at the time was a little company called iguana entertainment who had previously worked on the much loved turo the dinosaur hunter so I'm sure some business guide a claim put two and two together and well sou park for the N64 was born and while it didn't review all that well compared to the likes of golden turo it sure did sell a lot and that meant a PlayStation version had to happen and a team called appala interactive was brought in to Port it over now the thing is porting a game built on the turo engine which was you know specifically designed to cater to the N64 wasn't the easiest thing in the world in fact most games that were designed with the N64 in mind and then later ported to the PS1 almost always turned out really bad I think Glover is a prime example of this and it's not necessarily down to unskill developers or laziness it's just really really hard to do and when Publishers are also giving you strict deadlines to get these things out on store shelves well the results usually speak for themselves so unsurprisingly getting South Park over to the PlayStation easier said than done in fact for a while it seemed like getting a turo engine game running on the PlayStation at all would be impossible but apalooza persevered and nearly one year later after the 1998 and6 before release we got sou park on the PlayStation in all its foggy framy Glory we'll get into the quality of the port itself in time but for now let's quickly go over the game play and what you're going to be doing throughout your play time while South Park is a pretty standard shooter on a fundamental level the core gameplay really does remind me a lot of the Serious Sam series and that you progress to rather large but mostly linear levels while being assaulted almost endlessly by hordes and hordes of enemies basically if you replace a anient Egypt shotguns and headless bomb men with Colorado snowballs and turkeys you're kind of getting the same basic experience now since this came out at the beginning of South Park's existence you're mostly going to see locations and enemies inspired by the first season of the show we've got turkeys cows those weird Mesto clones and of course the iconic aliens although unfortunately there is no scule book but I imagine clearing the video game rights for the Patrick Duffy leg might have been quite the bother of course being limited to the first season also means means the developers had to add their own enemies into the game as well in the form of robots and uh killer toys but hey you know you got to shoot something not the cute animals though definitely don't shoot them the game will make you feel bad about it later and speaking of shooting the game also offers up a pretty diverse and wacky array of weapons and while it's certainly not turoc levels of cool there is enough here to make it stand out from the crowd we've got infinite snowballs ricocheting dodgeballs a plunger gun that lets you reuse ammo you can pick up off the ground a cool Nerf machine gun the warp oay which is easily the game's best weapon a chicken which is this game's sniper rifle for some reason and if you want to do some heavy damage the cow launcher or explosive teren and Philip dolls will take out most enemies with ease and better yet most of these weapons have alternate fire modes too giving you access to more powerful shots at the cost of more ammo or longer reload times you can say what you want but being able to piss in a snowball to Power It Up is an inspired design Choice let me tell you so far this all seems fine and you know what it kind of is of all the problems sou park has I think the shooting gam play itself is quite confident there's nothing all that exciting or flashy about it and the weapon balance can leave a little bit to be desired but the appeal is really that you're playing as a soar character troll dodgeballs at turkeys and while that may seem kind of crazy now in the late '90s this was very much what people were after now beating a level in this game often just requires you to progress true to the end killing everything in your path but there are a few things that will get in your way most notably these enemies called tanks which are kind of this game's main gimmick really these enemies will show up and continually spawn fod enemies until they're defeated and if that isn't bad enough tanks also try to run away throughout the stage and can even attempt to damage the town of South Park and if the town takes enough damage from these tanks you can even get a game over so as you can see the challenge in this game really comes comes from managing waves of enemies and prioritizing tanks so you can stay in control of everything and if you're not scaring levels for secrets and extra ammo these fights can sometimes prove pretty tricky especially in the later levels where tanks only have certain Windows to take damage unless you want to use a Terren and Philip doll that is the game also has a few boss fights which unfortunately offer no challenge whatsoever they're more or less just fights against massive enemies that do very little and die very quickly a nice way to use up a whole bunch of your ammo but otherwise yeah they're just kind of there now where I think South Park begins to have some bigger issues though is in its level design and overall variety the game only really has about three different locations there's the town the mountains outside the town and some very similar looking indoor levels some of these are meant to be inside a motor ship a warehouse or a toy factory but in reality there is very little setting them all apart levels usually consist of just moving forward and killing some enemies maybe you're going to have to follow your radar or a handy Arrow sign to find more enemies and then you rinse and repeat until you reach the end there is the odd level or two where you're going to have to be a few waves of enemies inside a smaller Arena style level although one in particular where you have to kill a bunch of aliens near a UFO drags on for an incredible amount of time to the point where I thought the game was glitched but nope it's just really that damn long and considering a lot of these levels feature tons of identical enemies very little visual variety and some let's be kind here very basic level design to the point where even the odd bit of excitement like climbing a ladder finding a secret cave or jumping up a stack of boxes isn't enough to save the game from becoming very repetitive quite quickly and while new tougher enemies do kick up the challenge as the game goes on the only reason you really want to push on in this game is because shooting things with weird weapons is kind of fun but that's about it at its best it's a a pretty mediocre shooter that sou Park fans should get a kick out of but other than that it's you know a middleof the road license game and honestly that's what people usually expect if anything I think the real biggest selling point of the game is its multiplayer which while far from a golden ey killer was a nice little pallet cleanser from time to time you could play as tons of different characters certain weapons had special effects in this mode like the cow launcher which obscures enemy vision and you can even get that fun little alien device from the first episode that makes people dance although sadly it doesn't play the old Al Johnson song which kind of ruins it for me I'm not going to lie I know it was just a dream I know I didn't have an anal probe and I know that I am not under alien control I love sing the moon and the juner so that's South Park in the nutshell really but for the most part what I described was the ideal N64 way of playing this game on the PlayStation a few additional problems rether ahead and some are quite unfortunate I'm not going to lie for one this game does have a plop by the way it's not very important but long story short a comet flew over sou Park and is causing all of uh this to happen yeah I'm not really sure how it works either but hey video games don't worry about it although a nice byproduct of this plot are some pretty funny cutscenes voiced by the show's cast they're short and inconsequential but it certainly makes for a nice addition to the game oh oh my God they kill Kenny dude who who's they a safe fell on him we always say they we always say they killed Kenny that does make any sense though oh yeah although the thing is these cutscenes were all made in engine for the original N64 release and as it turns out recreating these in the PlayStation version was uh not possible so instead we have lores video capture of the N64 versions cut scenes and let me tell you these do not look good I'm not really a stickler for video quality in these older games but this is noticeably poor to the point where if you didn't even know about the whole turo engine thing you'd still probably notice something was up this also has an effect on the game sound too which is uh also not great in fact for me the biggest issue I have with this port is the sound quality which takes a noticeable dip from the N64 original to the point where a lot of the music tracks actually sound quite harsh and Grading as you play through the game like I don't think South Park has a good soundtrack or anything but this PlayStation version is sometimes headache inducing due to how poor the quality is and it really does the composition's no favors whatsoever pick chck die die hey you want to pie of me that hurt you son of a bit I let me him out of my way dummy I'm kicking some ass stupid turkeys take that Peckerhead [Music] die die die die die [Music] [Music] Die Another pretty annoying and noticeable aspect of the sound are the kids's voice lines which repeat at an incredible frequency throughout the game and this is bad enough in the N64 version but in this PS1 version these voice lines go into overdrive where the kids are saying the same lines over and over after every kill every item pick up everything really turkey die turke die St turkey turkey die turkey die stupid turke luckily you can turn off both the voices and music in the options if they bother you enough although at the very least I would say turning off The Voice lines are a must on top of this the PlayStation version also has longer low times of course lower res visuals a wonkier frame rate and it manages to retain all the N64 fog as well I know there are people out here who prefer the PlayStation's crunchier look to the N64 original but in the performance Department there's no doubt the PS1 version struggles significantly more also I believe two levels had to be removed from the PS1 version also now whether that was down to time or Tech issues I'm not so sure but it does suck to have an incomplete experience as well it's also noticeably easier than the N64 version in my opinion but that could be a positive or A negative depending on who you ask so on paper the PlayStation version is clearly the worst of the two right well there is one thing in the PS1 version that I think gives it a slight Edge over the N64 original and that's the fact that it supports twin stick aiming via a dual analog controller which was pretty ahead of its time in 1999 sure it's not the first game that featured his implementation on the console I believe that honor belongs to hammerhead's 97 shooter shadowmaster but one thing that often doesn't get talked about when it comes to Twin stick controll in this era was that even if a game had it it often wasn't very good awkward button mapping no sensitivity sliders or invert toggles led to games that often just didn't feel great to play with twin stick controls even the ones that were good usually had some noticeable Quirk that reminded you why this was still very early Tech and we're all just kind of throwing at a wall to see what sticks sou park on the other hand in spite of all its flaws offers up some pretty decent twin stick aiming and this is mostly down to the game letting you map any and all buttons on your controller enabling you to play this game with a reasonably modern setup the only issue with it is that as mentioned there is a quirk with vertical aiming where if you let go of the right stick it automatically snaps you back to a center View and with vertical aiming also being very sensitive I found it pretty awkward to use with the right stick at all thankfully vertical aiming is rarely needed in this game and if you do have to look up or down you can still map it to the shoulder buttons which work just fine for me the important thing though is that there's a lot of choice here and unless you're somebody who is used to the N64 controller for FPS games the PlayStation version will offer up a more familiar gameplay EXP experience at least by modern standards so all in all that's a look at the PS1 Port of South Park and a little history on how it ended up on this list personally after playing it again for the first time in a long time I thought that while it still has a lot of problems it's still kind of fun to play through I don't think a newcomer to this game is going to enjoy it very much but if you played it back in the day and enjoyed it then you'll probably still get a kick out of it now it's not very long it's not very pretty and it doesn't sound very good but the shooting is still quite solid and in terms of theming there's really no other FPS quite like it I know for a fact that while many people dislike this game it still has plenty of fans too easily the most out of any game we'll be talking about today and that goes for the N64 and Playstation versions by the way but if you want to revisit this game in the best way possible did you know there was a PC Port released a few months after the N64 version that features none of the PS1 downgrades and is also patchable to work on Modern PCS now I got to say playing this thing at 60 FPS with no fog is uh quite the eye opener let me tell you this is probably a glimpse into the future when night dive runs out of games to remaster and they end up bringing this back now you may think I'm joking but I really wouldn't put it past night dive and you know the craziest thing of all I bet this game would sell pretty well if it got remastered too I don't think it would review very well but my God would it sound so in the end do I think s Park's PS1 Port deserves to be recognized as one of the console's worst games well even in spite of an admittedly rough Port this game wouldn't even crack my top 50 it's simply okay you might like it you might hate it but it's completely inoffensive now if you were to rank it on a worst PlayStation FPS list then I'd say it would be pretty high up there but I mean I've played the PS1 Port of arm Marines project swarm which is funly enough another acclaimed turo engine port on the console only this game is significant iFly less fun to play and honestly kind of busted too so yeah as long as this exists s Park ain't that bad believe me now before we move on to our next entry something I wanted to do while making this video was briefly take a look at some other games that might be relevant to the game we're discussing and in this case you might be aware that there are two other South Park games on the console that I would personally say have a worse reputation than the original so in the interest of science we're also going to briefly take a look at these games and see how they Stack Up starting with releasing not too long after the PS1 version of sou Park we have Chef's Love Shack which was also from iguana and acclaim and is a South Park themed quiz and miname collection now this game I owned as a kid and look I think kids tend to be a little less harsh on games especially in the days before the internet when we didn't really know any better and even then I still did not like this game I thought it felt a bit cheap and poorly put together the mini gamess weren't all that fun to play and the quiz segments were just kind of confusing like the questions were all worded very strangely and I just often times didn't know what Chef was even asking me long story short I didn't find it funny or fun to play even with friends now after revisiting it here briefly for this video my thoughts are mostly the same but I think I might have been also a little harsh on it yeah the game feels pretty low budget as do the mini games but In fairness they all work as intended and are mostly just variations of older arcade Classics with a South Park C of paint nothing special but playable they most certainly are and as for the quiz Parts I think I'm beginning to realize I was just a dumb kid as these questions are in fact completely fine it's just a mixture of general knowledge and S Park trivia which as an adult I was able to answer quite easily it seems very clear this game was aiming for a You Don't Know Jack style of quiz show a game I'm sure a lot of you are quite familiar with thanks to the incredibly popular and fun jackbox series but for people outside of North America who might not know You Don't Know Jack has been around long before the jackbox days and even has an entry on the original PlayStation albe it exclusive to North America and also Germany because they sure do love a quiz game the way the questions are presented in that series is very similar to the vibe in Chef's love shock and really it's a love it or ha it kind of style but I will admit it's not as confusing as my dumb kid mind initially thought it was also I do kind of like the premise of Chef's Love Shack which is just Chef hosting a quiz show in his house where the priz is to go on a date with him but unfortunately no women ever show up so the kids always end up playing much to Chef's disdain Roy why the hell can't we ever get Lovely Ladies sorry Chef Rick James is in town he's got all the lovely ladies all right come on Children Here We Go it's kind of funny at least for a minute or two so is this a good game no far from it but I think if you got four sou Park fans together to play this thing you'd probably get at least an hour or two's worth of fun out of it it sure is low budget but it's also about as harmless as most of the quiz games on this console just with some Jank mini games thrown in for fun I think the major difference here is that since it's a s Park game this one sold a lot more than most quiz games do and its audience was probably expecting something a little more zany than uh this so yeah naturally it got a harsher treatment than most but honestly it's far from the worst thing in the world our next game however is supposedly so bad it stopped Matt and Trey from greenlighting South Park games for nearly 10 years so uh yeah let's see how that turned [Music] out the final so park game to make it into the console was 2000 so park rally which was once again published by a claim but this time our game was developed by a different studio called Tantalus interactive who up until this point were known for porting games the Sega Saturn such as Wipeout 2097 and even some first party Sega titles like ma TT and House of the Dead and this right here is the first ever PlayStation game from Tantalus and boy people did not like this one even though it's called South Park rally this is in fact a cart racer although in spot of a a lot of the usual cart racer gimmicks like item pickup Sun arena battles sell Park rally is a pretty unique take on the genre for this era mostly because all of the races and challenges in this game feature a different objective type maybe you need to hang on to an item for a certain amount of time collect items in a specific order or even eliminate your opponents with specific weapons even the traditional races are a little bit odd thanks to sou Park's track Leo and checkpoint system it's a game I remember seeing in action back in the day and thinking it just wasn't for me because I tend not to favor racing games that are a bit more free form and their track design I guess you could say more Burnout Revenge less Burnout Paradise if that makes sense so unlike the previous South Park games this is my first time ever playing this thing and once again it really doesn't seem like the worst game in the world if you go into expecting a traditional racer or cart racer even it's probably going to troll you for a loop but I like that it seems to be trying a few different things in the game gameplay Department even if not all of them quite work once again a big part of the critiques for this game is due to how it looks and performs which I mean for a 2000 release is most certainly quite rough but the driving while nothing special is once again competent surprisingly competent I've played racing games that feel like absolute ass to play and this one here is way better than I expected it was going to be at least good enough to carry you through the game if you enjoy what's going on here although for me the thing I like the most about this game and some people might disagree with me here is how incredibly manic this game is it came out during the third season of sou park I think and in terms of references and characters it's got by far the most out of any sou Park game of this era and some of the weapons and items mixed in with the crazy music and characters made playing this game feel like a fever dream at times it's rare games make me stop in my tracks and say hold up what the is going on here but so park rally managed to do that a few times I don't know what this says about my level of humor but I got to say this here is pretty incredible also the game features this insane rendition of the sou Park opening theme that I can only describe as Primus trying to cover a Primus song it is absolutely unhinged [Music] so once again it's a rough game but not unplayable or unlovable I think maybe I just need to play further into it to find out how bad it really can be but like certain reviewers back in the day did give this game scores of around 8 out of 10 due to its variety and large amount of content so I mean maybe it's a game for some people personally I'd say out of the sou Park PlayStation games this is the one that I think I'd probably get the most out of simply because it's a weird funny racing game that has a Saddam Hussein pickup and that in itself is wild right anyway that's a look at all the sell Park games on the PlayStation and I'm sure we can agree sell Park's video game output has improved in quality quite a bit over the years but collectively these original Three while certainly not great now now or then still have some value in them even if it's just for South Park fans or nostalgia's sake at the very least they are competent on a basic gameplay level and I think there are many games out there that completely fall at that hurdle and as such at least by my standards I wouldn't call any of them the worst games on the console bad games guilty pleasures yeah sure I could accept that but the worst nah not even close anyway that leads us on to our next game the supposed fourth worst game on the console and I HED you like that little detour where we looked at other games in the series because uh this lady certainly had quite a lot of them on the console but one in particular stands out from the rest Onie [Music] go well I know a few of you are looking forward to this one it's Barbie Explorer making its way to the PlayStation in September of the year 2001 which isn't a bad Omen at all this game comes to us from developer romecraft game a British Studio who were responsible for the cool Men In Black animated series FPS which is way better than it probably has any right to be they also made the P exclusive PlayStation Port of space station Silicone Valley now known as Evo's space adventure supposedly this is also a very bad N64 Port so at least this video is staying consistent but of course we're here today to talk about the star of the show one of five Barbie games released on the PlayStation and the only one that seems to show up in Bad Games lists and while we will be looking at the four other Barbie games a little later in the video right now we're going to find out what happens when Barbie decides she wants to become Lura cof but in a Crash Bandicoot style 3D platformer now I know what a lot of you are thinking that actually sounds like a pretty good time right I mean let's not kid ourselves if somebody out there was to develop a literal Tomb Raider clone but it just starred Barbie I would play the hell out of that game well as long as it was good anyway and in the case of Barbie Explorer I'll give you a heads up this game is not very good now I'd like to think I'm pretty well versed in the world of Crash Bandicoot and the many crash adjacent Platformers out there we've got our top tier games our mid- tier games the awful Disney ones the weird ones for sick freaks and the late relas European troll games believe me I've played them all and this one might just be the worst I'm sad to say now before we get into why that is let's see what the game's all about the game opens with a pretty cool cutscene settings the simple plot which is Barbie is really pretty and talented and also the world's best Explorer so a museum Professor tasks Barbie with recovering the five missing pieces of a Mystic mirror that are dotted all around the globe this is also kind of the plot line to another crash clone by the way but I'm going to try limit the Yugo Clips going forward as he's quite upsetting to look at anyway we're into the game and normally I wouldn't really highlight a menu but there's this strange element to Barbie games where every time you highlight an option on the menu Barbie is going to tell you what it is you'll need to insert another controller into your console if you want to do some training in the virtual reality room press the x button now now this might seem fine but anytime you cycle through a menu quite quickly it sounds like Barbie is having an aneurysm press the press the press press the this is in every single Barbie game by the way and it is never not funny anyway since the game offers a cool special agent foror mission to practice Barbie's move set let's run through the basics as the world's best Explorer we're going to need to utilize some rolling to get under obstacles climbing to climb up the highest mountains and uh slightly less high things as well there's also a lot of jumping the occasional Vine swing or monkey bars she might even need to push something or pull something and also on occasion activate a switch and yeah that's the Barbie move set what more could you need well there is one more ability but we'll talk about that a little a little later so with our training out of the way we're now ready to start exploring one of the four zones on offer three of which Africa Tibet and Egypt are available right from the start and can be played in any order with the final Zone Babylon opening up after you've beaten the previous tree each Zone has three regular levels and then a boss level at the very end so far so good in fact if I'm being honest with you the production values of this game have been pretty good so far it certainly doesn't seem like a low budget effort at least on the presentation side and once we get into the main game playay yeah I got to say while it's not the flashiest presentation in the world Barbie Explorer really doesn't look half bad does it colorful environments good performance clean textures and of course we have gigantic Barbie who takes up most of the screen but looks pretty good while doing it she even gets a new outfit per World which is very on brand and some nice attention to detail now the goal in each area is quite simply to make it from one end of the level to the next you don't have to worry about collecting any special McGuffin to complete the level but you can collect these color gems that are dotted around the level if you want to get some extra lives or go for a 100% completion bonus which I assure you is harder than you think sometimes gems are also found in these chests that are off the beaten path and these chests can give you bonus extras like lives or a selection of time powerups that give Barbie some new abilities like super speed or extra high jumps these items can often be helpful or a hindrance in some cases but there are also special sections designed around using these items so you'll want to make the most of them whenever you can by the way while the game does have enemies that can damage you they're mostly just animals that are going about their daily business and if you happen to walk into them naturally it's going to hurt and the monkey is probably going to be real pissed off as well which we hate to see so if you thought Barbie was going to be rolling into crocodiles Donkey Kong style well you may want to think again because they actually reserve the crocodile for a bit where Barbie runs towards the camera it is a crash clone after all so you knew it was going to be in here somewhere and speaking of damage you might wonder how Barbie's health system works in this game and the answer to that is that if anything bad happens to her she dies immediately whether it's taking damage from a dust devil being crushed by a rolling Boulder or falling into a bottomless pit which is going to happen to you quite a bit I'd say it's all one and the same now this might seem quite rough initially but the game is very generous with lives which you can acquire by collecting 10 of these heart pickups some of which give you multiple hearts or even a whole life in one go so even though you will probably die quite a bit in this game thanks to plenty of available heart pickups and some rather forgiving checkpoints it does manage to alleviate the frustration and difficulty somewhat so uh yeah I think we've gone on long enough without mentioning the big problem with this game because if you really look at this thing in action it kind of seems like a competent but rather basic crash clone and you you know what it would be if Barbie didn't control like complete ass unfortunately for whatever reason the devs really took that Tomb Raider influence to heart and decided to make Barbie control like a worse version of Lara Croft controls that somehow manage to be both incredibly stiff and overly sensitive at the same time controls that are so bad it makes even the process of getting Barbie from point A to B on foot a rather painful experience and that's before she gets on the geometry or worst of all has to jump across some platforms it mostly comes down to the strange decision to lock Barbie's movement to eight directions and this is whether you're playing on a d-pad or with an analog controller which the game does support by the way this makes movement very awkward and when you combine this with delay jumps and some odd fixed camera angles that mess with your perception it becomes a nightmare to deal with very early on after trying my best to go out of my way to collect all the gems for 100% completion I learned that collecting all these gems is tantamount to torture never has the most straightforward collectible in a platformer been so difficult and painful to collect between the time it takes to slow down Barbie's momentum or line yourself up for a jump you'll have wasted so much time and probably lost quite a few hit points in the process that it makes you regret even trying to collect it and let me tell you these levels are surprisingly long too taking anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes and with a lot of gems to collect and believe me if you miss one there is no way you're going back to get it that gem is lost to the ages after playing through the second level it was at this point I decided to just give up on them completely as they are absolutely not worth the pain and just in case you're wondering the reward for collecting each and every gem in the game is absolutely nothing so luckily I did manage to save myself from a mild breakdown Bo bowing out early but either way I think a platformer that actively makes you want to avoid the most basic collectible the game has to offer well that's no good it's genuinely quite hard to convey just how bad these controls are without playing it first hand cuz I mean this looks like the most basic platformer in the world right but it's the type of game that would make even the best Gamers out there look like they're playing a video game for the first time and as the game gets tougher and the platform more uh platformy the frustration is naturally going to build up although one way to somewhat ease a lot of the platforming wo is to utilize the best move in Barbie's Arsenal which is a walking walking is primarily used for crossing unstable parts of the environment but if you're walking you also can't fall off the edge of a platform so it's very handy if you want to position yourself safely for a jump and it's something you'll have probably used a lot in Tomb Raider over the years as well as other games that feature Tomb Raider controls and uh difficult platforming now since this game does support the dual shock you can walk by tilting the left analog stick ever so slightly forward which is the intended way of walking in most games but the control here is so incredibly sensitive that you're always a millimeter away from pushing a little too hard and falling to your doom which happened way more often than I'd really like to admit thankfully there is a work around as there's also a dedicated walk button map to Ora one and trust me this is the only way you should be walking and you should be abusing this as much as possible for nearly every jump in the game it doesn't make the platforming good but it'll make dealing with it a lot more manageable as the game goes on now beyond the bad controls another big issue this game has is the music and sound and by that I mean there really isn't all that much of it the sound effects for the most part are fine even though they're mostly made up of classic video games stock sounds that you've heard in at least 10 other games you've played The Voice work is also kind of weird sometimes it's good but other times it seems oddly spliced together like you can clearly tell they've clipped four different voice clips and then put them together to form a single sentence congratulations you completed the level yeah you tell them Barbie now that stuff isn't really too big an issue the music on the other hand I think they straight up forgot to put it in the game okay so there is some music that plays on occasion randomly tread the levels that to its credit actually sounds quite nice and fitting for the locals but it's really low quality and lasts for about 10 to 20 seconds before [Music] stopping the rest of the time the levels just feature a little background Ambience that while nice I guess doesn't stop the game from feeling incredibly empty and just I don't know the void of life like sitting here silently in a dark room playing Barby Explorer in almost complete silence is a strangely harrowing experience let me tell you now this is consistent throughout the game with about a minute's worth of Music in these nearly 50 minute long levels which may I remind you is without me stopping for collectable as well I say that but I can't resist the odd branching path even if I usually regret choosing it immediately but yeah long story short the silence it's never not [Music] noticeable now the reason I say I think they forgot to include the music is because there's also a PC version of this game which from what I can tell is mostly identical to the PlayStation version gameplay-wise seriously though God help any of you that beat this on a keyboard you have my infinite respect but the PC version also has music in each of the levels and you know what it's pretty good [Music] too [Music] and I suppose that's the thing with Barbie Explorer if you discount the awful controls and sound problems the rest of the game is more or less fine climbing and other activities work as expected there's a bunch of puzzles throughout which while not all that challenging or unique do help break up the levels quite a bit there's even a little water section later in the game that isn't terrible and you know what we love to see it the boss levels are also kind of fun too even if you're not exactly fighting the boss itself these levels are more so just one-off gimmick stages that require you to tackle a new type of platforming Challenge and doing so will defeat the boss the challenge here is once again the controls more than anything but hey I appreciate the variety at least and for as bad a taste as this game left in my mouth I got to say it sure does look pretty on occasion yeah the levels aren't the most visually dense and interesting locals around especially considering how often these locations pop up in other video games and uh Crash Bandicoot 2 I guess seriously Barbie even has its own version of The Road to Nowhere if the crash influence wasn't already obvious enough but there are a few instances where this game stopped me in my tracks to take in the view or look at a weird little animal friend but the Highlight has to be the game's final Zone Babylon which really goes for the whole techno Babylon Vibe like you're exploring this ancient high-tech Temple and I kind of dig it the game certainly ain't that pretty all the time mind you but on a visual level there's certainly a lot to enjoy and yeah once you beat Babylon you get treated to one final end credit scene and then the game is mercifully over in a little over 2 hours and oh boy is it rough honestly if they put out this thing with good player movement a little bit of extra polish on the PC version soundtrack it would be a very easy and basic licens platformer both a completely inoffensive one at that something younger players and Barbie fans might have got a kick out of if they were just looking for a simple Barbie theme platforming game and while that still wouldn't be very good it would have been significantly better than what we ended up with here there's no sugar coating it the controls render this game the void of fun and the Eerie quietness of the levels just hammers it home even more and I know you may think I'm not the target marker for this game but believe me if it's a PS1 plat platformer I'm the target market and I'm sad to say it really is one of the worst the console has to offer I'd even say it's worse than the Lion King 2 and that game is really bad so before we cast Barbie Explorer off into the depths of Hell let's briefly see how the other four Barbie games Stack Up on the console I can't imagine they'll be quite as bad as this one was but the first Barbie game to ever make it to the console was also made by romecraft games so I'm sure that bodess well say hello to the first Barbie game to make it to the PlayStation it's Barbie racing ride developed by romecraft games and released in November of the year 1999 as a PlayStation exclusive and if you can believe it Sony published this Banger in the power region so it even has its own little dual shock ad that's fun this title if you haven't already guessed it is all about Barbie and horses and sometimes even Barbie riding a horse and I'd imagine if you were into Barbie horses and video games this thing would have blown your mind it isn't the first Barbie horse game to appear as there's been some PC entries in the past but this one is certainly quite unique it's kind of a mishmash of PC style Activity Center gameplay you know dress up your characters brush your horse's hair play a few simple mini gamess that kind of thing but the star of the show has to be these odd FMV horse riding sections where you help guide your horse around the trail while avoiding IES and occasionally stopping to play a little miname or interact with a cute animal friend there's four trails in total each with day and night variant and look while I'm not exactly the target audience for this game it's mostly fine for what it is similarly to Barbie Explorer it's not the most polished experience in the world but everything works and controls just fine and these FMV sections are kind of nice and relaxing in their own odd way well until you get stopped so you can hassle some squirrels for uh learning purposes oh yeah that weird menu voice thing is present here too I don't know if this was a request from Mattel or just a strange romecraft implementation but at this stage it's not a Barbie game if she ain't talking to you at every possible second press the press the x button on highlight new player and press the x button anyway that's Barbie racing rid certainly not a game for me but okay for what it is and delightfully weird on a visual level so it's got that going for it which is nice next up though we have a game that is much less weird but still kind of weird move over Tony Hawk cuz we've got a new extreme sports legend on the console and it's Barbie in super sports which made its way to the PlayStation in December of 1999 courtesy once again of run craft games this game gives us not one but two extreme activities for Barbie to participate in inline skating and and snowboarding and I to know about you but I never really knew how much I wanted a Barbie snowboarding game until I tried this the inline skating is pretty cool too I suppose it is a little more on brand for the character but hey who am I to deny Barbie's Talent at every sport and hobby imaginable now since the game is split into two separate Sports they kind of play like their own unique halves of the game inline skating plays from this overhead perspective and sees you moving around a bunch of open hul and Maze like environments while snowboarding is played from the usual third person perspective and plays unsurprisingly like any El snowboarder game available now while you can do some tricks and stylish reverse skating Maneuvers which are pretty amazing actually there's really not a lot of input required from the player to do any of this which is the say if you go over a ramp you'll automatically do a trick and if you line up and jump on a rail you will do a grind well sometimes the grinding is a little finicky so in other words if you hoping for something with the technical depth on skill of Tony Hawke you will be sorely let down the gameplay in Barbie Super Sports is actually more like a fun series of many challenges you have access to a hub and various different levels within them and it's up to you to go in and complete the challenges inside them you might need to collect a bunch of items get enough trick points beat your friend in a race and solidify yourself as the top Barbie all the classics are here there's also some nice additions like a shop that lets you buy new gear and outfits for cosmetic purposes I mean it is a Barbie game after all dressing her up is half the fun you know this game is all right actually it's pretty simple and sometimes kind of juny but it looks nice enough and there's a decent bit of variety across the two sports also the music is surprisingly good in this game I know you probably wouldn't look to a Barbie game for some ambient winter bangers but believe it or not they're [Music] here you were awesome let's try a stun on the halfpipe cool see if you can board through the slalom section [Music] now while this is certainly one of the better Barbie games it's nothing compared to the best Barbie PS1 game and that's the one where she solves crimes on a [Music] boat coming to the PlayStation in December of the year 2000 once again from romecraft games we have detective Barbie the mystery Cruise a Barbie crime mystery Adventure game and yes it's as funny as that sounds now this is actually the third detective Barbie game the first two appearing on PC but this final entry we're playing today is a PlayStation exclusive and my God is it a PlayStation game all right detective Barbie follows the usual Adventure crime formula you know wander around chat to Witnesses and suspects pick up items and clues and unravel the mystery while using your cute range of Barbie gadgets available in stores now it's a pretty leisurely paced Adventure game and a rather simple one at that but there's something quite Charming about the whole thing it's got a lot of cheesy voice acting some nice pre-rendered backgrounds and some frankly hilarious characters I don't know it just seems like a nice little Adventure game very much the kind of thing you would have played as a kid on your parents' PC but now in PS1 form and as an added bonus the game has a few 3D mini gamess as well which are about as polished as you'd expect from a game called detective Barby the mystery cruise but they're all fun enough the jet ski in particular is pretty great honestly I think this might make for a fun playr if you like a light-hearted mystery Adventure that takes about an hour to bead it's pretty easy rather simple and has some longer low times than most but it's got a lot of that Barbie charm and it also features the most of Ken we've seen in any game yet so that's a big plus the kenery is always appreciated anyway that leads us on to our last Barbie game and not only is this one a North American exclusive but it's also the only one not developed by runin Craft so that's [Music] exciting that's right it's Barbie got to have games a late releas Barbie minigame collection that made it to the console in November of the year 2003 now even though the idea of a late relase miname collection screams shovelware and look I'm not going to lie it kind of is this game surprised me a little cuz for a miname collection it's actually not that bad and a reason for this might be because it was was developed by dice of all people well dice Canada but still it means Barbie is ever so slightly connected to Battlefield and uh prism the dark unicorn the most famous of all dice games anyway we've got eight games on offer and the gimmick of this game is that there are eight games you all know and love but uh Barbie fied I guess there's a version of Connect 4 there's a little rhythm game you've got a horse racing themed Hangman game match the CDs uh just straight up puzzle bubbles some weird chess game A Match Tree Puzzler and best of all it's even got snake but now in congol Lime form it's pretty great while the games included here aren't really anything too exciting they're all tried and tested Classics in a way and as such they're kind of hard to mess up if executed properly and while this game does kind of feel a little flash gamey on a presentation level all the games play about as well as you'd hope and for me personally having a Barbie version of puzzle Bobble and snake kind of makes this a game worth owning I don't even know if there is another version of snake on the console but if not this will do so yeah once again this game is completely fine actually all the Barbie games are fine really inoffensive very easy but Pleasant cutesy video games except for one Barbie explor which on paper is the only Barbie game i' even really be interested in playing so it's a shame it's as bad as it is I'm not saying that I expected great things from it or anything but like I said if a platformer actively makes you want to avoid seeking out Collectibles due to the controls well yeah that's pretty dire what I go as far as to call it one of the worst games on the console though H yeah 100% it's just flat out boring and UNF fun to play to the point where even the novelty of playing as Tomb Raider Barbie in her four wonderful outfits isn't enough to Warrant a playr although in all seriousness somebody showed 100% % revisit this concept Barbie is more culturally relevant than ever it is time for a AAA Barbie Explorer where she saves and dangered species and liberates emerald mines don't tell me that wouldn't print money anyway that's enough Barbie for one video I think time to move on to the third game in our list and this one if you can believe isn't a licensed video game tie-in but instead a game that's part of a very well-known and beloved video game franchise that's still going strong today and while the series certainly has some some questionable entries one stands Head and Shoulders Above the Rest as not only the entry the fans hate the most but the creators as well ladies and gentlemen give it up for Mortal Kombat Special Forces released in June of the year 2000 and also the final Mortal Kombat game to make it to the console we'll probably talk about some of the others later don't you worry now this game is another standout in this list not just because it's the only one I don't own because it's ridiculously expensive for some reason and I personally didn't feel like shelling out 80 quid on a game that's probably terrible but the real reason this is an interesting pick is because it's a spin-off of an already very popular game series one that was a major player in arcades as well as the later days of the 16-bit era and notoriously struggled quite a bit in the transition over to Next Generation consoles and at of time when Mortal Kombat really could have used the win fans of the series got gifted with arguably the worst Mortal Kombat game of them all Special Forces a game that was not only panned by critics and fans of the series but had such a troubl development cycle that it resulted in series Creator John Tobias leaving Midway and Ed Boon more or less just disowning the game at one point it looked like this game could have killed off the franchise altogether and while that's certainly a funny thing to look back on nowadays considering the series is arguably in a better place than it's ever been special forces Legacy is still often a sore point for fans of this series now surely the game can't be that bad right and you know what after playing through it while it's certainly not a good game it's by far the best game I've played through for this video now I know that may not be saying much but comparatively to other games this one does the least wrong well at least on a basic gameplay level the real issue with Mortal Kombat Special Forces and the reason I think it's hated as much as it is is that it's a terrible Mortal Kombat game beyond the fact this game includes some Mortal Kombat characters a little bit of Gore and some rather Mortal Kombat esque music this quite literally could be any basic action game ever you might as well call it Warehouse fighting simulator or super gun battle or how about office block bust up who gives a at least it would be a more accurate title so before we get into the game playay itself let's first point out the places this game goes wrong and for me the biggest part is the story or I suppose lack thereof Special Forces seems like a game that wanted to be two different things the game opens with this really cool cuts scene sporting a 70s B movie black exploitation Vibe letting you think it's going to be some fun wise cracking Adventure that really doesn't take itself too seriously which honestly I would have [Music] loved [Music] but as soon as you get into the game the entire thing is just generic ass military briefings and special force is mumbo jumbo it's like they were trying to do metal gear solid or siphon filter but with Jack's tracking down and the feeding Kano and the other members of the black dragon Clan but it's done with such a stray face and is so incredibly generic that it just does nothing for the characters or the overarching Mortal Kombat lore like at this stage I know mortal combat wasn't quite the crazy Universe of characters that it is now but it still had a lot going on and plenty of interesting stories to tell and if you're going to make a spin-off highlighting some of these characters this is the perfect place to expand on that and this game just does absolutely nothing in that regard it might as well not even exist it's that inconsequential it's a clear sign of this game's development troubles and while you do see the odd glimpses of the black exploitation theming that they were going for in the opening with some of Jack's brief onliners the fact the game never really commits to either Style Just leaves it with both an identity crisis and absolutely no substance whatsoever why are we fighting bad guys in warehouses and deserts who are these members of the black dragon Clan we're facing down where is Sonia and the other special forces crew who the hell knows no amount of dull Mission briefings could ever possibly make you care about these characters it's really quite the missed opportunity now I'm sure Mortal Kombat fans could overlook this as long as the game play was up to scratch right and while personally I think the game play here is fun enough very little of what's here screams Mortal Kombat this is a game all about exploring levels using basic beat him up combat with bad guys the occasional bit of Gunplay solving some simple puzzles and then it's basically just that on repeat through five of the dullest looking environments imaginable now I know what you're thinking right it's got fighting I mean that's Mortal Kombat in a nutshell really but it's the fact the combat here doesn't really feel anything like Mortal Kombat none of the special moves combos uh anything really it feels like a game that's desperately trying to be anything other than Mortal Kombat and I think the crooks of it is that when the entire audience for your game is Mortal Kombat fans and you give them the anti-m Moral Kombat combat game a game that also threaten to ruin your favorite franchise by its existence alone well then yeah people are going to hate this thing but look as mentioned I came into this video trying to take each game at face value and while I can respect and understand Mortal Kombat fans distaste for this game I really didn't think it was all that bad it's more or less just a simple beat him up with some exploration and puzzle solving elements but it's a rather leisurely one to play through like the combat is just satisfying enough to keep you engaged until the very end sure the levels and environments are really Bland on a visual level but the level design and puzzles they really ain't all that bad there's Gunplay which isn't much to write home about but it works competently enough and there is a nice variety of weapons and gadgets to use throughout the game the bosses are uh okay these are kind of bad and have some really annoying abilities to deal with but at least you can stun lock the out of them and you know that's kind of funny this might be one of the most okay video games I have ever played it's basically the perfect for or five out of 10 really Bland but like just fun enough to make you want to keep playing now I will say it does leave one of the worst first impressions I've seen in a game by dumping you into this really bizarre combat scenario you see the core of the fighting here Works off a combo system where you press one of the four face buttons to execute a variety of punches and kicks and if you enter the right attacks in a specific order you complete a combo these combos do a lot of damage but they can also give an enemy if you kill them with the final hit which is quite fun and also the most Gore you're probably going to see in this game but combos Also Serve another purpose which is to refill your energy meter the longer the combo the more it refills and this energy can then be spent on one of your four special moves which are executed by holding L2 and pressing one of the four face buttons there's some classic Jack moves here which are quite nice to see although the Flaming Dash punch is the only one worth using but my God is it worth using now the thing is if you're fighting enemies using hand toand combat the only thing that really does any damage are combos or special moves and if you're just trowing out round punches or kicks enemies are just going to block everything and they're almost impossible to kill and while that doesn't sound like an issue when you start the game and come across the first two enemies you'll be surprised to find out that you have access to no combos whatsoever and as such fighting these enemies is an absolutely abysmal experience because of it I thought the game was busted or something since I could just do no damage to these enemies whatsoever now you may have noticed the XP meter in the top right of the screen when when you do eventually manage to kill an enemy this will give you experience and when you do eventually kill enough enemies to level up in this game not only will you get a full life refill which is very handy but you'll also get access to new Combos and as soon as you get access to combos the combat just all of a sudden works and it's simple but satisfying to use on enemies true out although funly enough one of the very first combos you get in this game is a simple five button combo of XXX square triangle and it's a lowkey the best combo in the game because of an infinite that can be abused shamelessly in almost every situation all you got to do is masch the x button three times and pretty much every enemy in the game can be locked in an infinite tree hit punch combo some of you might see this as a mark on the game but I mean you can avoid it if you like and personally I thought it was pretty funny cuz it even works on bosses and some of these really deserve the infinite combo let me tell you now while the beat him up combat will be your go-to for the majority of the game guns tend to be quite useful and plentiful too mostly because there's other enemies with guns and it is quite handy to be able to shoot them before they can shoot you aiming is automatic so long as you're pointing in the general direction of an enemy whether they're on screen or not shooting is a breeze you've got all the classic weapons your machine guns shotguns grenade launchers which uh you might want to be careful using and there's even sniper rifles which make good use of this game's firstperson aiming mode something that is also handy for looking around and admiring the levels if there was anything to admire now the only real downside to using your weapons is that ammo can be quite limited enemies do tend to drop ammo pickups on the regular but it's usually less than what you'd expend to kill an enemy so it's best to save your guns for when you really need them all the weapons and items in this game need to be accessed from the pause menu before use and there's also things like medkits and bombs which are needed to access some of the other parts of the level some mandatory for progression and others for secrets and items and yeah other than the odd simple puzzle or some backtracking that is pretty much the whole game you've got five locations to visit Each of which featuring their own little mini levels within you beat up the bad guys collect some items solve some puzzles and eventually fight a boss it's a video game all right and I think for me the big thing that hinders this game beyond the story and lack of Mortal Kombat Gore and flare is the limited top down view in an Ideal World this game should have featured a third person perspective as it would have better suited this game's combat and Gunplay in my opinion the narrow view just serves to get you shot off screen more often than not and it's just never fun and yeah these environments really are just the blandish I mean the first area is a warehouse the second is a sewer the third is an office block the fourth is a canyon and hidden tomb which is sadly nowhere near as fun as it sounds and lastly we get to visit the game's final area outworld which somehow might be the blandest location of them all if you like gray structures and platforms floating in a black void well then this is the place to be and I mean it's not even like the graphics are that bad it runs well enough the textures are fine the character models are okay it's just it's all so Bland and uninspired I don't know how else to describe it now I would say the biggest bright spot in this game besides the sometimes goofy combat and competent level design is the music which is easily the most Mortal Kombat thing this game has going for like if you were to play these tunes for somebody you'd almost certainly guess it's from a Mortal Kombat game and as far as Mortal Kombat music goes this game features some of the better tracks the series has to [Music] offer so that's a look at Mortal Kombat Special Forces it takes about 2 hours to be and like I said it's a nice Breezy playr I wouldn't really recommend it to anybody but I honestly can't see how anybody could consider this one of the worst games on the console a Mortal Kombat game absolutely 100% but bad video game nah it's simply just a bland action game and if for some reason you're in the mood to play a by the Numbers Bland action game that happens to start Jack from Mortal Combat well you can certainly play a lot worse than this let me tell you and after finishing my playr I had a little look to see if I could find out anything more about the game's development issues and I stumbled upon a prototype of the game from 999 that gives us a lot more insight into what the game was supposed to be notably the game features a third person perspective that like I said seems better suited to the gam playay there's also more cutscenes characters and even a playable Sonia would you believe I got to say it is really crazy that they just removed her entirely from the finished product book it really goes to show how troubled this development was if it came down to that now I don't want people to think this prototype represents a better game not only is this prototype quite rougher in the edes as to be expected but the game in this state is really not very fun or interesting at all it's basically a Mortal Kombat version of The Fifth Element if I'm being completely honest I mean it's even got the Tomb Raider walk function which is actually another pretty funny coincidence but it's clear to see whether you're playing the Prototype or the final retail version the development was certainly a troubled one and whatever game they originally envisioned it was just not meant to be but as mentioned previously this whole era of mortal combat games at least prep PS2 anyway was a bit Rocky but out of all the Mortal Kombat games to release during this era only one could truly step up and challenge the reputation Special Forces has and would you believe it it's another spin-off one that is also not very good but one that fans tend to look back at with Kinder eyes ah yes Mortal Kombat molies what a mess this thing is now on the PlayStation nearly all the Mortal Kombat games are flaw in some way or form we've got the Japanese exclusive Port of Mortal Kombat 2 which you probably didn't know existed but luckily you ain't missing much as it's incredibly Bare Bones and also not really a great conversion then there's the very fun and content-rich Mortal Kombat Trilogy which was my first ever Mortal Kombat game but it's also so busted it's completely unviable for competitive play so uh yeah that kind of sucks and of course we have the ever controversial Mortal Kombat 4 which was also a very uous Dev cycle for Midway as it turns out the transition over the 3D wasn't all that easy for Mortal Kombat but I've always liked what they were going for in this one that and it's also incredibly funny so yeah I guess you could say I have quite the soft spot for this one never come in major Briggs this is Lieutenant Sonia blade [Music] what Sonia this is Major braks come in Sonia this is J are you there going somewhere jerck Jack I thought you were going to thought I was what dead like my partner you just tossed off the cliff I'm I'm sorry Jack please don't drop me wait I I Promise Too Late Jerick you can't drop me you have to uphold the law you have to arrest me wait wait this is brutality you can't do it wrong Jerick this is not a brutality this is a fatality talented brilliant incredible amazing however beyond the mainline games we also got the first Mortal Kombat spin-off Mortal Kombat mology Subzero which aims to give us an action adventure title using Mortal Kombat movement and controls as well as role-playing elements and a zany liveaction story it's absolutely terrible and I kind of love it this right here is the exact opposite of special forces it is a bad video game with control that were never designed for this typee of gameplay and as a result it's incredibly frustrating to play but on the other hand it's a great Mortal Kombat game the combat the lore the visuals the environments and my God the liveaction cutcenes this thing is so unapologetically Mortal Kombat in its cheesiness and Gore that it's the kind of game a Mortal Kombat Die Hard would learn to love in spite of its flaws just so you could experience all the cool stuff within it anybody I know who likes this game will happily admit that it's not very good but they just don't care in the slightest and you know what I get it I'm always willing to overlook flaws in a game if it manages to deliver the goods in other avenues and while I think the game playay will be a bit much to overcome for non-mortal Kombat fans some of this stuff really is Peak Mortal Kombat especially if you're a fan of everybody's favorite freezy ninja it's a fine example of an arguably worst playing video game that can still find a positive reception in the community as long as it you know respects its audience sure it's bad but it's also trying something new it's doing stuff with it story and characters and most importantly of all it's an honest to God Mortal Kombat game and look at the end of the day that's what Mortal Kombat fans are after and if you give them an okay action game that delivers none of the Mortal Kombat action or spirit and also happens to almost tank the franchise in the process well then you might end up with a game that gets erroneously placed on worst PS1 games list for years to come so there you go anyway we're down to our our final two games now and before we make it to our grand finale we have one final license game to get through one that has shown many of us why we should truly fear God and His loyal holy Soldier Ned [Music] Flanders that's right it's The Simpsons wrestling another rather late release for the console making its way to the PlayStation in March of the year 2001 now if you've watched enough of my videos it's probably very easy to tell that I adore The Simpsons well you know classic Simpsons anyway and throughout my early years as a gamer there wasn't really a whole lot of Simpsons video games out there or at least ones worth playing the outlier was of course the very first Simpsons Game the much loved arcade title from Konami which while certainly not my favorite Konami brawler is still a very fun video game to play through even today after that though The Simpsons would be welcome to Acclaim licensing hell which meant we got a bunch of Bart Simpson Platformers on 8 Bit 16bit And handheld consoles and while some of these have their moments for sure generally they were not very good at all so like many Simpsons fans out there I was very excited to see how the series would translate over to new fifth generation consoles as this time period was arguably when The Simpsons was at its peak in popularity so naturally it wouldn't be too long until we seen our first 3D Simpsons Game W not would wash the taste of all these games right out of our mouths and uh yeah it just never came maybe the reaction and sales from the accan games were so bad that they just held off making any Simpsons games at all but eventually in 2001 after the PS2 had already been released to the PlayStation would finally see its one and only Simpsons Game Simpsons wrestling which if you consider the combined popularity of both The Simpsons and wrestling at this point in time well this game was always destined to sell like Hu cakes and believe me it sure did I don't think I knew a single kid with a PlayStation who didn't own or had at least rented this video game back in the day it was a big deal let's just put it that way but of course as we all know it somehow ended up here in the number two spot for the worst ranked PS1 games and personally I think the Simpsons popularity has a pretty big role to play in that and also the fact it was marketed as The Simpsons wrestling and while yes it does feature some light wrestling content it is most certainly not a good wrestling game so uh yeah let's take a look and see what went wrong now first things first the game was developed by an American Studio going by the name of big AP Productions now these guys are ex Lucas art staff who had worked on games like her's Adventures which I really quite like and they also developed the troubled Phantom Menace game which is pretty rough and janky but also quite ambitious as well a love it or hate it game in my opinion unfortunately though there next game Simpsons wrestling is generally a loath it or hate it kind of game as I don't think I've ever come across somebody who has fond memories of this thing now full disclosure I have beaten this game before although it was originally over the course of a weekend rental back in 2001 and it's one of those games where even as a kid you could clearly tell something was a little bit off with this thing like you can say what you want about the visuals right but the overall gameplay there's just something off about it but even more notable than that the game features one of the most ridiculous difficulty spikes that I've ever come across in a video game to the point where it's been etched into my mind ever since I first stumbled across it and if you played this game I'm sure you all know what that is but we'll get to that when we get there now I suppose the first thing we should cover is the game play itself because a lot of this game's issues revolve around the combat which you think given the fact it's called Simpsons wrestling takes place in a wrestling ring and requires a tree count pin to win matches would be you know a wrestling game but uh it's really not the combat and gameplay here is really more of a straightup fighting game that's mostly similar to certain Arena fighters of its day it just so happens to have some wrestling elements added in but the wrestling elements that are present here are nowhere near integral enough to the game playay or strategy of the fights to ever really consider it a wrestling game and I guess that alone combined with the fact up The Simpsons wrestling release during the Golden Era of wrestling games AKA this came out a few months after both no mercy and Smackdown 2 well immediately it was already adored in the eyes of wrestling fans but ignoring that how does the combat work well each character has three basic attacks tied to the square triangle and circle button square is a simple combo attack that you can execute by mashing the button repeatedly triangle is a projectile attack and circle is a powerful special move move and usually varies quite a bit from character to character all of these moves require energy to use which you can handily see above the character's help bar now this fills up automatically over time but can also be refilled by picking up items that spawn randomly around the ring these items can also restore your health increase your speed or might even add a letter to your taunt meter which you can also gain by executing a full combo on your opponent by using the square button once the taunt meter is full you can then execute the taunt to gain a brief window of invincibility which comes in very very handy during these fights and can also be carried over between rounds so it's important to manage this well once you manage to whittle down an opponent's health and reduce it to zero then it's time to pin them which you can do by pressing the L1 button and there you go you win the round and the first to win two rounds is the winner of the match it's basic fighting game stuff and by the way just in case you're wondering if you try to pin an opponent before they are at anything but zero Health it will be completely useless so uh yeah don't even bother now I would like to point out when I originally rented this game like many rentals this didn't come with a manual so when I learned the game it was pretty much just by around and experimenting with the various controls and what I managed to figure out was more or less everything that I just explained to you previously as the game has no in-game button config or mapping so you know I was just kind of winging it this time however I have both the manual and the internet help me learn the game and uh yeah it turns out this is quite important first off there are additional attacks most notably jump attacks which I kind of knew were in the game already but didn't realize there were three different additional attacks while you're in the air most of these are quite bad but pretty handy if you need to avoid opponents when they've just turned invulnerable or they're locked into a special attack animation the next move that I just learned existed are grapple moves which sadly are nowhere near as exciting or effective as I hoped you can do these by pressing the or2 button to initiate a lock up with your opponent but these are so hard to execute on opponents without taking damage yourself and are also kind of weak even when you do manage to get them off so frankly they're just not worth doing unless the opponent is already stuned then you're guaranteed a free hit from one the final move type however turned out to be a game changer and these are known as rope moves so in this game if you bounce off a rope there's a very brief window during this bounce where you can execute a rope move by pressing square triangle or Circle and while these moves are pretty tough to hit they can cause massive damage and stun opponents very very easily to the point where I think they are actually the strongest moves in the game by quite a large margin and this is pretty funny to think about considering that I've beaten this game before what even knowing they existed so going forward I just want you to keep these rope based moves in your mind because they are quite important now even knowing all the games attacks abilities and whatnot the biggest issue here in my opinion is just how the combat feels I don't know how else to describe it but the fighting in this game just feels like two very light balloon men occasionally bumping and rubbing off one another dealing very very small amounts of damage until eventually one just Falls over character movement is very fast and very bouncy but as a result the combat feels like a just has no weight to it whatsoever it's something you might not notice or appreciate much in fighting games because generally they have this stuff down but if you remove any sense of impact or tactile sensation to the combat it just doesn't feel right like I can see the moves hitting my opponent I can see their health bar going down but I just don't feel convinced I'm really doing much of anything like the combat right it does work and I do kind of enjoy the system of three different attacks that differ depending on if you're in the ground in the air in a grapple or hitting the Rope but it just lacks the weight and crunch that you'd expect from a fighting game and honestly it's the game's single biggest issue in my opinion if the combat in a fighting game doesn't feel good well then really what's the point at all now I will say over the course of my playr and especially considering that I now knew the full range of abilities available to me I kind of got into it a little bit by the end it's certainly not great but there is a rhyme and reason to everything the game somehow still has a flow even in spite of itself but I also think a big part of this comes down to the characters which is to say some are pretty strong and others are almost completely useless and from my experience nearly all of The Simpsons bar maybe Homer are really really bad and if you play it as any of these guys which you probably did well you're just making things harder for yourself let me tell you so this time around I opted to try out a poo and a practice game to get my seal legs so to speak and the sc. AO Circle attack is this wild flailing continuous attack which have done correctly absolutely wrecked opponents so uh yeah aoo seemed like the way to go now the game is split into three different circuits with the next one unlocking after you beat the previous one so we're going to begin the new Challenger circuit with a pooh and do keep in mind that this stage that I didn't really know about the damage potential of rope attacks so I never really used them all that much as simply spamming combo attacks abusing my special Circle ability and making sure I got as many items as I could before my opponent seemed to work out pretty well for me at least this was until I got to the seventh fight in the circuit which is a boss battle against Smithers and Mr Burns well it's mostly against Smits but L burnsy is outside the ring chucking nukes at you and uh yeah unsurprisingly these hurt quite a bit the game takes a significant jump in difficulty here but if you manage to hang H out near the bottom corner of the level you can avoid the nukes and the fight really isn't the worst thing in the world beyond that the only other notable fight in this circuit is the final battle against Kang which is consistently one of the easiest fights in the game due to how big this thing is and it also seems to have no way to defend from you spamming combos so there you go now after beating this circuit we did manage to unlock two new characters for our roster bumblebee man and the ever lovable Mo sylac and since MO will cause me quite a bit of hassle during our fight earlier I figured this would be a good guide to try out in the next circuit the defender circuit aka the bane of everybody's existence now this circuit is pretty Infamous among players of this game because not only does the opponent's AI rank up quite a bit in terms of difficulty basically preventing you from ever being able to get off a full combo to increase your top meter but the fights also just tend to be a little more hectic overall in other words if you don't know what you're doing things are about to get rather challenging quite quickly now Mo's moves for the most part aren't really all that good his combo is strong his projectile attack which is a flaming MO is quite useful since it covers a large patch on the ground but his Circle attack which is the spin around using the Old Reliable Plank with nail just does terrible damage so that's no good but it's here though in this circuit that we begin to understand the power of the mo Circle rope attack which might just be the single strongest move in this game well bar one but you'll see that in a moment this attack if you use it accurately and patiently absolutely demolishes most of the opponents in this game to the point where even new toer characters like Professor Frank won't know what hit him in the glaven it even makes the Smits fight a whole lot easier although it is still kind of a coin flip on how badly Mr Burns is going to you up but eventually with all that out of the way you're going to come across one of the most infamous characters in fighting game history Ned Flanders now Ned right I'm not going to lie kind of a bad character most of his moves and abilities you could classify as some of the very worst in the game Bad combos bad rope abilities bad Trolls bad jumping attacks you name it but none of that matters because Flanders Circle attack is one of the most broken moves ever put in a video game Flanders after a short prayer based cast time calls down lightning from above that not only follows you around the ring but it goes on for a very very long time essentially making you unable to fight during this period And if you get caught in it it quite literally evaporates your health to the point where one misplay during this move will likely cost you the entire round so in other words this guy is a nightmare to fight and I remember struggling over and over and over again to beat this guy back in the day it might have taken me maybe 10 or so tries until I eventually got him down for a single pin and I don't think I'll ever forget the first time that I pinned him wipe the sweat off my brow and thought wow I can't believe I've got to beat this guy in another round only for him to be resurrected by God with full health ready to go again you have to beat this not once not twice but four times it is one of the most things ever put in a video game and I personally think this is a major driver as to why this game is appearing in this video a character so in its design that it lingers in the memory of those who have played it for years to come and in retrospect I kind of appreciate it for just how insane and memorable it was even if it kind of made my life hell back in the day so going into this Infamous fight now armed with the brain of an adult ravaged by years of teenage drinking I was I was curious to see how this would go and yes almost immediately the lightning attack made my life hell but I did notice something critical here if I could stop the prayer animation from completing with say like a flaming moow or something this not only cancels the move but leaves Flanders with no energy left to do anything else and may I remind you the rest of Flanders moves are terrible so in other words we're now playing Operation never let this man pre and the rest of the time we're hitting him hard with M's rope attacks and if you can believe it I somehow managed to beat this on my very first attempt without dropping a single round I was quite literally speechless because this dude ruined my whole weekend as a kid and as if by Magic I had finally figured out his which really goes to show you the power of reading a manual and paying attention to damage numbers I guess but hey if it works it works after this we get to to quickly demolish Kang again and lo and behold it's time for the final stretch the champion circuit and since we've now also unlocked Frank and Flanders you better believe we're taking Flanders out for a spin not only because you have to pin them twice in around to defeat them and uh you know lightning but by selecting him it also means you won't fight against Flanders in the hardest tournament the game has to offer and yeah I think that's a smart decision all around now at this point I did kind of start to miss Mo and his powerful R attack since I really can't stress enough how bad most of flanders's move set is but seriously as soon as you learn that you've got to kick off every fight with the prayer lightning and just cross your fingers that the AI doesn't somehow cancel it you have more or less already won the fight in fact there were occasions where I would execute the move and then just put the controller down to see what would happen and more often than not it would immediately win me the fight with no extra input required other than just hitting the pin button when it was done it is absolutely insane and you know what also quite cathartic in its own way too after all these years of suffering and dealing with this attack it's nice to be on the utter side for once sure it does make the games difficulty non-existent but I'm not going to lie I think I kind of earned this one so we managed to beat the final tournament to Ren at the game and that unlocks us this bonus tournament which sadly is just a single fight but it does let us play as either itchy or scratchy which is actually pretty fun they're both very op and have some insane abilities but that's kind of exactly what you'd want from these guys so you do love to see it although personally I would have liked to play as worker and parasite but hey maybe that's just me so there you go in the end The Simpsons wrestling is a game that's still very flawed and I guess misleading if you were expecting a wrestling game but I don't know by the end I kind of warmed to the silliness and zaniness of it all it's not as broken as I originally thought it was and I do like that all the characters have a pretty wide range of moves that can make the game play kind of interesting and varied it's just you know the overall imbalance and lack of impact of the combat severely lets down any bright spots this game has and to me it is still by far the game's biggest issue for sure and another complaint that I often hear brought against this game is its presentation and Graphics which certainly is another rough one especially for a 2001 release the menus and characters dotted around the levels standing out as some of the worst offenders but with that being said I taught the selection of locations the Rings within them and the character models of the selectable Fighters really weren't all that bad if I'm being honest performance is a little inconsistent throughout although something I remember reading not too long ago is that a lot of this game's graphical issues actually relate to Fox requesting that they change and add a lot of things during development in particular these black outlines on the characters which I guess kind of help out a bit of cartoon flare to their look but this supposedly tanked the game's performance quite a bit so I'm not sure if this is entirely down to the development team or if it's just the usual publisher Network medling that often plagues most video games especially ones of the licensed variety but regardless I still think it looks okay and you can certainly tell the people making this game were pretty big Simpsons fan since a lot of phun cameos and callbacks make an appearance around the locations the Itchy and Scratchy level that takes place in the TV being a particular highlight I mean even pooie and disgruntled goat make an appearance and you got to respect disgruntled go right the sound is also pretty good to be fair the music is nothing outstanding but it is quite catchy and Suits the gameplay well in my opinion and most importantly of all the game is full of voice lines that were recorded by the original cast which is both amazing to see and to hear and I believe these lines were written by the devs themselves instead of the people making the show and I think it's a credit to Big Ape that most of these lines seem to fit right in with the characters and their personalities they are legit pretty funny at times so overall when it comes to sound I think they did a pretty good job in this department now there's a face and needed some makeup wrestling is a horrible and violent sport that glamorizes the infliction of pain upon your fellow man let us begin all right step back foolish Gladiator your strainings and gruntings are no match for my thinkings and Smithers you and Fel ninny stick your arm down the throat and rip out the heart you stous funker I like to think I'm a patient tolerant woman but right now I won't tolerate anything less than me winning I'm Homer a muncho man Simpson and I'm going to eat you alive with a will I wasn't the where the human body was capable of that ibly this is a million times better than boxing ow quit it ow quit [Music] it anyway that's the Simpsons wrestling and while it's clearly a game with a lot of problems and one that I probably don't feel like playing again anytime soon I really don't think this game is the Abomination that I once thought it was it's Scrappy it's silly it has no semblance of balance whatsoever and it's quite frankly a terrible wrestling game but it certainly got something going on beneath the bouncy ass combat I think if they had more development time tightened up the feeli and mechanics of the combat polished the presentation a bit and maybe removed wrestling from the title I think this could have been an all right game after all once again a lot of these issues often stem from a troubled or rushed development cycle and in this case it seems The Simpsons wrestling was yet another victim of this too and while anybody with Flanders flashbacks could easily consider this one of the worst games on the console I don't know after going through it again I've certainly had much worse times playing a video game on this platform let's just put it that way but as we mentioned this is the only Simpsons Game to make it to the console and thankfully from here on out the Simpsons did have a much better run of video games uh well at least as long as we don't talk about Simpson skateboarding which we won't but big a Productions would go on to make another fighting game based on a licensed property so why don't we go check that out real quick and uh oh yeah we might also need to jump up a console generation while we're looking at [Music] it well would you look at that we finally got a PS2 game on the channel and what a way to kick things off that's right nearly 2 years after the Simpsons wrestling which despite its bad critical reception sold a whole bunch of copies big a for back with MTV's celebrity de match on the PS2 now I haven't watched celebrity de match in quite some time and I'm sure a lot of it has age like milk but this was one of the top tier shows during my youth a gory clamation series about celebrities murdering one another in over-the-top gruesome ways it's kind of insane this thing even resisted but my God was entertaining so as is the law of licensed games it eventually got a PS2 entry and if you've played Simpsons wrestling and this game back to back you can certainly sense the DNA shared between them it's another wacky Arena fighter that takes place inside a ring only the wrestling elements are almost entirely gone instead it's just a series of insane looking moves that drain your opponents held before you eventually kill him with an even more insane looking move classic celebrity death match now most of the celebrities comprise of historical figures and '90s and naughty stars that notably appeared in the series and probably didn't mind Landing their likeness again for a little bit of cash now despite appearing on the PS2 the game feels notably lower budget in a lot of way the lack of music during fights and the graphics while certainly a big step above the PS1 era are pretty bad for a PS2 game and the performance once again ain't that hot either although the combat to its credit does feel a bit Tighter and more refined compared to the Simpsons wrestling and this is in spite of the game's significantly more insane attacks which are really the highlight of this thing well you know beyond Nick diamond and Johnny Gomez of course honestly this is just another standard licensed trash video game but if you liked Celebrity Death Match and can find it for cheap it really isn't the worst purchase you can make it plays fine and is just stupid enough to give you and some friends a fun couple of play sessions I'd say but of course that's not all because there was another Celebrity Death Match Game that came out a little bit after this one and conveniently did end up on the PS1 so why don't we go check that one out real [Music] quick launching a week after the PS2 version It's the PS1 version of celebrity death match and you may wonder why we didn't talk about this one first and that's because it wasn't made by big a Productions instead being developed by a team called koft and I got to say this here now this is a bad video game now I had some modest hopes for this after playing the PS2 version and then looking at the controls and this one and seeing that everything kind of lined up with what a standard wrestling game on the console would be but as soon as you get into the game play it is the stiffest most unresponsive that I have played in quite some time and I mean I've played Barbie Explorer watching back the footage here it doesn't even look all that bad but I really really can't stress enough enough how miserable it is to play this thing The Simpsons wrestling is Loosey Goosey as heck but I mean it's playable this on the other hand just feels like the game is fighting with you every step of the way and even after trying to put in a little bit of effort to get the controls down I just knew deep down inside that this wasn't a game I was going to be vibing with at all I guess it's probably to be expected of a 2003 budget PS1 tie into celebrity dep match but it somehow was even worse than I expected compared to this game Simpsons wrestling and the PS2 version of celebrity D match are a treat let me tell you and if you told me this game was one of the worst titles that the PlayStation has to offer I'd be very much inclined to agree with you so yeah now we know so with that out of the way it now leaves us with just one final game to talk about a game that I'm sure a lot of you are here for in the first place and a game that I've always been very interested in trying even in spite of its legendarily awful reputation and hey as the lcat says what could possibly go [Music] wrong well here it is the deao king of bad PlayStation games and the one you've all been waiting for it's bobsy 3D which made its way to the PlayStation in November of the year 1996 courtesy of a development team called identic now we've talked about a lot of games so far today but in the grand scheme of things all those other games you can kind of mix and match around a little bit there's certainly popular choices in worst games list as our testing is shown but I imagine if you ask a room full of 100 modly educated Gamers what the worst game on the PS1 is I'd say over 50% of them would say Bubsy 3D and I mean it's no surprise really bobsy is kind of being the the facto punching bag for the system ever since people started making PlayStation and bad game content on the internet and if you think about it in spite of many consoles having some Notorious bad video games you've got to be really special to be the de facto bad game on a console right like could you narrow down what the worst PS2 game is I can't what about the Super Nintendo or the Game Boy sure there's lots of bad games to choose from on those systems but the the facto worst nothing really comes to mind like Bubsy does for the PlayStation I think think the only other common examples that would be widely known is Superman 64 for the N64 or maybe Spirit of speed on the Dreamcast but even then both those consoles have a significantly smaller Library than the PlayStation has so in theory it should be easier to narrow down the worst video game for those consoles bobsy on the other hand is the worst out of a library of over 4,000 unique video games and I think that's what's always puzzled me about this game are are people sure this is really the worst cuz I mean I've played a lot of PlayStation games to completion probably a lot more than most people and I've still barely scratched the surface of what this consoles Library offers it's allowed me to play some really interesting and sometimes awful video games that have just faded from people's minds and I think in the case of Bubsy 3D we have a game that for many is an easy scapegoat for the title of worst it's a character who's known to be annoying and known to have bad video games it plays weird it looks weird and it came out after the likes of Mario 64 and crash biku which dazzled players with their amazing visuals and kind of helped solidify the blueprint for the entire genre whereas Bubsy 3D feels like a fever dream that was taped together with nothing more than a dream and some discount bungee cords now I'd like to stay for the record this is the first time that I've ever played Bubsy 3D my history with Bubsy actually goes all the way back to my childhood where I vividly remember renting a copy of Bubsy 2 on the Sega Mega Drive and really really not enjoying it my issue with this game is that it's a fastplace platformer with nonlinear levels and it's also the kind of game where if you move forward with intent but aren't aware of what's coming up you're likely going to be punished for it and while I know this game does have its fans and I've also seen people play this game quite well which I've discovered means you should never not be gliding it's still looks like it relies on some element of memorization and look more than reaction and to me that's not my idea of a fun 2D platformer I know some people might say the same thing about Sonic the Hedgehog but believe me something as simple as Rings Loop the loops and decent level design can just make a game work you know so to cut a long story short my bad experience with Bubsy turned me off ever trying the series again and I remember seeing Bubsy 3D in rental stores all the time as a kid but was just never never enticed to try it and then just kind of forgot about it until I got the internet and started seeing people making videos on top 10 list calling this the worst 3D platformer ever made and I mean yeah looking at how people play this game and also how this game looks it's pretty easy to see why right but over the years I've kind of felt pity for bobsy 3D in a way because a lot of the issues people seem to chastiser for I don't necessarily think are fair and a lot of them are also made in bad fate to a degree misrepresenting the facts to make both the game and the people who made it seem stupid I guess and before we dig into the actual review portion for this game I'd like to briefly talk a little bit about the reasons why bobsy 3D is the way it is now first off one of the most common critiques I see of this game from reviewers and content creators alike is that since it came out after Mario 64 and crash Bandu it's unforgivable for a 3D platformer to to both look and play like this when the competition looks and plays like this and while yes it's true this game did come out roughly 2 months after Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot in North America do any of you really believe that seeing these games in action would have allowed the developers to just very quickly fix the game and then that would just solve everything games take a long time to make and almost every aspect of the game's design is built to cater to a character's movement and abilities you don't just give loss analog control and suddenly Tomb Raider is magically a better game the entire game is designed around Lara controlling look she does people nowadays may not think this is good player movement because it doesn't conform to Modern standards but back then there were no standards all you had to do was just make sure your character had the abilities to meet the tasks ahead in a fun way and Tomb Raider is a good and well design game because it does just that Bubsy 3D's movement however is a well we'll get into it a little bit later but it's not very good let's just put it that way but regardless they've clearly had this movement style set in stone long before they even knew what Mario 64 or Crash Bandicoot was and funly enough one of the producers of Bubsy did come across Mario 64 in a trade show a few months before the game's release and immediately went into panic mode when he played it like they knew Bubsy was going to have a bad time but by then it was too late the game was near completion and the publisher Accolade wasn't going to give tic any more time they needed to get this game out and that was that so I guess that begs the question where did tic go wrong and more importantly how did they go wrong well one thing the developers at Tic opened up about years later is that they really had no experience when it came to making a video game in 3D their past titles included Columbo Mystery Adventures and crossw word games designed for the Apple Newton PDA of all things so needless to say this was a very inexperienced team working at a time when 3D gaming was still very very new in fact if you think about it what 3D Platformers did these guys have to pull inspiration from most of the early Platformers on the console were games like gex Johnny bazookatone LX and Rayman graphically impressive 2D Platformers and a genre that has countless inspiration to pull from 3D Platformers on the other hand pretty much none the only two standouts at least in the west were 95's jumping flash a complete anomaly that managed to nail 3D platforming from a first person perspective building upon their previous experience working on the shooter geograph seal which also featured similar controls and for whatever reason nobody ever attempted to copy the style of jumping flash so it's still quite unique in the platforming sphere even to this day and beyond that there was also a game called floating Runner quest for the seven crystals which did come out in January 96 in Japan but also unfortunately released quite close to Mario 64 in the west and uh critics also bashed this game comparing it to Mario 64 as well so I guess what I'm trying to say is that the crew at Tic a team making their very first three-dimensional game were also making one of the very first 3D Platformers ever at a time where no other titles in the genre really existed except for jumping Flash and floating Runner if you happen to import it from Japan and I suppose there's also this obscure French PC title called Alpha Waves which you could argue Bubsy probably takes the most inspiration from at least on a visual level so the fact Bubsy is the way it is well let's just say I'm not all that surprised really and in the case of games like Mario 64 and crash Bandu not only did these games have longer Dev Cycles than Bubsy 3D each of these games had staff with significant knowledge of the hardware that they were working on meaning they could really get the best best out of their games on a visual and performance level not to mention Mario 64 is like this Landmark achievement in video games pretty much setting the blueprint for nearly every 3D platformer to come as well as pioneering analog control in the genre which was a literal GameChanger from movement in a treaty space something that Sony wouldn't be able to achieve until a few controller revisions later although this was something that Crash Bandicoot was able to overcome thanks to its more limited design approach featuring narrow Corridor stall levels with a fixed perspective mixed in with more traditional 2D levels completely playing to the limitations of the PlayStation d-pad this design philosophy meant that Crash Bandicoot not only played well but it looked incredible for the time and felt like another genuine step forward in the genre both crush and Mario 64 are incredible achievements for their time but given the resources and people behind them they were absolutely set up for success Bubsy 3D on the other hand was not set up for success but they tried their best and in a lot of ways the design choices they made in this game while seemingly quite silly now weren't really bad ideas at the time for example the game's visuals which are full of flat unshaded polygons mixed with the odd few textured walls and objects running at a high resolution are probably one of the easiest critiques to troll at this game nowadays because let's be fair it looks completely alien next to pretty much every 3D platformer in existence but back in the early to mid '90s this high-res polygon heavy look was really quite popular and made for some fantastic and frankly iconic looking video games and the PS1 had its fair share of these titles too which featur some of my favorite visuals on the console so I don't think the idea of going for this style and creating a really colorful high-res platform was bad at least on paper anyway the big issue though is that their lack of experience on the dev side resulted in them botching the game's memory allocations to produce such visuals which meant the space to add much of anything else was there very limited and considering Bubsy 3D levels were also at the time the biggest ever seen in a platformer keep in mind Mario 64 didn't exist yet well this was turning out to be a pretty ambitious game one not the developers just weren't experienced enough to really bring to fruition and while the game certainly is high rares and the levels certainly are quite large you can quite clearly see that the game struggles quite a bit because of this now even with saying that I really don't hate the way this game looks it's an acquired taste for sure and in the panon of hres untextured polygon games it's certainly on the lower end of the scale but bobsy is such a bizarre colorful and unique looking video game a mess of shapes and objects that make you feel like you're not just on an alien planet but playing a video game from another world or something I'm not here to argue that this is good but like nothing else looks like Bubsy 3D and for people to say that this game has no vibe or aesthetic I've got news for you pal this is the vibe this is the aesthetic it's highres polygons abstract shapes and bright colors and you know what I kind of dig it sure it means a lot of the levels kind of share a similar aesthetic true out that makes them a little hard to remember stylistically on an individual level but the game as a whole has some bizarre and fascinating visuals that just make it feel like nothing else out there it kind of reminds me of an old Marvin the Martian cartoon or something just weird structures and platforms floating in the sky and I know some of you may ask why would you make a game that just features random floating platforms and Abstract shapes instead of you know trying to create a realistic world but like what's wrong with making something that just looks weird and out there it's a video game game after all if you can't be creative here especially in the wild west era of 3D gaming then when can you be and honestly in spite of how confusing this probably looks to navigate on first glance I rarely ever felt that the visuals got in the way of the level design like they're structured to these environments believe it or not and if you ever need to backtrack or explore off the beaten path it's really not that difficult to find your way around these levels well most of the time but we'll get there so yeah in but if the hate this game's visuals get I kind of grew to like this aesthetic by the end I wouldn't want to see it in every game and clearly they could have pulled it off a bit better with some more experience on the dev side but I do get what they were going for and it's certainly quite the vibe in the right places it's kind of like they combined the Save By the Bell opening with a highres Sci-Fi video game starring a cat a weird way to describe it but it's about as accurate as I can be although while the visuals are certainly an acquired taste the controls and player movement on the other hand are uh yeah not great the controls are kind of what you'd expect from an early PS1 game the d-pad makes you run forward and walk back as well as turn left and turn right it's you know platformer time controls from the mid99s I've played worse and I've played better unfortunately Bubsy does carry over some of the momentum from his 2D days while you're moving forward but this momentum is quite manageable once you get the hang of it there's no camera controls by the way so you'll need to get used to that quite quickly as well but you can hold down the L1 button to look around if you need to survey your surroundings which is something I would recommend doing quite often you can also use the shoulder buttons To Shimmy ever so slightly to the left and right for more precise jumps and speaking of jumps Bubsy sure does have one a nice little single jump that positions the camera above Bubsy so you can see where he is about to land which funly enough is the exact same way jumping flash did it and while this isn't exactly a bad idea to adapt over to a third person game the big issue is that in jumping flash this is facilitated through a triple jump system where your first jump is normal your second one points the camera towards the ground and your third jump allows you to carefully maneuver yourself while in the air quite generous for platforming but it feels really great in motion Bubsy on the other hand he has one jump and that immediately changes your camera angle towards the ground it's quite flawed for sure and I think the biggest issue with it is that it prevents you from seeing what's around you while you're platforming which is uh quite important actually and this whole system in place I think would have been better suited to at least a double jump in my opinion but in saying that it does work a bit better than you'd probably think and this is mostly thanks to Bubsy having a pretty generous ledge grab but if you do get used to this game's jumping the platforming here is surprisingly consistent certainly a lot better than some games we've looked at today BBs other ability and one of his trademark moves taken from his older games is his ability to Glide by pressing the triangle button now this Glide doesn't really work like you'd expect it to which is to say if you want to Glide you can't do it from a jump pressing triangle actually makes you jump and then you start gliding although the fallback from this is that a Glide jump gives you less height than a regular jump but of course you will move a little further horizontally although the distance is usually quite minimal so I rarely ever use gliding for reversing platforms really the main usage of bbs's Glide ability is to float on top of fans and various other gust of winds to carry him higher a mechanic which will appear frequently tread the game it's a little weird to get used to at first but once you've got it down it is also surprisingly consistent in action and lastly bubsy's only order ability is to fire atoms at things atoms are the main collectible of this game and you're going to see them all over the place collecting 50 of them will heal bubsy's hit points a little of which he usually has four one for each toone is PA I suppose and naturally if you collect 100 you'll get yourself an extra life but instead of collecting atoms you could also be using them to kill enemies if you run into an atom while holding Square bobsy will then charge it up and once you let go of it you'll fire in the direction that you're aiming although if you do hold on to an atom too long it will explode and damage you which is generally the one thing you don't want to happen atoms are good for killing enemies from a distance as well as netting you extra points if you shoot them into other atoms which will create a fun little Point chain what are the points for uh bragging rights I guess I mean games just had points back then right but I at least like that there's a little technique here that you're going to have to exploit properly if you want to be a high score Challenger of Bubsy and I'm sure at least one of you out there is an expert at it although you may want to hold up because some atoms are of Greater importance than others as these atoms are also the key to unlocking some secret Areas now when the game first showed me this I thought it was taking the piss because you literally fire an atom into a random texture and then a whole Mountain just collapses to reveal a brand new area how on Earth are you supposed to spot these I thought but luckily in spite of the game's visuals it is in fact quite easy to tell where you're supposed to use this technique even if in one of the levels I just ended up glitching myself over a wall using my sick Bobcat jumping abilities because I already collected the item I needed to open it but hey whatever works you know there's also a few other items you'll come across and your travels like a battery that more or less works the same as a Mario star and there's also a pickup that lets you shoot Adams at will even if there's none around and this one becomes pretty important for some of the game's trickier sections so if you ever come across this thing just assume you're going to need it for something so now that we know the controls and quirks of bubsy's movement what is the goal of this game so to speak well story-wise Bubsy has been kidna by the woes after their last invasion of Earth and upon bringing him back to their home planet of rayon their ship malfunctions and releases bobsy to cause Havoc all across the planet bbs's goal in each level is to just simply make it to the end goal but bobsy can also go out of his way to find hidden rocket pieces that are dotted across the levels and this will allow you to build a rocket and then escape the planet so in other words beat the levels without collecting the rocket ship parts you're going to get the bad ending complete the levels with all the rocket Parts you get the good ending now naturally since you get something worthwhile if you're collecting these things and honestly I find you'll get the most set of this game's levels if you do seek a out we're going to aim for 100% of the rocket Parts each level usually has two rocket parts to collect and often the challenge of these levels at least for me anyway was figuring out how to get these two rocket Parts they're often hidden away behind secret doors maybe somewhere off the beaten path behind a little platforming challenge or maybe they'll require you to succeed at a weird little mini game they're not objects that you're going to stumble across by chance you're going to have to work to get these things and believe me in some levels you'll be working pretty hard most levels usually contain hints in the form of these o telescopes that show you the general direction of where they are but the challenge isn't really knowing their locations more so knowing the things you need to do in order to get there and honestly some of this stuff is pretty fun and interesting level design some of it is also not very fun or interesting level design but I did often feel quite pleased with myself whenever I managed to find these things as the solutions aren't always that obvious and do require you to think outside of the box or explore each area quite thoroughly which I quite like in my more open-ended Platformers and believe it or not Boby also features underwater levels which add even more mechanics into the mix now I know what you're thinking right tank controls early 3D platformer Bubsy 3D underwater level that's a a recipe for disaster right well Against All Odds I'd say the underwater sections of Bubsy 3D aren't just the best controlling parts of the game the control in general is just pretty good by which I mean everything behaves like you'd expect there's individual buttons to control your vertical movement and that whole momentum thing from earlier is now also gone so uh yeah it's actually pretty good you can still fire Adams while underwater which is quite handy but you also get a new attack that allows you to dash into enemies by using up some of the oxygen in your helmet oh yeah Bubsy has a little scuba helmet here that lets him breathe underwat you uh might wonder where he found this on an alien planet but if you're thinking about that sort of stuff while playing Bubsy 3D it's time to stop you can refill your air by collecting these little oxygen tanks that are dotted around the levels and while your oxygen will last quite a while of swimming around normally it drains very quickly when using your dash attack and you're probably going to need to use this Dash attack quite a bit so you better make the most of it Beyond this the only other standout levels are the boss battles which are also surprisingly not that bad well except for the final boss but we'll get to that in a bit including the final boss there's four fights in total with the first two bosses getting their own dedicated level these fights are very basic 3D platformer boss stuff as you'd expect but they do work well enough the first fight is against The Woolly Bully who attacks you from above while riding his little portable disco dance floor and I've seen people say that fighting this boss is really confusing that the game doesn't convey the solution to beating it very well but let's just use our brains for a minute here the bully is up high too high for us to reach via a jump there's also no atoms in the arena meaning we don't have any way to shoot projectiles atams so without jumping on atoms what's the only order ability bobsy has left maybe an ability that we've used quite a bit by this point an ability that lets us reach high Platforms in the air why yes it's the Glide of course and since this boss keeps leaving these little glowy blobs on the ground from his attacks I wonder what happens if we Glide over them ah yes we fly up in the air now able to attack the boss rinse and repeat until it's defeated now I can understand that the blobs don't necessarily convey they'll act as a gust of wind maybe some wind effect or washing noises would have made it more obvious but Bubsy has like two abilities he can use here and I can't imagine anybody wouldn't put two and two together and at least try to Glide over the only thing that's appearing in the arena it's classic PlayStation design if you don't know the solution to something just try everything until something works and at least with this game you've only got two buttons to use so even if you're a little bit dumb you're bound to figure it out eventually right now the second boss The Woolly mammit is even more straightforward although somehow also more confusing in this fight you're in an arena with electrified walls and the mammoth attacks by charging at you I wonder what you've got to do also the woolies in the audience are occasionally throwing a banana peels which also makes the mammoth have an even worse time would you believe now the issue that I had here was that I wasn't really sure if I was damaging the mammoth as there's no real indication that the mammoth hitting the wall is actually doing any damage and since the last boss died quite quickly after just three hits and this one seemed to be fine after taking multiple wall hits I thought I was maybe missing something but worry not you just got to do it a whole bunch of times and then the mammo will eventually phase out of the arena and you win lovely stuff now the reason I wanted to highlight all of this stuff first is because I want you to understand that even with bubsy's overt issues there is a confidently put together game here the levels mostly make sense and there's good reason to explore as you're awarded quite a bit for experimenting with your environment and going off the beaten path the controls are certainly not great but it is one of those games that you can learn to adapt to and even get kind of good at like one of the weird quirks of bubsy's jump is that he has crazy horizontal movement while up in the air it makes no sense whatsoever but if you figure this out and can use it to your advantage it greatly increases your movement options throughout the game it's weird awkward and very strange but Bubsy is a surprisingly playable game and dare I say even enjoyable at times like for an early attempt at a 3D platformer from a relatively inexperienced Dev team they got a lot more right here than you'd probably expect and I really don't think that gets highlighted enough but even still I can't sit here and tell you both 3D is a good game because it really isn't it definitely does some stuff right but even if you were to forgive it for being an early attempt at a trdy platformer there's plenty of annoying and frustrating aspects to the game's design that just overshadows things a bit too frequently especially as you move into the games later levels for one the enemies in this game are incredibly annoying to deal with early on the majority of the enemies will be these basic woolies that you can jump onto the the fee or use some atoms of course now these aren't really too annoying but quite quickly you'll learn that the hit detection in this game is not great as you're learning to manage the distance of your jumps which does take a little while to get down you'll realize if you land anywhere slightly off on your jumps you're going to take damage from an enemy and this also locks you into a short animation which while not that long does add that little bit of additional pain into getting hit now once you start adding flying enemies into the mix things get a little bit worse and when the game starts adding projectile enemies into the mix it gets a little bit worse again and then when the game gives you flying enemies that fire projectiles at you it gets quite worse and by the end of the game levels are filled with so many of these enemies just firing random at you from every conceivable angle and when the only way to avoid them is by jumping around and when the jumping locks your camera to a top down angle well as you can see it's insane the underwater enemies are also incredibly annoying too and probably the most dangerous in the game hence why I said you should hang on to your dash attacks because getting rid of these Lads is mandatory if you want your sanity intact I learned to gel with this game's platforming I liked its little puzzles and I like the exploration but I hated dealing with the enemies in this game if I could ever avoid them I most certainly would but by the end of the game they get so plentiful and hard to deal with that it just makes these already very hard levels an absolute nightmare to get through it's quite lucky this game gives you a ton of Lies if you bother to explore the levels Because by the end of this game they're going to drain quite fast no matter how good a horizontal jumper you are another issue relating to the hit detection is this strange thing that happens when you land on a platform sometimes basically if you land a little bit too close to the edge you might just activate a falling animation and die immediately it looks pretty awkward and seems kind of like like a glitch right but I figured out it only ever happens if you're above a bottomless pit or body of water and we're going to fall off the platform anyway now you might think that there's still time to maneuver in the air right but unfortunately you can only move in the air while you're in the jumping animation and when you land You' technically just left it so there's actually no way for you to survive and you just kind of die like I understand it but the way it happens is so weird on a visual level that I'd prefer if they just drop me down and let me die normally so it left no doubt in my mind as to what happened but uh yeah long story short make sure to try avoid the edges of platforms when you're landing on them because you never know when shit's just going to go wrong and while I enjoyed a lot of the earlier levels of this game to some degree the final row of levels on the level select screen oh these you'll get introduced to multiple levels that require you to ride these spaceships to get around and these levels are very large and have many many directions that you can go it was the first time that I felt genuinely lost in a level and trying to navigate around these things and also find the rocket pieces especially was a very very bad time and when the game presents you with a few more of these levels but then Ops the difficulty even further with tons of crazy enemies and difficult platforming sections it becomes an ordeal to say to least if you're not solving crazy puzzles playing Simon Says and riding weird robotic spiders around a level fraying to find a rocket piece you haven't lived late game bobsy 3D let me tell you the last level in particular is almost hilarious and how incredibly it is it introduces these new turret enemies that litter a big maze that you've got to navigate through and since the only way to really avoid them is by jumping you can't really tell what's ahead of you or where you even need to go but no matter where that is the answer is always pain there's also some mystery walls that teleport you backwards in the level tiny woolly that you can't hurt but they most certainly can hurt you and oh yeah you've also got to navigate through the maze backwards if you want to get the two rocket pieces it's absolutely but at least you can't say it's not a fitting final level there's even a few bosses in this level as well you've got Clifford the big red woolly which is just a simple platforming challenge really nothing too difficult here but the final boss is a two versus one fight against the woolly Queens Polly and Esther which is actually a pretty cute name for the two of in this fight you've got to avoid projectiles from both of them while also focusing on releasing atoms using this switch and then you've got to line up the atoms to hit the bosses while standing still and crossing your fingers and hoping you don't get hit in the process it is not very fun it is most certainly doable but it is not very fun by the way just in case you care about the ending to Bubsy 3D this is your spoiler warning I guess but the bad ending if you don't collect all the Rockets sees Bubsy try to escape but then get stranded in space which is uh quite Grim actually but the good ending sees bobsy escape the woly planet in his newly formed rocket only for him to enter a wormhole which then brings him back to prehistoric times where he is now trapped With The Dinosaurs also a pretty bad ending in my opinion but at the very least it sets it up for the sequel which Accolade had planned but never came to fruition because this thing didn't sell very well and there you go that's the end of that chapter now one thing I'm yet to highlight about Bubsy that's probably pretty important is the game sound particularly its music and uh bobsy himself because this stuff is also a Hot Topic when it comes to the quality of the game and this part in particular I think people are being quite hard on the music in this game really comes across like it's aiming for an old school cartoon Vibe mixed with a little bit of sci-fi which I can definitely sense all throughout its soundtrack it's just the issue is a lot of the game's instruments and sounds are quite odd and sometimes come off a little bit harsh in the mix which I can definitely see being a little unpleasant to some listeners ears there's this one sound in particular that they use throughout the entire game that's almost like the game's signature sound effect and I can only describe it as the sound that somebody makes while they're walking in wet [Music] shoes yeah not my favorite to say the least but to my surprise a lot of the levels in this game have some really catchy Tunes with interesting compositions and some really high quality production and even in spite of the odd instruments and sounds from time to time the music ended up being quite the highlight of this game and I don't know just added a little something to the strange and surreal environments Chell have a listen and hear for yourself [Music] [Music] n [Music] a [Music] [Music] yeah [Music] but the thing I ended up liking the most out of anything in this game and this I really didn't expect was Bubsy okay so stick with me here I legitimately thought Bubsy was kind of funny in this game not only does he not talk anywhere near as much as people seem to say he does I got a genuine laugh out of many things that he did say look a Maron convention it's kind of hard to explain but bubsy's character in this game is basically a combination of stereotypical New Yorker a little Bostonian an old timey Chicago guy but he's also a stupid cat Okay so the first level is kind of the exception in this game and I imagine this is where people get the whole he's talking all the time thing from because in place of a tutorial Boby gives you some basic guidance at certain points in the level you know climb the platforms look out for extra lives use the atoms don't fall in the water Etc but like none of this is annoying or even that cringe it's just stuff you kind of need to know and considering this 3D platformer St Stu is basically brand new it's not exactly a bad way to teach your players you want to be a video game Star for starters grab all the items you see there's plenty of them in each level and if you get enough of them you'll be in for some surprises now what would a platform game be with them platforms H I wonder if there's any extra lives up there see that thing in front of you that's a switch just run into it make something cool happen woohoo now if you lose a busy you'll start over here instead of at the beginning of the level ay life Grand Beyond this level though Bubsy doesn't even really talk all that much in game he might try out the occasional equipment defeating an enemy or collecting an item but there's a surprisingly deep pool of things he can say and considering the large gaps between him talking I never felt or noticed him repeating stuff often if at all like the idea of him killing an enemy and then saying I'm walking here in a New York accent or like calling an enemy an old timey insult like chowderhead or maroon or him taking damage and then complaining that he doesn't have health insurance I don't know man that's kind of funny to me woo what a rush give me my attorney K this guy gives stupid a bad name stupid Stampede I'm walking in here you did read the instructions didn't you what's the number for 911 some got to get a new Wes oh I don't have health care I think a lot of it does come down to how you feel about bubsy's voice itself but like I kind of liked it by the end if anything I wanted him to talk more and if you compare this to the onslaught of repetitive voice lines in s Park or even a game like gex where the dude is firing quips at you from every conceivable angle bobsy is nowhere near that level and hey even if you do hate his voice you can very easily turn it off in the options if you like I get the feeling this specific issue is directly from people who play the first level and then turn the game off which is like fair enough but I think of all the issues this game has Boby the Bobcat is actually one of its brighter spots I mean I love seeing him pop up in these amazing level intro cards that feature fun little puns and strange pre-rendered pictures I especially love the escape from wle one that has snake pliskin Bubsy which is without a doubt the greatest Bubsy of them all the game even has these funny cutscenes at the end of each level that play out like an old cartoon short with no dialogue and only a bit of old timey music and they feel like a nice throwback to classic cartoons with how zany and off-the-wall they can be and also the fact that bobsy is pretty much straight up being murdered in most of them and speaking of murder there's also a bunch of death animations which I think are really well done it's probably going to be be annoying seeing them quite a lot if you do end up dying in a way but they are certainly quite Charming all the same like I don't know this is a bad game right but at the end of the day I really didn't hate it it's got tons of problems it's often very frustrating but I just can't hate it I like the way it looks I think the level design often ain't too bad I think it's very ambitious I think the music is pretty nice and you know what I even like Bubsy I thought he was kind of fun it's a game that I don't think I'll ever want to play again but I am glad that I played it and when all is said and done this is a better attempt at creating an early 3D platformer then I think anybody will give them credit for and it's not a case that Mario 64 makes this game look in comparison even though it kind of does I think it more goes to show how incredible Nintendo are at making video games that with the right support resources and experience people can make absolutely incredible video games that are so revolutionary and get so much right that the entire genre just becomes better because of it so many 3D Platformers of this era and Beyond are good because Mario 64 showed them the blueprint Bubsy 3D never had this blueprint and thanks to that we have a 3D platformer that looks and plays like no other not many 3D Platformers can say that they weren't influenced by Mario 64 in some way but this one can and to me that makes it a game that's too too interesting not to be appreciated in some way a bad game yeah absolutely but the worst on the PlayStation nah not even close I mean even if you look at the game's review scores at the time it reviewed pretty well I know people seem to think a lot of these are fake or paid for or something but I really think if you played this back in '96 without trying Mario 64 and had nothing else to compare it to it would be quite decent by the standard of its time it's just people tend to look back at these games to a modern lens and even if you look at the gaming landscape a year later in 1997 it was completely different than it was just a year before and it really goes to show you that even if you're just a few months late to the party it can earn you a lifetime of ridicule so that begs the question what happened to the developers tic I mean you think a flop like Bubsy 3D would have been the end of the franchise and the studio who made it but back then you could make a bad game and not get sent dead trats on the regular so even though future bobsy games were cancelled and Accolade no longer worked the TIC they did get to work on a brand new IP but this time they had none other than Sony themselves to help him out a little [Music] bit God I love this game yes that's right nearly 2 and 1 half years after Bubsy 3D tic would work together with son's first party 989 Studios to make one of the console's most iconic series cphon filter and look I'm not really going to delve too much into this game I feel like a lot of you already know that this game is good and has a very important place in PlayStation history those PSP games in particular are chef's kiss but it goes to show that with a bit of time experience and support even a team that's capable of making the supposed worst game on the console might just be capable of making one of its biggest hits and I mean tic are still going strong today you might know them as Ben Studios nowadays most recently responsible for days gone which I know quite a lot of people really enjoy so next time you're mowing down hordes of zombies on your motorbike just remember bobsy paved the road for us to get here in his own weird little way good for him well that was a look at five of the worst PS1 games ever made at least according to a spreadsheet I made that Chronicles the opinions of algorithm friendly content on the internet I guess the video does sound pretty stupid if you label it like that so what was the goal of today's video was it to prove that these games weren't in fact that bad that there's apparently way worse games out there that we should be dunking on instead that Bubsy the Bobcat is completely misunderstood and Barbie is in fact the real villain of today's video who even knows anymore but I think I did learn a lot by playing these games that sometimes even bad games can still hold a lot of value whether it's just thanks to Nostalgia some company game mechanics weird visuals or maybe just punching a dude until he gets smaller that a lot of these games probably just end up in these lists cuz they're licensed games based on incredibly popular properties that just happen to sell a whole bunch of copies and might have just been the worst games in most kids collections even if they didn't really have all that many games at all that most of these games were just victims of a rushed and troubled development cycle and were hampered by publisher and executive medling something that still plagues games today and probably always will but I think no matter how you feel about these games each one at least has an interesting story to tell I can't really recommend any of them and I guarantee they won't be most people's cop of tea but I'm here to tell you if you do like these games and enjoy them for what they are there's absolutely nothing wrong with that and honestly all the more par it I mean even a game like Barbie Explorer which I legitimately think is one of the worst games on the console if you check out the comments under long plays of this game you will find countless people talking about how much they loved playing this thing how many good memories it brings back to them how they overcame the controls and felt proud for making it further each time they played I mean at the end of the day that's the stuff that really counts right who gives a if a game is good or bad as long as it makes you happy as for my own opinions I still think there is much worse out there than the games that we've looked at today and if you want to find out more about my personal top five worst PS1 games them being Tonga dreams is no good The Raven project and ubic I will leave a link to my reviews of each in the video description so if you want to see what constitutes being the worst in my eyes at least feel free to check out those videos later or better yet just try the games for yourself like I said the only way to really know a game is to play it yourself and trust me that's a much better way of doing things than just getting your opinions from random white dudes on the internet don't be fooled by the bookshelves behind them they may be full of games but their heads are empty but I think when you consider just how many games the PS1 has across all its regions it's almost impossible to narrow down the worst game on this console right I mean my top five worst games I only stumbled upon because I make a stupid internet show about weird games how many more bad games could be out there I could be doing this for years and still not really know and I know this video is focused on bad games but the same is true for good games too we all know the popular games the icons the trend setters but how much out there is still left to find plenty as it turns out sometimes you might stumble upon one of the worst games you've ever played but the next you're coming across an all-time favorite that you can't believe you've spent most of your life missing out on and that's why I love doing this I said at the beginning of the video I love good video games but I also love bad video games I think I'm just a video game guy right like I don't really think too hard about a game when I boot it up for the first time I'm just excited to see what Journey it's going to take me on sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad and sometimes it's Mortal Kombat Special Forces but it's always something different and I think if you let labels like worse than best affect the games that you choose to play you might just miss out on something in the middle that's perfect for you so above all else just trust in your own taste no matter how weird they may be I never let anybody tell you otherwise because when it comes to video games it's never black and white unless it is in fact black and white or black and white too anyway that's the end of the video so I'd like to give a huge thank you to my very patient and lovely patrons who help make videos like this possible including fine folk like Alan castlin bloody Cassie celo Crimson cyclist Danny Dave Nolan discon the mascot for the famicom disc system Doma Globe 99 Kyle winter Mr Papa M and biscuit trans rights are human rights Mr de joshon Nathan McMullen Richard Kramer SN kierstead and the lovely Spectre 117 who have all subscribed at the fan Plus+ tier and finally I'd like to give a special thank you to you the viewer wherever you are for watching this video where do you hated it or enjoyed it I appreciate you for giving me and bobsy the Bobcat your time I'm sure there's better ways to spend 2 and 1/2 hours but hey look at us we made it here together I'll be back real soon with some more more PlayStation content something that's hopefully a little bit shorter and features some better games but until then take care of yourselves and I'll talk to you again real soon see [Music] you oh

Channel: Sean Seanson

Views: 173,445

Keywords: sean seanson, obscure ps1 games, obscure playstation games, worst ps1 games, worst playstation games, top 10 playstation games, top 10 worst playstation games, top 10 ps1 games, top 10 worst ps1 games, worst ps1 games ranking, bad ps1 games, bad playstation games, bubsy 3d, barbie explorer, simpsons wrestling, mortal kombat special forces, worst psx games, bad psx games, top 10 bad ps1 games, ps1 games ranking, ps1 games list, ps1 games review, ps1 review, ps1, ps1 games

Id: 57iJN3KkwGQ

Length: 158min 17sec (9497 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2023