Top 10 Worst Launch Games of All Time

Games Lists Console Gaming
Top 10 Worst Launch Games of All Time

Console launches are an exciting time. The previous generations has practically reached it’s apex in terms of the graphical capability and we’re all waiting to see what games will look or play like from now on. And then the games come out and some are good or even great! On the other hand, some are digital trash fires pressed into a disc and sold to consumers who are just hoping for the best. Yesterday we discussed the twenty best launch titles to ever debut with a console. So today, let’s take a look back on the worst of the worst game abominations that launched with our favorite consoles.

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10. Marky Mark/INXS/Kris Kross: Make My Video (Sega CD)

Not so much a game as much as visual feed of nonsense, the game tasked you with “editing” three different videos from the music groups. Each game “level,” for lack of a better term, would evaluate your editing skills. Nonsensical and horrible by 1992 standards, the games were a critical and commercial failure.


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9. Street Fighter: The Movie (PlayStation)

Based on the 1994 movie that was a cinematic embarrassment, they continued the trend in the field of videogames. Awkward character voices, numerous instances of slowdown, and it wasn’t even a port of the arcade version but a terrible port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, this game much like the movie continues to be forgotten.


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8. Blue Stinger (Dreamcast)

If I told you about a survival horror game that takes on “Dinosaur Island” you would probably think I was talking about Dino Crisis. And you would be wrong! Blue Stinger was a bizarre game about a meteor, Nephilim, monsters, a virus that caused mutations, and the weeniest horror protagonist. The only good thing to come from the game was one of the playable characters named Dogs. Dogs Bower.


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7. Shrek (Xbox)

Facing off against other launch titles like Halo, Dead or Alive 3, and Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, Shrek was a bland platformer movie tie-in games that wasn’t even based on the movie but a semi-sequel.


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6. Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (PS3)

Giant humanoid machines going head to head on the battlefield sounds like a winning proposition for a videogame but Crossfire was a technical mess front to back. Ugly, drab, and packed to the gills with bugs, it was quickly lost in the deluge of many other Gundam games to come out.


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5. Game Party Champions (Wii U)

The original Wii had a plague of bad minigame collections. The console had so many that you could take all of the cases and build an entire town’s worth of houses with them. The Wii U was no different and it all started with Game Party Champions. A bland name for a bad party game, everything was controlled using the Wii U gamepad and didn’t take advantage of the Wii remote.


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4. Knack (PS4)

I wanted to like Knack, I really did. But between the annoying characters, nonsense story, and far too linear gameplay, it was next to impossible. All of the advertising showed Knack growing to various sizes from small to gigantic but the game only allowed that in certain points. It looked nice but gameplay-wise brought nothing to the 3D platformer table.


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3. Angry Birds Star Wars (PS4/Xbox One)

There’s nothing wrong with Angry Birds. It’s a fun game about launching birds at pigs. And it’s free to play on mobile devices! So tell me why this version was the exact same version as the iOS and Android versions but cost $60 and was a launch title for two major consoles?


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2. Call of Duty: Ghosts (PS4)

The Call of Duty series has always been good for average to great quality games, Black Ops 2 is one of my favorite first person shooters of all time. So when Ghosts was released, I was excited! It was the first Call of Duty for new consoles. What I got was frustration-inducing characters, bad plot twists, villains who had no real motivation (South America banded together to fight the US with a space laser for some reason?), and a mediocre multiplayer with none of the excitement of the previous entries.


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1. Fighter Within (Xbox One)

The original Kinect for the Xbox 360 had so much promise but required so much to make it work. The right amount of space, the right amount of lighting, and it wasn’t a cheap peripheral. So when the Xbox One was announced to have an improved Kinect packed in, it was something to look forward to. But again, it had the same problems. And games like Fighter Within did nothing to improve the Kinect’s image. A 2.5D fighting game where you as the controller faced the camera, the moves weren’t always easy to do and the game sometimes just didn’t track where you were. A sad salute to what could have been.


Terence Wiggins is the co-host of the podcast Whatever We Call It, the creator of the videogame online zine We <3 Video Games, the cookie wizard behind The Black Nerd’s Baked Goods, and the Internet’s best friend. He’s on Twitter @TheBlackNerd.

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