Brad Hates Games

When Batman Forever was released, a big deal was made about the graphics. They were going to use some cutting edge technology, and were supposed to be THE BESTEST MOST AWESOMEST GRAPHICS EVER. This game came out only a few months before the release of the Playstation, but the graphics in this were going to kick so much ass that you’d forget all about that next-gen system.

Now we could sit here and make all the tired arguments you always hear from gaming purists about how graphics don’t matter, and gameplay is the only important thing, blah, blah, blah.. But it all seems like a moot point when the graphics look like this:

If that represents the developer’s best effort toward the one aspect of the game that was given the most attention, you can probably imagine how the rest of the game turned out. It hardly even requires discussion. But for what its worth, Batman Forever is a crappy side-scroller with erratic control. And most of Batman’s moves were taken directly from Mortal Kombat, which just happened to have been made by the same development team.

In other words, it’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from a game based on a mediocre movie and published by Acclaim.

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If a large group of bad game ideas were to get together and have an orgy without using any birth control, Cyber-Cop would be the unplanned, yet completely predictable, result. It’s not enough that it’s a first-person shooter (which was already more than the Genesis could handle competently), but its an unnecessarily complex one, with an inventory, and equipment upgrades and other nonsense to worry about. The result is an ugly, hard to control game with a nightmare interface and some pretty generic gameplay.

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Not every elimination requires a great deal of explanation. Some games have a single, fatal flaw that disqualifies them from making the Top 100. Others are completely terrible in every possible way, and to write about them at length would result in little more than simply republishing the thesaurus entry for “horrible”. There are also games that are bad in not-very-interesting ways. And sometimes we’re just feeling kind of lazy. For all of these situations, we have these single sentence eliminations. Every Wednesday, we’ll do ten. Today, the following games get crossed off the list:

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Before we can discuss Bible Adventures, I need to explain to you exactly how we’re doing this project. Stryker used to own a used game store. He doesn’t anymore because, I swear to God, 90% of the people who came in were there to sell their old games and use the money to buy crystal meth down at the bus stop. This wasn’t very good for business, but the upside was that Stryker managed to amass a pretty impressive personal collection of NES and Genesis games. This collection provides us with approximately three quarters of the games on our list. However, Bible Adventures was not amongst them. Stryker had never even heard about a Genesis version of Bible Adventures.

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In 1992, Electronic Arts decided to make a pinball game for the Genesis about Motley Crue. You might want to stop for a minute and repeat that to yourself so you have a chance to fully let that sink in. Let me tell you something – people don’t come up with that idea on their own. A concept like that has to either be the result of a computer combining bad ideas at random, or else it’s the born out of some kind of unexpected accident, like those old Reese’s Cups commercials where the chocolate bar mistakenly ends up in the peanut butter. Except in this case, the peanut butter is horrible gameplay and the chocolate is Motley Crue. These days EA has a reputation for being a publisher focused almost exclusively on the mass-market, which only makes it all the more strange that they would intentionally try to create a game absolutely no one would ever want to buy. To fully understand this, we need to examine what the company used to be like in the Genesis’ heyday.

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Today is the lightning round, where we’ll trim down the list with a lot of blanket eliminations and quick judgments. I know that probably doesn’t it make sound like we’re being completely fair or putting much time and thought into our choices. That’s because we’re not right now. But don’t worry – none of the games getting eliminated today ever really had a chance in hell of cracking the Top 100. Think of today as another housecleaning day – we’re just taking out the trash.

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Back in the Genesis era, Electronic Arts would release a new version of its more popular sports games every year. Years later, this leaves us in an interesting philosophical question – if you could only have 100 Genesis games, how many of them would be different versions of Madden? Depending on how much you like football, your answer should be either one or zero. The same principle applies to pretty much all the other sports that EA made a new game for every year – hockey, baseball, basketball, and soccer. Therefore, we’re going to just lump them all together as one series per sport. After many cases of Miester-Brau and some bare-knuckle boxing amongst the staff, we decided our favorites were Madden, NHL, FIFA, their various NBA series, and Triple Play/Tony Larussa.  We also decided to keep PGA European Tour but get rid of the other gold games. Therefore, go ahead and say goodbye to EA Sports’ also-ran games:

Bill Walsh College Football

Bill Walsh College Football ‘95

College Football USA ’96

College Football USA ’97

PGA Tour Golf

PGA Tour Golf 2

PGA Tour Golf 3

PGA Tour Golf ’96

Of course, EA wasn’t the only company putting out sports games. A lot of other publishers released sports titles in the hopes of coming out with an even better product than Electronic Art’s offering and wrestling away some of their market dominance. At least that’s what they claimed. Since almost all of these games were cheaply produced knock-offs of the EA versions, it seems more likely that the companies that made them were really just hoping that some kid’s parents would get confused and accidentally buy the wrong football game. Well sorry, other sports games, if your entire legacy is ripping off a more successful franchise and making children sad on Christmas, then you can’t have a Seal of Approval. Therefore, we are eliminating the following games:

Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf

AWS Pro Moves Soccer

Brett Hull Hockey ’95

Cal Ripken Junior Baseball

Champions World Class Soccer

Chi Chi’s Pro Challenge

Coach K College Basketball

College Football’s National Championship

College Football’s National Championship II

David Robinson’s Supreme Court

Dick Vitale’s “Awesome, Baby!” College Basketball

Double Dribble The Playoff Edition

ESPN Baseball Tonight

ESPN National Hockey Night

ESPN Sunday Night NFL

Frank Thomas’ Big Hurt Baseball

Hardball

Hardball 3

Hardball ’94

Hardball ’95

Head-On Soccer

Jack Nicklaus Golf

Joe Montana II: Sports Talk Football

Joe Montana Sportstalk Football ’94

Mario Lemieux Hockey

Mike Ditka Power Football

MLBPA Sports Talk Baseball

NBA Action ’94

NBA Action ’95

NBA Action ’96

NBA All Star Challenge

NBA Showdown ’94

NCAA Final Four Basketball

NCAA Football

NFL Prime Time ’97

NFL Prime Time ’98

NFL Quarterback Club

NFL Quarterback Club ’96

NFL Sports Talk Football ’93 Starring Joe Montana

NFL Sports Talk Football ’94 Starring Joe Montana

NFL Sports Talk Football ’95 Starring Joe Montana

NHL All-Star Hockey ’95

Pat Riley Basketball

Pebble Beach Golf

Pele 2 World Tournament

Pelé!

Pete Sampras Tennis

Pro Quarterback Football

RBI Baseball 3

RBI Baseball 4

RBI Baseball ’93

RBI Baseball ’94

Roger Clemens’ MVP Baseball

Tom Lasorda Baseball

Troy Aikman NFL Football

Unnecessary Roughness ’95

Wayne Gretzky Hockey

World Championship Soccer

World Championship Soccer 2

World Cup USA ’94

World Series Baseball

World Series Baseball ’95

World Series Baseball ’96

World Series Baseball ’98

World Trophy Soccer

By the way, these are just the “simulation”-style sports games. The more arcade-style games, such as NBA Jam, will live to fight another day.

Also, as long as we’re talking sports, let’s thin out the ranks of the tennis games, shall we? IMG International Tour Tennis is our game of choice, based almost solely on the fact that it was the only one we played where we could hit the ball with any kind of consistency. Hey look, we like a challenge in our sports games as much as anyone, but Michael’s Chang’s Watch the Computed Controlled Guy Score a Bunch of Aces on You just doesn’t make for a very engrossing game. Anyway, the following largely unplayable games are now off the list:

Andre Agassi Tennis

ATP Tour Championship Tennis

David Crane’s Amazing Tennis

Davis Cup World Tour Tennis

Jennifer Capriatti Tennis

Wimbledon Championship Tennis

So this was a busy day. 105 games got eliminated. For those of you scoring at home, that means the total remaining games is now below 600. Next time, we’ll do a lightning round, knock off a bunch more games, and try to get things down close to 500.

Our first round of cuts shouldn’t be a big surprise to fans of our main website, Brad Hates Games, because we’ve already covered them there. In fact, the article in which we discussed most of them was the inspiration for this project. Needless to say, if we’ve already decided something was one of the Ten Worst Genesis Games That You’ve Probably Heard Of, it’s not going to make the Top 100. Therefore say goodbye to the following games:

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Believe it or not, over 700 games were released in the United States for the Sega Genesis. Perhaps even more unbelievably, only about 500 of them were different versions of Madden. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the important thing to note is that the gatekeepers over at Sega were none too picky about handing out the Sega Seal of Quality to pretty much anything that came across their desks. Sega, like most other console manufacturers, didn’t like to prevent games from being released on their system based on subjective criteria like “Is this game any fun?”, so they tended to stick to more objective concerns like “Does the cartridge actually fit in the system?” or “Will this game cause the Genesis to start on fire?” For the most part, as long as the game didn’t explode and send pieces of molten plastic flying into children’s eyes, it got the Sega Seal of Quality.

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