Written by Shaun McCracken

After doing the 9x99, which is my opinion on what is the 99 best games I've played or enjoyed, I started thinking about the titles that haven't met my expectations or was just a letdown. This was originally going to become another Top 11 list, but I ended up finiding quite a few games that have disappointed me over the years. So I figured, why not double the amount of entries and create this feature to compliment the top 99 games (according to me).

Like I've said before, this is the top 22 most disappointing games I've every played. But, this is not a "worst ever" list, because these games are not 100% terrible, and some games on the list have actually done pretty well critically. This is a list of games that I didn't enjoy or felt that it never really met it's potential. I'm sure many of you, at one time or another have felt this way over some games you've bought or played in the past as well.

So, are you ready for a taste of tedium? Sit up straight and pay attention, because what you don't know, could kill you. Maybe.

Oh, I also included an "artists rendition" of each game on the list. Sure, they may not be pretty, but it's all we got!

22 D

Donkey Kong 64 (Nintendo, N64, 1999)

Some games that we've seen in the 2-D era have made a pretty successful leap into the 3-D era. Super Mario 64, Metroid Prime and Grand Theft Auto 3 are perfect examples of this. On top of that, they've maintained their classic gameplay elements and re-invented them for a new generation. DK64 may have been a pretty hotly anticipated game at the time, and it was so big that it had to have the Expansion Pak accessory shipped along with it. But DK64 may have been too little, too late. The gameplay and design seemed so rehashed and uninspiring by this time that I really just didn't care about this game. When Donkey Kong Country debuted on the Super NES, it was a pretty revolutionary game, for one reason or another. But when DK64 hit the N64, it pretty much hit the system with a "thud". It was like playing Banjo-Kazooie with monkeys, only with a crappier camera.

21 D

Driver (Infogrammes, PS1, 1999)

This may have been "game of the year" for some people, but I really couldn't find what made Driver that great. Sure, you had a pretty large environment to roam around in, but that almost seemed to be it. The missions were pretty much point-to-point challenges, and some were pretty difficult to complete since you couldn't damage the car. Kind of hard to do when the police are relentless and the traffic is too thick. On top of that, the driving engine wasn't that great. Perhaps I'm one of few who didn't like this game, and I'm not afraid to say it.

20 D

Top Gear Overdrive (Kemco, N64, 1998)

At the time, TGO's biggest draw was it's graphics. If you had the expansion pak, or opted for the letterbox mode, TGO looked pretty damn good. Sadly, that was TGO's best feature. The gameplay itself was pretty wafer-thin. With basically a championship mode to it's name, TGO had no incentive to keep people playing it's game, such as a time-trial, records or even single-race events. On top of that, the developers couldn't have gone the extra mile to get the licenses for the cars they are obviously knocking-off in the game. TGO could have been a great arcade racing game, had there been more of a "game" put in.

19 D

Roadkill (Midway, PS2/GC/XBOX, 2003)

Probably the most recent disappointment on the list, Roadkill is just one of those games that turned out not exactally what I expected. I thought this was going to be a vehicular combat game, like Vigilante 8 or Twisted Metal. In a way, it is. But you have to search all over town to figure out on what needs to be done next, and that's not really explained "clear as day". On top of that, the game has some of the blurriest and muddiest textures I've seen in recent times, and that really doesn't help the game out anymore than it does.

18 D

Resident Evil: Survivor (Capcom, PS1, 2000)

In Japan, this game supported a light-gun accessory, and from how this game looks, the use of the gun would make sense. But for some reason, the US release of the game was made into a first-person shooter of sorts. Now, this could have worked, even in the RE world, but Survior had clunky and slow controls, which is just plain wrong for shooters. Also, the game was not that attractive, and you really couldn't save your progress in the game. I think you had to start from the beginning each time you started the game. That sucks, since this game takes hours to complete.

17 D

South Park (Acclaim, N64, 1999)

This is basically South Park running on a Turok engine. Why in god's name South Park would make a great FPS is beyond me, but Acclaim thought it would be a smart move. While the world looks pretty much the same as the show, and includes some pretty funny foul-mouthed voice samples, the gameplay was repetitive as hell. The first few stages were practically made up of you killing turkeys with dodgeballs. It seems like the whole game was like that, where you had only one or two types of enemies coming after you. Snore. This could have made a decent 2-D platformer, but no one asked me.

16 D

Body Harvest (Midway, N64, 1998)

Body Harvest is one of those games that sound great in theory, but actually playing the game is not that fun. Perhaps if this game were made for a current genreation console, it could have been better, but Body Harvest just didn't gel with me. There was way too much wandering around and getting lost, and the variety of vehicle types really didn't make that much of a difference in gameplay. Throught the game, I felt tlike there was something missing in the game, and I think it was fun.

15 D

007 Racing (EA Games, PS1, 2000)

One could credit this game for getting Midway to bring back SpyHunter in a modern form. In fact, this game plays almost like the modern-day SpyHunter games. To say that this is a racing game would be a flat-out lie. There's no real racing element in this game, and I hope whoever game this game it's "007 Racing" title was fired, or at least demoted. 007 Racing could have potenitally been a good game, if it weren't for the unclear objectves, ugly-ass graphics and the lack of long-term gameplay. Eutechnyx really could have made this about re-creating the best 007-film chases for us to play, but instead created a crappy storyline around a medicore driving game. Knowing now that a game like SpyHunter can make the action-driving genre successful, I would like to see EA take a stab at this kind of game again, but using the NFS team that created the driving stages for the current generation Bond games.

14 D

Mega Man 8 (Capcom, PS1, 1996)

Before I realized everything else the PlayStation had to offer in terms of games, Mega Man 8 was one of the games I really wanted to play the most, since I was a really big fan of the series. When I finally got my PS1 system a few years back (1999, to be exact), Mega Man 8 was one of the first games I bought myself. All the anticipation was killed when I heard Mega Man's voice in this game. When he opened his mouth in the FMV sequences, it was basically hearing him say "I sound like a f--king little girl, and I just crushed all your expectations on how I should sound in these games! Tee-hee!". On top of that, the game was grossly colorful and had some of the worst bosses in the game's history. Tengu Man? CLOWN MAN?!! And some of those bosses sounded oddly homosexual. Especially Aqua Man, which has never heard of the term "subtle". Capcom really knew how to take the "man" out of Mega Man.

13 D

Hybrid Heaven (Konami, N64, 1999)

As hard as I tried, I never undersood Konami's Hybrid Heaven. I couldn't understand the story, I couldn't understand the gameplay, it was just very confusing in general. You can't blame Konami for trying out a new franchise, especially one that could possibly be considered Metal Gear Solid's equal on the N64, but this game was just uncomprehensible. And what was up with the polygonal man-ass?

12 D

Rally Cross 2 (989 Sports, PS1, 1998)

This is one of the poorest rally-racing games I've ever played, and I was expecting so much more out of it when I got it. Sure, it has a course editor, but that means crap when the game plays so slow, and the controls suck ass. Plus, there were no licensed cars. And the music, ugh, let's not go there. Nice to know that 989 was always a symbol of integrity, huh?

11 D

Mega Man II (Capcom, GB, 1991)

Perhaps one of the weakest games in the entire MM series, and the worst GB Mega Man game in the lineup. It seems like Capcom wasn't trying too hard when they made Mega Man 2. The graphics were not as great as the first Game Boy MM game, as well as the MM games after this on the system. The sound was just plain bad, and the music wasn't even the same as the NES Mega Man counterpart (all the other MM Game Boy games in the series had the same stage music heard in the NES version, except for Mega Man V, which had totally different bosses). To make everything worse, the game felt slower than other games in the series. This was just an all-out disappointment for me.

10 D

Enter The Matrix (Atari, PS2/GC/XBOX, 2003)

At some point or another, we expected to see "The Matrix" be turned into a videogame. When that time finally came, we were excited. When we were told that this was going to be connected to the movies, as a side-story of sorts, it sounded great. Then hearing how everyone involved in the movie was going to be a part of this game made this game hotly anticpated. When ETM debuted, we were presented with one of the biggest letdowns in gaming history. Sure, you have some pretty impressive production values, but the gameplay itself was far from revolutionary. This was basically a brawler with some gunplay, driving and cheap special effects thrown in. If that wasn't bad enough, the graphics were very underwhelming. Sure, the character models looked pretty good, but the environments were bland, plain, and blocky. The icing on the cake is that there were bugs in the final version. But as a consoltation, we do get to see two women kiss. But do we really break even?

09 D

ToCA Championship Racing (3D0, PS1, 1998)

After playing this game, I kind of shudder when the ToCA name will be used again in a video game (luckily, the recent ToCA Race Driver 2 for the Xbox is pretty good). ToCA Championship Racing sounded like it would be a pretty good racing game, since I heard comparisons made between this and Gran Turismo. But this is one of the worst handling racing games made. You can't take sharp turns in this game without oversteering. In fact, 70% of the moves you make results in oversterring. This isn't fun, not for me, not for you. If you can't even stay on the road, why bother to keep playing?

08 D

Sega GT (Sega, DC, 2000)

Sorry, ToCA CR is not the worst handling racing game made. That dubious distinction goes to the original Sega GT, which appeared on the Dreamcast system back in 2000. You can't blame Sega for trying to come up with an answer to Sony's own Gran Turismo series, but you can blame them for the god-awful driving engine we had to sit through. In Sega GT, don't even think about adding more power to your car, because for some reason, the more power your car has, the worse it handles. Where Gran Turismo refines the driving experience, Sega GT destroys it. While Sega made good in Sega GT 2002 for the handling situation, the original Sega GT is a disasterous event that's hard to recover from.

07 D

Mario's Tennis (Nintendo, VB, 1995)

What's the best game to show off what your new system can do? I know! How about a F--KING GAME OF TENNIS?!! Mario's Tennis has to be one of the weakest games to be shipped with a gaming system in the history of video games. Sure, the Virtual Boy was not the best system made, but it had some interesting capabillites that was explored in games such as Red Alarm, 3-D Tetris and Teleroboxer. Mario's Tennis was probably the worst game you could use to demonstrate what this system can do. On top of that, the game just wasn't that fun to play. I'll be sticking with Galactic Pinball, thank you very much.

06 D

Super Mario Land (Nintendo, GB, 1990)

A Super Mario game was bound to hit the new handheld system at some point in time, and everyone asked "when". When SML finally did debut in 1990, it turned out to be one of the most disappointing Mario adventures ever created. The game was half as long as the original Super Mario Bros., with 16 stages instead of 32. The world we were thrown into was just not nearly as great or memorable as the console Mario games. The game was also pretty hard to play, as Mario was this tiny little blur that was hard to see half the time. Luckily, the design was fixed in Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, but this really doesn't make the original SML look any better.

05 D

Covert Ops: Nuclear Dawn (Activision, PS1, 2000)

I think this is one of the only games that I've played twice, and then traded in to GameStop. It just wasn't that good or engaging, and it really could have been a pretty good game. The problem is, you're on a train the whole time, which can work for a videogame, but doesn't lead itself to much variety. Then there's the load times you have to go through each time you enter a new train car. This sucks when you're backtacking back and forth to figure out where the hell to go next. Covert Ops is just one of those games I didn't care to play, and one I didn't care about when I traded it in (in fact, I got a pretty good trade in credit on the game, more than what I paid).

04 D

Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 (Sega, DC, 2001)

The prospect of having 12 classic Sega games on one disc sounds great, until you play them. With the exception of Virtua Cop 2 and Sega Swirl, every game in this collection had a botched emulation. The graphics were almost on-key, except I think a couple of the games played slower than they should. But the sound was massacared. Sonic the Hedgehog did not sound like Sonic. The same went for all the other games on the compliation. When you buy a collection of classic games in one disc, cart, etc. you expect those games to be the same as you played them in the past. Sega failed on that count.

03 D

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (Konami, NES, 1990)

TMNT II: The Arcade Game is kind of like telling kids there's no Santa Claus. When you were my age when this came out (I was 10), and was familiar with the arcade game, you were pretty much expecting to have what you saw in the arcade game on your home console. Knowing now at my age that the NES really couldn't pull off this kind of feat, being a kid, you couldn't help being disappointed. The game looked less colorful, played a little differently and just didn't really seem as fun as it did in the arcade. When your 10, you don't really realize the limitations of a console, and when you see a game claim itself to be "The Arcade Game", you expect to see the exact same thing in the arcades. This, was not. However, Konami redeemed themselves with a near-perfect port of TMNT IV: Turtles In Time on the Super NES in 1992.

02 D

Tomorrow Never Dies (EA Games, PS1, 1999)

GoldenEye 007 was an excellent game on the N64, and an excellent shooter in general. It's also the start of James Bond franchise becomming a profitable license in the video-game world. When Rare passed on the oppertunity to make Tomorrow Never Dies, we wondered "why?". When EA decided to make the next Bond game, it was a little exciting to hear, and one could wonder if this would be as good as GoldenEye, or better. But with one fell swoop of it's release, TND was one of the biggest letdowns in gaming history. It was shorter, clunkier and uglier than GoldenEye, and totally lacked one of GE's biggest draws: it's multiplayer mode. While EA has gotten better and better with the Bond games over the years (the recent Everything Or Nothing is actually pretty damn good), TND is still remembered as the worst Bond games made. Not a terrible game in general, but when you follow one of the bigger selling games of the time with a medicore product such as this, things aren't looking so good.

01 D

Tomb Raider Series (Eidos, PS1-DC-PS2, 1996-2002)

There's no use narrowing down a specific game in the series when every game in the series is a letdown. The Tomb Raider franchise has consistently been one of the biggest letdowns in video game history. While the adventure element is fairly solid, the controls are just plain god-awful. I'm not sure why the people at Eidos and Core thought that this was an ideal and playable engine, BECAUSE IT'S NOT! Walking, jumping, shooting, evading; everything you need to do in the game is too much of a chore to be enjoyable! The franchise could have changed direction when it hit the PS2, but NO, the controls were just as crappy, and on top of that, the game was buggy. It's sad to see that a series have so much untapped potential. After 3 or so games, you would think that the developers would attempt to create a new engine, but I guess the people at Eidos know more than we do, huh?