The Top Ten Most Cowardly Video Games of Recent Times

Last week, I explored video games’ recent decision to have all their teeth removed before gumming you, sweetly yet insistently, until your eyeballs roll back in your head and you fall into a deep lustrous sleep, dreaming of jelly baby tigers and castles made of fragrant tofu. Games, I argued, have become too forgiving. Today, let’s follow that thought through with a list of the worst offenders: the titles that shy away from any kind of challenge and offer ceaseless rewards and workarounds to the pale, coughing homunculi who shamble through their campaigns. Also, I thought we’d confuse matters by throwing in games that just look like they’re spineless. And some games that I haven’t even played, but which I’ve heard are stupid.

It’s a pretty definitive list.

10 – The Hobbit
(Vivendi Universal; PC, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox)

The Hobbit sends you out on an epic adventure filled with dragons and loot and moronic puzzles about cogs, and then lays down a trail of bright blue gems for you to follow, ensuring that you never, ever have to think for yourself.

It may not have been the first game to do this – some, like Fable 2, have subsequently done it really, really well – but it was certainly the first to combine it with a gap-toothed cow-town art style that suggested the designers had been inspired to create the whole thing after looking through mug shots of the people doing the voices in The Archers.

The Hobbit doesn’t just neuter Tolkien’s grand narrative: it turns it into eight-to-ten hours spent in the company of the kind of characters you’d otherwise only meet whilst waiting to see the nurse on a cross-channel ferry. At least with Vivendi’s game you always know where the nearest exit is.

9 – Resistance: Fall of Man
(Sony; PS3)

Games love guns, but they’re getting increasingly concerned with shoot-outs, which tend to kill off all their players and land them on the second hand shelves in HMV. Halo got around this by letting you shrug off laser damage. Kill.Switch allowed you to fire while tucked safely behind cover. Resistance goes further than both, however, by giving you a rifle that can shoot through walls.

Nice idea, but where does it end? In Halo 4, you’ll apparently be able to mail bullets to your enemies from the safety of an orbiting post office. You’ll also be able to stock up on those four-colour Biros while you’re up there.

8 – Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
(D3 Publisher; PS3, Xbox)

Matt Hazard may have smartly satirised shit games, but in doing so it completely forgot to not be a shit game itself. It made up for this rookie mistake by ladling on the world’s lamest Achievements. You get an Achievement for pausing the game – and possibly then bricking your console into an alcove like in that Edgar Allan Poe story, so you’ll never have to encounter it again – and another just for sitting through the opening cut-scene. That these are just two of the most basic examples is probably why that last one is harder to earn than you might imagine.

7 – Ecco the Dolphin
(SEGA; Megadrive)

Ecco’s actually pretty challenging stuff. It’s on this list because it’s the only video game that was owned by that kid at school whose parents drove him to the gates every morning in a Saab. It’s awkward, faintly spiritual and entirely tasteless, in other words: the ludic equivalent of trying to eat a dreamcatcher. Worse yet, SEGA’s lamest IP feels distinctly educational, too. Don’t just join Ecco on his crazy dolphin capers, eh? Learn a little about his ecological plight at the same time. Sure, ask a seahorse which bit of ocean floor you have to shout your sonar at in order to progress to the next level of bland marine blueness, but don’t be surprised when a man from Shell comes along and pours a barrel of crude oil down its throat.

Incidentally, when real life dolphins aren’t performing in hillbilly circuses or nosing US missile submarines safely through oceans riddled with floating mines, they’re raping their watery colleagues just for the sheer ever-loving joy of it. Ecco was strangely silent about this kind of behaviour. Hopefully it will provide the central mechanic for any sequel.

6 – Kirby’s Epic Yarn
(Nintendo; Wii)

The first of a couple of entries from the Wii, the console exhausted parents give their kids when the Ritalin’s run out and they’ve been banned from all the creche-centres in a ten-mile radius. In mitigation, Epic Yarn’s brilliant fun, but it resembles something you accidentally bought on Etsy. Kirby’s a piece of wool, and the landscapes he moves through are stitched together from felt, cotton and shiny little buttons. What happens if he spills a glass of milk? That isn’t going to be pretty.

Michael Cimino wanted to take the same visual approach with The Deer Hunter, apparently, but John Cazale talked him out of it.

5 – Malice
(Evolved Games; PS2, Xbox)

Deep in the marzipan mountains of the land of twee, the troubled British developer Argonaut once forged a game that dared to explore the big questions. Questions like, “What would happen if somebody gave Gwen Stefani a really large hammer?” What would happen, by the looks of it, is that she’d hammer out a shit 3D action game.

Argonaut, stumbling through the foot-and-mouth death throes of bankruptcy while it hacked Malice together, also had the brilliant good fortune to release this platformer just as everyone decided that platformers were dead. They were wrong: platformers aren’t dead, generally speaking. It’s just this one that is.

4 – Prince of Persia
(Ubisoft; PS3, Xbox, PC, Mac)

Inclusivity: it forced McDonalds to put in wheelchair ramps, but it also gave us the 2008 version of Prince of Persia, a platforming game in which you can’t die by falling off a platform. You can still die inside, though.

3 – Boom Street
(Square-Enix; Wii)

Square-Enix’s latest is almost exactly like Monopoly, except you can press a button, select “out to lunch” mode and the game will play itself for you. Press another button, and the developers will drop by in a shiny gyrocopter and suggest some hilarious things for you to tweet the next time the Young Apprentice is on. ‘Lord Sugar’s boardroom doors make it look like he’s coming out of the shower!’ ‘Nick really likes tractors!’

2 – Rogue Warrior
(Bethesda; PC, 360, PS3)

If you’re Vietnamese, you’ll be familiar with the name Dick Marcinko because, somewhere around 1967, he dropped by and killed you and your entire family. Marcinko’s many autobiographies are filled with so many breath-taking feats of casually violent heroism that it’s enough to make you suspect he’s protesting a bit too much, and that he actually spent his war years quaking beneath a Sunbeam Alpine in the car park of a Circle K, hoping that nobody was coming over to steal his hubcaps.

A few years ago, Rebellion turned Marcinko’s lavishly implausible exploits into a game called Rogue Warrior. Aside from concluding with a rap by Mickey Rourke, Rogue Warrior’s mainly famous for the fact that the entire thing lasts just two hours and has only ten weapons. New to video games? Let me put that in more literary terms for you. Imagine if Martin Amis’ latest was three pages long, and every other word was “beanbag”.

1 – Chulip
(Natsume; PS2)

Chulip’s on this list because it’s a game about kissing people. Luckily, a miserable critical response meant that the development team quickly learnt their lesson, and the studio’s next game was about beating lesbian teenagers to death with sticks. And that’s why this list exists – the critics always get what they want, in the end.

Previously: Why Did Video Games Start Being Pussies?