The era of the Xbox 360 was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. I might have adopted the console a bit late into its generation, but I had a lot of fun with the games I got for it. It wasn’t hard for Xbox fans to feel on top of the world with titles like the Fable and Halo games serving as the cream of the crop of the 360’s offerings.
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It did have some incredibly bad games on it, though. At least some bad games had a chance of wrapping around and being so bad, they were good in a different way. None of us can ignore the side of the Xbox 360’s releases that were just plain weird, and this console had a lot of those. Let’s reminisce, cringe, and be thankful that we’ve moved on from games like these… at least somewhat.
10
Culdcept Saga
A for Effort
Everyone loves a good card game, right? No? Then how about a board game? Why not both? Culdcept Saga combines board game elements with deckbuilder mechanics to create an experience all its own. There’s a real attempt here to make an incredibly unique game. Too bad that its mechanics drag games out to be over three hours if things get really intense.
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Culdcept Saga has a special place in my heart because its development team truly cared about the art that went into the in-game cards. It took a year to develop Culdcept Saga’s cards just so card artists all across Japan could have their art featured in the game. There were also hardly any restrictions, so there’s both a wide variety of intriguing and outright weird cards, like any good card game should have. Unfortunately, though, this and Culdcept Saga’s long playtime are a strong but understandable hurdle in helping it find its audience.
9
Operation Darkness
World War 2 Didn’t Need to Be More Anime
Before I talk about how bizarre this game is, let me just say that it has a few interesting merits. For starters, it’s a tactical JRPG that includes gunfire, adjusting the size of the maps to match. It takes place during World War 2, and it asks the much-needed question: “What if the Nazis employed the help of zombies and vampires?” The result is Operation Darkness, which now sits in a strange position of being either cool or questionable while ending up as a bit of a mediocre experience overall.
The reason it’s here on this list is that it’s so over-the-top with itself that it tells me why some people just can’t get into one of my favorite genres of games. With hammy voice acting and a ridiculous plot, it borders on insensitive to the history it represents, in my opinion. For every neat thing Operation Darkness does that might make it interesting, there’s a flaw in there that just makes it feel weird overall. It’s certainly a game that belongs on the Xbox 360, and I mean that in the most awkward, but somewhat affectionate, way possible.
8
Flashback
Just a Shadow of What it Could Be
Released
August 21, 2013
Developer
VectorCell
Publisher
Ubisoft
When people talk about remakes of classic games, there are a lot of different things that come to mind. There’s the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy games that expand and makes what was old new again. Or, there’s more loyal remakes, like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door for Switch, which is the same game made from the ground up. It’s hard to tell what 2013’s Flashback was supposed to be.
On the surface, it really does look just like a modernized version of the 1992 game. It’s still a platformer with gun-based combat, but how it feels is where everything goes completely wrong. The platforming doesn’t register your input half the time, there’s a tacked-on skill system that straight up doesn’t work, and the fact that Memory Flash cutscenes are drawn, but not colored in really feels lazy. There was so much charm in the original Flashback’s artwork and the comic cutscenes don’t measure up to it at all. It’s really sad that its remake, spearheaded by many of the original staff, just came out like a total downgrade to the original.
7
Damnation
Everything That Could Be Wrong, is Wrong
Back in 2004, Epic Games hosted the Make Something Unreal contest. The competition was surprisingly aimed towards mod developers who used the Unreal Engine for their work, rewarding them with grants and licenses to make their mods into legitimate games. Keep in mind that our next game, Damnation, came in second place that year.
Damnation is a strange game with an edgy Steampunk alternate history premise and presentation. It seems to be at war, mind the pun, between exploration, shooter combat, and team mechanics. Your run lacks any urgency, the animations are either just keyframes or don’t exist, and the aiming is strangely third person in the middle of the screen. Combined with the excess bloom and use of brown and gray as if they’re the only colors that exist, Damnation is a weird game that represents many of the bad trends of the era it was from.
6
Babel Rising
I’ve Heard About “Playing God,” but This is Ridiculous
I think, despite us all living different lives and having our own beliefs, we’ve all run into a religious game of some kind. If we can base popular games on Greek Mythology, then who’s to say biblical myth isn’t fair game?
Babel Rising puts you literally in the position of God, furious at mankind as they try to build the Tower of Babel. If you know the story, you know how this goes. Your job is to smite them with your own two hands. Babel Rising was released on plenty of platforms, including the Kinect.
Being able to send little people flying by bringing divine wrath with your hands is definitely a Kinect game idea in terms of how silly that is. It helps that there’s nothing really more to the gameplay. You unlock different powers and the levels get a tad harder, but like many of the Kinect games like this, the novelty wears off after 20 minutes.
5
007 Legends
What Not to Do with the James Bond License
007-legends-spy.jpg
When you think of James Bond games, what comes to mind? Some people enjoy them for the way they adapt the cinematic excellence of Bond films to an entirely other medium. Others enjoy stepping into the shoes of the world-renowned secret agent. I don’t think a lot of them come for guns. They really don’t pick up 007 games just to play another first-person shooter.
Somehow, Activision didn’t get that memo, and it released 007 Legends to critical failure. The Xbox 360 one reviewed the best, why I’m including it on this list, but the 360 version being the best just means there’s more of a chance to experience the legitimately weird parts of the game instead of possible broken ones.
We really didn’t need what’s more or less a Call of Duty 007 game. I can’t think of a person who’d ever ask for this. Activision apparently did, though, for some reason. It’s a strange Bond game on any metric. It forces Daniel Craig’s likeness in many older James Bond film missions while keeping most of the cast the same. It gets away with it under the framing (or the excuse) of featuring the films as “modern reimaginings.” It’s just bizarre and misses many of the things that truly make a 007 game important.
4
Adidas MiCoach
We Dodged a Bullet Somewhere Around Here
Released
July 24, 2012 (NA)
Developer
Lightning Fish Games
Publisher
505 Games
We all hate it, but I think one part of Xbox that certainly makes it a Microsoft product is how the brand stubbornly pushed itself onto other markets and products. There’s a whole E3 presentation that people have cut down to every mention of the word “TV” from one year, after all. Part of the reason none of us adapted to the Kinect easily was because of how it was clear they didn’t understand the audience very well, unlike how Nintendo did with the Wii.
I don’t think I can find a game that represents how much Xbox misunderstood their player base entirely as much as Adidas MiCoach does. It’s a Kinect tie-in game to Adidas’ MiCoach smart fitness initiative. In it, players could receive feedback from real athlete hosts, get more detailed feedback with the use of a branded heart monitor, and train for six different sports.
It was a Kinect game, though, so you know where this is going. It was found to be unresponsive by critics, and notably didn’t catch on because it’s not like any of us would’ve played it anyway. To make things worse, Adidas MiCoach was also on PlayStation Move, and that was rated even worse by reviewers. The Kinect version is the better one, and even then, it’s not worth anyone’s time.
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3
Coffeetime Crosswords
Riddle Me This — How?
YouTube via Delisted Games
Remember Xbox Live Arcade? It was certainly something, wasn’t it? Either you’d find a nice hidden gem for yourself to play in-between releases, or you’d find some of the most ridiculous shovelware out there. Coffeetime Crossworlds is definitely a surprising part of Live Arcade’s lineup. It’s notable because it’s terrible, and I’m left here to wonder how could you screw up crosswords of all things?!
According to the critics that reviewed Coffeetime Crosswords, poor souls, the game’s UI for picking letters was easily monotonous to use. I can’t blame them, considering you have to pick every letter out like you’re using a rotary phone. It got tedious, frustrating, and somehow managed to repeat puzzles. You know it’s bad when critics are telling you to save time and just buy a newspaper instead.
2
No Luca No
The Perfect Game Needs Cats and Cereal
YouTube via PickHutHG
Released
August 6, 2011
Developer
Silver Dollar Games
Publisher
Silver Dollar Games
On the subject of the bottom-of-the-barrel Xbox Live Arcade games, there’s one game that grew infamous with a few people on the World Wide Web. It’s much more palpable than Coffeetime Crosswords, but probably twice as ridiculous. It was called No Luca No, and it was developed and published by Silver Dollar Games.
It’s a game where you push a cat named Luca away from eating your huge bowl of cereal like you can’t share any of it. And that’s it. You push the right control stick to the right to push him away as long as you can to get a higher score.
The longer you struggle against the black cat, the more his owner whines in annoyance and frustration. I’ve always wondered, is there an end to the voice lines? Does it loop after a while? Does No Luca No have an ending? The world may never know.
1
Hulk Hogan’s Main Event
Gets the Award For Most Awkward Kinect Game of All Time
YouTube via Game Saloon
Kinect games were awkward a good 90 percent of the time. We’ve established this. A lot of times, though, it’s through the fact that the motion sensor never quite worked just right. Hulk Hogan’s Main Event was genuinely awkward on its own merits, which takes talent.
Not only does the game try very hard to combine cartoony cell-shaded models with heavy amounts of bloom that would make Damnation blush, but it also uses speech bubbles for its cutscene dialogue in a very cheap manner. Every fight is broken up into four stages, and each one follows the same template to where your enemies are clearly in the same pose every time you go to pin them down. It’s so monotonous and pointless in how it executes its main gameplay.
To add insult to injury, it also fully uses the Kinect camera feature, taking photos of you hitting the game’s stupid poses as you play. It’d cause some laughs, but is it really worth playing when the high point is making fun of yourself? I don’t really think so.
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Okay, it’s time to get these gaming grandpas to bed.
