Anyone born in the 80s was born into a magical time in the world of gaming. Sure, they (or you) may have missed the Atari family of consoles, or even things like the Collecovision or Intellivision or other such 70s competitors, but we lived in a magical time because we had the Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom, for those living in that region of the world). We came up in what many people would consider the “golden age” of gaming — we had the Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, even the PlayStation 1 and the Nintendo 64, and we had many of the original PC classics like Doom and Wolfenstein. We had a lot of classic games back in our day — some that have a timeless appeal that all the high-graphics and flash can never capture. But we also lived in a dark age of video games. We had games that we thought were cool or great because we had nothing else to compare them to — games that attained such a high status based purely on innovation or novelty. We weren’t stupid, we were ignorant: we could never have imagined, in a hundred years, that video games would evolve to where they have today. Today there are a lot of old games that still keep a place in many gamers’ hearts because of their nostalgia factor, but the fact is that these games sucked. And there are some games that have always sucked, but for reasons that escape me they’re still hailed as great, timeless games!

Well, it’s time to give these nightmares the send-off they deserve.

Some games have the fanboy factor, some have never been looked back at for a really good evaluation…and for some titles, their fans need to wake up and smell the coffee, because they have no excuse! Well, whatever excuse these games have for being considered great or “classics”, it’s time to tear that excuse down. This is my list of the top 10 pieces of shit that people celebrate as classics.

This article contains some VERY strong language, so reader discretion is advised. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

10. Final Fantasy III (NES/Nintendo DS)

The only crime Final Fantasy III has committed is being called a Final Fantasy game. An RPG by any other name, and it would have had expectations for mediocrity — and would have fulfilled those expectations. In gameplay, this title is a staple of the standard, classic RPG. In story and execution — the two most prominent elements in an RPG game — the game is bland and unattractive. You get four characters with a small, boring history set to save the world in a series of effortless sequences that balance out with the classic RPG gameplay to give you a sense of neutrality for all your efforts. To be fair, this game wouldn’t have made it on the list except for the fact that it’s a Final Fantasy game — and when “Final Fantasy” is in a title, you get four legions of fans salivating for the game and ready to hold it’s name up on high. It’s not really a bad game. It’s just…blah.

9. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Sega Genesis)

Ok, Sonic die-hards and classic gamers, before you start spewing hate comments and such, let me just say that I’m not here to dump on Sonic 3 and call it a turd nugget. I remain a huge fan of this game to this very day — like, I could probably pick it up right this second and play it and enjoy the hell out of it. The Sonic franchise itself, leading up to the later generation of games, had a dazzle effect that left us blinded. The reason why Sonic 3 makes the list is because of the big flaw that all Sonic games have. We all remember the high-speed runs, the loops, the springs…Sega used to brag that its systems had “blast processors”, which allowed it to do things the Nintendo and Super Nintendo didn’t, such as the high-speed action (remember “Sega does what Nintendon’t?), but that was just a marketing gimmick — there was no such thing as “blast processing”. Well, on that same token, there was no such thing as “classic gameplay” in all of the classic, trademark Sonic moments. Some of the biggest, best moments in Sonic games — moments that hooked us as gamers — were moments when we did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Think about it: all those crazy high-speed boosts and sequences involved you hitting a spring and watching. What did you do? Strip that part away, and you had gameplay dominated heavily by just holding down the right button — and at the biggest moments, jumping. And these moments involved far less strategy than platformers of its time i.e. Super Mario Bros., because those strategic elements were replaced with the flash of flying through loops and stuff at high speed.

On top of that, level design grew rather lazy by the time Sonic 3 came out. It really felt like Team Sonic didn’t put the care and detail and effort into Sonic 3’s levels that they did Sonic 1 and 2. The bonus stages were nice, but they lacked the difficulty of the bonus stages in the first two games. It just felt like the love was gone a little. But, of course, Sonic 3 is probably the most beloved Sonic game made (probably my favorite as well, to be fair), but it’s own problems plus the mostly-sizzle lacking-steak gameplay that ran rampant through the rest of the early Sonic games lands this one as a classic that needs to be rejudged.

8. Final Fantasy V (Super Nintendo/PlayStation)

Again, another game perhaps stripped of its justice because of its game. As a Final Fantasy game, FF5 is expected to be a flag-bearer, a gold standard game. Coming fresh off the heels of the truly classic Final Fantasy IV, this title is perhaps held in a higher regard than my number 10, and has certainly been immortalized overseas — but it doesn’t fail to disappoint any less. It occurs to me that Square/Squaresoft (one of the companies that would join the merger to become today’s Square-Enix) knew that this title, like 3, didn’t stand up as well as others in the original 6, and was smart enough not to release it internationally until the Final Fantasy craze hit the world in full, for is it any surprise that America initially received 1, 4, and 6 only, and that they were packaged as 1, 2, and 3 — as if trying to disavow the rest? To me, this was certainly a smart move: Final Fantasy V was a boring little RPG with just a little difficulty and with a storyline ranging from stupid to practically non-existent. It wasn’t until the very end that the main villain appeared and a storyline materialized that actually compelled the player to continue on — but just when the storyline actually gets interesting, it’s time to fight the final boss. Square saved the best part of the storyline for the last 2% of the game. The front 98% of the story is total crap, so why bother playing through to the last two?

Also, the final boss is called Exdeath. Ooh, what an original and unique name. Exdeath. Really? Are you fucking kidding me?

7. Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation)

Now, here’s where we REALLY start shoveling into the shit. Square comes off what could be argued as its biggest year yet (or ever), just a year or so removed from releasing three of its biggest games ever — including a game that could be the argued as the best RPG of all time (or even the best game of all time!). Now, when you land yourself a five-star platinum whooper of a nuclear product, it’s not unreasonable to try to emulate or recycle a lot of the elements that made the previous game so huge. So, naturally, this is what Square did. The final result was a soulless game with a cast of characters static, shallow, and almost completely unlikable (maybe except for one) and a storyline that was as out-of-touch with its fan base as it was just simply…bad. Cloud Strife set a standard for video game characters so high with his depth and intricacies that it would swallow whole most anyone who tried to emulate it with even a scrap less detail or love spent on him/her, and would spawn something I like to call “Cloud Strife Syndrome”. What is “Cloud Strife Syndrome”? It’s when you have a brooding, apathetic, callous main character with a troubled past who is either thrust into the spotlight and/or turns out/becomes some good or heroic guy in the end.

Essentially, a Mary-Sue.

Cloud Strife was a troubled young man who had a decent life as a Shinra military policeman, until the combination of brainwashing, experiments, shame of personal failure, and serious injury/trauma causes him to amalgamate his memories with memories of Tifa and Zack to create a persona of an elite solider that he’s not; and he comes to fabricate this persona so often and so deeply that he buries his true memories and self beneath his subconscious and begins to believe his own very powerful lies until encouragement from his friends (Tifa mostly) and a drop into the Lifestream force him to earth up his true memories and true self. So, what is Squall? Squall is an angsty teenager who grew up on an orphanage with a goth/flamboyant vibe, who acts like a dick to everybody to protect his fragile little feelings. In other words, he’s straight-up textbook depthless emo. Rinoa’s just a typical cute girl with a somewhat aggressive push, Questis is the hot teacher, Zell is the super-energetic spirit character, Irvine’s little more than a cheap knock-off of Squall (a knock-off of a knock-off…how pitiful), the story’s about teenage emo love with some nonsensical crap about sorcerers and Squall floating through space to get Rinoa…the only redeemable quality about this game is Laguna’s scenes/plot, and its tie-in. And, really, it’s not enough.

Now, the reason why this game doesn’t rank higher is because of its mixed reviews. There are some that see the game and story as classics, and even see Squall as a likable and deep character, including a journalist that mused on Squall having a “repressed Wagnerian broodiness”. But there are also many people who see this game the way I do: a game centered on the main character and a character-driven storyline, with the character said storyline is driven by being a chump. So, at least not everyone’s delusional.

6. Street Fighter (Arcade Console)

For a long time (and for some, even today), a joke ran in America about the Street Fighter franchise. There were 5 different versions of Street Fighter 2, the Alpha series spin off, all these games…but where was Street Fighter 1? Did it even exist? Obviously it existed — and I was one of the rare few who actually found it and played it a bit back while Street Fighter 2 was still in circulation.

The original Street Fighter was considered a trend-setter, and would later spawn what would arguably be the best fighting game franchise ever (of which I’m such a fan of I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Street Fighter and its canon and such). For a game that spawned such a wonderful and celebrated series, how could the original suck so bad? You could argue that it simply didn’t age well (most Street Fighter games don’t age well at all, in fact); but for a trend-setter, I happen to think that it sucks as much back then as it does now. Street Fighter was built with the noblest of intentions, but the final product was just full of conceptual holes and programming stupidities. The idea of Street Fighter was to build a game like the old karate game for Nintendo, to allow two players to have a martial arts brawl, but with a twist: with the proper button input, your character would suddenly unleash a fireball or an amazing hurricane kick, giving them secret moves to bring a new level of excitement to a hand-to-hand duel. Here’s the problem: the original arcade units had special sensors in the joypads that sensed pressure in the way you pushed, gripped, and moved the stick when performing your 8-bit hadouken, shoryuken, or tatsumaki sempukyaku (the hurricane kick, for those less savvy). Most players didn’t know that — or the fact that the amount of pressure on the buttons would determine the strength of the attack or, indeed, if it even executed at all. So, considering that the special moves were almost impossible to pull off, that explains a lot. The problem is that when later ports were released, they didn’t have any means to register pressure applied to their joysticks or D-pads. The end result? You were lucky to pull of a special move once per fight no matter how hard you go for it, and the damage said special attacks did were completely random. You could finish a fight with a successful hadouken, or you could do about as much damage as a mosquito bite. Bad concept and bad programming, if you ask me. The unnecessarily high difficulty is just the icing to this overrated cake. Maybe with a little more thought and work, this game truly could have been a trend-setting classic. But it’s not — so pass it.

5. Scribblenauts (Nintendo DS)

It’s not necessarily fair to call Scribblenauts a classic because it only came out this year. But because Scribblenauts is such an innovative game — perhaps even a bona fide pioneer — this game is more a future classic (or more likely to be one, anyway). It has many elements of a future in the making, including positive sales, hype, and that wonderful innovation factor that most games today lack. If you’ve been reading my other articles, then you’ll have already read how I took this game to task: it’s a sandbox that loses its appeal very quickly, with a gameplay and a build-up that doesn’t inspire you to keep playing. In theory, this game should have infinite replay value; in fact, it has no replay value at all. The puzzles and overall main game quickly become tedious for anyone who plays in spans exceeding five minutes, and its rapid drop in value suggests that this notion is starting to carry on. It’s worth a rent — and you should only buy it if you plan on using it solely to kill time at appointments or meetings for 15-minute work breaks. Maybe Scribblenauts 2 will be the big classic of this franchise — although the premise of this game suggests that making a classic of this series may, realistically, not be possible. If you want a bigger review as to why this game deserves a shit blanket, read my review of this game.

4. Phantasy Star (Sega Genesis)

The funny thing is that the above image is so much better than I remember the game looking.

A lot of people hail Phantasy Star as one of the greatest RPG franchises of all time. A lot of people see this game as a trend-setter, a classic, an iconic title mandatory for any gamer of any generation. To them, I say this: why?

It’s barely removed from Final Fantasy, in essence. Actually, Phantasy Star is barely removed from a lot of games. The NES had games (perhaps even one or a few licensed under D&D) that took the first-person presentation in battle with their RPGs. The only difference, maybe, would come in the form of inferior graphics. But that counts for so little that it’s pathetic. When you enter a dungeon or a cave or anything similar to these environments — any RPG fan knows what I’m talking about, and they also know that you run into one sooner than later — you’re thrown into a psuedo-3D bland mess with no compass, no indicators in direction, no map, and unless you have a guide book or walkthrough, you’re pretty much lost and hopeless. Shoot, that’s how I felt when I played Phantasy Star. I couldn’t get past the first dungeon because I had no idea how to navigate, and the game’s presentation was such a mess that I didn’t even care. That’s what you get with this so-called classic: gameplay you’ve seen before either on a PC or, if you look hard enough, the supposedly “inferior” NES, a severely disjointed story that you’ll never get into at all because you’ll get stuck before you can learn anything about this world, and what really, strongly looks to be a whitewash, boring, uninspired sci-fi anime story or something like that (sci-fi usually has a way of producing uninspired and uninteresting whitewash to begin with). And you get that experience with each Phantasy Star you pick up on the Genesis: by the time you hit the first dungeon, you get lost and soon discover that, with the presentation of the game, you really don’t care anyway.

So what’s its redeeming quality? If it weren’t for these games, there would be no Phantasy Star Online. Phantasy Star Online is the light at the end of the tunnel, and the culmination of this game and the entire Phantasy Star franchise. Yet when you get right down to it, PSO is nothing more than a Diablo 2 knock-off (though, for the record, I AM a PSO fan). Then the Phantasy Star franchise goes right back into the shitter with Phantasy Star Universe — a game that tries to take PSO but give it a more centralized storyline, which turns out to be another trashy, obnoxious space anime with bad voice-acting, a plot only a 13 year old Otaku can enjoy, and an episodic presentation that interrupts gameplay in the most obnoxious way and makes you want to clear the game in a hurry so you can play with a custom character (so you can get to all the good gameplay and amazing new mechanics without dealing with the anime trash).

Phantasy Star is where things start to get good, but now we really hit the roller coaster and dig into the meat and potatoes of games you think are the shit, but are just plain shit.

3. Fallout (PC)

The original Fallout is a gem in its own way. It’s a very rare sort of game.

This is the type of game that lies to you. It tricks you. It deceives you into thinking that this game is going to be so spectacularly amazing that you’ll never, ever want to stop playing it.

But the moment you leave Vault 13, you want to rip your hair out.

The very first thing I noticed about this game when I played it was that it was incredibly, unbelievably ahead of its time. If I can say nothing else good about Fallout, it’s that this game was so ahead of its time, one would think Interplay had hired clairvoyants. Fallout was released in 1997, but its stat systems, perks, and general gist of mechanics and things would be used in 2000 and around 2004(ish); and even 11 years later, when they were used for Fallout 3, the stats and perks and things that the original Fallout pioneered fit right into place and seemed both fresh and perfect for the times. The isometric graphics are rather timeless — no matter how far technology is pushed, as long as you can make the sprites a little more detailed and/or intricate, isometrics remain in style and often serve as a tell-tale sign of a good game.

The problem with Fallout was that the stat system and character customization and abilities were so ahead of their time that they couldn’t reconcile with the climate and gameplay mechanics of THEIR time. But this is no simple conceptual problem that makes Fallout worthy of being one of the top 3 most overrated games of all time. Even if the game wasn’t so advanced, it still couldn’t reconcile the twisted, perverse pleasures the game designers had when they made this game. And they are sick little fucks, too; I believe this in my heart. Don’t believe me? I’ll illustrate with a typical walkthrough of the time.

You are the Vault Dweller from Vault 13, in a post-apocalyptic America. The water processing chip, a component that purifies water to your community and makes it drinkable, goes bad. You have 150 days to find a replacement, or everyone in your vault dies. You’re told that Vault 15, a few days’ distance away, should have a replacement chip. So you travel to Vault 15, but guess what? It’s destroyed, and the chip is gone. Great, so you just wasted very valuable time. You find a town along the way, recruit some people, do a few quests, and a couple other towns open. You go through them, explore them, talk to people…then guess what? You’re stuck. After you reach Junktown, you have nowhere to go and no leads. So you’re screwed. You can wander if you want to try to find your next lead — or even another town — but all the while your time is ticking away, and it’s ticking away FAST. You could have just skipped ahead and bypassed Vault 15 and all these other places, but how were you supposed to know that they’d be red herrings designed to waste your time? And where do you go, anyway? Well, you’d better pray that your first decision is a good one, because the clock’s ticking!

Fallout is for masochists. Fallout is a game for people who get a kick out of punishing themselves. And quite honestly, I’m not that type of person. And to make matters worse, there’s so much you can do with your character and so many different skills you can use to interact with the environment and so many modifications, the interface is an absolute mess. You don’t really know what skills you should work up or why, what use they’ll do for you, etc. And when it comes to sneaking and stealing, the primitive isometic graphics give you absolutely no mercy at all. What’s accessible? What can you check? What can you steal from? How, exactly, do you sneak without giving yourself away? And anyway, will it really matter in the end? Supposing a different skill layout actually helps you discover how to advance in the game. How, in the holy hell, is a gamer supposed to know how to build themselves without a strategy guide? If you get it wrong, you’re fucked — so have fun torturing yourself. If it’s any consolation, the developers of the original game are probably beating off to your frustration, so at least you made them happy.

Once Bethesda bought Interplay and gained the rights for Fallout 3, the franchise became the classic and monument to glory it deserves to be. Fallout’s setting, environments, ambiance, and back story make for such an incredible experience. A user-friendly and better-integrated interface, the semi-linear presentation (you can wander and do as you pleased, but you weren’t tied to a time limit and at no point were you left high and dry when wanting to advance), and the awesome first-person/V.A.T.S. juggle were just some of the things Fallout needed. Of course, Fallout 3 isn’t perfect — it suffers from the myriad of bugs and sub-par A.I. common in a big-world Bethesda RPG, but Fallout 3 is so much better than its predecessors. There are still many Fallout fans today who speak of the former sequel candidate, Van Buren, as if it were part of the canon or might someday be released — or SHOULD even be released! — and to them I say that they should stop talking about Van Buren in such high regard. The project is dead. That studio shut down. Van Buren is just another cancelled Fallout title, and quite honestly Van Buren’s cancellation in favor of Bethesda’s Fallout 3 is the best thing that could have happened.

2. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Arcade Console/Dreamcast/PlayStation 2/Xbox 360)

Now, of all the classics that people claim that they can play to this day, here’s a game that people DO play regularly to this day! I, myself, for a very long time counted myself as a rabid fan of this game. 3-on-3 tag-team action, insanely fast battles, a game where only the technically sound thrive…

But then one day, after having played Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike for a good, long while, I realized that MvC2 sucks. It sucks so bad, it’s unplayable.

I’ve never played a sloppier, more imbalanced fighting game in all my life. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 boasts a roster of 56 characters in total — and whenever you have a game bulging at the seams with characters, balance goes right out the window. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is the sort of unfair game where, if you play with the right three characters (any from the S tier), no matter how good your opponent is, you will crush him or her without a prayer. The game relies on big, flashy, and cheap attacks that fill the entire screen, or else other special attacks that do absolutely nothing. But no matter who you play as, the game is unrewarding. Hits don’t feel solid in this game. Everything has a sloppy, disjointed, imbalanced feel to it. Normal attacks feel so utterly inferior to special attacks, which sometimes feel inferior on their own or are simply inferior in general to super attacks. And super attacks are…well, if you want to know how good or solid or rewarding they feel, check a tier list.

When it comes to regular attacks and the like, the game was definitely made to be able to realistically squeeze six opponents into a 60- or 90-second brawl. And that’s a major problem, because battles and hits don’t feel decisive at all. You can just button mash, or throw up your biggest beam, and just brush right along. The Street Fighter Alpha series also suffered from this horrible imbalance (with Alpha 3 being the worst example and another unplayable game — though its no surprise with its 900-some odd character roster list), but MvC2 manages to be even worse. The release of MvC2 on Xbox Live may have killed the value of anyone owning an original disc (like myself), but there was a time when MvC2 was valued at around $150 — but, honestly, I wouldn’t value it at $1.50. Any fighting game with a tier list should be considered and reconsidered before being purchased, but MvC2 is the worst example of a fighting game ever. The only cool thing it brought to the table was giant 3-on-3 battles, and perhaps a valuable lesson to Tatsunoko vs. Capcom in the value of a solid, balanced fighting game no matter how crazy the pacing is or how big the roster is — and by the looks of early demos, Capcom’s taking this lesson to heart.

1. Battletoads (NES)

Yeah, that’s right. The number one most overrated “classic” — the cream of the crap — is everyone’s beloved Battletoads. And why the fuck not? Every single previous title I’ve listed has had some sort of redeeming quality, however slight, whether or not I’ve listed them. But there is absolutely, positively NOTHING good to say about Battletoads. Nothing. Maybe the pause music, but that’s it — and that doesn’t amount to shit. Battletoads is nothing but a generic platform beat-em-up with a few humorous moments and A LOT of conceptual and programming faults.

Where do I begin? Oh, I know! Why not begin with the fact that in co-op, you can kill your partners? What the fuck was the purpose behind being able to kill your friend when you played two-player? The idea of “friendly fire” isn’t unheard of, and it has appeared in games both before and after Battletoads. Hell, in Super Mario Bros. 3, you could play your friend in a sort of original Mario Bros. remix, but you could actually use that competition to gain their cards and potentially big 1-Ups, or rack up more cards on each level up for bragging rights. In Battletoads, you don’t get jack shit for killing your friend. You don’t get health, you don’t get extra lives, you don’t even get points. And the game is so brutally hard that the LAST thing you want to do is kill your friend. Problem is that it’s so easy to do (like in the second level, when you descend down the large pit). Like, what in God’s name were the programmers thinking when they included friendly fire? The idea of being able to kill your friend for absolutely no gain makes absolutely no sense at all!

Battletoads is a very difficult game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What makes it bad is that the challenge comes from the game’s programming just as much as it does things like enemy A.I. or puzzles or things like that. The challenge comes from the fact that in the first level, you have to jump for a certain pixel that’s almost impossible to locate to get a 1-Up, or that you have to be able to time jumps just right on those hover vehicles when sometimes you just can’t pull it off considering the previous jumps — or the fact that when you hit a ramp, you have to land at a certain pixel or small section of pixels because if you miss them — even if you land on solid ground — you’re dead. What’s the point of even trying to get through the game when you’re going to get screwed because the same idiots that thought it’d be a good idea for you to kill your friends didn’t know how to program a landing, or (for lack of better term) proper collision detection? Battletoads is just a faster, flashier, but sloppier knock-off of Double Dragon — which makes it no surprise that the two games had a mediocre mash-up.

I shouldn’t even have to mention the story, but I feel that it bears commenting on, because it’s so fucking stupid. Apparently three mutant toads (Rash, Zits, and Pimple) are working for some giant bird. Some evil dominatrix chick kidnaps Pimple and some princess for…I have no clue why, so the bird commands you from a ship to go save them. A bird commanding three toads and a princess…what the fuck?! I would love to know what the developers were on at the time, because I bet it was high-quality stuff! It makes so little sense that thinking about it gives me a headache. But the retarded storyline doesn’t even matter: even with a good story, Battletoads is irrevocably bad, and the perfect example of how NOT to make a game.

And yet people love it. People love this game, and call it a classic. Why? Is it because of some misplaced, ill-conceived nostalgia? Is it because people only value its nostalgia, not having any good standard to measure it again, so they continue to lie to themselves that Battletoads can even resemble “decent” on a good day? When rumors of a new Battletoads game for Wii hit the internet, it suddenly spawned a massive fag-fest at 4chan and at other sites frequented by 15 year old boys who think that fart and dick jokes are cool and funny to prank phone call GameStop stores asking for the new Battletoads. That shit’s not funny, not even a little bit. Never mind how annoying it is to receive such phone — though it’s VERY annoying to receive a call for Battletoads knowing some little scrawny punk is calling because he saw someone else do it on his favorite viral site; there will never, EVER be another Battletoads game ever made. Ever. And you know what? Rare should never even consider making a new one either. Battletoads is built on a monument of beyond-awful gameplay that, for reasons that may forever elude me, still charms nostalgia gamers to this day. Battletoads may very well be the most overrated game of all time, but anyone with any modicum of standards who puts any thought to Battletoads should see, right away, just how bad this game was. It sucked back then, it sucks even worse now, and the further along we go in history, the worse Battletoads will be. The Wii Battletoads fad isn’t funny, the game isn’t funny, and nothing associated with Battletoads is funny, cool, good, etc.

If you want a timeless game — one that deserves to be called a “classic” — then go play Super Mario Bros. 3. Play Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out (or just regular Punch-Out). Play Final Fantasy I. Play Chrono Trigger. Play Secret of Mana. Play Suikoden I and/or II. These are true timeless classics. As for the list above, throw these games out. Bury them deep in the ground where they deserve to be.

Well, except for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. You can keep that one.