Everybody has at least one: a game that, for one reason or another, just never appealed to you despite its presence on the "best games of all time" list for many people. A game that you're almost ashamed to admit to hating in polite company, for fear that you'll be branded a gauche iconoclast (or, worse, an ignorant troll). A game that makes you question not just your tastes, but the concept of popular taste as a whole. I mean, what do people see in that game? This is an anthology of those games for some of Ars' editors.

We go into this list knowing that our picks are going to be baffling to some of you, and that we're in the extreme minority with most of these picks. That's kind of the point. Before you accuse us of just trying to "stir the pot" with intentionally subversive picks, know that the author of each of these blurbs truly and honestly just doesn't like the game being discussed. Also know that, no matter how popular a game or series is among the general public, we fully believe that every game has its flaws, and that there is no title that can (or should) be universally loved by literally everybody.

With that, let the slaughtering of the sacred cows begin!

Dragon's Lair

by Kyle Orland

I was too young to catch the whole Dragon's Lair craze in the '80s, but I distinctly remember the first time I saw the game sitting alone in a movie theater lobby sometime in the early '90s. My reaction can be divided into three distinct stages.

Stage 1 (After seeing the game's "attract mode" animation from across the lobby): Holy crap? What is... how do they get graphics like that? Is there a VCR under there? The whole game doesn't really look like that, does it? No... it can't. Can it?

Stage 2 (After putting in a dollar—A WHOLE DOLLAR—to try it out): Oh my god, the game does actually look like that! I'm actually going to get to control a real cartoon! This is so awesome!

Stage 3 (After making a total of one correct move before dying three times in succession): What the hell was that? That sucked!

Dragon's Lair seems to keep getting ported to new platforms in the decades since I first saw it had that arcade experience (most recently winning a coveted Steam Greenlight spot), so there must be some market of nostalgia-filled gamers whose opinions of the game probably gelled during Stage 1 and 2 above. And while I can appreciate the artistry of the animation, which still holds up today, I find the see-a-flash-and-hit-a-corresponding-button gameplay just truly, utterly, stupefyingly bad.

This isn't just sour grapes after one tough arcade play either... I spent a good deal of time struggling with a CD-ROM version years later just so I could see more of those wonderful, fluid, moving drawings. It didn't change my opinion one bit. As a short film (or even a choose-your-own adventure "interactive" movie), Dragon's Lair would be amazing. As a game, it's awful.

Gears of War

by Sean Gallagher

For Christmas in 2006, there were two things on my wish list: An Xbox 360 and Gears of War. I wasn't disappointed on Christmas morning—the disappointment wouldn't arrive until some time around New Year's.

There were some innovative things about Gears of War's combat engine (shoot from cover! OMG!), and it held up well in multiplayer. But the single-player campaign came nowhere near living up to the wave of hype that Gears of War rode in on. The plot was plodding and monotonous. The AI for "squad members" and the list of commands available to direct them made them more of a liability than an asset most of the time. And then there were the absurd mechanics of that chainsaw assault rifle.

Unfortunately, after the Xbox 360 etched a scratch into my first copy of the game, I actually had to buy a second before I figured out it probably wasn't even worth paying for once.

Halo

by Lee Hutchinson



Halo, how I dislike thee. A first-person shooter with few redeeming qualities, it's the kind of game that would have been released into obscurity had it not been a launch title for the original Xbox. The game sported mediocre graphics, a cliche-filled and unoriginal single-player campaign, and a tired and uninspiring set of multiplayer options. In spite of these detriments, its position as the only multiplayer first-person shooter available to Xbox users guaranteed its success. Apparently when you're dying of thirst in the desert, any drink will do, even if it's your own pee.

Halo's success is particularly cringe-worthy considering how ridiculously inferior it was to first-person shooters available on PC. Its contemporaries include classic AAA titles like Aliens vs. Predator 2, Ghost Recon, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, all of which were vastly superior to Halo in every way but one: they weren't available to Xbox users clamoring for a way to frag their buddies.

The game spawned a plethora of (much better, actually fun) sequels and has legions of fans, but the first game in the series was just plain bad.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

by Andrew Cunningham

I think it was Twilight Princess that ultimately prompted me to give up on modern Zelda games. From the outset, there was something about it that felt perfunctory. It was obviously trying very hard to build a deeper, story-driven game on top of Ocarina of Time's sturdy foundation. And while there were certainly moments of greatness strewn amidst TP's bloated, 30-something-hour running time, in the end it just felt like Zelda-by-the-numbers. Get your sword. Go to the dungeon. Find item (dah dah dah daaaaaah!). Beat dungeon and boss with item. Explore around until you finally find the next dungeon. Repeat.

Twilight Princess was really just the culmination of a long-running trend. Both Zelda and Mario, two of Nintendo's biggest flagships, are respectful of their roots to the point that they sometimes feel fenced in by their conventions. But Mario has taken what made the original games so fun—precision platforming, great level design, and pick-up-and-play gameplay—and pushed it to the fore. Newer games have even forgone the tiresome, empty hub worlds of Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy in favor of a format that puts as little time between turning on the console and playing a level as possible.

Zelda, on the other hand, has taken the best elements from the NES and SNES entries—puzzle solving, exploration, and swordplay, in roughly that order—and weighed them down with over-long tutorials, interminable cutscenes, and fetch quests that pad the games' running time without really adding much to the fun. Twilight Princess added insult to injury by replacing the precise button controls with gratuitous controller waggling (in the Wii version), making it by far my least favorite entry in the series (though, to be fair, I haven't even given Skyward Sword a chance after Twilight Princess scared me off the series).

Listing image by Shardayyy