PC Gamer, in its 30 years on this earth, has had the privilege of reviewing some incredible games. Absolute classics. The faces on the videogame Mount Rushmore. We're talking Half-Life, we're talking Civilization 2, we're talking Deus Ex.
And frankly, you've heard quite enough about all of them. I'd bet if you typed "Deus Ex" into our website search bar you'd get a list of results long enough to crash your computer. You'd also probably get a lot of results that don't mention Deus Ex at all; I don't really know how our site search works. The point is, you sure as hell don't need me to run you through all the videogame milestones PC Gamer has passed on the long road to 30. You already know them.
What you haven't heard about is all the trash. The garbage. The shovelware detritus that a series of now irrevocably scarred writers have had to play and review over the last three decades. Critics can write plenty about the merits of System Shock and Dungeon Keeper, but who out there will take the time to remember Big Brother Series 2: The Game and Plumbers Don't Wear Ties?
Me. I will. To mark PC Gamer's 30th, and in the spirit of growing older, wiser and kinder, I've gone back to play some of the absolute dirt-worst games to ever grace our pages with the aim of finding something, anything nice to say about each of them. Every cloud has its silver lining, and even the most execrable games have their unique qualities, their little moments of genius, right? Right?
Just a note: These games got some of the lowest review scores we've ever recorded, but I didn't just take the bottom six on The Big PC Gamer Review Spreadsheet and call it a day. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that, well, not all of those games are actually entertaining. Some are just plain broken, and others don't really offer much to write about.
The second is that attempting to play the lowest game on the list—Monsters, Inc. Wreck Room Arcade: Monster Tag—resulted in this. And I don't uninstall Windows NT for anybody.
Deer Avenger (1998)
Made by: Simon & Schuster, Hypnotix
Reviewed in: PCG 073
Score: 4%
What's wrong with it?
Deer Avenger is a game in which you prowl the woods looking for wealthy poachers to exterminate, but it's also got its bad parts. Stepping into the role of gaming icon Bambo, a deer who dislodges himself from a trophy mount at the game's beginning and immediately becomes a domestic terrorist, your task is to lure hunters out into the open before vaporising them with one of three weapons: an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, or a slingshot.
All well and good, except finding these hunters mostly means holding your mouse at the corner of your screen and infinitely scrolling across a 360-degree panorama of some trees while you wait for a footstep sound effect to play, at which point you execute your prey and the game just, uh, ends? You do get a nice shot of your quarry's head mounted on your wall, I suppose, and in the time between loading the game and firing your gun you can click the "Call" button to hear Bambo pretend to be a sexy lady, which explains quite a lot of what I see on the internet these days. You can also fart at will, the gameplay impact of which is negligible.
What's good about it?
You know what? There's something here. Not in the grab-bag of lazy stereotypes that make up Bambo's quips, or in the actual gameplay, which is about as invigorating as a Victorian moving panorama. But the idea? The idea works for 2023. We live in a world blighted by wildfires and hurricanes; the notion of a work that parodies actual hunting games to tell a tale of nature physically rebelling, tooling up and defending itself against rapacious and unthinking men as they despoil the land pursuing cheap thrills is a brutal act of détournement in the 21st century. Plus, Bambo loves making fun of my Pentium, which is just quaint.
And if you don't buy that, well, then I liked the animation that happens when you riddle a guy with bullets and he just kind of deflates, leaving a pair of eyes and a hat atop a pile of clothes. It had a good Looney Toons vibe.
John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles (1998)
Made by: Mindscape
Reviewed in: PCG 069
Score: 3%
What's wrong with it?
John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles is a point-and-click adventure game in which a JPEG of your son asks you to save him from the ghost of your dad. Despite this, it's not great.
This one's a little interesting, actually, and features what must be one of the biggest divergences of opinion between PC Gamer's UK and US arms in our history. Where PC Gamer UK scored the game an excoriating 3% based on the "four good things in it, worth three-quarters of a percent each," PC Gamer US scored it a healthy 79%, though at least partially because it was an oasis in a desert for point-and-click fans in '98.
I've gotta say I err closer to the spirits of PC Gamer UK writers past on this one. Playing this game is a chore even when you disregard the rigamarole of getting it running on a modern machine (I had to convert several hundred .wav files to a different, better kind of .wav file and install some kind of QuickTime variant that is probably mining crypto). The puzzles are simplistic, the game looks muddy and flat when you're stationary and downright inscrutable when you move, and it overflows with detail that is almost universally dull but that you have to take onboard anyway. After all, you never know what will be relevant to a later puzzle.
Also, the player character's voice actor sounds like he woke up in the booth after an abduction, which I can't tell if I like or not.
What's good about it?
You know, I thought this one would be pretty easy. After all, if I got stuck for ideas I could draw on PC Gamer US' 79% review to pull something good from, but honestly? Not much of that review holds true for my experience in the modern era.
But you know what does hold up? Malcolm Metcalf, the ghost dad antagonist of the game who stole your son. Where your player character sounds perpetually dazed, ol' dad is having the time of his life, whispering insults and taunts into your ear like slow-flowing poison whenever you click on something. He's hammy in a sinister, Jon Irenicus kind of way, which—given this is a game about rescuing your boy from a disused asylum run by the ghost of your dad—works pretty well! If I were reviewing Blackstone Chronicles today, I'd probably settle somewhere between 3% and 79%.
Big Brother Series 2: The Game (2000)
Made by: SoftMachine
Reviewed in: PCG ???
Score: N/A
What's wrong with it?
Here's the thing: I think "N/A" may, technically, be the lowest score PCG has ever given, but it also means Big Brother Series 2: The Game wasn't included in our record of reviews, so I have no idea which issue this thing got reviewed in. I only know about it from our own Wikipedia entry, which mentions that our reviewer said they had "put as much effort into reviewing it as they did in making the game."
Well that's just catnip. So thank you, mysterious reviewer and anonymous Wikipedia editor, for bringing it to my attention. The game is truly miserable. I'm not even sure it's right to call it a game; it's more a minigame collection strung together by some clipart that feels right out of Newgrounds in 2004. Except bad. That's a bad thing, in this particular instance.
The minigames themselves are terrible, a mish-mash of simple memory games and tests of dexterity that would, ordinarily, be doable by a child, except something about modern machines means at least one of them runs at fifty-six million miles an hour. You play them as one of the contestants from Big Brother UK's second season. Kind of. You play as one of their heads stitched onto a cartoon torso, which is both perplexing and horrifying.
What's good about it?
This one's actually quite easy. Josh.
And Bubble.
And every other person who signed up for Big Brother's second UK season in the early 2000s and had to shoot a frankly bizarre video introducing themselves to the nation. They are all cringeworthy, they are all awkward, they are all wonderful. In 2000, PCG's reviewer likely couldn't have cared less about these weirdos and their videos, but now they're a time capsule from a bygone era, a glimpse into what the world was like when reality TV was a new concept and we all had strong opinions about Al Gore (I mean, I was 6, but I was passionate about the Medicare lock box).
The minigames are irredeemable, but the bits where I get to go and learn about these ghosts who once haunted my parents' televisions? Absolutely priceless. This thing is a goldmine.
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (2004)
Made by: High Voltage Software
Reviewed in: PCG 143
Score: 3%
What's wrong with it?
I think probably the key ringleaders implicated in the creation of this game should be in prison. On a personal level, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude is the worst game I had to play for this feature. Not because of the actual gameplay, which consists largely of forgettable rhythm and physics games that depart the mind just as quickly as they enter it, but because literally the entire plot of the game is about manipulating people into sleeping with you. But in, like, a funny way.
Or not in a funny way, actually, because on top of being spiritually wretched the game is also staid and predictable in just about everything it does. The jokes fall flat, the references are stale, and Larry himself is essentially despicable. I think the 3% must be because it technically runs, and not every game can achieve that.
What's good about it?
Quits swiftly.
Bravo Romeo Delta (1993)
Made by: Frankenstein Software
Reviewed in: PCG 023
Score: 3%
What's wrong with it?
The first thing I did in Bravo Romeo Delta is nuke the White House. I don't know what the second thing was, because this game's UI consists of four screens and every single one of them is absolutely unparseable. It's a Cold War sim—a kind of proto-Defcon—that puts you in charge of either the US or USSR's nuclear arsenal and charges you with… well, I guess I don't know what it charges you with.
This is a game too antediluvian to have anything like a tutorial. Everything was likely explained in its manual, now lost to time. It also has almost no artwork and even less sound: the decision to dump 30 nuclear bombs across strategic targets in the US is accompanied only by a minor blip, like you're inputting your PIN at an ATM.
This is a strange one, because Bravo Romeo Delta is exactly the kind of thing I'd get super into if it had literally any grippable surface for me to latch onto. As it is, I'm just a monkey at a typewriter that happens to be connected to several thousand nuclear warheads, bashing around aimlessly and without thought, accidentally extinguishing millions, perhaps billions of lives as I try to find my way from the Nuclear Strike Plan Generator screen to the Command Control Communications screen. Is Belgium gone? I think I just got rid of Belgium.
What's good about it?
All the things that are bad about it are, I'm pretty sure, also good. This feels like a Paradox-before-Paradox game to me, just a rat's nest of information and weird UI that probably obscures some kind of really cool simulation. Selecting a target and scrolling through a list of different nukes like you're choosing what to wear to prom is honestly kind of impressive in the way it captures the strange, detached evil of nuclear weapons. I just wish I had any idea what the buttons I'm hitting meant.
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
Made by: United Pixtures
Reviewed in: PCG 008
Score: 3%
What's wrong with it?
For reasons they will one day have to justify before our father in heaven, Limited Run Games recently announced a remaster of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (1993), an FMV comedy dating sim that consists almost entirely of still images overdubbed by voice actors recording their lines into a phone.
To be fair, you could easily make a game fitting that description and have it become one of my favourites of all time, but Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is dire. It's a loose assemblage of dull tropes and bad jokes stuffed into something that is, I suppose, technically a videogame. The only input a player has is choosing which riveting route the storyline will follow, making it a kind of awkward choose-your-own-adventure that will, if you play your cards right, sometimes yield an image of an actor in their underwear. According to legend, PC Gamer of yore called it "irksome and yobbishly executed pseudo-pornographic photo story with the wit and charm of an elephant's arse," so there's room for improvement in the new version.
What's good about it?
It kind of sucks? I mean that in a positive way. It's undoubtedly a terrible and slovenly game, if game is even the right word, but I can't help but find something charming about how incredibly subpar it is. The only bit of actual FMV in the game consists of an underpaid and questionably talented actress at the very beginning, reading lines off a cue card against the unironed bed sheet the devs used as a backdrop.
It is artless in a way that even everyday life is not artless, like someone has gone in and carefully constructed the worst thing possible. It might sound strange, but it's kind of a pleasure to witness in the same way a technically accomplished painting is. You just don't see this kind of low quality every day. This level of talentlessness takes talent. Now that I think about it, I can't wait for the remaster.
