Planet Sillicon

Poor reviews for a chuckle

By blog on Sep. 6, 2009.

I’ve written before on how really bad game reviews tickle my sense of humour, so today I’ve had a little time to kill and was looking up DS games that scored 1.0 on IGN. Here are two that seemed most funny.

First up we have not only Elf Bowling 1, but Elf Bowling 1 & 2! The premise behind this ‘game’ is that you are Santa, and you hate elves, so in the first game you’ve got them set up as ‘Pins’ and you ‘Bowl’ at them. See all those loaded words there? That’s because the sprites look so bad, that calling this a game is really being too generous. All you do is tap once, that’s it. You can’t aim, apparently, or do anything, really. You just have to tap the screen. And that’s just the first title, wait, there’s more! The second title is supposedly worse than the first! In this one, hateful Santa and his elves are in ‘Paradise’ and Santa’s now using the elves to play shuffle-board with. According to the review, there’s no animation of the elves, they just sort of bump about. This game originally made the rounds on the web as a free flash-game. Somehow it was made into a DS title that you’re supposed to actually pay for!? Apparently there are songs in there, too. “Elf, Elf, Baby” and “Who let the Elves out”… I shudder at the thought. Ahh, how funny! Looking at the video, this is by far the worst looking DS game I’ve ever seen.

Second abysmal game is simply called Aquarium. Now, the cover art actually looks kind of intriguing, in a DS game sort of way. When you look at the clean, nice cover, you think this must be an interesting, though perhaps short lived, game, but you’d be so very, very wrong. Aquarium is a, well hang on, is meant – sort of – to be a game where you put fish in a tank and feed them some stuff that they don’t actually eat, just swim back and forth and the food disappears, and you’re supposed to find this relaxing. There are unlockables, though it’s not explained what unlocks them – probably just sitting through more of this horrible little game – and you can ‘decorate’ the tank with scenery and what not, that apparently looks hideous. Wow, this is so bad it may have passed funny and gone right to “Why?” Here are some screens if you would like to subject yourself to the funniness, because the screens to attain that level of so bad it’s bloody hilarious.