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The 10 Worst Games Nintendo Ever Published
by Charlie Reneke
trueclassicgaming.blogspot.com
I've been accused of being a Nintendo fanboy. I actually don't deny it. Hell, it's fair. I'm a Nintendo booster. It's the company that my interactive entertainment roots were planted in. With few exceptions, Nintendo has usually always provided the top games of each generation since the NES came around. Any game Nintendo is willing to publish, regardless of who developed it, must be exceptional. I'm crazy I guess. I own every single game Nintendo has ever published in North America. No exceptions. If Nintendo published it, I own it, I've played it, and I've usually loved it.
But... nobody is perfect.
And so, today I bring you the worst of Nintendo. And these are games where Nintendo is to blame. There will be no Phillips CD-i games here, even though you can blame Nintendo for those ones in a short-sighted kind of way. Of course, you might as well blame Nintendo for the PSP while you're at it because using such logic the crappy PSP wouldn't exist if Nintendo hadn't double-crossed Sony in the early 90s which led to the creation of the Playstation which later led to the creation of the Nintendo punching bag that is the PSP. You also won't find Mario is Missing! or it's likes on here. And quite frankly, Mario is Missing wasn't a bad game. That's right, it needed to be said. Mario is Missing! is a perfectly good edutainment game. Granted, it was marketed in a dishonest way so that unsuspecting players and parents would not know it was a educational game. As far as gameplay goes, it's no worse then Carmen Sandiego, and a lot better then the boredom simulator known as Oregon Trail that retards of my generation convinced themselves was fun. "I'm playing a kind of video game in school! Dude! Classic!"
What you will find here are the stuff that Nintendo funded themselves and published under their label. This will include some games not developed by Nintendo themselves. I defined a Nintendo game as a game that Nintendo paid to have created. Most of the stuff on here was created by Nintendo themselves anyway, but I thought I would give that warning up front for those hopeless Nintendo apologists who will be all uppity at me for including Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on this list. And it's on here. And it sucks. Yes it does.
Alright, bring on the crap.
#10: Baseball
Developed Nintendo R&D1 (Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Mario Bros, Popeye)
Release: 1983 (Japan Famicom) 1985 (NES), 2002 (E-Reader), 2007 (Virtual Console)
If anything else, Baseball proves that Nintendo has no shame. Nobody in their right mind would have called Baseball a good game in 1983 when this pile of shit hit the Famicom in Japan. Yet Nintendo has had the nerve to release it another three times. How bad is it? Pretty awful. Damn near unplayable. Outfielders move like they're shackled at the ankles while wearing cement shoes, while base runners, although animated to look like they've suffered a stroke, can move so fast that they can reach home plate before the ball even lands. And it usually lands right in the outfielder's glove, making your base-running marathon a big cock tease. Part of the problem is no effort at all seems to have been spent on balancing the size of the diamond with the rest of the playfield. If you somehow manage to hit a line drive into a bare part of the outfield, you'll almost certainly get a triple out of it, and with no luck needed, possibly get an inside the park homerun. The graphics are bad, even by the standards of the era, and the gameplay is actually a step down from Major League Baseball on the Intellivision, and that's just pitiful. The fact that Nintendo actually had the nerve to re-release this TWICE in this decade, for money instead of some kind freebee gag gift, shows that they can be downright evil. I mean, Legend of Stafi isn't good enough for a US release, but Baseball gets released more then four times if you count Arcade and Gameboy ports?
ing scumbags. It would be cheaper to allow players to experience NES baseball by actually playing baseball after huffing paint and filling their underwear with cement. More humane as well.
#9: Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Developed by Lucas Arts
Release: 1996 (Nintendo 64)
Save your e-mail, Star Wars nerds and Nintendo apologists. I don't want to hear it. If you like this game, you either are blindly in love with Star Wars or you played Shadows of the Empire at an impressionable age where your brain hadn't developed to the point where it could recognize processed crap. Even though it might be able to now, you'll still convince yourself that Shadows of the Empire was a good game like a woman who tries to convince herself a date-rapist will call her back in the morning. Shadows is NOT calling you back. And what a tease this game is. It starts off with what is legitimately one of the best opening levels in a video game, a recreation of the opening battle of Empire Strikes Back. It's fun and hell, I would even say it holds up today. BUT WAIT~! Because 50% of the game is not a vehicle based shooter, but rather one of the crappiest Doom clones ever made. You control some loser named Dash Rendar, which sounds like the star of a gay porno movie, and you-up your way through unplayable sprawling maps and hoping like hell you don't step within twenty feet of a cliff, because if you do you will somehow slip and fall to your death. And even if you don't give up after the first of these sequences in hopes of another fun mini-game like the Hoth level, you're still shit out of luck because the controls in most of the other vehicle shooter levels are broken. I almost didn't include this game on my list because it was developed by Lucas Arts, but then I discovered that Nintendo 100% staked them on this game so they would have exclusive rights to a Star Wars game around the time the Nintendo 64 launched. Lucas Arts as a result trashed a point-and-click adventure they were working on for the PC in favor of this shit. Shadows was later released on the PC with slightly improved visuals but the gameplay itself was still broken. Combine this with the fact that the game is, by default, worse now because of the 5th Generation Curse and I'm honestly feeling a bit guilty for letting it slide with the #9 spot on the list.
#8: Urban Champion
Developed by Nintendo R&D1
Release: 1984 (Famicom), 1986 (NES), 2002 (E-Reader), 2007 (Virtual Console)
Another triple-dip by Nintendo, and for an even worse game if you can believe it. Most people name this as the worst game ever made by Nintendo. Obviously I'm not going that harsh, but Urban Champion is pretty bad. It's a 2-D fighting game, pretty much Nintendo's attempt to make a game like Karate Champ. A lot of early NES games are shallow, but Urban Champion sinks to new lows with a game so pathetically stripped down that it would barely qualify to be a microgame in the Wario Ware series... and funny enough, it is! Two guys duke it out. If you land a punch, you knock your opponent backwards. The object is to knock each other into a manhole. There's two type of punches, a fast punch and a heavy punch, which you can aim up or down. And that's pretty much it. Occasionally, some chick will poke her head out a window and throw a flower pot at your head, which is not very good edict for witnessing a street fight. You wait until AFTER the fight is over to bludgeon someone over the head from a height of 20 feet. How rude. Also, a cop will occasionally break up the fight and make you start over again. There's very little room for strategy. The game basically plays out like a Rock-Paper-Scissors done in half-second intervals. You don't really have time to think about how to play, so you basically just mash buttons and hope for the best. Every single Mario Party game has done the exact same thing, and yet Nintendo, as recent as January 1st of last year, was charging people FIVEing DOLLARS for the right to mash buttons. There is literally nothing else to do in this game but mash buttons, unless you count pressing the start button at the beginning of the game. I suppose you could find fun in it by using other body parts to mash the buttons, like your toes, your tongue, or the cheeks of your ass. Just remember to save the ass for last you sick bastards.
#7: Kirby Air Ride
Developed by HAL
Release: 2003 (Gamecube)
Kirby Air Ride is a testament to the can-do spirit of getting shitty games onto the market. Air Ride debuted as one of two tech demos on the day the Nintendo Ultra 64 was unveiled to the public on November 24, 1995. It didn't get much attention, mostly because the hundreds of people at the trade show gathered around Super Mario 64, the other game that was shown. Those who didn't want to wait six hours to play Mario 64 for ten minutes gave up and tried Kirby Air Ride, a cute racing game starring the pink cloud of fluff. Those who did called it one of the worst games ever shown at Nintendo's Space World (Shoshinkai) trade events. Nintendo quietly cancelled the game, and what was completed of it sat in the can for eight long years. Fast forward to late 2002. Nintendo doesn't have any first-party games to release, remembers Kirby's Air Ride was pretty much complete, and gives it the go ahead to be ported to the Gamecube. Released in October in North America, I was shocked to find some of my favorite critics actually liked it, so I picked it up myself. Big mistake on my part, paying $50 for a game that might as well be called "Kirby Hold Down A and Pray!" The controls are broken on pretty much every level, mostly due to the fact that everything except the limited steering function is mapped to the A button. You use A to build up speed boosts but also to break. If that alone doesn't throw you through a loop, the A button also serves as the button you use to eat your enemies. BUT WAIT~! THERE'S MORE! Once you eat the enemies, you also then have to press the A button to use their abilities. I get that Nintendo designed the Gamecube controller to have the A button be very large, but apparently Nintendo didn't trust anyone to be able to find the other three face buttons or the two shoulder buttons. If you needed any further proof that Nintendo thinks every one of their customers is an idiot, look no further. But what really befuddles me is how so many critics gave this game passing marks. An average of 7 out of 10 from EGM. 7 out of 10 from Game Informer. IGN and Gamespot were a little more critical, giving it roughly a 5 out of 10 each. 1up.com, a surrogate of EGM, had the balls to rightfully call the game crap and give it a 4 out of 10, while EDGE gave it a 3 out of 10. Even those scores seem generous. But I guess if you need a game that gives you a proper tutorial on use of the A button, you could do much worse then Kirby Air Ride. Then again, you can get the same experience by booting up the Gamecube and messing around in the system's main menu. Whoops, nevermind... it uses the B button too.
#6: Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II
Developed by Nintendo IRD (Punch-Out!! Series, StarTropics)
Release: 1994 (NES)
Anyone who's talked with me for any small amount of time about video games knows that I practically want to marry StarTropics for the NES. It's easily my favorite game ever that doesn't have "Tetris" in the title somewhere. So when I was 12 and word arrived that a sequel was on the way, I was positively wired for it. I mean I had dreams about it. I was so excited. Sure, the previews looked pretty bland, but they're just pictures! So, on my thirteenth birthday, June 4th, 1994, I was given Star Tropics II, now titled "Zoda's Revenge" along with a nasty case of the Chicken Pox. But I figured, no big deal. Even sick as a dog and covered in pock marks, there's no way I can not have a good time today! Turns out, I was better off with the Chicken Pox. Zoda's Revenge is total dogshit. Gone is the exotic tropical settings, replaced by some of the most drab environments possible to draw on the NES. The cool weapons like the Yo-Yo are also gone, replaced by a infinite supply of flimsy slow battle axes that you throw. You later upgrade to other flimsy weapons like a dagger and a katana, which again, you throw, not swing. The cool pressure-sensitive buttons in the dungeons return, but there isn't as many of them, and nowhere near the same amount of puzzles. It's like they dumbed the concept of the game down, which is really strange because sequels usually cater to the fanbase of the original. But even with the concept dumbed down, the game is much harder because you now have free-range jumping. It sounds good in theory, but jumping is so floaty that you're almost certain to unfairly land in the water. The multi-terraced dungeons don't help either, and neither does the ability to jump diagonally. And just to let you know what a pile of shit this is, the first level isn't a level at all but rather a quick static-screened cut scene. The second level starts you off with RANDOM BATTLES! Honestly, random battles! In a StarTropics game! Who decided this was a good idea? The storyline, which sees Mike Jones traveling back in time to meet such historical figures as Sherlock Holmes and Merlin, is one of the main reasons why the dungeon design is so bad. Every level is themed to the time Mike Jones travels backwards into, and as such everything is designed around the gimmick instead of having the gimmick be based around the game design. It's reverse-logic thinking. And I can't stress enough how dreary the graphics are. While everything in the original was bright and colorful, Zoda's Revenge is dull and lifeless. And the music is so bad you'll want to stick bananas in your ears. It makes me wonder why Nintendo even bothered. The Super NES had been out for three years at this point and one would think if they were intent on making a new StarTropics they should have made it on the SNES. Then again, maybe Nintendo secretly hated StarTropics. Maybe it was the red-headed stepchild of their franchise family, the one with the blandly designed hero, but the game design was good enough that people might start to talk about the series more then Legend of Zelda or Mario, and it simply had to be eliminated. That's the only logical reason I can see for putting this pile out into the marketplace. That and Nintendo's undying hatred of us all.
#5: Donkey Kong Barrel Blast
Developed by Paon (DK: King of Swing, Donkey Kong Jungle Climber)
Release: 2007 (Wii)
The only Wii game on this list (although Wii Play came close), Donkey Kong Barrel Blast began life as a bongo-based game on the Gamecube but was quietly cancelled when the motion-controlled machine caught fire. Revived on Wii, bongo-controllers replaced by Wii-Remotes, you'll instantly flash back to memories of Kirby Air Ride. Only Barrel Blast is even worse. You wave the nunchuck-Wiimote furiously up and down, and if anyone happens to walk into the room while you do this you have to avoid blushing and explain to them that you're not wanking off. There's little to no freedom in movement, as you basically just move forward, as if you were playing a rail shooter. The challenge is apparently trying to achieve maximum speed, which doesn't actually feel fast, but at least a meter on the screen tells you it is so that counts for something I guess. To make turns, you sort of arch the controller in a downward fashion, which is kind of the same way you build up speed. It's incredibly stupid and imprecise and leads to many collisions with objects, and it doesn't help that collision detection doesn't seem all that accurate either. Occasionally I passed right through objects, and at other times I *know* I missed the object but the game still registered an impact. A few critics, namely all of them, bitched about the game using rubber-banding AI, but quite frankly every kart-racer game uses rubber banding. There's so many other things wrong with Donkey Kong Barrel Blast that bitching about something that's present in every similar game the genre has ever seen is downright nit-picky. None of the course designs are particularly clever. In fact, I would say they're so bland that they were likely slapped together at the last second, along with the control scheme. And why couldn't just keep the bongo support intact? I mean, it was already programmed into the game when they began the port to the Wii, and the Wii has the Gamecube ports right in the side of the damn machine. The only reason I can think of is Nintendo is angry at the under 10,000 people who bought Donkey Kong Jungle Beat before it got clearanced out for not spreading the word about it good enough and wanted to punish us. That must be it. After all, it couldn't possibly be the fact that Nintendo showed no balls themselves when it came to marketing Jungle Beat, just like they showed no balls in marketing Eternal Darkness or Pikmin 2 or Odama. Nintendo has balls to spare, and they'll prove it by sending Reggie Fils-Aime to your house with a roll of measuring tape.
#4: Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Stadium 2, Pokémon Colosseum, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, and Pokémon Battle Revolution
Developed by HAL (Pokemon Stadium 1 & 2), Genius Sonority (Colosseum, Gale of Darkness, Battle Revolution)
Release: 2000 (Stadium, Nintendo 64), 2001 (Stadium 2, Nintendo 64), 2003 (Colosseum, Gamecube), 2005 (Gale of Darkness, Gamecube), 2007 (Battle Revolution, Wii)
Yes, I said Donkey Kong Barrel Blast was the only Wii game on this list, but that wasn't a lie because Battle Revolution is the EXACT SAME GAME as Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64, and since I didn't want to write five different entrees for five crappy games, I decided to lump all the Stadium games together. Because they are all the same stripped down Pokémon game, only twice as expensive as the fully-realized handheld games they serve as backups for. That's right, backups. That's pretty much the main function of Pokémon Stadium, to backup your collection of characters. Oh sure, you can play an ultra-stripped down battle simulation using those characters if you wish, but why do that when you can just use the same characters to fight actual enemies and earn actual experience points in the actual game? Imagine if some other game company did the same thing! If Square-Enix made a game called Final Fantasy Stadium where you took your party from Final Fantasy XII, removed all the RPG elements and simply had them fight one battle at a time, you would think Square-Enix had gone bat-shit crazy. Nintendo apparently heard these criticisms and decided instead of making a full-fledged console version of Pokémon, they would farm out the Gamecube version of Stadium to a startup group of hacks called Genius Sonority. That way someone else would get the hate mail. Genius Sonority (or Snore-ity as I call them, ha, the wit) thought the best way to tackle this situation was to add something that vaguely resembled an RPG to their versions of the game. Only they played nothing like the Pokémon games they were leaching off of, and were in fact thinly-disguised versions of the same non-game game that the N64 stadiums were. Gale of Darkness was supposed to be something of an original console RPG version of Pokemon, but nobody was really surprised when it was basically the same game as Pokémon Colosseum, only slightly prettier and with more dialog. I imagine part of the design process involved someone yelling out "I can still tell it's not a real game! Just keep piling on more dialog! It'll look like a real RPG soon!" With Pokemon Battle Revolution, they seemed to have given up on trying to market it as a new game and just basically said "Play Pokémon... online!" And it apparently worked. I didn't include Pokémon Box on this list because it's not really a game either but at least Nintendo didn't try to market it as such. They basically said it's a storage device for your creatures, nothing more, and I can respect that. Plus it's going to be worth boatloads one day. Anyway, if you've played one of these games, you've played them all. Stay tuned for the next installment, "Pokémon You, Pay Up", coming to the Wii in 2008. Actually, it already hit in the form of a game called My Pokémon Ranch, which I haven't played but judging by what I've read you might as well pencil it in as the 6th game to be listed #4 on this list. At least it's cheap.
#3: Hey You, Pikachu!
Developed by Ambrella (Pokémon Dash, My Pokémon Ranch)
Release: 2000 (Nintendo 64)
I'm not sure exactly what Nintendo was trying to prove with Hey You, Pikachu, but I can't help but notice the strange coincidence that Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast had recently released for the Sega Dreamcast around the time Nintendo came out with this. Actually, Pikachu came out in 1998 in Japan, seven months before Seaman arrived. That said, it's still a rip-off. Seaman spent years in development and was highly anticipated. Pikachu came out of nowhere and was likely developed in a very short amount of time. And where Seaman is articulate and shocked the hell out of me by knowing about the movie Back to the Future, Pikachu can only say the words "Pika", "Chu", and "Pikachu." That's two words less then my dog can say ("Bark", "Ruff", "I", "Love," "You," I kid you not). Granted, the point of Pikachu isn't to be psycho-analyzed by the damn thing, but rather for you to bark orders at the overly cute little critter while he sssslllllooooowwwllllyyyy performs mundane tasks like watering a garden and fishing. It's basically a virtual pet game, and that would be great if the game actually understood your commands. And for some people, it does just find. But if you have any kind of accent in your voice, don't bother. And although this game is marketed to children under the age of 10, it has problems with them as well. My kid sister had this game when she was nine. She had no accent and spoke very clearly. Yet this game could not understand a single word she said, and when it can't do that Pikachu gets pissed off at you. The point of the game is to develop a friendship with it, but you can't get "Pika Points" when it's angry at you, nor can you get it to follow any of your commands. Like almost any voice-recognition based video game, the design is broken. But at least with Seaman the game didn't punish you for taking 20 tries to finally spit out "Hello" in a way the game could understand. The sad thing is, I actually wanted to like this game. There's something undeniably loveable about Pikachu, at least for those of us that don't harbor a blind hatred for all thing Pokémon. Having this game was going to be the closest I could get to owning a pet Pikachu, at least until scientists figure out how to genetically modify the appearance of a dog.
#2: Pokémon Channel
Developed by Ambrella
Release: 2003 (Gamecube)
This is a game about watching Pokémon watch TV. Seriously. Oh sure, there are one or two points in the game where things are almost interactive, but otherwise this isn't even a friggen game! In this sequel to Hey You, Pikachu!, you toss out the microphone in favor of a cursor. Although this works 100% better then a microphone, there is almost nothing interactive about most of the Pokémon Channel experience. The idea is Professor Oak has drafted you and your Pikachu to be the test audience for a new Pokémon cable system. So you watch the shows and... that's pretty much it. Sure, you can explore the area outside of your house in limited intervals and chat with wild Pokémon, but that will last only a few minutes before Pikachu gets pissed and demands that you go back inside and watch an anime called "PichuBros" for the one hundredth time. Like Hey You, Pikachu, your goal is to keep the little electric rat happy. The only way to do this is to keep him fed and in front of the television. And that sucks because there is high potential for fun in this game if only you could actually do exploring. You can't. You're glued to a television, watching Pikachu watch an aerobics show. None of the dialog here is particularly witty and all the attempts at camp are lost. If the show had featured most of the writing staff of the cartoon, it likely would have at least been entertaining in the way a good interactive DVD is. But only the PichuBros short that you have to watch, without hyperbole, at least a dozen times was conceived by the show's staff. There's no humor even on an ironic level here. At least in Hey You, Pikachu you could have fun by tricking Pikachu into running face first into a door. Here you can make him trip over a banana peel, but what's the point? If you do it he'll get angry and demand that you turn on PichuBros again. I don't understand why Nintendo keeps going back to Ambrella. I can't think of a single reason, so I'm just going to assume the Yukaza is somehow involved. They haven't made a single game that's critically acclaimed. Hell, they haven't made a single game that hasn't been universally shat upon. And the only game they've made that didn't make this list in one form or another is Pokémon Dash, which only avoided inclusion by being barely better then Baseball.
Before we get to the #1 game, which I'm sure you're scratching your head over, here's some other stinkers that were under consideration but ultimately were not included.
-Pokémon Dash (Nintendo DS, 2005): You can mark this off as the #11 game on the list. It was really, really close. Ultimately, I decided that stroking a stylus in four different directions was more fun then playing something vaguely resembling America's Pastime as preformed by stroke victims.
-Donkey Kong Jr. Math (NES, 1985): I know, this one gets a lot of hate. You know what? As a multi-player game it's not bad. Sure, math is never really fun but if you grew up hanging out with a lot of Mensa types, this was the type of game you would play to prove you're smarter then someone else. Not too much smarter because you're playing a crappy game, but still...
-Volleyball (NES, 1987): Another stinker sports game, but not quite on the level of Baseball, which as previously established, was the #10 game here. Anything else had to be worse.
-Stack Up/Gyromite (NES, 1985): The truth about these games that nobody really tells you is that if you play them with the R.O.B. robot, they're actually pretty fun. Gyromite especially. I would love to see some kind of revival for it, but that will never happen.
-Cruis'n USA (N64, 1996): I really, really wanted to include Cruis'n USA on this list, but the truth is although it was published by Nintendo, they didn't really pay to make it. It was totally produced and funded by Midway, who simply hadn't worked up the balls at that point to publish their own stuff on consoles. So off the list it goes, because otherwise it would have been #1.
So, what is, for my money, the worst game ever published by Nintendo?
#1: Mario Pinball Land
Developed by Fuse Games
Release: 2004 (Gameboy Advance)
I love pinball and I love Mario, so logically I wanted to love and possibly mate with Mario Pinball Land. And instead, Nintendo handed me the worst game they ever made. Mario Pinball Land is broken in every way possible. This was the first commerical game developed by Fuse, so at least they have an excuse, but I can't believe Nintendo green-lighted this for release. Didn't anyone actually test it? The physics are all wrong and feel too heavy on gravity. This is really made painful by the fact that every board is circular and thus you'll spend 90% of the game flinging the ball (Mario squished into being the ball himself) around the room in one big circular motion. The flippers are too small and the ball too large, which means you're either launching the ball off the tip of the flipper or the dead center of it. Skill shots should be renamed 'luck shots' because you're going to need it to actually hit them. It's one of the misunderstood quirks of pinball among people who don't play a lot of it. Pinball is not random, but rather totally skill based. If you know what you're doing, you can ring in highly difficult shots and nail seemingly impossible targets. Video Pinball, to this point, had not been very good at simulating real life physics. They're getting better. But with Mario Pinball, they were so limited by technology that they should have at least made some effort to improve the flippers so at least you could launch Mario off at more then three different angles even if it meant using some kind of artificial computer assistance in helping the player, something I'm rarely in favor of. Even with all the physics problems, this wouldn't be so bad if the boards had some life to them, but they don't even have that. They wanted to make a game the played like Mario 64, only have it be a pinball game. Epic failure. Every 'board' pretty much plays out in single-screen format with two, maybe three things to shoot at. Half the time you'll hit a target, only you don't have enough speed built up and thus not actually hit the target, even though you do hit it. I get the impression that most of the problems with Mario Pinball are due to the shape of the boards, which cause that circular motion as previously mentioned. But the gravity and flippers are so poorly designed that common pinball techniques like trapping and toe-shots are impossible. Nintendo and Fuse clearly missed the point in what players expect from video pinball games. If people wanted an epic quest, they would play a game that caters that form of gameplay. Now, after spewing out a list of the ten worst games ever, we get a happy ending. Because Fuse actually learned from it's mistakes. It's next game (and apparently last game), Metroid Prime Pinball (2005, Nintendo DS), righted every wrong that was done in Mario Pinball. The physics? The best video pinball had ever seen. The gameplay? Classic pinball with a Metroid theme, instead of Metroid done with a pinball theme. It's the best video pinball game ever made, including the recent Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams Collection. So Fuse, I salute you for being a company that actually strives to make improvements. You've been quiet for three years, and judging by sales numbers of Metroid Prime Pinball I'm guessing you've passed away, but if not I look forward to all your future products. You've made the worst game Nintendo ever published, but proved that you at least learned something in doing so. Unlike a certain company that will not be named (cough, Ambrella, hack).
by Charlie Reneke
trueclassicgaming.blogspot.com
I've been accused of being a Nintendo fanboy. I actually don't deny it. Hell, it's fair. I'm a Nintendo booster. It's the company that my interactive entertainment roots were planted in. With few exceptions, Nintendo has usually always provided the top games of each generation since the NES came around. Any game Nintendo is willing to publish, regardless of who developed it, must be exceptional. I'm crazy I guess. I own every single game Nintendo has ever published in North America. No exceptions. If Nintendo published it, I own it, I've played it, and I've usually loved it.
But... nobody is perfect.
And so, today I bring you the worst of Nintendo. And these are games where Nintendo is to blame. There will be no Phillips CD-i games here, even though you can blame Nintendo for those ones in a short-sighted kind of way. Of course, you might as well blame Nintendo for the PSP while you're at it because using such logic the crappy PSP wouldn't exist if Nintendo hadn't double-crossed Sony in the early 90s which led to the creation of the Playstation which later led to the creation of the Nintendo punching bag that is the PSP. You also won't find Mario is Missing! or it's likes on here. And quite frankly, Mario is Missing wasn't a bad game. That's right, it needed to be said. Mario is Missing! is a perfectly good edutainment game. Granted, it was marketed in a dishonest way so that unsuspecting players and parents would not know it was a educational game. As far as gameplay goes, it's no worse then Carmen Sandiego, and a lot better then the boredom simulator known as Oregon Trail that retards of my generation convinced themselves was fun. "I'm playing a kind of video game in school! Dude! Classic!"
What you will find here are the stuff that Nintendo funded themselves and published under their label. This will include some games not developed by Nintendo themselves. I defined a Nintendo game as a game that Nintendo paid to have created. Most of the stuff on here was created by Nintendo themselves anyway, but I thought I would give that warning up front for those hopeless Nintendo apologists who will be all uppity at me for including Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on this list. And it's on here. And it sucks. Yes it does.
Alright, bring on the crap.
#10: Baseball
Developed Nintendo R&D1 (Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Mario Bros, Popeye)
Release: 1983 (Japan Famicom) 1985 (NES), 2002 (E-Reader), 2007 (Virtual Console)
If anything else, Baseball proves that Nintendo has no shame. Nobody in their right mind would have called Baseball a good game in 1983 when this pile of shit hit the Famicom in Japan. Yet Nintendo has had the nerve to release it another three times. How bad is it? Pretty awful. Damn near unplayable. Outfielders move like they're shackled at the ankles while wearing cement shoes, while base runners, although animated to look like they've suffered a stroke, can move so fast that they can reach home plate before the ball even lands. And it usually lands right in the outfielder's glove, making your base-running marathon a big cock tease. Part of the problem is no effort at all seems to have been spent on balancing the size of the diamond with the rest of the playfield. If you somehow manage to hit a line drive into a bare part of the outfield, you'll almost certainly get a triple out of it, and with no luck needed, possibly get an inside the park homerun. The graphics are bad, even by the standards of the era, and the gameplay is actually a step down from Major League Baseball on the Intellivision, and that's just pitiful. The fact that Nintendo actually had the nerve to re-release this TWICE in this decade, for money instead of some kind freebee gag gift, shows that they can be downright evil. I mean, Legend of Stafi isn't good enough for a US release, but Baseball gets released more then four times if you count Arcade and Gameboy ports?
ing scumbags. It would be cheaper to allow players to experience NES baseball by actually playing baseball after huffing paint and filling their underwear with cement. More humane as well.#9: Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Developed by Lucas Arts
Release: 1996 (Nintendo 64)
Save your e-mail, Star Wars nerds and Nintendo apologists. I don't want to hear it. If you like this game, you either are blindly in love with Star Wars or you played Shadows of the Empire at an impressionable age where your brain hadn't developed to the point where it could recognize processed crap. Even though it might be able to now, you'll still convince yourself that Shadows of the Empire was a good game like a woman who tries to convince herself a date-rapist will call her back in the morning. Shadows is NOT calling you back. And what a tease this game is. It starts off with what is legitimately one of the best opening levels in a video game, a recreation of the opening battle of Empire Strikes Back. It's fun and hell, I would even say it holds up today. BUT WAIT~! Because 50% of the game is not a vehicle based shooter, but rather one of the crappiest Doom clones ever made. You control some loser named Dash Rendar, which sounds like the star of a gay porno movie, and you
-up your way through unplayable sprawling maps and hoping like hell you don't step within twenty feet of a cliff, because if you do you will somehow slip and fall to your death. And even if you don't give up after the first of these sequences in hopes of another fun mini-game like the Hoth level, you're still shit out of luck because the controls in most of the other vehicle shooter levels are broken. I almost didn't include this game on my list because it was developed by Lucas Arts, but then I discovered that Nintendo 100% staked them on this game so they would have exclusive rights to a Star Wars game around the time the Nintendo 64 launched. Lucas Arts as a result trashed a point-and-click adventure they were working on for the PC in favor of this shit. Shadows was later released on the PC with slightly improved visuals but the gameplay itself was still broken. Combine this with the fact that the game is, by default, worse now because of the 5th Generation Curse and I'm honestly feeling a bit guilty for letting it slide with the #9 spot on the list. #8: Urban Champion
Developed by Nintendo R&D1
Release: 1984 (Famicom), 1986 (NES), 2002 (E-Reader), 2007 (Virtual Console)
Another triple-dip by Nintendo, and for an even worse game if you can believe it. Most people name this as the worst game ever made by Nintendo. Obviously I'm not going that harsh, but Urban Champion is pretty bad. It's a 2-D fighting game, pretty much Nintendo's attempt to make a game like Karate Champ. A lot of early NES games are shallow, but Urban Champion sinks to new lows with a game so pathetically stripped down that it would barely qualify to be a microgame in the Wario Ware series... and funny enough, it is! Two guys duke it out. If you land a punch, you knock your opponent backwards. The object is to knock each other into a manhole. There's two type of punches, a fast punch and a heavy punch, which you can aim up or down. And that's pretty much it. Occasionally, some chick will poke her head out a window and throw a flower pot at your head, which is not very good edict for witnessing a street fight. You wait until AFTER the fight is over to bludgeon someone over the head from a height of 20 feet. How rude. Also, a cop will occasionally break up the fight and make you start over again. There's very little room for strategy. The game basically plays out like a Rock-Paper-Scissors done in half-second intervals. You don't really have time to think about how to play, so you basically just mash buttons and hope for the best. Every single Mario Party game has done the exact same thing, and yet Nintendo, as recent as January 1st of last year, was charging people FIVE
ing DOLLARS for the right to mash buttons. There is literally nothing else to do in this game but mash buttons, unless you count pressing the start button at the beginning of the game. I suppose you could find fun in it by using other body parts to mash the buttons, like your toes, your tongue, or the cheeks of your ass. Just remember to save the ass for last you sick bastards.#7: Kirby Air Ride
Developed by HAL
Release: 2003 (Gamecube)
Kirby Air Ride is a testament to the can-do spirit of getting shitty games onto the market. Air Ride debuted as one of two tech demos on the day the Nintendo Ultra 64 was unveiled to the public on November 24, 1995. It didn't get much attention, mostly because the hundreds of people at the trade show gathered around Super Mario 64, the other game that was shown. Those who didn't want to wait six hours to play Mario 64 for ten minutes gave up and tried Kirby Air Ride, a cute racing game starring the pink cloud of fluff. Those who did called it one of the worst games ever shown at Nintendo's Space World (Shoshinkai) trade events. Nintendo quietly cancelled the game, and what was completed of it sat in the can for eight long years. Fast forward to late 2002. Nintendo doesn't have any first-party games to release, remembers Kirby's Air Ride was pretty much complete, and gives it the go ahead to be ported to the Gamecube. Released in October in North America, I was shocked to find some of my favorite critics actually liked it, so I picked it up myself. Big mistake on my part, paying $50 for a game that might as well be called "Kirby Hold Down A and Pray!" The controls are broken on pretty much every level, mostly due to the fact that everything except the limited steering function is mapped to the A button. You use A to build up speed boosts but also to break. If that alone doesn't throw you through a loop, the A button also serves as the button you use to eat your enemies. BUT WAIT~! THERE'S MORE! Once you eat the enemies, you also then have to press the A button to use their abilities. I get that Nintendo designed the Gamecube controller to have the A button be very large, but apparently Nintendo didn't trust anyone to be able to find the other three face buttons or the two shoulder buttons. If you needed any further proof that Nintendo thinks every one of their customers is an idiot, look no further. But what really befuddles me is how so many critics gave this game passing marks. An average of 7 out of 10 from EGM. 7 out of 10 from Game Informer. IGN and Gamespot were a little more critical, giving it roughly a 5 out of 10 each. 1up.com, a surrogate of EGM, had the balls to rightfully call the game crap and give it a 4 out of 10, while EDGE gave it a 3 out of 10. Even those scores seem generous. But I guess if you need a game that gives you a proper tutorial on use of the A button, you could do much worse then Kirby Air Ride. Then again, you can get the same experience by booting up the Gamecube and messing around in the system's main menu. Whoops, nevermind... it uses the B button too.
#6: Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II
Developed by Nintendo IRD (Punch-Out!! Series, StarTropics)
Release: 1994 (NES)
Anyone who's talked with me for any small amount of time about video games knows that I practically want to marry StarTropics for the NES. It's easily my favorite game ever that doesn't have "Tetris" in the title somewhere. So when I was 12 and word arrived that a sequel was on the way, I was positively wired for it. I mean I had dreams about it. I was so excited. Sure, the previews looked pretty bland, but they're just pictures! So, on my thirteenth birthday, June 4th, 1994, I was given Star Tropics II, now titled "Zoda's Revenge" along with a nasty case of the Chicken Pox. But I figured, no big deal. Even sick as a dog and covered in pock marks, there's no way I can not have a good time today! Turns out, I was better off with the Chicken Pox. Zoda's Revenge is total dogshit. Gone is the exotic tropical settings, replaced by some of the most drab environments possible to draw on the NES. The cool weapons like the Yo-Yo are also gone, replaced by a infinite supply of flimsy slow battle axes that you throw. You later upgrade to other flimsy weapons like a dagger and a katana, which again, you throw, not swing. The cool pressure-sensitive buttons in the dungeons return, but there isn't as many of them, and nowhere near the same amount of puzzles. It's like they dumbed the concept of the game down, which is really strange because sequels usually cater to the fanbase of the original. But even with the concept dumbed down, the game is much harder because you now have free-range jumping. It sounds good in theory, but jumping is so floaty that you're almost certain to unfairly land in the water. The multi-terraced dungeons don't help either, and neither does the ability to jump diagonally. And just to let you know what a pile of shit this is, the first level isn't a level at all but rather a quick static-screened cut scene. The second level starts you off with RANDOM BATTLES! Honestly, random battles! In a StarTropics game! Who decided this was a good idea? The storyline, which sees Mike Jones traveling back in time to meet such historical figures as Sherlock Holmes and Merlin, is one of the main reasons why the dungeon design is so bad. Every level is themed to the time Mike Jones travels backwards into, and as such everything is designed around the gimmick instead of having the gimmick be based around the game design. It's reverse-logic thinking. And I can't stress enough how dreary the graphics are. While everything in the original was bright and colorful, Zoda's Revenge is dull and lifeless. And the music is so bad you'll want to stick bananas in your ears. It makes me wonder why Nintendo even bothered. The Super NES had been out for three years at this point and one would think if they were intent on making a new StarTropics they should have made it on the SNES. Then again, maybe Nintendo secretly hated StarTropics. Maybe it was the red-headed stepchild of their franchise family, the one with the blandly designed hero, but the game design was good enough that people might start to talk about the series more then Legend of Zelda or Mario, and it simply had to be eliminated. That's the only logical reason I can see for putting this pile out into the marketplace. That and Nintendo's undying hatred of us all.
#5: Donkey Kong Barrel Blast
Developed by Paon (DK: King of Swing, Donkey Kong Jungle Climber)
Release: 2007 (Wii)
The only Wii game on this list (although Wii Play came close), Donkey Kong Barrel Blast began life as a bongo-based game on the Gamecube but was quietly cancelled when the motion-controlled machine caught fire. Revived on Wii, bongo-controllers replaced by Wii-Remotes, you'll instantly flash back to memories of Kirby Air Ride. Only Barrel Blast is even worse. You wave the nunchuck-Wiimote furiously up and down, and if anyone happens to walk into the room while you do this you have to avoid blushing and explain to them that you're not wanking off. There's little to no freedom in movement, as you basically just move forward, as if you were playing a rail shooter. The challenge is apparently trying to achieve maximum speed, which doesn't actually feel fast, but at least a meter on the screen tells you it is so that counts for something I guess. To make turns, you sort of arch the controller in a downward fashion, which is kind of the same way you build up speed. It's incredibly stupid and imprecise and leads to many collisions with objects, and it doesn't help that collision detection doesn't seem all that accurate either. Occasionally I passed right through objects, and at other times I *know* I missed the object but the game still registered an impact. A few critics, namely all of them, bitched about the game using rubber-banding AI, but quite frankly every kart-racer game uses rubber banding. There's so many other things wrong with Donkey Kong Barrel Blast that bitching about something that's present in every similar game the genre has ever seen is downright nit-picky. None of the course designs are particularly clever. In fact, I would say they're so bland that they were likely slapped together at the last second, along with the control scheme. And why couldn't just keep the bongo support intact? I mean, it was already programmed into the game when they began the port to the Wii, and the Wii has the Gamecube ports right in the side of the damn machine. The only reason I can think of is Nintendo is angry at the under 10,000 people who bought Donkey Kong Jungle Beat before it got clearanced out for not spreading the word about it good enough and wanted to punish us. That must be it. After all, it couldn't possibly be the fact that Nintendo showed no balls themselves when it came to marketing Jungle Beat, just like they showed no balls in marketing Eternal Darkness or Pikmin 2 or Odama. Nintendo has balls to spare, and they'll prove it by sending Reggie Fils-Aime to your house with a roll of measuring tape.
#4: Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Stadium 2, Pokémon Colosseum, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, and Pokémon Battle Revolution
Developed by HAL (Pokemon Stadium 1 & 2), Genius Sonority (Colosseum, Gale of Darkness, Battle Revolution)
Release: 2000 (Stadium, Nintendo 64), 2001 (Stadium 2, Nintendo 64), 2003 (Colosseum, Gamecube), 2005 (Gale of Darkness, Gamecube), 2007 (Battle Revolution, Wii)
Yes, I said Donkey Kong Barrel Blast was the only Wii game on this list, but that wasn't a lie because Battle Revolution is the EXACT SAME GAME as Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64, and since I didn't want to write five different entrees for five crappy games, I decided to lump all the Stadium games together. Because they are all the same stripped down Pokémon game, only twice as expensive as the fully-realized handheld games they serve as backups for. That's right, backups. That's pretty much the main function of Pokémon Stadium, to backup your collection of characters. Oh sure, you can play an ultra-stripped down battle simulation using those characters if you wish, but why do that when you can just use the same characters to fight actual enemies and earn actual experience points in the actual game? Imagine if some other game company did the same thing! If Square-Enix made a game called Final Fantasy Stadium where you took your party from Final Fantasy XII, removed all the RPG elements and simply had them fight one battle at a time, you would think Square-Enix had gone bat-shit crazy. Nintendo apparently heard these criticisms and decided instead of making a full-fledged console version of Pokémon, they would farm out the Gamecube version of Stadium to a startup group of hacks called Genius Sonority. That way someone else would get the hate mail. Genius Sonority (or Snore-ity as I call them, ha, the wit) thought the best way to tackle this situation was to add something that vaguely resembled an RPG to their versions of the game. Only they played nothing like the Pokémon games they were leaching off of, and were in fact thinly-disguised versions of the same non-game game that the N64 stadiums were. Gale of Darkness was supposed to be something of an original console RPG version of Pokemon, but nobody was really surprised when it was basically the same game as Pokémon Colosseum, only slightly prettier and with more dialog. I imagine part of the design process involved someone yelling out "I can still tell it's not a real game! Just keep piling on more dialog! It'll look like a real RPG soon!" With Pokemon Battle Revolution, they seemed to have given up on trying to market it as a new game and just basically said "Play Pokémon... online!" And it apparently worked. I didn't include Pokémon Box on this list because it's not really a game either but at least Nintendo didn't try to market it as such. They basically said it's a storage device for your creatures, nothing more, and I can respect that. Plus it's going to be worth boatloads one day. Anyway, if you've played one of these games, you've played them all. Stay tuned for the next installment, "Pokémon
You, Pay Up", coming to the Wii in 2008. Actually, it already hit in the form of a game called My Pokémon Ranch, which I haven't played but judging by what I've read you might as well pencil it in as the 6th game to be listed #4 on this list. At least it's cheap.#3: Hey You, Pikachu!
Developed by Ambrella (Pokémon Dash, My Pokémon Ranch)
Release: 2000 (Nintendo 64)
I'm not sure exactly what Nintendo was trying to prove with Hey You, Pikachu, but I can't help but notice the strange coincidence that Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast had recently released for the Sega Dreamcast around the time Nintendo came out with this. Actually, Pikachu came out in 1998 in Japan, seven months before Seaman arrived. That said, it's still a rip-off. Seaman spent years in development and was highly anticipated. Pikachu came out of nowhere and was likely developed in a very short amount of time. And where Seaman is articulate and shocked the hell out of me by knowing about the movie Back to the Future, Pikachu can only say the words "Pika", "Chu", and "Pikachu." That's two words less then my dog can say ("Bark", "Ruff", "I", "Love," "You," I kid you not). Granted, the point of Pikachu isn't to be psycho-analyzed by the damn thing, but rather for you to bark orders at the overly cute little critter while he sssslllllooooowwwllllyyyy performs mundane tasks like watering a garden and fishing. It's basically a virtual pet game, and that would be great if the game actually understood your commands. And for some people, it does just find. But if you have any kind of accent in your voice, don't bother. And although this game is marketed to children under the age of 10, it has problems with them as well. My kid sister had this game when she was nine. She had no accent and spoke very clearly. Yet this game could not understand a single word she said, and when it can't do that Pikachu gets pissed off at you. The point of the game is to develop a friendship with it, but you can't get "Pika Points" when it's angry at you, nor can you get it to follow any of your commands. Like almost any voice-recognition based video game, the design is broken. But at least with Seaman the game didn't punish you for taking 20 tries to finally spit out "Hello" in a way the game could understand. The sad thing is, I actually wanted to like this game. There's something undeniably loveable about Pikachu, at least for those of us that don't harbor a blind hatred for all thing Pokémon. Having this game was going to be the closest I could get to owning a pet Pikachu, at least until scientists figure out how to genetically modify the appearance of a dog.
#2: Pokémon Channel
Developed by Ambrella
Release: 2003 (Gamecube)
This is a game about watching Pokémon watch TV. Seriously. Oh sure, there are one or two points in the game where things are almost interactive, but otherwise this isn't even a friggen game! In this sequel to Hey You, Pikachu!, you toss out the microphone in favor of a cursor. Although this works 100% better then a microphone, there is almost nothing interactive about most of the Pokémon Channel experience. The idea is Professor Oak has drafted you and your Pikachu to be the test audience for a new Pokémon cable system. So you watch the shows and... that's pretty much it. Sure, you can explore the area outside of your house in limited intervals and chat with wild Pokémon, but that will last only a few minutes before Pikachu gets pissed and demands that you go back inside and watch an anime called "PichuBros" for the one hundredth time. Like Hey You, Pikachu, your goal is to keep the little electric rat happy. The only way to do this is to keep him fed and in front of the television. And that sucks because there is high potential for fun in this game if only you could actually do exploring. You can't. You're glued to a television, watching Pikachu watch an aerobics show. None of the dialog here is particularly witty and all the attempts at camp are lost. If the show had featured most of the writing staff of the cartoon, it likely would have at least been entertaining in the way a good interactive DVD is. But only the PichuBros short that you have to watch, without hyperbole, at least a dozen times was conceived by the show's staff. There's no humor even on an ironic level here. At least in Hey You, Pikachu you could have fun by tricking Pikachu into running face first into a door. Here you can make him trip over a banana peel, but what's the point? If you do it he'll get angry and demand that you turn on PichuBros again. I don't understand why Nintendo keeps going back to Ambrella. I can't think of a single reason, so I'm just going to assume the Yukaza is somehow involved. They haven't made a single game that's critically acclaimed. Hell, they haven't made a single game that hasn't been universally shat upon. And the only game they've made that didn't make this list in one form or another is Pokémon Dash, which only avoided inclusion by being barely better then Baseball.
Before we get to the #1 game, which I'm sure you're scratching your head over, here's some other stinkers that were under consideration but ultimately were not included.
-Pokémon Dash (Nintendo DS, 2005): You can mark this off as the #11 game on the list. It was really, really close. Ultimately, I decided that stroking a stylus in four different directions was more fun then playing something vaguely resembling America's Pastime as preformed by stroke victims.
-Donkey Kong Jr. Math (NES, 1985): I know, this one gets a lot of hate. You know what? As a multi-player game it's not bad. Sure, math is never really fun but if you grew up hanging out with a lot of Mensa types, this was the type of game you would play to prove you're smarter then someone else. Not too much smarter because you're playing a crappy game, but still...
-Volleyball (NES, 1987): Another stinker sports game, but not quite on the level of Baseball, which as previously established, was the #10 game here. Anything else had to be worse.
-Stack Up/Gyromite (NES, 1985): The truth about these games that nobody really tells you is that if you play them with the R.O.B. robot, they're actually pretty fun. Gyromite especially. I would love to see some kind of revival for it, but that will never happen.
-Cruis'n USA (N64, 1996): I really, really wanted to include Cruis'n USA on this list, but the truth is although it was published by Nintendo, they didn't really pay to make it. It was totally produced and funded by Midway, who simply hadn't worked up the balls at that point to publish their own stuff on consoles. So off the list it goes, because otherwise it would have been #1.
So, what is, for my money, the worst game ever published by Nintendo?
#1: Mario Pinball Land
Developed by Fuse Games
Release: 2004 (Gameboy Advance)
I love pinball and I love Mario, so logically I wanted to love and possibly mate with Mario Pinball Land. And instead, Nintendo handed me the worst game they ever made. Mario Pinball Land is broken in every way possible. This was the first commerical game developed by Fuse, so at least they have an excuse, but I can't believe Nintendo green-lighted this for release. Didn't anyone actually test it? The physics are all wrong and feel too heavy on gravity. This is really made painful by the fact that every board is circular and thus you'll spend 90% of the game flinging the ball (Mario squished into being the ball himself) around the room in one big circular motion. The flippers are too small and the ball too large, which means you're either launching the ball off the tip of the flipper or the dead center of it. Skill shots should be renamed 'luck shots' because you're going to need it to actually hit them. It's one of the misunderstood quirks of pinball among people who don't play a lot of it. Pinball is not random, but rather totally skill based. If you know what you're doing, you can ring in highly difficult shots and nail seemingly impossible targets. Video Pinball, to this point, had not been very good at simulating real life physics. They're getting better. But with Mario Pinball, they were so limited by technology that they should have at least made some effort to improve the flippers so at least you could launch Mario off at more then three different angles even if it meant using some kind of artificial computer assistance in helping the player, something I'm rarely in favor of. Even with all the physics problems, this wouldn't be so bad if the boards had some life to them, but they don't even have that. They wanted to make a game the played like Mario 64, only have it be a pinball game. Epic failure. Every 'board' pretty much plays out in single-screen format with two, maybe three things to shoot at. Half the time you'll hit a target, only you don't have enough speed built up and thus not actually hit the target, even though you do hit it. I get the impression that most of the problems with Mario Pinball are due to the shape of the boards, which cause that circular motion as previously mentioned. But the gravity and flippers are so poorly designed that common pinball techniques like trapping and toe-shots are impossible. Nintendo and Fuse clearly missed the point in what players expect from video pinball games. If people wanted an epic quest, they would play a game that caters that form of gameplay. Now, after spewing out a list of the ten worst games ever, we get a happy ending. Because Fuse actually learned from it's mistakes. It's next game (and apparently last game), Metroid Prime Pinball (2005, Nintendo DS), righted every wrong that was done in Mario Pinball. The physics? The best video pinball had ever seen. The gameplay? Classic pinball with a Metroid theme, instead of Metroid done with a pinball theme. It's the best video pinball game ever made, including the recent Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams Collection. So Fuse, I salute you for being a company that actually strives to make improvements. You've been quiet for three years, and judging by sales numbers of Metroid Prime Pinball I'm guessing you've passed away, but if not I look forward to all your future products. You've made the worst game Nintendo ever published, but proved that you at least learned something in doing so. Unlike a certain company that will not be named (cough, Ambrella, hack).
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I did like them better than the Gamecube games though. Maybe because I was younger?
