While I try to be civil and maintain respectful professional relationships, I’m not afraid to call game companies on their BS when they mess up. While I don’t take joy in crapping on someone else’s hard work, I believe it’s important to point out when a developer or publisher does poorly, in hopes that they can improve in their future efforts. Here are the games that failed spectacularly in one area or another this year.
Note: You can listen to a podcast where Jenn and I discuss these awards! Check it out here!
- Worst Monetization / Scam
- Most Overrated
- Laziest Copycat
- Worst Port / Remake
- Most Overpriced
- The “Who asked for this!?” Award
- The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award
- Most Disappointing
- Nintendo’s Biggest Blunder
- Worst Hardware – New for 2024!
- Worst Game
- Additional Commentary!
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Worst Monetization / Scam
Star Wars: Hunters – There are all kinds of terrible things ugly monetization can do to a game, preying on children and those with addictive personalities, turning the game into a grindy slog to push players to spend money to skip to the good parts, injecting pay-to-win elements into the gameplay so winning and losing could come down to who spent the most. Star Wars: Hunters is guilty of most of these, as well as the cumulative sin they all contribute to: They take a good game and twist it into something far worse. Star Wars: Hunters could have been a solid addition to the Hero Shooter genre, but instead it’s yet another cautionary tale that greedy publishers likely won’t pay attention to when they pull this same thing yet again in another game they ruin in their pursuit of an easy buck. Meanwhile, we see exactly the opposite unfolding on other platforms with another Disney property in the far better game Marvel Rivals. Why oh why couldn’t Nintendo Switch have gotten that Hero Shooter?
Runners-Up:
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Most Overrated
Alisa Developer’s Cut (81) – I have nothing against retro games that revisit a genre as it was in a bygone era. Heck, I celebrated the game Homebody for doing exactly that with the same genre Alisa aims to resurrect, the classic old-school “Survival Horror” game. However, I can’t help but feel like the nostalgia goggles blinded other critics to this game’s horrible flaws – its absolutely disastrous combat, its terrible game design with far too many enemies far too early into the game, and its complete lack of anything that’s actually, you know, scary. I think someone needs to remind a few game critics that you can revisit what was so great about older games without rehashing all of the worst of those games’ flaws.
Runners-Up:
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story (85)
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (82)
Mediterranea Inferno (87)
Emio: The Smiling Man – Famicom Detective Club (74)
WitchSpring R (83)
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Laziest Copycat
Zumba Royal Marble Shooter Mania – Not only is this game a copycat, it’s a copycat of a copycat, seemingly stealing the Zumba games’ name, which itself was already blatantly copying the Zuma franchise. Yet despite that this game is copying an oft-repeated formula that is at least 21 years old (26 years old if we go back to the 1998 game Puzz Loop), it still can’t manage to get the basics right, with terrible controls making it a pain to even aim your shots in the game, and with a color scheme that has you color-matching with color shades that are far too similar to each other. Even for a Zuma knockoff, this is pretty pathetic.
Runners-Up:
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Worst Port / Remake
Comic Store Arcade – The runners-up in this category both suffer one understandable flaw – performance issues. The Nintendo Switch is getting old, and games are definitely showing it… but that’s not the flaw Comic Store Arcade has. On the contrary, this game’s extremely simple mobile-style visuals would be hard to mess up. Instead, this is a game where the Nintendo Switch version has the computer-controlled customer characters getting stuck every few minutes, forcing you to restart the game. And then sometimes the game just outright crashes on you entirely. This is a simple Idle Game, this shouldn’t have been difficult to port over, but apparently whoever was in charge of this had absolutely zero quality control, and the result is a game where the Nintendo Switch version is virtually unplayable.
Runners-Up:
Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron
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Most Overpriced
Mario Vs. Donkey Kong ($50) – This is a genuinely solid remake of a very good Game Boy Advance game, but it’s still a remake of a Game Boy Advance game. We’re talking about a game I can buy right now on eBay for under $15, a game that when it was brand new sold for $30, a game that is now 20 years old. And we’re not talking about a true classic like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Super Mario RPG. It’s pretty clear that there’s only one reason this game is priced only $10 less than Princess Peach: Showtime! and Super Mario Party: Jamboree – because they can get away with it.
Runners-Up:
Construct Farm ($10)
nGolf ($22)
nZen ($10)
Lyne ($10)
Gunvolt Records: Cychronicle ($15)
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The “Who asked for this!?” Award
Construct Farm – Construct Farm is a game where you plop down pieces of a farm onto a plot of land… and that’s it. There’s no gameplay here, no goal, not even simulation elements where you’re growing crops. What’s more, you can’t change the camera angle, the game looks terrible, and the performance is atrociously bad. Even if all you want to do is custom-create your own little 3D farm, you’re better off going with an actual farming Simulation game. At least it’s sure to run better than this garbage.
Runners-Up:
nBlocks – Unblock Your Creativity!
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The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award
Multi Maze 3D (436MB) – The runners-up this year at least attempt to make something visually-impressive, even if they fail miserably at it and take up way more space than the end result should justify. But Multi Maze 3D doesn’t even have that excuse. Its simple, untextured 3D geometric shapes in front of an empty void looks like the most bland, basic, generic mobile game imaginable. And for this Multi Maze 3D uses a nearly a half a GB of memory? What an absolute waste.
Runners-Up:
Line Time (910MB)
Warhammer 40,000: Dakka Squadron (8.7GB)
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Most Disappointing
Cat Quest III – I was really looking forward to the third game in this series, after the family-friendly take on a Diablo-style Action-RPG we had in the first and especially second games in the series. Unfortunately, this game’s ambitious Open-World elements completely ruin what was so great about this game, introducing massive difficulty spikes that not only make this a game that isn’t really appropriate for younger and less-experienced gamers, but make it less fun for even more experienced players. I just hope that if and when we do see a fourth game in this series, that the game’s creators course-correct and address the massive problems this game had.
Runners-Up:
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
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Nintendo’s Biggest Blunder
Nintendo not giving credit to composers in the Nintendo Music app – While some of the other problems listed in the runners-up are arguably bigger issues, this one is an issue that would have been easily resolved, and the refusal to credit the people who made this app even possible is horribly disrespectful to every musician who ever worked on a Nintendo game. For shame.
Runners-Up:
Nintendo withholding information about their games’ developers
Performance issues in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Mario & Luigi: Brothership
Nintendo still not fixing long-running problems (Joy-Con drift, Nintendo Switch memory problems, etc.)
Nintendo Switch eShop becoming a hellscape of shovelware, scam games, and publishers churning out multiple versions of the same game to flood the eShop.
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Worst Hardware – New for 2024!
Tie: Simgal Wireless Switch Gamepad Controller / Nonbliep Switch Pro Wireless Controller – This is the first time I have had a tie in these awards, and it is because both of these controllers have the exact same flaw – they stopped working within an hour or two of use. While other pieces of hardware on my list may not have worked properly, there’s at least the possibility that I was using incompatible hardware or software, or that I hadn’t configured things properly – I’m only human, after all. But these two controllers? Just straight-up died not long after I got my hands on them. That’s not user error, that’s not incompatible software or anything, it’s a straight-up hunk of junk that’s going to cost people money and leave them with useless plastic.
Runners-Up:
Aknes GuliKit Goku USB Wireless Controller Adapter
Mytrix Switch Pro Wireless Controller
Leadjoy VX2 Aimbox Keyboard and Mouse Adapter
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Worst Game
Comic Store Arcade – Even the worst games should still, you know, work. I should be able to load them up and play them without them becoming unplayable within a matter of minutes, or simply crashing on me over and over again. And surely any game that had such a flaw would have to be ambitious enough to justify such a thing, right? Wrong – Comic Store Arcade is mobile trash through and through, a game that aims for the bottom of the barrel and somehow misses, a game that forces you to quit within minutes of playing it, reliably every time. You should all do yourselves a favor and not play this game even one time.
Runners-Up:
Zumba Royal Marble Shooter Mania
Offroad Masters: Motocross Races
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Additional Commentary!
Just going to comment on the categories I feel like I have more to add.
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Worst Monetization / Scam
Two of the runners-up this year are on the list because there are screenshots on the eShop that do not reflect what the game actually looks like. Nintendo, I really hope you get your house in order this next generation, because things can’t keep going on like this. Get some curation for your eShop for goodness sake!
Oh, and as a side-note… while recording the podcast, I had the hardest time saying the word “monetization” without messing up. Seriously, someday I’m going to have to make a blooper reel for the Patreon folks…
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Most Overrated
I had about twice as many games as I listed here up for consideration, and these were just the worst offenders. I very nearly gave this award to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, because that game has made multiple “Best Of” lists for 2024, despite that the overwhelming majority of games included in it are awful, and anyone who wants a Digital Eclipse Gold Master Series game on your list, you already have one right there that has better games and more interesting documentary content: Tetris Forever.
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Laziest Copycat
I thought for sure that Overheat: Kitchen Chaos was so shameless a copycat it would have to win this, but I suppose there’s always the potential for something worse to come down the sewage pipe…
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Worst Port / Remake
There might’ve been more games I could have included here for being imperfect ports, but I didn’t feel like slamming on any games just for not being as good as the version on other platforms unless it really seemed like they could have been better than what we ended up getting.
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Most Overpriced
Ah, the eternal dilemma – What’s worse, a good game that’s far too expensive, or a horrible game that costs anything at all? Construct Farm is worthless, and being $10 surely makes it far too overpriced… but then if I go down that route, wouldn’t the same be true of every game I give an F grade to? If this category is going to actually be about the price, I can’t let myself be blinded by low quality, it has to be about the content of the game and how it’s priced compared to comparable stuff, and Mario Vs. Donkey Kong being priced $20 more than its own price 20 years ago certainly seems to qualify.
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Most Disappointing
As per usual, some of the games in this list are still good, but that doesn’t keep them from being disappointments.
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Nintendo’s Biggest Blunder
Is there something wrong with including stuff on here like Joy-Con Drift and the eShop being a broken mess? Not as long as it remains a problem, it’s not!
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That’s all for today! to keep up with all of the eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards, be sure to check back at the Awards’ Start Page, which I’ll be updating throughout the week!
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