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From 'Wii Music' to 'Shadow the Hedgehog', we're diving into 20 video games that, despite being critically panned and full of flaws, somehow managed to sell millions of copies. Find out which notorious overachievers made the list!
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00:00So, as we all know, the history of gaming is littered with cult classics,
00:04brilliant diamonds left to shine in the darkness by the general public.
00:08But you know what? This list is not about them.
00:10Instead, we're taking a look at some of gaming's most notorious overachievers,
00:14towering edifices of mediocrity,
00:16whose staggering commercial success belied the deficiencies of their design.
00:20Translation, they kinda sucked.
00:22So let's take a look at them, as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com,
00:25and these are video games that sold millions, despite being terrible.
00:291. Wii Music
00:30The mid-to-late noughties was a golden period for rhythm games.
00:34The likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band saw gamers across the world strutting their stuff
00:38and living out their rockstar fantasies in the comfort of their living rooms.
00:41Naturally, Nintendo wanted to get in on the action in their own idiosyncratic way.
00:46Unfortunately, this particular brand of idiosyncratic genius was less The Beatles and more John and Yoko.
00:52Wii Music suffered from two big problems.
00:54One was its inescapable air of cheapness,
00:57from the low-tech graphics to the public-domain songs that made up the majority of its tracklist.
01:02And the other was total lack of immersion.
01:04Guitar Hero and its ilk succeeded because playing on their peripherals
01:07created a genuine sense of engagement with the music.
01:10Wii Music, on the other hand,
01:11simply asked players to half-heartedly swing their Wii controller around
01:14in a vague approximation of whichever instrument you were tasked with playing.
01:18This had all of the immersion of waving a baguette at home
01:20and pretending you were conducting the London Symphony Orchestra,
01:23with the downside being that you couldn't eat the Wiimote afterwards.
01:27Shadow the Hedgehog
01:28There is no greater indicator of emo's power in the mid-naughties
01:32than the fact that Shadow the Hedgehog managed to sell millions of copies.
01:35Now, Shadow the Hedgehog may not be the worst Sonic game ever made.
01:39The glitch-filled, bestiality-promoting Sonic 06 definitely holds that dubious distinction,
01:43but it's definitely located somewhere near the bottom of the Sonic barrel.
01:46As well as its posturing, try-too-hard attitude,
01:50Shadow suffers from the same bugbears that affect pretty much all of the worst Sonic games,
01:54chiefly a camera that actively avoids showing you important information
01:57and overly sensitive controls making the protagonist move like an absolute pinball.
02:02Unfortunately, Shadow also adds its own bitter twist to the toxic Sonic formula,
02:06and that is guns.
02:08The gunplay in Shadow really is utterly hopeless,
02:11as the lock-on constantly fails to distinguish between friend and foe,
02:14and the aforementioned camera problems see the player having to constantly fire at off-screen targets.
02:19It says something that Shadow the Hedgehog never received a sequel despite selling millions.
02:23Sega knew that they got lucky with this hedgehog's first and so far last game
02:27and wisely quit while they were ahead.
02:30Aliens Colonial Marines
02:31Ah, yeah, I mean, just look at this footage.
02:34It tells you everything that you need to know about the state that Aliens Colonial Marines launched in.
02:38The millions of people who had the misfortune to purchase this game
02:41may have expected a nerve-shredding Aliens experience,
02:43but what they got were interstellar improv routines.
02:46The AI of the eponymous Xenomorphs were utterly broken,
02:50leading to scenes like the ones you're seeing here.
02:51Incredibly, the Xenomorphs' wonky AI was later discovered to be the result of a single typo in the game's code,
02:57with a renegade A completely breaking Colonial Marines' artificial intelligence systems.
03:02Six years and millions of dollars in development costs flushed down the drain
03:05because of a random spell-check error.
03:08Now that was a waste of resources that even Wayland Yutani would balk at.
03:12Hey You Pikachu
03:13I mean, how far can you stretch the definition of game here?
03:17It's a question that Nintendo has often asked itself to varying degrees of success.
03:21Sometimes it leads to greatness, like the beguiling charms of Animal Crossing.
03:25And other times, well, it winds up with players yelling futile commands at a yellow rat determined to ignore them.
03:31Hey You Pikachu was a voice recognition game for the N64
03:34that successfully rode the Pokemon hype train to the tune of around 2 million sales,
03:38which is pretty impressive for an $80 game that contained maybe two hours of content.
03:43Hey You Pikachu tasked players with instructing Pikachu to complete simple puzzles
03:47through the microphone that came bundled with the game,
03:49which led to the vastly inflated price tag.
03:51Unfortunately, Pikachu's limited vocabulary,
03:54meaning that he could only recognize around 200 words,
03:56and the mic's limitations itself,
03:58meant that the yellow mascot was as likely to zap you with a thunderbolt
04:01as he was to follow your commands.
04:02Combined with the game's lack of content,
04:04Hey You Pikachu was an overpriced novelty
04:06that signaled the death knell for Nintendo's foray into voice recognition gaming.
04:11Homefront
04:12A blatant attempt at jumping on the Call of Duty bandwagon,
04:15Homefront didn't just miss the mark,
04:17it stumbled, fell in front of the wagon,
04:19and got trampled to death by the horses,
04:21who then used its remains as a toilet.
04:23Homefront makes the classic mistake of any pale imitation,
04:26in that it chooses the wrong things to copy from its inspiration.
04:29In this case, it means that Homefront is overtly scripted,
04:32to the point that you feel like the designers are only begrudgingly letting you play it.
04:36Every single action is narrated out loud for you by your squad of tropes,
04:40I mean, sorry, teammates,
04:41while the camera points you exactly where you need to go,
04:44and a button prompt details exactly what you have to do.
04:46It's like the developers just don't trust you,
04:48and feel the need to force you into having the exact experience that they envisioned.
04:52And the nadir comes when Homefront, and yes, this actually happens,
04:56demands that you press X to jump into a mass grave.
04:59It's exactly as crass, tone-deaf, and moronic as it sounds.
05:03And to add insult to the intelligence of the player,
05:05the only QTE that this game needed was press X to get your refund.
05:09Call of Duty Ghosts
05:11And speaking of Call of Duty,
05:12here's the point where the franchise just went off the rails.
05:15A jumbled mess of a game,
05:17COD Ghosts had no idea what it wanted to be.
05:20The game's marketing promised a campaign focused on guerrilla warfare and stealth,
05:23hence the ghosts of the title,
05:25as you sneaked around America to thwart the bad guys du jour.
05:28So naturally, the first mission ends with more explosions than a Michael Bay movie,
05:31and the finale involves flying into outer space and firing a sci-fi doomsday weapon.
05:36What?
05:36Ghosts just felt like a game made in a hurry,
05:39a hodgepodge of different half-baked ideas,
05:41and themes just all thrown together in the hopes that something would stick.
05:44Take Extinction as an example,
05:46a twist on the traditional COD Zombies mode.
05:48Extinction replaced the undead with extraterrestrials for no adequate reason.
05:52It was a change for the sake of change,
05:54and COD quickly went back to the Zombies in all future installments,
05:57which rather sums up Ghosts' lack of impact on the franchise.
06:00Although it sold tens of millions and ended on a massive cliffhanger,
06:04COD's publishers have made no sign that Ghost 2 will ever be forthcoming.
06:08Resident Evil 6
06:10And speaking of franchise low points, here's Resident Evil 6.
06:14Thinking about it, Resident Evil 6 and COD Ghosts actually have a lot in common.
06:17They're both regarded as one of the worst games in their series.
06:20They both suffer from overstuffed, messy campaigns,
06:22and they both somehow sold in the tens of millions.
06:26Playing Resident Evil 6, the first thing that strikes you is the weightlessness of the combat.
06:30Enemies take far too many bullets to go down,
06:32and there's no sense of impact in any of your weapons.
06:35Every battle feels like a childhood playfight with that one friend who refused to admit that
06:39they were dead, usually through some sort of force field bullshit.
06:41The second thing that you'll notice is that Resident Evil 6 would have benefited enormously from
06:45while just being cut in half.
06:47The four-campaign single-player is easily two campaigns too long,
06:51and Chris and Jake's stories contain the worst gameplay in Resident Evil history.
06:55Chris's story is a dull slog, and Jake's is so badly designed, it will actively annoy you.
07:00Amid life crisis in video game form, Resident Evil 6 saw Capcom embarrass itself trying to ape
07:06the trends of the time.
07:07It didn't work, and Capcom thankfully took the series back to its roots for the rather stellar
07:11Resident Evil 7.
07:13Kinect Adventures
07:14In video games, as is the case in so much of life, timing is everything.
07:19For a golden minute, Microsoft's Kinect looked like it was going to be the next big thing
07:22in gaming, a body-tracking device that promised a shining future of controller-free gaming.
07:27But it turned out to be a buggy, barely-responsive novelty item that was quickly discarded when
07:32the depths of its flaws became apparent.
07:34Unfortunately, millions of people fell for the hype, resulting in the woeful Kinect Adventures
07:39making its way onto this list.
07:41A pack-in game bundled with the Kinect itself, Kinect Adventures was clearly meant to be seen
07:45as the next Wii Sports, a minigame compilation designed to show off the possibilities of the
07:49new hardware.
07:50Unfortunately, whatever magic pixie dust Nintendo used on the Wii Sports title was clearly in
07:54short supply with this one.
07:56Like the aforementioned Hey You Pikachu, Kinect Adventures is less a game and more of a showcase
08:01for a semi-functioning piece of tech.
08:03Two hours of limb-flailing let most gamers see everything this title had to offer, at which
08:08point the game itself began gathering dust alongside the Kinect.
08:12Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy
08:13So in 2020, we saw CD Projekt Red's infamous RPG, aka Cyberpunk 2077, become the biggest
08:20pinata of the video games industry.
08:23And November 2021 saw gaming outlets far and wide absolutely batter Take-Two's disastrous
08:28revival of the PS2-era Grand Theft Autos.
08:31And with good reason.
08:32Far from being the definitive additions promised in the title, the remasters made each game
08:37actively worse.
08:38Characters were given hideously ugly redesigns, iconic songs from the soundtracks were cut
08:42for licensing reasons, and the game's remastered weather effects were legitimately worse than
08:47the 2004 originals.
08:48And that's not even mentioning the bizarre glitches or the genuinely insulting Switch port.
08:52And yet, despite all of that, Take-Two reported that the remasters exceeded sales projections,
08:57with up to 10 million copies reportedly having been sold.
09:00Now, the GTA games themselves have always held a dim view on humanity.
09:04And if that many people willfully parted money for this dumpster bar of a collection, then
09:08you can see why.
09:09FIFA Legacy Editions
09:11So here's a true story.
09:12If you look up FIFA 22 on Nintendo eShop, there is only one picture available in the
09:17preview gallery, which begs the question, what are EA trying to hide?
09:21Is it the mannequin-like character models, the lack of modes, or the fact that EA have been
09:25releasing the exact same game for five years?
09:28And that's not hyperbole, by the way.
09:30The FIFA Legacy Editions use the same engine that powered FIFA 2017, with only the team
09:35rosters and outfits changing every year.
09:38While other consoles get engine updates and new modes every year, Switch players get a
09:42reskin version of a five-year-old game.
09:44The FIFA Legacy Editions are endemic of everything wrong with the game's industry, a cynical,
09:49effort-free cash grab that nevertheless makes millions every year.
09:52The only way that the Legacy Editions could be more insulting is if EA started bundling them
09:56with NFTs showing their shareholders laughing at you all the way to the bank.
10:01GoldenEye Rogue Agent
10:02GoldenEye Rogue Agent just about manages to scrape into this list, with one million copies
10:07sold across all formats.
10:09Which is appropriate, because just scraping by seems to have been the overriding ethos
10:13behind its creation.
10:15From 1999 to 2005, EA released one James Bond game a year.
10:19Given that rate of production, it was inevitable quality control would drop at some point,
10:23and with Rogue Agent it plummeted like Sean Bean at the end of the movie this game takes
10:28its title from.
10:29From the decision to name it after the most beloved 007 game of all time, to the bland,
10:33identikit levels populated by braindead henchmen, Rogue Agent bears all the hallmarks of a game
10:39churned out to make a quick profit.
10:41EA's tenure with the Bond franchise did occasionally lead to magic, everything or nothing, as still
10:46an absolute joy to blast through.
10:48But there's no doubt that the company's decision to milk the 007 brand produced as much trash
10:52as treasure, with Rogue Agent sitting squarely at the top of the landfill.
10:57Sonic the Hedgehog 2006.
10:59Sonic 06 is the one where Sonic's corpse is brought back to life after being kissed
11:03by a human princess.
11:05Right, entry over, moving on!
11:07Okay, fine, let's do it properly.
11:09In a franchise that has seen its fair share of clunkers in the last 18 years, Sonic and
11:13the Black Knight, Sonic Forces, Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric, it's almost impressive that the
11:182006 entry is still seen as the absolute nadir of the series.
11:23Needless to say, that reputation is fully deserved, as Sonic 2006 is utterly abysmal at
11:28everything it attempts.
11:29The storyline is overstuffed, overwrought nonsense involving gods, time travel and interspecies
11:35necrophilia.
11:36The camera and glitchy controls actively conspire to send you falling to your doom at least once
11:40a level, and loading screens are absurdly prolific and ridiculously long.
11:46Incredibly, Sonic 2006 came out hot on the heels of the equally dreadful Shadow the Hedgehog,
11:52which was released only a year prior.
11:54Not many series could survive a devastating one-two punch to their reputation.
11:58Maybe that princess kiss really was magic.
12:00Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness
12:01Poor core design.
12:03While Sonic Team survived producing disaster after disaster, one bad game was all it took for
12:08Tomb Raider's original developers to collapse like a poorly built house of cards.
12:13To be fair to core, they realised that the Tomb Raider formula had become increasingly stale
12:17over the past five entries, and so Angel of Darkness was meant to be a new direction for
12:21the franchise as a whole, but said new direction came perilously close to turning the franchise
12:25away from the promised land and straight to the island of irrelevancy.
12:28Putting it kindly, Angel of Darkness was a brave failure.
12:31None of the new features worked, the RPG mechanics were half-baked, the controls were an
12:36unsatisfying halfway house between the D-pad-focused classic games and modern analog stick controls,
12:41and the stealth mechanics would have been risable in the early 90s, never mind 2003.
12:46Despite selling just under three million copies, Angel of Darkness's critical pasting meant that
12:50the franchise was passed on to Crystal Dynamics, who provided some impressive course correction with
12:55their own highly underrated Tomb Raider trilogy. Core design, meanwhile, were quietly shuttered
13:00a few years later.
13:01Medal of Honor Warfighter
13:03EA's series of World War II-focused FPS games were hugely popular in the early noughties,
13:08with Frontline and Rising Sun combining to sell upwards of 15 million units.
13:12Unfortunately, in 2007, a Call of Duty-shaped bomb fell from the sky and obliterated gamers'
13:18interest in EA's franchise. EA fought back with 2010's Medal of Honor, a modern warfare-based
13:23reboot that shamelessly pilfered from Activision's juggernaut franchise.
13:27Medal of Honor's copying from Call of Duty's homework may have been brazen,
13:30but it clearly worked as the reboot sold around five million copies.
13:34Unfortunately, EA failed to make Lightning Strike twice with the follow-up.
13:38Warfighter was a rushed mess of a game. The shooting felt weak and unsatisfying,
13:42the campaign was comfortably the worst in franchise history,
13:45and the game released with a boatload of technical glitches,
13:48such as enemies and allies alike flickering in and out of sight like predators with wonky camouflage.
13:53Despite this, Warfighter still managed to sell three million copies across all formats.
13:58Unfortunately for it, and the series at large, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 sold 31 million copies.
14:04EA saw the writing on the wall and admitted defeat,
14:07quietly closing the door on what had once been one of their biggest money makers, WWE 2K15.
14:13Though we're not including 2K20 and there's a very good reason for that,
14:17as while the game will forever be remembered as one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history,
14:21its publishers have tactically acknowledged that fact by refusing to release sales data for it.
14:27They have however released sales for WWE 2K15, which means we know that 3 million
14:32WWE fans experienced one of the biggest backward steps in franchise history.
14:37After the truly excellent 2K14, expectations were high for what was being billed as the first
14:42truly next-gen entry in the WWE 2K series. Sadly, all that effort was spent on making sure the
14:48wrestlers' baby oil glistened just right meant that the work in a lot of other areas was left undone.
14:53A staggering amount of content from the previous year's entry was left on the cutting room floor.
14:57The roster size had shrunk alarmingly from 83 wrestlers to 60. Entire match types went missing,
15:03custom-made stories were out, and inexplicably, you couldn't create female wrestlers anymore,
15:08meaning you were stuck with the whopping 8 female talents that released on disc.
15:12Anthem. This one takes a bit of research, because EA have never officially revealed Anthem's sales
15:17data, but thanks to the fine folks at Superdata Research, its public knowledge,
15:21that Anthem made $100 million in digital revenue in its launch month. Only 3.5 million of which came
15:28from in-game purchases. As such, you can reasonably intuit that Anthem sold well over a million copies.
15:34Furthermore, by actually playing it, you can also ascertain that Anthem was lucky to sell over
15:3810,000 copies, let alone a million. For a game about bombing around lush sci-fi vistas in Iron
15:43Man-style power armour, Anthem is unspeakably dull. Once you've spent the dozen or so hours
15:48it takes to polish off the campaign, all you're left with is a ceaseless, joyless grind of bashing
15:53overly familiar enemies in increasingly boring locations. The fact that you can apply the previous
15:57sentence to any number of live service failures over the years, such as Avengers, Babylon's Fall,
16:02Godfall, shows why Anthem failed. It was yet another mediocre entry in an overstuffed market,
16:07and soon found itself occupying one more casket in an increasingly packed graveyard.
16:12Need for Speed Payback
16:14Goodness me, EA have shown up rather a lot on this list, haven't they?
16:18It's equal parts disturbing and impressive that one company can produce so much crap
16:22while raking in so much money. The fourth and final EA game on this list,
16:26Need for Speed Payback, represents an interesting contrast to Medal of Honor Warfighter.
16:30Like Warfighter, Payback represents the absolute worst of its respective franchise.
16:34Like Warfighter, Payback sold upwards of three million copies.
16:37Unlike Warfighter, Payback didn't represent the end of its franchise as Need for Speed games are
16:42still going strong to this day, with last year's Need for Speed Unbound being something of a serious
16:46highlight. When it's on form, it's arguably the greatest arcade racing series in the world,
16:51and it didn't deserve to go under because of one bad game. Having said that, Payback was a really bad
16:56game.
16:56Payback unsuccessfully married the series High Octane Racing with one of the blandest
17:01open worlds ever created and further self-sabotaged with the introduction of insidious microtransactions.
17:07Both additions, somewhat ironically, slowed the game's pacing to a crawl and ensured that Payback
17:11was best left in the franchise's rear-view mirror.
17:14Pac-Man for Atari 2600. In the olden days, reviewers used the phrase
17:19Arcade Perfect to describe a home console game that almost perfectly replicated its arcade version.
17:25Pac-Man on the Atari was very much the opposite end of that scale.
17:28Just looking at it tells you what's wrong automatically. Even non-gamers have a pretty
17:34good idea of what Pac-Man is supposed to look like. It's pretty much the we have Pac-Man at
17:38home
17:38meme, and unsurprisingly, it plays as terribly as it looks. Such was the Atari version of Pac-Man's
17:44all-encompassing ineptitude that it, along with the legendarily terrible licensed E.T. game,
17:50is often blamed for the video game market's infamous crash in 1983. Over 8 million people bought
17:56Pac-Man on the Atari, and it's all too easy to imagine every one of those 8 million thinking,
18:01well I'm not making that mistake again, before swearing off video games for good,
18:04and finding something else to do with their time. Some games may have gotten their franchise cancelled,
18:09but Pac-Man is one of very few that almost caused the death of the entire industry in North America.
18:14Wii Play. Sometime with a product, it's not about what you do, but how you market it. And in the
18:19case of Wii Play, it was less how you market it, and more what you bundle it with.
18:23Wii Play sold close to a whopping 30 million units, not because of its quality, but because it came
18:28bundled with the Wiimote, the controller for Nintendo's hugely successful Wii console. Given that the Wii
18:33was at its best when you had as many friends and family members together as possible, all swinging
18:38Wiimotes, you can see why Wii Play sold so well. A free game to go with a much needed extra
18:42controller,
18:43how bad could it be? Sadly, and predictably, the answer to that question is very bad indeed.
18:48Wii Play wound up being a total waste of both the plastic it was printed on, and of the five
18:53minutes
18:53Nintendo apparently spent developing it. A collection of half-baked mini-games that would
18:57be shamed by even the most basic free app store download, Wii Play unfortunately acted as a precursor
19:03to the tidal wave of shovelware that would eventually consume the Wii. And to be fair on that front,
19:08Nintendo had only themselves to blame. If one of their own games was a half-baked mess like Wii Play,
19:13they were hardly in a position to complain when other developers delivered titles of similar
19:18quality. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. I personally had a good time with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet,
19:24and it may be the least objectively terrible game on this list, but I wouldn't put that quote on the
19:29box. Regardless of the core gameplay loop, Nintendo shouldn't have released these games in the
19:33condition they were in at launch as it buried any other conversation about the game. 22 million people
19:39and counting picked up the latest monster collecting adventure and booted up the game to find a level of
19:43polish that didn't reflect Pokemon's standing as one of the biggest media franchises in the world.
19:49Fans forgave Pokemon Legends Arceus for its shaky performance because it tried something new with
19:53the Pokemon formula, but Scarlet and Violet, both mainline entries in the franchise, should never
19:58have been allowed to tarnish the brand to the extent that they did upon their release. Such is the power
20:03of
20:03Pokemon that tens of millions of gamers have willingly parted with their cash to spend more time in its
20:08one-of-a-kind world, even when said world has a habit of popping in and out of existence or
20:13slowing down
20:13to a crawl at a moment's notice. There are a good number of things Nintendo and Game Freak can do
20:18to
20:18fix the Pokemon franchise, and in fact we put them all into a handy video for you. Click this to
20:23stay
20:23with us here at WhatCultureGaming, otherwise leave a comment down below about more bad video games that
20:28sold really well. Like this video, subscribe, head over to whatculture.com for more content every day.
20:33I've been Si for WhatCulture, and have a good week.
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