A Guide to the Crappy Games You'll Get From Old People This Holiday

Ah the holiday season, a time when people 'round the world come together in harmony to pretend to care about peace and love while secretly lusting after the years' shiniest new consumer goods. Unfortunately for us gamers, people who grew up when a cup-and-ball was considered cutting-edge fun are all too often the ones tasked with acquiring our digital entertainment.

With that in mind here's our guide to the various cyber-turds, excreted in 2009, that will be squeezed into your stocking this Christmas by well-meaning parents and grandparents. Start practicing masking your disappointment now, kids.



Category One: Lousy Games Based on Licenses You Like

While most older folks live in fairly airtight cultural bubbles, even your grandma who spends all her time watching "Murder She Wrote" reruns is at least vaguely aware of Star Wars, Harry Potter and them sexy Twilight vampires (perhaps more aware of the last one that you want to know). The kids today seem to like this stuff, so surely they'd like a videogame based on them, right?

Of course what a non-gamer doesn't realize is that the development of your average licensed game is handled with more or less the same level of tender loving care you use to clean your cat's litter box. Licensed games are made by people who not only have no idea how to make a fun game, but are so utterly uncreative that even coming up with their own character by slapping a pair of running shoes or sunglasses on a cartoon marsupial is beyond them.


Lumps of Coal to Expect: Star Wars: The Clone Wars -- Republic Heroes, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, Scene It? Twilight (admit it, you like it)



Category Two: Right Game, Wrong Platform

Here's another situation largely unique to gaming that you can't really blame non-gamers for being confused by. When you watch a movie or TV show on various platforms the size and clarity of the picture may change, but you get the same basic content. The Lord of the Rings isn't a special effects epic on the big screen and a puppet show filmed in Peter Jackson's basement on the DVD. Both versions are the same.


Not so with videogames, where depending on the platform you may be getting completely different games. Worse, it's nearly impossible to predict which version of a multi-platform game will be superior -- sometimes the flashy high-def version is the one to buy, while other times it's the damn DS game that's better. Either way, the version educated gamers don't want will be the one most likely still sitting on the store shelf waiting to be picked up by a relative of yours who doesn't know a PSP from an Xbox from their left tit.

Lumps of Coal to Expect: Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, any EA Sports game made for the PS2 or handhelds



Category Three: "Helpful" Recommendations of Store Employees

Every year certain titles are hyped by frothing publicists and game executives as the next great step in human evolution. They'll blow your mind, turn your DNA inside-out and leave you quivering in a puddle of your own bodily fluids. Roughly half the time when these games finally come out they're actually, well... kind of lousy.

This leaves game stores in a bit of a bind. They now have approximately 500 copies of a game which have to be cleared out somehow. As a result, when your grandmother timidly steps across the threshold of the game store, all store employees see is a flashing blue-haired target. Now we're not saying all game store employees are heartless opportunists looking to foist the year's flops off on unsuspecting elderly victims, we're sure some of them are good people who work by a strict code of ethics. Anything is possible, right?


Lumps of Coal to Expect: Rogue Warrior, Spyborgs, Velvet Assassin, Wet



Category Four: Bad Games from Franchises That Delivered in the Past

Now we don't want to paint our elders as complete gift-purchasing incompetents. Sometimes, out of sheer dumb luck, or because you made sure the name of the game you wanted was printed in three-inch tall, bright-red letters on your Christmas list, they will actually get the right game, and when they do, oh boy, they remember it.

Sure, they may eventually forget inconsequential things like which order their pants and underwear go on, but they won't forget how well that copy of Sonic 3 went over 15 years ago. As a result that smarmy blue varmint will continue to haunt your Christmas stocking until you personally hunt down and eliminate every last member of Sonic Team. Err, not that we'd ever advocate anything like that. Perhaps we've said too much.


Lumps of Coal to Expect: Tony Hawk Ride, Sonic and the Black Knight, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, pretty much any "MySims" game



Category Five: Bad Games in Good Games' Clothing

For every title on the shelves that's actually worth playing, there are another couple games trying desperately to piggyback on that good game's success, and we can't blame them. Making decent games is like, hard work and stuff. These days it takes tens of millions of dollars and countless thousands of man-hours to create a top-notch videogame, with no guarantees as to whether or not it will be successful.

Ultimately it's a lot more efficient to simply focus on how the game is packaged and presented. Never mind that the game itself is about as fun as a DVD box full of swine flu, what matters is fooling unsuspecting shoppers into thinking your game is the next Wii Sports. Producing quality games is fine and all, but quite frankly it's not a great business plan.


Lumps of Coal to Expect: Deca Sports 2, Monster Band, Game Party 3, Hurry Up Hedgehog (ripping off Sonic in 2009 is just sad)

Category Six: Games Based on Things Old People Like

From time to time we all make the mistake of buying gifts based on what we'd like to get, rather than accounting for the recipient's tastes (yes, we know all about that Steven Seagal box-set you bought your girlfriend last year). It's a particularly common problem amongst older game shoppers, whose eyes often seem to be magnetically attracted to the most boring shit on the rack.

Game publishers are clearly well aware of this, as there's really no other explanation for the baffling fact that there have been nearly 20 videogame versions of Wheel of Fortune released over the years. With the casual videogame market ever expanding this pandering to the aged is sure to only get worse -- expect "Jitterbug Jitterbug Revolution," and a "Sims 3: Porch-sitting Adventures" expansion pack to appear under your tree in 2010.


Lumps of Coal to Expect: The Price is Right 2010 Edition, Wheel of Fortune, Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders, any one of the dozens of crossword or sudoku games weighing down the DS rack



Category Seven: Games That Will "Improve" You

While most people are content with temporarily buying their child or grandchild's love, a small handful can't help but wonder if killing Nazi-bred zombie gorillas as a D-cupped cyborg ninja is really going to enrich the recipient's life in any way. Are they really learning anything as they replay the same lesbian dwarf sex scene over and over again?


Thankfully for those looking to ease their guilt, there have been a flood of "games" released over the last couple years that purport to either grow your brain or shrink your ass. Surely grabbing little Timmy a couple of these games will balance out any bad karma gained by buying him that copy of "Breastarella vs. the Third Reich" he actually wanted.

There're two problems with this plan. One, there's been roughly one good brain-training game ever made (that being the original "Brain Age" game that kicked off that whole trend), and two, gyrating on an expensive bathroom scale in front of your TV isn't actually going to get you in shape. At least the lesbian dwarf sex scene will strengthen your right forearm.

Lumps of Coal to Expect: Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima, Junior Brain Trainer, Challenge Me: Brain Puzzles, Brain Challenge Deluxe, Personal Trainer: Walking, Jillian Michaels' Screaming at Fatties 2009



Category Eight: Dinosaur Games

Most of the above categories assume that the shopper has at least some vague notion of what to buy. A naïve, ill-informed notion, but hey, at least it's something. But what if you don't even have that? Buy something with a dinosaur on the box, of course. With age comes wisdom, and your parents and grandparents know that even if a game with dinosaurs in it stinks, it's still a game with dinosaurs in it, and thus can't help but be at least a little bit awesome.


Lumps of Coal to Expect: Jurassic: The Hunted, Fossil Fighters, Battle of Giants: Dinosaurs, Barney's Backyard Brawlfest



Nathan Birch, as part of his quest to never grow up, obsesses over videogames at GameSpy.com, writes dick jokes for Cracked.com, and writes and draws his own funny animal webcomic over at Zoologycomic.com