Sorting through the worst PS1 games is a journey through the past, a different time of game development and marketing where nearly anything could get approved, and did, and failed miserably. The competition for worst PS1 game is strong, with candidates ranging from the niche first-party games that get quietly brushed under the rug, to bold ideas too ambitious for their time, and some just straight-up awful games that make you wonder whether anyone actually bought them. There’s a Hooters game, for some reason. HBO Boxing tried and failed to revolutionize sports games, and there once was a Star Wars fighting game that barely even functioned and sits, quietly ignored, beside the PS1’s better-known Phantom Menace and Jedi Battles.
Bubsy 3D
Poor Bubsy catches a lot of flak for being one of the worst PS1 games, and it’s not entirely his fault. Sure, the camera is shockingly bad, and the controls are straight out of old-school Resident Evil. It was also developer Eidetic’s first shot at a game that wasn’t based on crossword puzzles.
Trusting a team with little experience in designing platformers with your console’s first major 3D platformer seems like an odd choice bound to end in sadness, even if you were just trying to rush and compete with Mario 64. Eidetic later developed Syphon Filter, eventually became Bend Studio of Days Gone fame, and never made a platformer again.
Jersey Devil
Jersey Devil sounds like a nice, almost Tim Burtonesque concept on paper. A lil’ baby devil escapes from a cruel scientist’s lab by blowing it up and, for reasons unknown, dedicates himself to protecting the city of Jersey from the scientist’s mutated plants.
The trouble is that everything Jersey Devil tries had either already been done better or outshone it in the following few years. Loose platforming, bland level design, and repetitive puzzles made this one easy to forget when you had Crash Bandicoot, Rayman, and, the following year, Spyro the Dragon to choose from.
At least it wasn’t developer Behaviour’s last venture in the realm of horror games.
Hooters Road Trip
Hooters Road Trip is as tacky and poorly considered as it sounds, and it’s a truly atrocious racing game as well. While PS1 games hardly have the visual fidelity of something like Gran Turismo 7, most of them at least tried to render cars and raceways as accurately as possible. Not Hooters.
You get car blobs in various shades of garish colors, some of the least inspired track designs in video games, and appalling controls that send you careening off the road at the slightest touch of a button.
Star Wars Teras Kasi
Teras Kasi doubles as one of the worst Star Wars games, which is a shame since a Star Wars fighting game actually has potential. Just… not this one. Teras Kasi’s approach to fighting games is “press buttons until you when. Combos? Never heard of ‘em!” which is fun for maybe five minutes at most. Compounding the issue is how incredibly slow all your movements are.
There’s no real strategy or satisfaction in Teras Kasi’s battles, certainly nothing like what you’d hope for when Princess Leia and Darth Vader face off in a fistfight.
Darkstone
Darkstone is “we have Diablo at home.” It’s a fantasy RPG that hits a lot of the same beats that Blizzard’s series does, including a supernatural force bent on destruction, multiple character classes, and even similar locations that you travel to. It’s also a lot clunkier than Diablo could ever dream of being and lacks any of the visual panache that Blizzard’s original game had. With barely any atmosphere to speak of and such an annoying combat system, the only thing Darkstone had going for it was its low price point.
Mary Kate and Ashley Magical Mystery Mall
Licensed games have a reputation for poor quality that isn’t always deserved – except in this case. Magical Mystery Mall is a pretty strong candidate for one of the worst games ever, not just on the PS1. You play as the eponymous twins who go on a shopping trip and find that every store in the mall magically transports them to some of the worst-designed mini-games.
These range from slowly snowboarding your way down a slope with approximately zero obstacles or points of interest to rollerblading through a restaurant, delivering pizzas and ice cream to customers with so much patience that there’s never any danger of failing or needing to multitask.
There’s even less danger of having fun.
The Fifth Element
You’d think Bruce Willis’ cult-classic action movie might lend itself well to action game format, and maybe you’re right, in another universe. Bad video game adaptations of popular movies are hardly rare, but what Kalisto Entertainment came out with for The Fifth Element was painful.
Cumbersome controls and enemy AI that’s happy to stand and watch you kick their comrades into walls or fire off 20 rounds of Willis’ handgun unchallenged make playing any section of the game a chore. When the level design lacks anything in the way visual or tactile interest as well, you start to wonder why you’re even bothering.
Mortal Kombat Special Forces
Mortal Kombat Special Forces was an odd game and one that series creator Ed Boon even said “didn’t turn out very good at all” in an old interview. Special Forces is meant to be an action-adventure where you pull off combos to restore your special ability meter and gain new powers from defeating foes, a la Mega Man.
“That’s a strong concept,” you might think, and it is, theoretically. In practice, most of Special Forces sees you traipsing around after keys and pass cards to unlock the way forward – and they aren’t easy to find. Throw in dull, muddy graphics and one of the least inspiring soundtracks in games, and you end up with a very unpleasant experience.
RPG Maker
The first RPG Maker for consoles was probably ahead of its time. The basic premise was the same then as it is now: use a set of tools to create the RPG of your dreams. Only in this iteration’s case, it was more of a nightmare unless you spent ages learning the tool set’s complexities. Even then, the limits on what you could create and the added frustration of building it on console instead of using a mouse-and-keyboard setup turn what should be a satisfying creative experience into a bit of a frustrating slog.
Torneko: The Last Hope
Torneko was also ahead of its time, at least in the sense of its subject matter. It’s a Dragon Quest 4 spinoff that swaps traditional RPG-ing for a mystery dungeon adventure, complete with roguelike resets and brutal difficulty spikes. Seeing familiar characters in new settings is something we see pretty often in the contemporary games space, thanks in large part to Fortnite, but Torneko’s two halves don’t really join up well at all.
The mystery dungeon side is crushingly difficult, especially if you’re not used to the genre. Meanwhile, the Dragon Quest aspect is almost devoid of story, so outside a few cameos and Torneko himself, you really don’t get anything substantial from the RPG side either.
Gex: Enter the Gecko
The first Gex wasn’t exactly a stellar example of platforming innovation, but its design and general execution were pretty solid. The jump to 3D treated the smart-talking lizard poorly, though. Enter the Gecko suffers from the same kind of bland platforming and level design as Jersey Devil, but what makes Gex’s worse is how it ties in with the plot. Gex is meant to enter a series of worlds ripped from popular TV shows and movies – and in most cases, they have absolutely nothing to do with the source material. The best the motif can give us is a swapped color palette and enemies without doing anything interesting from a design perspective.
The third game was, if not as daring in its platforming as it could have been, at least more willing to have fun with its source material.
HBO Boxing
HBO Boxing could’ve been a special kind of sports game. Its big selling point was the “dual control” feature, which mapped left- and right-hand controls to the PS1 controller’s left and right sides. That’s pretty cool – except it didn’t really work. Unresponsive controls and wonky animations plagued HBO Boxing, which isn’t really a situation you want when your game relies on responsive inputs and smooth animations.
Dragon Valor
Dragon Valor dreams of being an epic action RPG, and it just falls short in nearly every way. The story follows a young man on a quest for revenge after his village is attacked and has the makings of strong story, despite sharing so much with Xenogears and other RPGs of the time. The action lets it down, though.
Movement in Dragon Valor is weirdly floaty, which makes moving around and timing attacks more difficult than it should be, along with generally just feeling bad to play. Environments are basic and a bit dull, and the boss fights that cap off each chapter feature big bads with limited movesets, poor AI, and the aggression of a newborn kitten.
Digimon World 3
While Pokemon settled into the pattern it would hold for decades, the Digimon World games were impressive in their willingness to innovate and do something a little bit strange at times. The downside was that the actual foundation of the games needed quite a bit of work, especially in Digimon World 3.
The world itself looks gorgeous, and the soundtrack is on par with the anime series. The battles take ages, though, and aren’t even that engaging. If you want to level up and evolve your Digimon – y’know, the whole point of playing a Digimon game – you have to go through dozens of fights to scrape together enough experience and then do it all over again for the next ‘mon.
KISS Pinball
KISS ends up everywhere, and in the days when pinball adaptations were as common as licensed movie games, KISS Pinball was, perhaps, inevitable. It was also terrible. The KISS representation is lacking, and the pinball portion is even worse. You get two cluttered tables, an awful set of physics that sees the ball get stuck more often than not, and really no incentive to ever come back for more. Other pinball games did it far better, and it’s a far cry from the physical KISS pinball table.
Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22
Before Dragon Ball Xenoverse, there was Ultimate Battle 22, and it was bad. There is a slight caveat to its dreadfulness, though. It was almost a 10-year-old game by the time it launched in North America in 2003. For some reason, Bandai thought releasing a barebones fighting game – that wasn’t very good in 1995 when it first launched – in a market where the PS2 existed was a good idea, and it really wasn’t. The fighting is lackluster, the visuals are overly basic, and there’s hardly any Dragon Ball Z to speak of, outside a small selection of fighters.
South Park
We’ve seen plenty of South Park game adaptations over the years, but the strangest and least enjoyable was 1998’s South Park. This one is an FPS game, because of course it is, and pretty much the only thing you do is shoot your way through far too many waves of turkeys and other unfortunates. It’s painfully straightforward, with little of the show’s personality and some rather unpleasant audio and visual effects. The publisher behind this was also responsible for bringing the Magical Mystery Mall game from earlier in the list into the world, so maybe the state of South Park isn’t too surprising.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
