10 Video Games We Love BECAUSE They're Fun Trash
The "hits the spot" junk food of gaming.
You know, when I’m feeling fancy, I’ll go out and get myself some fancy tuna sashimi. Freshly cut, on a bed of shredded seasoned mooli radish. I’ll savour every bit and dab the corner of my mouth delicately with a fabric napkin, before sipping on a glass of moderately-priced bubbly.
But I don’t always feel fancy. I don’t always have the time to get dressed up to go out and paint the town... fish.
Sometimes you just need a bit of... rubbish. Grotty, filthy, rubbish. You want to just sit on your living room floor, in your pants, watching Better Call Saul, with a beans and Hula Hoops sandwich, scratching yourself and farting every time Saul Goodman grimaces.
There’s something inherently comforting about something you know is a bit guff, yet hits the spot like nothing else can. Supermarket Sweep. Big Mac. Hello Magazine. Post-club donner kebab. These are the little bits of crap that nourish the soul in a way nothing else can.
And the same is true for gaming - we don’t always want a Citizen Kane, sometimes we want a Good Burger.
Sometimes we don’t always want a God of War, we want some of this exceptional schlock.
10. Earth Defense Force (Series)
Earth Defense Force is one of those games that, when you explain it to people, elicits a universal shout of “that... that sounds amazing.” After all, how many other games let you fight a skyscraper-sized robot in a mech of your own, all whilst four hundred-odd tiger-sized ants rip the local Asda to bits?
The problem is, EDF has always been a wee bit... janky. In theory, that mishmash of sci-fi tropes and B-movie madness sounds like it’d be the perfect videogame, but in execution, it suffers from schlocky dialogue, utterly bizarre animations, frame rate issues, and repetitive gameplay.
But, in a way, those issues somehow make the experience - that you’re playing the videogame version of a crap, low-budget disaster flick you found on VHS at a car boot sale - all the more authentic.
Even better is that the games all allow you to play through their respective stories with a friend, so you can feel like an unstoppable alien-murderin’ hero with your best bud. And, even when your console slows to a crawl as the robotic animation-laden beasties fill the screen, it’s impossible not to get swept up by the chants of your AI pals screaming,
“E-D-F! E-D-F!!”