10 Critically-Acclaimed Video Games That BOMBED

Elite Beat Agents should have been an easy sell for Nintendo's budding DS platform - take widely-known and loved licensed music tracks (albeit performed as naff cover versions), and have your players tap and swipe to the beat, engaging directly with the new hardware in a novel way, with a concept almost anyone can understand.

And yet, Elite Beat Agents (the westernised version of the comparatively more successful Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!) simply couldn't garner the kind of attention that simple sales premise might imply - because the Nintendo DS was a breakthrough platform for non-gamers such as the very young or elderly, the visuals proved to be a bit too wacky and intimidating at a glance (and, to be fair to old Agnes, the game does have a level where you fight a lava golem at an amusement park by playing baseball to Good Charlotte's "Anthem.")

Whilst the younger audience opted for games such as Nintendogs, elderly customers found their comfort in experiences like 100 Incredibly Beige Wordsearches or Professor Mindsworth's Senility Delayer instead - Elite Beat Agents was simply too crazy for Grandma Ethel, but not cute enough for little Timothaniel.

Too few games these days allow you to stop a pirate mutiny by singing "Y.M.C.A," however finding an audience for that niche has, to date, proved difficult.