10 Insanely Awful Video Games In Famous Franchises

6. Ultima IX: Ascension

The mainstream gaming audience gives little credit to it now, but the early Ultima series played a huge part in making RPGs an actual extant 'thing' in video games. The infamously cryptic, tough, but brilliantly-written dungeon crawlers were among the first games to throw players into lore-rich worlds, where you could develop a character, venture around open(ish) outdoor environments, and have some degree of choice to your in-game actions. The series captivated gamers throughout the 80s and early 90s, before things faltered a bit with the eighth entry. Ultima then took a five-year hiatus before coming back in 1999 for the final chapter - a fully 3D world that promised to end things with a bang. But it was not to be, as its foray into the 3D realm was ugly, buggy, and had a general aura of not even being a complete game, possibly because it went through several different plots and iterations before coming to rest on something that was a shambolic mish-mash of several different versions. It was a grim ending to a once-loved franchise, and effectively killed Ultima stone-dead... which is probably why you never heard about it unless you were born in the 70s or 80s.