10 Terrible Video Games We All Ended Up Owning
We just couldn't help ourselves but buy these games.
Given the cost of your average AAA video game, the vast majority of players never set out to intentionally add terrible games to their collections, and yet, an atrocious end product doesn't always mean it will also sell poorly.
In fact, awful games sell like hotcakes on the regular, and while smart players will ensure to read reviews before buying any game, we have all fallen foul of this at one time or another, helpless against the desire to play an enticing new game, critics be-damned.
These 10 video games are all uniformly bad, whether rushed through development or churned out to make a quick buck as lazily as possible.
And yet, on paper they all could've been genuinely terrific, well-made titles - hence why each sold better than their quality would ever reasonably suggest.
From long-awaited games based on classic movies to highly anticipated next-gen sequels, and even glorified tech demos intended to show off your gimmicky new hardware, these video game failures nevertheless wound up in the libraries of millions of players, where they may even still reside today...
10. Enter The Matrix
Back in May 2003, people couldn't get enough of The Matrix - the third film hadn't yet come out and tainted everyone's perception of the IP, and so a Matrix video game was basically a critic-proof slam dunk.
Enter the Matrix was not a good game by any stretch of the imagination, as even beyond its bug-riddled, stilted gameplay, you were forced to play as one of two underwhelming Matrix side characters, Niobe or Ghost, rather than as Neo, Morpheus, or Trinity.
Yet The Matrix was such a hot commodity that the game nevertheless went on to sell gangbusters, ultimately shifting 5 million units worldwide. If you were a teenage boy playing video games in 2003, you definitely owned this thing.
The tragic irony is that the effortlessly superior 2005 follow-up, The Matrix: Path of Neo, was an infinitely better - albeit still flawed - game, yet apparently sold poorly enough that its commercial performance was never even publicly reported. Oof.