10 Video Games We Love BECAUSE They're Fun Trash

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.

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!!”