The top 20 great games with terrible things in them

If there’s one thing NowGamer enjoys more than the perfect videogame, it’s a title with one crucial flaw that can then be endlessly picked over, dissected and argued about. From blue shells to cheap bosses to, well, Shadow The Hedgehog, our pastime seems packed with creators tying up loose ends with the development equivalent of cotton thread.

With this in mind, cover your eyes as we investigate, in no particular order, the top 20 videogames almost ruined by such a bone-headed decision. Only open up your fingers a bit, otherwise the words will be a little hard to understand…

Spider-Man 2 – Doc Ock
Highlight: Free-roaming through a well-realised New York, using an excellent, momentum-based swing mechanic.

The Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in was almost suspiciously good at a time when every licensed game sucked ass. Luckily for our perceptions of reality, the game decided to self-implode during the final boss encounter. During this absolutely shocking ‘battle’ with Doctor Octopus, the tentacle-bearing toolbag has an ‘unstable energy source’ that frustratingly throws Spidey around the environment whenever he comes into contact with it, causing a disgustingly unfair amount of damage. At the end, when you’re fighting Doc Ock in the harbour, trying to disable the device, falling into the water below will kill Spider-Man. This stupid idea contradicts the fact that on any occasion earlier in the game, when Spidey tumbles into the bay, he climbs out unscathed. Did the water become toxic in the meantime or something? Illogical! All in all, it set a nice precedent for all the Spider-Man games that would follow, as it was total crap.

Halo 2 – The non-ending
Highlight: Playing the multiplayer, non-stop, in your underpants.

Halo 2 was a dumb single-player game, absent of the sandbox-style set pieces present in the first and reliant on a bone-headed storyline about Master Chief getting his groove back or something. The ending was the greatest crime, however, as Bungie didn’t leave players with any real closure, instead making reference to ‘finishing the fight’, an event that sounded at least 16 times better than anything that actually happened in Halo 2, from beginning to end. Not only was the ending unsuccessful at wrapping everything up in the daft storyline, but it also made players feel like they’d been playing a prologue for the past eight hours instead of the actual successor to Combat Evolved. We can’t recall our reaction at the time with any degree of precision, but it probably included words that rhyme with ‘puck’ and ‘runt’.

Fallout 3 – The rubbish, flexible ending
Highlight: Everything. Wandering around the Capital Wasteland and experiencing the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

Your choices in Fallout 3 essentially amounted to nothing, by the time the ending rolled around, as a very tired Ron Perlman fluctuated wildly between positive and negative tones, depending on which unlucky bastards you happened to cap while on your travels. He doesn’t exactly say this, but here’s a paraphrase of the kind of inconsistent speech uttered to the player: “The man from Vault 101 left an innocent traveller… but then killed loads of people. On the way, he learnt how to be virtuous… but more people died by his hand. Luckily, by the end he found redemption and became a hero… but was also a bastard.” Frankly, it wasn’t decent enough payoff for all those choices made throughout the game. If you downloaded Broken Steel, however, the adventure would continue, meaning the ending essentially became moot. It just shouldn’t have been there to begin with.

… continued