The Worst of 1989.
Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to Georg Mack Plays the Classics. When you have so many games released in a year, there are bound to be some stinkers that get in the way of the good stuff. We’re going to look at the 10 worst games of 1989 so you don’t accidentally buy them second hand.
The 10th worst game of 1989 is California games on the NES. The gameplay was awful, the graphics were poor, and it was just unfun. The Master System showed that this game didn’t have to be trash, but it was.
Coming in at 9 is Baby Boomer on NES. Color Dreams didn’t want to go through the official Nintendo channels to release games, probably because these are trash. This baby wants to kill himself and you have to do your best to find all the things on screen that want to help him out. It plays horribly.
Number 8 is Sesame Street: A-B-C on NES. Remember that I’m an adult man and this is an edutainment game for toddlers. They might find some fun from it, but I didn’t.
The 7th worst game of 1989 is John Elway’s Quarterback on NES. The gameplay is slow, the passing is stupid, and the AI is awful at everything. Putting a British company in charge of American football seems like a terrible idea. Remember this came out at the same time as Tecmo Bowl…
The 6th worst game is NFL Football on NES and hey, it’s even worse than John Elway! Atlus and Rare fought among themselves to make the worst football game you have ever played and Atlus won out. The speed of the game is molasses. Many of the rules are forgotten. It’s terrible.
Number 5 is ALF on Sega Master System. Everyone loves ALF, but they wouldn’t if their first exposure to him was from this adventure style game. You have to do everything in a specific order and the difficulty comes from the bat cave. Once you have that figured out, you’ve got a ten minute game that is just stupid.
Number 4 is the nearly unplayable Uncanny X-Men on NES. When you take control of the X-Men you should feel powerful. Here you are weak and die in mere moments as enemies and obstacles attack ferociously. That, along with the hidden message you have to tease out in order to make it to the final level will leave you confused and throwing this out forever.
The bottom 3 are some of the most terrible things I’ve had the misfortune of playing. Montezuma’s Revenge on the Sega Master System is an awful time. I doubt anyone had the patience to get through the easiest mazes, let alone the higher difficulty ones. The controls are a mess, the items system is moronic, and you die so easily. Montezuma wins here.
The number 2 worst game of 1989 is Taboo: The Sixth Sense on NES. I don’t know what Rare and Tradewest were thinking here. Let’s put a tarot card reading on an NES cartridge and then put warnings on the label to entice people into buying this garbage! Dumb.
The worst game of 1989 is the worst game I’ve played yet, and it’s Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine on NES. This is literally unplayable dreck. I hated every second I spent on Cybernoid. The controls were awful. Enemies that you destroy often decided to still be able to attack you anyway. The powerups were basically useless. It was just horrible from start to finish and I’m happy to never play it again.
It’s inevitable that there will be more terrible games as time goes on, but hopefully they’ll have some more merit than these.