My Top 10 Worst Video Game-Related X-mas Presents

Video games have been a mainstay on my Christmas lists for most of my life. As a kid, they were on my list because they were something too expensive for me to buy on my own. As a kinda-adult, I put games on my list because I still can't afford them as I normally spend my own money on bare necessities like gas for my car and Milwaukee's Best. So over the years, I've gotten a lot of video-games and accessories as Christmas presents and most of been very awesome. But then there are the other ones. Things bought by well-meaning relatives or things young Alan wanted because he had been suckered in by a slick marketing campaigns. Here are the 10 worst video-game related presents I have ever received.

10. Super Scope (Super Nintendo)
“Whoa! It’s a bazooka, that’s way cooler than a Zapper.” – 10 year old Alan Talaga, idiot.

I really thought this successor to the NES Zapper (The Duck Hunt Gun) was going to be the coolest thing ever because I was 10 and believed that bigger = badass. Upon taking it out of the box, I soon learned that bigger also equaled heavier. The thing was too heavy to use and burned through 6 AA batteries in less than a few hours. Worst of all, it didn’t have any sort of feature that turned the Super Scope off if left idle for X number of minutes. That meant that whenever a family or friend came over to play it, they would leave the behemoth on and, by the morning when I would check on it, another 6 AA batteries would have been eaten up.

AA Batteries view this thing the same way we view Hitler.

9. Back to the Future II and III (NES)

Remember that part of Back to the Future II where Marty has to fight a jumping hamburger? Back to the Future II and III is just one of many bad NES platforming games to be based on movies. In the game, Biff has stolen a bunch of ‘historical artifacts’ and hidden them around 1955, 1985, and 2015 and you have to find all of them to fix the timeline. At least that’s what the game intro said, the gameplay itself consists of just wondering around randomly trying to find these artifacts only to die before you can collect more than 2 or 3 of them. So while it’s just another crappy licensed game that’s way too hard, this one annoyed me more than any other because of two things: 1) I loved the Back to the Future trilogy and bad games based on those sacred movies were offensive to everything kid-me stood for. 2) There is a whole second half of the game based on Back to the Future III which I could never reach because I could never get past the II part.

It irks me that this is STILL hiding somewhere in that game, unreachable to me.

8. Konami Laserscope (NES)

This guy looks bad but I looked even lamer.

Were you worried that you didn’t look enough like an idiot while playing Duck Hunt? I didn’t because someone got me the Konami Laserscope for Christmas. This helmet fit (un)comfortably over my head and fired in the direction my head was pointing whenever I said “Fire” into the microphone. To add in some challenge, the aiming reticule on the side is horribly inaccurate so you just guess where you think the target is! The only fun my friends and I had with this was when we realized the helmet-gun will fire when you say anything into the microphone, not just “Fire.” So we had tons of fun yelling “Booby” and “Poop” in order to kill ducks.

7. Street Fighter II – Street Fighter II Turbo – Super Street Fighter II (Super Nintendo)
None of these is a bad game but together they were a huge waste of money. Every year, I convinced family members to buy me the new version of Street Fighter II for 60-70 dollars a pop when the only differences were usually a few new characters. In the end, this one game ended up costing about 200 bucks, X-Mas list money that could have been put to far better use. Sadly, millions fall prey to phenomena every year when they pick up this year’s version of Madden.

6. Action Max VHS Video Game
This “system” played VHS cassettes while you shot targets on the screen. For the first five minutes, it was awesome, I was actually interacting with a real movie. But then I realized that nothing changed in the game, you couldn’t actually win or lose. All you could do is shoot at the screen and the gun would count how many targets you hit. The only VHS we had for it was a horrible ghost shooter called The Rescue of Pops Ghostly and I doubt I played through it more than twice.


But I will admit, Pops Ghostly is a sweet name as far as ghost names go. Should I die and end up haunting some place, I’m seriously considering using Pops Ghostly as my supernatural pseudonym.

5. Wayne’s World (Super Nintendo)

So terrible.
I always excited when I would receive a wrapped box of a certain size. I had figured out the dimensions of Super Nintendo boxes and could immediately tell when someone had gotten me a SNES game. But as I opened one present, my hope turned to horror. My aunt had given me Wayne’s World. The Game. She knew I liked Wayne’s World the movie and that I had a Super Nintendo so she thought this was a perfect fit. But I had read the review in Nintendo Power (Nintendo’s own magazine that told you to buy more Nintendo games) and they said it was horrible. Nintendo’s own propaganda rag said you shouldn’t buy this thing, that’s like Soviet-era Pravda endorsing the free-market. I knew this game was going to be bad. But I wanted to be nice and even played the game in front of her to make her happy. But, God, did that game suck.

4. Acclaim Wireless NES Controller

This one seemed like a no-brainer. Back when my mom owned the fabulous Falls Motel, we had a massive living room where the couches were set back from the TV several feet further than the miserly NES controller cord would allow. I was tired of sitting on the carpet and it seemed that a wireless controller would finally allow me to intermingle my love of Zelda and cushioned seating. Unfortunately, as opposed to today’s now-standard wireless controllers that work on a combination of bluetooth and magic, in the 80’s, wireless controllers worked on a combination of TV remote-style infrared beams and hatred for all that is good in the world.

Upon testing out the controller, I quickly figured out that the controller only responded to my button pressing about half the time and, even when it did respond, that there was such a horrible lag that I ended up getting killed by the first Goomba in Mario 1-1. Within 15 minutes, the thing was boxed up and I convinced my mom to take me to Wal-Mart where I tried to return it. On that day, little Alan learned a dark lesson about the futility of retail returns on open items. So thanks, Acclaim Wireless NES Controller for killing a little bit of my soul!

3. South Park (Nintendo 64)

Never forget.

I swore I’d never forget… But just like hippies who protested Vietnam turned into the Baby Boomers who supported the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I put another crappy licensed game on my Christmas list. Somehow I felt that a first-person shooter based on South Park could actually be good due to voiceover work by Trey Parker and Matt Stone but, oh, was I was so wrong. While it’s not as horrible as other licensed games on this list, it has a higher ranking because I was older at this point and I should have known better. But I had to live with my mistakes, just like Baby Boomers have to live with the fact that the war helped build up an economy-crushing deficit that decimated their 401k retirement accounts, South Park for the N64 decimated any good times I would have for the rest of Christmas vacation.

2. Tricks of the DOOM Gurus
By the early-to-mid 90’s, I thought I was an elite little hacker, with my sweet hacks of Duke Nukem 3D that made his foot attack super powerful (i.e. I changed one number in the files that made of the game, it’s about on the same technical level as changing a value in an Excel Spreadsheet). After those awesome mods, I was ready to move up to the next level with the book Tricks of the DOOM Gurus. This book was going to give me the tools to make my own DOOM levels and they were going to be awesome. In actually, level creation was much harder than the back cover of the book made it look and I struggled to make levels consisting of anything more than square rooms before giving up and going back to playing games as opposed to trying to make them. This one makes it so high on the list because it's the first time I had a Christmas Present make me feel like an idiot. Though I think my levels were still better than those in the South Park game.

1. U-Force (NES)

What the Hell do I do with This?

What if you could play Mike Tyson’s Punch Out by actually punching at the boxers on the screen? Long before Wii Boxing, this controller used infrared beams to judge where your hands were. Moving your hand would cross one of the beams and make your character punch on the screen. Or it made your character dodge. Or it made your character stand there and do absolutely nothing. The actions of this controller were so random and annoying it makes Dane Cook jealous.

Still, I look back in fondness on the U-Force. My dad had spent a lot of money on the U-Force and valiantly worked for days trying to get it to work. After one last attempt of getting it to work with Mario 2, he started making jokes about how horrible it was and I joined him, as he and the U-Force started off my life-long love of making fun of things that annoy me. When I think about my dad during Christmas-time, I remember the joy we had in hating the U-Force. My worst present ever ended up giving me some of my most treasured memories.

Thanks for the memories, you terrible piece of technology.