The 2000s were a golden age of trashy games, imo. I mean, there's true bottom of the barrel content in any decade, but 2000s titles don't have the benefit of being dismissed as time wasters like today's iPhone detritus or the landfill-bound titles of the Atari days. Most (but not all!) of the titles on this list were released as full $50/$60 titles. In other words, the 2000s were the age of the *prestige* trashy game - and the below are therefore my favorite examples of mid-aughts prestige trash.
Ranked from least bad to most bad.
Showing 1-10 of 24 items
I don't put GoldenEye: Rogue Agent on this list because it's an awful game in a pure gameplay sense - it plays well enough for an FPS from 2004 - but for how desperately idiotic it is. The premise: you are a 00 agent who kills James Bond during a training exercise, eliminating him from the 007 universe and therefore allowing you to complete missions for all his biggest foes. It's also sorta grimdark. I feel like this game from the very start misses the point not only of the original GoldenEye N64 title, but also of the entire general appeal of James Bond. I love Bond films, but it's kind of amazing that EA somehow made a worse version of that already (sometimes purposefully!) stupid franchise.
Mass Effect: Galaxy was a Mass Effect lore-filler that revealed the backstory of Jacob, a Mass Effect 2 squadmate. It was also probably the worst tactical RPG I've ever played, with serviceable, Saturday morning cartoon-style cutscenes between each skirmish. For Mass Effect freaks like me, this was worth it, but for anyone else on planet Earth this game is a skip. It's been de-listed from every digital store, as far as I know, so...that's that on that, I guess!
I won't get too much into it, but there was something deeply haunted about the Rugrats PS1 games. I don't even mean the obvious recycled content from game to game, but just the, like, VIBE of it all. There's a curse in there somewhere. Some lost spirit wanders the code of the Rugrats games.
Most every element about Marvel Nemesis is hilarious, but I think my favorite is that Nickelback-ass-lookin' Wolverine right there. Who in their right mind would take such a colorful cast of characters and place them in this diarrhea brown/green world??
Maybe something of a surprise that with a name like Big Mutha Truckers this game isn't a straight up horrorshow, but then I've never played Big Mutha Truckers 2: Truck Me Harder, which is apparently the official sequel. In any case, having played this game and laid eyes on its general depictions of the blue collar south, I somehow find myself convinced that the Big Mutha Truckers character design team did not exercise their maximum capacity for empathy towards their fellow man during this project.
This game was the result of someone saying 'what abouuut...who wants to...be...beat UP? A millionaire?' out loud in a boardroom. It's sub Mad Magazine bullshit for no one.
This pseudo movie tie-in game was either a dull-in-the-head lightgun game or a tougher-than-Dark Souls racing game depending on the character your chose - or, it was both if you had a light gun and a friend. And all because the world needed another mid-aughts Ben Stiller vehicle? Good riddance.
ESPN International Winter Sports 2002 (or: ESPNIWS2002) wasn't finished! It literally wasn't done yet. This game has two generic athletes assigned to each country, and they all appear to have dialogue that was never recorded. It's a glaring issue that's at its best in the character/country select screen, where the camera actually zooms in to these characters just to show you this unfinished feature as each athlete mouths away in silence. Hilariously, this game's bobsled races feature Mario Kart-ian speed boost pads, and the ice skating events are DDR rhythm minigames.
So...I THINK this game is called Monopoly Party to get in on the Mario Party craze? But in reality it's just a sorta shitty digital version of Monopoly with some themed boards. Look at that cover art, though. That's some real early-aughts shit right there.
I'm sure this was a perfectly fine stocking stuffer for football dudes or whatever, but this specific game is my favorite example of the way sports games can just fully devolve into nonsense. My friends and I used to play it just to instigate bugs and observe them. Once we booted it up and the players had no arms or legs. That's fucked up!