Playing a bad video game is kind of like riding a moped. It’s all fun and games until your friends find out. We all have them too… those games that we can’t help but love but secretly don’t want our friends to know about. Games so bad or so embarrassing that you hang your head in shame as you power up your console but you just can’t help yourself. After a very officially unofficial poll we’ve come up with 7 games that we’d call our biggest guilty pleasures.
7: Lollipop Chainsaw
Coming in at number 7 on our list we have the adventures of Juliet Starling in Lollipop Chainsaw. This game isn’t even necessarily a bad one as it scored a fairly respectable 70 overall for a metascore. The reason this game qualifies as such a guilty pleasure? Its hero is a short skirt wearing cheerleader zombie hunter. No matter what you tell your friends about the entertaining hack and slash action or the *snicker* engaging storyline and characters they’ll assume one thing and one thing only; YOU ARE A PERVERT. One only needs to do a Google image search for this game and they’ll see what we’re talking about. Here’s an example… you dirty birds.
6: Candy Crush Saga
King stumbled on to one hell of a winning formula when they released Candy Crush Saga to the Facebook masses back in April of 2012. Simple match-three puzzling, which is addictive in its own right, with all sorts of fun bells and whistles and a too cute for words backdrop helped propel Candy Crush past Farmville 2 as FB’s biggest game. The guilt comes in when you’re too cheap to pay for more lives and sheepishly have to troll your friends over Facebook with invites to the game. We all know it to be true. How many status updates have you seen like this? ‘If one more person sends me an invite to their stupid game I’m gonna have to choke a bitch. Also, I’ll block your ass faster than a hooker drops her panties for quarters.’
5: Dragon Age 2
There is no doubting that Dragon Age Origins is one of Bioware’s undisputed masterpieces. If anything it could be on a list of the best RPGs ever made. How can a game that did everything so right devolve into everything that was Dragon Age 2? Where do we even begin? Take almost everything that worked for the first installment and scrap it! Despite Dragon Age 2 being horribly inferior to the first it isn’t an entirely horrible game. If you played Dragon Age Origins though it’s essentially your sworn duty to hate on it. Dragon Age 2 is a game that you quietly slog through without telling any of your RPG loving friends.
4: Call of Duty
I like to refer to Call of Duty as the Nickelback of the gaming world. Everybody makes fun of Nickelback and no one admits to listening to or liking Nickelback but they sell millions upon millions of albums. Subsititue ‘playing’ for ‘listening’ and ‘Call of Duty’ for ‘Nickelback’ and it’s pretty much the exact same thing. Sure it’s known as the bro-game of choice but a franchise that can sell millions of copies year after year has some merit… but seriously though, I don’t play it. I DON’T… buuuut I may just play Advanced Warfare.
3: Peggle
Peggle’s only real crime is being a casual game that can suck in even the most hardcore of gamers. We all grew up watching ‘The Price is Right’ when we got to stay home from school on sick days. We all loved watching contestants try their hand at Plinko. We all love this skill testing (I use the word skill very loosely here) digital version of Plinko with its cutesy ‘Peggle Masters’. Sadly, for the fear of being taunted with nerdisms like ‘CASUAL GAMER IS CASUAL’, no one ever wants their friends to know how much they like taking out coloured pegs.
2: DDR
Not only did DDR rule arcades before they started to disappear off the face of the planet but it made the leap to home consoles with those horrendous folding dance pads a few years later. It also laid the ground work for one of the Kinect’s biggest wins with Dance Central. Of course there aren’t many of us who want to admit to being a sweaty teenager with a fistful of quarters doing spin moves on that light up dance floor. Popular enough to spawn really horrible spoof movies DDR was an arcade juggernaut and we all secretly loved to play it… if the arcade happened to be empty. This is all because when WE played it we never got reactions like this:
1: DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball
DOA Volleyball is eye candy disguised as a video game plain and simple. It’s one of gaming’s finest displays of jiggle-physics and has scantily clad women from the DOA franchise competing in a beach volleyball competition. Funny that it never included any of the men from DOA? As shameful as it might be the game still sold more than its fair share of copies. What that means is that there were a lot of you playing DOA Volleyball to add some B-roll into your spank bank. You know what I mean. Now if THAT isn’t a guilty pleasure then I don’t know what is.