Once you’re a child, nothing makes a game more tempting than being told you possibly can’t play it. Parents banning games was like a seal of quality. In the event that they didn’t want us near it, it needed to be amazing, right? Except sometimes, they were completely right.
Whether it was shoddy design or eye-roll-inducing edginess, these are the banned titles that weren’t price sneaking into our collections. Seems, Mom and Dad had higher taste than we gave them credit for.
BMX XXX
This was the holy grail of ‘forbidden’ games. I mean, a BMX game with nudity and crude humor? For a lot of preteens, it was checked out as the top of adult entertainment. As an alternative, the sport was a broken mess of weird controls and strange physics.
The developers, Z-Axis, had an amazing popularity from their work on the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, but this felt like a betrayal. All of the ‘adult’ content that was presupposed to make it edgy just felt like an inexpensive gimmick slapped on top of a genuinely bad game.
The Guy Game
I do not think my parents even knew what this was, however the box art alone was enough to earn it a spot on the ‘hard pass’ list in my house. Thank goodness. Marketed as a trivia game where college girls would perform ‘flashes’ in the event that they answered incorrectly, it was all the time a sketchy game, but in 2004, a participant sued the developers, revealing she was a minor on the time of filming.
You may have thought your parents were just being uptight, but in hindsight, they were ahead of the curve. This wasn’t a cheeky party game; it was a trainwreck that aged worse than warm milk.
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust
Ah, Leisure Suit Larry. The name alone guaranteed parental bans. I assumed they were blocking some risque, hilarious adventure. Nope. Box Office Bust has ridiculously clunky controls, the platforming sections were practically unplayable, and the humor was less clever satire and more dull one-liners.
It felt like a game from a bygone era that refused to learn anything from more modern titles. My parents may need just been having a knee-jerk response to the title, but they were inadvertently saving me from a very awful game.
Postal 3
Postal 3 was banned in my house because “violence for the sake of violence” wasn’t allowed. I swore my parents were overreacting. Then I attempted it. The previous games had a popularity for satire and over-the-top violence, but this one just felt soulless. It was buggy and poorly optimized, and its attempts at ‘shock humor’ landed with a thud.
The unique Postal series was all about crude chaos, but Postal 3 lacked the identical energy. It was actually a chore to play, not the exciting banned game I had imagined.
Night Trap
This game had a popularity before I used to be even born, having been a part of the 1993 U.S. Senate hearings on video game violence. My parents, naturally, heard about that and immediately slapped it on the ‘nope’ list. Years later, I finally played it, and wow. The sport wasn’t violent. It was just bad.
It’s campy B-movie nonsense, and never in a fun way. The gameplay consists of flipping through different cameras and activating traps at the suitable moment. The ‘controversy’ gave it far more credit than it deserved.
Duke Nukem Eternally
For over a decade, Duke Nukem Eternally was the stuff of legends. It was in development for therefore long that it felt more like an urban myth. My dad once said, “That game looks silly.” He wasn’t fallacious.
By the point the sport finally got here out in 2011, it was a large number. The jokes were ancient, and the graphics were dated. The clunky controls weren’t any higher, either. Years of hype changed into a large disappointment, and the community backlash was intense.
Mortal Kombat: Special Forces
My parents banned all fighting games as a result of the violence, and my biggest disappointment was not having the ability to play Mortal Kombat. I assumed the sport can be awesome if I could just discover a way around their rule. Nope. Special Forces is infamous for 3 reasons: sluggish controls, bland environments, and not one of the magic that made MK iconic.
Even hardcore fans call it one in every of the worst spinoffs ever, and it is a black mark on the series’ history. Even probably the most loyal Mortal Kombat fans will inform you it was a mistake.
Superman 64
My parents banned this one for probably the most honest reason possible: “It looks bad.” I had seen the box art and was convinced that flying around as Superman needed to be fun. But I used to be very fallacious.
The sport’s controls were exceptionally broken, and the core gameplay loop was just an countless series of frustrating ring-flying challenges. Unnecessary to say, it was a profound disappointment. The sport was so poorly made that I could not play it for greater than half-hour at a time.
This was my dad’s personal “no.” He was an avid gamer himself and would regularly talk concerning the infamous E.T. on the Atari 2600 and the way it was the sport that helped tank your complete industry.
I attempted it on an emulator years later, and yeah. Falling into holes again and again is just not a fun gameplay loop. It’s an exercise in pure patience and frustration. Let this be a case study in the hazards of rushed game design.
Shaq Fu
My parents banned it because “celebrity games are all the time scams.” I assumed they were being cynical. Then I played Shaq Fu. Imagine clunky fighting mechanics and Shaquille O’Neal shoehorned right into a martial arts plot that makes zero sense. The controls were unresponsive, which made timing nearly inconceivable, and the clunky animations made it more of a button-masher than a real fighter.
It’s turn out to be a running joke within the gaming world due to the strange premise alone. It may need been great if the gameplay and graphics had been refined. As an alternative, it is a game that everybody laughs at and never plays.