Best Of

That Time When Everyone Was Making Sexy Beach Volleyball Games…

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Since completing my lengthy ranking of all of the PSM swimsuit issues, I’ve been continuing to go back through a massive pile of gaming magazines for an even lengthier writing project (stay tuned to IC2S in the near future for that). Skimming through gaming history has been fascinating, but it has also made me aware of several eras of gaming history that passed me by. For example: we all know and remember Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball (in part because I won’t shut the fuck up about it), but did you know that there were four other sexy beach volleyball games that released in a one year period from 2002 to 2003? And as weird as that is, it’s not even the weirdest detail: this sport was apparently so important that each console had its own exclusive sexy volleyball title! Suffice to say, I had to check these games all out and compare them! So let’s enjoy the waning days of summer reading about all the balls that were getting slapped in the early 2000s…

Beach Spikers: Virtual Beach Volleyball

Console: Gamecube
Release Date: July 12, 2002 (originally released in Japanese arcades in July 2001)
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega

What is it?

One of Sega’s many Virtua-sports titles, Beach Spikers started off as a fairly big hit in Japanese arcades. It was ported to the Gamecube a year later, it kicked off this trend of sixth console generation beach volleyball games.

How does it play?

Beach Spikers plays how every good sports sim should, translating the feel and strategy of real-world volleyball to video game form, while being easy to play. You have a lot of control over where you send the ball and how you respond in any given situation. Positioning also matters a lot, because you have a very small ring in which you can return the ball: if you’re on the edges of this, then your return will liklely be weak or fly off wildly, often costing you a point. There’s a pretty high skill ceiling here, so I imagine that there’s some people who have put in the necessary practice and gotten downright godly at playing Beach Spikers.

How does it look?

Beach Spikers looks like a Dreamcast game… that’s not to say that it looks awful, but it has clearly been made very early in the sixth console generation, in that awkward time when developers were still coming to grips with the new technology. As a result, character models are fairly low-detail, swimsuits are clearly just a skin textures with little-to-no bump mapping, and animations are stiff and awkward. Sand does deform somewhat and stay that way through the match though, which is pretty cool! The lighting can also get downright gorgeous at times, which elevates the proceedings immensely.

How’s the soundtrack?

Breach Spikers has a generic, unlicensed rock soundtrack. It’s just straight-up background noise, that’s all.

Also worth noting, the menu has an announcer who enthusiastically calls out every menu item you select… it gets really annoying fast. Like, dude, I know it’s World Tour mode, that’s why I picked it!

How sexy is it?

Beach Spikers is going for authenticity, so sexiness hasn’t really been emphasized here to the degree that it would be in many of its successors. All the outfits practical and fairly realistic. There’s a sense of matter-of-factness to the game’s sex appeal: this is just beach volleyball, of course it’s sexy!

That said, there are seventy outfits and colour variants available to choose from, and a full half of these show off a fairly significant amount of cleavage. Despite being practical and realistic, all of these suits are still showing off a ton of skin. To put it in perspective, there are several swimsuits in DOAXBV which are more conservative than every single outfit in this game. In addition, none of the in-game characters are real people, which means that Sega made the conscious decision for this game to feature only women, and then make them all conventionally attractive. It’s pretty clear to me that there was a conscious effort to tastefully lean on sex appeal, while trying to stay authentic to the beach volleyball experience.

Who are the characters?

Beach Spikers doesn’t really have characters per se. There are sixteen countries with two players per team, for a total of thirty-two in-game characters. That said, they are basically just pre-made create-a-characters, which brings us to the real exciting bit: Beach Spikers‘ world tour mode allows you to create your own duo, and has a ton of face, hair, and outfit options to choose from! You may not get any sort of personality from these characters, but at least the create-a-character mode gives you a lot of attachment to your players!

Also: I find it hilarious that Team Canada’s two players are named Olvis and Quilico, what the fuck, haha.

What’s the verdict?

Beach Spikers is a lot of fun! It aims to be an authentic volleyball experience, and it absolutely nails the assignment. I can absolutely see how you could sink countless hours into this game. Becoming more skilled at it and then going through a world tour playthrough seems like it would be really fun!

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball

Console: Xbox
Release Date: January 21, 2003
Developer: Team Ninja
Publisher: Tecmo

What is it?

Do I really need to explain this? Not only is Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball the only game on this list that anybody remembers, but I’ve covered it (and its myriad of sequels) several times in the past. Check out those links for your deep-dives.

Funnily enough, while the Dead or Alive franchise was often accused of being a Virtua Fighter rip-off, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball would also be accused of being a clone of Beach Spikers: Virtua Beach Volleyball (for his part, Tomonobu Itagaki claims that the similarity was coincidental and that a volleyball mode was originally planned for Dead or Alive 2).

How does it play?

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball stands out from its competition by being more of a vacation simulator, rather than a pure volleyball game. You spend as much time relaxing, shopping, gambling, and watching the girls frolic as you do actually playing volleyball. This gives the game a really soothing atmosphere which makes it a lot more compelling than its thin content would have you think.

That said, the volleyball itself is fun. It’s quite simple to get the hang of and controls very intuitively. One could argue that this gives it less depth than some of the other games on this list, but it’s enjoyable, and the other activities on offer help shake up any feeling of monotony. My one complaint about the volleyball in DOAXBV is that the camera often leaves your character off-screen, which can make it hard to position correctly (although this would be fixed in its sequels).

How does it look?

Like most of Team Ninja’s games, DOAXBV is gorgeous-looking. They’re clearly utilizing the same tech as Dead or Alive 3, with highly-detailed character models, impressive sand physics and lighting. Unfortunately, you spend too much of the game staring at menu screens, but when you are in the action, it’s a technical showcase.

How’s the soundtrack?

DOAXBV features a licensed soundtrack with lots of chill reggae and bubblegum pop from recognizable artists such as Bob Marley, Spice Girls, Baha Men, and Christina Aguilera. The soundtrack helps sell the chill vacation atmosphere of the game and emphasizes that Team Ninja aren’t treating this game as a joke.

How sexy is it?

This first game is tastefully restrained in its sexiness (mostly). Sure, it’s kind of laughable watching the girls aimlessly stand around looking sexy, but there’s a clear level of respect for the characters at the end of the day. There’s a voyeuristic quality to the game: you’re just getting a glimpse at these sexy ladies having fun and hanging out. They’re having fun for themselves, they’re not just trying to look sexy for you, which is honestly more arousing than if the game was going all-out.

Of course, you can dress the girls up in dozens of different bikinis, some of which get ridiculously revealing. Getting those swimsuits requires hours of grinding for currency and staring at menu screens, so if you want to maximize your experience you’re going to have to do your chores first.

Who are the characters?

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball features all of the girls from the mainline Dead or Alive games up to that point, plus newcomer Lisa.

What’s the verdict?

While I’m still not a huge fan of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball (or its sequels), I cannot deny that it’s fun and relaxing in small doses. The non-volleyball activities also help to keep things somewhat fresh, which definitely helps it to stand out among all the other sexy volleyball games that released at the time.

Also, side-note: I blamed this game for tarnishing Dead or Alive‘s reputation in my Love/Hate article, but I now think that things are a bit more nuanced than that. After all of my writing project research, it’s clear that Dead or Alive was kind of doomed from the start. From the moment Tecmo marketed the first game as “sexy Virtua Fighter“, the series was always associated with sex. Every mention of Dead or Alive had to have an obligatory reference to boobs, despite contemporaries like Soulcalibur having just as much fan service (if not more). It seemed like there was the potential for Dead or Alive 2 and 3 to transcend this reputation, with near-universal acclaim for their fighting systems showing that there was more to the series than just sex appeal.

Then Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball came out. On the one hand, this brought the series a massive amount of attention: the game came out in January 2003, and it was still in the public conscious more than a year later, with everyone still talking about how sexy the game was. However, this increased public conscious was a double-edged sword: it meant that more people just viewed the series as porn without actually playing the games, and it also meant that future Dead or Alive games had to lean harder into the sex appeal to satisfy the audience they had cultivated. That worked at the time, but with gaming culture becoming increasingly more diverse and mature, such overt sex appeal would rapidly limit its audience.

Outlaw Volleyball

Console: Xbox (ported to PS2 in Europe in 2004 and North America in 2005)
Release Date: July 8, 2003
Developer: Hypnotix
Publisher: Goddamn Simon & Schuster Interactive!?!! (Seriously!)

What is it?

Developer Hypnotix released Outlaw Golf in 2002, establishing a blueprint for sports games featuring wacky, over-the-top, low-life characters. Naturally, such a blueprint would apply easily to volleyball, whose reputation as a “sexy” sport would no-doubt draw an audience with the game’s lurid content and M-rating.

Hypnotix, for their part, would end up being acquired by EA in 2005 (shortly after the PS2 port of Outlaw Volleyball released). They would go on to be assimilated into the EA Sports development arm, where they’re still making sports titles to this day. I mean… that’s got to be a best-case-scenario when you’re acquired by EA, right? If nothing else, titles like Outlaw Volleyball helped the studio develop a sports game expertise that kept them relevant!

How does it play?

Outlaw Volleyball isn’t quite as authentic as Beach Spikers, but it is far closer to an EA Sports-style sim than you would expect. While there are some arcadey elements (such as a turbo meter you can use to get guaranteed points), the game is clearly going for the look and feel of televised volleyball, complete with an announcer, instant replay, and screen transitions with a network logo.

Of course, this is also an Outlaw game, so that means that there’s some extra violence thrown in for the hell of it. You can cross the net to fight a player on the other team, which plays out like a fighting game. This is a hilarious concept, but in execution, these fights play awfully, with extremely stiff and simplistic controls lacking any depth. Aside from the comedy of beating your opponent senseless, the only reward you get for it is that the loser suffers a major stamina penalty, although this does not have much of an effect on gameplay.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that a massive chunk of this game’s appeal (?) is its comedic writing, so you’re probably going to spend a lot of time early on listening to/watching the bevy of comedy skits that play out before the match and between serves. Many of them are groan-inducing, and they start repeating very quickly, but I did get a fair few laughs at how ridiculous and shameless this game gets… sometimes, these laughs were even with the game, rather than at it!

In terms of game modes, you’ve got standard exhibition, random match, training, and tour mode (basically, your single-player campaign). There is a four-player mode, and I can just imagine how fun it would be to get the boys together, crack some beer and illicit substances, and then have a laugh while playing this game.

How does it look?

Outlaw Volleyball looks and feels like a budget title. The character models are decent by sixth-generation-standards, but everything else is pretty poor. Sand doesn’t react to your movement at all, bystanders look like they were rendered on a SNES, background objects would have been too bad for even Pokemon Sword & Shield, etc. They got the absolute most important things right, but that’s about it.

How’s the soundtrack?

Outlaw Volleyball‘s licensed soundtrack is identifiably “early-2000s”: lots of rap, post-grunge, punk, and nu-metal. Despite this, there’s not a single song on here that anyone has ever heard of. It’s clearly a case where they didn’t have the budget to license any big hits, so instead they just settled on a bunch of facsimiles of popular sounds. The music here feels like something an executive would say “the cool kids were into”.

That said: goddamn Steve Carrell voices the game’s announcer!? This was 2003, so it would have been pre-fame Steve Carrell! That’s so cool!!

How sexy is it?

Outlaw Volleyball has eight female characters (it also has eight male characters, but the game is clearly not prioritizing their sex appeal). Each character has three different outfit options, all of which show off a significant amount of skin. Each outfit also has five different colour/pattern options, which gives the characters surprising amount of customization! These outfits can get so revealing that they rival DOAXVB for sheer exposure. Oh, and fret not: of course there are jiggle physics… they’re not great, but at least they’re here, because Hypnotix know what their audience wants.

That said, I don’t think “sexy” is the right word for Outlaw Volleyball. This game is downright trashy, and proud of it. The game has such a gaudy, raunchy, over-the-top attitude, that you can never be sure if they’re trying to be sexy, or if they’re trying to be funny. Like, when a nearly-naked character enters the court doing a lap dance routine, am I supposed to be aroused, or am I suppose to laugh at how ridiculous the whole situation is? Whatever the intent, the absurdity of the sex appeal got a fair few laughs out of me.

Also worth noting: this game came out while cheat codes were still a thing. Guess what the primo cheat code is in this game? If you guessed “big boob mode”, then congrats, you are on the same wavelength as Hypnotix. Enter a quick set of commands during a match and the characters’ boobs will balloon to ridiculous proportions. Funnily enough, they actually look extremely squished and are so big that I don’t think that the jiggle physics even work on them anymore, so I actually think that the game is “sexier” without this mode on. Then again, if you’re looking to maximize the comedy, then this is a must-have cheat (along with the standard big head mode).

Who are the characters?

Like I said earlier, Outlaw Volleyball has sixteen characters to choose from (eight male, eight female). They’re all a bunch of broad stereotypes, although this does mean that they have a fair bit of individuality. Highlights include:

  • Lizzy, an English punk. Just… imagine the most offensive English stereotypes, and you’ve got Lizzy. I nearly spit out my drink when I picked her on the character selection screen and she shouted out “Bloody nice choice… for a wanker!”
  • Shawnee is this game’s indigenous character… hoooooo boy, in a game defined by broad, raunchy humour and stereotypes, Shawnee has aged the worst by far. She references rain dances, runs around with tomahawks and a bow, has a fucking eagle that just hangs out with her… yikes.
  • Doe Joe is the Asian stereotype… He knows martial arts, obviously. He also has a thing for Elvis, for some reason?
  • Summer is literally just a stripper. That’s her entire personality. She starts the match doing a chair dance and her voice lines are all about her sex work. Suffice to say, she’s arguably the trashiest character in the entire roster.
  • Clem is your generic redneck. I legitimately laughed out loud when I saw that he hails from “Swampass, Tennessee”.
  • Natasha’s your USSR woman stereotype: short hair, super muscular, declaring her love for Mother Russia, firing off machine guns, and downing vodka in between serves.
  • Donna is literally just a New Yorker. Seriously, I don’t think they were going for anything more than that with this character.

What’s the verdict?

I’m not really sure who Outlaw Volleyball is for. Its volleyball gameplay is a bit more involved than DOAXBV (which would have been its direct competition at the time), but then that gets diluted by the arcadey elements and fighting system. The “outlaw” gimmick doesn’t even do it that much of a service either, since DOAXBV already had the sexy volleyball market cornered, so you can only really appeal to an even trashier audience niche. That said, I honestly found the game to be kind of enjoyable, in that rare “so bad it’s good” way that video games struggle to achieve. Unfortunately, it feels like it would get old very fast, and I don’t think that the volleyball gameplay is good enough to stand up on its own. Certainly not a classic, but I can see it being fun on occasion, especially with friends!

Outlaw Volleyball: Red Hot

Console: Xbox
Release Date: July 8, 2003
Developer: Hypnotix
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Interactive

What is it?

A baffling, stripped down mini-version of Outlaw Volleyball with some exclusive content. Bizarrely, this game was only available by renting from Blockbuster. Outlaw Volleyball released when DLC was in its infancy: with that in mind, it makes a bit more sense why they would see a deal with Blockbuster as a better financial opportunity. However, if it came out even a year later, this definitely would have been a $3 DLC pack: that is the level of exclusive content we’re talking here.

How does it play?

As you would probably expect, Red Hot plays identically to Outlaw Volleyball… it’s just significantly worse as a complete package. You’ve only got two game modes available: Exhibition and Free Play. At least the four-player mode is still here, so you could get some fun out of the game if you have some friends to share a laugh with. However, the game also makes the insane decision to lock all but one of the tutorial videos!? Did they just assume that no one was going to bother to learn how to play this game?

How does it look?

I’ll give Red Hot some credit: the hell court is actually pretty cool looking. Otherwise, this game is just reusing assets from Outlaw Volleyball, so it looks slightly-less mediocre than that game did.

How’s the soundtrack?

We’ve basically got the exact same soundtrack as the main game. The only major difference is that the stage intro is no longer voiced by Steve Carrell, but rather some other random guy… until the match starts, and then it’s back to Steve Carrell (who just says his lines from the main game). They clearly just couldn’t/didn’t want to pay Steve to come back to the studio for this.

How sexy is it?

Only four of the ladies from Outlaw Volleyball are playable in Red Hot… and, my God, they picked the absolute worst foursome for this game. They’re all dressed in devilish new outfits, but these aren’t particularly arousing or revealing. Worse, you can’t change their outfits and you get no customization options… lame!

Who are the characters?

Like I said, Outlaw Volleyball only has four playable characters. The character select screen shows the rest of the cast as locked, teasing that you might have some sort of reward for playing the game. As far as I can tell, Hypnotix just couldn’t be arsed to modify the character select screen, so they permanently locked them away from us.

As for the characters, we’ve got Chica, Donna, Harvest, and Natasha. Chica, Donna, and Harvest are all so boring, and easily my bottom three if I was ranking the female roster on sexiness. Natasha is about the only character I’m fine with, since she’s at least kind of funny and interesting. I’m just shocked that they didn’t want to use Summer, the literal stripper character, and put her in a slutty Halloween costume? Insane choice.

What’s the verdict?

Look, maybe I’m being a bit harsh on what is effectively a demo disc with some exclusive content… but Red Hot is not even good as a demo disc, because you had to pay for it. You could rent Red Hot… or, for the same price, you could rent the full Outlaw Volleyball game and get a significantly more complete experience. Or you could actually rent a game that’s good. When just renting the game for a couple bucks is a bad choice, you know that you failed to a catastrophic degree. There’s no scenario where choosing to play Red Hot over literally anything else makes any sense, making it one of the absolute most baffling games I’ve ever experienced.

Summer Heat Beach Volleyball

Console: PS2
Release Date: June 30, 2003
Developer: Acclaim
Publisher: Acclaim

What is it?

Of all of the games on this list, Summer Heat Beach Volleyball is the one that is most clearly a ripoff. Publisher Acclaim* clearly saw that Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball was an Xbox exclusive, so they rushed to release their own sexy volleyball game for the PS2 before anyone else could, hoping to make some desperately-needed bank. Unfortunately, the game sold poorly and its failure helped fuel Acclaim’s bankruptcy only a year later. Oops!

It doesn’t even end there though for Summer Heat Beach Volleyball: according to good ol’ Wikipedia, the rights to the IP were purchased by Throwback Entertainment in the bankruptcy proceedings. They announced that they were going to release a sequel on the seventh generation consoles and seemed legitimately excited about it, but no game ever materialized and no cancellation was ever announced… I just think it would be hilarious if there’s secretly a sequel to Summer Heat Beach Volleyball that’s been stuck in development hell since 2006.

*Acclaim were so notorious for the poor quality of their releases that people would refer to them as “Ack-Lame!” Obviously, this is a major reason why they ended up bankrupt.

How does it play?

Summer Heat Beach Volleyball feels very arcadey. The volleyball controls are quite simple, but there’s one main mechanic which the entire game is built around: aiming the ball on offense. When you are serving or spiking, you can hold down a button when the ball’s in the air and then aim where your shot will go with the left analog stick. This gives you a lot more direct control over the ball than any other game on this list, and in a very simple, intuitive, and skillful way! If nothing else, this helps the game feel pretty fun at times!

However, this emphasis on offense has its issues. The defensive game kind of sucks, especially because your AI companion is an idiot. They very rarely act when the ball is returned by the other team, so you end up being the entire defense in an effective 2v1. I legitimately think that this was an intentional design decision, because it means that you’ll be forced to use the ball aiming system all the time.

The other big issue with the game is that it floods the screen with massive arrows showing you the exact path that the ball is going to take at all times. You don’t really pay attention to the characters or the setting, it ends up being background noise in a “chase the arrow” simulator. Your optimal action is always to just go where it tells you to.

Oh, one other weird thing about this game is the “Beach House” mode. This essentially acts as an on-rails, in-game menu: you hold down either L2 or R2, which causes you to move back and forth through a beachside house and interact in first person view with some items (trophy case for records, TV for unlocked movies, etc). I do not know why they wasted development time on this largely-useless feature…?

How does it look?

Summer Heat Beach Volleyball looks dated, even by 2003 standards. Bystanders, which the camera lovingly pans by before every match, would have looked poor on the PS1 and they don’t even have any animation: they just stand there, motionless! Everything looks second-rate and it just reinforces the notion that this is a low-rent version of DOAXBV. The character models, one of the most important things in a “sexy” game like this, are uncanny. While the bodies are actually pretty good, the faces on every character look terrible. The game is seriously in need of a good, distinct art style (I really have to hand it to Team Ninja, the anime-like art style of DOA2/3/Xtreme 1&2 really holds up, and Summer Heat Beach Volleyball is a good reminder of how easily it could have failed).

At least the sand deforms slightly when you take a step, so it’s got that over Outlaw Volleyball.

How’s the soundtrack?

Surprisingly, Summer Heat Beach Volleyball actually has some recognizable names on the licensed soundtrack! Sum 41, Kylie Minogue, Pink: recognizable! But does it make any sense listening to “Fat Lip” while playing sexy beach volleyball? Not really…

How sexy is it?

Summer Heat Beach Volleyball is easily the second most overtly “sexy” volleyball game on this list (after DOAXBV, of course). As soon as you go to the character select screen, you are greeted by the jiggliest boob physics this side of DOA. Like, even the small-chested Asian character’s boobs jiggle like mad, it’s hilarious. They clearly put a disproportionate amount of effort into this physics system. Unfortunately, the aforementioned uncanny faces really do not do this game any favours in terms of sex appeal.

Each character has only two swimsuits, with five colour variations each, which doesn’t give you a whole lot of variety. That said, all of these suits are quite revealing and wouldn’t look out of place in DOAXBV (aside from looking significantly less-detailed).

However, what really wins this game some sexy points is its well-designed replay system. This allows you to rewatch the last set with very intuitive rewind/pause/fast forward controls and you get free control of the camera. This is fantastic for virtual photography, allowing you to get your chosen girl into the perfect pose for a well-framed shot!

Who are the characters?

Summer Heat Beach Volleyball does not have a create-a-character mode, instead having a set character roster… unfortunately, none of them really have any “character” to speak of. That said, this game has a wild character roster. We’ve got nine girls, six guys… and then there’s six joke characters. That’s right, the men are as important to the devs as the fucking joke characters. These joke characters are: a wooden mannequin, two Greek statues, a crash test dummy, and two glitch characters (one of whom looks suspiciously like Cortana). Between this and the Beach House mode, it’s clear that Acclaim did not have their development priorities straight. You couldn’t have allocated some resources towards making your character models look good? No…?

What’s the verdict?

Summer Heat Beach Volleyball just feels cheap. Everything about it is just the second-rate version of DOAXBV, which makes it seem like a disappointment in comparison. The offensive game is fairly fun, but the game is seriously lacking in any other depth to make this something I’d want to keep playing for any length of time.

So, why did we suddenly get five beach volleyball games in the course of one year? I can only really speculate, but I think that the monumental success of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a big influence. After its success, publishers were scrambling to create their own extreme sports titles, and soon the market was flooded with all manner of Tony Hawk clones. However, these developers started trying to differentiate themselves and branch out to other, untapped sports. I suspect that beach volleyball started gaining attention as a good sport to branch out to due to its easy association with sex appeal. Sex appeal in games had really started to ramp up towards the end of the PS1-era (especially after Tomb Raider and Dead or Alive really pioneered the concept), so it makes sense that all of these games would lean into that to a greater-or-lesser degree.

For the sheer hell of it, here’s how I’d rank the beach volleyball games I’ve played in terms of overall quality (relative to one another):

Y’know what? Let’s sneak a cheeky bonus entry in here as well…

BMX XXX

Console: Xbox, PS2, Gamecube
Release Date: November 15, 2002
Developer: Z-Axis
Publisher: Acclaim

What is it?

Once again, we have “Ack-Lame!” up to their usual shit. The concept is simple: “what if BMX, but with boobs?” For obvious reasons, BMX XXX is one of the most notorious and trashy games of its era.

Z-Axis were the developers behind the Dave Mirra’s Freestyle BMX games. These games were blatant Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater clones, but were fairly well-regarded nevertheless. However, the while developing the third entry in the franchise, Z-Axis and Acclaim decided to pivot in a more adult direction in a desperate attempt to make their game stand out in the sea of Tony Hawk clones. The resulting shitshow was glorious:

  • Dave Mirra went on to sue Acclaim for associating him with the game and tarnishing his reputation in the process. In addition, no celebrity BMX riders or licensed equipment chose to appear in the game due to the controversy.
  • The game was banned in Australia (not exactly a rare occurrence, but still notable).
  • It was also banned from sale at Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us, the two biggest game distributors at the time, kneecapping the game’s attempt at standing out in the market.
  • Sony would force Z-Axis to remove all nudity before they would allow the game to release on PS2… which completely defeated the purpose of the game.
  • The game ended up selling terribly and was another big factor behind Acclaim’s bankruptcy a couple years later.

How does it play?

Trying to make precise movements in this game is really frustrating. You can turn in place freely, but if you actually want to move anywhere, you have to start pedalling in that direction. You can’t just walk the bike to a particular point, you have to go there with some acceleration. That means that you are going to overshoot your target frequently, even if you’re right beside them. This is especially annoying when you’re trying to line up a trick, accept a mission, or complete a challenge.

The game has a fairly standard, Pro Skater-style mission structure, where you accept challenges from NPCs in each stage. These can get really annoying because, if you fail, you have to go back to the quest-giver and restart the quest (including any cutscene they may have, although you can skip them at least). Considering that all of these challenges are timed, you’re probably going to fail at least once, leading to a lot of tedium.

That said, BMX XXX is still working off of the solid skeleton of the Dave Mirra games (which, in themselves, were using the blueprint set by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater). With that kind of iron-clad foundation, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the moment-to-moment gameplay is decent enough. Maximizing your scores and learning how to land tricks is enjoyable, but it’s not exactly an original formula either.

Also worth noting: the game’s sense of humour is about as juvenile as you’d expect. Dick and ball jokes are forced in everywhere, the first level has you ferrying hookers to a love hotel, there’s a pimp strutting around, one mission has you delivering monkeys in diapers, etc.

How does it look?

You’d think that you’d want to make your “BMX, but with nudity” game at least look good so you can show off that saucy content, but apparently not. Despite being a next-gen title, BMX XXX looks worse than some PS1 games. You can count the number of polygons these characters have on two hands (and still have fingers left over for your mom). This is particularly surprising, considering that Z-Axis’ previous BMX game looked significantly better. Apparently, the adult pivot caused Z-Axis to throw out a lot of work that had already been done on the game, but Acclaim didn’t give them any more time to complete it. Combine that with developers disagreeing with the new direction and a rapid realization that the game was going to fail spectacularly, it’s little wonder that a bare-minimum effort was put in.

How’s the soundtrack?

Shockingly, BMX XXX has a licensed soundtrack with multiple notable names on it. Like, I can understand why Saliva’s “Click, Click, Boom” and Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” appear in this game: those bands are trashy enough that I can see them signing on for a titty BMX game. But the moment you start the first mission and Green Day’s “Basket Case” is playing, I was floored. Did they know that they were being put into fucking BMX XXX??? For that matter, did KRS-One and De La Soul?

I will say though, N.E.R.D.’s “Lapdance” is the perfect kind of trashy atmosphere for this game!

How sexy is it?

Look, I was not kidding when I said that this game’s graphics wouldn’t look impressive on PS1, let alone next-gen consoles. The graphics are far too shitty to be even remotely arousing, which is a massive issue in a game whose entire premise revolves around titillation. Most people who make articles about this game don’t show how poor the nudity is in this game, but I’m here to deliver. I honestly don’t think it’s even good enough to warrant an NSFW warning, but I’ve elected to hide them behind the spoiler tag below:

Click here for the saddest video game titties of all-time!

If the sight of low-resolution nipples hasn’t gotten you hot and bothered, then BMX XXX also has unlockable FMVs. Acclaim scored a brand deal with real-life strip club, Scores, which was fairly popular at the time due to endorsements from some of their celebrity regulars. They agreed to have Acclaim film some of their girls performing dance routines which would be unlockable rewards in the game. Obviously, this is tacky as all hell, but it’s a hell of a lot more arousing than the attempt at polygonal nudity above. That said… I’m not ashamed to admit that Scores’ “Logan” is fucking hot (if she ever appeared in anything else, let me know in the comments).

That said, I really wish that the editing of these videos was better. Each video is about thirty seconds long, and no shot lasts more than a second, so they are very disorienting. This editing style allows them the videos to look flashy, but I barely get any time to appreciate the girls and their dance routines before they’re over. In addition, only three of the eighteen FMVs feature any actual nudity. Making matters worse, the PS2 version of the game has zero nudity, because Sony would not allow Acclaim to release the game unless it was completely excised. That’s right, not kid-friendly Nintendo, who released the game completely uncensored, fucking Sony.

As is usual for these kinds of games, you have to grind through a lot of shit to get any of this “sexy” content. The FMVs are locked behind completing challenges on each level, but there are cheats at least which can instantly unlock them all. The same cannot be said for the ability to make your biker topless, which is not available until you’ve gotten the highest score in two freestyle challenges. That’s a lot of effort for what amounts to lackluster softcore porn at best.

Like Outlaw Volleyball, BMX XXX isn’t really sexy, it’s just trashy. However, at least Outlaw Volleyball can claim to be a fantasy of trashiness: BMX XXX is just plain tasteless. It feels like an insult to the audience’s intelligence, especially considering how flaccid the game’s adult-oriented gimmick ends up being.

I need to reiterate this: this is a real game which exists.

Who are the characters?

BMX XXX has an underwhelming character roster. There are a bunch of pre-made characters, but they’ve clearly been made in the in-game character creator (which is where the in-game nudity is, so that’s clearly the intended way to play). There is, however, an unlockable joke character called “Amish Boy”, who has unique assets that you can’t use in the character creator. That’s… something, I guess.

Also worth noting, this game’s entire point for existing is “BMX, but with boobs”, so it’s kind of funny that they even bothered incorporating male characters at all.

What’s the verdict?

BMX XXX is one of the most embarrassing video games ever made. I don’t know if I can put it any more succinctly than that.

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Ranking the PSM Video Game Girls Swimsuit Issues

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

When I was a teen (back around 2005), I really got into video game magazines. EGM, Game Informer, Official PlayStation Magazine, Edge… I would sneak over to the corner store before church and get any issue I could find. In retrospect, I really should have subscribed to all of these, because I would have saved a ton of money in the process, but there was such a magical feeling in checking the magazine rack every week and seeing a new treasure on sale waiting to be poured over. This was before we got high speed internet at home (our dial-up connection was limited to only a couple hours per month), and before I could even buy video games in my home town. Suffice to say that these magazines were my Bible of video game culture.

One of my favourite gaming magazines from this time was PSM, the unofficial PlayStation magazine. As much as I enjoyed Game Informer and the Official PlayStation Magazine, those two publications were borderline advertisements that you paid money for: exaggerated/hyped previews, soft review scoring, every hyped game would get very high scores, and very little critical to say. PSM, on the other hand, was unofficial, so they just said whatever the hell they wanted to. This gave it a much edgier tone and significantly more personality to its reporting and articles, which made it much more appealing to me.

Part of PSM’s charm in the early days was that they would commission comic book artists to do the front cover illustrations for whatever game they were featuring that month. This was opposed to every other gaming magazine at the time, which would just use official advertising art approved by the game’s marketing team. As you can imagine, I find their two Dead or Alive covers to be so fucking cool. This practice would fade out over time, which I get: the comic book covers don’t really communicate that these are gaming magazines unless you recognize the cover character, and it would cost more money than using marketing materials. However, it definitely demonstrates the magazine’s gradual loss of personality as the years went on. By the time of the PS3’s launch, the magazine underwent a big, “serious” rebrand, which heralded their unfortunate shuttering a year and a half later.

Perhaps the most notorious distillation of PSM’s personality was their annual swimsuit issue. PSM would dedicate nearly a dozen pages showing off their comic book artist pals’ illustrations of various female video game characters in skimpy swimwear… yeah, the early 2000s were a wild time in gaming compared to today. Six swimsuit issues were published between July 2000 to September 2005 (which, I think, was right before I started reading PSM regularly). These sort of low-key offensive ploys to gain market attention are completely lost in today’s sanitized, corporate media landscape… that’s not to say that we should necessarily bring the 90s/2000s era of “edge” back, but there is a certain charm to it in retrospect.

The entire concept of a PSM swimsuit issue was fucking hilarious, so it made me want to track down each issue to see what sort of comedy I could mine out of them. So, here we are: I’m going to go through every swimsuit issue and then ranking each art piece from best to worst. Surprisingly, I seem to be the first person to actually try to do this, because I could not for the life of me find compiled information on which issues had a swimsuit special, what characters appeared in it, and how many years PSM ran it for. I had to find all this info myself while combing through the magazine’s back catalogue.

Speaking of which, credit goes to Retromags for archiving the magazine’s print run. Websites like that are a fucking godsend!

Jump to:

The Scoring System

Each art piece will be scored 0-10 on the following Certified Scientific™ criteria:

  • How HOT is the image (aka, the HOTNESS score)? These articles all promise me art of HOT video game girls in BIKINIS, so how well does the image deliver on that central premise?
  • Is the art off-putting (aka, the Liefeld score)? Comic book artists are notorious for having a terrible understanding of human anatomy, so I’m expecting to see some abominations as we go through this. To be clear, terrible anatomy will result in a low score, whereas an appealing image without any obvious deformities will earn a high score.
  • Does the character selection make sense (aka, the Character selection score)? There weren’t a whole lot of notable female video game characters in the early 2000s, and this will be worse for PSM since they were limited to PlayStation game characters only. Because of this, I’m genuinely curious to see how PSM are going to manage to fill out these issues on an annual basis, and whether they’re going to have to resort to some really weird selections in hindsight. High scores for the no-brainer picks and low scores for the most baffling character selections.
  • Does the character’s personality shine through (aka, the Personality score)? It’s easy to draw a sexy woman, but it’s another thing entirely to capture that character’s personality in the image. I really love when fan art is able to communicate who that character is, so I will be giving major bonus points to any images that can pull that off.
  • Is their swimwear design interesting (aka, the Swimwear design score)? These are swimsuit issues, after all! How does each piece of swimwear look? Is its design interesting? Does it tell us something about this character, or does it just take their in-game outfit and make it more revealing?
  • Intangibles. Any positives or negatives that don’t fall into the previous categories will get mentioned here and potentially provide some bonus points as merited.

PSM Issue 35 (July 2000)

This inaugural issue of the swimsuit special (featuring Regina from Dino Crisis!) promises HOT art of your favourite Game Girls! Can they deliver…?

(Seriously, can they? I’m literally writing this before I’ve even looked at the issue. This is the sort of stream-of-conscious shit I write when I’m high.)

Yeah, this is the over-exaggerated macho writing I was expecting, but at least it acknowledges that this is intended to be tongue-in-cheek… wait a minute, what’s that last part…?

…my God.

Turtlenecks.

Okay, this article is now gonna detour as I try to find some of these uncensored images. I have to know if PSM were just edging their audience, or if they were actually hosting hentai on their website at one point…

Holy shit, guys, so I actually found the page archived on the Wayback Machine! It has all the illustrations there in fairly high quality (for image files from the year 2000 anyway). As expected, they did not post hentai on their website: the “uncensored content” amounts to a bit more sideboob on three of the images. Open them up in another tab here and then check them out after you read this article (no spoilers!).

Anyway, let’s get onto this issue’s images…

HOTNESS:
5/10		PSM sure seemed to like this one, making it their cover image and the first image in the entire article. The style’s a bit too exaggerated for my taste, but there’s one glaring flaw that spoils this for me…
Liefeld:
4/10		My God, look at her left leg. It single-handedly ruins the image for me. On top of that, her legs are twice the length of her entire upper body. Damn, right out of the gate we’re getting the deformed anatomy: not a good look, PSM!
Character selection:
7/10		Regina from Dino Crisis is a really cool pick! While the series didn’t last particularly long, she’s still remembered today and fans have been begging Capcom to resurrect the series for ages. At the time of publication, she still would have been a fairly popular character, so this gets a solid grade from me.
Personality: 4/10It’s been a long time since I played Dino Crisis, but I recall Regina being a fairly no-nonsense character. This image just looks like “generic hot girl” to me.
Swimwear design:
3/10		This “bikini” is just Regina’s in-game costume, but they snipped away portions of it so they could show more skin. That’s a pretty boring way to design a character’s swimwear in my opinion. It looks more like a superhero costume than it does a swimsuit.
Intangibles: 0/10I really hate how the T-Rex is licking its lips and giving me the “come hither” look.
HOTNESS: 9/10HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE, DEAD OR ALIVE GIRLS SPOTTED!!! Yeah, that by itself was enough for me to get excited, but… I mean, just look at it! This is the level of quality that you’d want to get from a PSM swimsuit issue!
Liefeld:
7/10		I really had to look closely to nitpick this one. Kasumi’s shoulders are a bit weird, Leifang’s left leg might be a bit too long, and I have no idea what’s going on under Tina’s boobs, but I really had to pull out the magnifying glass to even notice. I’m fine with some exaggeration and stylization for this category, it’s when it comes at the detriment of the image that I start docking points.
Character selection: 10/10I see DOA girls, I immediately upvote. Also totally justified selection for the time, as Dead or Alive was fairly popular and known for its sex appeal. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball wasn’t even a thing yet, so this particular image ended up becoming prophetic in retrospect.
Personality: 5/10Here is by far the biggest issue with the image: the mischievous looks from all three of the girls really don’t convey their personalities at all. That said, this can maybe be chalked up to there only being one Dead or Alive game released at that point, which had pretty limited story and character presentation.
Swimwear design:
8/10		In contrast to Regina’s entry, this is exactly what I’m looking for for this category. They’ve taken the colours associated with each of the girls’ main costumes and then reworked those into a unique swimsuit that feels appropriate for them.
Intangibles: 10/10I see DOA girls, I immediately upvote. You may feel that this is just my bias showing, but these categories are, as I have established previously, scientific, so therefore reality is biased in my favour. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, take it up with God.
HOTNESS: 6/10While I’m not sure I’d say that this is a particularly “hot” image, it’s certainly appealing to look at. I quite like it overall!
Liefeld:
5/10		This one is not too bad overall, but its score is cratered due to one blatant flaw: the girls’ waists are INSANELY thin, which looks very off-putting attached to their gigantic hips. If not for that, this could have been a perfect score, but it’s so obvious that it really hurts the image.
Character selection: 2/10Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I had no idea Ridge Racer even had characters, let alone ones who people would want to see in swimwear. Then again, the people who love these characters really love them. Apparently Reiko Nagase is so popular amongst fans that her replacement, Ai Fukami, only appeared in one game before going back to Reiko, because fans threw a complete tantrum over the change.
Personality: 5/10Granted, I know nothing about these characters, but they look like they’re having fun, so… 5/10?
Swimwear design:
7/10		Again, I know nothing about these characters, but I get the impression they usually just wear plainclothes, so their swimsuits here seem to be original designs. They’re cute outfits, I like them overall.
Intangibles: 5/10Having the racing girls be riding jet skis is a pretty clever idea and also adds a bit of variety to the images. That’s worth some points as far as I’m concerned.
HOTNESS: 8/10Ahh, the video game queen herself, Lara Croft was practically designed for this kind of article and looks as good as you would have hoped. The sun-drenched Egyptian skyline really sells this one. A solid enough contender, befitting The Queen.
Liefeld:
5/10		I’m a bit mixed on this image. Lara’s left boob has an odd shape to it, but my biggest issue is the skewed perspective, which makes Lara look exponentially thinner the further down her body you go. It’s distracting and makes me like this image a lot less than I would like to.
Character selection: 10/10There was no way that PSM could do a swimsuit issue in the year 2000 without Lara Croft.
Personality: 10/10They’ve really captured Lara’s personality in this image. The sass, confidence, and classiness are there. Sex appeal was baked into her character from the start, so this is an easy 10/10.
Swimwear design:
8/10		It doesn’t take a whole lot to get a decent score from me in this category. This is a very simple bikini, but it’s in Lara’s colour and feels like something I actually could see her choosing to wear.
Intangibles: 5/10I don’t know what is up with the guy with the eyepatch and gun (it appears that they’re pirates trying to board Lara’s yacht, but why does he look so weird?), but between him and Winston’s runny nose, there’s lots to look at here when you’ve gotten your eyeful of Lara.
HOTNESS: 2/10There is a lot going on with this image. On the one hand, we’ve got Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, and Leon Kennedy representing Resident Evil! On the other hand, this image is clearly intended to be more comedic than hot. That’s fine, but it definitely costs this entry in the HOTNESS score.
Liefeld:
10/10		The first entry thus far where I’ve got no nitpicks or glaring flaws to point out – Leon, Claire, and Jill look like human beings, good job.
Character selection: 6/10While Jill and Claire were pretty much video game royalty by the year 2000, I’m not sure how much sense they make for a swimsuit issue. They’re meant to look like regular people. As a result, if you took out the zombie and the RPD logo, you probably wouldn’t even realize who these characters are supposed to be. I’ll still give a decent score since they kind of had to show up in an article about PlayStation women, but their indistinct designs lose them some points.
Personality: 8/10Leon being a sad sap, Claire being feisty, Jill being the professional voice of reason… yeah, I’d say they’re tapping into these characters’ personalities here.
Swimwear design:
3/10		The girls are just wearing more revealing versions of their official outfits… boring. It feels kind of necessary though, because without Jill’s tube top and Claire’s red shorts, there would be even less here to identify them.
Intangibles: 1/10It’s pretty funny that there’s a rotting zombie in the back, but the entire premise of the image is so weird for a swimsuit article: Claire smells the zombie and then assumes that the smell is because Leon farted. That’s… a decision, I’ll give them that.
HOTNESS:
6/10		This one is like a tale of two images. On the one hand, we’ve got a fairly generic, cutesy anime image of Rinoa, Quistis, Cloud, and Squall having fun at the beach. It’s not particularly “hot”… but then we have Tifa pasted into the foreground and, poor girl, she looks like she’s cold. If this image was just Tifa, this would be up there, but so much of the image is just plain dull and generic.
Liefeld:
7/10		So I’m not really noticing any egregious issues with this one, so that means that it’s time to nitpick. The perspective seems to be off once again, and the shadows make no sense at all, but overall this picture benefits from its simpler art style.
Character selection:
6/10		Tifa and Rinoa are timeless Final Fantasy characters, but Quistis…? I haven’t played Final Fantasy VIII, and don’t think I’ve ever even heard of her, is she that popular a character? I honestly thought that she was Aerith with her hair died blonde at first.
Personality:
2/10		I’m not really seeing anything of these characters’ personalities conveyed here, it’s just generic hot anime girl art.
Swimwear design:
4/10		Rinoa and Quistis’ outfits are kind of cute, but understated. Is Tifa even wearing swimwear? She’s basically in her official, in-game outfit.
Intangibles:
3/10		The Chocobos in the background are cute.
HOTNESS:
1/10		This image, featuring the Street Fighter girls, really falls flat when you remember the premise of the PSM swimsuit issue. Street Fighter has a lot of things that you’d expect them to hone in on (particularly Chun Li’s massive thighs and Cammy’s ass). We can’t even see Cammy’s ass at all! And Chun Li’s thighs: they’re pencil thin! On top of that, there are more Street Fighter guys than girls here! Yeah, the more I look at this image, the worse it gets.
Liefeld:
8/10		This one’s a good demonstration of the difference between an exaggerated art style and bad anatomy. There’s a lot of exaggeration here (particularly with Zangief and E. Honda), but I’m not seeing anything that looks like an outright mistake… other than Chun Li’s pencil thighs. Seriously, what the fuck were they thinking with that?
Character selection:
10/10		The girls (and guys!) of Street Fighter are iconic, so it’s a no-brainer that they’d get a spot in this issue.
Personality:
2/10		This image seems to be intended to be a more comedic take on these characters, but as a result it doesn’t really give us much to glean of their actual personalities.
Swimwear design:
2/10		This is a weird one, not because the swimsuits are necessarily bad, but because I can barely even see them. They can’t make much of an impression if you aren’t even going to show them.
Intangibles:
3/10		I’ve got to give some bonus points for including Blanka, Dhalsim, and Zangief in a swimsuit special.
HOTNESS:
6/10		This one’s clearly alluding to Baywatch and the fantasy of being rescued by a hot lifeguard. While that’s fairly hot in its own right, Meryl’s ass is doing some heavy lifting.
Liefeld:
7/10		About the only direct criticism I have of the art is that weird fold under Meryl’s boobs… but, honestly, it took me a while for my eyes to get there. Ahem.
Character selection:
7/10		This entry is literally just a grab-bag of PlayStation girls picked seemingly at random. At least we’ve got some pretty big names here: Meryl Silverburgh from Metal Gear Solid (who Snake literally remarked “had a great butt”), Aya Brea from Parasite Eve, Lian Xing from Syphon Filter (which was a huge franchise at the time), and Hana Tsu-Vachel from Fear Effect. I don’t really get why they grouped these particular girls together, but I ain’t going to complain.
Personality:
3/10		Once again, this is just generic “hot girl strikes sexy pose” art that says nothing about these characters or their personalities. Aya Brea as a hot lifeguard seems particularly weird. However… I have to give points for Meryl’s ass, not just because it’s distractingly rendered, but because it’s a pretty big plot point in Metal Gear Solid that Meryl has a great ass. That’s dedication to character right there!
Swimwear design:
5/10		I’m not really sure what they were going for with these swimsuits. On the one hand, they aren’t just “in-game costume, but more skin”. On the other hand, they don’t really seem to be particularly interesting or true to the character. I dunno, they’re fine, but I’m lukewarm on this swimwear.
Intangibles:
0/10		The big selling points of this one are the interesting character selection and Meryl’s ass… other than that, there’s not a whole lot I can say about this image.
HOTNESS:
8/10		This is about as risqué as a magazine for teen boys could get in the year 2000. The entire image is meant to be an over the top juvenile fantasy… which actually kind of hurts it for me somewhat. It’s trying too hard to turn you on with the excessively-cutesy art style.
Liefeld:
10/10		I can’t really complain about this illustration being “off”. There’s no navel, which makes it a bit less hot, but this is clearly a stylistic choice rather than a mistake. Valkyrie’s face and particularly her doe-eyes feel make it feel like they’re trying a bit too hard to arouse you… but that’s not really an issue with anatomy, so top scores it is.
Character selection:
3/10		Okay, so this is where we pull back the curtain on what makes this particular entry special: Valkyrie Wilde was the subject of an April Fools joke PSM had done that same year. What was that joke, you may ask? It was a fake preview for a video game where the entire premise is that you play as… a naked woman with guns. Yeah, so this is basically just PSM’s editorial team making up their super hot fantasy OC and plastering her wherever they could. I’ll give them some credit for keeping the bit going, but man, that’s just a masturbatory uroboros.
Personality:
10/10		Valkyrie Wilde is a hot naked girl with guns. This image is of a hot naked girl with guns. They encapsulated her entire personality here flawlessly.
Swimwear design:
0/10		She’s not even wearing swimwear! I was promised HOT video game girls in BIKINIS!
Intangibles:
0/10		I already gave her bonus points for being a callback to an April Fools joke, so I don’t think she deserves even more points for the exact same thing.

All-in-all, that was a fairly interesting first issue! Quite the grab-bag of styles, characters, and quality, covering most of the major game series known for their sex appeal at the time. I’m very curious to see if PSM would push the envelope even harder next time around.

PSM Issue 47 (July 2001)

No spoilers on the cover this time, just Spider-man slinging webs and a promise of BIKINI GAME GIRLS inside. No more “uncensored” versions of the images that I can find from this point onwards. Alright, let’s see what they have in store for us…

HOTNESS:
6/10		There’s a really understated hotness to this image that I really enjoy! The girls here aren’t posing suggestively, and their swimwear is downright modest, but their enthusiasm, general attractiveness, and appealing art style make this an image I do like to look at!
Liefeld:
10/10		I don’t really have any complaints about this one. If I really want to nitpick, Elise (the blonde)’s feet don’t even look like they would be on her surfboard, but it doesn’t really hurt the image’s quality overall.
Character selection:
2/10		While SSX was a pretty big extreme sports franchise at the time, were its characters particularly notable? If the article didn’t specify that these characters were named Elise, Zoe, and Kaori, it would have been a nightmare for me to try to figure that out for myself.
Personality:
6/10		I’m running into the same problem I did with Ridge Racer where I have no idea if this is captures the characters’ personalities or not. I guess SSX is a snowboarding game, so that would naturally provide some overlap with surfing…?
Swimwear design:
6/10		Elise’s black and pink bikini top is cute, but otherwise these outfits aren’t particularly notable… that said, they do look like practical swimwear for extreme sports enthusiasts and they are also wholly original outfits. Even thought they aren’t particularly “hot” swimsuits, I’ve really got to reward that dedication to character… and all that to represent some random characters from SSX!
Intangibles:
5/10		Again, like Ridge Racer, bonus points for finding a way to incorporate SSX‘s gameplay into the image.
HOTNESS:
6/10		I think somebody at PSM has a fetish for Asian women… Even if that is the case, the large robes concealing some skin and the self-conscious expression do make this kind of hot.
Liefeld:
5/10		I didn’t really see any major issues with the anatomy here… until I noticed Samanosuke’s head. Either he has a massive head, or Kaede’s head is tiny… neither option is particularly good and kind of ruins the image for me. On further inspection, Yuki’s eyeline is also kind of weird, but that’s definitely more of a nitpick than the giant fucking head in the background.
Character selection:
3/10		A couple minor characters from Onimusha get a whole page in this year’s swimsuit special? Really? While Onimusha has never been a juggernaut franchise, this would have been around its peak in popularity, so I can kind of see why they would consider it. Still, what a weird selection in retrospect.
Personality:
3/10		Once again, I do not know these characters very well, but based on a couple long-form analyses of Onimusha I’ve watched over the years, I don’t think that this really captures the characterization of Yuki, Kaede, or Samanosuke. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
Swimwear design:
3/10		While I do rather like the design of Yuki’s swimsuit, Kaede is literally just wearing her in-game costume. For a “sexy” swimsuit article, that’s pretty egregious, especially considering that Kaede is the more important character of the two to the narrative.
Intangibles:
0/10		The image would honestly be better if it was just Yuki, the inconsistent head sizes are an own-goal that could have easily been avoided.
HOTNESS:
6/10		Oh hey, it’s a mash-up between two of the images from last year: Lara Croft and the comedic Resident Evil illustration. Once again, this one is leaning heavy on the comedy, so while Lara and Claire’s outfits are certainly nice, sexiness isn’t really the intent here.
Liefeld:
6/10		Lara’s right hand is weirdly undefined, and her right leg looks REALLY long, but otherwise this isn’t too bad on the Liefield scale.
Character selection:
10/10		I’ve already covered these two characters, so I’ll keep this brief: yeah, they’re both PlayStation royalty. They’ve made Claire look a bit more distinctly “Claire Redfield”, so that’s also a positive.
Personality:
5/10		I had to think about this one a little bit, but does reacting with disgust at the sight of a zombie really fit Lara Croft or Claire Redfield? They’d both whip out a gun and deal with the problem I think.
Swimwear design:
8/10		Lara’s in her near-perfect bikini from last year, so she gets a passing grade for just doing what already worked. Claire’s a bit more interesting, since they actually went to some effort to give her a unique design. It uses her red and black colour motif, and I like how this one-piece suit turned out on her.
Intangibles:
0/10		As a call-back to last year’s images, I feel like this one’s a bit of a disappointment. Better than the previous Resident Evil one, but clearly inferior to the Tomb Raider image.
HOTNESS:
0/10		Man, this picture sucks, and that’s largely down to the terrible colours that make everything look like brown shit. I don’t think that the image is unsalvageable, but it needs to be completely re-coloured. Even then… it’s not a very “hot” image, now is it?
Liefeld:
8/10		As far as the Liefeld scale goes, this doesn’t look terrible… but there is some weird composition stuff here where Kaldea (the raven-haired one) has her knee poking out past Dominique (the blonde one)’s boob, which makes it look like she’s got a deformed elbow or a boob poking out. They should have differentiated the characters better or just cut that small detail out entirely.
Character selection:
0/10		So this issue, unhelpfully, does not tell you what games the characters are from, which really presents problems when PSM are commissioning drawings of characters from games like The fucking Bouncer. This was a Squaresoft JRP-beat-’em-up that released in the early PS2 lifestyle. The game had some hype behind it, but sold extremely poorly and was not received well. Sure, I’ve got the benefit of a quarter century of hindsight, but this is a baffling selection for the annual swimsuit issue.
Personality:
5/10		I haven’t played this game. Barely anybody has played this game, and many who did don’t even remember it. I had to look up some information to try to figure out if this in any way accurate. In every picture I saw of her, Echidna (the redhead) looked pissed-off, so… accurate, I guess? That said, Dominique was usually pretty happy, so… a middling score is probably right? I dunno, you’ve never played this game, so you will not be able to contradict my score.
Swimwear design:
3/10		Bleh, the swimwear here is dull. Again, the colours do not help matters at all.
Intangibles:
0/10		I’m kind of glad that this image is of The Bouncer, because if I got art like this for a series I actually cared about, I’d probably start awarding negative points.
HOTNESS:
3/10		Good God, they really fucked up Viola’s face. She’s supposed to have a pretty standard 80s anime-style adult woman look to her, but instead they’ve given her the face of a dude. Olga also does not look a thing like her Metal Gear Solid 2 counterpart and I would never guess that was supposed to be her. This image is kind of mediocre overall, but these issues really sour the image for me.
Liefeld:
5/10		Again… it’s Viola fucking this one up. Her shoulders to her neck are like a fucking stretched triangle, it just makes my issues with her face even more pronounced. If you can ignore her though, the rest of the image is pretty good.
Character selection:
5/10		Some interesting selections here for the random character grab-bag. Zone of the Enders‘ Viola makes sense: the series had a lot of hype, because it was produced by Hideo Kojima at the height of Metal Gear fever. That’s also why it makes sense that Metal Gear Solid 2‘s Olga Gurlukovich is here as well. Vikki Grimm from Army Men is a bit more of an odd pick, but when you think about it more it totally makes sense for her to show up in a swimsuit issue. She only exists in the Army Men games to add a bit of sex appeal! Konoko from Oni is the most interesting selection, not least of which being that Oni was a game developed by Bungie and published by Rockstar! A pretty obscure title here, but a really interesting inclusion!
Personality:
4/10		Where the fuck is Olga’s armpit hair, you cowards??? That’s legitimately a personality complaint, by the way, because… fuck me, I can’t believe I’m about to explain why Olga’s armpit hair tells us about her as a character… Anyway, it’s a weird, unexpected character detail that communicates that immediately communicates to the audience that she’s not just a sex doll like so many other female video game characters of the time. She’s a professional soldier who isn’t concerned with conventional beauty standards. Here, they’ve not-so-subtly danced around that and just made her “generic hot girl”.

As for the other girls, I’m not really familiar with them, but that said: Konoko’s serious expression appears to be accurate to her character, and Vikki Grimm has always been the Army Men eye candy so I guess that one works. But yeah, again, they completely fucked up Viola.
Swimwear design:
4/10		Vikki and Konoko’s swimsuits are pretty interesting, but Viola and Olga’s are much more dull… on a whole, I’d say this is a wash.
Intangibles:
0/10		I cannot really convey how badly Viola and Olga fucked over this otherwise-mediocre image’s score for me.
HOTNESS:
1/10		Oh great, the terrible colouring is back and… I mean, just look at it, this picture looks awful. Again, I’m sure this looks better as a sketch, because the piss they painted this with completely ruins the image.
Liefeld:
5/10		Hana’s proportions look like they might be off, but my main complaint is that the hands just look weird… Oh God, and Hana’s bikini disappearing behind her neck just reveals that she was born on Kamino, because that neck is LONG and SKINNY.
Character selection:
8/10		Fear Effect is one of those series that wasn’t super popular, but was still known for its sexiness, so Hana and Rain are actually pretty cool selections.
Personality:
1/10		The characters’ expressions here tell us nothing of their personalities. They look downright bored.
Swimwear design:
1/10		God, this whole image sucks.
Intangibles:
0/10		All I can think while looking at this image is that it looks like a B-grade high school art submission.
HOTNESS:
4/10		Once again, I’m not a fan of the colouring, but for once this is for stylistic reasons rather than looking like utter ass. I’m just not a fan of the harsh shadows and highlights, it makes the image look unpleasant (which isn’t what you want from an image aiming to look hot).
Liefeld:
5/10		Man, this particular image feels like something Rob Liefeld would draw. That said, this doesn’t look too bad, except that Sarah Bryant’s spine is broken and so is… whoever the purple-haired lady is. I legitimately do not know who that’s supposed to be. I checked the Virtua Fighter character roster and couldn’t find her, so I think that it’s just the artist’s OC.
Character selection:
5/10		Virtua Fighter has never really been the most popular fighter on consoles, but I think that its characters would have been just relevant enough to earn its place in this issue.
Personality:
6/10		So I don’t know a whole lot about Virtua Fighter, but the differing expressions and poses do give you some insight into the girls’ different personalities, so I think that deserves some points.
Swimwear design:
4/10		Pai’s pink bikini is very cute, but there’s not a whole lot we can glean from the others’. Dural’s black bikini is a tad uninteresting, and Sarah and Aoi’s are hidden enough that they don’t leave an impression on me.
Intangibles:
0/10		I legitimately don’t understand why the illustrator threw in a dancing alien and what I can only assume is somebody’s OC making a cameo.
HOTNESS:
1/10		I’m not even sure if this is meant to be a part of the swimsuit collection or not (there’s a full-page ad for a goddamn Gundam game separating it from everything else). Suffice to say, this is a comedy image, so unless you’re into blue beast men, there’s nothing arousing about it.
Liefeld:
9/10		Tidus’ arm musculature is a bit weird looking, but otherwise this is very solid artwork.
Character selection:
0/10		So this one actually gets a 0/10 from me for two reasons:
1) Yuna’s 17 years old… She’s not being sexualized in this image, but it sure is sus…
2) They got a Final Fantasy X swimsuit issue commission and didn’t even include Lulu in it! Travesty!
Personality:
7/10		Tidus is laughing.
Swimwear design:
3/10		Oh, is there swimwear in this picture? It’s so far away that I couldn’t see it.
Intangibles:
7/10		While this picture is just terrible for a series about HOT girls in BIKINIS, it is a pretty solid piece in its own right that’s full of personality, so I’ll throw it some bonus points.

Man… this was a really underwhelming issue. Were PSM intentionally trying to tone things down after going about as hard as they could get away with in the inaugural swimsuit issue? I’m not sure, but here’s hoping that the next year’s images improve matters…

PSM Issue 61 (August 2002)

Oof, it’s always interesting when you see a gaming magazine hyping up a game that’s going to go on to be a notorious disaster (in this case, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, generally considered the nadir of the franchise). Oh and what’s this?

You’re promising A LOT here, PSM, and I doubt you can follow-through on that…

HOTNESS:
10/10		PSM are actually bringing their A-game out of the gate this time. I think that most of us can agree that this is pretty damn hot.
Liefeld:
9/10		Lara’s head and body seem to have a slightly different skin tone, but that’s me nitpicking so much that it’s not even an anatomy issue, it’s a colouration one.
Character selection:
10/10		I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s Lara Croft. You’d be asking where she was if she wasn’t in the annual swimsuit issue.
Personality:
7/10		While Lara’s personality doesn’t shine through quite as much as it did in her first iteration, the location and props really go a long way to selling the idea of Lara as an adventuresome noblewoman.
Swimwear design:
10/10		As much as I liked Lara’s bikini in the first swimsuit issue, I’m glad they tried something new this time around, and they absolutely knocked it out of the park. This gem-studded number just radiates the classy opulence of Lara Croft.
Intangibles:
10/10		I don’t really have much else to say about this one. If you are committed to making a video game girls swimsuit issue, then this is the level of quality that you are wanting all your commissions to meet (and probably costs a lot to commission, which would be why we don’t have many of this quality).
HOTNESS:
0/10		OH FOR FUCK SAKES! Not only is 17-year-old Yuna in this pic, but so is 15-year-old Rikku. I ain’t risking a visit from the Feds, so 0/10 HOTNESS, officer.
Liefeld:
5/10		I ain’t studying these minors’ anatomy enough to identify whether there’s an issue with them so… middling score?
Character selection:
1/10		Look, I’ll give one point here entirely down to them including Lulu this time, but… for fuck sakes, I can see them not realizing that Yuna is 17, but Rikku looks underage. What the fuck were they thinking?
Personality:
1/10		Based on my brief glance of the image, this just looks like generic hot girl pose stuff.
Swimwear design:
1/10		They’re all just wearing a more revealing version of their in-game costumes…
Intangibles:
10/10		Look, I’ve got to give this image some credit because, again, they actually included Lulu this time. Crop the rest of the image out and she could carry this entry on her own – she looks that good!
HOTNESS:
3/10		So the bodies and poses in this image are actually pretty hot, but fucking hell the faces are derpy, which ruins the entire image. It’s clearly a conscious, stylistic choice by illustrator Ryan Kinnaird, but I can’t stand how it looks.
Liefeld:
6/10		Ignoring the faces (since they’re not a mistake), Pellegri (the blonde)’s shoulders are hunched forward in a way that looks really awkward to maintain.
Character selection:
2/10		KOS-MOS, Shion, and Pellegri from Xenosaga are such a weird selection – it was a brand IP whose first game hadn’t even been localized yet, so most PSM readers would have no idea who these characters were. Between this, The Bouncer, Zone of the Enders, and Onimusha, I really get the sense that there was someone high-up at PSM obsessed with relatively obscure Japanese franchises and forcing them to appear in each year’s swimsuit commissions.
Personality:
4/10		I know nothing about Xenosaga, but as far as I can tell, this just looks like generic hot girl poses.
Swimwear design:
6/10		While I don’t know much about these characters, their swimwear at least lives up to the goal of looking alluring. Maybe not the smallest bikinis, but they’re a bit more revealing than what we’ve seen in the past from PSM.
Intangibles:
0/10		I can’t get over those faces.
HOTNESS:
4/10		While this image suffers from a lack of detail, I do really like how it captures the look of an underwater photograph. That at least makes this image really enjoyable to pour over.
Liefeld:
10/10		Any potential issues can be chalked up to the intentionally-skewed perspective of the “camera”. As a result, I have zero complaints to level.
Character selection:
3/10		Like the previous Onimusha swimsuit commission, it seems really weird to me that they would choose a character like Oyu for an entire entry in this year’s issue.
Personality:
0/10		Look… you can’t even tell this is supposed to be Oyu from Onimusha 2. She could be literally any dark-haired woman in fiction.
Swimwear design:
3/10		This outfit is… fine, I guess? Not particularly interesting or something that feels fitting on this character.
Intangibles:
5/10		I do think that this image deserves some extra points for the unique perspective it brings. This is a pretty mediocre image overall, but the pose and lighting really bring it to life.
HOTNESS:
10/10		So many of these swimsuit commissions have been safe, conventional, submissive, hot girl fantasies. Trish doesn’t deviate too hard from that, but there are hints of a “bad girl” here: the motorcycle, the black leather, the way she looks down on you… Yeah, this one is legitimately enticing.
Liefeld:
10/10		I’ve got no complaints. If anything, her anatomy is more realistic here than it is in some of her official arts.
Character selection:
10/10		Trish showing up in the 2002 swimsuit issue is a no-brainer: the game was massive, and she was such an iconic sex symbol that she appears in silhouette in the game’s logo.
Personality:
5/10		I actually do think that the outfit, motorcycle, pose, etc in this image do capture some of Trish’s personality. It’s too bad that they drew her in a generic anime art style though, it makes it nearly impossible to tell that it’s supposed to be her. You could tell me that this image could be literally any blonde, buxom video game girl and I’d probably believe you.
Swimwear design:
5/10		I’m mixed on this one. Black is obviously Trish’s colour, but the actual swimwear doesn’t work for me. However, the accessories she’s decked out in make her outfit so much more interesting than the actual bikini.
Intangibles:
3/10		I don’t really have a whole lot more to say about this particular picture: it’s really good, and I like that it’s hitting some different notes than most of the other illustrations in these articles. Most of that’s covered in the other categories though, so I can’t really justify many bonus points.
HOTNESS:
6/10		Oh hey, the main girls of Virtua Fighter are back, and this time they’ve brought some friends from Tekken. Sure, this is mostly just “generic hot girl” art, but having them posed on beach towels does give the image some interesting novelty.
Liefeld:
5/10		Most of my complaints here relate to Pai Chan. Her pose causes her torso to look compressed, her head is twisted in a way that makes her look like she has no neck, and she has no butt whatsoever. The others are mostly fine, although their lower-halves seem to be a bit too small compared to their upper halves.
Character selection:
4/10		Were the girls of Virtua Fighter ever popular enough to warrant back-to-back appearances in the PSM swimsuit issue? It’s nice to see them give some Tekken representation at least.
Personality:
0/10		This is just generic hot girl art. Making matters worse, Sarah looks absolutely nothing like she’s supposed to.
Swimwear design:
5/10		I quite like Christie and Julia’s unique and personalized outfits, but Sarah and Pai’s are just generic bikinis. This one’s a wash for me.
Intangibles:
4/10		I’ll give some bonus points for this image being the first two-page spread, so we get more room to pour over the finer details.
HOTNESS:
4/10		I know I keep saying this, but this image is just generic anime hot girl stuff, with a bit of comedy thrown in. It’s not terrible, not not particularly arousing. Apparently I’m just a snobby wanker.
Liefeld:
10/10		No real concerns, my only complaints are all stylistic rather than mistakes.
Character selection:
0/10		Fucking Maximo??? The game was fairly well received at the time and sold well enough to be a Greatest Hits title… but still, fucking Maximo??? I had no idea that there even were women in the damn game.
Personality:
0/10		This image is so generic that it legitimately looks like they pasted the girls’ heads onto stock “sexy” bodies.
Swimwear design:
2/10		I was going to give some points for Mamba Marie’s costume at least getting across that she’s a Conan-style fighter… but then I found out that she’s literally just wearing her in-game outfit (so is Sephonie, the generic brunette on the right side of the image). Sophia and Aurora Lee are both wearing more revealing versions of their in-game costumes, and I can’t even see Lenore’s outfit. All-in-all, very uninspired stuff.
Intangibles:
5/10		I’ll give some bonus points for the comedy of Maximo getting his armour knocked off and his underwear stolen.
HOTNESS:
3/10		This is another one of those cases where the original sketch was probably pretty good, but the end result is absolutely botched by the colouring. While there are parts that I like (Tracey, the brunette at the top, looks pretty cute), everything just feels a bit too indistinct.
Liefeld:
2/10		Oh my God, look at Leeann (the middle one)’s head: it’s so lopsided. Elise (the blonde) also has a couple issues. Her sexy pose makes it look like she’s gonna fall into the water at any moment, her bikini top strap goes over her left shoulder really awkwardly, and she has literally no neck.
Character selection:
0/10		Man, PSM were really scraping the bottom of the barrel for this issue. I’ve at least heard of every game thus far and could understand why someone would include them in this list, but Tracey from SledStorm? Leeann from Freestyle? I’ve literally never heard of these games. Elise from SSX Tricky makes a bit more sense, but she was also in last year’s issue! Are SSX‘s characters so good as to warrant back-to-back swimsuit special appearances???
Personality:
5/10		Sports girls like doing sports, I guess?
Swimwear design:
6/10		For what it’s worth, at least all the swimwear in this image are really cute!
Intangibles:
0/10		Everything about this commission feels kind of half-assed. I think even PSM were just trying to fill some page space with this one.

This issue came out swinging with Lara Croft, but every subsequent art piece (aside from Trish) was quite disappointing. I was promised the SMALLEST bikinis, but they failed to deliver! I don’t think I can ever trust again! I’m starting to think that the whole “HOT video game girls in BIKINIS” promise is just a joke to sell magazines to 13-year-old nerds…

PSM Issue 72 (June 2003)

…mother of God. I’ve been burned before, but it looks like PSM might be swinging for the fences with this swimsuit issue. I’m promised 11 pages of “our HOTTEST pictures EVER”, and if this cover is any indication, they might be able to pull that off (ahem).

HOTNESS:
4/10		Holy shit. Look, Dead or Alive has the reputation for being the titty fighter, but I’ve always considered Soulcalibur to be low-key the fighting game with the most egregious fan service (at least amongst the mainstream publishers). That’s right on display here (just like Ivy’s ass). Yeah, this is exactly the sort of piece that you’d want to see out of a video game girls swimsuit issue.

That said, Talim (the girl on the left) is also in this image and she’s only 15… Her inclusion here is very questionable… but she’s also presented the most tastefully? I dunno, you can draw a picture of a 15 year old in a swimsuit as long as you’re not fucking them with the camera, but this is so sus that I’m halving the points that I would have given otherwise.
Liefeld:
8/10		About my only complaint here is that the faces look like they were done separately from the bodies, and Ivy’s left shoulder looks a little off. Let’s be honest though, you’re staring at Ivy and Taki’s assets, there’s no way you’re even noticing that. Oh and Ivy’s bikini appears to be lopsided too for no discernable reason.
Character selection:
7/10		See my previous comment about Soulcalibur‘s fan service. Soulcalibur II was a 100% guaranteed inclusion in this year’s swimsuit special (and, for what it’s worth, Ivy and Taki’s outfits are actually less egregious than the stuff they wear in official art). Again though… gotta shave some points off for including Talim at all, because seriously: what the fuck, PSM? Seong Mi-na and Sophitia were right fucking there waiting to be used!
Personality:
2/10		Soulcalibur goes a long way to fleshing out its story and characters, to the point where they all have fairly distinctive personalities and goals… none of that comes across here, this is just a boyhood sexy harem fantasy. I guess I’ll give a couple points for Ivy being mostly-naked like she is in-game?
Swimwear design:
6/10		They’ve got each girls’ signature colours down pat, so that’s a plus. Talim’s swimwear is basically just a more revealing version of her in-game outfit, but the other three are more distinctive. Ivy’s in particular takes inspiration from her Soulcalibur II outfit without outright repeating it, so that earns some points for sure. There’s a spread on these ones, but I think that they’re pretty good overall.
Intangibles:
6/10		Crop out Talim and this is easily one of the best entries in the history of PSM’s swimsuit specials. A great crossroads of iconic characters and appropriately alluring, high-quality art, all set to a unique and exotic backdrop!
HOTNESS:
5/10		While this isn’t the most exciting image in the world, it sure is HOT video game girls in BIKINIS… so I guess that’s the bare minimum we can expect?
Liefeld:
5/10		Sun Shang Xiang (the one in orange) has a humpback it seems. Ayame, on the other hand, has something weird going on where her leg connects to her ass cheek… did they think that a realistic thigh would make her look too fat or some bullshit?
Character selection:
4/10		If you had to pick a Dynasty Warriors girl for a video game swimsuit issue in 2003, then Sun Shang Xiang is the obvious choice… but the fact that she’s here at all is still an odd choice. This would have been the height of Dynasty Warriors‘ popularity, but even then the series wasn’t really known for its sexy ladies. Ditto with Ayame, Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven had a mixed reception and was a pretty niche title.
Personality:
10/10		I haven’t played Tenchu, so I don’t know exactly what Ayame’s personality is like, but this image really gets across a fearsome and competitive personality, which the Tenchu Wiki describes for her. Sun Shang Xiang, on the other side, has always been more of a playful and cheerful character, so I’d say that the image captures their contrasting personalities well!
Swimwear design:
5/10		While these two swimsuits do match the characters’ signature colours, their designs are just not that interesting to me. Definitely a your-mileage-may-vary situation though.
Intangibles:
1/10		This might just be the most “average” image in the entire series.
HOTNESS:
4/10		Oh for fuck sakes, more art by Ryan Kinnaird… I’m sorry, I just do not find this art style appealing, especially with the way that he does their faces. In spite of that, Trish is still kind of hot through sheer force of sex appeal.
Liefeld:
10/10		I don’t notice any egregious anatomy issues, but I also don’t want to look at this goddamn picture any more than I have to.
Character selection:
6/10		So Trish was a no-brainer for the 2002 issue, but I’m kind of surprised to see her return in 2003 as well. I guess there was just a lot of lingering hype for Devil May Cry 2 at the time? If that’s the case, then Lucia also makes sense here.
Personality:
4/10		I… guess…? It resembles their personalities, but I can barely even tell that these characters are supposed to be Trish and Lucia at all.
Swimwear design:
4/10		Kinky, b-movie alien bikinis wasn’t something I was expecting to see in this article, but here we are. Two of the more overtly revealing bikinis in this entire series, but wasted on an image I don’t even want to look at.
Intangibles:
0/10		I’m sorry Ryan, you’re probably a chill dude, but I just do not like your art.
HOTNESS:
5/10		Lara’s back once again and, despite appearing here in a wet t-shirt, this image feels underwhelming. This time, it’s because they made the stylistic choice to not outline her arms, so they seem to disappear into her body. It makes her look like a fleshy blob abomination until you take a closer look. A few more black lines, and this would be significantly better.
Liefeld:
6/10		…wait a minute, is that supposed to be fucking camel toe!??!!!?
Character selection:
10/10		Lara Croft was still a video game goddess in 2003, it would be weird if she didn’t appear for the third consecutive year.
Personality:
10/10		Yeah, that sure looks like Lara Croft. Even having her slaughtering wildlife is totally in-character, even if it’s a baffling thing to include in a swimsuit issue.
Swimwear design:
7/10		This looks like an outfit you might expect to see Lara Croft wear in-game during the Core Design era. The wet t-shirt is a nice touch too.
Intangibles:
0/10		This is a weird one, but definitely feels worse due to being a poor showing from the Queen.
HOTNESS:
4/10		This image is trying so fucking hard to be sexy and provocative. Unfortunately, reeking of desperation makes this image so much less appealing.
Liefeld:
3/10		Zoom in on Kitana (the brunette on the right)’s right boob. What the actual fuck is going on with it!? Her face appears to be lop-sided as well. Also, take a look at Frost (the blue-haired on the left)’s left leg: it’s fucking gigantic.
Character selection:
2/10		Look, let’s be honest with ourselves here: for all its popularity, Mortal Kombat isn’t really known for its sexy girls (and this is in spite of them having some ridiculously revealing outfits. Sonya Blade and Kitana would have been the franchise’s most notable sex symbols in 2003, but they are well below other female fighters in terms of popularity and attractiveness. Add on top of that that Mortal Kombat was at its nadier after Mythologies: Sub Zero, MK4, Special Forces, and Advance and it seems really weird that they’d get a two-page spread after all that. Granted, Mortal Kombat has enough general popularity that it makes sense that they’d get some representation, but still, there are far more deserving games in 2003 that could have gotten a look in.
Personality:
0/10		This is generic sexy girl poses and nothing else. If you made me guess which franchise these characters were from, I would not in a million years have guessed Mortal Kombat. This looks like a magical girl manga, not Mortal Kombat.
Swimwear design:
5/10		While I appreciate that there was clearly thought put into each of these outfits, none of them are particularly interesting at the end of the day.
Intangibles:
0/10		For a two-page spread, this one’s pretty underwhelming.
HOTNESS:
2/10		Oh my fucking God, AGAIN Ryan!?! Let me re-iterate: I am looking at these images one at a time. I didn’t know that I was going to be seeing so much Ryan Kinnaird art when I started writing this. Was the guy just cheaper to commission? Was he easy for PSM to work with? Why does he show up this often?
Liefeld:
10/10		I hate the faces, obviously, but at least I don’t see any notable issues with her anatomy.
Character selection:
5/10		After the first game bombed, Zone of the Enders was already a damn-near forgotten franchise at this point. Still, there was some lingering cult popularity back in 2003, so it’s not a terrible choice. Maybe PSM were trying to drum up some interest in the franchise?
Personality:
5/10		I know nothing about Ken so… a 5/10?
Swimwear design:
7/10		While the other two schlock sci-fi bikinis Ryan did this same issue were a bit too silly for my tastes, I actually like how he’s gone about designing Ken’s bikini. The red chrome evokes imagery of expensive sports cars, which actually makes the image more alluring. Too bad it’s wasted on a Ryan Kinnaird art, but it certainly bumps the score up at least.
Intangibles:
0/10		This image is improved ten-fold if you just crop it off at Ken’s chin.
HOTNESS:
10/10		I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but my fighting game of choice before Dead or Alive was Soulcalibur. While Sophitia has always been my favourite, her sister, Cassandra, is exceptionally attractive too. For an art piece of HOT video game girls in BIKINIS, this is a fucking masterpiece.
Liefeld:
7/10		My only complaint is that Cassandra’s spine looks like it’s detached from her neck, but you have to be actively looking at something other than her ass to notice that.
Character selection:
10/10		While not the most obvious choice in the world, Cassandra is one of those characters where you see them in a swimsuit issue and go “man, what a great inclusion!” Giving her an entire page to herself is also fantastic, too many of these commissions end up feeling crowded.
Personality:
7/10		Cassandra is a committed, fierce, courageous, and confident character, which I feel is communicated here with this pose and expression. Then again, this could also be seen as “generic sexy pose” and it’s a happy accident that they’ve executed that in a way that seems like something you could see Cassandra doing. I think it’s worth points regardless.
Swimwear design:
10/10		It’s perfect, I don’t know what else to say.
Intangibles:
10/10		This is a great piece, full-stop, and deserves every point I throw at it.
HOTNESS:
5/10		Okay, is PSM just trolling me at this point? Not only is this another piece featuring Ryan Kinnaird, but it’s of the exact same Xenosaga girls we got last year?
Liefeld:
9/10		There’s a little weirdness going on here, but nothing particularly noteworthy.
Character selection:
0/10		No. Having Xenosaga in 2002 was already a questionable selection, but having them be in back-to-back swimsuit issues when Dead or Alive was one-and-done despite being at the height of its popularity is just fucking bullshit. Another Ridge Racer image would have made more sense than this.
Personality:
5/10		I have no idea, so 5/10.
Swimwear design:
4/10		More sci-fi bikinis… ehh, having them be held together with arcing energy just seems silly.
Intangibles:
0/10		Credit where it’s due, at least I can stand looking at this Xenosaga image. And Shion’s pose is pretty cute.
HOTNESS:
5/10		Oh hey, at least we can see the Street Fighter girls this time… too bad it’s on a pretty mediocre image.
Liefeld:
10/10		I’m not noticing any obvious anatomical issues.
Character selection:
9/10		I’ll be honest, I have never even heard of Sakura. However, that’s kind of irrelevant, because Street Fighter‘s Chun Li and Cammy are video game goddesses who could show up in every PSM swimsuit issue like Lara Croft and no one would question it.
Personality:
0/10		This is just generic sexy girl poses.
Swimwear design:
4/10		While the swimsuits do seem like something each character would wear, they’re not particularly interesting.
Intangibles:
0/10		The fact that I barely prefer this to the previous Street Fighter image (where you couldn’t even see the girls) is a damning praise.

Okay, yeah, that issue was definitely a big step up from the last couple years, even with the Ryan Kinnaird overload. Let’s see if PSM can keep the quality up in the final two swimsuit specials…

PSM Issue 86 (July 2004)

Oh… PSM were really playing down this year’s swimsuit special, eh? A small, undescriptive headline, and muted promises of “fun in the sun” rather than “HOT video game women in BIKINIS!” Were PSM’s editors starting to grow embarrassed with the tradition, or are they just trying to set expectations to a more reasonable level? Let’s find out…

HOTNESS:
7/10		Honestly, after all the trolling Ryan Kinnaird has done to me thus far, I was not expecting to see him put out a piece that’s actually pretty good. Amazing what you can do when you actually put some effort into the face!
Liefeld:
7/10		Chun Li’s left eyebrow is very skewed and lop-sided. She’s also got no belly-button, but that’s clearly a stylistic choice. Nothing too severe I’d say.
Character selection:
10/10		It’s Chun Li, we’ve gone over this: girl’s up there with Lara Croft amongst video game girl royalty.
Personality:
0/10		This is just generic sexy girl posing.
Swimwear design:
7/10		This is actually a pretty interesting one for me. I love the design of the swimsuit: it really fits the visual language you’d expect from Chun Li. However, she usually is associated with blue, not red, but I like how this has turned out regardless. Pretty damn solid, I’d say. (Note: there actually is a blue version of this image that I’ve seen floating around, but I like that they chose to go with red; it’s definitely the bolder choice!)
Intangibles:
6/10		I think Ryan deserves some “BRAVO!” bonus points after all the shit I’ve given him up to this point.
HOTNESS:
6/10		I’ve never played a Jak & Daxter game, so I’m not really familiar with these characters. That said, this is image is suggestive in all the right ways, which makes it hotter than the images that are trying way too hard to be appealing.
Liefeld:
5/10		Ashelin’s face is shaped like a goddamn comma. Keira’s better, but good God that thigh gap. Her hips are wider than her shoulders too!
Character selection:
6/10		I mean… sure, I guess? Jak & Daxter was one of the biggest PS2-exclusive franchises in 2004, so I guess it makes sense that some characters from it would show up here? That said, it also was never really known for sex appeal, so still kind of weird at the end of the day.
Personality:
5/10		I know nothing about these characters… so 5/10.
Swimwear design:
6/10		Keira’s swimsuit is pretty cute, and the button-up shirt she’s wearing makes it even cuter.
Intangibles:
0/10		I famously hate elves (don’t tell me they’re humans, Jak Wiki, they’re fucking elves).
HOTNESS:
4/10		Oh Ryan, just when I was starting to warm up to you, you reminded me why I disliked your art style in the first place. This is actually extra insulting to me, because Bloodrayne is a franchise all about sex appeal, so it feels like it’s getting squandered with this image.
Liefeld:
5/10		Oh my fucking God, what is wrong with her right foot??? I’m trying to imagine the contortion she would have to subject herself to to wear that boot.
Character selection:
9/10		Majesco were on a hard marketing push in 2004 to make Bloodrayne 2 a success. The first game was a disaster, but Rayne’s eye-catching design had won her some fans, so having her appear here in the 2004 swimsuit issue is a very obvious decision.
Personality:
8/10		Rayne is not a very complicated character: she’s an sexy vampire killer for edgy boys, and I’d say that this image gets that across quite well.
Swimwear design:
5/10		This is just Rayne’s in-game outfit, but more revealing. That said… still a pretty hot outfit, not gonna lie.
Intangibles:
0/10		Fun fact, only three months later, Rayne would bare her boobs in the pages of Playboy, rendering this mediocre art of a HOT video game girl in a BIKINI completely redundant for titillation.
HOTNESS:
5/10		This sure is an image of HOT video game girls in BIKINIS frolicking at the beach.
Liefeld:
10/10		I’m not seeing any obvious issues with the anatomy this time.
Character selection:
5/10		Okay, so Chun Li and Cammy are video game royalty, but are the girls of Street Fighter so iconic that they deserved four whole pages to themselves in the 2004 PSM swimsuit issue…? Sure, Soulcalibur had three pages last year, but those were all of different girls, and the release of Soulcalibur II was arguably the peak of the franchise’s popularity. Meanwhile, this image has Chun Li again… I think even Lara Croft would be pushing it to appear twice in one swimsuit issue.
Personality:
3/10		I actually thought that this was a Final Fantasy image at first glance… I guess Chun Li and Ibuki are identifiable, but Cammy is unrecognizable for such an iconic character.
Swimwear design:
3/10		Ehh, that is some pretty generic swimwear.
Intangibles:
0/10		Another one of those “perfectly acceptable” swimsuit issue commissions, but nothing more than that.
HOTNESS:
1/10		Holy fucking shit, do I really need to explain why I hate this one? This Slenderman-esque take on Nina Williams is exaggerated to the point of looking idiotic.
Liefeld:
0/10		This legitimately looks like what you’d expect to see from a 13 year old boy’s create-a-character wank-material: maxed out the boob and hip sliders and as little clothing as possible.
Character selection:
8/10		If you are going to put a Tekken girl in your swimsuit special, then Nina is the obvious choice. It especially makes sense here since her solo spin-off game, the notorious Death By Degrees, was due out the next year. As a result, there would have actually been some hype around her in particular in 2004.
Personality:
8/10		While there’s basically nothing to identify that this is THE Nina Williams, the image at least gets across her cold and ruthless personality.
Swimwear design:
2/10		That’s about the most generic bikini I’ve ever seen.
Intangibles:
0/10		This is easily one of my least favourite commissions in this entire series.
HOTNESS:
3/10		Oh hey, it’s another Adam Warren/Ryan Kinnaird collaboration (we’ve even got another sci-fi bikini!). GOD they are trying so hard to make Nova look sexy, to the image’s detriment.
Liefeld:
7/10		My main complaint here is Nova’s arm placement in the top-left picture. Try posing the way that Nova is posed there. Her left arm must be scrunched really awkwardly (maybe even painfully) behind her to make that kind of pose.
Character selection:
6/10		There’s an interesting story behind this one. The magazine does not tell you who the hell Nova is or what game she comes from, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure it out. After doing some digging, I eventually realized that this is the main character from StarCraft: Ghost, the notorious StarCraft console shooter spin-off that went into prolonged development hell before finally being cancelled. So, on the one hand, I can see why she’d be included here, since hype would have been through the roof for this game. On the other hand, it’s a pretty poor choice in retrospect.
Personality:
0/10		Something tells me that Nova was not going to spend StarCraft: Ghost making “fuck me now” faces.
Swimwear design:
2/10		I don’t get this obsession with sci-fi bikinis, much less one that’s “tacti-cool”.
Intangibles:
1/10		They were trying so hard to make Nova look attractive, so the fact that she ghosted us all makes this funny in retrospect.
HOTNESS:
5/10		I said it before and I’ll say it again: someone at PSM clearly had a thing for Asian women. As far as these HOT images of video game girls in BIKINIS go, this is fairly middle of the road.
Liefeld:
6/10		What the hell is going on with Ayame’s left arm and shoulder!?
Character selection:
3/10		Ayame from Tenchu was in last year’s special, and the series was already on its decline in popularity by 2004, so this is a very questionable choice (that I can only quantify with my previous thoughts about an editor forcing their favourites into every issue). As for Kurenai from Red Ninja and Hibana from Nightshade, I’ve never even heard of these games. A Red Ninja selection actually makes some sense to appear here though: the entire gimmick of that game was that you played a kunoichi who could get a “seduction kill” on enemies. This was done by flirting with them suggestively to lure them in for an instant execution. That’s fucking bonkers; too bad the game was a janky mess by most accounts.
Personality:
3/10		I’m not gleaning much personality from this picture, it just looks like generic sexy poses.
Swimwear design:
3/10		So the swimwear here is pretty uninteresting to me, with one exception: why the hell does every girl have a rope-tied bikini bottom…? Is that just a stereotypical kunoichi thing? Is it some typical Asian-women fetish thing? They had the exact same type of bikini bottom of Ayame last year, so it clearly means something. Seriously, someone explain this to me, because it’s starting to concern me!
Intangibles:
5/10		I’ll give some bonus points for having this be set in a sauna, it gives the image some thematic flair. The peeking ninjas are also kind of funny.

Wait… that’s it? Yeah, there are only seven images in this year’s swimsuit issue (the previous three issues had nine, eight, eight, and nine, respectively). Granted, this is because there are more two-page spreads and all the others are full-page images, but still… this was a really underwhelming issue. When a Ryan Kinnaird commission is your highlight for the year, you know that the bar for quality got lowered. The character choices were pretty poor (Lara didn’t even show up this year!), there were no show-stopper images… was PSM’s heart not in it anymore? Or was their budget getting stretched thin…?

I’ve got a bad feeling about the final issue of the swimsuit special…

PSM Issue 101 (September 2005)

How the times change in only a few years. This was by far the hardest swimsuit issue to find, because not only was it released after the summer was over, but they don’t even advertise it on the cover. It seems pretty clear by this point that somebody in charge was either ashamed of the whole affair, or they were doing it entirely out of obligation by 2005. They claim in the editor’s blurb that “this is our best ever” swimsuit issue. I’m sitting here writing this having not seen any of these images yet: I don’t believe them. I’m fully expecting to end this series on a dull note. Let’s see if my instincts are on-point…

HOTNESS:
8/10		As we have come to expect, the near-anual Lara Croft image is pretty damn hot (the gun holster tan-line is pretty damn funny too)!
Liefeld:
7/10		Lara’s body is borderline contorted and her right boob is notably larger than her left one, but those are pretty nit-picky complaints.
Character selection:
10/10		It’s Lara Croft: if anything it’s weird that she didn’t appear in the 2004 swimsuit special. It seems that year off was due to Angel of Darkness bombing, but that hasn’t stopped PSM from including much more questionable characters in these pages…
Personality:
6/10		While this is a pretty funny image, it doesn’t really capture Lara Croft’s confident and sassy personality, does it?
Swimwear design:
8/10		The simple but perfect Lara bikini is back. Complaining that they aren’t even trying to top perfection seems petty.
Intangibles:
8/10		Man, people were really sour on Lara Croft after Angel of Darkness, eh? Glad to see her back again for the finale.
HOTNESS:
3/10		Oh look… it’s our old friend… I actually don’t mind the Ada half of this image: his art has improved and it’s the most outright, over-the-top sexualized any Ryan Kinnaird image has gotten to this point. However, the Leon/Ashley half just kills it, because… I mean, just look at them. Leon looks like a fucking human-coloured crocodile and Ashley looks like she stepped out of a pulp serial novel.
Liefeld:
0/10		This is textbook Rob Liefeld stuff.
Character selection:
6/10		Resident Evil 4 would have already been a year old when this came out, but I guess that the release of the PS2 port would be reason enough to earn it a spot (especially considering how massive this game was on release).
Personality:
3/10		Ashley is scared throughout Resident Evil 4, has to rely on Leon to protect her, AND tries to fuck Leon… in spite of that, I think this image is terrible at communicating what Ashley is like. Here she looks like his vapid, seductive sex doll, but that’s not the case at all. Ada, as a femme fatale, should be pretty easy to do right, but even she comes across as generic. Really poor showing here.
Swimwear design:
4/10		Okay, I’ll admit that the “4” on Ada’s bikini is kind of a cool touch… that’s about the only thing I find notable here though.
Intangibles:
0/10		Leon’s abs have more layers than an ogre.
HOTNESS:
8/10		While I usually do not find Adam Warren’s cutesy art style to be particularly alluring, he’s giving 110% here to accomplish it anyway. This is definitely one of the most suggestive swimsuit images in the entire run of PSM, but the cutesy art style keeps it from feeling tacky or excessive.
Liefeld:
10/10		The art style is so minimalist that I don’t think Adam could screw up Rayne’s anatomy if he tried.
Character selection:
5/10		Rayne was fresh off of two poorly received video games, that embarrassing Playboy article, and the upcoming film was coming out when Uwe Boll was already known for making terrible movies, so it was clearly going to bomb as well. By this point it was obviously Rayne was never going to be the next big female video game star, so it does feel a little odd that they’d commission art of her two years in a row.
Personality:
7/10		While this does look like something that Majesco themselves would release to advertise Bloodrayne, I do feel like it’s notably missing her sarcastic and aggressive attitude. Still, it captures enough of Rayne’s characterization that I can’t be that harsh on it.
Swimwear design:
6/10		This swimwear looks very fitting for a character like Rayne.
Intangibles:
10/10		Major bonus points for making this work with the limited colour palette!
HOTNESS:
7/10		Oh hey Ryan. You did a pretty good job this time, this is almost on-par with your Chun Li piece!
Liefeld:
7/10		Her upper-right thigh looks a bit strange…
Character selection:
5/10		Oh my God they did it again! Apparently they were already concerned that StarCraft: Ghost might get canceled, but they were putting this commission out there to will it into existence.
Personality:
5/10		The game never came out, how am I supposed to know Nova’s personality in StarCraft: Ghost?
Swimwear design:
7/10		Congrats Ryan, you got to make a sci-fi bikini that looks interesting.
Intangibles:
5/10		The dramatic irony of PSM stating that “we were worried for a bit, but it looks like StarCraft: Ghost is guaranteed to come out now!”
HOTNESS:
0/10		From what I can find, Rin from Tenchu is 14 years old (and looks it). What the actual fuck PSM? This opens up a whole can of worms for how you assess this image: is Rin being sexualized here? Maybe, but I don’t think it matters anyway: this image is part of a sexy swimsuit collection, there’s a baseline assumption that you’re supposed to oogle every character in a swimsuit. Like, if they just put a random photo of a little girl in the middle of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, that would be really fucking weird.
Liefeld:
10/10		I do not notice any anatomical issues (other than one of the characters’ bodies being four-plus years undeveloped).
Character selection:
0/10		No. Just fucking no. Two years of Tenchu was insane enough. How they hell do we have Ayame three consecutive years!? She was clearly one of the bosses’ favourite characters (definitely the guy who has the Asian fetish), because it’s absolutely insane to imagine this being a popularity selection. Plus… y’know, including a minor, but I would have given this a 0/10 for Ayame alone at this point.
Personality:
5/10		I don’t know these characters… you know the drill.
Swimwear design:
2/10		THE FUCKING ROPE BIKINI-BOTTOMS ARE BACK, WHAT IS THIS GODDAMN OBSESSION!??!!
Intangibles:
5/10		Everything else aside, the Kitsune-head bikini top is legitimately funny.
HOTNESS:
10/10		So this particular image is interesting, because it’s meant to be appealing primarily to the women readers of PSM… and I think they succeeded! Making this even more impressive is that this image is still appealing for the men, because we have Lady looking smoking hot!
Liefeld:
10/10		I’m not noticing any glaring issues, which is extremely impressive for an image like this with a big muscly man front and center. Bravo, Jo Chen!
Character selection:
10/10		If you have to pick a male video game character that the women readers of PSM would find attractive, you couldn’t do much better than Dante. The fact that the extremely appealing Lady is here too is just an incredible bonus.
Personality:
10/10		You know you could see Dante doing this exact scene in-game and it would be perfectly natural.
Swimwear design:
6/10		This is the one area where this image falters, and that’s because I can barely see what anyone is wearing! Nothing looks bad… but I’d like to have a better look at both to give their swimwear full points.
Intangibles:
10/10		No notes, this is easily one of the best images in the entire series and I’m glad to see the swimsuit special going down swinging for the fences.
HOTNESS:
3/10		Oh my God: these are official images created by EA. They used their Marvel license for Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects to commission sexy swimsuit images of Storm and Elektra. That means one of two things:
1) They had multiple back-and-forths with Marvel to get these images approved by them, or
2) They just went ahead and did it and could have gotten into hot water with Marvel if they found out.
The funniest part about all this though? The images kind of suck.
Liefeld:
3/10		It should come as no surprise that the actual comic book superheroes end up having some of the worst anatomy in the entire series. From the waist-up, Elektra is just a contortionist’s nightmare. At least Storm looks good though.
Character selection:
2/10		I do not understand the decision-making that went into selecting Storm and Elektra for this swimsuit issue. Elektra was really unpopular due to the fresh memories of the Daredevil and Elektra movies bombing. Storm was reasonably popular I guess, but I can’t help but feel that Marvel wasn’t willing to let EA use their more popular characters for this swimsuit ad.
Post-script: turns out that the reason they picked Elektra and Storm is because they were the only established female characters in Marvel Nemesis. There were multiple original characters in that game which were designed for sex appeal, which makes me wonder why they didn’t include one or more of their original characters here to specifically advertise the game?
Personality:
4/10		Storm looks like a valley girl, which couldn’t be further from her character. As for Elektra… I guess that looks like a pose she’d do?
Swimwear design:
0/10		Storm isn’t even wearing a swimsuit! And I think that Elektra is literally just wearing one of her costumes from the comics.
Intangibles:
5/10		The fact that these are official images of licensed characters provided by EA is just so goddamn funny.
HOTNESS:
4/10		Oh my God they did it again. EA wants you to think that the girls of SSX are hot, but these in-engine PS2 renders aren’t particularly impressive.
Liefeld:
10/10		I guess the benefit of using renders is that you avoid most of the anatomy pitfalls that drawing everything from scratch brings with it.
Character selection:
1/10		It’s so funny that these are officially-created renders provided by EA themselves. It just reeks of desperation to drum up interest for SSX on Tour, which was launching the month after this issue released. After three games, it was clear that nobody cared about the characters in SSX, especially after a two year gap between releases. On top of that, this is the third time SSX characters were appearing in the swimsuit special. Might I remind you that Dead or Alive and Soulcalibur both only appeared once (and this is despite Soulcalibur III‘s hyped release later in 2005).
Personality:
5/10		Something, something, don’t know this character…
Swimwear design:
3/10		Kaori’s outfit looks more like sleepwear than swimwear… Elise’s outfit is just mediocre.
Intangibles:
4/10		Again, it’s so funny and reeking of desperation that EA would provide these images themselves to PSM for their swimsuit special. What a wild marketing move. This is something that legitimately would not be done today by a major publisher.

Credit where it’s due, this was a great final issue for the PSM swimsuit special. You had some of the best art in the entire series, some weird swings, and hilarious editorial choices. Certainly better than what I was expecting!

Final Rankings

What a wild journey that was. It was legitimately interesting to see how the PSM swimsuit special evolved from issue-to-issue: starting out as a legitimate attempt to get attention through sex appeal, and then slowly feeling more and more like an obligation. That said, I imagine that the budget for the special was higher in the first issue, and then got tighter and tighter with each subsequent one. I also think this is probably why Ryan Kinnaird was all over these issues: he was probably able to do commissions fast and inexpensively, hence why he was soon doing two or three images per year. That said, when PSM wanted a particular image to make a splash, you can tell that they put the money into it, hence how we got the stunning images of Cassandra, Dante & Lady, and Lara Croft sharing space with art of notably worse quality.

Then there’s the next thing I want to address: I expect that a common response to these swimsuit articles would be “boy, they couldn’t do this today!” I honestly think that that is patently false. Could, say, IGN or Eurogamer suddenly decide to release an annual swimsuit special? Yeah, I think that they could do so with little controversy surrounding the decision. As long as they treated it with a bit more tact than PSM did, and had a bit more balance between the girls and guys, I think that there would be minimal criticism. That said, would they do this? No, probably not, but that’s not so much due to “wokeness”. Unlike the 90s and early 2000s, game’s journalism is now directed at a general audience rather than teenage boys (a shift in audience that we can track through PSM’s own gradual loss of personality over the years).

Wanna know how I know that you could make a video game swimsuit issue today without it being a problem? Well, I was looking into Ryan Kinnaird’s career after I finished the last issue and it turns out that the guy has been contributing to UDON magazine, which releases its own video game girl swimsuit specials to this day. They’re actually pretty damn good! All that said, as much as I’ve complained about Ryan Kinnaird through this article, the guy’s art style has improved significantly since these articles were published, so I want to give him some kudos: nothing against you, I just did not like most of your swimsuit illustrations in PSM! Congrats on finding a way to make a career for the last quarter century drawing HOT video game girls in BIKINIS!

With all that said, lets get to the final rankings based on the sum total of their scores. In the case of a tie, I’ve ranked images based on personal preference:

RankCharacter(s)SeriesIssueArtistTotal Score
1Lady, DanteDevil May CrySept 2005Jo Chen56
2Lara CroftTomb RaiderAug 2002Greg Horn56
3Cassandra AlexandraSoulcaliburJune 2003Greg Horn54
4Kasumi, Leifang, Tina ArmstrongDead or AliveJuly 2000Sam Liu49
5Lara CroftTomb RaiderSept 2005Frank Cho47
6RayneBloodrayneSept 2005Adam Warren46
7Lara CroftTomb RaiderJuly 2000Adam Hughes46
8TrishDevil May CryAug 2002Kevin Lau43
9Lara CroftTomb RaiderJune 2003Adam Hughes38
10Chun LiStreet FighterJuly 2004Ryan Kinnaird37
11NovaStarCraftSept 2005Ryan Kinnaird36
12Elisa, Zoe, KaoriSSXJuly 2001Andy Park35
13Talim, Ivy Valentine, Xianghua, TakiSoulcaliburJune 2003Greg Horn34
14Lara Croft, Claire RedfieldTomb Raider & Resident EvilJune 2003Randy Green32
15Valkyrie WildePSM April FoolsJuly 2000Adam Warren31
16RayneBloodrayneJuly 2004Ryan Kinnaird31
17Ai Fukami, Reiko NagaseRidge RacerJuly 2000Tommy Yune30
18Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Leon KennedyResident EvilJuly 2000Andy Park, Jon Sibal30
19Sun Shang Xiang, AyameDynasty Warriors & TenchuJune 2003Jo Chen30
20KenZone of the EndersJune 2003Ryan Kinnaird29
21Lian Xing, Aya Brea, Meryl Silverburgh, Hana Tsu-VachelVariousJuly 2000Joyce Chin, Arthur Adams28
22Tifa, Quistis, Rinoa, Cloud, SquallFinal FantasyJuly 2000Naska28
23Sakura, Chun Li, CammyStreet FighterJune 2003Rick Mays28
24Ashelin, KeiraJak & DaxterJuly 2004Kevin Lau28
25Trish, LuciaDevil May CryJune 2003Ryan Kinnaird28
26Yuna, Tidus, KimariFinal FantasyJuly 2001Roger Cruz27
27Elise, KaoriSSXSept 2005EA Studios27
28Yuki, Kaede, SamanosukeOnimushaJuly 2001Ken Lashley26
29Chun Li, Sakura, CammyStreet FighterJuly 2000Ale Garza26
30Ibuki, Sakura, Elena, Chun Li, CammyStreet FighterJuly 2004Arnold Tsang26
31Ayame, Kurenai, HibanaVariousJuly 2004Rick Mays25
32OyuOnimushaAug 2002Keron Grant25
33Sarah Bryant, Pai Chan, Christie, JuliaVirtua Fighter & TekkenAug 2002Rick Mays24
34Sarah Bryant, Pai Chan, Aoi, DuralVirtua FighterJuly 2001Mike S. Miller24
35KOS-MOS, ShionXenosagaJune 2003Adam Warren23
36ReginaDino CrisisJuly 2000Arthur Adams23
37Rin, AyameTenchuSept 2005Adam Warren22
38Viola, Vikki Grimm, Olga Gurlukovich, KonokoVariousJuly 2001Tone Rodriguez21
39Mamba Marie, Sephonie, Lenore, Aurora Lee, SophiaMaximoAug 2002Adam Warren21
40KOS-MOS, Shion, PellegriXenosagaAug 2002Ryan Kinnaird21
41NovaStarCraftJuly 2004Adam Warren19
42Nina WilliamsTekkenJuly 2004Jason Pearson19
43Rikku, Yuna, LuluFinal FantasyAug 2002Terry Dodson18
44Storm, ElektraMarvel comicsSept 2005EA Studios17
45Tracey, Leeann, EliseEA Sports BIG franchisesAug 2002Joe Chiodo16
46Dominique, Kaldea, Echidna, SionThe BouncerJuly 2001RV Valdez16
47Ada Wong, Leon Kennedy, Ashley GrahamResident EvilSept 2005Ryan Kinnaird16
48Hana Tsu-Vachel, RainFear EffectJuly 2001Matt Broome16
49Frost, Sonya Blade, Nitara, Kitana, Lei MeiMortal KombatJune 2003Kevin Lau14

And here’s how I would rank the images based entirely on personal, subjective appeal:

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My Favourite Magic: The Gathering Cards of 2024

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Over the past couple years, one of my friends finally convinced me to check out Magic: The Gathering… and my wallet has been cursing him ever since. One of my weekly rituals is to listen to the EDHrec podcast, which recently had an episode about their favourite cards of the year. This got me thinking about what my favourite cards of the year were as well, which eventually lead to me sitting down and writing a full-on article about this.

Instant

  • I love modular cards like Archdruid’s Charm. Such a flexible and useful card. Does just about anything you would want it to.
  • I always love a good, free protection spell. Most of my white decks will have some creature I can sac to pay this, if I’m in a life-or-death situation, I’d gladly sacrifice my commander to cast this.
  • Really cool and, again, FLEXIBLE card for a low cost. Gets rid of all those pesky tokens, or you can cycle it away for cheap if you don’t need it.
  • Again: this card does everything I could want it to without costing a premium. Incredible utility piece.
  • A strictly better version of Relentless Assault, and by A LOT. I find myself throwing in a couple extra mana all the time casting this, the upsides are always worth it.

And the winner is…

Sorcery

  • Glimpse the Impossible is an insanely good card for being a common. It’s the best of impulse draw and self-mill combined. Impulse draw for three cards is great already, but then having them go to the graveyard and refund themselves with an Eldrazi Spawn token is just incredible for three mana. I’ve already got this in a couple of wildly different decks, it’s just got a ton of decks it works in.
  • This card is a no-brainer inclusion for me in pretty much any red deck from now on. I would pay this card’s mana cost just to be unblockable, but also making it a land-hate card is a cherry on top. The fact that it’s also a land makes Sundering Eruption an incredible card.
  • Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the funnest cards I’ve ever seen, effectively capturing the essence of its titular inspiration.
  • Another very flexible card, Insatiable Avarice is a great tutor, or it can also be a good draw spell, or it can be both. A great card to have in hand, and it never feels bad to cast.
  • Tempt with Bunnies is mostly just a funny card, but it is a legitimate powerhouse in a token deck, and a decent draw spell for white.

And the winner is…

Enchantment

  • Innkeeper’s Talent is a stupidly good card for any deck already running Hardened Scales. Just puts a stupid amount of +1/+1 counters out and protects your creatures while it’s at it.
  • This card is so fun! You give all your opponents a gift, but your creatures get a benefit from then on for it. The potential for politicking with it is also cool.
  • First of all, I LOVE the art for this card. Secondly, I love the whole “Enduring” enchantment creature cycle, having them come back after death makes them so reliable!
  • Charitable Levy is a great little piece of light Stax and provides some ramp while it’s at it.
  • I’ve heard Ripples of Undeath described as the Sylvan Library of black, and I cannot disagree. It’s incredible, providing early-game graveyard fuel, while also allowing you to get back any particularly important cards.

And the winner is…

Artifact

  • Smoke Bomb is such a good utility piece. You can use it to protect your creature, screw over an opponent from targeting their own creatures, and then, when your turn rolls around, you can make one of your creatures unblockable for colourless mana. Probably my favourite card from the Assassin’s Creed set.
  • The Swords cycle are just generically good cards and Sword of Wealth and Power has to be one of the best of the bunch. Fit into pretty much any aggro and/or spell slinger deck.
  • A mana rock with a tribal anthem tacked on? Yes please!
  • Twitching Doll’s a super interesting mana dork for any token deck. I have a Jinnie Fay deck, so this thing comes in on-curve and is ready to passively produce a bunch of tokens later in the game.
  • I have a vehicle deck and Brotherhood Vertibird is BUSTED at 3 mana, easily hitting for 10+ evasive damage every turn.

And the winner is…

Creature

  • The Infamous Cruelclaw is such a wild card for only three mana, easily able to cheat in big threats to put on the pressure early. It’s even evasive!
  • I LOVE Darkstar Augur’s design. Gambling with life is my favourite thing to do in Magic, to the point where I went and built an entire Standard deck around this card and the concept. Hell, the first and only time I’ve ever won a draft was using this card as my centerpiece. LOVE it to bits.
  • Marionette Apprentice is a wildly efficient and useful card in any token/aristocrats deck.
  • Crime Novelist is just stupidly busted in any deck that wants it. If you’re making any number of Treasures, it quickly spirals out of control, becoming tall and netting you free mana – all on a lowly uncommon! Absolutely busted card.
  • Another token/aristocrats piece, Kambal is really cool for allowing you to clone opponents’ tokens to produce extra value for yourself, while also pinging your opponents for their trouble. So many decks are running tokens that you don’t even need to build a strategy around it, he’ll just passively work in pretty much any pod.

And the winner is…

Lands

  • Basically Cabal Coffers for tribal decks, Three Tree City can be a massive payoff in the right deck, while offering just enough counterplay to not feel completely busted.
  • The Verge cycle of lands are very flexible dual lands with a very reasonable restriction which makes them very reliable.
  • Urza’s Cave is a great utility piece, effectively giving you a second copy of your best land for three mana.
  • The Surveil Lands straight-up caused me to re-evaluate surveil as a mechanic, and the power of tapped lands. I used to write off any “enters tapped” land from my decks, because they couldn’t wait the extra turn to get that mana. I figured that they might be good in a graveyard focused deck, but once I tried them out and found myself using their ability to filter the next card, I fell in love. Plus they’re basically an auto-pick when you cast an “enters tapped” ramp source!
  • The MH3 MDFC lands are great – a lot of them have solid effects, but the fact that they’re stapled to a land that can come in untapped if you want to just makes them no-brainer includes in nearly any deck.

And the winner is…

(Note: in the EDHrec podcast, Planeswalker was the next category. I have only two of the Planeswalkers released this year, Sorin of House Markov and Kaito, Bane of Nightmares. Really not enough variety to even have a valid opinion, but if I had to pick, it would be Kaito.)

Mechanic

  • Expend is such a simple but cool mechanic that it’s shocking that we haven’t seen it before. Having abilities trigger once a certain amount of mana is spent is a cool little mechanic which gives you plenty of freedom to decide how to go about it and how you want it to payoff.
  • The Enduring cycle of cards have such a unique and creative way of making a card powerful and difficult to remove without giving it by making its ability overpowered or Hexproof or Ward.
  • Like I’ve said, I LOVE a flexible card, and Spree takes everything good about modular cards and just makes it better. Several Spree cards have become staples in my decks just due to how much choice they give you.
  • Offspring is such a cool ability, allowing you to pay a cost to make a 1/1 token copy of the creature when it enters the battlefield. You’re generally incentivized to do so, and Offspring’s a huge part of why Darkstar Augur was my favourite creature of the year.
  • Plot’s definitely the most “out there” mechanic on the list today, but once I got to play with it, it’s actually super useful: cast the card now, but have it go off at a later time. Especially good in the early game, when mana may be at a premium.

And the winner is…

Commander

This category is solely made up of the commanders I built this year. There may very well be better commanders from 2024, but it would be wrong of me to say that the ones I built weren’t the best, wouldn’t you agree?

  • I’ve said it many times – you put a cute fox in front of me and I’ll throw money at you. Literally bought the Bumbleflower precon just to get ahold of him. Beyond being adorable, I also really like how Mr. Foxglove’s ability doesn’t lock you into any specific buildpath, you can build whatever kind of deck you want. Mine is +1/+1 counters and poison themed deck!
  • Masked Bandits is one of my all-time favourite MTG arts and, when I saw the factions in Bloomburrow, I knew that I wanted to make a raccoon tribal deck. There are, unfortunately, no Jund raccoon commanders, so Masked Bandits ironically didn’t make the cut, but I found myself surprised by just how much I enjoyed the Expend mechanic on Muerra. It makes every turn into a little mini-game, trying to get the most out of your mana to trigger the ability as many times as possible. The passive 3 life gained per turn also really adds up over the course of a game.
  • So I have never played a game with Ms. Bumbleflower as the deck’s commander, I have put her in the 99 and I really appreciate how unique her ability is for a precon commander. The group hug and politicking that she enables are surprisingly powerful tools, which make for a really fun card all-round.
  • I am an absolute sucker for Orzhov aristocrats decks. Around the time Modern Horizons 3 released, I was thinking of making an angels deck… but when Shilgengar introduced me to the idea of a aristocrats/reanimator angel deck where you’re saccing your angels for a big blood ritual… AHHHH, it’s so damn cool! In practice, Shilgengar plays like a power, old-school battlecruiser deck, where it struggles to get going, but can absolutely destroy the board if that mass resurrection occurs.
  • My second ever deck was Olivia, Crimson Bride, so when I saw that they were releasing a new precon with her as the commander, I immediately pre-ordered it (I probably shouldn’t have, I cut about 2/3 of the precon out and probably would have saved money if I just looked at the decklist and ordered the singles). Her ability basically turns her into a Professional Face-Breaker, which is very powerful in its own right. Her main issue is that she quickly becomes archenemy, so be sure that you’re ready to take the heat.

And the winner is…

And that’s the end! I hope you enjoyed this impromptu dive into the world of Magic: The Gathering! I don’t know if I’m going to make this an annual thing or not, but this certainly was a fun project for me.

If you liked this article…

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Ranking the Albums I Listened to in 2024

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to my annual music countdown! As is tradition here on IC2S, I go back through the albums I’ve listened to this year and then rank them from worst to best. Hopefully this list encourages you to check out some new music you may or may not have heard of before now!

There’s no honourable/dishonourable mentions this year, so let’s just get right into the countdown, starting with…

16) The Fall, Trapt

Trapt hold the distinction of having the worst album I’ve ever listened through, so of course I was going to have to see what the hell they were going to shart out the next time they released an album. The Fall certainly leaves a “great” first impression… I mean, just look at that cover, there’s no way this wasn’t AI generated garbage (just look at the face, hands, feet… what the hell is this?). For the record, Trapt put out an even worse AI generated cover for one of the singles from this album, so this is in no way unwarranted speculation.

Shitty AI art is one thing, but we’re here to make fun of the actual music. Okay, that’s a bit unfair – I actually heard reasonably good things about this album going in and, as I demonstrated with OMNI last year (or, hell, my very generous Left Behind reviews), my pre-conceived thoughts on an album don’t necessarily line up with my final thoughts. That said… this is Trapt. I had thought that Shadow Work might just be an experiment that went wrong, but no, The Fall sounds pretty damn close to what we got from Shadow Work. Now, to be entirely fair here: it’s not as bad as Shadow Work, but that statement sets the floor so low that “The Fall is terrible” is still an big improvement.

So I guess “lowest common denominator soft post-grunge” is just Trapt’s default sound now? I know it’s kind of a joke at this point, but “Headstrong” is what this band is known for. You’d think that they’d try to provide something for people looking for more music that sounds like that? Instead, we get track after track of whiny, toothless, lethargic, limp rock that blends together to produce boredom. Not since I was three years old has music so effortlessly put me to sleep like “Home” did. For most of the album, it’s just this – aggressively mediocre rock songs with no energy to them, and it makes for a completely forgettable listen.

…note: I said most. Yeah, I’m going to be somewhat charitable to Trapt here, because there were a couple tracks that I actually found myself enjoying. “Above It All” has an 80s pump-up pop-rock sound and energy to it. It even has a guitar solo! This track was fun, I kinda liked it. Then there’s “When I Get Better”, which just goes full pop and is all the better for just embracing it instead of taking a bunch of half-measures. These aren’t exactly song of the year contenders, and they’re not doing anything unique, but I could see myself legitimately enjoying these two songs if I gave them a few more listens.

But… yeah. That’s just two songs in a nearly hour-long album. They definitely rocket The Fall well past the level of Shadow Work, but it doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of this album is just dull.

Trapt? More like… Crapt, amiright?

15) Doomsday/Here I Am/Learning How to Be Human, Manafest (Bandcamp… none of these albums are on there though…)

Earlier this year I had to re-rip a bunch of my CDs so I’d have better audio quality for the MP3s on my phone. In the process of doing that, I had to go over a couple Manafest albums and they reminded me that, once upon a time, he was making some legitimately good music. After a swathe of disappointments, I had sworn off giving his newer releases a chance multiple times, but after this recent listen of Epiphany and Glory I said “Y’know what? I’m gonna give Manafest ONE last chance to impress me.”

…and then I looked at Spotify and saw that he has released THREE albums in 2024 which, as far as I can tell, literally share 81% of their tracks between each other (that’s not even a joke; I did the math, 27 out of 31 tracks between these three albums are on at least one of the other albums… worst of all, Here I Am doesn’t even have one unique track).

Okay, so even if these albums end up sucking, it’s at least going to be an interesting story, right? As far as I can tell, it seems like he released a bunch of singles in 2023 and 2024 and then compiled them into Doomsday… and then made two more albums which compiled the previous album and then added a couple new tracks each time. These albums released weeks apart from each other and two of them even have the exact same album cover! As far as I can tell, Learning How To Be Human is intended to be the “definitive” album, but then the other two are classified as full-on LPs on Spotify and Album of the Year, so who the hell actually knows? It’s such a baffling way of going about things – I’m used to seeing bands release an EP with a few tracks from an upcoming album, but this usually is just a snippet, the tracks can often end up being different than the album versions, and it’s not unusual for there to be some unique material. Releasing basically the same album three times just makes no sense; good luck understanding this mess. Is it to game the Spotify algorithm, somehow? Do you get more listen time this way? I don’t get it at all.

Whatever Manafest’s reasons for re-releasing this album so many times, the resulting music is… fine. I mean, it’s Manafest – my expectations are already pretty low given how many times he’s left me disappointed, so at least my expectations were met this time, I guess? The music is at its best when Manafest is leaning into his classic rap-rock sound, where it at least has some energy to it (such as “Glitch in the Matrix”, “Here I Am”, and the “Doomsday” remix). It’s at its worst when he’s attempting to pull off a modern pop sound, which results in boring, limp instrumentation and flat vocals (“Back of a Church”, “HELP!”, “No Stranger To The Pain”).

I’m going to be charitable and include the unique tracks from Doomsday into my analysis as well (since I basically view this as one big album in my mind). These tracks include covers of “Crawling” and “In The End” by Linkin Park, “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, and “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”. Unfortunately, these covers are fine at best. “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” fares best, with an aggressive, country-gospel swagger. On the negative end of things though is “In The End”, which suuuuucks compared to Linkin Park’s rendition. It exemplifies what makes most of these cover tracks fail, and that’s the limp instrumentation and flat vocals compared to the tracks they are covering, which robs them of much of their energy.

All-in-all, it’s another Manafest album. As soon as it was done, I found myself thinking “Well, I can’t imagine that I’m ever going to listen to any of this ever again”. Nothing here is necessarily bad like The Fall, but it sure as hell is dull and not something I have any interest in experiencing again. I guess that’s part of life though, you don’t need to keep forcing yourself to keep trying things that you just don’t enjoy anymore. I’ve been at that place with Manafest for at least a decade, and checking-in, I can say that I’ve made the right choice. Unless he has a big farewell album, or a universally-acclaimed comeback at some point, I really can’t see myself bothering to pay any more attention to Manafest ever again. Best of luck, Chris, and thanks for the memories; it was pretty cool that you signed my copy of Glory seventeen years ago.

14) Colossal Oppressor, Ten Ton Slug (Bandcamp)

Earlier this year, as I was regretting selling my copy of Toxrill, the Corrosive back when I started Magic, I came across this awesome album cover on r/metal. It was destiny, I had to give Colossal Oppressor a listen. Ten Ton Slug are, appropriately, sludge metal (think early Mastodon), with a heavy, aggressive, slow-tempo sound. The results are enjoyable and definitely worth a listen, but none of the songs particularly stood out to me. And… um… yeah, that’s about all I can really say about Colossal Oppressor. As you can tell, it didn’t leave a big impression on me and the fact that I’m struggling to put a paragraph together about the album should tell you all you need to know.

13) What Slept Beneath Tarvos, The Wise Man’s Fear (Bandcamp)

The Wise Man’s Fear return to the annual music countdown and this time they’re branching out a bit from their usual fantasy-metalcore themes: this time, they’ve ventured into sci-fi! While this is largely a narrative change, it has resulted in an eclectic mixture of new elements worked into their sound, including electronic music, more deathcore sections, and even a couple tracks with rap-metal influences. This results in some interesting tracks, the highlights of which would be “Obsidian Blade” and the title track. Unfortunately, my main issue with What Slept Beneath Tarvos is that there just isn’t enough here. This is an eleven-track album which lasts barely twenty-four minutes. Two of these tracks are mood-setting instrumentals and four are interludes, meaning more than half of the tracks here don’t really give us any meat to dig into. I’m not even sure if you can really classify an eleven-track release as an EP. Whatever the case, What Slept Beneath Tarvos is just too short. It leaves you hungry for far more, and that makes it feel disappointing. Maybe that’s just me being greedy, but the album as a whole suffers for it.

12) HAPPY, OCEANS (Bandcamp)

Since releasing one of my favourite albums back in 2020, OCEANS have been steadily releasing new music. Hell is Where the Heart Is represented a new chapter for the band, moving into a more nu metal-inspired sound, which also coincided with an increase in angst that led to some pretty cringy songwriting at times. HAPPY finds OCEANS leaning harder into the nu metal trappings, introducing some rap elements into the fold now. Unfortunately, this means that we get some of the cringiest music in their career with “SLAVES TO THE FEED”: “I’m sick and tired, this social media game is a charade / Fake personas, chasing fame, it’s all a masquerade / We’re scrollin’ through the timelines, dealing with our clicks / Validation is the drug, I’m breaking free from the fix”. As you can probably tell, HAPPY is largely about our relationship with social media and its effect on society and mental health. I’m very much receptive to an anti-social media song, but this kind of ham-fisted songwriting just comes across as dumb (contrast this with OMNI: Part I‘s artful approach to the topic). That said, I do find myself getting some guilty pleasure out of HAPPY: it’s extremely angsty, but in a way that feels sincere and the eclectic fusion of genres sounds good for the most part. This is definitely one of the messier releases of OCEANS’ career, but it’s still an enjoyable time.

11) Voyage of the Dead Marauder EP, Alestorm (Bandcamp)

As I’ve said plenty of times now, Alestorm’s career has been pretty mixed for the past several years. On the one hand, you know exactly what to expect of them – the issue is whether the new music they deliver actually ends up any good. Voyage of the Dead Marauder acts like a little slice of their career as of late and, thankfully, it is mostly successful. On the one hand, we have their more “high-effort”, “serious” pirate metal tracks, exemplified with the titular “Voyage of the Dead Marauder”. Then there’s the goofier tracks and, as a Canadian, I’m happy to say that “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate” is one of the funniest songs Alestorm has ever put together. Meanwhile, “Uzbekistan” carries on their tradition of globe-trotting adventures, landing somewhere in the middle between serious and an outright joke, although the resulting song is a bit middling overall. Then there’s the video game soundtrack nostalgia bait, “Sea Shanty 2”. Of course, this is also a modern Alestorm release, so it has to have another “LOL, obscene!” track, and this is filled out with “Cock”… which is about as lame as you’d expect. Look, “Fucked With an Anchor” came out seven years ago and this is, at least, the third time we’ve gotten an attempt at copying it; are Alestorm fans really clamoring for a new one with every album? All-in-all, Voyage of the Dead Marauder doesn’t break any new ground, but for $5 it’s a worthwhile buy, even if only for the title track and “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”.

10) Pirates II: Armada, Visions of Atlantis (Bandcamp)

As I alluded to last year with Delain’s Dark Waters, I’m really hungry for some non-Alestorm pirate metal. I had checked out Visions of Atlantis’ Pirates a couple years ago, so I was interested to see what this follow-up would hold. Similar to Delain, Visions of Atlantis approach pirate-themed music through a symphonic metal lens, so if you’re familiar with that subgenre, you should know exactly what to expect: operatic female vocals, power metal vibes, string instrumentation, etc. In that regard, Pirates II is on the heavier side for symphonic metal, but doesn’t present anything particularly innovative. That said, there are some really solid tracks here, such as “The Land of the Free” and “Tonight I’m Alive”. If you’re getting bored of Alestorm’s extremely tongue-in-cheek take on pirate metal, then Pirates II should help scratch that itch.

9) Wake Up the Wicked, Powerwolf (Bandcamp)

It’s another year, so that means that Powerwolf obviously put out another album to milk their rabid fanbase. This time we get Wake Up the Wicked, which feels like a throwback to Blood of the Saints, in contrast to their last couple albums, which have been experimenting with the boundaries of Powerwolf’s traditional sound. On the one hand, this means that Wake Up the Wicked is not breaking any new ground – every song sounds like a Powerwolf song, it’s all very familiar. On the other hand, this is Powerwolf – they’re very good at what they do, and even with all this well-trodden ground, they’re still making really enjoyable songs, like “Bless ’em With the Blade”, “1589”, and especially “Thunderpriest”. All-in-all, it’s Powerwolf: if you like them, you’re gonna like this. If you don’t like them, there’s nothing here that you haven’t heard before.

Also, I feel the need to say that Powerwolf usually have some of the best deluxe albums in the industry, featuring entire bonus albums of cover tracks, either by Powerwolf themselves, or by various friends and peers. Unfortunately, Wake Up the Wicked‘s deluxe edition is underwhelming in comparison, only having a live album and orchestra versions of the album tracks. This isn’t nothing, but Powerwolf have set the bar so high that it feels relatively disappointing and is worth noting.

8) VERITAS, P.O.D. (Bandcamp)

As a long-time P.O.D. fan, it’s been sad seeing a band, which was once on top of the world, struggle for any relevance for nearly twenty years now. VERITAS marks the first time since at least 2012’s Murdered Love that P.O.D. has gotten an actual marketing push behind them, with several singles released to hype up the album. P.O.D. always does something different with each new release, but VERITAS sees the band leaning into their a heavier, more straight-forward hard rock side (in fact, their signature reggae elements are practically non-existent this time around). The highlight of the album is easily “AFRAID TO DIE”, featuring some of the strongest music and lyrics that the band has put out in the last decade, which has made it the band’s biggest hit in years. Other highlights include “DROP”, which is one of the heaviest tracks P.O.D. have ever put out (featuring Randy Blythe of Lamb of God, no less), “LIES WE TELL OURSELVES”, and “I WON’T BOW DOWN”. Other tracks are fine, but unremarkable, like “I GOT THAT”, “LAY ME DOWN”, and “THIS IS MY LIFE”. The album itself is barely over half an hour, so it doesn’t last very long (nor does it outstay its welcome). Overall, VERITAS has some great tracks on it, but they’re offset by an equal number of unmemorable tracks, making for a bit of a mixed bag in the end. Still, it’s heartwarming to see P.O.D. getting some recognition again and I hope that they can really capture that success when the next album cycle rolls around.

7) OMNI, Pt. 2, Project 86

I’ve had very complicated feelings about Project 86 and OMNI, but I went over those in last year’s album list, so I’m not going to repeat it here again. Suffice to say, we’re back for what is apparently Project 86’s final studio album, bringing another round of social media paranoia and heavy metalcore music. Unsurprisingly, this release is very much a “part two”, carrying on immediately from where the first album left off and making for a seamless double album listen. Pt. 2 is largely the same as the previous album, although it does differentiate itself a bit by not being bogged down by extended interludes, and is even heavier, angrier, and even more paranoid than the previous album was. Unfortunately, I’m still soured on Project 86 for aforementioned reasons, so while I can acknowledge that this is a solid album, I’m sad that I can’t enjoy it the way I’d like to. Maybe someday I’ll be able to look back on Project 86 with different eyes and, at that time, OMNI will stand as a beacon marking the end of an impressive career.

6) Stories to Forget EP, Words of Farewell (Bandcamp)

Words of Farewell have a pretty well-established sound at this point, putting out epic, industrial-tinged, melodic death metal. I’ve always enjoyed their new releases, and Stories to Forget is more of the same in that regard. From the opening moments, Stories to Forget is clearly Words of Farewell doing what they do well, but damn if it is not enjoyable. My favourite tracks here include “A Lesser King” and “Mono No Aware”, but you really can’t go wrong with any track on Stories to Forget. Also of interest is “This Mirage, My Likeness”, which is basically a cover of “This Shadow My Likeness” from their album A Quiet World, but given a very different sound which makes it an interesting companion piece. All-in-all, Stories to Forget is not reinventing the wheel, but it is an enjoyable little collection of solid music that is sure to please any fans of Words of Farewell.

5) Erebus EP, REMINA (Bandcamp)

Since REMINA’s debut album released in 2022, I’ve found myself drawn back to STRATA again and again as a go-to chill, melancholy, atmospheric listen. Suffice to say, I’ve been looking forward to their next project ever since. Erebus is a stop-gap release of sorts, songs that were produced as part of an upcoming album, but which did not fit with the album’s themes. Rather than discard them, REMINA decided to release them as their own stand-alone thing. As a result, Erebus does have a somewhat incoherent feel to it, but the tracks that we have gotten are solid. REMINA are clearly trying to expand their sound beyond the atmospheric, chill, haunting, cosmic doom they established on STRATA, which is best exemplified with this EP’s title track and “Siren’s Sleep”. “Cinderfall” hews closer to what I’d expect from this band, but “Siren’s Sleep” is really the highlight here. It has a more traditional doom metal sound to it and features male vocals which contrast well with Heike Langhans’ poignant voice. If this is what REMINA’s cast-offs sound like, I cannot wait for the full album to get into my hands.

4) LIFA Iotungard (Live), Heilung (Bandcamp)

The original LIFA is easily my favourite Heilung release: the live setting works so well for their style of ritualistic, Neolithic folk music. Naturally, when I heard that Heilung were releasing a second live album, I was excited to see if it could capture that same sort of energy. While I can say that, for the most part, LIFA Iotungard succeeds, there’s a couple nagging issues which make me enjoy it less than I’d like. First of all, the quality of the recording is a bit worse compared to LIFA, sounding like some of the performers aren’t mic’d up and are getting recorded from halfway across the venue. Secondly, there is a lot of overlap in the setlist between LIFA and Iotungard, with only four new tracks added to this set. If this is your first Heilung experience, then you probably won’t mind, but if you’re like me and have listened to LIFA many times over the years, it’s probably a bit disappointing, especially since new tracks like “Svanrand”, “Norupo” and “Traust” are major highlights here. It also probably doesn’t help that this was performed and recorded in 2021, long before Heilung released Drif, so their options for new songs to perform was more limited than it would have been if they had released a more recent live recording. Really though, this is largely nitpicking – LIFA Iotungard is a spellbinding listen from start to finish. If you have not listened to Heilung before, then you owe it to yourself to experience the hypnotic splendor of tracks like “Alfadhirhaiti”, “Othan” and “In Maidjan”, especially in a live setting like this.

3) CONCRETE JUNGLE [THE OST], Bad Omens

Since topping my list of best albums of 2022, Bad Omens have found themselves become arguably the biggest new band in metal, leading the charge for a new movement of pop-metal fusion bands. It’s kind of a cool moment for me, because I’ve never had a band I liked suddenly become popular. Interestingly, Bad Omens have decided to follow-up this success with an experimental album which gives me some hope for the band’s future. My biggest hang-up with The Death of Peace of Mind was always that I feared that Bad Omens would drop their metal roots altogether, but CONCRETE JUNGLE [THE OST] suggests a future where Bad Omens doubles down on the pop elements and the metal elements simultaneously, which is enticing to say the least.

CONCRETE JUNGLE [THE OST] is basically a three-part “expansion pack” to The Death of Peace of Mind, featuring new tracks, remixes, and some live performances, for a meaty, hour-and-a-half release. The remixes and live tracks are all what you’d expect, so I won’t labour on them, but the real meat of this release is in the nine new tracks (one of which is a cover of a song from the first Bad Omens album). These new tracks have a distinctly cyberpunk feel to them, weaving pop, metal, and industrial elements together in a way that just bores into your skull and stays there. My favourite of the bunch is “THE DRAIN”, which has an absolutely killer, heavy bassline which you can’t help but headbang along to. Other highlights here include the infectious “V.A.N.”, “ANYTHING > HUMAN” , and the heavy EDM stylings of “NERVOUS SYSTEM”. Really, for an album billed as an experimental supplement, CONCRETE JUNGLE [THE OST] is brimming with ideas and great music and makes for a great listen in its own right. Add in the fact that they also threw in an entire album of remixes AND an entire live album as gravy, and this release is just an absolute treat. I may have had some hesitation about Bad Omens’ future after TDOPOM, but after CONCRETE JUNGLE [THE OST], I can’t wait to see what the band has in store for us going forward.

2) Shining, Swallow the Sun (Bandcamp)

Since I discovered them in 2020, Swallow the Sun have become one of my all-time favourite bands. Their brand of doom metal mixes beauty and melancholy in such an evocative way. Their past couple albums have been grappling with the tragic passing of Aleah Stanbridge, the partner of songwriter Juho Raivio, which has clearly affected the band’s musical output. Moonflowers was particularly dour and depressing, but it seems like Swallow the Sun have turned the page for Shining. If I had to liken it to one of their previous albums, I’d say it’s closest to Emerald Forest and the Blackbird: it’s still definitely extreme/doom metal, but there’s much more of a focus on melody and catchy songwriting (“Under the Moon & the Sun” is probably the best example of this). Every track here is solid and easy to listen to, to the point where I’d argue that this is the most accessible Swallow the Sun album ever put out. So what are you waiting for then? If you haven’t listened to Swallow the Sun yet, then there’s no better time than now!

1) Welcome to Suffocate City, The Funeral Portrait (Bandcamp)

Earlier this year, one of my friends excitedly recommended me a song they had discovered. I decided to check it out and that was my introduction to The Funeral Portrait. I really dug their emo rock sound and hungrily devoured every song they had put out. They reminded me a lot of early Marilyn Manson, except not garbage and without the edgelord pontification. It looks like I got onto the train just in time, because shortly thereafter, The Funeral Portrait were an up-and-coming supporting act for big bands and they announced their first big album in years, Greetings From Suffocate City. About half of the tracks on it had already been released as singles, and they were all great, so I already knew that this was album of the year material for me.

Greetings From Suffocate City is just packed front to back with great rock tracks. “Holy Water”, “Greetings From Suffocate City”, “You’re So Ugly When You Cry”, “Happier Than You”, “Alien”, and “Generation Psycho” are all well-worth a listen and any one of them would easily be stand-outs on a weaker album. In my opinion, the diamond that shines the brightest is “Dark Thoughts”. This is the track that first got me into The Funeral Portrait. For the album release, they’ve turned it into a duet with Danny Worsnop, which compliments the track’s bluesy feel. It’s easily one of my favourite tracks of 2024, but “Voodoo Doll” is a close second, with a powerful message which is made all the better with the soaring guest vocals from Eva Under Fire. Greetings From Suffocate City is a triumph and I hope it heralds great things for The Funeral Portrait going forward.

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15 Best Movie Posters of 2024

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

It’s mid-December, so that means another count-down of my favourite movie posters of the past year! In case you’re unfamiliar with how this works, I spend the year trolling through impawards and collecting all the really cool, interesting and striking poster designs for 2024 movies and then narrow them down into a shortlist. As always, any poster released during the year is eligible to make the list, but special consideration is given to posters which are intended for mass distribution rather than posters which are intended to be limited-release, alternative, “artistic” posters. As usual, you can see the full-sized poster in all its glory if you click on the images.

Anyway, with those considerations out of the way, let’s get onto the list, starting with some dishonourable mentions:

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Bloodline Killer is a badass title for a horror movie, and this poster is trying its damnedest to be edgy, but it just comes across as goofy to me. Maybe this movie is good, but this poster sure as hell isn’t making that case for me (also, that axe head is tiny).

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“OH FUCK ME“, I literally said when I saw this poster with Matt Walsh’s shitty, fucking face plastered on it. All that this poster makes me want to say, upon seeing it, is “yes, you are, you piece of shit”. That said: I’ve heard that the movie is not nearly as bad as it looks. I may, in legitimately good faith, check it out just to see if that’s true.

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Yeah… they’ve made another one of these movies (two, actually, since I last covered the series). Unfortunately, God’s Not Dead 3‘s more moderate message was rejected by the audience, so they went back to full-on conservative circle-jerking for these last two movies. In God We Trust appears to be the most overtly-political of them all, featuring Pastor Dave trying to run for office… good fucking God, given how bad the other movies were, I cannot begin to imagine how awful this one will be. I am probably going to do another Retrospectives catch-up in 2025 covering all the new movies in existing Retrospectives series, so expect more suffering from me when I get around to watching this…

And with that said, let’s get into our top 15 proper:

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15) The Wild Robot

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a simple man. You put a cute fox on your movie poster, and you’ve instantly caught my attention. That said, these posters genuinely do a great job selling the movie: a sense of wonder, joy, and mystery with charming characters, reminiscent of The Iron Giant. Hell yeah, I’d love to see that, sign me up.

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14) Twisters

Twisters made for a pretty good, back-to-basics summer blockbuster. Lots of excitement and mayhem, with a fun, Hallmark-style romantic drama at its center. These posters for Twisters do a good job of letting you know what you’re in for: the wonder and terror of nature, and how powerless our heroes will be in the face of it. Also, probably goes without saying, but the posters hearken back to the iconic poster for Twister, so it also promises to be a good time like that movie was (I’d say they succeeded).

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13) Alien: Romulus

Even if you know nothing about the Alien movies, this poster for Alien: Romulus is uncomfortable. If you do know what a Facehugger does to you, this poster is downright disturbing. The overwhelming red gradient makes the poster eye-catching, while also feeling threatening and alarming. A very well-composed and considered poster all-round, does a great job appealing to Alien fans and general horror audiences too who may be less familiar with the franchise.

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12) Destroy All Neighbors

This year’s “what the fuck is this movie!?” poster, Destroy All Neighbors is certainly eye-catching. Initially this appeared blasphemous – the guy looks and is posed like zombie Jesus. However, after a bit more analysis, I think the guy got electrocuted, which burned his face off? It looks pretty wild and wacky and it makes me kind of want to know what the hell is going on in this movie.

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11) Despicable Me 4

I haven’t cared about Despicable Me since the first movie came out, but I will say that this poster is pretty cool. I like how they’ve composed the image: first you look at Gru, then the goofy minion trying to look like a badass, and then up to the baby. Really sells what this movie’s going for: a colourful, light-hearted, comedic, family-friendly spy caper.

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10) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

While not as grand as some of the posters for Fury Road, I kind of like that Furiosa is going for its own thing here. Furiosa is posed like a saint in a medieval painting, a connection which is only reinforced by the adoring skeletons and war boys at her feet. The car parts everywhere remind the audience that high-octane vehicular action is at the core of this series’ identity. Having everything in the poster be made out of gold highlights this film’s turn into grandiose myth-making. It’s a very cool poster in its own right, the sort of thing you’d be stoked to mount on your wall, but the extra depth just makes it all the better.

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9) The Apprentice

Admittedly, I didn’t want to put this film on the list. I was sick of Donald fucking Trump in 2017, I sure as hell did not want to see his stupid, fucking face when this movie came out, and the 2024 election results have just made me hate the idea of anything Trump repulsive. That said, when I had to make my list, I couldn’t help but begrudgingly accept that this is one of the best posters of the year. It’s appropriately gaudy, invoking the desperation of Trump to appear rich. Sebastian Stan looks perfect as Trump, to the point where I kind of want the movie to turn into Inglourious Basterds in the third act… Jeremy Strong looming over it all makes you wonder what part he has in shaping Trump as well. As much as I hate to admit it, this is really solid poster.

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8) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

I am happy to report that the latest Planet of the Apes film had some of the most visually-interesting posters of the year. I particularly like the center poster, which references the colours and composition of the original film’s poster, while also working in a destroyed cityscape and the main characters. I also really like how much they set the king ape up as a real sinister bastard. Considering that the previous films set the apes up as the good guys, it’s good to remind the audience that there’s going to be a shift in tone going forward, with the established moral lines being much more grey. I haven’t actually gotten the chance to see Kingdom yet, but these posters certainly suggest that it will be a good time.

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7) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

A new Monsterverse movie released this year and, once again, the marketing team was on-point, giving us some of the most visually striking posters of the year. While I do think that Godzilla x Kong‘s posters are a step down from their previous work, and they haven’t given us anywhere near the same number of absolute bangers, what we did get still looks really cool. Hopefully next time they step their game up a bit more, because I’d love to see Godzilla top one of these count-downs once more.

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6) Art of a Hit

Like Alien: Romulus, Art of a Hit uses red to invoke threat and alarm. Unlike Alien: Romulus, I do not know what this movie is about, and it makes my mind brim with imagination. We’ve got five characters, presumably a rock band central to the narrative. The guitar is dripping blood, suggesting that this isn’t just a standard music biopic – some pretty nasty events are going to play out. The title itself is clearly a double-entendre, promising murder will be involved. I had never heard of this movie, but this poster legitimately has got me interested, which means it’s doing its job. Bravo, poster.

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5) Back to Black

I do not particularly care about Amy Winehouse’s music, but damn, even I am impressed by how perfectly they’ve transformed Marisa Abela to look like her for this poster. I also appreciate that they’re being respectful here – they don’t invoke the a lurid, grimy side of Winehouse’s life here. Instead, they celebrate her at her peak, the best image of her that the public would have seen. Sure, it’s probably all in service of yet another Oscar-bait music biopic, but this poster is at least promising.

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4) In a Violent Nature

Speaking of grimy posters, In a Violent Nature‘s posters absolutely deliver what you’d want to see out of a brutal, old-school slasher film. I especially like the first two posters, which use evocative, messy stills to invoke 70s grindhouse film advertisements. They don’t show too much directly, but the implications are all there that you’re in for a bloody, nasty time. The third poster is more modern and conventional for a slasher film, reminding me of the sorts of posters we got for My Bloody Valentine 3D. All-in-all, these are some pretty impressive posters for an indie slasher film, easily some of my favourites of the year.

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3) Terrifier 3

Of course, as far as grimy, nasty, old-school posters go, it would be pretty hard to top Terrifier 3. True to form, these posters are fucking gross, which is entirely appropriate for a Terrifier film. I’m not a huge fan of art that is shocking and violent solely for the sake of getting people offended (Crossed, Cannibal Corpse’s entire discography, etc), but these posters are absolutely warranted in the case of Terrifier 3, considering that they intentionally market this franchise as “movies so shocking that only the most hardcore of audiences can make it through them”. The Christmas imagery just makes this even more offensive, likely intended to be evocative of the moral panic which occurred around Silent Night, Deadly Night.

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2) A Quiet Place: Day One

In an industry inundated with meaningless character posters and Drew Struzan rip-offs, I am always a sucker for a good “simple” poster, which A Quiet Place: Day One nails beautifully. You will see the image and the warnings before you realize what movie is being advertised, due to the small title. In my opinion, this makes them much more effective. In addition, they also have some more subtle additional details about the film’s setting and the importance of obeying the “rules” to survive in this world. As for the last poster for Dolby Cinema, it’s very much an ad (the double-Ds take up more real estate than the actual movie being promoted), but I love how elegantly it communicates the importance of sound in these particular films. It straight-up sells me on the idea that, yeah, seeing this movie in Dolby Cinema would probably be the ideal way to go about it.

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1) Longlegs

These posters for Longlegs perfectly combine my favourite things about a good subtle poster and a good horror movie poster. It reminds me a lot of 2018 best poster runner-up, The Clovehitch Killer, where the there isn’t really any one “thing” going on with it to tell you what the movie is about… however, the image is so beautifully shot and composed that it communicates far more than you might expect at first glance. The first poster is downright disturbing – why the fuck is she holding that knife to her belly?! That doesn’t look like the face of someone who is scared. The implications are profoundly unsettling. Meanwhile, the poster featuring Maika Monroe is just her reaction to something horrifying. We see that she has a gun, and she’s still terrified. Naturally, this gets your imagination going, wondering what she could have seen: did she see the end-result of the previous poster? I don’t know, but it is very effective.

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My 100 Worst Movies of All-Time (25-1)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

25. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Kicking off our bottom twenty-five, we have another legendarily bad sequel, Jaws: The Revenge. Suffice to say, this movie’s as bad as everyone has said. Again, this is another horror sequel that just kills off its most famous characters, making Sherriff Brody die of a heart attack off-screen and then having his son, Sean, get killed by the shark at the very start of the film. It just feels insulting to the series’ legacy and is such a lame way to try to make us give a shit about Ellen Brody… that’s right, the main fucking character of this movie is the mom who is basically window-dressing in the previous films. This could work with a hell of a writer who tries to flesh out her character, but this is Jaws: The Revenge: of course we don’t give a shit about her. The film is just fucking boring, and rehashes the original film for most of the runtime, only a thousand times worse and with nonsensical plot developments which make the shark seem like it has psychic powers. I generally find that the movies most notorious for being bad are over-hyped: sure, they’re bad, but they were also famous enough that a general audience would recognize them. For the real bad shit, you usually have to look into the more obscure films which lack even professionalism. Jaws: The Revenge, on the other hand, is one of those bad movies that has well and truly earned its reputation. Like I said before: the 80s were a wild time for baffling, theatrically-released stinkers.

24. BloodRayne (2005)

Oh hey, BloodRayne has an entry in both my all-time worst games and worst movies list, what an accomplishment! Once again, we’re looking at a Uwe Boll video game adaptation “classic”. Despite its star-studded cast (which includes Michael Madsen, Billy Zane, Udo Kier, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez, Meat Loaf, and Kristanna Loken, fresh off Terminator 3, as Rayne), the film feels completely amateur on every level you can think of. It makes for an incredibly shoddy film, which attempts to create this huge fantasy epic, but with basically no talent, budget, or capability to do such a thing. It doesn’t even feel like this is a passion project for Boll, everything is just lazily done. It’s not even as laughably entertaining as some of his other, more notorious efforts either.

23. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Even by the standards of 90s slasher sequels, Freddy’s Dead is just the worst. The film is so embarrassing: New Line Cinema clearly viewed Freddy Krueger as a global icon, and so they removed the last shreds of horror from him to give him more mass appeal. Instead, they just play up his one-liners, making him completely insufferable. The result is like one of those corporate mascots who is marketed as edgy, but they can’t actually be edgy or they’ll piss some people off, so they just come across as lame instead.

The film looks incredibly cheap, which is why it’s so shocking that they actually had a fairly large budget to work with. Its plot is also downright insane, immediately starting with the premise that, in a ten year period, Freddy has killed every single teenager in Springwood, except one. That is just monstrous and gets glossed over almost immediately. It also just suffers every pitfall you’d expect a bad slasher sequel to fall into (bad acting, bad narrative, tired formula, etc).

That said: Carlos’ death scene is still a solid, grade-A kill, and the one time that the cartoonish tone actually works for the movie.

22. Pompeii (2014)

I would say that this movie was a bigger disaster than the real-life eruption of Vesuvius, but that would be just insensitive, stupid and uninspired… oh hey, all of those words COULD describe Pompeii adequately though. Pompeii is clearly trying to be a mix of Gladiator and Titanic: a lowly gladiator and a high-born merchant’s daughter fall in love and try to evade her betrothed and survive the natural disaster going on around them, only to be met with tragedy at the end. Unsurprisingly, Kit Harrington and Emily Browning put in terrible performances as the lead characters. Only Kiefer Sutherland puts in an enjoyable performance, as he hams it up like mad as the primary antagonist. The actual eruption sequences are about as loud, CGI-filled, and over the top as you’d expect. The eruption of Vesuvius has a ton of potential for a great film, but you’re not going to find it here. Stay as far away as possible.

21. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

This… this movie did not get a theatrical release. In 1997!? No, there is no way they would do that. I literally am having to look this up as I’m writing this, because I do not believe it happened. Not with this level of quality. No, that is not possible, no one in their right mind would think that this movie belongs on a theater screen. OH MY FUCKING GOD, IT GROSSED $51.3 MILLION!??!

I legitimately think that the original Mortal Kombat is one of the best video game adaptations of all-time. This sequel is staggeringly bad, even by the standards of video game movies. The acting is abysmal. The narrative is nonsense. The special effects look horrendous. The fights are terrible. The sets and costumes look so fake. THIS MOVIE HAD A $30 MILLION BUDGET!?!?!!!?

It might sound like I hated Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, but I actually love it. It is a special kind of bad, one which is utterly unhinged and never boring. However, it is because of that love that I have to put Annihilation in the place it deserves: near the top of the worst movies of all-time list.

20. Dogman (2012)

I’ve long had a fascination with the legend of the Michigan Dogman, a werewolf-like beast said to roam the woods of its namesake state. So, when I found out that someone was making a movie based on the cryptid, I was immediately interested. Hell, I saw a copy of the Blu-ray of this movie at an HMV back in the day for like $30 or $40, but I was so interested that I almost went and paid that outrageous amount for it. THANK GOD I did not, because it would have been the worst purchase of my life. I’d love to say that Dogman is this plucky, indie film success story, but it is anything but that. The film looks so cheap that you could confuse it with a home video. The narrative is incredibly dull, with no suspense at all. The acting is below even amateur. Oh, and to make it all worse, the film just ends anti-climactically, leaving you feeling even more pissed off after all that. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but Dogman really left an impression on me that I vividly remember it for just how bad and boring it was and will often bring it up whenever I’m asked what the worst movies I’ve ever seen were.

19. Monster Hunter (2020)

Boy, Paul W.S. Anderson sure is getting a lot of spots on this bottom twenty-five list, isn’t he? I’m not even exaggerating when I say that Paul W.S. Anderson has to be the worst writer-director and producer in Hollywood these days. After ruining the Resident Evil film franchise, Anderson and Milla Jovovich turned their sights to another Capcom video game franchise: Monster Hunter… and, somehow, they’ve managed to make an even more insulting adaptation of their source material.

Now, I do think that Monster Hunter could make for an interesting high-fantasy film series if it’s confined to the world of the games and features a character learning to hunt these monsters that threaten civilization. Instead, Anderson goes for that lucrative US military propaganda money and makes this a dimension-hopping misadventure where a bunch of marines get pulled into a portal to a world full of monsters. Pretty much everything here sucks, particularly the direction and breakneck pacing. The film barely makes use of the Monster Hunter concept of preparing for the hunt ahead, which is nuts considering that’s entirely what those games are about. Instead, this is just another brainless Paul W.S. Anderson flick that will entertain only the most undiscerning of tastes.

18. Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

Silent Hill: Revelation is staggering for how badly it captures the appeal of its series. The original Silent Hill is definitely one of the better video game adaptations (which is to say that it’s not great, but has some interesting ideas and captures the tone perfectly). It pretty much laid the blueprint for what a sequel would need to do: use the same brand of spooky, psychological of horror and aesthetic, but just have a stronger story this time and you’ll make a legitimately great film, guaranteed. Revelation didn’t give a shit about that. Released at the height of the garbage Silent Hill games and the 3D movie trend, Revelation discards its predecessor’s lessons entirely and instead dives face-first into a pile of shit. Gone is any attempt at psychological horror, this is just the most generic horror slop you could imagine. Seriously, this film is a total disaster: the writing, the acting, the special effects, the direction… everything. Like, I don’t want to be “that guy”, but I’m certain that even I could make a better Silent Hill film than this.

17. Alone in the Dark (2005)

Yet another Uwe Boll classic, Alone in the Dark gets us near the top of his game. Like BloodRayne, this film feels embarrassingly amateur. This can be felt the moment the film begins. Like, you know that a movie is going to be bad when it opens with a lengthy narration which explains the movie’s backstory. It just keeps going on and on to the point that it’s comical. Legend has it that this narration was added after test audiences said that they couldn’t understand what was going on in the film, which caused Boll to over-explain everything in response. The rest of the film isn’t much better, as it’s a horror movie that is direly short on scares. That said, there is one pretty cool moment halfway through where a bunch of soldiers have a shootout with a bunch of monsters in the dark, which is lit only by their muzzle flashes as they get swarmed. It’s the sort of cool sequence that makes the rest of the movie feel even more boring in comparison… like, you’re telling me you could have been doing that this entire time?

16. Vanished (2016)

Vanished was so bad when I watched it for this year’s Left Behind retrospective that it was legitimately shocking. It is just so cynical, stapling a gaggle of YA movie tropes onto a Walking Dead narrative, and then loosely tying it to Left Behind in an attempt to appeal to general audiences. That said, it’s hilarious that about 80% of this movie is a pissing contest between conservative evangelicals and conservative libertarians. That at least makes the movie kind of interesting, but the film is so badly made that it’s almost unwatchable. I legitimately think that Tim LaHaye was lying to his grandson when he said that he liked the movie, and the fact that he died shortly after watching it… well, I’m not gonna say that the movie did him in, but hopefully it left him with one more massive disappointment before the end.

15. God’s Not Dead 2 (2016)

God’s Not Dead 2 is a torturous watch. It’s the absolute worst example of the American evangelical Christian persecution complex in action, a propaganda piece which is so transparently cynical in its construction. Atheists are portrayed as a bunch of God-hating body snatchers who love nothing more than to ruin the lives of poor, innocent, put-upon Christians who never bothered anyone in their lives. The entire premise here is ridiculous, but even the filmmakers realize this, because after all their posturing about how the government and courts are biased against Christians… they end up siding with the Christians, because there’s literally no case here that can be made against them. The film doesn’t even make this out like there’s a big, clever twist that the Christians use to save themselves, it just fucking happens. Like… I can’t believe I’m defending Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist again, but at least that movie tries to justify its propaganda and persecution complex by having it be set in a nebulous near-future where the government has taken over everyone’s lives after an unprecedented emergency. Getting any enjoyment out of God’s Not Dead 2 requires you to be fucking deluded.

14. Fantasy Island (2020)

Oh, speaking of movies that shocked me with how bad they were… I wasn’t expecting much out of a Fantasy Island remake, but somehow this movie managed to be worse than I could ever have imagined. This is supposed to be a professionally-made film with big-name actors, an experienced director, and a great production studio, so how is this the result of all that talent!? The film is entirely bereft of any sort of scares or tension, which would be bad enough, but the writing is also incredibly dumb and the characters are paper-thin and uninteresting. About the only fun in this movie was when the two brothers were on screen because, while they were a couple of stereotypical “bro” types, they were at least enjoying themselves… so maybe I’m just jealous, because I sure as hell was not enjoying myself watching this shitty film.

13. Piranha 3DD (2012)

Piranha 3D is a surprisingly solid horror film, with some of the gnarliest gore I’ve ever seen in my life thanks to Alexandre Aja’s involvement. It’s also just really fun, bringing in creative kills, big set-piece carnage, and an unabashedly sleazy tone that we rarely get out of a big movie like this these days, all wrapped around a very competently told Jaws-like narrative.

Piranha 3DD attempts to double down on the sleaze, the humour, and the cameos, but the resulting film is so much worse than its predecessor in every way imaginable. The humour and sleaze have been pushed to a point where it just makes the film stupid… like, the first movie had a guy get his dick bit off and then eaten and regurgitated by the piranhas, so in the sequel we need to have more penis trauma, right? How do they go about this? Well, a baby piranha… swims up a girl’s vagina… Somehow she does not really notice that there’s a fish swimming around in there, and this piranha doesn’t do what every other piranha in this series has done up to this point. Anyway, she has sex with her boyfriend, who gets a piranha biting him in the dick for his troubles. How does he deal with this problem? If you said “he grabs a knife and cuts his own dick off!”… then congrats, you’re as insane as the people who made this film. That’s the level of contrived, tired bullshit this fucking movie is subjecting you to.

12. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

Speaking of bad horror sequels to Alexandre Aja movies which double down on the things their predecessor did, The Hills Have Eyes 2 left me fucking infuriated. The Hills Have Eyes remake (and the original before it) is notorious for having a character get raped by the villainous mutant cannibals. It’s stomach-churning stuff, but it’s shot in a tasteful way that really emphasizes the horror of the act and its effect on the women involved. Anyway, want to take a guess what aspect of the first movie The Hills Have Eyes 2 doubles down on? Yeah, the movie opens with a woman, who has been raped who knows how many times by these cannibals, giving birth to a mutant baby, and then is immediately killed by the mutants. Oh yay, cheap, mean-spirited sexual abuse and violence against women, just what I wanted… Later on, we also get a full-on rape scene after the cannibals capture one of the main characters. It’s infuriating, because the film makes you think she’s going to fight her way out before anything can actually happen to her, but no, right after she beats up her attempted rapist, a stronger cannibal immediately shows up and then he rapes her. Making matters even more despicable, the goddamn thing’s shot like a fucking porno.

The movie isn’t just shit for the ham-fisted and juvenile handling of sexual violence though. This movie attempts to follow the Aliens sequel template by having a bunch of marines fight against these mutants… but, my God, these are the worst soldiers I have ever seen on-screen. They act like a bunch of children in a Call of Duty lobby, rather than actual trained soldiers. I don’t care how much these cannibals know the terrain, they got killed by a dog and a pissed off nerd in the last film, they wouldn’t stand a chance against a squad of trained marines with guns. Fuck this piece of shit movie, I despise it.

11. Lost City Raiders (2008)

We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Lost City Raiders is a TV movie about a bunch of Indiana Jones-style adventurers who look for relics after global warming has flooded most of the Earth. As you’d expect, the acting, effects, and narrative are terrible. Unfortunately, it also has a budget which would make a shoestring take pity on it. This film’s big MacGuffin is an ancient staff which is obviously made of plastic. At least it’s somewhat entertaining, but this movie is so painfully far from its ambitions that it’s downright pitiful.

10. Noobz (2012)

Man… 2013 was a different time. In a pre-Trump, pre-Gamergate, pre-anti-woke grifter world, Noobz legitimately seemed like an outdated portrayal of gamer stereotypes. Not even a year later, it would turn out that a large contingent of gamers actually were proud of being racists, homophobes, and general assholes and wanted you to know it. So… yeah, Noobz is basically Gamergate: The Movie. Even if that wasn’t enough to turn you off, the “comedy” here is awful, just a bunch of “edgy” stuff that sounds like it was cooked up by a teenager. Like… I don’t care how much you want to offend people, if the bulk of your comedy revolves around constantly making fun of a character’s life-threatening disability, and making fun of a character for being really obviously gay, you really need to diversify your jokes and get some actual fucking taste. This movie was pathetic in 2012. Now it’s just annoying in a world where fuckwits like Grummz exist to jerk off the losers who look at Noobz and think that it speaks to them.

9. Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? (2014)

I really cannot understate just how badly made Atlas Shrugged Part III is. As bad as its predecessors were, you can at least tell that John Aglialoro and company were trying to make something good – they just were too inept to actually pull it off. However, after bleeding tens of millions of dollars on those movies, it feels like Part III exists only out of obligation and pure spite. Part III is cheap and shoddy to a shocking degree, to the point where I was constantly having to pause the film to take notes about some ridiculous detail I noticed. This happened so frequently that I ended up doubling the film’s runtime from all the notes I took. It’s not even like the film itself is all that interesting: it’s mostly just a bunch of time wasting to try to fill out a feature length and then get it all over with. The politics also get downright insane, ending with a scene where Dagny shoots a guard who would rather discuss a toddler’s understanding of the philosophy of free will rather than just get the fuck out of the way when told to… oh, and we’re supposed to think Dagny is righteous for doing this. If there was ever an indictment of Randian philosophy, there can be no clearer example than Atlas Shrugged Part III. It comprehensively shits all over the entire philosophy in both narrative and in its tawdry execution.

8. House of the Dead (2003)

House of the Dead is our final Uwe Boll entry and another shocking example of a movie that got a theatrical release. I legitimately do not understand how someone could see this movie and then say “people need to see this in theaters!” In a lot of ways, it’s an incredibly generic 2000s teen horror movie, but Boll packs in some proper batshit insanity which make this movie unintentionally hilarious. My jaw was agape so many times while watching this movie because I couldn’t believe that Uwe Boll had actually put something so ridiculous to film. We’re talking action sequences which are filmed on a turntable, so Boll can get copious amounts of slo-mo shots while the camera spins around the actors, and there are even sequences of the video game spliced into the film at complete random. While it may be easily one of the worst video game movies ever made, it’s also incredibly watchable and a lot of fun mock.

7. The Room (2003)

The Room is legendary for its poor quality and insane writing. The subsequent decades, and the release of The Disaster Artist, have pulled back the curtain on this film’s bizarre aspects in a way that actually makes the entire thing an interesting exploration of Tommy Wiseau’s own psychology. However, even with that in mind, The Room is legendarily bad for a reason and deserves every bit of its reputation, even if it is one of the most fascinating and unintentionally funny bad movies of all-time.

6. Teenage Zombies (1959)

Again, here’s a temperature check so you understand just how far down on this list we are in terms of quality: Teenage Zombies is a no-budget, Z-grade sci-fi movie from the 50s with basically no filmmaking talent to speak of. Hell, long stretches of it are shot more like a stage play than a movie… not for any stylistic reason, just because everyone involved had no idea what the fuck they were doing. The film also features the world’s worst gorilla costume, and the poor guy inside has clearly been given no direction, so he just kind of stands there awkwardly and wriggles around every once in a while as the camera just lingers on him pathetically. It’s not even particularly fun either, it’s just boring. A friend of mine actually bought this movie on DVD when we were in high school, and it turned out that the DVD distributor had inserted a softcore porn feature at the start of the film. I don’t know if that was just put in to try to try to sell copies of the DVD, but I am certain that that was infinitely more enjoyable than Teenage Zombies.

5. Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009)

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus was my warning to never again trust movies that sell themselves as “so bad it’s good”. This movie was infamous on release for its ridiculous scenes of giant sharks jumping out of the ocean to catch passing jet liners. These scenes are indeed hilarious… but they are also where literally all of the money has been spent, because they are intended to go viral and sell copies of the film to the morbidly curious. However, there are no funny secrets hiding here waiting to be discovered: it’s just a bunch of wheel-spinning and constantly reused CGI shots until they can get to the ending. I bought this for five dollars on DVD, because I figured it would be funny-bad. It wasn’t. It was soul-crushingly awful. They even forgot to key out the green screen at one point! Did literally no one even watch the movie before releasing it!? I’m not even kidding here, I want my ninety minutes and five dollars back.

4. Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

Another legendarily bad “classic”, Birdemic is a surreal experience. It’s basically like if someone ripped off The Birds, but shot the whole thing on a handicam, hired the world’s worst actors, and then used literal animated gifs for the birds. There is actually a legitimate message here about environmentalism and love, so you can tell that writer-director James Nguyen really believed in this movie… he just has zero talent, so instead we get this. It’s also just really fucking dull for the first half, wasting so much time on a weirdly chaste romance that no one gives a single shit about… only to suddenly cut to a bunch of looping gifs of birds flying around and exploding. I nearly ran out of breath from laughing when this first happened, and some of the bird attacks are hilariously pathetic (they fight them with goddamn coat hangers!), but Birdemic is mostly just dull. Truly one of the worst movies ever made, but at least it made me laugh, which is more than I can say for…

3. Project X (2012)

I was not kidding back in the day when I said that I loathed Project X. A found footage film released at the height of that trend, Project X follows a group of teens who try to throw the biggest, craziest party of all-time. You’d think that this would be a formula for some fun hijinks, but Project X‘s cast of assholes make the whole affair insufferable. Costas is still the most infuriating character in cinema, up there with Dolores Umbridge in that class of characters that even Mother Theresa would murder with her bare hands if she met them. It literally nothing more than eighty-eight minutes of douche bags being douche bags, with no redeeming qualities. Even the party aspects aren’t that entertaining. Oh hey, it’s teenagers drinking, doing drugs, and… uh… pissing on each other and throwing Martin Klebba in an oven, because making fun of little people is always good for a laugh, right? Fuck this fucking piece of shit movie.

2. Scary Movie 5 (2013)

All of the other Scary Movie films were really bad, but they at least had the occasional laughs and the presence of such comedic talent as Anna Faris, Regina Hall, and Leslie Nielsen would help elevate the proceedings immensely. Scary Movie 5 has none of these qualities, making it a pathetic film to watch. The jokes are tired, stupid and go on for way too long. About the only good thing that I can say about this movie is that, for once in this franchise, at least it doesn’t lean into mean-spirited homophobia, transphobia, and making fun of people with disabilities… but, like, I shouldn’t have to congratulate the movie on that. The Zucker spoof movie was well and truly dead long before Scary Movie 5 came out, and the fact that this movie was still this bad after all that is just an indictment on humanity as a whole.

1. Howling: New Moon Rising (1995)

I cannot conceive of a movie worse than Howling: New Moon Rising. In every single way imaginable, this movie is abysmal. It is, allegedly, a werewolf movie which has more country music line dancing sequences than it does scenes with werewolves. The entire cast are extras… like, full-stop, there are no actors here. The film reuses copious amounts of footage from previous Howling movies in order to pad out its runtime. Nothing fucking happens in this movie until the last couple minutes, at which point we get the world’s worst werewolf costume and then the townsfolk immediately shoot it to death. There is literally nothing redeeming about this movie, it is pure garbage and makes the other Howling sequels look like fucking masterpieces in comparison.

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My 100 Worst Movies of All-Time (50-26)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

50. Halloween II (2009)

Credit where it’s due: Rob Zombie tries to do something completely new with the Halloween franchise for this sequel and he brings his own unique vision to the proceedings. Unfortunately, that vision fucking sucks. The first twenty minutes are absolutely wasted on a dream sequence, which feels like it’s been shoved in by studio mandate just to up Michael Meyers’ body count. Rob Zombie also had to force his wife into the film, so suddenly the entire Meyers family is getting visions of their ghost mother trying to bring them all together (yes, even Laurie Strode, who hasn’t seen her birth mother since she was a baby). The film wastes nearly an hour and a half before Michael even gets into Laurie’s vicinity, meaning that most of the film is a bunch of wheel-spinning, toothless kills, and spending time with straight-up unlikeable characters. It’s a senseless, nasty, nihilistic film that makes you feel like you’re punishing yourself by watching it.

49. Scary Movie 4 (2006)

In my initial drafting of this list, I nearly put every single Scary Movie entry in my bottom one hundred. I binged them all a few years ago, and it was one of the most torturous viewing experiences of my life. However, I know that the first two are kind of well-liked, and I didn’t remember exactly what I disliked so much about them (other than them being dumb and not very funny), so I kept most of them off. That’s not something I can say for Scary Movie 4 though. I’ve actually seen this particular entry a couple times over the years, and it was significantly worse on a revisit. It suffers the usual Scary Movie problems (a disjointed plot which is just a bunch of popular movie scenes mashed together and made “comedic” in the lowest common denominator way possible), but this one was also really lazy and offensive when it got to The Village portion of the plot. Of course these fucking hacks will make jokes about Adrien Brody’s character being autistic. And Bryce Dallas Howard’s character is blind, so they’ll have her walk into a crowded meeting hall and take a big dump, because she can’t see! Haha, fuck this piece of shit movie.

48. Batman & Robin (1997)

I distinctly remember seeing this film in theaters as a child, and my God, upon rewatching it, is is wild that they gave this a major release in the 90s. It was a different time, I guess. That said, Batman & Robin is a pretty entertaining watch, due to its very campy, Adam West-style humour, hammy acting, and wild production design. While I definitely think that moving Batman to a grittier style was a wise choice in response to this movie, Batman’s kind of missing this sillier side to the character after all these years, so Batman & Robin doesn’t feel nearly as blasphemous in 2024.

That said… still not a very good movie. There’s a reason it’s still on this list, after all, but it’s one of those movies that’s entertaining in its badness at least.

47. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985)

Oh and speaking of entertaining badness and insane theatrical releases, the only explanation I can think of for how we got Howling II is this: copious amounts of COCAINE. This movie is fucking batshit, and the only reason it isn’t completely unwatchable is due to committed performances from Christopher Lee and Sybil Danning, and its legitimately boppin’ New Wave soundtrack. That said, what other movies are you going to find where all the werewolves have wildly different makeup effects, a dude’s eyeballs explode out of his head, there’s a furry threesome, and Sybil Danning tears her shirt open in a shot that is repeated seventeen times during the end credits?

46. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

The reasons for this film’s failure are well-documented, but to sum it up: The Cannon Group purchased the rights to Superman, brought back Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, and Margot Kidder, promised a big budget, and even gave Reeve creative control, which led to the optimistic nuclear disarmament plot. However, when it actually came time to make the film, Cannon suddenly slashed the budget in half, leaving them with a shoestring budget to try to bring this superhero film to life. The results were pretty embarrassing, looking significantly worse than the original film from nine years earlier (for that matter, don’t even get me started on how poorly it holds up to the bombastic action of Superman II). Even if that hadn’t been an issue though, The Quest for Peace would have been a letdown due to just being poorly written, easily as bad or worse than Superman III in that regard.

45. Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Halloween: Resurrection is a bad movie in its own right, but it feels so much worse coming off of H20, which had been the first good Halloween movie in sixteen years. It’s like the Weinsteins made a good Halloween movie by mistake, said “Oops, gotta fix that,” and then immediately sent the franchise back to hell where it belongs. Resurrection commits the cardinal sin of bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis, putting her all over the advertising, and then kills her off in the opening minutes of the film. Oh, and they also undo the ending of H20 by making Michael’s titular resurrection one of the most ridiculous ass-pulls to force a sequel in cinema history (to be fair, this was planned at the time H20 was filmed, and you can kind of tell that that’s not Michael at the end of that film, but it’s so contrived).

And that’s just the first fifteen minutes! From there, Resurrection turns into a stupid, teen slasher movie which tries to riff on reality TV programs and livestreaming. The film is painfully early-2000s, with a kung-fu fighting Busta Rhymes, horror meta-commentary, found footage gimmicks, and a bunch of pretty, one-dimensional teenagers for Michael to carve up.

44. In the Name of the King 3: The Last Mission (2013)

I’ve seen a lot of Uwe Boll movies over the years. Most of his movies are utter shite, but occasionally you’ll get something from him which is borderline competent (Bloodrayne 2, Assault on Wall Street), or even good (Rampage… seriously, check it out), and you just want to give the guy a hug for pulling it off for once. One of those “good for a Uwe Boll movie” movies was In the Name of the King: Two Worlds, a decent action movie featuring Dolph Lundgren and Natassia Malthe (who I will always have a soft spot for due to her appearance in the best video game movie adaptation ever… also, a bit of a tangent here, but I have to give Boll major credit for keeping her employed, as she had been blacklisted in Hollywood by Harvey Weinstein after he raped her in 2008).

Anyway, all this to say, I actually had some hope for the third In the Name of the King movie going in. Unfortunately, The Last Mission feels like no one cared about it at all. Boll is clearly working on a miniscule budget, filming on location in Bulgaria with local, no-name actors, and over-utilizing an awful CGI dragon. Probably worst of all though, the film is in critical need of an editor because it has some of the most boring and drawn out action sequences I’ve ever seen.

43. The Santa Clause 2 (2002)

This movie deserves a special spot in my own personal hell due to how often my parents would put this stupid fucking movie on. I enjoyed the original Santa Clause as a kid, but this sequel was just worse in every way, with Tim Allen over-acting his ass off as an evil, toy Santa, an extremely contrived plot to force Scott Calvin to get married, and weird, talking reindeer who love to fart.

42. The Predator (2018)

The angriest I’ve ever been walking out of a theater may very well have been the time when I saw The Predator. I was pretty excited for this movie going in: it was being directed by Shane Black (fresh off of Iron Man 3) and featured Thomas Jane, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, and Yvonne Strahovski? Colour me interested! Unfortunately, the movie has been butchered to hell and back by Fox, with some of the strangest editing I’ve ever seen (the way that Traeger accidentally shoots himself in the face with his back to the camera would never have been filmed this way if this was actually intended to happen). I do appreciate that it tries to do something a little different with the Predator formula, evolving our understanding of the Predators in an interesting way, but for every interesting idea there are a half dozen which are incredibly stupid. The new bounty hunter Predator is almost all-business, and isn’t nearly as interesting as the classic honour-bound Predators, or even the sadistic Super Predators from Predators. This new Predator just massacres anyone that gets in its way, which goes against the entire appeal of the character. Don’t even get me started on the idiotic characters, or the ending, which is so bad that I walked out of the theater saying that they either had to decanonize this movie, or Predator as a franchise was dead. Thankfully, it seems that everyone involved in the franchise agreed.

41. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers (1995)

The title of “worst Halloween movie” is one that is fiercely contested, but I have to give the crown to The Curse of Michael Meyers. This is largely due to the film being butchered worse in the editing room than one of Michael’s victims, leaving the film largely incoherent. There are long stretches of the movie where stuff is happening, but none of it actually makes sense when you sit and think about it. The film also fails to deliver on the plot threads left dangling by the previous film, introducing the Cult of Thorn and then implying that it gives them power over Michael Meyers… for some reason. But that doesn’t matter, because Michael just decides to kill them all anyway. What an ignoble way to end the original Halloween franchise and Donald Pleasance’s career.

40. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)

As bad as the third In the Name of the King is, the original is even worse for me, just due to how much more it has going for it. We’ve got a great cast (Jason Statham! Ron Perlman! Ray Liotta! John Rhys-Davies! Burt Reynolds! Matthew Lillard!), a much bigger budget, and some actual ambition on display. You can tell that Uwe Boll is trying to make this his very own version of Lord of the Rings, with some massive battles and there are even some legitimately cool moments, like the wizard’s duel in the finale. However, the film is plagued with utterly laughable dialogue, poor editing, bad acting, and a crappy script. It’s good for a few belly laughs, but after the first hour it just turns into an utter slog. This is one of those movies that’s only two hours, but feels like it’s nearly twice that length. Worst of all, one of my friends used to say that this movie was actually good, so I went in with some actual expectations, only to have them quickly melt away.

39. Against the Dark (2009)

I can’t remember if one of my roommates in university recommended this movie to me back in 2009, but I decided to check it out and was floored by how bad it was. It’s a blatant ripoff of I Am Legend, featuring Steven Seagal’s bitch ass occasionally fighting vampires, with basically no budget and TV movie production values. Suffice to say, it fucking sucks (and no, that’s not even intended to be a pun, this movie doesn’t even deserve puns).

38. Battle of the Bulbs (2010)

Battle of the Bulbs is a total piece of crap TV Christmas movie. Most of these low-budget Christmas movies feature terrible acting, a generic plot, and a totally forced resolution, but Battle of the Bulbs is so much worse and more predictable than you are imagining. My family are obsessed with these formulaic, Hallmark Christmas movies, to the point where they watch them year-round, so I’ve seen plenty of them. With that in mind, I can definitely say that Battle of the Bulbs is the worst Christmas movie I can ever recall seeing.

37. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012)

As bad as the first Atlas Shrugged movie was, part two is so much worse. At least the first part had the decency to just be cheap and boring, but part two doubles down and hammers you over the head with its shitty politics. To be fair, the movie has much higher production values, and Samantha Mathis put in a legitimately good performance as Dagny Taggart (despite a few shaky line deliveries), actually managing to make her feel sympathetic. Unfortunately, the film’s still shoddily made, has some of the worst special effects I’ve ever seen in a professionally-made movie, and most of its runtime is spent preaching at the audience to make sure they “get” the message rather than actually moving things forward. The politics are just plain stupid here, and I don’t even mean that in a biased way: I mean that you have to be a fucking moron to believe that America would ever implement something like the “Fair Share Law” or “Directive 10-289”, but that’s the sort of idiocy you have to float to make Objectivism seem morally justified.

36. I, Frankenstein (2014)

Some movies are so fundamentally flawed that you have to wonder how they even managed to get greenlit, let alone released. As you may have guessed, I, Frankenstein is one of those movies. The film is basically Frankenstein mixed with Underworld, and even features the writer of the Underworld films (and is co-written and directed by the guy who wrote the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Collateral!?). The film is just ridiculously stupid at all levels. Maybe with a light tone it could have been enjoyable, but I, Frankenstein is embarrassingly self-serious, features Syfy channel-level production values, and makes you generally feel pity for the actors who ended up trapped making it.

35. Osombie (2012)

Man… 2012 was a wild year. America was fresh off of assassinating Osama bin Laden, and some chuckle fucks thought that it would be a great idea to make a movie where he comes back to life as a zombie and leads a zombie jihad. In case it wasn’t obvious, the film was pretty offensive considering that American soldiers and Afghanis were still dying in the War on Terror at the time. The only nice thing I can say about this movie is that the make-up and cinematography are pretty good considering the budget. Otherwise, this movie is dumb as dirt – you can tell that it’s the ramblings of a bunch of Call of Duty/Nazi Zombie players put to film. The “special forces” characters are stupid, and the civilians are somehow even stupider. It’s not even all that fun, campy, or over-the-top to compensate for this.

34. Paintball (2009)

The first review I ever published on IC2S was for this really shitty horror movie about a bunch of doofuses who go paintballing and find themselves getting killed one-by-one by a lone mercenary. Every good idea this film has gets completely wasted. Most egregiously, the characters are assembling parts for a paintball grenade launcher that fires acid-filled paintballs, but when they finally get all the pieces, it doesn’t fire. What the hell kind of bullshit writing is that, especially given how boring the rest of the movie is!?

33. Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988)

Howling IV is another victim of severe budget cuts. Originally intended as a more faithful adaptation of the novel, Howling IV had basically all its funding pulled just prior to filming, meaning that the cast and crew had to work with the smallest filming budget known to man. Unfortunately, this means that what we do get is fucking boring, with basically nothing happening for 90% of the runtime. When stuff does finally start happening at the very ending, it’s still a far cry from the original film in terms of quality (and I don’t even particularly like The Howling, so that’s saying a lot). Romy Walthal also puts in perhaps the worst lead acting performance I’ve ever seen, which is a feat considering this franchise’s pedigree.

32. Beyond Loch Ness (2008)

With Beyond Loch Ness, we’ve hit the point on this list where awful TV movies reside. Beyond Loch Ness sees the Loch Ness Monster coming to North America to snack on locals in surprisingly gory fashion. It’s laughably bad all-round, and the special effects are definitely what you’d expect from a TV movie, but at least it’s somewhat entertaining to make fun of.

31. Evil Bong (2006)

Man… this movie. I don’t even know where to start with it. Despite their miniscule budgets, Full Moon Features have made some reasonably ambitious stuff over the years (I watched this in a double-feature with Trancers, which was a pretty good time!), but Evil Bong is the polar opposite of ambition. Hell, it’s downright lethargic. The film is shot like a sitcom, with basically everything taking place in a one room apartment. The characters just mill about and get high, while the titular Evil Bong offs them one-by-one. We get some cameos by Tommy Chong and Full Moon Features regulars, and there’s some dancing strippers in the Evil Bong’s dream world to give the audience something to look at. It’s all just… so dumb. I was high when I watched this movie, and even then I was just sitting there thinking “what the fuck am I watching?” Clearly, no one involved gave a single shit when they made Evil Bong, they just filmed enough improvised bullshit to get to feature length, and then called it a day.

30. Game Over, Man! (2018)

This movie might have been the point where I just started to assume that “Netflix Original” meant “this movie is a stinking garbage pile that will give you cancer if you so much as sniff it”. I thought that the premise sounded intriguing: it’s a “homage” to Die Hard, starring three slackers trying to pitch their get their video game concept to an influencer who is staying at the hotel when terrorists break in and take everyone hostage. Unfortunately, within the first five minutes, we’ve got a cornucopia of cringy semen and closeted gay jokes, which make up the bulk of this film’s attempts at humour. Like… picture this scene: the terrorists are about to find the slackers, so they need to come up with a plan to slip past them. Two of them basically just hide behind the curtains, and the third pretends that he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation by hanging himself in the closet with his dick out. The two henchmen find him and… turns out they’re gay, so this causes them to want to fuck on the bed in front of him!?!!! Oh, and this also means that we get Adam Devine running around with his dick out for the next five minutes, which didn’t do it for me, but maybe that’s a plus for some of y’all. There are a few laughs to be had, especially when the film really does push the envelope (I legitimately laughed when the terrorists try to humiliate the influencer by forcing him to eat another man’s ass out, only for him to go whole hog into it, to everyone’s enjoyment), but for the most part, Game Over, Man! is either lowest-common-denominator levels of cringe or outright offensively bad.

29. Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002)

I recently went into excruciating detail about why this movie is so bad, but here’s the TLDR: it’s boring as fuck. To be fair, the book it’s based on also sucks, but at least it had the good grace to end with a big, exciting war. This movie doesn’t even have that, so it’s just ninety minutes of wheel-spinning and low-stakes drama, with awful evangelism tactics, and the worst romantic misunderstanding subplot I’ve ever seen. I fucking hated Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, so the fact that this movie is much further down on this list should really say something about how dire a watch it is.

28. The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

The Cloverfield Paradox is, to date, the biggest movie disappointment of my life. A friend and I both really loved the first two Cloverfield movies, so we were excited to watch this movie when it shadow dropped during the Super Bowl. We had heard initial impressions that it wasn’t very good… but, c’mon, it’s a Cloverfield movie, how bad can it really be?

Turns out… really, really bad. To put it simply, in The Cloverfield Paradox, shit just happens for no reason. You either go with it, or the entire thing falls apart immediately. The movie sets everything up like we might get an explanation or reasoning for what’s happening. Why is a woman suddenly embedded in the walls? Why does the ship’s worm colony suddenly appear inside a dude and kill him? Why does a dude’s arm get detached and then start moving on its own volition? The answer: just fucking because. There’s no real rhyme or reason: they just went to an alternate dimension and everything is completely fucky here. I think there’s a reality wherein this could be satisfying, but here it just becomes frustrating, as nothing makes any fucking sense and is just there to look cool or spooky. As usual for J.J. Abrams, the mystery of it is most of the actual appeal, so the fact that there is no actual mystery is just a piss-off. Meanwhile, the entire time this is happening, we’ve got a gargantuan Cloverfield monster fucking up Earth and we don’t even get to see this until the final shot of the film, which is just infuriating. I hate this movie with every fibre of my being. It took a bourgeoning franchise of critically-acclaimed, loosely-connected, sci-fi originals and completely destroyed it in one, single movie. How do you fuck up an entire franchise that badly!?

27. Troll 2 (1990)

Troll 2 is legendarily bad, and as funny as it is, it definitely deserves its reputation as one of the worst movies ever made. I saw it in theaters as a double-feature with Best Worst Movie, and I even got to meet George Hardy, so I was primed to enjoy its brand of insanity. It did not disappoint. The film is a combination of low budget, bad acting, and legitimately weird writing, all of which is made worse due to a severe language barrier for the director, which makes everything in the film utterly bizarre to witness.

26. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an utter embarrassment and easily the worst movie in a franchise notorious for its bad sequels. Despite being written and directed by one of the co-creators of the original film, it completely misunderstands why the original film was so resonant back in 1974. The film makes all sorts of meta-commentary about bad horror sequels, but this falls completely flat because the film itself is even worse than most other bad horror sequels (which is saying a lot). This is largely due to the baffling script, which features the Illuminati controlling the Sawyer family to try to get them… to scare people, I guess (it’s stupid). About the only thing making this movie watchable is Matthew McConaughey’s unhinged performance as Vilmer, which isn’t exactly good, but it is certainly memorable for how over-the-top he gets.

And that’s it for part two. If you’re reading this the day it comes out, then my list of the 25 worst movies of all time will be out tomorrow!

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My 100 Worst Movies of All-Time (100-51)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Rounding out this new series of favourite and least favourite media, we have my list of the one hundred worst movies of all-time. Films here have earned their placement based on how badly-made they are, if I’d ever want to watch it again, and how much I personally despise the film in question. There are actually quite a few movies on here that I think are extremely entertaining, and I will mention this when it’s relevant, but I have put more weight on their general quality than how enjoyable they are. And, again, these are all very subjective opinions and can only really be based on the movies I personally have seen. Got it? Let’s get into it.

100. Big, Bad Wolf (2006)

Werewolves are my favourite movie monsters, so I will admit that some of my distaste for this film stems from how they handled the central monster. There are two really big negatives here. First of all, the werewolf talks a lot. He is a joker who gives Freddy Krueger a run for his money in terms of all the bad jokes he spouts. Secondly, this werewolf likes to rape women. This film’s pretty notorious for being the one where the werewolf rapes people, and you know that they lean into the exploitation aspect of that. There are a couple pretty prominent scenes of rape and sexual assault, which just makes the film all that more unpleasant to watch, especially when it’s also trying to be comedic.

99. Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

I don’t think there’s ever been a movie I watched more out of obligation than The Rise of Skywalker. By the time it released, I was already sick of Star Wars due to the fanboy discourse around The Last Jedi. Then, when I found out that The Rise of Skywalker was undoing all the “unpopular” elements of The Last Jedi, it made me even more hostile going in. The main thing that I liked about The Last Jedi was that it was setting up a future for Star Wars to tell new stories, instead of just rehashing the greatest hits, so it seemed like The Rise of Skywalker was just going to be more half-assed original trilogy homages. I walked into that theater, but I didn’t do so with any excitement – it was Star Wars, so I had to see it. I could have been watching Knives Out, Jumanji, or goddamn Cats instead!

While this obviously coloured my opinion on the film, there were plenty of other things that really fell flat: an insultingly-dumb narrative, breaking the rules of the Star Wars universe constantly, twists that feel completely unearned, emotionally manipulative attempts to tug at your nostalgia strings… the list goes on.

This movie just makes me feel empty. It’s by far the worst Star Wars movie ever made. I don’t even consider it canon, I’ve basically deleted it from my mind, to the point where I get genuinely surprised when I’m reminded of its existence.

98. The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

I had extremely low expectations for the original Babysitter film, but the premise sounded funny enough that I gave it a shot. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how fun it was, largely thanks to the fantastic lead performance by Samara Weaving. When I found out that they were going to make a sequel without her, I was hesitant, but figured I’d give it a shot again. Unfortunately, Killer Queen is a half-baked, self-referencing rehash of the original. I’ll give Emily Alyn Lind credit for trying to be a fierce villain, but she’s no Samara Weaving.

97. Battlefield Earth (2000)

One of the most notoriously bad movies ever made, Battlefield Earth is largely remembered for being terrible due to its ties to Scientology. If you’ve actually seen the film, you will know that it is extremely campy. It also just looks and feels weird, being shot near-entirely in Dutch angles. That said, I feel like Battlefield Earth‘s notoriety is more due to its prominence and political leanings than its actual qualities. The movie is pretty terrible (hence its placement on the list), but it is also bad in an entertaining, expensive, professionally-made way. You could certainly do a whole lot worse, as you will soon see…

96. An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

An American Werewolf in London‘s most hailed aspect was its amazing practical effects, so why the fuck did they think that a fully-CGI werewolf would be acceptable for its sequel? Bear in mind that this was done using 1997 CGI (that is to say, it looks worse than most modern made-for-TV movies). The film also seems to have misunderstood the comedic elements of its predecessor, attempting to go for a much more over-the-top tone, which is just grating.

95. Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (2011)

This first Atlas Shrugged adaptation fails, not so much due to its deluded politics (the most offensive of which are toned down quite a bit), but due to being incredibly boring, cheap, and poorly-made. The film is all “tell, don’t show” and my God does it want nothing more than to go on didactic rants. There’s not even a payoff, since this is very much a “part one” movie, making it an even more inessential watch if you’re not prepared to strap in and watch its even worse sequels…

94. Ouija (2014)

Few horror movies are as limp as Ouija. It features dull characters, terrible attempts at scaring the audience, a toothless PG-13 rating, and is just plain boring to top it off. It’s a bad movie, and not even in a fun way, which makes it all the more shocking how good its prequel turned out (and makes this movie’s quality all the more offensive).

93. The Happytime Murders (2018)

I wanted to like The Happytime Murders. A goofy, raunchy, puppet-based cop comedy sounds like a good time. Furthermore, Melissa McCarthy gets too much hate; this seems like the sort of project she could do well in. Unfortunately, The Happytime Murders is just… stupid. It’s the most cliched cop movie premise you could ask for, with the only original thing being its puppet gimmick that it assumes will let it get by. Instead, it quickly turns into a one-note joke in a film which is direly short on laughs (we get it, it’s another puppet having sex and doing drugs, do you have any other jokes?). Hell, Melissa McCarthy barely even makes an impression, good or bad. She’s just “here” filling a role literally anyone else could have. Like a puppet without a master, the film is nowhere near good enough to hold itself up when its only gimmick is running this thin.

92. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

A Nightmare on Elm Street seems like it should be a decent remake. Jackie Earl Haley is great casting for the new Freddy, it’s got an early performance from Rooney Mara, and it explores new ground with sleep deprivation and how that could bring nightmares into the waking realm, making Freddy even more unavoidable. Unfortunately, A Nightmare on Elm Street does one of my least favourite 80s tropes: “what if Satanic Panic, but real?” Considering that the Satanic Panic ruined several lives over a moral panic that was entirely fictional (not to mention that it made nerds and metalheads social pariahs for more than a decade), I hate seeing this concept get legitimized… and that’s not even getting into how they explicitly made Freddy a pedophile here. It works for the character, but my God, when they make it an overt part of the plot, it does not make him enjoyable to watch. Really though, the worst part of A Nightmare on Elm Street is how dull and formulaic it is, which is a real shame, because the original films are some of the most creative slashers in the entire industry.

91. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

I often hear people saying that the only good Resident Evil movies are the first one and Apocalypse. These people are dead wrong. I can only imagine that they watched them once when they were young and haven’t seen them in at least fifteen years, because Apocalypse suuuuuucks (and so does the first Resident Evil movie, but it’s good enough at least to not end up on this list). This was the start of the “Alice is a Mary Sue” trope in these movies, and every other character ends up being upstaged by her, or they are just worthless to the narrative. The action isn’t even all that good either, thanks to the weak direction.

90. Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)

Friday the 13th: Part III is close to being enjoyable thanks to its cast of memorable weirdos (Shelly, the biker gang, the annoying hillbillies, fuckin’ Chili), some gnarly kills, and Chris is probably my favourite final girl in the entire franchise. However, the film really falls flat due to being a really dull rehash of the previous two films (which also weren’t that great for that matter). The directors of these films seem to think that tension is built by having characters dick around for several minutes until something happens, but in this movie they forgot that they probably should have these characters, y’know, actually do something. Instead, we get scenes like the bikers frolicking aimlessly in a barn for minutes on end when they’re supposed to be prepping for a vengeful arson. The film also was shot in 80s 3D, so it looks pretty embarrassing today. This is the sort of film that’s more enjoyable as a series of highlight clips on Youtube than it is as an actual viewing experience.

89. Fantastic 4 (2015)

Josh Trank’s much-maligned superhero reboot feels like it has executive meddling all over it. It’s interesting, with ambitions to be a gritty, morally grey, body-horror-inspired take on the material. Unfortunately, what we get here is half-baked, messy, and fails to capitalize on any potential in the premise, ultimately making the whole affair feel pointless.

88. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should have been so simple: take the, er, skeleton of Pride and Prejudice and then add some over-the-top zombie action between the romantic drama. Instead, the film opts for an excessively-serious take on Pride and Prejudice with some scenes and lines changed to add in zombies, which makes them feel perfunctory rather than a key part of the story (imagine that). Oh and then add in that this is a wannabe-gory zombie film that’s being neutered by a PG-13 rating, so you can’t even get any visceral thrills to stave off the boredom. Add it all up and you’ve got a boring, one-note slog that it should have been a slam-dunk fun time at the movies.

87. Assassin’s Creed (2016)

Assassin’s Creed had all of the potential in the world, from its cast, to its production values, to the unusually strong narrative of its video game source material. Unfortunately, it’s all completely wasted on a script which strips out all of the mystery and intrigue of the games, spends 90% of its dialogue reiterating the exact same dialogue about free will over and over again, and is just plain dull. I would love to find out where exactly this project was screwed up, because there was so much potential for a great movie here that the fact that they missed by so much is a crying shame.

86. A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

A Good Day to Die Hard is, frankly, a really sad end for this storied franchise. Say what you will about some of the other Die Hard sequels, but this is the only one that is outright bad, with weak action sequences, a script by Skip Woods (that is to say: full of complicated political intrigue that does not translate well to a fast-paced action movie, making the whole thing seem dumb as all hell), and poor chemistry between Bruce Willis and Jai Courtney. Hell, even John McClane is annoying in this movie, which is a sentence that should never have to be written, but here we are.

85. Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

I’ve been watching the Hellraiser sequels this year and, thus far, they haven’t been nearly as bad as I had heard. I legitimately kind of like the wild ambition of Bloodlines, and Inferno and Deader are way better and more interesting than they have any right to be. However, that cannot be said of Hellseeker, which is an absolute slog of a film. The film commits multiple deadly cinematic sins, most notably that it brings back original final girl Kirsty Cotton, only to kill her off in the opening minutes. Instead, we spend the rest of the runtime with her boring-ass husband, Trevor, who just looks constantly confused. The next hour and a half are spent in explicit dream logic, with no way to tell what is really happening and what is not, or when scenes shift from reality to fiction. This might sound like it could be spooky or leaves the film up for interpretation, but it’s not that deep. Instead, it just gets fucking annoying, causing me to stop caring about what is happening, because the film sure as hell doesn’t want me to invest in any of it. It doesn’t help that this movie came after the much better-executed Inferno and is clearly drawing inspiration from it, meaning that the reason for all this dream logic is pretty obvious if you had seen that film already.

84. Hellraiser: Hell on Earth (1992)

As bad as Hellseeker is, Hell on Earth definitely takes the cake as the worst Hellraiser I’ve seen (so far). You can feel the Weinsteins’ fingers all over this movie, forcing bigger body counts for Pinhead and the Cenobites to turn them into more traditional slasher villains. Those Cenobites, by the way, are just embarrassing this time around, with some of the ugliest designs in the entire franchise. All this results in a film which just does not work. The characters suck, the attempts to expand the mythology suck, the script sucks… everything just sucks here.

83. Wrath of the Titans (2012)

Despite its success, the Clash of the Titans remake was pretty bad, getting by from Liam Neeson saying “Release the kraken!” and being the first big 3D movie released after Avatar. I figured they’d try harder to justify a sequel, but somehow they managed to make a film which was even dumber and more generic than its predecessor (which is a feat in itself).

82. Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Retribution is by far the dumbest Resident Evil movie. There’s shockingly little plot here: Alice is trapped in an Umbrella facility and needs to escape… that’s it. Meanwhile, a bunch of characters from the games (who are terribly brought to life on the big screen) are trying to break her out. Oh, and Milla Jovovich had just had kids, so now Alice is a mother, despite it never being an aspect of her character until now. How do they force this in? Well, she meets a kid who thinks she’s her mom, because Alice is stuck in a real-life simulation where Alice clones have been trying to survive a zombie apocalypse… life I said, it’s fucking dumb. We then get a bunch of admittedly decent action scenes, but there’s basically no substance to grab onto here. You can do better, trust me.

Oh, and that kid? Dead by the time the credits roll. Boy, being a mom sure was important to Alice!

81. Hitman (2007)

It’s bad when you’re watching a story that is so convoluted and nonsensical that you think “this must be a Skip Woods film”, and then check IMDb to confirm your suspicious are correct. I dunno if the guy just writes elaborate scripts which then get butchered on their way to screen, but he legitimately is one of the worst screenwriters in all of Hollywood.

80. Saw 3D (2010)

Saw 3D opens with a trap which has two guys strapped to a table saw. A woman, who is cheating on them both, is suspended above them. They are instructed by Jigsaw to take a life in order to free themselves. Oh, and this trap takes place in a public storefront, so they quickly draw a crowd of onlookers who just stand there and gawk rather than, y’know, trying to stop this attempted murder. It’s so bonkers that I legitimately thought that this was supposed to be a public theater satire of the Jigsaw killings, but no… it’s a real Jigsaw trap and they actually want us to take this whole thing seriously. It was at this point that I realized that Saw 3D was going to suck.

Saw 3D is a cartoonish embarrassment, easily the worst Saw film ever made. There are some pretty nasty traps here, but they’re undermined by significantly more traps which are just idiotic> The colour grading is awful due to being shot in 3D, which makes the copious amounts of blood look hot pink. It also features an infuriating finale, with perhaps the most unjustified death of the entire franchise. It’s absolutely no wonder the franchise took a seven year hiatus to try to wash the stink of this movie off.

79. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Most of the Friday the 13th movies are consistently mediocre, rarely deviating from a pretty simple formula. However, around the time of Part VII, the producers started feeling like they needed to bring in some gimmicks, and Jason Takes Manhattan seemed like it could be the most exciting of these. The promise of having Jason head into the big city to carve up teens sounded like it could shake up the formula just enough to be a big, blockbuster event. Unfortunately, Jason Takes Manhattan is notorious for being one of the most disappointing films in the entire franchise. Pretty much everyone knows that the New York section of the film only last about twenty minutes and the rest of the film is spent on a cruise ship, where Jason somehow manages to go unnoticed as he kills tons of irritating kids who give us no reason to actually care about them. The film also introduces an idiotic “kid Jason” subplot which is one of the most embarrassing ideas in the entire franchise (which is saying something, considering some of the bullshit they added in the latter-day sequels).

78. Survival of the Dead (2009)

I’ll give George A. Romero credit for continuing to make films and try to push the zombie genre forward as he was approaching his seventieth year. Unfortunately, Survival of the Dead was an embarrassing note to end that career on. You can see glimmers of the social commentary which helped make his original Dead trilogy so good. The film takes place on an island where a bunch of ranchers are attempting to cure their undead relatives. Cowboy and Hatfield/McCoy shenanigans ensue from there. Unfortunately, the film is just fucking stupid, cheap, and poorly-shot, with dull characters. About the only thing that actually stood out to me was that the film answers the question “What happens if you bite a zombie?” That’s… pretty dire if it’s the only thing that really stands out about the film (the answer is “You become a zombie”, by the way).

77. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

I fucking hate this movie. Paul W.S. Anderson pulls a bunch of shit from his ass to try to make sense of this franchise he’s cobbled together and try to give it some sort of satisfying send-off. As you’d probably expect, the results are really dumb and not satisfying in the least. What you may not expect is that the actions scenes kind of suck here as well, negating the one defense that people will try to use to justify liking these movies. Worst of all though is that a man died and a stuntwoman got maimed making this piece of shit movie, all because Paul W.S. Anderson and the other producers cheaped out on the production and put their crew at risk. Imagine dying or having to get your arm amputated, all for goddamn Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. Fuck this movie, it deserves to rot in hell.

76. Superman III (1983)

This movie is just so embarrassing. Superman becomes a secondary character in his own film, while Richard Pryor performs a bunch of cartoon antics that take up way too much screen time. The plot is incredibly dumb, full of the childish jokes that people complained about in the theatrical cut of Superman II since Richard Lester has taken over full directing duties this time around. It’s kind of a shame too, because the cast are generally great. There’s also a cool subplot where Superman is turned evil, but then Clark Kent splits from him and the two sides of Superman have to fight for control. It’s a genuinely good concept, which is entirely out of place in a film where a woman gets pushed into a computer and is instantly turned into an android…

75. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Michael Bay’s original Transformers film was actually pretty well-regarded when it released. It wasn’t until this movie, Revenge of the Fallen, that people really came to realize that these movies were not good. The action was incoherent, the narrative was dumb, and the film was incredibly lowbrow (to the point of having two racist caricature robots and a transformer with a set of testicles), and the film was overloaded with CGI.

74. Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

Honestly though, I think Age of Extinction is even worse than its more notorious older sibling. This is the Transformers film with a character who carries a card on him to justify statutory rape. We’ve got Mark Wahlberg taking over as the leading man… which I guess is an upgrade? He’s incredibly dull, but at least he doesn’t annoy me like Shia LaBeouf’s Sam did. We also get a healthy dose of Stanley Tucci, which is a highlight, but even watching him doing cartoonish antics gets grating the longer it goes on. For the most part, Age of Extinction is every bit as loud and dumb as any other Transformers movie, but what puts it over the edge for me is my experience when I watched it in theaters. The movie had dragged on to what felt like a climactic action sequence and the story seemed to be wrapping up. I legitimately thought the movie was about to end, and if it did, then this wouldn’t have been my least-favourite Transformers movie. But no, then suddenly the film goes to China, and I check my watch: we’re only halfway through this movie, what the fuck!? Suffice to say, the back half of this movie was worse than the front, making this drawn out experience feel even more torturous.

73. The Wicker Man (2006)

The quintessential “Youtube highlight reel” movie, The Wicker Man isn’t really worth watching. The clips you see online are weird, but in-context they do make some sense. However, this movie is a pure, bad 2000s horror remake (glossy production, big budget, weak horror elements). It’s only differentiator is that Cage’s performance is absolutely bonkers, but you really should just stick with the highlight reels.

72. Death Note (2017)

I have the perhaps notorious opinion that the Death Note anime is kind of trash. In what world is a show, where 70% of its episodes are bad and then 30% are great, “one of the greatest anime of all-time”? So, believe me, I was not coming into this Death Note adaptation expecting it to suck. Hell, I was actually kind of excited, because I already liked Adam Wingard for You’re Next and Willem Dafoe as Ryuk was awesome. I love the premise of Death Note, so I was eager to see if a different interpretation could do better. Unfortunately, this Death Note movie squanders basically everything that actually was good about the manga and anime in favour of a by-the-numbers supernatural crime drama. Gone are all the philosophical musings about morality and justice which were the main reason the series was so compelling to begin with. Instead, it’s just generic cop plots and high school killer clichés.

71. The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

In high school, my friends and I would do these really amateur rifftrax of movies we didn’t like. We got through most of the Twilight movies, but I feel like we gave them a fair shake (we all felt that Eclipse was not bad). I get that these movies are not for me, and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum… but, my God, this movie was a torturous experience. It is so slow and dull, stretching a thin plot over more than two hours of runtime. The main characters make this feel even worse, because I didn’t give a shit about any of them (I will say that the background characters have much more interesting personalities though).

70. Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

When I was ordering this list, Transformers: Age of Extinction became a bit of a barometer for me. I’d think of bad blockbusters and ask “Is this movie worse than Age of Extinction?” to help rank them. For Independence Day: Resurgence, that was a very quick and definitive “YES”, which should give you an idea of how bad it is. This long-belated sequel is even louder and dumber than the worst Transformers film. For a movie that was in development for twenty years, it’s almost shocking how half-baked Resurgence feels. There are lots of pointless subplots, the “escalated” threat feels no where near as potent as it did in the original, and the characters have basically no development and give us no reason to actually care about them. In fact, the only characters I felt anything for were the gay scientist couple, but that was mainly because of their charming performances rather than the script. If you want mindless action, then the movie will deliver that, but it’s not even particularly noteworthy in that regard. Just rewatch the original if you need some stupid fun, it did that far more competently.

69. The Purge (2013)

The Purge was the biggest disappointment I have had in theaters. The premise is incredible: crime becomes legal for twelve hours once a year! However, they clearly had no budget to work with, so they set the entire film inside a single house. The entire premise just gets used as an excuse for why their home is getting invaded, why their power has been cut, and why they can’t just leave. Making matters worse, most of the film revolves around the Sandin family somehow managing to get lost in their own goddamn house as they try to find a homeless veteran who snuck in to try to escape the purgers. I didn’t expect The Purge to be anywhere near amazing, but it failed to be even entertaining.

68. The Angry Birds Movie (2016)

If you are, like, the youngest of kids, then Angry Birds probably passes for you, but just barely… Unless you are amongst the most easily entertained of people, Angry Birds is just a collection of dull “comedy” scenes stitched together haphazardly, which are anchored by a bunch of irritating pastiche characters, all in an effort to try to turn this shitty mobile game into a proper multi-media franchise. Yeah… good luck with that, Rovio.

67. Don’t Breathe 2 (2021)

Don’t Breathe 2 is one of those sequels that is fundamentally flawed in its conception and therefore doomed to failure, no matter how it was handled. The Blind Man is a relentless monster and trying to humanize him for this sequel is an idiotic move. This would just be a boring, run-of-the-mill father revenge movie, but it’s a sequel to Don’t Breathe. There’s certain expectations that come with that, and this film does not meet them! There’s barely any tension to be had. Worse though, the film doesn’t even acknowledge that The Blind Man is a psycho rapist, we’re just supposed to accept his own justification that he “technically didn’t rape anyone”, forget about it, and accept that he’s changed. It’s so fundamentally stupid that it brings the rest of the film down around it.

66. Red Dawn (2012)

I will never forget how hard I laughed when I was watching Red Dawn, and then it suddenly turned into an ad for Subway. I’m not even joking, it was the most blatant product placement I had ever seen in my life. Josh Hutcherson even called the employee a sandwich artist and made sure they used his favourite warm and flaky bread!

I thought that the original Red Dawn was kind of crappy, so I wasn’t even going into this expecting it to not live up to the original. However, this film can’t even reach those modest heights. The film gets let down by its characters (who, if they aren’t just bland, are straight-up unlikeable), mediocre action sequences, and a script which is insulting to the audience’s intelligence at times. Also, the fact that North Korea are the ones conquering America is fucking hilarious (and then it’s frustrating when you realize this is because they shot the film to be about a Chinese invasion, but then edited it so that they could try to sell the film in China… like, have some integrity to something other than the almighty dollar).

65. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011)

Look, as bad as New Moon was, it doesn’t hold a candle to Breaking Dawn – Part 1. The previous Twilight films barely had enough plot to fill one movie. The thought that you could get two movies out of Breaking Dawn is laughable, and the film suffers due to Lionsgate’s desire to double-dip their audience. The film is every bit as boring as New Moon and is just as long as the other movies, but there’s less plot to work with than ever before, making this an even more torturous viewing.

64. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

I have so much I want to complain about with this movie, but I’ll keep it relatively brief. An adaptation that’s more faithful to the source material makes sense for Resident Evil, but there are so many bone-headed decisions made here and half-baked ideas. The film is loaded with Easter eggs and callbacks to the games, but these end up serving no purpose to the actual narrative, which makes them feel cheap and insulting to the audience’s intelligence. This movie’s girl-boss version of Claire is somehow less interesting than than her “she’s just a normal tomboy” persona from the games. Leon being portrayed as a washed-up failure of a cop is an interesting idea, but he is given absolutely nothing to do in the entire movie, so it just feels like someone had a personal vendetta against his character. The idea of having Raccoon City as a ghost town feels like it was done to make filming during COVID restrictions easier, but it ruins the entire premise of a mass outbreak that makes the games’ version of these events so compelling. Resident Evil games don’t exactly have great stories, but the first and second games have very different tones and plot structures. You don’t have to be a fucking genius to realize that, if you mash the plots of the first two games together, it doesn’t make any sense and ends up creating a narrative that is so much worse than either by itself. Oh, and don’t even get me started on what are the stealthiest zombies I’ve ever seen in a movie, dear God. The one positive I can say is that the cast are all really good, I just wish they had been given some proper material to work with. As is, Welcome to Raccoon City is as bad as the worst Paul W.S. Anderson Resident Evil movies, which is something I never expected to have to say.

63. Taken 3 (2014)

Look, we were already burnt out on the Liam Neeson action movie after Taken 2, but Taken 3 still felt like one of Bryan Mills’ signature nut punches. The film has two major issues which leave it hamstrung. First of all, the action just plain sucks, due in large part to the haphazard, rapid-fire editing (not to mention that there is a distinct lack of actual action this time around during basically the entire second act). Secondly, the writing is abysmal. Idiotic plot conveniences abound. I literally slapped myself in the face at least five times during the movie in frustration at how stupid everyone was for the sake of the plot. Not to go on a tangent, but I noticed the freaking bagels the second he found Lenore dead: he had an ironclad alibi and could have been released in a couple hours if the police just checked a fucking security camera. Instead, Bryan Mills decides to get into gun fights and car chases with the police every five minutes, presumably because he’s an idiot. Beyond even that though, I’m kind of insulted that they fridged Lenore to begin with. For one thing, it is such an overused and sexist trope that it demonstrates just how lazy the writers are. For another, it retroactively makes Taken 2 even worse by making its third act pointless, since we now know she’s going to die anyway.

62. R.I.P.D. (2013)

R.I.P.D. is what happens when a movie exec decides to cater to all the things that people like. It combines Men in Black, Ghostbusters, Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn, and Ryan Reynolds (before people were getting annoyed with him). However, the resulting movie ends up feeling way too juvenile for its own good.

The film has some funny moments, but more often than not you’re left groaning at the bafflingly stupid, juvenile jokes which were thrown in for no good reason. Like… there’s a scene where they’re chasing the bad guys, and these bad guys are just farting constantly as they run away… it’s so funny that I forgot to laugh. The plot was very formulaic as well, which could have been fine if the rest of the film was enjoyable, but seeing that it wasn’t, it just ends up making the whole thing feel worse.

61. Catwoman (2004)

Catwoman is one of those films where I cannot believe that they actually released this in theaters. It is such a baffling movie, with unhinged performances from Sharon Stone and Halle Berry. I’d love to say that this movie is a misunderstood masterpiece, as it does have a great look for Berry and some style, it’s just so, so dumb. We got a lot of really bad comic book movies in the 2000s, and Catwoman is undoubtedly the worst of them.

60. Terminator Genisys (2015)

The only nice thing I can say about Terminator Genisys is that it retroactively made people fonder of Salvation. The entire premise of having John Connor turn evil feels downright blasphemous to the series’ legacy. Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney are about the two worst actors you could have picked to lead a major film like this, which is even worse when you compare them to Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. The film is also basically a “greatest hits”, remixing scenes from significantly better Terminator movies to lesser effect. Predictably, this makes the film feel like it has no identity of its own, other than being really fucking dumb.

59. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

God I hate this movie. I get that they wanted to go for a different tone, but… guys, it sucks so bad. The Whedon-isms are grating and clash with the off-beat style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The aliens also stop being the real threat about two thirds of the way through, leaving us with an abomination of a replacement. Oh, and Ripley fucking suuuuucks in this film.

58. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

I HATED Fallen Kingdom, so when I find myself thinking back on it with some fondness after watching Dominion, you know that Trevorrow has screwed up big-time. There are so many things I could complain about in this movie, but here’s just a handful of them:

  • The legacy characters are blatantly shoehorned into this movie. You could cut them out of the film entirely with basically no effect to the main plot.
  • The movie has stripped out the horror elements of the series entirely. It’s now just straight-up action, which is far less interesting.
  • The bad guys are all a bunch of unthreatening weenies. I don’t even mean just the human characters either: Giganotosaurus, which is only in this movie to give the T-rex something to fight, has absolutely no bearing on the greater plot and can barely muster a threat to our characters (compare that to the Spinosaur in Jurassic Park III to really understand how dire this film is at everything).
  • The film is incredibly bloated. At one point it felt like it was going to end and then I realized there were (somehow) still fourty-five more minutes left.
  • The film commits to some incredibly stupid retcons. These retcons obviously were put in place to try to respond to criticism of Fallen Kingdom, but in their cowardice, they just made it worse.
  • The stupidest thing about this movie though is that it ends with the message “hey, genetic manipulation is cool actually and will solve all our problems with it!” How much further from Jurassic Park could you get than that?

Dominion is just further evidence that Jurassic Park should never have had sequels, or at the very least, the franchise should have not been brought back from extinction after Crichton’s death. I’m probably going to do another round of Retrospective catch-ups eventually, so expect more expanded thoughts on this movie in the future.

57. Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist (2023)

GOD, this movie is just fucking exhausting. It’s like spending all your time on Twitter reading what the grifters and outrage merchants are saying; it makes you want to scratch your face off in frustration. That said, complain all you want about the in-your-face politics: the real, crippling issue it faces is that it is criminally dull. For reference, the original Left Behind adapted all the material in this movie into a fairly brisk hour. This movie stretches that out to two hours and it absolutely drags as a result. Add in some very lethargic performances (especially from ol’ Sorbo himself) and the aforementioned ham-fisted politics, and this is a film that struggles to maintain interest.

56. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)

Oh good, finally we get a movie that is just really badly made rather than one that actively pisses me off just thinking about it. Put simply, The Legend of Chun-Li is crap on basically every level. It’s pretty embarrassing when you make a Street Fighter film which gets completely outclassed in all regards by the notorious Jean Claude van Damme film, but they somehow managed that here. The Legend of Chun-Li is not even all that entertaining either, with some very limp fight scenes. It also features a couple shockingly violent (for PG-13) scenes which are jarring against the overall light tone, further making you wonder what the hell anyone was thinking while making this movie.

55. The Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018)

I legitimately really enjoyed the original Escape Plan movie, it was a good 80s throwback film with a fun cast and premise. I didn’t expect much from a sequel, but if it could capture even a fraction of the previous film’s quality, it would still be decent. Unbelievably, Escape Plan 2: Hades is so ineptly put together that I can’t believe that Stallone and Dave Bautista signed on to be in it. There might have been a decent movie in here somewhere, but it’s totally wasted on a poorly shot and horrendous, incoherently edited film.

54. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Meyers (1989)

Halloween 5 is a pretty terrible film, even by slasher sequel standards. The film was shot without a completed script, and it totally shows, because there is no way that someone could sit down and intentionally write out the events of this film before it was filmed. The film throws in a bunch of dumb mythology about ill-defined bloodlines and curses, and Tina is one of the dumbest final girls in slasher history, making for a movie where you can feel your brain cells dying as you watch it.

53. Halloween Kills (2021)

My God, Halloween truly is the worst major horror franchise, because so many of its entries fucking suck. Halloween Kills is the most recent of these abominations (I… mostly liked Halloween Ends?). In a lot of ways, it’s a high-production value version of an 80s slasher sequel: a terrible plot and characters, but lots of brutal, gory kills. However, this feels so much worse for two reasons: 1) Halloween (2018) was so good and Kills comes nowhere close to it, and 2) The movie drags like mad. It feels positively aimless, wasting lengthy scenes on mostly-dull characters and half-baked plots with unearned resolutions. The ending also just straight-up pisses me off. About the only thing this movie does right is making Michael Meyers a terrifying, unstoppable monster, so I can understand why some hardcore Halloween fans would enjoy this. For my part, I was bored from start to finish of this wheel-spinning, poorly-edited, frustrating mess.

52. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

I have to give Jason Goes to Hell some credit for at least attempting to do something completely different with the Friday the 13th formula, but they absolutely failed and the results are baffling to witness. Suddenly adding a bunch of mystical lore nine movies in to try to explain some of the weirder aspects of the previous films was a fool’s errand, and having Jason be this body-hopping spirit is way less interesting than if he’s just an unstoppable, undead killing machine. This fundamental issue makes the film borderline unwatchable, even if it does have some fun characters and really gnarly kills that get lost in the shuffle. Oh, and do I need to mention that the movie ends with Jason climbing up a dead woman’s vagina so that he can be reborn from her corpse? Yeah… this is quite the film.

51. Howling III (1987)

Howling III is one of the most unhinged movies I’ve ever seen. I’ll give them some credit, they were swinging for the fences with this movie: it is brimming with ambition and a sincerity; you can tell that this was a passion project for Philippe Mora. Unfortunately, this film is absolutely deranged, featuring terrible werewolf designs, awful special effects (the scenes with the werewolf baby puppet make me want to pour bleach in my eyes), some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen, and a certifiably insane script with too many superfluous characters. This is a film which packs a whole five or six acts into an hour and a half runtime (for reference, your average movie tells its story over three acts in the same timeframe), meaning that it has no time to actually linger on any ideas, but also just wastes a bunch of time on pointless bullshit. Criminally, it’s not even all that entertaining either.

And that’s it for part one. If you’re reading this the day it comes out, then part two will be out tomorrow!

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My Top 100 Movies of All-Time (25-1)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

25. Heat (1995)

“Epic” is one of those terms that can get thrown around willy-nilly, but Michael Mann’s crime drama really earns the moniker. We get both the cops and the criminals’ perspective on this heist, so when their storylines converge, it is truly explosive and tense. The film goes to great lengths to fill out the details of its world, even down to the getaway driver who only shows up for a couple scenes. We get a whole backstory and motivation for him, only for him to suddenly get gunned down in the climactic shootout after the heist goes wrong. In any other movie, he’d be cannon fodder, but because Mann bothered to give him a real characterization, it’s actually pretty tragic seeing him get killed.

That shootout, by the way, is one of the most insane gun battles ever put to film. The gunfire is loud as shots echo throughout the open streets of Los Angeles. The sheer number of bullets fired and the carnage that erupts is comparable to the infamous jungle shootout in Predator, but with actual people involved on both sides of the exchange, and you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens to these characters that we’ve come to sympathize with on either side. Oh, and it’s a Michael Mann film, so everything is stylish as fuck.

Also, this is the movie where Al Pacino’s eyes bug out and he yells “SHE HAD A GREAT ASS”, and I’ve never quite recovered from the laughing fit it put me through.

24. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Quentin Tarantino’s debut film is still one of my all-time favourites. It almost feels like a stage play, as most of the film is confined to a single warehouse, where a group of criminals try to figure out which one of them is a police informant after a heist gone wrong. The drama and paranoia which plays out is intense, as you are left constantly guessing and as events escalate in some unexpected ways. It helps that the cast are masterful here, from Harvey Keitel’s professional Mr. White, to Steve Buscemi’s weaselly Mr. Pink, to Michael Madsen’s quietly psychotic Mr. Blonde.

Oh, and I said it when I first watched the film, but it has held true all these years later: I will never be able to hear “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel the same way again after watching this movie.

23. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

As much as I love Reservoir Dogs, I do have to agree with Aldo Raine that Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s masterpiece. This alternate history World War II film largely earns those accolades thanks to a scene-stealing performance from the (at the time) basically-unknown Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa. He is a terrifying villain, one who is calculating and sadistic, who loves toying with his victims. His introduction (one of the best character introductions in all of cinema) makes all this very clear, and makes every subsequent scene he’s in nail-bitingly tense, as you cannot tell if he knows or suspects more than he is letting on, or how he may press his knowledge for his advantage.

Of course, it’s not all about Hans Landa, as Inglourious Basterds is chocked full of great performances. Michael Fassbender is only really in one scene, but my God, what a scene that is; “intense” and “unforgettable” only scratch the surface of how good it is. Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine and the titular Basterds are also great: a bunch of meat-headed Americans who, despite blundering their way across Nazi-occupied France, manage to win the day with some good ol’ fashioned American stubbornness. The real highlight though is Mélanie Laurent’s Shosanna, a hidden and hunted Jew who finds herself in a position to destroy the Third Reich once and for all, if not for one pesky Nazi who has an infatuation with her…

Inglourious Basterds is a great film, one that has some interesting commentary on topics ranging from America’s unilateral relations with other countries, to the danger of cultural ignorance, to the power of film, to the nature of evil, to toxic masculinity. I loved it when I first saw it, and I’ve only grown more affectionate over time.

22. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

As I said back when I did a retrospective on this series, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of my all-time favourite horror movies, and easily the best slasher film ever made. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps most important is the film’s documentary-like cinematography, which lends the film a very grimy and unsettlingly realistic feel. As a result of this, the relatively tame violence feels so much more disturbing and intense. Hell, the scariest parts of the film aren’t even the acts of violence, it’s the scenes of Sally going mad as she sees the disturbing sights at the Sawyer’s dinner table. The screams, lingering shots on the macabre objects, and the camera getting uncomfortably close to her terrified eyes are so much more unsettling than even the infamous meat hook scene. There’s so much more you can say about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but I’d really recommend reading my retrospective on the film: it says so much more than I can really cover here.

21. Die Hard (1988)

Die Hard is one of the most perfect screenplays ever written. Everything is so efficiently presented and the pay-offs are setup so well. Outmanned and out-gunned, hard-luck New York cop John McClane needs to use his wits to survive and rescue his estranged wife, Holly. The odds are stacked against him, but seeing him slowly even them as the film goes on is thrilling, and the more grounded take on an action hero was such a breath of fresh air at the end of the 80s. I also just love how the world of the film slowly opens up, with this claustrophobic siege in an office plaza eventually expanding to provide the perspectives of the police, FBI, and the media as well. Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber steals the show, of course, but you really can’t understate just how good Bruce Willis is here as John McClane, especially considering he was known as a comedic actor at the time. That said, Die Hard is also one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, so perhaps he was putting those talents to good use.

20. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a quintessential Charlie Kaufman screenplay. He’s the guy who also wrote Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, so the guy has some pretty wild ideas in his head. The film sees Jim Carrey (in a great dramatic role) playing Joel, who discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Kate Winslet’s Clementine, has undergone a procedure to erase all her memories of him. Hurt by this revelation, Joel does the same to her in retribution. However, in the middle of the process, he regrets undergoing the procedure and he falls back in love with her, only to have these memories torn away from him one-by-one. It is such a beautiful and tragic way to present love and the cycles of pain and joy it can put us through over the course of a relationship.

19. Up (2009)

As I said before, Pixar have some of the stupidest premises in the history of cinema. “A man uses a bunch of helium balloons to lift his house so he can fly to South America” is the sort of insanity you overhear in the dementia ward, not the premise of one of the greatest films of all time. The balloons that I laughed at end up being a delightful kaleidoscope of colour to liven up the film. Everyone knows just how devastating the opening sequence of this film is: it’s a masterful piece of wordless storytelling which conveys a lifetime of hopes, dreams, and tragedy in a scant four minutes, and it absolutely gets you on-board with Carl’s curmudgeonly antics for the rest of the film. Seeing Carl slowly open up and grow over the course of the adventure is delightful. I also love how this is contrasted against his childhood hero, Charles Muntz, who is incapable of letting go of the past, to the point where it turns him into a monster.

18. Nightcrawler (2014)

Nightcrawler is a disturbing film, one which reveals the seedy underbelly of America that we try to keep hidden. The film is a scathing indictment of how late-stage capitalism corrupts everything (especially the American media) and the sort of psychopathy and moral bankruptcy it requires from you in order to get ahead when you’re starting with nothing. The film works so well thanks to the confident writing and direction of Dan Gilroy, and an unforgettably slimy performance from Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom. Honestly, I don’t want to say too much more than that: it’s a film that demands to be seen, and I don’t want to spoil that experience for you.

17. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)

It’s Star Wars, what else can I say? Of the original trilogy, A New Hope is my least-favourite, but considering it’s still this high up, that really says a lot about how good these movies are. A New Hope is the most efficient of the original trilogy, introducing this universe, its concepts, and some of the most iconic characters of all-time in a fairly lean two hour runtime. The special effects still look incredible (depending on which version of the film you watch), putting most modern films to shame, and the action sequences are all-time classics of the genre.

16. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

I will never get over how overtly feminist The Silence of the Lambs is. The entire plot revolves around Clarice Starling trying to prove herself as an FBI agent, but she is constantly underestimated, objectified, and harassed due to being a woman. Meanwhile, the villain is obsessed with the idea of being a woman, but simultaneously does not view women as people, enabling their horrific acts of violence against them. It’s one of those movies that would absolutely be decried as “woke” if it released today, but, because it pre-dates that discourse, is grandfathered in as the “right” way to write a female character by those chuds.

And then, of course, there’s Anthony Hopkins’ spellbinding take on Hannibal Lector. He’s hamming it up a little bit for dramatic effect, but the character is at his peak here, a calculating predator who is toying with Clarice and the FBI to achieve his own ends. He works best here as a supporting character, before subsequent sequels would force him into the narrative as much as possible. Lector is electrifying, but Clarice Starling is the real emotional core of the film, and The Silence of the Lambs really keeps that in perspective, to great success.

15. The Raid 2 (2014)

I liked The Raid, but I couldn’t help but be a bit underwhelmed by its very rudimentary narrative. However, The Raid 2 takes all the balls-to-the-wall, visceral action choreography of the first film, and then transplants it into an undercover cop movie which is already solid in its own right. This is largely thanks to a great performance by Arifin Putra as Uco, the son of a mob boss who is frustrated by his father’s conservative approach to business. This frustration is preyed upon and causes Uco to perform a coup to take power for himself. Of course, the action sequences are the real draw for a Raid film, and The Raid 2 does not skimp on the mind-boggling, over-the-top fights and colourful villains (including one guy who executes people using literal baseballs). While they are more spaced out than they were in the first film, the additional narrative weight makes these fights even more effective, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more impressive collection of action sequences.

14. Whiplash (2014)

Of course, it’s one thing for a movie with elaborate and visceral fight choreography to get your heart pumping fast. It’s a whole other thing when one of the most intense films you’ve ever seen is a goddamn drama film about a student musician, but Whiplash really needs to be seen to understand just how stressful this film is. J.K. Simmons is terrifying as Terence Fletcher, a musical professor with a short fuse who attempts to break his students in order to see if they can transcend to something truly great. The film is somewhat controversial for arguably justifying physical and emotional abuse in order to create art, but I do not feel like it is necessarily saying that Fletcher’s actions are right. Fletcher’s abuse of Andrew causes the two to absolutely despise each other. Andrew’s obsession with becoming a great drummer is clearly keeping him from having any sort of happiness, and the film implies that achieving his goal means that he’s probably going to die young, unsatisfied, and unappreciated. The film asks if that is all worth it, and the answer there is much more unclear and personal. Whichever side you fall on, Whiplash is an enthralling film, one you will struggle to look away from. I have never seen another film where, even to the very last second, you are absolutely glued to your seat, waiting to see what happens next.

13. Jurassic Park (1993)

When I was a kid, I loved Jurassic Park. I loved the tense dinosaur attack sequences, and it created an obsession over dinosaurs in me for several years. Then, around the time The Lost World came out, I suddenly started to get scared of this movie I had been fine with for years, so I avoided it for a while. It wasn’t until around the release of Jurassic Park III that I got over this and started indulging in my love of Jurassic Park again and really got to appreciate what a masterful film this is. It’s insane that the CGI has held up as well as it has after thirty years, but people don’t really appreciate how good the practical effects are and how the CGI supplements them. It also helps that this is a Michael Crichton adaptation, so it’s got that great mixture of heady sci-fi ideas, grounded explanations, and rip-roaring action spectacle.

12. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Like I said earlier, The Last Crusade used to be my favourite Indiana Jones movie, but the more time passes, the more I appreciate the straight-forward, action-packed, pulp adventure approach of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The action sequences are exquisitely crafted and choreographed by Steven Spielberg, allowing for some of the most creative, death-defying, and exciting stunt work of all-time.

Then there’s the characters. I’d argue that Indiana Jones is Harrison Ford’s greatest character: scrappy, smart, quick-thinking, and cultured, Indiana Jones lights up the screen and I cannot imagine anyone else playing him. Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood is also fantastic, an extremely fierce and independent companion for Dr. Jones, who puts the rest of the series’ stable of love interests to shame (and, again, someone who would definitely be accused of being “woke” if this movie came out today).

11. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

When I was a kid, I found The Empire Strikes Back to be a bit boring. Sure, the opening battle was cool, but all the stuff on Dagobah and the asteroid field kind of dragged out for me. Having gotten older and more mature, I appreciate these moments of downtime a lot more, as these are the source of some much-needed character development. Mark Hammill is given a lot more to chew on, as he finds himself desperately trying to become accepted as a Jedi, but constantly falls short in his lessons as he puts the lives of his friends first. Meanwhile, Han and Leia’s relationship suddenly heats up, and makes things take a turn for the tragic when fate starts to tear them apart again.

Plus, y’know, that Battle of Hoth is one of the greatest sci-fi spectacles in all of cinema, really setting the bleak and tragic tone this film is going for. The lightsaber battle towards the end of the film really cannot be underestimated either. It is one of the most emotionally-charged battles in the entire franchise, as Vader toys with his prey and Luke seems to be teetering on the edge of giving into his hatred for the man who killed his mentor. And, obviously, the film features one of the greatest twists in any piece of media, ever.

10. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

It’s not often that a pure action movie generates legitimate Oscar buzz, but it’s even more remarkable when it’s nominated for Best Picture and ends up winning the most awards of the entire year. Hell, it’s worth remembering that Fury Road is a sequel to The Road Warrior: at the time, The Road Warrior was one of those all-time great sequels that you compared to The Empire Strikes Back and Aliens as the way to do a sequel that’s better than its predecessor. Fury Road is so good that it has made people forget about The Road Warrior in that conversation. All that is to say that Fury Road is an adrenaline-fueled, hyper-focused, action thrill-ride which takes everything we loved about previous Mad Max movies, cranks it up to eleven, and then features one of the most efficient action movie narratives of all-time.

9. The Thing (1982)

The Thing is a remarkable horror film, one which earns its reputation as one of the best in the genre. The premise is just ripe for suspense and paranoia, as a shape-shifting alien infection works its way through a team of scientists in Antarctica and preys on the survivors one by one. It is a masterpiece of implementing the horror rule of leaving things up to the audience’s imagination. We never truly know who is a Thing and who is not, nor are we given clear answers about when certain characters become infected, leaving a lot of gaps to fill for the audience. However, that ends up being half the appeal, and there are fierce fan debates to this day about the fates of certain characters.

There’s also the film’s incredible practical effects, which bring the body horror to life in disturbing detail. While I think that the paranoia is the real draw for The Thing, the much-lauded effects are a close second, making the alien antagonist one of the most visually-arresting foes in horror cinema. The cast are also fantastic, especially Kurt Russell, and the film defies genre conventions by having its lead characters actually be quite smart and level-headed while dealing with this existential nightmare. There’s a reason why so many hardcore horror fans cite The Thing as their favourite of the genre and, while I can’t quite agree, it’s certainly one of the greatest horror films of all-time.

8. Aliens (1986)

James Cameron’s follow-up to Alien shakes-up the formula you’d usually expect from a sequel, especially at the time this movie released. Usually, a sequel will just do what worked before and retread the original, ultimately leading to a movie which is a lesser version of its predecessor. James Cameron says “fuck that” and takes a legitimate effort to expand this universe, build upon its characters, and try to tell a bigger, more explosive story using the original is a foundation. The result is a movie which adds a lot more action, but still has more than enough horror to feel like a satisfying follow-up to the original without lazily rehashing its plot structure. While it does actually have several of the same plot beats, so much has been added that you wouldn’t really notice unless you sat down and thought about it. You’ve already seen Alien, so why not see what happens when we get a whole bunch more aliens involved, and actually have them annihilating trained soldiers while they’re at it?

The expanded cast are great, from the all-business Hicks, to the insecure macho posturing of Hudson, to the slimy company man, Burke, to the unsettling, inhuman android, Bishop. Many of these characters don’t get a whole lot of time to make an impression, but they make the most of it, and it really sucks when they meet their fate at the hands and inner jaws of the xenomorphs. The special effects are also phenomenal, utilizing suits, animatronics, projection, and miniatures to flawless results. Aliens is so good that it is basically the template for how to make a sequel that stands on equal footing with its predecessor.

7. The Matrix (1999)

I remember around the time that Inception came out, there were debates about whether it was better than The Matrix. I scoffed at those comparisons, because there is no comparison to speak of: The Matrix is superior in every conceivable way. You really cannot understate what a monumental film this was at the turn of the millennium. On top of being one of the most kick-ass action movies ever made, The Matrix also deals with real-world philosophy and theology in a way that is digestible to general audiences. It’s also just got such a distinctive style, aping 80s and 90s anime in a way that we hadn’t really seen before in the West. The film’s action sequences would go on to inspire countless imitators in film and (especially) video games. Sure, its sequels could never match the brilliance of the original film, but does that really matter when The Matrix is such a good, stand-alone film in its own right (and, for that matter, the sequels are all pretty decent, they just aren’t this good)?

6. Alien (1979)

When I first went through the Alien franchise, I liked the action-packed bombast of Aliens the most. However, as the years have passed, I find myself loving the original Alien more and more with each rewatch. This industrial, corporatized, analog vision of the future is still fascinating and not explored nearly enough nowadays. I like how the cast are all a bunch of normal people whose choices throughout the film are fairly sensible (even Kane sticking his head in the alien egg – there’s no way he could have expected something to be able to get at him from in there). It’s also pretty cool that the “main” character is not revealed until very late in the film, as everyone has pretty equal billing until they get offed one-by-one. Of course, this is also the debut of one of the most iconic monsters in all of cinema, and the xenomorph has never been scarier than it is here. HR Giger’s design is fascinating and disturbing, capturing his unique art style to create something unforgettable. I’m still in awe of how they were able to bring this thing to life in 1979 so flawlessly.

5. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

The Fellowship of the Ring has a daunting task in front of it: faithfully condense the first part of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy epic into a three hour film. This had long been considered impossible to pull off, but Peter Jackson brings Middle-earth to life so flawlessly that he makes it look easy. The mythological opening sequence gives a taste of the epic scale to come, but the sleepy opening sequence in the Shire does a great job of establishing the home that is in danger of getting swept up in this conflict. We are introduced to our colourful cast of hobbits, wizards, and rogues as they try to escape the menacing Ringwraiths, who feel like they’re ripped straight from a horror story.

Then the film does something really special – halfway through, it basically becomes a second movie, introducing a new quest, several more characters, and escalating the stakes and danger far beyond the mortal peril we had already endured up to that point. This second half is every bit as strong as the first, utilizing the diverse New Zealand biomes to make Middle-earth feel like this breath-taking world full of ancient history that we barely get to scratch the surface of.

I find it really hard writing about these sorts of really famous, highly-lauded films. For one thing, you’ve probably already seen them, so I’m just telling you what you already know. However, if you have not seen them, then I don’t really want to spoil it for you either. The Fellowship of the Ring is a must-see film, the sort of movie that comes around once in a generation, which really is the most important thing I can convey about it.

4. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983)

Look, I get that A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back are generally considered more even experiences overall than Return of the Jedi. Frankly, I do not care. I am a sucker for an epic, satisfying conclusion, and Return of the Jedi is about as good as you could ask for (and, to all the Star Wars fans who say that Return of the Jedi is not even a good movie: fuck you). I’ve commented on the structures of some of the greatest sequels of all-time while making this list, and I love how unique Return of the Jedi‘s take on this is. The first half is basically spent reuniting the cast and cleaning up the messes left from the previous film, introducing its own self-contained antagonist, unique locales and exciting action set pieces.

The second half is then spent concluding the trilogy’s overarching storyline. Again, we’ll get people complaining about the Ewoks here, but they’re completely fine. They fit in with the series’ themes of plucky, outgunned and underestimated people winning the day against the evil empire. The best parts about this portion of the film are the climactic lightsaber battle (which, in my opinion, is maybe the best in the entire franchise), and the epic space battle. The amount of work that must have gone into bringing this battle to life in 80s technology is mind-boggling to consider. Taken all together, the finale is easily the best epic sci-fi battle sequence in cinema, and makes for a great conclusion to the original Star Wars trilogy.

3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is perfect. I can scarcely imagine what you could do to make a better sequel than this. This largely comes down to the big twist: the Terminator from the last film is the good guy this time. Right away, this turns the entire premise on its head and keeps T2 from being a lazy rehash (even though it’s still basically the same premise, only with a more dangerous Terminator variant). This story adds much more depth compared to its predecessor by making Arnold’s Terminator slowly learn what it means to be human and the importance of being a hero. Linda Hamilton has also gone from being a helpless damsel to one of the most kickass action heroines of all-time (again… this movie would be “WOKE!!!” if it came out today).

Also, and this needs to be emphasized: the action sequences in this film are incredible. The motorcycle chase. Arnie going ham with a minigun on the police (zero casualties). The helicopter chase. The steel mill finale. Any other action movie would be jealous to have even one of these sequences, but T2 is stuffed with exhilarating sequences which are all the better due to their practical stunt work. In the annals of unnecessary sequels, T2 is just the best, making the case that every other unnecessary sequel is just doing it wrong.

2. Planet of the Apes (1968)

If there’s one good thing that came out of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake, it’s that it caused the 1968 original to start getting broadcast on TV at the time… which is how I ended up watching it. I wasn’t really expecting much of it at the time: what is it, some dumb, hokey sci-fi movie about evil monkeys? I wasn’t planning on sitting around and watching the whole thing through.

However, as soon as the hunting sequence began, I found myself getting drawn hard into Planet of the Apes. Seeing Taylor get captured, wondering what happened to his companions, and seeing this ape society unfold before us, you’re left with so many questions that you need to find the answers to. The film just sucks you in to its satirical reflection of the worst of human society. The satire touches on all sorts of topics, ranging from animal experimentation, to the separation of church and state, to nuclear war, and class conflict. The ape makeup holds up a lot better than you’d expect, still allowing the actors to emote and display the personalities of their characters. I also think that Charlton Heston is an absolute legend for his performance as George Taylor: he goes from misanthropic dick, to extremely sympathetic, then back to a selfish prick for the finale, all while hamming it up deliciously. As much as I like most of this movie’s follow-ups, nothing will ever top the original for me. It is such a special film in my heart, and I will treasure it until the day that they put me in the grave.

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Confession: I was actually a bit underwhelmed when I first saw The Return of the King. I remember writing a class project in eighth grade that I thought that the video game adaptation was better. However, as soon as I had rewatched it once, I already had no idea what that stupid little child was saying: The Return of the King is a singular experience, one which defines and even transcends beyond the bounds of “epic”. Like I said, I’m a sucker for a satisfying, epic finale, and The Return of the King is about as grand a spectacle as you could ask for. The Siege of Minas Tirith and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields are shot and directed on a scale that I have never seen replicated (and, trust me, I have been looking desperately for twenty years for anything to come close). The battle is a roller-coaster of emotions, seeing the hopelessness of the defenders as they get battered by Sauron’s armies, only for the Riders of Rohan to show up and turn the tide… only for the Mumakil to show up and throw everything into disarray again. And then it just keeps going and building from there. This battle literally makes me cry, it is so epic and unrivalled that I cannot contain myself.

Of course, The Return of the King isn’t the king just for its epic battles. Frodo, Sam, and Gollum’s storylines really hit a crescendo here, and this is the point where the unassuming Samwise Gamgee becomes one of the greatest heroes in all of cinema. I cry just thinking about “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you! Come on!”, it’s one of the most beautiful expressions of loyalty and friendship ever put to film (note: yeah, I literally just had to wipe the tears out of my eyes while writing this… that is the power of The Return of the King)*. This is a once in a lifetime film, culminating more than nine hours of story in such a satisfying way. This has been my favourite film for more than half my life at this point, and I do not expect that any film will ever hold a more special place in my heart. I cannot wait to share this movie with my own family when they are old enough, and I can only hope that they experience the same magic that I did.

*Okay, this is just getting ridiculous… while going through this article for a final pass-over before publishing, just reading that line made me start tearing up again.

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My Top 100 Movies of All-Time (50-26)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

50. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

The Last Crusade used to be my favourite Indiana Jones movie while growing up, but as I’ve gotten older I find that it’s somewhat uneven. The first act is pretty cartoonish and the film doesn’t actually get properly stellar until the last thirty minutes or so. That said, once Sean Connery gets involved, the film gets a major shot in the arm, and there are so many funny, iconic moments and some well-crafted action sequences which make it a real blast to watch. In terms of pure, unadulterated fun, The Last Crusade is definitely a highlight of the franchise.

49. Predator (1987)

At first glance, Predator seems like it’s just a standard, macho, 80s action movie. However, what really elevates it is its genre-bending horror twist, a star-studded cast, cool creature design, and underrated direction by John McTiernan. The way that the film slowly reveals the antagonist piece-by-piece is a masterclass in leaving the audience in suspense. The premise of having an incredibly powerful alien monster hunting the most dangerous men in the world is also just badass as all hell. For being an all-time great action movie and a surprisingly good horror flick to boot, Predator really stands out as something special.

48. Se7en (1995)

After years spent cutting his teeth on music videos and the infamously troubled production of Alien 3, David Fincher finally got the chance to show off his talents for Se7en, and the result was one of the bleakest, grimiest noir cop movies of all-time. The central mystery, revolving around the hunt for a serial killer who is theming their murders around the seven deadly sins, makes for a captivating watch. Seeing how each kill plays out also has a sick fascination to it and the ending twist is one of the bleakest in cinema history.

47. Fight Club (1999)

Fight Club is a film that seems like it should not work, especially coming from a major studio. The narrative is very post-modern, it has a punk edge to it, and the fact that half the audience seems to miss that it’s a commentary on toxic masculinity doesn’t really help matters either. However, David Fincher once again brings it all together in a mesmerizing mixture of violence, dark humour, and anarchistic political commentary.

46. Pulp Fiction (1994)

I used to be pretty unimpressed with Pulp Fiction, but my most recent rewatch gave me a lot more appreciation for the film. It is very disjointed by design, using Tarantino’s signature non-linear storytelling approach to dole out its narrative in bits and pieces (even going so far as to kill off a character and then have them back at a time before their death occurred in the narrative later on in the film). Each segment plays out like it’s own self-contained narrative, but each one is extremely memorable and cool. Quinton Tarantino is clearly just showing off with his dialogue writing, but who cares how extra it is when the results are this entertaining?

45. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

The perpetual number one movie on the IMDb top 250, The Shawshank Redemption is an all-time crowd-pleaser of a movie. It is unquestionably one of the most hopeful films ever made, taking the audience through a journey of injustice and darkness, only to bring them through to a happy ending where everyone gets their comeuppance and our heroes are able to finally find some justice. While I certainly think that there are plenty of better movies than The Shawshank Redemption, I cannot deny that this is a great little narrative and the sort of movie you really need to pop on every once in a while for some motivation.

44. The Dark Knight (2008)

As good as Batman Begins was, The Dark Knight blows it out of the water. The narrative is more twisty and complicated than your average blockbuster, often cutting back and forth between multiple characters before it culminates in some big, shocking reveal that shakes up the narrative from that point onward. Much has been said about Heath Ledger’s Joker, and deservedly so, but what’s really remarkable is how well we he works compared to his countless imitators. Ledger’s Joker is definitely one step ahead of most of its foes, but it feels like he uses chaos to create opportunities for himself, whereas the Joker rip-offs just seem to have a supernatural knack for planning things they could not have possibly predicted (looking at you, Raoul Silva). Also, for as much as this film is remembered for being the dark, gritty take on Batman, hindsight has shown that the film was a lot more fun and measured than we gave it credit for.

43. Pearl (2022)

I liked X a lot. I LOVED Pearl. Mia Goth is so good as the titular Pearl that her performance alone elevates this movie to the stratosphere. The film shows Pearl’s slow-burn descent into madness as she desperately tries to become a Hollywood star to escape a life of rural, domestic drudgery. It plays out like a twisted, Technicolor fairy tale as she comes to realize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way her mind works. Then, when you consider that this movie was basically made on a tiny budget, using left-over bits and pieces from X, and Pearl is a truly astonishing accomplishment.

42. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

The Bourne Ultimatum unfolds like a stealth-action video game. Each action sequence plays out like an elaborately-structured “level”, with Jason Bourne messing with the enemy agents, thwarting security, and using crowds of people to sew chaos so he can reach his objective. Then, at the end of each level, we get a big, climactic boss fight or vehicle section to cap that section off. It makes for a thrilling, constantly-escalating series of showdowns, thanks to expert direction from Paul Greengrass. I don’t even mind the much-maligned shaky cam here, I think it just adds to the chaos in this particular film.

41. The Terminator (1984)

Jason Cameron’s original sci-fi epic feels a bit aged thanks to its special effects and very 80s soundtrack, but that doesn’t really take away from what an accomplishment this film is (and especially considering the miniscule budget it was made on). It’s basically a high-concept, sci-fi slasher flick. The film absolutely nails Arnold Schwarzenegger’s strengths as an actor at the time, showing that he has more to offer than mere imposing physicality, and the action sequences are as thrilling as ever.

40. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a balls-to-the-wall, irreverent, bloody action spectacle. Fans of that film likely expected more of the same for Volume 2, but instead, Quentin Tarantino pivoted to a much more subdued, contemplative, and philosophical tone for its follow-up. As a result, I can understand why Volume 2 is divisive, but for my money, it is so much better than its predecessor. Giving us more information about The Bride’s backstory makes her significantly more identifiable. She was cool before, and we sympathized with her desire for revenge, but getting more context about what led her to this point, and about the sort of person Bill is, makes the film so much more compelling. The climactic showdown with Bill plays out more through words than it does actions, and while that might be disappointing to some, it makes for a truly unforgettable finale.

39. Ratatouille (2007)

Pixar movies have, objectively, some of the stupidest premises for a major studio film, and Ratatouille might be the stupidest of them all. A rat wants to become a chef, so he hides under a fuck-up chef’s hat and uses his goddamn hair to direct him to become an elite cook…!? In what world does this premise make for a good movie? Well… this world, apparently, because Ratatouille is a triumph of cinema. It’s got everything you’d expect of a Pixar classic: charming animation, strong writing, fun characters, and lots and lots of heart.

38. The Descent (2005)

The Descent is, unquestionably, one of the best horror movies since the new millennium began. The film is already frightening enough when it’s just dealing in claustrophobia, paranoia, mental illness, and the tension between its cast of spelunking women, but then the monsters finally show up, all hell breaks loose. In particular, Juno is one of the most badass characters in any movie, to the point where you start off hating her, but really start to sympathize with her in spite of her moral failings when it becomes obvious that she really does care about her friends in spite of her actions. There’s an overbearing sense that you can’t truly trust everything you’re seeing, which leaves plenty of room for interpretation as well. This is especially punctuated by the film’s gender relations, which lend a lot of thematic depth to the proceedings (especially since nearly all the crawlers they encounter are male, and the lone female emerges after Sarah kills its child…).

37. The Founder (2016)

The Founder is one of those biopics that just shouldn’t work. Oh wow, a movie about the guy who turned McDonald’s into a national chain, how good can it be? Turns out that this movie is enthralling from start to finish. Even something as simple as the McDonald brothers explaining how they turned the restaurant experience into an assembly line is brought to life in fascinating detail. Michael Keaton is as great as you’d expect as Ray Kroc, and he gets truly sinister towards the latter-half when he goes from down-on-his-luck businessman to outright predatory monster. It’s also worth noting that this film came out in 2016 when America was first in the grips of MAGA fever, which lent the film an unintentional air of relevancy, as the parallels to Trump’s own sinister capitalist rise are palpable.

36. Jaws (1975)

Jaws is a movie you really need to see to understand just how good it is. The first half plays out as you’d expect a creature feature to: big shark goes around picking off swimmers, the sheriff tries to prevent this from happening, but is overturned by his higher-ups, until a very public attack forces the town’s hand. As good as the first half is, it’s the second half, where Brody, Hooper, and Quint try to hunt down the shark, that Jaws becomes legendary. The three characters have such clashing personalities and we get some of the earliest examples of Spielberg’s trademark sense of wonder, until we reach the bloody, tense finale.

35. Silence (2016)

Silence can be a pretty rough watch. A slow-burn, religious epic about the enduring power of faith in the face of intense persecution, the film poses some pretty serious theological questions about whether denying faith is more Christ-like than standing firm and allowing others to suffer as a result. The film ultimately leaves the answers up to you. I don’t imagine this will hit nearly as hard for the non-religious, but for someone like me, the journey is spell-binding, thanks largely to a committed performance from Andrew Garfield and deft direction from Martin Scorsese.

34. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

This first Pirates of the Caribbean film is one of the funnest scripts ever put to screen. There’s just enough Jack Sparrow here to make his roguish antics charming, without being annoying (like in some of the sequels). Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are also quite fun as the star-crossed lovers, and Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa makes for a fantastic villain. The film is packed full of the requisite swashbuckling action, and the horror twist at the end of the first act makes for a devilishly clever way to up the stakes.

33. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead feels like a big movie, with hundreds of extras, wild special effects, huge sets, and lots of gory action sequences. The fact that it was filmed on a budget around half a million dollars just makes the resulting film even more remarkable as a result. Much has been said about this film’s social commentary on consumerism, but it really does bear repeating, as it makes the film a lot more interesting than if it was just a simple zombie exploitation film. Night of the Living Dead set the template for the modern zombie, but Dawn of the Dead really cemented the concept, especially the prevalence of over-the-top gore and societal collapse which are staples of the genre now.

32. The Incredibles (2004)

The Incredibles plays out like a kid’s version of Watchmen, with some libertarianism thrown in for good (?) measure. The first Pixar movie to really feel properly mature in its storytelling, The Incredibles brings bombastic action, heart-felt emotion, and some really funny moments together inside its Art Deco-inspired setting to create a truly special film. As good as the action sequences are though, it’s the family drama that really makes this film so good. Seeing how Bob Parr’s mid-life crisis throws his family life into chaos, and how he comes to terms with that, is every bit as compelling as any battle with Syndrome or the Omnidroid.

31. Taxi Driver (1976)

Taxi Driver left me fucked up when I watched it. Another one of those films I watched for my film elective, I felt like I was having a mental breakdown watching this story of weirdo loner Travis Bickle descending into extremism. I definitely was not in the best headspace at the time (maybe due to university-related stress, or maybe due to being a lonely weirdo myself at the time), but the movie left an impression on me that few other films ever have. It’s a dark and scary film in unconventional ways, featuring an all-time great performance from Robert De Niro.

30. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Pan’s Labyrinth is a haunting and beautiful film. My first exposure to it was at a movie rental place, where it was playing on one of the TVs there. Seeing the creepy makeup effects for the titular Pan, I instantly knew that this was a must-watch for me. Guillermo del Toro’s creature designs are so unique and frightening. The fairytale adventure we go on is decidedly dark, violent, and adult, but what makes it truly remarkable is how it is contrasted against the real-life horrors of fascist Spain during World War II.

29. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Some people say that Saving Private Ryan‘s first twenty minutes are amazing and then the rest of the film is mediocre. Those people are wrong. Obviously, the opening carnage as Tom Hanks’ Captain John Miller and his squad storm Omaha Beach is harrowing and pulse-pounding, resulting in some of the most visceral war scenes ever filmed. However, their journey across Nazi-occupied France to try to bring home James Ryan, whose brothers were all killed in action, is still very compelling. As Miller’s squad starts suffering casualties of their own, they begin to question their role in what basically is a PR mission for the US army. Notably, James Ryan himself is left haunted by his unwitting and unwilling role in all of this, spending the rest of his life questioning whether it was all worth it just to save him.

28. The Iron Giant (1999)

It has been said that The Iron Giant is the best Superman movie of all-time and I can’t really disagree with that assessment. The story of a boy and his secret giant robot friend, things begin to escalate when a pesky government agent starts investigating rumours about the robot. As fun as those hijinks are, the film really gets good as the robot begins to learn about humanity, morality, the thin line between life and death, and the importance of choosing the kind of person you want to be. The ending makes me bawl like a baby, it is so beautiful.

27. Dredd (2012)

I gushed about Dredd more than a decade ago, about how it is such a well-constructed action movie that it transcends the sum of its parts. Like John Wick, a lot of this comes down to really efficient world-building. Dredd does not waste a lot of time explaining its dystopian sci-fi world and how it works. Instead, it manages to communicate everything with quick environmental details or background dialogue. The action is also just kick ass, featuring gorgeous slo-mo shots that put Zack Snyder’s filmography to shame. The characters are also great. Karl Urban’s Dredd is a stone-cold badass, but Olivia Thirlby’s Cassandra Anderson is the real emotional heart of the film. Lena Headey’s Mama is a blood-chilling villain, one who acts aloof, but is clearly a barely-restrained psychopath who will happily commit acts of brutality with little provocation. Hell, even Wood Harris’ Kay, a low-level thug who’d be cannon fodder in any other movie, leaves lasting impression here. The movie is also unexpectedly and subtly feminist, which is always nice to see!

26. Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 is, hands-down, the best superhero movie of all-time. Doctor Octopus is one of the best comic book villains ever put to film, a tragic and sinister villain in equal measure. The action sequences are spectacular, featuring great special effects and swooping camera work which shows off the epic scale of these battles. What makes this film so goddamn amazing though is Peter Parker’s personal drama. He’s so down on his luck and his life is such a chaotic mess that you can’t help but sympathize for him, especially considering how much good he does for the city in secret. Seeing how he struggles to juggle his busy schedule, hold down a job, try to help Aunt May, and figure out how to deal with his feelings for Mary-Jane Watson is every bit as compelling as seeing him punch Doc Ock in the face. I used to really dislike Mary-Jane, but in my most recent rewatch, I really started to sympathize with her: she clearly loves Peter, but he can’t be honest with her and keeps giving her mixed signals, which forces her to give him an ultimatum to decide what’s truly important to him.

Oh, and the horror hospital sequence is one of the scariest and most intense non-horror movie scenes of all-time. It’s insane that Sam Raimi managed to put a three minute Evil Dead sequence in his family blockbuster.

If you’re reading this the day it comes out, then be sure to tune in again tomorrow for the third and final part of this countdown!

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My Top 100 Movies of All-Time (100-51)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Surprise! Like I said in my favourite video games list, I’ve been tracking every movie I’ve watched for about twenty years now. In that time, I’ve compiled ratings for nearly fourteen-hundred films, so making a top one hundred list is simultaneously trivial, and yet, even harder, because I have so many more pieces of media to pick between. One hundred picks seems like a lot, but it really is not: several movies that I love didn’t even make the list. Furthermore, I didn’t include several classics that I’ve seen, but haven’t watched in over a decade, so the details are too fuzzy for me to include them in good conscience (The Godfather movies, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Apocalypse Now, etc). As usual, this is entirely subjective and only based on the movies I have seen, so leave your angry comments about me omitting Norbit down below. Got it? Let’s go…

100. Tropic Thunder (2008)

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Tropic Thunder. I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and had to work early the next morning. Around midnight, we put on the TV to the movie channel to kill a few more minutes before bed. Tropic Thunder was playing, and I figured we’d turn it off pretty quickly. You see, around the same time that Tropic Thunder released, we got the critically-lambasted Delta Farce. For some reason, I thought that Tropic Thunder was a similarly-bad military comedy and paid it no heed.

However, I quickly found that my initial assessment of the film was incorrect. Tropic Thunder was fucking hilarious. The whole thing was just comedy gold. We stayed up the whole time to watch it and didn’t get to bed until around 2am. I was bloody tired at work the next morning, but it was completely worth it.

99. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

This is a rough film. Tilda Swinton puts in an incredible performance as a mother who struggles through life after her son, Kevin, went on a mass murder spree. Seeing how Kevin got to the point he reached is gut-wrenching. The really remarkable aspect though is how it forces you to interpret Kevin’s actions: was he born evil, or was he made this way by his mother? The film leaves this entirely up to you, and it can lead to some pretty fierce opinions. This film is beautiful, and horrifying.

98. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

A pitch-perfect horror/romantic comedy, Shaun of the Dead is fantastic. Very funny, very sweet, sincerely romantic, and legitimately gory and scary by the end.

97. Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott brings to life a stunning, noir-cyberpunk realization of the future through jaw-dropping 1982 special effects. The results look incredible even today. The narrative is phenomenal, exploring existential themes about life, duty, and what makes one “human”. It’s the sort of cerebral blockbuster that we just don’t get enough of these days.

For the record, its sequel, Blade Runner 2049, just barely missed the top one hundred. If you have not seen it, fix that.

96. Nope (2022)

Nope is a remarkable film. It’s very Spielberg-ian: it’s got moments of wonder, then moments of excitement and suspense, and then moments of pure terror. I’m not kidding, this movie’s horror is so effective because of what it doesn’t show and what it implies. There’s a subtlety to it that allows for the horrors to arise after you’ve watched it, creeping in when you’re thinking about it later and leaving you properly disturbed. For the most part though, this film is quite exciting and wonderous, and yet another feather in Jordan Peele’s cap.

95. How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

How to Train Your Dragon is one of those classic kids movies that can be enjoyed by all ages: full of wonder, emotion, and with a strong story at its center of growing up and earning the acceptance of your peers and family by being yourself.

94. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa has the impossible task of following up on Fury Road, one of the greatest sequels of all-time. While definitely a weaker film overall, it manages to still stand out thanks to not being a simple retread of its predecessor. Furiosa is a grandiose, myth-making epic, chronicling the history of the wasteland, as seen through the eyes of its titular character. Like any good prequel, Furiosa lends its main character a lot of additional depth, and it really makes Fury Road all the more satisfying.

93. The Kid (1921)

The lone silent film on the list today, The Kid is classic Charlie Chaplin: lots of silly, physical comedy, backed up by an extremely moving narrative. It’s a truly timeless film, one which can easily be enjoyed even today.

92. Godzilla Minus One (2023)

I love me a good Godzilla movie, but Godzilla Minus One is by far the most impactful in terms of the human drama. Unlike nearly every other Godzilla movie, spending time with the human characters is never a drag. We see first-hand how the people of Japan rebuild their lives from nothing after World War II, so seeing them brought low again by Godzilla makes the requisite destruction all the more stomach-churning and effective. This rendition of the monster even reminds us that the terror of war and nuclear devastation never truly leaves you. It is insane how Godzilla is still resonating with audiences in new ways seventy years later, but Godzilla Minus One is a testament to the creativity of the filmmakers Toho employs.

91. Shrek (2001)

Shrek has to be one of the most quotable movies of all-time. Like, do you really need me to spell out why this movie is so good? I love Shrek. You love Shrek. It’s funny, exciting, and heart-warming in equal measure.

90. Casino Royale (2006)

I’ll admit, I kind of hated Casino Royale when it first came out. My family had been binging the 007 DVD collection which had recently released at the time, so we picked up Casino Royale to continue the collection. However, Casino Royale feels nothing like any other Bond movie released before it, which really turned me off of it for a while. However, in the years since, I’ve found myself really drawn to it. It ditches the traditional Bond formula and is much more of a conventional action/spy thriller, with some of the best writing, direction, and performances in the franchise.

89. Shrek 2 (2004)

I give the slight edge to Shrek 2 over its predecessor, but it is very close. What really makes Shrek 2 work so well for me is the whole second half of the film where Shrek is, well, not “Shrek”. You can clearly tell that Shrek believes that all of his problems stem from people being prejudiced against him for being an ogre, so seeing him get to turn that around and then find out that, actually, his problems can’t just be magically solved gives the movie a lot of emotional weight. Plus it’s every bit as funny and exciting as the first movie, although I definitely have to give the edge to this movie for the fantastic “Holding Out for a Hero” finale.

88. Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

I don’t tend to be a big fan of war movies: most of the time, they want to have big, exciting action sequences, but they also need to have an anti-war message, so they end up feeling schizophrenic. These sorts of war movies also often have way too much time wasted on a requisite romantic subplot, and it absolutely bogs the entire thing down. Letters From Iwo Jima is one of the good ones. At the time of its release, the Japanese side of the conflict was never really addressed in western media – they were the bad guys, a bunch of kamikaze sub-humans who would rather die than dishonour their country, with the Battle of Iwo Jima representing the height of their bloody conviction. Letters From Iwo Jima paints the Japanese soldiers with a far more sympathetic and human brush. They’re just regular people who are pressured by their superiors and country into doing awful things. There are some truly intense scenes here, all punctuated by fantastic performances, and the overwhelming dread that comes from knowing how hopeless the characters’ defense of the island is.

87. Schindler’s List (1993)

The most famous Holocaust movie, Schindler’s List is obviously not a great time at the movies. The film is bleak, depressing, and emotional, showing how society slowly devolves into fascism, how that affects the lives of the scapegoats that the fascists have marked for death, and how individuals choose to react within this system. A very difficult film, not one that you want to rewatch often, but one which is more relevant today than it was thirty years ago when it released.

86. Akira (1988)

The animation in Akira is simply stunning, bringing to life a bleak, cyberpunk vision of the future. We see the friendship of Shōtarō and Tetsuo get torn apart after government experiments grant Tetsuo god-like power and he goes on a rampage.

85. Shin Godzilla (2016)

A lot of people preferred Godzilla Minus One, but for me, Shin Godzilla is the stronger and more original modern Godzilla movie. Shin Godzilla is the first film to feature an evolving Godzilla threat – at first, something alarming, but not so dangerous as to be unstoppable. However, due to government inaction, the threat escalates until it is something overwhelming and destructive. It isn’t until actual experts get involved and people start working together for the common good that the threat becomes in any way manageable. Shin Godzilla moves at an incredibly fast pace, making it constantly engaging and a very easy watch, while Hideaki Anno’s signature abstract, evocative style makes Godzilla the scariest he’s been since the 50s.

84. Tarzan (1999)

Everyone has their childhood favourite Disney movie, and for me that movie was Tarzan. It came out at the perfect time for me, and I loved its exciting action sequences, music, and more mature storyline. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate it in more ways: the film is explicitly about growing into an adult, and so it has an additional emotional weight to it now that I’ve watched this as a kid, an adult, and now a parent. Soon I will share it with my own children, and the cycle will continue.

83. Godzilla (1954)

It is truly remarkable how effective Godzilla is seventy years after its release. In so many of its sequels, the destruction sequences are fun and exciting. Here, they are terrifying and horrific, especially for a film released in the 50s, keenly evoking the horrors of the atomic bomb which were still fresh in the minds of the people of Japan. The special effects also are impressive for the time period and the film moves at a very quick pace, even with its grand scope. Finally, the human element of the film is extremely compelling, a factor which its successors almost always fail to recapture even to this day.

82. The Shape of Water (2018)

It’s wild that this film won Best Picture for 2018, but I’m so glad that it did. I loved The Shape of Water. It’s so easy to meme on it for being the monster-fucker movie, or you can be a tool and say “the monster can’t consent” when it very clearly can… that’s all missing the point. The Shape of Water is legitimately, and sincerely, about the power of love outside of the accepted norms of society. The main characters are minorities forced into positions of servitude: a mute woman, a black woman, a gay man, a fish monster, etc. They use their positions on the outside in order to circumvent the monstrous, patriarchal villain. The scene where Richard Jenkins tries to express his feelings to another man, only to be met with scornful rejection and homophobic panic, is truly heartbreaking. His decision to then, in response, try to help Sally Hawkins to be with her own lover is inspiring and really hammers home the film’s message. The Shape of Water is such a great film, don’t be a fucking cynic about it and you will have an amazing time.

81. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Full Metal Jacket is notorious for having one of the best first acts in movie history (largely thanks to a transcendent performance from R. Lee Ermey), only to fall off for the rest of the movie. While this assessment isn’t entirely wrong, the second half of the film is better than these people give it credit for, showing how the dehumanization of the military system turns soldiers into emotionally-stunted psychopaths. That said… yeah, the first half has some of the best lines in all of cinema, which is even more insane when you consider that R. Lee Ermey made most of them up on the spot. Fucking legend.

80. Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

First of all, Kubo and the Two Strings is a gorgeous film, utilizing state-of-the-art stop motion animation to make a film where every single frame is a work of art. However, what really earns it a spot on this list is its narrative, which is mature, emotional, tragic, exciting, and even scary. It’s a film for all ages, a tale about the power of stories, family, and how your ancestors have helped shape you into who you are today.

79. Tokyo Story (1953)

I took a film elective back in my first year of university and was introduced to several interesting films that I never would have encountered otherwise. Tokyo Story stands out among them for how unusual it is. It is an incredibly slow and deliberate film, to the point where the camera barely moves and there are long shots which just show the characters going about their business at home. The film is about an aging couple who go to visit their children, but find that they have grown up to be selfish and ungrateful. The one exception is Noriko, their widowed daughter-in-law, who is the biggest sweetheart in the entirety of cinema. The film itself clearly has themes about family and how traditional Japanese society post-World War II was impacted by Western influences. Not the easiest watch on this list, but a very rich one if you can deal with a slow pace and are looking to branch out to something a bit more different and cerebral.

78. Red Cliff (2008)

Anyway, fuck the cerebral, Red Cliff is a historical epic by John Woo. Set in the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China, we follow Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang as they flee the despot Cao Cao, who has taken control of the imperial court and is on a campaign to eliminate all his potential rivals. Our heroes seek shelter with the warlord Sun Quan and his advisor, Zhou Yu, and quickly establish a hasty alliance as they make their stand at the titular Red Cliffs against an army several times their size. The film then features several impressive battle sequences, often employing elaborate, clever strategic gambits which make the film endlessly entertaining and keep the audience on their toes, wondering what sort of genius move Zhuge Liang will spring next. As someone who loves Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in general, Red Cliff left me overjoyed at how well it captured one of the greatest chapters of this period of history.

77. The Bourne Identity (2002)

The Bourne Identity came out at a time when action movies had started getting really over-the-top, and it was a breath of fresh air as a result. The amnesia aspect lends the plot a strong, central mystery, and the action sequences are fantastic. The film is also kind of ahead of its time, steeped in post-9/11 paranoia and US government overreach which they couldn’t have possibly known would be so relevant and defining for the time it released. It also made Matt Damon into a legitimate action hero, which was an incredibly risky move at the time when he was just “the Good Will Hunting” guy.

76. Ben-Hur (1959)

There’s nothing quite like a 50s film epic, and the Charlton Heston-starring Ben-Hur is certainly one of the most remarkable amongst them. Trying to figure out how they shot the massive sea battles and the climactic chariot race with 50s technology is mind-boggling, and the story itself is simultaneously personal and epic in scope.

75. Toy Story (1995)

Another all-time classic family film, Toy Story kicked off Pixar’s fifteen year dominance of the animation industry, and remains amongst their best to this day.

74. Paths of Glory (1957)

Another one of those films I watched for my film elective, Paths of Glory is a tragic World War I film by Stanley Kubrick. The central narrative revolves around generals sending men to die, and then sending even more to die to take the blame for their mistakes. It reveals the nasty side of military hierarchy and the injustice of war.

73. District 9 (2009)

District 9 is a remarkable film, mixing a very overt South African apartheid allegory with a kick-ass sci-fi action romp. The special effects are really good, doubly-so when you consider it was made on a fairly low budget. The narrative is the real highlight though, laying bare the exploitation, isolation, and dehumanization of marginalized groups and how the dominant group enforces this order. Even if you somehow can ignore all that, the film also has some real nasty body horror and an explosive finale where people are literally getting blown to bloody bits by alien weaponry, making it easy to enjoy on multiple levels.

72. Her (2013)

Spike Jonze has such a wild filmography, often taking a weird and intriguing concept and then playing that out over the course of a feature-length film (in that regard, Being John Malkovich barely missed the top one hundred, largely because I haven’t seen it in more than a decade, so the details are a bit fuzzy now). Her follows a lonely, isolated man who purchases an AI assistant and then finds himself falling in love with her. True to form, Spike Jonze then explores this basic premise quite thoroughly, making for a fascinating watch. Her is a film which was remarkable at the time, but has only become moreso in the past few years with the rise of AI “girlfriends” and even the founder of ChatGPT trying to contract Scarlett Johansson herself to voice their own AI due to an obsession with the film (tech bros never understand the movies they claim to love, eh?).

71. A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place came out at the right place and time for me. As much as I loved the slow, paranoid, post-apocalyptic horror movie, It Comes at Night, that film’s marketing notoriously promised an intense creature future, which it definitely was not. Then came A Quiet Place, which was everything that film promised to be. Not only that, but it came out just over a month after I found out that I was going to be a father, which provided the family-based storyline an added weight and gravitas. People nitpick the shit out of this movie, but I think it’s entirely unfair. If you can leave your cynicism at the door, A Quiet Place is incredibly well-directed (especially for a directorial debut!), well-acted, and intense as all hell (which is even more notable considering that it’s a PG-13 horror film).

70. Toy Story 2 (1999)

Toy Story 2 does everything you want a sequel to: it’s bigger, funnier, more impressively animated, it expands the series’ world, and it introduces several fun, new characters. If you don’t cry at the “When She Loved Me” sequence, you don’t have a heart.

69. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

The Naked Gun is easily one of the funniest films ever released, one which I find myself quoting all the time. It is a pitch-perfect noir cop movie spoof, with fantastic sight gags, a memorable third act, and a effortlessly deadpan performance from Leslie Neilsen (who was mostly known for dramatic roles up to this point).

68. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Of all the movies spewed out by the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the past decade and a half, the ones that have held up the best have to be the Guardians of the Galaxy films. These movies were a major gamble at the time, a property that basically no one had heard of or cared about, starring untested leads and directed by a man best known for making gross-out horror and comedy movies. However, James Gunn really brought his love of comic books to the screen, crafting a hilarious and compelling world, thanks in large part to a star-making performance by Chris Pratt, and supported by colourful performances from Dave Bautista, Zoe Salanda, and Bradley Cooper. This particular film is one of the tightest and most fun comic book romps of all-time, making it an easy recommendation whether you like the MCU or not.

67. Dune: Part One (2021)

Despite influencing all of sci-fi media, either directly or indirectly, for the past sixty years, Dune remains a unique sci-fi vision for how rich and elaborate its worldbuilding is. Denis Villeneuve brings this universe to life with his signature eye for scale and gorgeous cinematography, producing a film which is just plain epic in an era when blockbusters are falling apart at the seams.

66. Get Out (2017)

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut created waves upon its release, and for good reason. This is a damn good horror movie which introduces its mysteries and then slowly pulls the back curtain on them before the frightening and visceral conclusion. Its racial themes were especially relevant at the time, and lend the film much more depth in the process.

65. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

For a long time, the original Mission: Impossible was my favourite movie in the franchise by a pretty wide margin, even as people sang the praises of each subsequent sequel. Nah, I preferred the more grounded, paranoid, and intriguing approach Brian De Palma took as opposed to the bombast of the sequels. That is, it was my favourite, until Fallout released. Fallout is just the best, hands-down. We’ve got some of the most insane stunts of the entire franchise, we’ve got the fun extended cast which have built up over the past few movies, and we even have some of the more compelling villains to round it all out. It’s just an incredible action movie, top to bottom, and easily the best movie in the franchise.

64. The Witch (2015)

The Witch is one of those horror films which crawls under your skin and demands your attention long after it’s over. As someone who studied Renaissance and early-American literature, it’s fascinating to me that this feels like a direct adaptation of the sort of cautionary stories which would be told at the time: tales of witches committing acts of evil against Christians, the importance of obeying the church leaders, and the corruption of nature against the God-fearing. As a result, it’s arguably a Christian film in some respect, a warning against consorting with the devil. However, remarkably, it is just as much a Satanic film, since you can interpret it just as easily to be a liberation for Thomasin from her harsh, religious family into a world where she can live deliciously. Add in the gorgeous cinematography, the keen eye for authenticity, and the more subtle scares, and The Witch is an all-timer horror movie.

63. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead is one of those movies that you have a bunch of pre-conceived notions going in: it’s a low budget, black and white zombie movie from the sixties, how good can it really be, especially after decades of gory successors? The answer is that Night of the Living Dead is shockingly good, even today. The racial elements of the film have long been acknowledged as a happy accident, but seeing the tension between Ben and Harry is palpable and unmistakable, especially given the civil rights battles occurring at the time. There are also some surprisingly brutal zombie scenes, and the ending is incredibly bleak.

62. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

As good as the first Guardians of the Galaxy is, Vol. 2 is even better due to its much stronger emotional core. I remember being a bit mixed on it when I first saw it, since it’s much more unfocused. However, the film has strong themes about family… but not in a simplistic way, it’s all about the messy aspects of family: found family, estranged family, abusive relationships, jealousy, selfishness, and the love that can still be found in spite of all that. All of that, on top of the same sort of mad-cap humour and action of the original film, make Vol. 2 arguably the best movie in the entire MCU.

61. Parasite (2019)

Parasite was such an enthralling film. When I watched it, I got about halfway through and then I needed to take my dogs out to do their business before bedtime. “That’s fine,” I thought, “I’ll just watch to the end of this scene and then I’ll take them out.” That scene suddenly and unexpectedly became extremely tense and just kept escalating. Every time I thought it was reaching a crescendo, it just kept wringing more and more tension out, before finding more unexpected ways to make things escalate. After about thirty minutes of this I just resigned myself to watching the rest of the movie (the dogs were fine, by the way).

Parasite is fascinating for how it handles class conflict. It’s not morally black-and-white like you might expect from a poor people vs rich people movie. The impoverished heroes of the film are scheming and taking advantage of the rich characters, and there’s definitely a sense that they’re not exactly in the right. That said, the rich characters are also ignorant, lazy, and dumb. Their wealth is clearly not due to merit, they just got lucky to get where they are, whereas the poor characters have to work like mad just to stay alive, and screwing over others is just what they have to do to survive. It’s such a fascinating film and far more tense, funny, and nuanced than you’d expect going in.

60. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film that was formative to me growing up. As a result, it pains me that I can never watch it again. I have carried so many little life lessons and quotes from this movie with me and I treasure them dearly. This is also a film that left me bawling, even as a teenager. Just imagining reliving some of these moments now when I have grown older and have my own kids gets me choked up, and I can’t put myself through that kind of emotional turmoil. That said: this is a must-see film, especially if you’re still young enough that it’s not hitting so close to home.

59. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Rogue One is, by far, my favourite Star Wars movie of the Disney era, an opinion I’ve held since it released (I remember a lot of people saying it was mid, or that the characters are uninteresting, and I will not hear that shit). The climactic, third act battle is incredible and deserving of its accolades, but I think that the first two acts are also underrated. Seeing a scrappier, more morally-compromised Rebellion is fascinating, and seeing them learn to unite under a more idealistic ideology is cool to see. I also do, legitimately, like the characters and seeing them getting cut down one-by-one in the finale is heart-breaking.

58. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

My least-favourite of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers is still an all-time great film. It’s got everything that makes the other movies as good as they are: great characters, fantastic writing, epic battle sequences, and ground-breaking special effects, but it has the most prominent flaws in the trilogy. Most notably, after the first half, the film drags when it is not following Aragorn’s storyline. When the action cuts to Merry and Pippin, Arwen, or Frodo (after he gets captured by Faramir), the pace slows to a crawl. Even Aragorn’s storyline suffers at times, as the whole section where Edoras is evacuated and until they get to the warg battle is just kind of dull. That said: it’s still The Lord of the Rings. Even at its worst, it’s still miles ahead of most other films, and the duller moments just feel worse due to being juxtaposed against some of the greatest moments in cinema.

57. Batman Begins (2005)

Batman Begins, along with Casino Royale, ushered in the brief era of “gritty” reboots in the mid-2000s. A lot of those movies ended up being laughably bad, but Batman Begins was really remarkable for how well it nailed the idea of a more grounded take on Batman, especially after the disastrous reception of the Schumacher films.

56. John Wick (2014)

After years of Taken rip offs, the conventional action movie was feeling tired. John Wick seems like it’ll be another one of these, but it ended up being something unexpected, new, and special. The subtle world-building makes the film’s relatively simple setup feel so much more grand. The action sequences are fantastic, aided by a thumping EDM soundtrack. It also helps that the film trims all the fat that action movies feel they need to throw in to make you interested: there’s no obligatory romantic subplot, just a cute dog and a bad guy that you want to see punished so badly. It’s also worth noting that, at the time this released, Keanu Reeves was kind of a joke for how wooden his acting can be. However, John Wick absolutely nails Reeves’ strengths as an actor, putting in one of the best performances of his career and, once again, turning him into a beloved icon that he has remained for the past decade.

55. Titanic (1997)

James Cameron can do no wrong. Titanic is one of those films that has something for everyone: the romance parts are fine, but if that’s not your cup of tea, then you’ll love the spectacular sinking sequences, which remain some of the most tense, exciting, and tragic set-piece action sequences in all of cinema. This movie started a life-long obsession with the great ship for me, and for that I’ll always have a place in my heart for this film.

54. Hot Fuzz (2007)

My personal favourite of the Cornetto Trilogy, Hot Fuzz brings Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost’s signature British humour to the action/cop movie genre. The result is a film that is equal parts side-splitting comedy and rip-roaring action film, with more memorable lines than you will be able to deal with (yeah, motherfucker!).

53. War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

The finale of the modern Apes trilogy promises action and spectacle, but ends up being a far more emotional, dark, and contemplative film than you might expect. This will likely divide fans of the previous two films, but for my part, War is a grand finale to Caesar’s story. The film is structured like a Biblical epic, creating the foundation for a myth which will lay the bedrock of the new ape society.

52. Sicario (2015)

Sicario is a spectacular action-thriller, featuring spellbinding performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, and with the adept direction of Denis Villeneuve. The film shows the ugly side of America’s war on drugs, how it affects Mexico, how it causes those involved to dehumanize Mexicans, and the ways that America perpetuates the conflict for their own benefit. Easily the best part of the film is the sequence where a convoy of DEA agents cross the Mexican border to apprehend a senior member of the drug cartel in order to provoke a response. You’re left on the edge of your seat the entire time, waiting for the cartel to strike, watching them circle like jackals. It’s easily one of the best-directed thriller sequences I’ve ever seen, a nail-biting scene that you need to see for yourself.

51. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

For about thirty years running, The Road Warrior used to be the template for a sequel that is bigger and better than its predecessor. That reputation is kind of forgotten now considering how monumental Fury Road was, but it really has to be said that The Road Warrior is still a hell of a great action film. This film’s car chases are still some of the craziest action sequences put to film, and its depiction of the post-apocalypse has gone on to influence every other vision of a hellish future we’ve gotten since.

And that’s it for part one of this list. If you’re reading this the day it releases, part two will be out tomorrow!

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My Worst 25 Games of All-Time

~ Barloq ~ 2 Comments

So, since I went through my top 100 games of all-time, I thought it might be interesting to flip the script and see what my least-favourite games ever were! Important note: I’m only covering twenty-five games on this list. Put simply, it’s a lot harder to get through bad video games as opposed to other forms of media: you either know the sorts of games you’re into, or you are so put-off by a game that you drop it immediately before you can make any impressions. As a result, I don’t have a lot of games played that are truly awful (even the first few entries on the list aren’t all that bad). And, again, these are all very subjective opinions and are based on the games I personally have played. Got it? Let’s get into it.

25. The Simpsons: Road Rage (2001, PS2)

The Simpsons do not have a good track record with video games. There are a few gems, but Road Rage is not one of them. It’s literally Crazy Taxi, but with a Simpsons skin over it. As you might expect, the entire premise is extremely thin: pickup passengers, drive them to their destination as fast as possible, get money based on how quickly you get there. The one thing that makes Road Rage sort of worth it is the quippy writing, which should give you a few laughs. However, there’s not a whole lot to do here and you’re going to hear the same lines over and over again, so it’s an experience that is going to grow dull pretty fast.

24. The Incredibles (2004, PS2)

If you grew up in the PS1 and PS2 era, you probably went through a “licensed games” phase where you were too young to realize that these games sucked. I used to play through anything back then, having not developed any standards of what proper game design was like yet. The Incredibles is the first game where I can remember myself getting close to the end, getting killed over and over by the bullshit controls and balancing, and just deciding “I’m done, this game isn’t worth it.” It’s a very simple, but poorly balanced beat ’em up. Not a game I truly hate, but one that I can’t say I ever actually enjoyed myself playing.

23. Dead Space 3 (2013, PS3)

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit harsh here, but I really do hate Dead Space 3. It killed off one of my favourite franchises, and shit all over its story and gameplay on the way out. If you think I’m just being harsh, then feel free to ignore this entry and put Turning Point: Fall of Liberty on the list… I really couldn’t justify it myself though. Turning Point left me feeling indifferent. Dead Space 3 fills me with disappointment and anger which invalidate any of its positives. As I said in my Love/Hate analysis of the game, it’s a fundamentally compromised experience, one that is worse than its predecessors in every way, and not even good compared to Uncharted and Gears of War, which it’s trying so hard to be like. Perhaps it’s for the best that Dead Space died here, I’d hate to see what would have happened if they paraded its corpse out for a fourth entry.

Oh, by the way: the remake pisses me off too. EA shuts down Visceral and then gets a new studio involved and parades Visceral’s work out when there’s greater profit potential? Fuck you, EA.

22. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (2006, PS2)

This one makes it onto the list for a very specific reason. Back when Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out, the gaming magazines were singing its praises, calling it the best shooter on the market and a must-play. As a fan of the genre, with that kind of endorsement, I knew I had to check it out. I bought a copy for my PS2, fired it up… and I was bored shitless. The gunplay was so mediocre, the squad controls were a lot less in-depth than I had been led to believe, and there was no cover system… What were the game journalists thinking…? It’s like they were playing a completely different game.

Well… turns out that they were. At the time of the Xbox 360 and PS3’s release, Ubisoft had a fucking scummy policy where they would release completely different versions of games on last gen consoles. The differences between the current gen versions (which got all the coverage and accolades) and the last-gen versions were barely communicated, so I (and many others) got duped with low-effort junk after being told it was gold. The fact that the next-gen version was so good makes it sting even more, I am so annoyed that I got hyped up for this experience and then bought the “wrong” game.

21. Friday the 13th: The Game (2017, PS4)

I actually Kickstarted this game back in the day and, while I didn’t have particularly high hopes, I figured it would at least be interesting. Little did I know that Friday the 13th: The Game would play out pretty similarly to the movies themselves: pretty bad in its own right, but made all the worse due to legal battles over the rights. Friday the 13th was one of the earliest asymmetrical multiplayer horror games: one player plays as Jason against a group of survivors, who need to complete objectives and survive in order to win. While the core of the experience was kind of fun (whether that be sneaking around to find a way to escape the campground, or hacking up teens with a machete), the game was buggy beyond belief. It felt awful to play: the controls were janky, the graphics and animations were very poor (it would have looked dated even on last gen consoles), and the netcode was pretty bad. It was unique enough an experience that I did forgive a lot of this for a while, but I was never under any illusions about how badly made the game was.

That was all bad enough on its own, but what really sank Friday the 13th was that the franchise became embroiled in a rights legal battle, halting any further development of the game for years. There were more game modes, characters, and cosmetics planned, but they never got the chance to implement them, and the game basically withered away on the vine. As we have seen with Dead By Daylight, there was definitely a market for this kind of game, but it’s sad to see that Friday the 13th didn’t really get a fair shake to carve out a proper place for itself.

20. Resident Evil 6 (2017, PS4)

Resident Evil 6 is an exhausting game. There’s just too much stuffed into this bloated mess of a game. In trying to appeal to everyone, it leaves nobody satisfied. There’s so much here that much of it isn’t given enough attention, leaving half-baked mechanics and level designs. Of the four campaigns, the only one that I kind of liked was Jake & Sherry’s. However, I’ve heard just as many players say that Chris or Leon’s campaign were the only one they liked, so you can see how polarizing this campaign structure is. The four campaign structure also screws over the plot (which is easily the dumbest and most over-the-top in franchise history). Then spread this out over a twenty hour playthrough, and you can see why Resident Evil 6 just generates exhaustion even thinking about it.

19. Twisted Metal 4 (2017, PS4)

I loved Twisted Metal as a kid. We had a PS1 demo disc with Twisted Metal 2 on it and my brothers and I would play split screen matches against each other in that demo, it was awesome. Unfortunately, after Twisted Metal 2, the original developers moved onto other projects and the franchise was handed over to 989 Studios. Twisted Metal 3 and 4 are both pretty notorious for how badly they screwed up the franchise’s tone. For my part, I think 4 is worse (hence why it made the list): Twisted Metal 3 feels like the previous games, just… significantly dumber. Twisted Metal 4, on the other hand, turns the franchise into a cartoonish joke. Sweet Tooth pulls off a coup and takes control of the contest, which could be a really cool concept. Unfortunately, they’ve also interpreted Sweet Tooth by putting more emphasis on the clown part, so all of his scenes have him juggling in a circus while surrounded by goofy clowns… it’s something, alright. That’s not even taking into account the actual game itself. The cars look like toys and control like ass. The only cool things are that you can create a custom car (with, like, a grand total of nine options to pick from) and Calypso enters the contest with a goddamn nuclear rocket truck (which is dumb because it makes him by far the coolest driver in the game, why the hell would you play anyone else?).

18. Star Wars: Episode I – Jedi Power Battles (2000, PS1)

You really had to be there for Star Wars: Episode I. Lucasfilm were milking the shit out of it, licensing Star Wars all over the place. The film had 5 video game tie-ins just in that first year (which isn’t even counting all the handheld ports those games got). One of these was Jedi Power Battles. My brothers and I enjoyed it as kids, largely because it was the most “violent” game we were allowed to play at the time. I enjoyed the hack ‘n slash combat for the time, and the blaster deflection parry was really cool, but even back then we had one major complaint… See, Jedi Power Battles isn’t just a hack ‘n slash like it is advertised to be. Oh no, the game is also secretly a 3D platformer… and the absolute worst 3D platformer ever made, I may add. You spend an inordinate amount of time in this game jumping over bottomless pits to land on platforms. With this game’s slippery controls and isometric camera, it’s legitimately difficult to make some of these jumps. Making matters worse are that the game has some extremely precise jumps, to the point where there are jumps in the first goddamn level that you will not make unless you start jump after you’re already off of the platform. It’s fucking ridiculous, but it reaches a zenith during the Coruscant level. You spend 99% of this level jumping on platforms… oh, and it also happens to be the longest level of the entire game. You have a limited number of lives in this game: on more than one occasion, we had to restart the entire level, because we kept falling into bottomless pits over and over again.

By the way, this wasn’t just me being a scrub as a kid. I recently fired up Jedi Power Battles on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and, as soon as I got to the platforming sections, I just kept dying. It was flabbergasting how much they were asking of you and how badly it controlled. It’s too bad, the game is pretty fun when it’s actually being a hack ‘n slash, but the platforming is such an inordinate problem that it sinks the entire experience.

17. Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 6 (2002, PC)

Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 6 is clearly a budget title. That is fine. You get a relatively large open world in which to go hunt animals (large enough that there’s an ATV you can drive), and there’s a pretty impressive number of real-life gear in the game that you can use. The problem is that the game is clearly trying to be a hunting simulation, and expects you to treat it like one: slowly, quietly sneaking up on your target to land the perfect shot.

Unfortunately, the illusion shatters as soon as you get bored. “Fuck these deer, I’ve got things to do,” you say and then you just start sprinting headlong at them. The game’s animal AI is too dumb to react appropriately to a screaming monkey with a gun blasting at them, and so they stand there dumbfounded as you close the distance with them in the blink of an eye. Then, when they do run, you’re supposed to track the blood and figure out where they went. Instead, you just sprint after them, continually blasting the poor deer in the ass with your Cabela’s-branded gun. I legitimately wish that they had put some mechanics in to prevent this from happening. A hunting sim could be pretty interesting as a unique, niche experience. However, if you have to force yourself not to play like a moron to actually get that unique experience, it kind of ruins the whole thing.

16. BloodRayne (2002, PS2)

I had always been kind of interested in BloodRayne. I was nothing if not an edgelord when this game came out and I thought that her character design was cool. Given my love for shit movies, I had also seen two of the Uwe Boll adaptations (honestly… BloodRayne 2 ain’t bad). I recently decided to try out the games to see how good they were…

This game left me infuriated. The graphics are terrible (at least, they are in the PS2 version that I played). The art design makes the whole game unpleasant to look at. The voice acting is bad. The level design sucks more than our half-vampire heroine does, especially when the game turns into a finnicky platformer. The melee combat is just the worst though. In order to make a melee attack, you have to press L1 to attack. This would be awkward enough, but there’s absolutely no tracking or enemy lock-on and the attack animations lack impact, so you might as well by attacking with a wet noodle for all the damage it’s doing to the enemy. Add this all up, and melee combat feels like you’re flailing around in thin air all over the place. This gets so much worse later in the game when enemies that are immune to your ranged weapons are everywhere, forcing you to engage with this shitty melee system.

It’s wild how far a great character design can get you. This game was shit, but it still got multiple sequels, films, and a Playboy spread, all because the main character looks fucking cool. Actually playing the game though? I forced myself to get through, but the bright spots were few and far between.

15. Shrek 2 (2004, PS2)

My youngest brother was really into Shrek as a kid. Naturally, he was given the Shrek 2 game as a gift, and it was up to my brothers and I to join him for some co-op, isometric beat ’em up… fun? Yeah… surprise, surprise, Shrek 2‘s one of those shitty licensed video games. The beat ’em up gameplay is extremely simple and tired. For a game with a fixed, third person camera, you’d think that they’d be able to keep all the players and enemies on-screen, but somehow this game struggles to even do that consistently. There’s also just too much slow, dull platforming, often tied to specific characters’ abilities (meaning that everyone else just sits around and waits until the other player does their chores).

14. Resident Evil Survivor (2000, PS1)

I hated Resident Evil Survivor when I first played it. Having played much worse Resident Evil games since (spoiler alert), my opinion has softened on it somewhat, mainly due to its ambitious branching pathways and its hilarious voice acting. However, that’s not to say that I’ve forgiven it. Survivor is still a shockingly bad game: terrible graphics, terrible gunplay, idiotic puzzles, and the lack of saves is fundamentally moronic, not to mention that it’s only like two hours long. Survivor is not this underrated, misunderstood hidden gem. It sucks. It has some cool ideas, but it fails to do them any justice. It just sucks.

13. Super Noah’s Ark 3D (1994, SNES)

Yes, this is a real game. It’s literally running on the Doom engine. It also was unlicensed, meaning that video game retailers were not allowed to stock it. It’s also just laughable on its face: you’re playing as Noah, firing sleep-inducing food at animals (mostly goats; suspiciously, there are way more than two goats on this boat). You then do the “classic” Doom thing of hunting around a maze for keys… it sucks. Like, the joke was funny, but actually having to play it for any length of time is just not worth it.

Also, while writing this entry, I found out that Super Noah’s Ark 3D spawned from a failed attempt to make a Hellraiser game!?! It’s a wild story, you legitimately need to check it out.

12. Dead or Alive Paradise (2010, PSP)

I recently covered my problems with Dead or Alive Paradise here on IC2S, but put simply: it’s the most inessential Dead or Alive game of all-time. The DOA Xtreme gameplay is severely lacking in things to do. The hardware is ill-suited to provide the sex appeal this kind of game is supposed to deliver. Worst of all though, the gameplay changes have turned this already content-thin game into a grindy slog that is just not worth the effort it asks of you. If you have to play a DOA Xtreme game, then make it literally any other one.

11. I Am Alive (2012, PS3)

This game was one of my biggest video game disappointments. I remember back when I Am Alive was first being teased, it sounded really unique: a stealth-survival game where you play a normal guy trying to make his way through a destroyed city after some sort of disaster. Having the environment be the primary antagonist rather than combat encounters was really intriguing and I waited eagerly for more info on it… Well, I was waiting a long time, because it took about four years for this game to re-emerge with a release date. I heard from the reviews that it wasn’t very good, but I had waited so long for this game that I had to try it out anyway.

Just by playing I Am Alive, you can feel the developmental struggles it faced. Everything looks and feels janky. The game was also very buggy, straight-up crashing on me on multiple occasions on PS3. It got to the point where I just had to admit it: the reviewers were right, after all the struggles that went on during development, the devs weren’t able to make the game they had wanted to. It’s too bad, I still think that the concept of I Am Alive is great, which makes what we got sting all the more.

10. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (2012, PS3)

If playing your new Resident Evil game makes me start saying nice things about Resident Evil 6, then you know that you fucked up. Slant Six Games made multiple SOCOM games, so why is the shooting in this game so bad? Guns either do piddly damage, or they do a normal amount of damage, but run out of ammo extremely fast. Gunplay is also frustratingly inaccurate, and predictably dull. Most frustratingly, enemies are absolute bullet sponges, taking a ridiculous amount of ammo to take down. It takes me three whole clips from the strongest assault rifle to down one hunter, does that not seem excessive? Don’t even get me started on Tyrants or Nemesis, who ran through max ammo at least three times for my weapon before he went down. It is just so badly designed that it is not fun to play in the slightest.

9. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (2009, PS3)

Oh man, every time I think about my biggest gaming disappointments, I go back to this game. As you saw on my top one hundred games of all-time list, I loved the original Star Wars: Battlefront games. At the time, the only thing I loved more than Star Wars was The Lord of the Rings, so naturally I thought that The Lord of the Rings: Battlefront would be an awesome idea. Lo and behold, a couple years later they announced that this idea was actually going to happen, and that the original developers of Battlefront, Pandemic Studios, were going to be the ones to make it. This was incredible news, as Pandemic were renowned for making good games, so there was pretty much no way this could get screwed up. At this point in time, I was usually reading reviews before buying new games, but this game was such a slam-dunk that I ignored the nagging doubts and paid sixty dollars up-front for it.

So… turns out that I overlooked a key difference between Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings in video games: Star Wars: Battlefront is pretty easy to pull off as a large-scale shooter. Conquest, on the other hand, is mostly melee-based, with archers and mages there to provide some ranged attacks, while being annoying as fuck. Melee combat was not implemented well, making the entire core gameplay a slog. The game was also far buggier and unpolished than Battlefront, making it feel very last-gen. Not even the alternate history campaign, where you play as Sauron clubbing hobbits to death, was interesting enough to warrant a look. This game absolutely broke my faith in the games industry, and I am extremely judicious about buying games after doing some research about them now.

8. Godzilla (1990, GB)

If you buy a Godzilla video game, you have some pretty basic expectations for what that is going to entail: either something like Rampage where you smash a city, or a fighting game where you beat the shit out of other kaiju, like Primal Rage. What you do not expect is a cartoony puzzle game where you climb vines, push a bunch of rocks around a maze so that you can smash all of them against another solid object, while occasionally swatting away other cartoony kaiju that wander too close. Oh, and if you take too long, King Ghidorah shows up and will instantly kill you. This is a baffling game on so many levels, I am not sure what the hell they were thinking. Surely the Godzilla license was just slapped onto some random video game to make it sell more? This was such a weird game, it was one of the first games I had for our Gameboy (which my brothers and I traded some other kid at school for), and I distinctly remember playing it and getting to a point where I had to question what I was doing with my life.

7. Bible Adventures (1991, NES)

Oh look, another Wisdom Tree game! Growing up in an evangelical household which was pretty strict about the sorts of games were were allowed to play, I actually had a copy of this game back in the day. The game plays a lot like Super Mario Bros. 2, acting as a 2D side-scroller where you pickup objects and avoid enemies. The game consists of three parts, the first of which is Noah’s Ark, which tasks you with grabbing animals and bringing them back to the ark. This game is full of frustration due to the shit controls and how easy it is to get damaged, causing all the animals to get scattered and run off, forcing you to chase them back down. It’s mired in frustration, and that’s the best game in the collection. Baby Moses tasks you with babysitting the titular Moses, with controls which are just as bad and gameplay just as frustrating as in Noah’s Ark. While you will accidentally cause Moses to get killed over and over, you can choose to chuck him in the river if you want to, inadvertently making it one of the few games where you can straight-up murder a baby (Grant Theft Auto would never). Then there’s David and Goliath, which just fucking sucks.

6. Revolution X (1994, Arcade)

Revolution X has to be the cringiest game ever made. It’s an arcade light gun shooter, and in that regard it’s pretty bog-standard. What makes the game so bad though is that it takes place in a world where the New World Order has taken over and hate youth culture, so they ban music, movies, and games. The only way to fight back is through the power or rock ‘n roll! And, to make things even more cynical, it features the likenesses and music of Aerosmith. Yeah, this game is basically wearing the corpse of revolution in order to advertise for a rock band which sold-out decades earlier. While the game itself plays… fine, I guess, the entire premise is so lame that it ruins anything it might have been going for. The sort of game you only play for a joke or if there’s literally nothing else available.

5. Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation (2017, PC)

Writing the Love/Hate entry for this game literally made me angry. This game represents everything that I hate about the modern gaming industry (games designed to be addictive and predatory rather than fun), but it is so much worse due to how this game has supplanted the mainline Dead or Alive fighting games in Tecmo-Koei’s eyes. Worst of all? The predatory shit works. I hate the game and I have not picked it up since I finished the article, but goddamn if I do not see it in my Steam library and get that compulsion: “Oh, I am missing out on using some of my limited energy points for the day, it will only take a few minutes to use them all…” And, for what? To unlock some more worthless swimsuits in hopes of getting a low drop-rate swimsuit that doesn’t even look good? Nah, fuck this shitty fucking game.

4. The Simpsons Wrestling (2001, PS1)

The Simpsons Wrestling was a game I rented for a laugh back in the day. I was aware of its reputation, but I was a dumb kid and didn’t think it would be that bad. Hoo boy, was I wrong. For one thing, the game is wildly unbalanced, making the main Simpsons family get outshone in their own game by fucking Bumblebee Man of all characters. On top of that, Ned Flanders is apparently considered to be one of the most broken fighting game characters of all-time (although at least in his case I can understand it, stupid, sexy Flanders…). The controls feel like ass; you’re flailing around for the entire fight. The graphics and camera are awful, even by PS1 standards (the fact that this released late in the PS1 lifecycle makes this even more egregious, but it would have no better in 1995). The only nice thing I can say is that at least I didn’t buy the damn game myself, which is more than I can say for most of the games on this list.

3. NPPL Championship Paintball 2009 (2009, PS3)

Around the time I played this game, my brothers and I were really into paintball. We would take part in large-scale mil-sim events with hundreds of people on each side blasting away at each other. One of my brothers was also on a speedball team, so I was also fairly familiar with the more competitive side of the sport. NPPL Championship Paintball 2009 is based around the competitive speedball side of things, but it ultimately just seems kind of pointless. Paintball is cool, because it lets you simulate video game-like combat scenarios in real life (without having to worry about serious injury, death, or police response). However, when you turn this back around and translate paintball into a video game, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially when the translation is incredibly janky, cheap, and broken. Much like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 6, the enemy AI is only programmed to deal with you playing the “right” way: if you just charge straight down the middle and shoot everyone you come across, you’ll end every match consistently in less than ten seconds, breaking the entire experience. I promise you, if you tried this in real-life paintball, you would be downed immediately, but here the enemy AI is so bad that they do not know how to deal with it. At that point, just play a competitive shooter, you’ll have a way better time.

2. Resident Evil Survivor 2 – CODE: Veronica (2001, PS2)

Resident Evil Survivor 2 left me shocked at how bad it was. I wasn’t expecting much after slogging through its predecessor, but Survivor 2 makes that game look like a masterpiece. It’s the cheapest, laziest game imaginable, made up of 99.9% reused assets. I mentioned this in my Love/Hate entry, but I really need to reiterate that this is a shooter whose maps and assets are literally ripped right from a survival-horror game. They’re completely different genres, so these maps make no sense for a run ‘n gun experience, and the graphics look really bad, because they weren’t supposed to be seen up close. Hell, even the “new” stuff in this game is just assets ripped from the Dreamcast ports of Resident Evil 2 and 3 (and you can tell, because they look worse than the CODE: Veronica assets). Add in that somehow this game is even shorter than its predecessor, and this isn’t even a dumpster fire: it’s just a travesty.

1. Umbrella Corps (2015, PS4)

Umbrella Corps is the worst game I’ve ever played, in part because it should know better. This game came out at the end of Capcom’s half-decade of bed-shitting, with one final shart as they tried, once again, to make Resident Evil into Call of Duty. The game has aspirations of being a highly-competitive, esports shooter, but it just plays like ass. The UI is cluttered to hell, with all sorts of messages and redundant notifications telling you that you can move into cover or do a melee attack, which make it hard to actually see what’s happening on-screen. Of course, this part of the game was dead within a week or two of release, and at this point, Umbrella Corps as it has existed for most of its awful life is an over-glorified series of spec ops missions chores. These missions are tedious, dull, and infuriating – easy to cheese, but if you do, they take forever to complete, so you risk losing just to not have to play this game anymore. I bought this game on sale for six dollars, and I still feel like I got ripped off. I don’t understand how a major publisher releases a game like Umbrella Corps in 2015. We had long figured out shooters by this point, which just makes it so much more egregious than anything else on this list.

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My Top 100 Games of All-Time (25-1)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

25. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003, PC)

Knights of the Old Republic has some of the best writing in all of Star Wars. Back when Disney bought Star Wars and everyone was still excited about the possibilities of new movies, I had a pretty simple request: adapt Knights of the Old Republic to film. You could adapt this game’s script with little changes required and it would be a hit (assuming they didn’t screw up in the execution). The twists would be able to land too, because most mainstream Star Wars fans haven’t played it, so it would still have impact. Oh, and most importantly, adapting KOTOR would not ruin the ending of Return of the Jedi and piss off the fanbase.

KOTOR is just the ultimate union of Star Wars fantasy and Bioware RPG gameplay. Customizing your character and slowly developing their Force powers and lightsaber over the course of the game is awesome. The real-time with pause combat is simple, but flashy in-motion. Seeing what the Star Wars universe was like long before the original trilogy is fascinating. The way that your affinity towards the Dark and Light sides of the Force affects your character, your companions, and the way the story plays out. If you love Star Wars, then you owe it to yourself to give KOTOR a try.

24. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002, PS2)

Another one of those games that was bought for me as a gift and that I wasn’t too interested in until I started playing, Sly Cooper is a fantastic blend of 3D platforming and stealth gameplay. In order to emphasize stealth, Sly (and most enemies you face) will die in one hit. This might sound rough, but the game is balanced around it and it feels very fair – if you are being sneaky, then you should have the upper-hand in every encounter. In fact, I actually prefer this system over Sly‘s sequels, which give everyone health bars… presumably because it is more “expected”? I guess it makes combat have a bit more depth? Whatever the case, combat isn’t really the focus of these games and I much prefer the snappier system in place here.

Like many 3D platformers of the day, Sly Cooper features collect-a-thon elements, but they aren’t just here to give you something arbitrary to do. Levels are littered with coins to steal, which will net you lucky charms (which allow you to take up to two hits before dying) or extra lives. You also collect bottles containing pages of the titular Thievius Raccoonus, which will eventually unlock really useful new moves and abilities that you can use, such as slowing time or creating a decoy to distract enemies.

So the core gameplay of Sly Cooper is rock solid, but the game’s presentation, characters, and story really elevate it. The game has a cartoonish, 50s noir style which is complemented by its cel-shaded graphics which have aged very well. The characters aren’t revelatory, but they’re fun: Sly’s your charming rogue, Bentley’s the high-strung brains of the operation, Murray’s the dumb-but-eternally-loyal and eager getaway driver, and Carmelita is the cop who will stop at nothing to put Sly behind bars… but is her obsession purely professional…? The whole thing is wrapped around a plot which is just perfect for video games: Sly comes from a line of master thieves who have recorded the techniques they have developed in the Thievius Raccoonus, but the book is stolen and his family murdered by a group of rival thieves called the Fiendish Five. Sly and his friends then need to reclaim his family’s knowledge and get revenge on the Fiendish Five. It’s a fairly simple setup, but compelling. Sly Cooper is just an extremely well thought-out video game: everything has been carefully considered and maximized to make Sly Cooper the best it can be.

23. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (2005, PS2)

Sly 3 doesn’t evolve the formula of the franchise very much: gameplay-wise, it’s more of what was established in Sly 2 (basically: Bentley and Murray are new playable characters, the one-hit-kill system is gone, stealth is de-emphasized, and guards can be pickpocketed for easy cash for upgrades). What really makes Sly 3 stand out is its exemplary writing, which builds upon all the developments made over the course of the trilogy. In this game, Sly is putting together a team to pull off a heist against Dr. M, who has taken over the island housing the Cooper family vault. Dr. M has been attempting to break inside to steal the generations of hoarded treasure held within. It seems like a pretty simple setup, but there are some major revelations and developments which twist the way we view our characters and the Cooper family in surprising ways. We also get several returning characters from the previous two games, some of which have undergone major developments. Most notable of these is Panda King, one of the Fiendish Five who killed Sly’s parents. The gang finds themselves having to recruit Panda King in order to successfully pull off the heist, but the tension between Sly and him is so taut that feels like it could snap at any moment. It is great writing, daring to take the difficult route, and the game is so much more rewarding for it. Dr. M is also a surprisingly complex villain, who I’d argue is the best antagonist in the franchise. Building up the gang and then executing this final heist makes for one of the most enjoyable game stories in its own right, but when you combine that with the things this game is doing as a trilogy-ender, it is a monumental achievement.

22. Ninja Gaiden (2004, XB)

Ninja Gaiden is notorious for its difficulty, demanding precision and quick reflexes to survive on higher difficulties. The game’s hero, Ryu Hayabusa, is a demon-slaying ninja badass and one of the coolest game heroes around. The story is functional by video game standards: Ryu needs to get back the Dark Dragon Blade, which was stolen from the Hayabusa ninja clan by the Vigoor Empire, all while battling ninjas, Fiends, and the Black Spider Clan. That’s right… there’s actually a game in my top one hundred which is here purely because of the gameplay. Ninja Gaiden‘s harsh challenge is tough, but fair, demanding that you learn its systems if you want to succeed. When you do overcome a fight that has been challenging you, the feeling of satisfaction is palpable, and the the fight is all the more manageable for it. Something I like about this game in particular which makes it stand out from its sequels is the hub-based world. For most of the game, you explore the streets of Tairon, battling enemies as you gain access to new areas and uncover some cleverly-disguised secrets that only a true ninja could perceive. I know that it’s been said before about this game, but it really does bear saying: Ninja Gaiden makes you feel like a true ninja badass and is well worth experiencing if you can stomach the challenge.

21. Bioshock (2007, PS3)

Whenever I recount my time with Bioshock, I always go back to the very first thing that happened to me in the game. You have an extremely brief opening cutscene where your plane crashes into the ocean and your character rises to the surface of the water to see flames from the wreckage. I sat there a good twenty seconds or more, expecting some object to come into frame from off-screen. Then it hit me: No… these are the in-game graphics!? The reflection of the fire on the water looked so good that I literally thought it was a CGI cutscene. The game was that immersive at its very first second. Then you travel down into the undersea city of Rapture and your mind is in absolute awe of what you are seeing. An art deco, undersea, libertarian dystopia is such a unique setting. And then the horror elements creep in, as you see what has become of the city and its denizens. By that point, you are just fully invested in Bioshock‘s atmosphere: this is just the coolest world design in videogames. It also, quite famously, has some of the best writing in any game of the time, being philosophical while also keeping it entertaining. It also has one of the best twists in gaming, a mind-blowing revelation that makes you re-evaluate your sense of self. And then there’s the plasmid powers you collect and upgrade during your journey which shake up the gunplay in unique ways.

Oh, and who could ever forget the first time they saw a Big Daddy? How about the sheer terror the first time you had to kill one? This game is fantastic, full-stop.

20. Metal Gear Solid (1998, PS1)

Since release, Metal Gear Solid has rightly been praised for pushing the boundaries of cinematics and storytelling in videogames. It’s a staggering achievement for a PS1 game, boundlessly creative and quirky in equal measures. There’s so many legendary moments in this game, that I’m not even sure it makes sense for me to recount them: you either know about them already, or you need to experience them for yourself. So, instead, I’m gonna use this space to describe my introduction to Metal Gear Solid…

This was a game that I had heard about while growing up. I was really into gaming magazines around 2001. One of the first gaming magazines I bought was the Metal Gear Solid 2 cover story for The Official US Playstation Magazine, which really hammered home to me that these games were must-plays (I can still remember their guide on how to fake being sick to get a whole extra-long weekend off to play it). They all sang the praises of the Metal Gear franchise, and they said that Metal Gear Solid was the best one. That said, I wasn’t able to play them at the time: I was eleven when MGS2 came out, I was not allowed to play any M-rated video games, and I didn’t have any money to get them myself.

Around 2005 or 2006, I had fallen in love with the stealth action genre after playing all of the Splinter Cell released to that point. I was itching for some more top-tier stealth games, so obviously Metal Gear Solid was at the front of my mind. I managed to get a ROM of Metal Gear Solid, which I played on an emulator on my PC. I’ll tell ya, over the course of the next few evenings, my mind was blown. I loved the over-the-top action and characters. I loved the equally philosophical and farcical narrative. The presentation was incredible. I loved the insane, fourth-wall breaking gameplay moments. The boss fights were incredibly unique. It was just such a good experience that I started checking out the other games in the franchise as well, and soon Metal Gear Solid was even more important to me than Splinter Cell itself.

19. Shadow of the Colossus (2005, PS2)

Another one of those “early, undeniable examples of games as art” games, Shadow of the Colossus is unrivalled in its atmosphere. The colossi are these majestic, sombre beasts who you have been tasked to slay in order to resurrect an mysterious woman. The resulting journey is nearly wordless, which just absolutely sucks you into this game’s world. Each colossi is not fought in the traditional sense: they are all have a fairly simple puzzle based around their movements which, once solved, will allow you to climb onto their body and stab a weak point until the beast dies. Each colossi is unique and memorable, and the minimalist story really packs an emotional wallop. It’s just such an impactful and artfully-crafted videogame, you just can’t help but be in awe of the talent on display here.

18. Nioh (2017, PS4)

Once again, Team Ninja have an entry that I love entirely for the gameplay. Nioh has the best combat system of any game I have played, bar none. It plays largely the same as any other Souls-like: a stamina bar, challenging difficulty, if you die you lose your souls, etc. The main differences are that Nioh has a loot-based item drop system and that the game is linear and mission-based, rather than having you seamlessly navigating an open world. However, Nioh introduces two mechanics that shake up the Souls formula in some genius ways:

  1. Weapon Stances – Each weapon you get has three stances for your attacks: high for a slow, powerful attack, mid for a standard attack, and low for a quick, weak attack. Right away, this wildly expands the options you have at your disposal for any given combat encounter, but certain enemies are also immune or vulnerable to specific stances.
  2. Ki-Pulse – Nioh has a sort of “active reload” system to instantly replenish your stamina bar if you time a button press correctly. You will quickly get to grips with this maneuver when you play, it makes for a really cool system where you encourage aggressive combat maneuvers in order to maximize your damage dealt.

The game also retains Team Ninja’s pedigree for difficulty. In that quality, Nioh definitely stands out compared to its peers, with a level of precision required that rivals Ninja Gaiden. And I just love the guardian spirits, a charming gang of adorable, magic spirit creatures that give you special powers if you become friends with them. Nioh is just a great game to play, constantly pushing your limit and forcing you to get better.

17. Halo 2 (2004, XB)

Halo holds a special place in my heart. Some of my fondest gaming memories are playing Halo and Halo 2 at a couple youth group LAN parties as a young teenager. I loved the first few Halo books. The writing and world-building was (and still is) top notch. Despite this, I didn’t have an Xbox or a decent PC growing up. So, when the LAN parties stopped happening, I never really got a chance to play them again. I did, briefly, have an Xbox 360 and I attempted to play through Combat Evolved a couple times, but found that I didn’t like the game’s design. As a result, I never made it to trying Halo 2.

Fast-forward to a earlier this year. The Master Chief Collection was on sale for cheap on Steam, and I finally have a PC capable of playing it. Fuckin’ sold, that was an awesome deal. Once again, I found myself growing tired of Combat Evolved‘s design, but I forced myself through. Even then, it took me a couple months to get through to the end.

But then I started Halo 2. MY GOD, the sheer leap forward in every single way is spectacular. The story presentation and writing are legitimately film-like. The level design is much clearer and more distinct. Gameplay is improved in every regard. Dual-wielding guns is such a power trip. Even the small changes to the shields system make you feel more like a badass than before. I would turn off Combat Evolved after one or two levels, but for Halo 2 I blitzed through three levels back-to-back without breaking a sweat, and the only reason I didn’t go any further was because I badly needed to sleep. I got through Halo 2 in about a week, and loved it the whole way through.

16. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007, PS3)

The release of Call of Duty 4 was a bomb-shell in the gaming industry. This one game effectively killed the World War II shooter, which had been a gaming staple for a decade. Suddenly, every shooter had to be a modern military game. Its set-piece moments were jaw-dropping and influenced countless imitators. Halo had been the top dog shooter up until that point, but then this game dropped and arena shooters were decimated. Given that we were still early in the Iraq War at the time, the game had an extra layer of relevance. At the time, this game felt kind of dangerous and daring for how much it invoked real-world politics. This also, of course, started the annual Call of Duty release schedule that we are all sick to death of now.

And, in spite of all that, Call of Duty 4 is still as incredible as ever. This game looked unbelievable back in 2007. The campaign was shockingly strong for a straight-forward shooter game, with memorable characters, cool set-pieces and some gut-wrenching moments. It’s the sort of game that demonstrates the effectiveness of a good, curated, linear campaign: the iconic “All Ghillied Up” is almost entirely scripted, but goddamn if it does not get your pulse pounding. You may be done with Call of Duty now, but anyone who was there for Call of Duty 4 knows that that game was (and still is) a singular experience.

15. Ape Escape (1999, PS1)

Of all the games that were bought for us as a gift that I didn’t have much interest in until I played it, Ape Escape is the best of them. My brothers and I got a PlayStation for Christmas in 2000 and Ape Escape was one of the games we got with it. We didn’t have a whole lot of interest at the time though: what, we’re trying to catch some monkeys? Eh, sounds boring. But then, being bored one day, I decided to try it out, and quickly got sucked in. Now, Ape Escape is my most-replayed game of all-time. I must have played through it at least seven times since I first bought it. Hell, one of the first things I did when I got my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro was to load Ape Escape onto it and then play through the whole thing again, which ultimately led to me writing the Ape Escape Love/Hate series.

The core 3D platforming gameplay of Ape Escape is solid, but what really makes it stand out is the innovative use of the (at the time) brand-new dual analog controller. The left stick controls movement and the right stick controls whatever gadget you currently have equipped, giving you a level of control and precision unseen in console games up to that point. The gadgets themselves are also really neat, with the stun baton to whack monkeys and enemies, the sling shooter to snipe distant targets, the sky flyer to launch yourself high into the air or extend a jump, and the RC car to access small spaces (and harass monkeys), just to name a few of them.

Also… chasing the monkeys is just a hell of a lot of fun. They have three levels of alertness, so approaching them strategically is incentivized, and each ape has its own level of aggression and speed, making each encounter feel fresh. The time-travelling structure is also inspired, shaking up the environments and gameplay after every three levels so that it never gets stale. I love this game so much and I can guarantee that there will be even more replays of it in the future.

14. Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988, NES)

Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of those sequels that blows its predecessors out of the water. Super Mario Bros. was a monumental game for its day, but Super Mario Bros. 3 surpasses it in every single metric. Its graphics are some of the best on the NES, and it’s wild to see how much they have improved in only three years (or two years if you consider that the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 originally released in 1986 and had basically the same graphical fidelity as the first game). There are way more levels and you navigate through them using an overworld map. There are even more clever secrets than before. The power-ups are more varied and are super cool: leaves and tanooki tails to fly, the frog suit to swim easier, and the hammer suit to hurl hammers at enemies. The combination of ambitious innovation and flawless execution make Super Mario Bros. 3 a timeless classic and one of the few NES games that is just as enjoyable today as it was back then.

13. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016, PS4)

So, as you can see from my placement of Uncharted 2 on this list, I really loved that game. However, it’s follow-up, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, was pretty disappointing to me: sure, the set-piece moments were better than ever, and there were some fun new characters, but the story felt like it was an after-thought, which made it by far my least favourite game of the trilogy. I figured that Uncharted 2 would remain the best of the franchise and that would be the end of it, but then a fourth game was announced for PS4. I was optimistic, but I really did not expect to love Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End as much as I did. The writing is the best in the franchise, bar-none, giving us a satisfying and mature end for these characters we’ve grown to love so much over the course of the series. The set-pieces are grander than ever, which is aided immensely by the improved technology since the previous game. The game also takes a cue from the Tomb Raider reboot, introducing some hub areas where you can explore and pick your next mission to complete. The game is also just gorgeous, putting its predecessors to shame in this regard (and those games were no slouches in the graphical department either). For the most part, Uncharted 4 is more of the same, but executed at the absolute best this franchise has ever seen.

12. The Last of Us (2013, PS3)

The Last of Us is one of those games that is so good that it transcended the gaming industry and is just part of the wider culture. This sombre, contemplative, depressing, and tragic story of a man and a girl travelling across a post-apocalyptic wasteland is easily one of the best-told narratives in the medium. Its ending is legendary, one of the most iconic in modern pop culture, and one which has been heavily-debated since it released (for my part, Joel did not do the right thing, and the Left Behind DLC is meant to make this unmistakably clear to the audience).

On top of this, I think that the gameplay is also very underrated. As opposed to Uncharted‘s bombastic action, the gunplay of The Last of Us is slower, more visceral and dangerous. You’ll often spend significant chunks of gameplay using stealth, avoiding alerting enemies as much as possible until you have to engage them. The cordyceps zombies also present a significantly different threat to the human survivors you come across, giving the game a survival horror tone. The way that you scavenge for supplies to craft make-shift weapons and items was also quite innovative for the time, and would be replicated for years after release by other games. This system encourages careful exploration and is done in such a way that you never have enough supplies to do everything you may want to. The Last of Us is Naughty Dog at their peak, flexing their development muscles to create an unforgettable experience.

11. Dead Space 2 (2011, PS3)

Your mom may hate Dead Space 2, but I love it. The game comes out of the gate swinging, featuring one of the most horrific and pulse-pounding opening sequences of any video game. The original game was already great, but Dead Space 2 ups the ante by bringing in more Uncharted-style bombastic action set-pieces. Contributing to this is that Isaac Clarke is no longer a silent protagonist, which allows him to have a lot more personality. This also enables the game’s more personal story, which sees him grappling with crippling PTSD and mental illness due to the events of the first game. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this though is that the game does all this without compromising the survival horror tone – this game is every bit as scary as its predecessor, while also being an action thrill-ride at the same time. The franchise’s core gameplay is every bit as compelling as before, but is now more refined and has more variety of weapons and enemies to keep combat fresh and endlessly replayable. Of all the new additions, my favourite is the Stalker enemies. While most necromorphs will attack the moment they spot you, Stalkers mess with your head like a pack of wolves. They’ll surround you, peek at you to see if you’re distracted, fall back if you get too close, and then scream like a banshee as they charge in for the kill. The first time I fought these guys, I was absolutely terrified, it was such a special experience. The Tormentor is also one of the coolest and most intense boss fights I’ve ever experienced, despite basically being an interactive cutscene.

10. Pokémon HeartGold (2009, DS)

I played countless hours of Pokémon Gold and Silver back in the day, making them one of my favourite games in the franchise. I think that the fourth generation of Pokémon games were the peak of the franchise’s gameplay. Combine these two interests together and we have Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, remakes of the gen two games utilizing the engine and mechanics of the fourth generation games. These games are the ultimate Pokémon adventure, full-stop. The difficulty is legitimately challenging, even for series veterans. The Johto region feels lived-in and steeped in history. The post-game in Kanto is expanded further as well, making this meaty second chapter even more impressive. Your favourite Pokémon follows you around on the overworld. It’s just the best rendition of the classic Pokémon formula, I don’t know how else I can describe it.

9. God of War (2018, PS4)

I’ve dabbled in the God of War games, but I haven’t gotten a chance yet to play through them all. However, I decided to try out the 2018 God of War and was surprised by just how good it was. While I do think that the story of the Greek God of War games is underrated and a lot more interesting than people give it credit for, God of War‘s 2018 entry is unrivalled in its writing. Maybe it’s just the timing of the game for me: I got this right after the birth of my son, so the tale of Kratos and his son, Atreus, on a journey to spread the ashes of Atreus’ mother really resonated with me. Seeing a more matured Kratos lends him so much more depth and sympathy – you can see how he’s trying to direct Atreus to not make the same mistakes he made. And then there’s the primary antagonist, Baldur: he looks like a drunken weenie the first time you see him, but he quickly demonstrates that he is incredibly dangerous, unhinged, and a legitimate threat to Kratos.

The game is also just gorgeous. The environments are breath-taking and I love all the colourful particle effects which just make the game look magical as you go on your Norse journey. The way that the game plays out like one long, seamless take keeps you immersed in this world.

The game also just plays well. I wasn’t sure if I’d like an over-the-shoulder melee system, but it actually plays about as well as the more traditional action game camera in the previous God of War games. It plays like a nice middle-ground between a Souls-like and a more traditional character action game. Kratos’ axe is also just the coolest melee weapon ever, allowing you to throw it and then have it fly back into your hand with the press of a button (hitting any enemy it crosses paths with on the way there for bonus damage). Combat is bloody, visceral, and satisfying. I particularly like the optional Valkyrie bosses hidden around the game world, which really test your skills and are a stiff challenge.

I loved my time with God of War. I rarely bother to platinum games, but I knew pretty early in that I was going to see it through for God of War. I loved this game so much that I had to see everything it had available, including all the optional challenge areas.

8. Dark Souls (2011, PS3)

Another example of “gameplay isn’t everything”. I think that Nioh is superior to Dark Souls in terms of its combat. However, I think that Dark Souls is, without question, the better game overall due to its less-obvious qualities. Of these, the best is the looping, open-world structure. Each area is designed like a linear level, funneling you through encounters until you reach a boss or the next area. However, many of these areas will connect to other areas, giving a sense of interconnectedness and geography to the world. There are several moments where you will reach a gate or an elevator, use it, and then be shocked to see that you’re now in an area you’ve already explored. The sense of verticality is also very unique, as the world is designed as a bunch of regions stacked on top of each other: at the bottom are the ancient, forgotten dregs of this world, while the top is the isolated, gilded realms of the gods themselves. That’s right, FromSoft have mastered world design so well that it’s even thematic. The game’s story presentation is also very unique, choosing to communicate it through the environment and item descriptions rather than an overt narrative. This intentionally leaves much of the story up to interpretation.

Of course, then there’s the combat system, which still influencing the industry to this day. It is relatively slow and deliberate, forcing you to carefully consider every action you make while balancing your stamina bar and limited healing resources. The enemy designs are inspired. Creatures like the Gaping Dragon, Pinwheel, and The Four Kings are such unique concepts, but so evocative and mysterious in their design. The difficulty is tough but fair. Pretty much anyone is capable of overcoming its challenges with a little perseverance and, if that fails, level-grinding.

Dark Souls is a game which just feels like a myth brought to life. Exploring and battling through its forlorn world is haunting, like you’re trespassing in a place you were never meant to be. Its difficulty may have been long surpassed by its successors, but it is still a good challenge and as satisfying as ever to overcome.

7. Bloodborne (2015, PS4)

Bloodborne was my first Souls-like experience. Like Dead or Alive, this game came across my radar after completing the Ninja Gaiden games. I was looking for another game with challenging hack ‘n slash combat, and Bloodborne came highly recommended. With that in mind… I was not primed for the kind of experience that Bloodborne was offering. The combat was fast, but not as fast as Ninja Gaiden, and there was no way to block, so I kept getting destroyed by basic enemies. The gameplay wasn’t really “clicking” with me, but I decided to persevere. However, piece-by-piece, it started to click in place in my mind. The importance of shortcuts, parry and dodge timing, careful analysis of the area, and stamina management really started to settle in. Around two-thirds of the way in, I “got” it, but I still wasn’t blown away. However, this all changed in one moment: I bought the DLC, played through to Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower… and I was stuck. She absolutely destroyed me multiple times. I tried to summon a co-op helper, but no one was answering my bell. I distinctly remember sitting there, waiting for minutes for someone to respond, when I decided: “Fine, I guess I’m just gonna knuckle-down then and do this myself.”

I died, over and over again. I must have done so over twenty times, but I was slowly learning more and more of Lady Maria’s moveset, getting her health down lower and lower as I went. When I finally managed to overcome her, it was like a deadly ballet between the two of us, and I felt a satisfaction that I had never felt in the game up to that point. I was changed, and I resolved to try to beat every Souls-like boss thereafter without summoning, if I could reasonably do so. It was the true start of my love affair with these games.

Like Blasphemous, Bloodborne is a game which ticks all my boxes. Souls-combat, but faster and more aggressive? Gothic and eldritch horror aesthetic? Blood? Fanatics? Goddamn fuckin’ werewolves!? Bloodborne is what you get when you take a solid gameplay foundation and then commit to a particular vision and aesthetic, elevating the game well beyond the sum of its parts.

6. Civilization VI (2016, PC)

While I think I’d say that Civilization IV was the most fun I had with a single Civilization game, if I had to pick one of these games to play today, it’s Civ VI, without question. Starting with Civ V, Firaxis shook up the series’ formula in some pretty fundamental ways, moving from a grid to a hex-based map, and making cities far more specialized and customizable. While I wasn’t a big fan of Civ V, Civ VI plays like a more refined version of that game, but with several more features added. Shaping your nation and conquering the world through diplomacy, culture, religion, or good ol’ fashioned war is a lot of fun, and no two games will ever play out the same. There are also an overwhelming number of civilizations available to play, providing even more variety and incentives to play the game how you want. I also like how the game doesn’t really force you into picking one particular victory route early – it’s completely viable to wait until the modern era to really commit to a victory condition (unlike, say, Civilization: Beyond Earth, where you’re pretty much knee-capping yourself if you diversify your nation’s interests). The “just one more turn” gameplay is just as addictive as ever as you set goals for yourself and see them come to fruition over the course of the next few turns and there are lots of options to customize the game to your liking (including options for some pretty wild, alternative game modes).

5. Tetris (1989, NES)

Tetris is the definition of “simple, but addictive”. Drop shapes made up of four blocks, try to make lines with them to clear them out before they reach the top, you get more points if you clear more lines at once, and the game gets faster the more lines you clear. Good luck, and try to get the highest score possible.

There are lots of different versions of Tetris out there: they’re all great, and I really like the quality of life improvements that have been developed over the years, but the NES version was the one that first got me into the game. Whenever I start replaying Tetris, I can see the blocks falling in my mind where ever I go. I used to keep track of my scores in NES Tetris… I wanted to show off a bit, but I can’t find the text document anymore… As I recall, I used to be able to get to around level twenty-five when it starts getting too fast to react, and I’d get as many four-line-clears as possible up to that point.

4. Resident Evil 4 (2005, GC)

Resident Evil 4 is an incredible game. The ambition, innovation, and attention to detail on display is staggering. Resident Evil games had grown really stale at the time, so it came out at the perfect moment. What makes this more remarkable is that the game basically plays like a classic Resident Evil game, only with full 3D and manual aiming, but its changes make it feel like a wholly new thing. Its over-the-shoulder camera revolutionized third person videogames and resulted in numerous imitators for years thereafter. It established Leon Kennedy as an absolute badass. There are just so many things you can say about this game’s legacy, that you really can’t understate how important it was.

For my part, I owned a copy of Resident Evil 4 on PS2 back around 2008, but I hadn’t really gotten past the opening village battle. It wasn’t until 2021 when I started the Resident Evil Love/Hate series that I finally decided to commit to trying it out. While it took about an hour to get used to the controls, once I acclimated, I was stunned at just how refined this game was. The whole experience is so lovingly crafted and varied that it never gets boring, and the campy tone doesn’t diminish from the horror elements. Then there’s all the little, optional systems you can engage in: treasure-hunting to get extra currency, the gun range where you can win prizes for good shooting, and you can do tricks during the jet ski section. Hell, what other game makes inventory management fun!? There’s a reason why this game is still being re-released and remade twenty years later, it’s an essential pillar of the gaming landscape and a monument to fantastic design.

3. Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023, PC)

Back during the early-to-mid 2010s, video games liked to tell us that “your choices matter”. However, after scores of Telltale and Quantic Dream games, the Mass Effect trilogy, Fallout, etc, gamers came to realize the truth of the matter: making consequences matter in games is hard. If you give the player the ability to make a choice which could change the game world, it’s simply too much work to make that choice actually matter in the grand scheme of things. At most, you may create a short, branching path, but it will just lead back to the main path again. Have to choose to let one of two characters die? You can be sure that the one you saved with have basically no bearing on the plot, or they’ll do the exact same things the other character would have done anyway. Hell, Fallout will let you kill just about anyone, but if a character is actually important, you can shoot them as much as you want, but they’ll just fall unconscious and forget anything happened the next time you see them. Once you realize this, it really destroys the illusion and can make certain choices completely worthless when you encounter them. I remember distinctly feeling this in The Walking Dead: Season 2 when you had to choose which characters would live and die… effectively rending that character useless for the rest of the journey, since they could be dead in another player’s playthrough and it would be too much effort that half your player base will never see to give them a major role thereafter.

Baldur’s Gate 3 throws this conventional wisdom out the window. While the game’s narrative does move forward on a fairly linear track, the amount of influence you have over events is astounding. While it doesn’t offer nearly as much freedom as a proper, tabletop DND game, it comes unreasonably close to achieving that. Like, for the earliest example of this unprecedented amount of freedom: you come across a druid grove where tiefling refugees are staying. The relationship between the grove and the tieflings is extremely strained, but the tieflings can’t leave because the road to Baldur’s Gate is too dangerous due to raids by the Cult of the Absolute. As a result, they’re on the verge of committing violence to stay in the safely of the grove. Initially, you can pick a side to support, or you can choose to try to find a compromise. Or, later on, you come across the Cult of the Absolute, who are trying to kill both factions, and you can choose to side with them. The expectation is that you will find a peaceful solution, but if you want to side with the cult and massacre everyone, that is completely viable. In fact, an entire character and their unique storyline is locked behind this option. Hell, you can choose to kill everyone on all sides and the game will just continue to go along, locking off content as characters abandon your party and questlines become unachievable. Characters will even acknowledge all the unexpected little choices you make. And, if this isn’t ridiculous enough, the game is fully voice acted, meaning that the amount of work that has gone into planning for every eventuality players could make is mind-boggling. Most players will never see much of this content. Hell, there’s an entire world of animals and corpses you can talk to, but you will only ever see it if you cast “speak with animals” or “speak with dead”, respectively (and you really should, these interactions are amazing). Hell, when you do reach Baldur’s Gate, much of the populace are interactable, with dialog trees and fully voiced performances. Many of these characters are there for nothing more than flavour, and all it does is make the world more believable and lived-in. That is the scale of the work put into Baldur’s Gate 3, and the more you think about it, the more it defies comprehension.

That’s all well and good, but the game is also just really fun. Due to the level of freedom, you get to approach its turn-based combat system in whatever ways you see fit. You really come to love the characters here, customizing their abilities to suit your needs, and forming relationships with them as you advance their side-quests. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an unreasonably good game, the sort of experience that you simply cannot expect anyone else to one-up. It will be the sort of game that we point to even a decade from now as an unrivalled pinnacle of the industry and one that you can go back to over and over again and find new secrets each time.

2. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005, PS2)

As I said in the Metal Gear Solid entry, I became interested in those games because of my love for Splinter Cell. When I was in my early teens, I bought Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow at a street fair, and it began my love affair with stealth games. I loved it and made sure to pickup a copy of the original game shortly thereafter. With those two completed, we came to the newest game at the time: Chaos Theory. I had loved the previous two games, so I was super excited to get it… but, I couldn’t. See, Chaos Theory was the first Splinter Cell game to be rated M. My parents had a “no M-rated games” policy for us kids. I was only sixteen, I couldn’t wait another year to be old enough to play them! No, I was going to have to put my own roguish skills to the test…

So, one day when we were at Wal-Mart, I headed to the electronics section to look at the games. There was Chaos Theory, locked behind the game cabinet. I asked the clerk to get it out of the cabinet and ring it up. I figured he was going to ask me to verify my age, which would dash my plans, but he didn’t bother. I snuck it home and kept the game hidden so that my parents would never know that I had bought an M-rated game. My brothers and I were very good kids, so intentionally disobeying them like this was exciting and dangerous. It’s kind of silly, but it felt like I was the one sneaking about and pulling off secret missions without getting caught.

Chaos Theory plays much like its predecessors, but with some tweaks. These include a new noise meter, an EMP device for your sidearm, improved graphics and animations, smarter enemies, and a choice of lethal and non-lethal melee attacks. The missions are also really well-designed. Most famous of these is the bank heist near the start of the game, which is just a flawless example of thrilling game design. The level mixes infiltration, exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving in such a glorious blend. The voice cast are on top form here, especially Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher. His performance in this game makes Sam Fisher downright terrifying at times. Chaos Theory was the absolute peak of Splinter Cell, before Ubisoft felt that the series needed to be shaken up. As a result, we’ve never really gotten another game quite like it, making it a game that is still worth playing to this day.

1. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004, PS2)

Snake Eater is perfect.

I love the writing. The political philosophizing stands side-by-side with big, dumb action sequences, and juvenile humour. The journey that Naked Snake goes on in this game is genuinely moving.

I love the characters. Naked Snake is the best Metal Gear character, bar none. The Boss is just incredible, and her motherly relationship with Snake adds so much emotional weight to the plot. EVA is a great Bond girl; enticing, but one who you never really think you can trust. Ocelot is a lot of fun when he shows up, I love that they gave him a more immature personality to match his age. Volgin is such a fun villain to hate; joyously evil and sadistic.

I love the boss battles. The obvious highlight is The End. The first time I came across him, I knew his reputation. I got shot by him almost immediately without even seeing him and decided right there to chicken out on the fight. I knew about the clock-skip trick, where you can win the battle automatically by moving your system clock forward a week, which causes The End to die of old age. I did it, but I didn’t feel good about it. Some time later when I replayed the game in the Subsistence re-release, I decided to knuckle-down and do the fight for real this time. I can distinctly remember running around lost for the first part of the fight, trying to figure out where The End was hiding. However, I soon began to realize all the ways you could pin-point his location, and soon it was a game of hunter vs hunter. I think it took me an hour and a half, but I gunned him down and felt the rush of satisfaction for overcoming such a creative and unique challenge.

I love the setting. A jungle in Russia is a pretty wild setting, but it’s so evocative. The jungle is the realm of predators, so being able to hunt enemies here makes you feel so cool. The setting also takes Metal Gear from the hallways and corridors they had been in up to that point. Levels are open, with lots of room to maneuver and pick your approach. You have to hide in plain sight, which is so much more badass than hiding in a locker.

I love all the ways you can mess with guards. For example, you can blow up their food supplies to make them hungry and vulnerable to eating poisoned food that you’ve left around. You can also blow up their ammunition stores so they can’t shoot you if you’re spotted. You can also throw a pissed-off, poisonous animal at them to get it to bite them to death.

I love the new survival elements. Having to hunt for food to sustain yourself really hammers home the idea that you’re an operative deep in enemy territory. I love how the camouflage meter facilitates the more open level designs without sacrificing the stealth gameplay.

I love the ending. Snake Eater has my favourite ending of any piece of media. The first time I played this game, I was blown away by the final boss fight and cutscene. It re-contextualized the game’s events and really made me question what I had done to get to this point. It’s beautifully acted and emotional. It’s the cherry on top of a perfect sundae.

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My Top 100 Games of All-Time (50-26)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

50. Demolition Racer (1999, PS1)

A childhood classic, Demolition Racer is what it sounds like: combine demolition derby destruction with a high-octane racing game. The results are, predictably, catastrophic, with cars slamming into each other at high speeds, vehicles sent flying everywhere, catching fire, and exploding. This isn’t just nostalgia talking either, I’ve gone back and replayed this game multiple times in the past few years and it is always a blast.

49. Gravity Rush 2 (2017, PS4)

Gravity Rush 2, and its predecessor, are joyous games. Their plots are uplifting, full of positivity in the face of danger. Their characters are charming and unique. Most importantly though, the central mechanic reminds you of the simple joy of play. Too many games have movement and traversal as a lengthy chore that you have to manage in order to get from point A to point B, and you spend more time bored and annoyed getting to your destination than you actually do enjoying yourself (looking at you Witcher 3…). Gravity Rush flips the script on this: being able to shift gravity at will to fall towards your chosen destination is as breath-taking at minute one as it is at hour fifteen. It matters less that combat is a bit finnicky when the moment-to-moment gameplay is this fun and the writing is this charming. Gravity Rush 2 is pure joy and the industry needs more games like this in it.

48. Twisted Metal: Black (2001, PS2)

While Twisted Metal 2 is probably the best-playing Twisted Metal game, I’ve reiterated over and over here that gameplay isn’t everything, and Twisted Metal: Black is one of the best examples of this. The game is bloody difficult, perhaps too much so at times and the game can feel downright unfair. However, where Black really stands out is in its presentation and story. Black is easily one of the darkest video games ever released. Its cast are a bunch of psychopaths let loose from an insane asylum, all doing battle with each other and tearing across the city of Midtown in order to be granted a wish of their choice. You’ve got such colourful figures as No-Face (a professional boxer who lost a fight, causing a doctor who had bet on him to remove his eyes and tongue and then stitch them shut), Mr. Grimm (a Vietnam vet and former POW who is wracked with PTSD and a craving for human flesh), Preacher (a delusional pastor who downed a goddamn baby because he thought it was possessed), Warthog (a serial killer whose wish is to remove the part of the brain that makes him feel remorse when he kills), and of course Sweet Tooth (an unrepentant, murder-obsessed serial killer who wears a clown mask). Each character has a very dark and disturbing story that plays out over the course of the game, and the game’s world is suitably gloomy and depressing. It’s so over-the-top grimdark that it’s cartoonish, but then loops right back around to being properly dark stuff due to how hard it commits to the whole thing.

47. Resident Evil 2 (2019, PS4)

Resident Evil 2 remake was a lightning rod moment for the gaming industry, kicking off the remake craze we find ourselves knee-deep in. The game is just a bloody good, tense thrill-ride. Zombies have not been this threatening in decades, taking tons of ammunition to put down for good, which incentivizes you to conserve your resources and avoid them where ever possible. The design of the RPD is also still one of the most memorable environments in gaming and it’s just as compelling here in full 3D as it was on PS1. While it does stumble a bit towards the latter-half and the story isn’t all that interesting, Resident Evil 2 is one of those games that you cannot stop thinking about once you pick it up.

46. The Movies (2005, PC)

Peter Molyneux is notorious for over-hyping his games, but the one time he actually struck pure gold has to be The Movies. As a business management sim, it’s pretty cool: you manage a movie studio, building sets, hiring star directors and actors (and keeping them happy), managing crew, and developing technology from the silent era up to the modern day. All this is decent enough for a game in its own right, but what catapults The Movies to the stratosphere is the in-game machinima tools that give you a lot of freedom to create your very own movies. I’m talking dozens and dozens of scenes (each with variants and customization options), systems to allow the characters to lip synch with any recorded audio, special effects, and a basic video editor. It’s a mind-blowing amount of freedom, to the point where I made a feature-length spy movie back in high school using The Movies.

45. Blasphemous (2019, Switch)

Sometimes a video game comes out which is just made for me. Blasphemous scratches so many of my itches: Metroidvania, Souls-inspirations, religious fanaticism, dark fantasy, blood, penitence… I picked it up in a sale a few years ago and I was glued to my Switch for a week straight, obsessed with journeying through this nightmarish civilization to prove my devotion to the faith. It isn’t doing much different than your average Metroidvania game, but it hits so many of my interests that I can’t help but adore it.

44. RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999, PC)

Like many other 90s kids, I got this game for free in a box of cereal. The game itself is the pinnacle of management sims, with a simple premise: build the amusement park of your dreams. Build attractions, setup decorations to make things more aesthetically pleasing, landscape to your liking, optimize your pathways, and design your very own rollercoasters (which, inevitably, will be too intense for the guests)! Each guest also has their own name, amount of money they’ll spend, and likes and dislikes which can help you tailor the park to maximize returns.

Of course, that’s all good if you’re playing the game as designed. You can easily turn RollerCoaster Tycoon into a psychopath simulation as well. Make vomit-inducing rides and then charge your guests to use the bathroom. Are guests mad that you charge them $5 to go for a piss? Grab ’em and throw them on punishment island, where they’ll angrily run in circles until you send the island into the ocean and drown everyone. Or, the classic option: build an unsafe rollercoaster and watch it crash and explode, killing everyone on board. You don’t have to be a dick in RollerCoaster Tycoon, but it’s a lot of fun that the game gives you the freedom to do so.

43. The Walking Dead (2012, PS3)

Telltale had been making narrative, episodic games since the mid-2000s, but they never really had any major hits, and their biggest swings (looking at you Jurassic Park) were considered fairly poor and did not make a splash. So, for a while, Quantic Dream’s games were the gold standard for narrative games, with Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain being quite notable titles of their eras. However, even back then, the writing of those games was heavily criticized, but I (and many others) excused it, because we couldn’t really get these kinds of cinematic, narrative-based experiences elsewhere.

Then Telltale’s The Walking Dead came out, and Quantic Dream were obsolete overnight. The Walking Dead established a formula of narrative, choice-based games that Telltale would milk dry over the next few years, but The Walking Dead stands tall amongst them just due to the strength of the writing here. The tale of Lee and Clementine is unforgettable: an escaped convict stumbles across a little girl whose babysitter has been killed during a zombie apocalypse and takes her under his wing. The illusion of choice is very much a thing here, but it doesn’t really matter that much when the journey itself is so good. What makes it so good are not the big choices anyway, it’s the little ones – do you go all-out to protect Clementine, or do you try to preserve her innocence as best you can? No other video game has managed to make me cry like this one, and I imagine if I were to replay it now, after becoming a father, it would leave me absolutely devastated.

42. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (2004, PC)

I’ve been a Warhammer 40k fan for most of my life, and I can say with confidence that the original Dawn of War is still unsurpassed as far as 40k games go. An old-school RTS which innovated by putting the focus directly on getting you into combat, Dawn of War lets you engage in visceral, bloody, large-scale war with friends or AI opponents. Several factions were added in expansions, meaning that it is absolutely packed with content to try out. The game is still fully playable online to this day as well, and I’ve had the pleasure of getting together with friends recently to try to hold the line against high-level CPU teams hell-bent on annihilating us. It results in glorious carnage as your units rain gunfire and artillery down and chainswords rip through flesh. The modding community is also great, bringing in an entirely new, playable faction and removing the game’s unit cap for ultimate apocalypse mode.

41. Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires (2004, PS2)

I am not exaggerating when I say that I love Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires. I have poured countless hours into this game as I gleefully hack and slash my way through ancient China to reunite the land under my banner. Empires specifically is great, because it adds a level of grand strategy to Dynasty Warriors‘ usual formula, as each battle captures territory, makes new items available, allows you to recruit and capture officers, and gets you one step closer to conquering the nation. This change takes the rather repetitive combat of Dynasty Warriors and gives each battle a level of importance and resonance that it may otherwise lack, since each action you do is building towards a grander goal. The nature of the world map also means that no two campaigns will play out the same: you’re always going to have different enemy factions, different officers fighting with you, different territories to attack and defend at any given time, etc. I actually replayed the game on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro a few months ago, and it was like cuddling in a warm, familiar blanket again. Later games may have expanded the political gameplay, but this version of Empires will always have a special place in my heart.

40. Resident Evil 3 (2020, PS4)

My go-to answer for “most over-hated game of all-time”, I legitimately enjoy Resident Evil 3 remake more than Resident Evil 2 remake. This, once again, comes down to the non-gameplay aspects: the story in Resident Evil 3 is easily the best in the entire franchise. Jill is a fucking badass, Carlos is cool, Nikolai is a great secondary antagonist, and Nemesis is a terrifying, relentless monster. Resident Evil 3 plays like a PS3-era, cinematic action game in the vein of Dead Space 2, the sort of experience we rarely get these days when every game has to be open world and dozens of hours in length or it’s not worth gamers’ time. The runtime is fine for this sort of experience: the six-to-eight hours you spend are maximized for fun and spectacle, and I got significantly more enjoyment out of this than I did out of the bloated, two hundred hours spent toiling away in Fallout 4 (and I call bullshit on anyone who claims to have beat it in three hours unless they were specifically running through it as fast as possible). Plus it’s on sale all the time now, so price isn’t even a problem. Sure, it cuts some content from the original, but the original still exists: play ’em both, I say.

39. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege (2015, PS4)

While the game has expanded in some wild directions since release, the core gameplay of Rainbow Six: Siege is one of the best multiplayer shooters I’ve ever experienced. I got in early, a few weeks after launch when the game was in a very rough state, and I was hooked due to how intense it was. As a defender, having to fortify your position while you can hear attackers breaching to get to you makes your heart beat fast and your palms sweat in anticipation of what’s to come. As an attacker, you have to watch every step you take as you try to get in as safely as possible. Each encounter is life-or-death, with instant kills coming frequently. The operators’ unique weapons and equipment fundamentally affect how this plays out and creates a mix-and-match system that makes every game unique. While I don’t really play competitive shooters much anymore and, as a result, I’ve effectively retired from Siege for good, my time with the game was easily some of the best experiences I’ve ever had in an online game.

38. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015, PS4)

With the glut of open world games we’ve gotten in the past decade, my opinions on The Phantom Pain have softened somewhat. Traversal quickly becomes a pain in the ass, as starting any mission will require you to get past multiple guard checkpoints, you always feel obligated to look for new soldiers to recruit for your base, and the side ops get extremely repetitive. That said, The Phantom Pain still stands out thanks to its fundamental gameplay systems. Stealth remains incredibly fun, all the wild and wacky gadgets at your disposal give you so many ways to mess with guards, and the guards actually learn and start to counter your tricks, forcing you to change things up regularly. In spite of its problems, it’s still a great sandbox experience and a solid send-off to the greatest saga in gaming.

37. Mass Effect 2 (2011, PS3)

While Mass Effect 3‘s ending soured the entire franchise, Mass Effect 2 at least remains one of the best action RPGs on consoles thanks to its fairly self-contained story. You’re basically tasked with putting together a team of specialists to go on a suicide mission. The first twenty or so hours are just you recruiting your team, getting to know them, preparing your ship and equipment, and (most importantly) growing emotional connections to your entire crew. We then get one of the best finales in gaming as your team plunges into the gauntlet and your decisions over the course of the game come to fruition. Depending on what you’ve done, one or more of your crew can die executing the mission, which is about as emotionally impactful as you would expect.

36. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999, PS1)

Shock! Horror! I liked both versions of Resident Evil 3! While I certainly have some issues with it compared to its predecessor, Nemesis is such a unique and ambitious game for its time period. Its scope is significantly wider than any previous Resident Evil game, allowing you to freely traverse an entire section of Raccoon City. The titular Nemesis is also downright scary here, barely operating within the limits of what you can reasonably deal with in Resident Evil‘s tank control scheme. The freedom and sense of risk/reward that this gives you is great – you can avoid fights with him if you want to, but if you choose to tough it out, you’ll be handsomely rewarded for your efforts. I remember when this game was considered the dark horse of the franchise, so seeing it get all the love after all this time is great to see.

35. Dead or Alive 2 (1999, PS2)

A couple months ago, I would have said that I liked Dead or Alive as a franchise, but I wouldn’t have had any of the games in my top fifty. Dead or Alive 2 changed that for me. The game is a massive improvement on its predecessor, adding in new characters, fun new mechanics, stage hazards and multi-level stages which wildly change how a battle looks and feels. The game is also simply packed to the brim with content, to a degree that we just do not get out of games anymore. It’s a simple enough game that anyone can pick it up, but deep enough that there’s a lot to learn and come to grips with if you really want to dedicate yourself to learning. Like I said in my recent Love/Hate series, I’m so glad that I decided to check the older games in this franchise out, because they were a real joy to get to experience.

34. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015, PS Vita)

Hotline Miami 2 is largely more of the same from its predecessor, but when that game had one of the most addictive and replayable gameplay loops of any game, that’s nothing to sniff at. Hotline Miami 2 is hypnotic: an acid trip of colour, blood, ultraviolence, synthwave, and pure focus. You will die over, and over, and over again as you try to perfect your killing spree and get through each area unscathed. This results in a ballet of bullets as you mow down enemy gangsters with dual SMGs, throw your empty gun to stun a guy, then slash their jugular open with a blade you picked up, then throw that blade into another guy’s head, grab another weapon to keep going, etc. All this coming as you die, hone your approach, die again, and so on until you have it down perfectly.

33. This War of Mine (2014, PC)

This War of Mine threads the extremely delicate line between entertainment and art with a serious message and, in my opinion, the results are poignant. Meant to act as a commentary on international conflicts and of the military shooters of the day, you play as a small group of survivors caught in an active warzone trying to survive to see peace return once more. You have to balance your survivors’ sleep, hunger, and morale, and developing your safehouse to be able to produce heating, supplies, and to be able to defend against looters. Then, at night time, it’s safe enough to sneak out and try to scavenge for supplies… but be careful, because you’re not the only one trying to survive…

Then there’s the heavy choices. Supplies are going to start drying up real quickly. Do you risk confronting other scavengers who may be hostile? Do you enter an area with ongoing exchanges of gunfire to risk getting to supplies that haven’t been picked over yet? Do you try to break into a gang’s well-stocked safehouse to steal their supplies? Or do you break into a defenseless old couple’s home and steal their supplies to keep yourself alive? If neighbours ask for help, will you give up some of your rations and medicine to help them? And, if you have children in your safehouse, how do you keep them safe and innocent in the face of all this? This War of Mine leaves these choices up to you, and only makes them harder as disease and winter set in, making you really test the limits of your morals. It’s a one-of-a-kind survival experience, and I implore you to check it out.

32. Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (2001, PS2)

Shattered Skies is a special game for me. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a pilot instructor. One of my earliest memories was flying with my grandfather in his two seater airplane and looking down at the world below us. Probably due to this connection, my aunt bought me a copy of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies as a gift. I wasn’t particularly interested at the time, but eventually decided to give it a try, and quickly became mesmerized.

On the gameplay front, Shattered Skies is an arcadey military air combat game where you’ll be dogfighting, shooting and bombing ground targets, and sometimes flying dangerously low to avoid radar and airburst artillery. The gameplay is actually way more varied than you’d expect for this kind of game and makes for a game that never gets old. You also get access to dozens of airplanes, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and customization options, which let you tailor them to each mission you find yourself in.

What really makes Shattered Skies so good though is its shockingly mature story – and I don’t mean that in the “rated M for mature” sense, I mean that this is some legitimately great stuff. The story is told from three perspectives: 1) the big picture, war room briefing perspective, which tells you about the progress of the war between ISAF and Erusea; 2) the in-game story of Mobius 1, who you control and turn into a legendary fighter ace over the course of the game; 3) the story of a grown man recounting his experience as a boy growing up in occupied San Salvacion. This third story is where the real emotional punch of Shattered Skies comes in, as we see his family killed as collateral damage in the war after the Erusean Yellow Squadron shoots down a plane, which crashes into their house. Despite hating the occupiers, he grows to have a strained relationship with some of the fighter aces in Yellow Squadron who are based in the city. While Yellow Squadron clearly have empathy for the boy and want to be seen as more than just occupiers, you get the sense that they are legitimately saddened when he has to stand up to them in order to protect a friend in the resistance. This more personal perspective of your enemies makes it a bittersweet moment when we have to face Yellow Squadron in battle as Mobius 1 and shoot them down one-by-one. It’s a shockingly clever and tragic way to lend emotional stakes to what would otherwise be standard air combat gameplay. This whole story makes Shattered Skies so much more than the sum of its parts, and is easily one of the best-written stories in video games.

31. Resident Evil 2 (1998, PS1)

I knew that Resident Evil 2 was celebrated back in the day, but I didn’t really realize just how good it was until I finally played it earlier this year. Given its placement here on the list, I also clearly liked it quite a bit more than its more polished and popular remake. I just love the way that Resident Evil 2 feels and plays: nearly everything good about the remake is intact here, and in some ways (such as the story and branching playthroughs) it’s even better. It’s incredibly impressive for a PS1 game and by far the most fun entry in the “classic” era of Resident Evil.

30. Resident Evil (2002, GC)

While Resident Evil 2 is the best of the classic era, the remake of the original Resident Evil is arguably the best distillation of the Resident Evil formula we’ve ever gotten, largely thanks to the changes and improvements it brought after six years of iteration. The original Resident Evil was a very rough and unrefined game: full of cool ideas, but lacking in the execution. REmake realizes that potential and then some, with graphics that still look fantastic today that help bring the oppressive atmosphere of the Spencer Mansion to life. The remake also makes several changes to the original game which keep things surprising to veterans and improve the overall layout of the mansion in the process. The Crimson Heads are the most notorious example of this, providing a nasty surprise to new players who are too liberal with their firearms usage, and adding a whole other layer of strategy as you have to figure out which bodies to burn before they reanimate as even more dangerous enemies.

29. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010, PS3)

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it may seem kind of weird to rank a Battlefield game so highly, because a Battlefield game is just another Battlefield, right? Bad Company 2 was special. Like Battlefield 3, this game was really designed for rush, and charging in with your teammates to take the MCOM stations was as intense as it was fun. Bad Company 2 also featured a level of destruction that no Battlefield game since has dared attempt to replicate: nearly every building can be blown apart or leveled entirely. While some argue that this makes the map kind of boring once all the buildings are gone, I call those people cowards: flushing defenders out of Arica Harbour with a series of tank shell strikes was a literal blast. The game also had some fantastic maps which, when they’ve shown up in subsequent Battlefield titles, have given me a rush of nostalgia that I’ve rarely felt for anything else. It’s a shame that the game was shut down for good last year, but the memories live on forever.

28. Dead Space (2008, PS3)

Dead Space is the best franchise to arise from the glut of Resident Evil 4 clones, and it’s not even close. A mixture of Event Horizon, The Thing, and Alien, this first game brings terror to the corridors of the Ishimura as you try to stay alive against hordes of necromorphs and find out what happened to your girlfriend, who was stationed on the ship. The core gameplay gimmick is inspired for a horror game of this nature: simply shooting a necromorph is insufficient to kill it, you need to blast their limbs off to immobilize them. Combined with limited resource survival gameplay, stasis blasts to slow enemies, kinesis to throw objects at your foes, and a good ol’ fashioned curb stomp when all else fails, the core gameplay of Dead Space is rock solid.

27. Fire Emblem: Awakening (2012, 3DS)

Fire Emblem: Awakening came out at a difficult time for the long-running franchise. Sales for the last couple entries had been underwhelming, so Intelligent Systems had one last chance to right the ship before the series went on ice for good. With this in mind, the developers threw the kitchen sink at Awakening, trying to make the biggest, best Fire Emblem of all-time, if only to give it a proper swan song. Luckily, their efforts paid off and Awakening gave the franchise a second life. While it largely plays like any other Fire Emblem game (turn-based tactics gameplay, RPG elements, perma-death, etc), Awakening‘s big new feature was an expansion of the relationship system to allow two of your soldiers to have children, who will inherit traits from both of them. This allows for some really fun and unique combinations, which work just as much for roleplayers as they do for min-maxers. While some fans have bemoaned this addition, claiming it turned Fire Emblem into a waifu simulator, I think that that opinion is fucking dumb. Awakening is a great game and, in my opinion, the most fun Fire Emblem I’ve played thus far.

26. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009, PS3)

I really enjoyed the original Uncharted when it came out, a lot more than most people who played it in fact. I loved the characters, the gameplay, and the story, so I was excited to see how Naughty Dog would up their game for the follow-up. What I was not expecting was for Uncharted 2 to absolutely blow everyone’s expectations out of the water and be widely considered the game of the year for 2009.

Uncharted 2 plays like its predecessor, but with some key refinements. The game is overall just bigger: more grand spectacle, bigger set-piece moments, more characters, more complex story. As much as I liked Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher in the first game, they really come into their own here, and I love that Naughty Dog didn’t take the easy route of having their pulp hero have a new love interest in every game.

And that’s it for part two. If you’re reading this the day it came out, then the final part will be up tomorrow!

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