Games! Let's talk about 'em. There are so very many of them that come out each and every month, that our attention tends to drift from game to game, tossing some of them to the side undeservedly. Other times, we can spend $60 on a game, only to feel absolutely robbed when we realize that it is not what it was cracked up to be. This is a fundamental imbalance in just about every field of popular culture. In movies, cult classics become favorites among fans despite a low box office gross, while absolutely terrible movies such as 2012 make a heap of money.

In this article, we've pulled together a list of games that have been sales sensations despite their frustrating nature, and games that haven't received nearly as much attention as they deserve. We need to have a conversation about our game buying habits, I feel. Hype can make us blind to a game's true shortcomings until we get our hands on them ourselves, when they become all too clear. On the other hand, stunning games that are barely marketed can be ignored completely, leading to, in some cases, developers having to close their doors.

Now that we have the internet, there really is no excuse. We can no longer rely simply on magazines to tell us what we think about certain games. We need to do our research long before we purchase them, and make an informed decision about which ones are worth our cash. That being said, let's begin this hall of shame/hall of little fame cavalcade.

30 Bad: No Man's Sky

Where do we begin? No Man's Sky is the poster child for overhype. We were promised seamless flying between worlds, a connected universe that would potentially allow us to meet our friends, and a real impact on the universe. What we got was nothing of the sort. We got texture pop-in on a tremendously terrible scale, a sealed-off theme park ride of a universe, and a feeling that this huge universe was painfully empty. There's possibly 10 hours of fun to be had in this game. Nothing close to what we were lead to expect.

29 Bad: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

Despite some people's love for the Skate franchise, there is no purer virtual skating experience than the early Tony Hawk games. They were outlandish, irreverent, fun, and challenging. Then the fifth installment is released, and what do we get? A broken, buggy mess. The game's goals are taken from a tiny pool, so you can be sure you're going to see the same one over and over. The trick system has been demolished, with no flatlander moves available. There are long, long loading times that destroy the game's crucially important flow. It's an insult to the franchise.

28 Classic: Mirror's Edge

The original Mirror's Edge has a bit of a cult following, but it's still vastly overlooked. but is still worth playing for a fair few reasons. One, the game captured parkour's essence, with an incredible sense of speed and movement that's unmatched by any AAA title. The game's world was a foreboding dystopia that shied away from the dark worlds we usually associate with such a vision, instead focusing on pristine, shiny authoritarianism. Finally, the combat was unimportant. While there were sections that funneled you into a fight, they were far from plentiful. The game captured the joy of movement.

27 Bad: Star Wars Battlefront 2

I'm going to begin this entry by talking about everything I like about Battlefront 2. It looks quite nice. There we go, didn't take long, did it? The game is substantially flawed. Why? Loot boxes. If you're going to have a multiplayer mode that lets us play as some of the most iconic characters from Star Wars, don't lock that behind hours of grinding. I'm a busy man. I don't have the time to do that. I also don't have the inclination to give you even more money than I already have to unlock something that is IN THE GAME.

26 Bad: Aliens: Colonial Marines

This game sold bafflingly well, and I don't know a single person who likes it. The game was hyped as far back as 2008, with previews telling us about how the game was going to give us the chance to truly experience the terror of being a soldier in the world of Alien. We got a mess. The game was marred by terrible graphics, bugs, and an AI so dumb that it couldn't solve a kindergarten word search. This last problem turned out to be an easy fix, with just a .ini edit required. Yet the devs didn't do this. Insulting.

25 Classic: WWE All Stars

I know barely anyone who played this game, yet know so many who keep playing the latest yearly franchise update. It's a crying shame. All-Stars is a game that was able to capture the absurdity of wrestling like no other. The game brought a fantastic roster of characters into the fray, was boldly colorful and over-the-top, and was plain fun. It had a few weaknesses, but it was genuinely one of the best wrestling games I've ever played. What I wouldn't give for more of these and less yearly updates.

24 Bad: Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

I had some misgivings about including this game. When I played the demo, I liked it, but I believe that was more down to it looking amazing for an early Xbox 360 game. Despite its visuals, its flaws were many and all too manifest. The protagonist, called Wayne (yes, really), was a hollow shell of a character, with barely any development whatsoever. The story was a poorly translated mess, and its gameplay mechanic about staying warm was a huge mistake. You could freeze after beating a huge boss just waiting for its lengthy death animation to end.

23 Bad: Superman 64

Where do you begin with a game that's as universally reviled as Superman 64? Let's just dive in. The level design is inexcusable, with objectives that are as far from compelling as you can be. The controls are unresponsive, the draw distance makes it seem like Superman is a pensioner in need of a new prescription, the framerate is massively inconsistent, and the glitches are manifold. The story is barely there. The graphics are some of the worst ever seen on any home console, before or since. It is a nauseating experience. The only purpose it serves is a yardstick.

22 Classic: Mercenaries: Playground Of Destruction

Ignore this game's sequel. The original is superb. It gave you an open world, a huge array of weapons and airdrops, and let you go wild. As a mercenary, you were tasked with taking down, by any means necessary, 52 North Korean leaders and generals. Along the way, you interacted with five different factions including the UN, China, and the Russian mob. The world was more destructible than anything we'd seen before, allowing you to blow up just about any building you wanted with a little imagination and some C4. Play it. Even now, it's still great.

21 Bad: Call Of Duty: Ghosts

I'm not a person who's sniffy about enjoying some of the Call of Duty franchise. If you want a back-to-basics action shooter, some of them are absolutely superb. Others...less so. Ghosts is the epitome of what CoD shouldn't try to do. I'm going to focus on the game's story. There are other criticisms, but this is the most important one for me. It's absurdly overly-Patriotic, with you having to repel an invasion of Latin Americans from the United States. Yeah. Talk about a poorly-judged tone. Absolutely terrible stuff. Stick to MW2 or Black Ops.

20 Bad: Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games

When it comes to Olympics videogames there have been way worse games than this. That being said, this does somewhat represent a dash to slap a franchise onto a sports minigame compilation and call it a day. The controls are slapdash, often frustrating, and poorly thought-out. The events feel very shallow and some of them feel practically identical to each other. It just all comes together to feel very unfinished, and more like a big advertisement for the 2008 Olympics than a coherent videogame.

19 Classic: Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

This is one of my all-time favorite stealth games. At its most basic, the game is a ninja-em-up, with you tasked with taking down various targets, helped out on your missions by a vast array of tools and weapons. The combat was fun and the levels were very well designed, so had it ended there, I would've been happy. However, it keeps going, and goes off the deep end into a deep pool of Japanese mythology. By the end of the game, you're fighting demons and evil sorcerers as well as common footsoldiers. Absolutely superb and barking mad.

18 Bad: Enter The Matrix

If you want a fantastic Matrix game, go check out Path Of Neo. Do not play Enter The Matrix for one moment. Dropping you into the shoes of two barely-known side characters from the movies, you're tasked with...honestly, I don't remember. The story is barely even there, which is a huge negative when you don't have any connection to the characters whatsoever. The combat is rough, as a whole, it's riddled with bugs, and level design that seems more banal than a supermarket layout.

17 Bad: South Park

Before you get your pitchforks, I am not talking about The Stick of Truth or its sequel, which are perfectly fine games. I'm reserving my ire for the truly dire Playstation and N64 game. It featured terrible graphics and voice acting, matched by gameplay that was composed of a terrible first-person shooter whose peak of comedy involved making "yellow snow." I'll leave exactly how that was done to your imagination. The fact that this didn't put the show off creating any more video games confounds me.

16 Classic: Condemned: Criminal Origins

Back in 2006, when you heard that the developers of FEAR were going to make a brutal melee combat focused game, you took notice. Condemned is a game that still deserves that same level of attention. In all my years of gaming, I've never played a game that has such a brutal melee engine. When you smack someone with a pipe, you can feel the blow, hear the sickening crunch of it hitting their skull, and feel somewhat appalled by your own actions. If you want a game that really does the horrific honesty of hand-to-hand combat justice, play Condemned.

15 Bad: Sea Of Thieves

I want a good pirates game, dammit. Since Assassins Creed IV, we've had nothing, and Sea Of Thieves certainly didn't fix that. Rare should be able to crack out a fantastic game about nautical naughtiness, but they just couldn't nail it down. The game is lacking in variety and feels super empty, as though they just gave up halfway through. Instead of taking a whimsical approach to Sid Meiers Pirates!, they just kind of...stopped. I don't think it's a BAD game, but it is severely lacking in substance.

14 Bad: Pac-Man For The Atari 2600

The top selling game of all time for the Atari 2600, this is a cancerous mess of a game. Think about Pac-Man's good points. The sound design is superb, all bleeps and bloops that have been crafted with real soul. The art is nice, if basic, and it flows very well. The Atari port has none of these things. The sound is a jarring mess, with bad effects capturing none of the magic of the arcade. The visuals flicker a crazy amount due to memory limitations, like it's trying to cull epileptic players. It feels like a knock-off.

13 Classic: The World Ends With You

I managed to pick up a copy of this way back when, and it made an instant impact. This was a JRPG that wasn't afraid to push itself free of the genre constraints. Set in Shibuya, the game drew inspiration from Japanese street culture and saw you fighting strange monsters in a very Tokyo afterlife. The combat used both of the DS' screens to great effect, while the art style was, and remains, gorgeous. A love letter to Shibuya, it is an astonishingly fantastic RPG with a superb story, which basically no one talks about.

12 Bad: The Simpsons Wrestling

Before Hit and Run brought us a Simpsons game worth playing, there was The Simpsons Wrestling. Imagine, if you will, the most simplistic wrestling game you can. Now put badly-drawn Simpsons characters that look like they've fallen out of MUGEN into it. That's the game. Its an ugly mess whose only redeeming factor is that it is occasionally funny, drawing from golden age Simpsons in a solid way. To get to any of those gags though, you have to trawl through a dull mess of a game. It's not worth it.

11 Bad: Need For Speed

I've got one word for you: FMV. You know how classic games can get away with choppy FMV and it be seen as charming? Apparently, Need For Speed assumed it could do that too. It can't. Its actors have all the charm of your seedy uncle, making up a solidly unlikeable cast. Then you have a multiplayer which feels unfinished, AI which loves to rubber band, a drift system that punishes you way too harshly, and missions that get repetitive after about an hour.