Psychotron

Released in 1994 to "cash in" on the CD-ROM craze that was sweeping the world - Psychotron has the dubious honour of being quite simply the worst most crudulous utterly-without-merit computer game of all time.

To put it another way, I've considered your Deer Hunter argument. I even flinched a little when you mentioned Redneck Rampage. But this game, my friends, sees off all pretenders to the crown of Worst of the Worst.

The only explanation for such a title actually making it to the stores is that someone, somewhere must have said: "There's going to be this lull, see, where lots of people start having CD-ROM drives, see, but the other developers won't have any titles, see, so we will make millions!"

The "plot" if I can sully that great word by application to this title, was that a "Psychotron" (an evil mind control device that the evil Kremlin had somehow made, or something) had been stolen from the CIA, and you had to find it and get it back. Yes the plot was that good! It's a race against time, and a race against your own better judgement as you sit through the first bit of live video in the game and think "Surely it can't all be this bad?"

You're a gumshoe with a penchant for poker, to recall just one of the game's most annoying moments. Let me take you there. You're playing poker with really bad actors pretending to be wiseguys. This is ok, you think, recalling Strip Poker on the Apple IIe from your highschool days, I can play poker against a computer opponent. But no! You have to select "dialog options" from a list, and if you get a single one wrong, like a bad Choose Your Own Adventure, you immediately die! And you can't save mid-sequence at any time in the game! So you have to get every choice in the video bits correct, or be forced to watch all of the non-existant production values all over again.

Ah the memories! I remember being astonished that you could fit that much bad acting into a space no larger than a postage stamp. Even more fun for the whole family was being forced to install a very buggy video driver into Windows 3.1 that would randomly crash your computer.

But, all that said, we have to give credit where credit is due. Here are the details:

Written by: Rick Gonzalez
Programmed by: Rick Gonzalez
Produced by: Robert Cox
Video Production by: Tom Henning
3D Animations by: Cody Davis
Music by: Kurt Otto

Take a bow guys - you're part of gaming history!