My Pokémon Ranch

It’s debatable if My Pokémon Ranch is even a game. If so, it’s one of the most boring games ever to see the light of day.

For My Pokémon Ranch, this Wii “game” was a way to store their Pokémon. You simply transfer the creatures over and you get to see them in an animated form. And if you transfer enough, you get Pokémon like Mew and Phone.

This is basically a glorified screensaver to make you spend additional time in the Pokémon. And that’s not exactly exciting stuff!

Mario & Wario

In its own way, Mario & Wario may be the most divisive game on this list. More than any other title, this is the game that players either love or hate.

It was a Japanese-exclusive SNES game where you play as neither Mario nor Wario. Instead, you control a fairy who must guide a blinded Mario to his destination. While some players liked the change of pace, it was tough for me to get excited over an entire Mario game based around an escort quest mechanic.

Learn With Pokémon: Typing Adventure

Learn With Pokémon: Typing Adventure is an edutainment game, and that’s already enough to tell you that it’s bad. But you’re probably not prepared for just how bad this game is!

This was a typing game for the Nintendo DS. It included a keyboard for you to use, but this keyboard is one of the most annoying peripherals ever created. And while the game billed itself as a typing teacher, you couldn’t excel in the game unless you already working knowledge of this universe.

And even when the game is firing on all cylinders, it’s basically one big advertisement teaching you how to spell Pokémon names. In other words, players forked over good money to get an advertisement to spend even more money on future Pokémon games!

Mario Family

The Gameboy sewing machine attachment has become internet famous. But have you ever wondered what games were made for that accessory?

Mario Family was a Japanese-exclusive Gameboy Color game. The premise is simple: you use the game to design sweaters and then the sewing machine to bring your sweater design to life. It’s actually a neat idea, but calling this basic sweater designer a video game is an insult to video games.

Metroid Prime Pinball

Metroid Prime is one of the finest games ever made. Ironically, though, Metroid Prime Pinball is one of the worst.

It’s simple a middle-of-the-road pinball game with the Metroid Prime name slapped on. It doesn’t do anything exciting with characters (like Sonic Spinball did) and doesn’t do anything to innovate pinball, either.

Whether you love Metroid or love pinball, this game is worth skipping either way.

Hotel Mario

The Eagles made the Hotel California sound like a scary place. But that’s nothing compared to the quiet horror of playing Hotel Mario.

This is one of those CD-I titles starring Nintendo characters. The gameplay involves fighting Bowser and his idiot children after they turned the Mushroom Kingdom into a landscape of seemingly-endless hotels.

There is no classic Mario fun to be had here. Instead, the closest thing to “fun” is watching the awful cutscenes and seeing just how bad the animator s made Mario look!

Hey You, Pikachu!

There are plenty of Pokémon super fans out there. However, even the biggest fans can agree that Hey You, Pikachu! is a waste of time and money.

The game is all about giving voice commands to Pikachu via the N64 microphone. And that’s it! You don’t capture Pokémon, fight trainers, or do any of the cool stuff fans expected from this game.

If you want to pretend Pikachu has an OnlyFans, this may be the game for you. But everyone else will find this boring after about five minutes of gameplay.

Mario Teaches Typing

What can you say about a typing game? Mario Teaches Typing is edutainment at its finest. Which is another way of saying the game is pretty damn bad.

Instead of traditional platforming, you control Mario by successfully typing words. This cuts all the fun out of the Mario experience, all while giving us the ugliest Mario graphics ever drawn!

Link: The Faces of Evil

Want to know a surefire sign that most players hated a game? When the legacy of that game is nothing but dumb memes.

A great example of this is the Zelda games for the CD-I. There were three games, but the gameplay was quite forgettable (especially compared to classic Zelda titles). The only memorable thing is the animated cutscenes, and these scenes are only memorable because they are completely awful.

Come for the awful platforming and stay for the cutscenes that look like they were drawn in MS Paint!

Mario Is Missing

It must be tough living in Mario’s shadow. But the worst part for Luigi is that his first real breakaway game, Mario Is Missing!, is hot garbage.

The premise is that Mario has been kidnapped and Luigi must find him. And this game fails on every level: the real-world settings are boring and the graphics are dull. You might forgive this game for being an edutainment title, but it gets countless facts wrong.

The game plays badly, looks awful, and gets almost everything wrong. Who the hell was this even made for?

Dance Dance Revolution: Mario

Ever wonder what a Dance Dance Revolution game would look like if you removed all of the fun stuff? Honestly, it would look exactly like Dance Dance Revolution: Mario.

This game copies the standard DDR formula, but you can’t control things with the iconic dance pad. And the only music you have is bad remixes of Mario music and even worse techno remixes of classical music.

Honestly, if not for that damn “I’m Han Solo” song from Kinect Star Wars, this would probably be the worst dancing game ever made.

Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland

Tingle is a pretty strange character. Some fans love him some hate him. And unless you lived in Japan or Europe, you probably never got a chance to play the title Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland.

If so, you should count yourself lucky. The game is all about gathering rupees and feeding them to a lake because a guy with a rupee for a head told you to do so. This is so tedious and boring that it would barely make for a fun minigame. Here, the monotonous minigame-style gameplay is the entire damn game!

Mario's Game Gallery

You know that thing where companies try to cash in on basic games by slapping a recognizable name on there? That’s exactly what is happening with Mario’s Game Gallery.

The games in question are basic stuff like checkers and Go Fish, and Mario is just there to provide some Nintendo window dressing. While this title is fun for being the first game where Charles Martinet voices Mario, slapping Mario’s name and face on a bunch of your grandparent’s board games doesn’t make for a great game!

NBA Street V3

NBA Street V3 was a hit at the time, but it’s tough to return to this old game. The controls and graphics that impressed us all back in 2005 can’t really hold a candle to modern sports games.

The weirdest version of this game is definitely the Gamecube version, though. Thanks to a special agreement with Nintendo, you can have characters like Mario and Peach playing against real athletes like Shaquille O’Neil.

If that’s not weird enough, you can also unlock the Beastie Boys and create the weirdest sports team up this side of Space Jam.

Donkey Kong Jr. Math

Want to strip all the fun away from a great game? All you have to do is add some math. And that’s exactly what happened with Donkey Kong Jr. Math.

Graphically, it looks exactly like Donkey Kong Jr. But the controls are sluggish and awful, and the math lessons are a bit too basic for even the most struggling student.

The one silver lining about this game is that it was such a commercial and critical bomb that Nintendo stayed away from the edutainment genre for a good, long time.