Ever wonder if your time could be better spent not playing video games and doing something else instead? I don’t! As long as it floats your boat and doesn’t sink someone else’s then do what makes you happy is what I reckon. And certainly never feel guilty about then feeling happy! That said, as a principle, as well as a convenient label, “guilty pleasures” is near enough to what I was thinking about when I put this particular countdown together…. Over a period of about two years! While most of these almost write themselves, this one took forever, no doubt because of my conflicted stance here! Anyway, we could be talking objectively bad games I still find perversely enjoyable, but as you’ll see, also games I’ve spent way more time with than they probably deserve for one reason or another, or continue to give a chance to because I won’t concede there’s not something in there somewhere to enjoy, or continue to enjoy while there’s barely anything in there to enjoy at all… And yeah, a bit of the more traditional sleaze I’m sure you have in mind too, albeit not necessarily only for that reason, of course! Right then, I’ll get into why each game in my top ten is there a bit more as we count them down, then I’ll throw in a couple of (dis)honourable mentions at the end, so let’s get into it!

10. Farming Simulator: C64 Edition (Commodore 64)

This game has no right to be in this list. It’s great, and that it exists at all is a wonderful gift… Literally! I believe this was originally included as a bonus in the Farming Simulator 19 Collector’s Edition for PC but has since been included in a C64 Mini update (where I first played it), then on Home Computer Heroes Collection 1 for Evercade, where I suddenly couldn’t get enough of it! Over twenty hours later, that’s a very odd thing too, considering you can see everything it’s got to offer in about ten minutes, which includes learning how to play, although there’s not a lot to that either! The idea is you plough your field with one tractor, switch to another to sow your seeds, then you wait for them to grow before you bring out the combine harvester, load everything into another tractor with a trailer and drive it around the corner to the silo so it can be sold. You need to keep an eye on the fuel in each vehicle and make sure you’ve got enough seeds, and if either is running low then you need to head over to near where the silo is to fill up, assuming you’ve made enough cash. If not it’s game over, otherwise off you go all over again! It doesn’t look great and sounds even less so, and the vehicle controls are crap, and there’s virtually nothing to do – just get whatever you’re in close to where it needs to be and the rest is automatic. And it’s wonderful! Like a cathartic little zen garden set in a gloriously brown C64 landscape that my game clock continues to tell me I really shouldn’t be involved in anymore!

9. Jimmy Connors’ Tennis (Atari Lynx)

“Hi, I’m Jimmy Connors. Welcome to the Bella Country Club. Let’s play tennis!” There might not be a lot to love in the last game but at least there’s something, unlike this stupid thing! When I originally got the Lynx Collection 1 cartridge for Evercade (don’t worry, it’s not a theme), this game wouldn’t load and I ended up getting a replacement because, in my eternal quest to find a new tennis game that I enjoy as much as Tennis on the original Game Boy, it was a key factor in buying the compilation in the first place. Ever wish you hadn’t bothered though? This is a 1993 tennis sim that also came out on the NES and the Game Boy, offering a choice of court surfaces, singles or doubles, various match types and four skill levels, which is all well and good if you can actually hit the ball… The instructions tell you to watch the square on the court that shows you where to stand, and the ball also has a shadow so you can “easily” see exactly where it’s headed, then making the choice of shot perfectly intuitive. Which translates to if you’re lucky you’ll return it about once per game! And it’s not like I’ve never won online tournaments in Mario Tennis Aces, for example, so something so fundamental and basic in a tennis game shouldn’t take this much effort, and that’s way before you even think about where you’re returning the ball to! The thing is, though, I’m still convinced there’s a decent tennis game hidden away in here somewhere that looks nice, sounds nice and moves nice, which is why I keep coming over and over again, and never learning my lesson in the slightest!

8. NFL’s Greatest: San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993 (Sega Mega-CD)

Over the course of researching my deep-dive into the wonderful (in my opinion!) Sewer Shark for Sega’s Mega-CD (or Sega-CD) expansion for the Mega Drive (or Genesis), I saw an awful lot of full-motion video. And most of it was awful! I can’t deny that’s also the case for NFL’s Greatest: San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993, where even squeezing it into the tiniest possible window does nothing to disguise quite how grainy it is! But however impressive it might have been back in 1993 (which is also open for debate!), I definitely can’t disguise it being a very niche game any time or anywhere, even in the USA, let alone here in the UK! Come to think of it, the word “game” is a bit of a stretch too, but for all of that, I really get what it does! Now, I often say I like my sports games to be PS1 or PS2 or GameCube era because I enjoy that balance of something like authenticity while still being very much a video game, rather than you playing a game like you’re watching it on TV. However, NFL’s Greatest does exactly the opposite in all respects, with a barebones and barely 16-bit “game” based on decades’ worth of actual archive TV footage (and you can imagine how that can go!) to play out what you’ve just called from your little offence or defence playbook… Something happens in the tiny little FMV area, the marker moves up or down the stadium display accordingly, then you choose another play. Normal NFL rules apply, for what that’s worth, and I assume it’s all fully-licensed, for what that’s also worth, but there’s almost nothing to it. It’s really little more than an idle clicker in an American football skin, which apparently is just fine by me!

7. Atari Karts (Atari Jaguar)

While I’ve not given it a huge amount of thought, Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch from 2022 (and significantly added to since) might well have become my all-time favourite compilation! It was also very much a launchpad for discovering the Atari Jaguar and its library for the first time, not that there’s a lot of it represented on there, but it does include 1995’s Atari Karts. And while Bentley Bear from Crystal Castles isn’t exactly Mario, it’s not terrible… Entirely! In motion everything is fine and dandy, with some of its wide variety of environments really looking good, and the tracks are well constructed, with plenty of racers to choose from, and it controls alright too… At least while things are going well! The slightest hint of contact with another car though, and you be could bounced in any direction, anywhere on the track, and at lightning speed, while a stationary object will more often than not leave you stuck to it – generally on a jagged corner that you then need to try and manoeuvre back and forth off of! Utterly frustrating and capable of stripping away any fun you were having in an instant. Yet here I am, with all its tournament cups won, gold on every race, every unlock unlocked, none of which I’ve ever done on any Mario Kart title over the course of decades! And I’ll still jump in for a race every time I’m down the Jaguar end of the Atari 50 games carousel – I just can’t hate it as much as it apparently hates me!

6. Rastan Saga II (Arcade)

If the first game in the series was Conan the Barbarian then its 1988 (or possibly 1989) sequel was Thor the Conqueror… Look it up – you won’t regret it! I reckon there’s a place for both on a rainy Saturday afternoon though, and despite the dreadful sampled speech, horrible music, slow pace, stiff animation, weird black lines around everything and generally pretty shocking gameplay, I think it’s alright! Known as Nastar or Nastar Warrior outside Japan, it’s never gone down well with anyone else though, as your loin cloth-clad warrior tries to protect some magical shrine or other from hellish invaders in a similar hack and slash fashion to the original. Bizarrely, however, they somehow took its template and made it worse in literally every respect, playing like a bad home port of Altered Beast meets any version of Sword of Sodan you fancy! All the sprites are bigger, I suppose, and some of the backgrounds are nice, and you get to fight a Medusa boss as you plod through its six stages, so it’s not all bad, I guess, but most of it really is, and right from the outset too, as you crouch to do this dreadful low, diagonal, piston-like sword thrust on a half a skeleton with green hair sliding along the floor like a starved snail! And that “sexy” speech right beforehand… As much as I’ve tried to stretch the boundaries of a guilty pleasure so far, this one really is the definition of one. No idea what I see in it but it won’t be the last time here that’s the case…

5. Afterburner (Commodore 64)

Depending on where you are in the world, you might be thinking okay, it’s not great, but considering it’s a C64 port of one of the most spectacular arcade games ever seen back in 1987, isn’t this the best they could have possibly done? Or you might be thinking yes, you are totally insane, which would actually be the correct response when you realise I am indeed talking about Activision’s “UK version” by Software Studios rather than the US one by Mindscape! Either way, you’re flying an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet through a multi-stage, chase-view dogfight, taking off from your aircraft carrier, shooting down swarms of incoming enemy aircraft over a diverse set of environments, refuelling and landing. To its credit, I reckon it does a pretty good job of replicating the look of the arcade game too – it’s perfectly recognisable, and the cinematic autopilot sections I just mentioned are perfectly authentic and even impressive, and there’s some lovely music playing in the background. All very ambitious, which is undoubtedly also the game’s downfall, and probably why the US version was better received, taking the opposite approach of capturing the essence of the gameplay over all the bombast. Here, though, once the action hots up, we have jarring, too-high-speed horizon movement as your plane kind of turns, while what you’ll eventually work out are supposed to be missiles, then subsequent explosions and crashes, all take place in messy boxes that end up filling the screen, alongside totally unscaled environmental sprites, and then it’s a proper mess! But the original was all about the fun to be had in the midst of its chaos – it’s just a different type of chaos your having fun with here, if you can get over that, and I for one certainly can!

4. Dangerous Streets (Amiga)

Some might argue that enjoying any one-on-one fighting game on the Commodore Amiga or anywhere else with a single-button joystick must be a guilty pleasure, but although they’d clearly have never played Fightin’ Spirit or IK+ in that case, they couldn’t be more right about 1993’s Dangerous Streets! I was actually researching my deep-dive into Fightin’ Spirit when I first came across this one back in 2023, exactly thirty years after its release, and was immediately struck by its ambitious move-sets, well-drawn fighters, hammy speech and all-out sleaze… Some of which might have kept me going back since then, I guess, but I think it’s mostly downright stubbornness, because on top of the dreadful animation, stiff move-sets and general lack of polish almost everywhere you look, it’s just way too hard! You’ve got single player, two player and tournament modes to keep you busy, and with the latter, I’m convinced that somewhere in the bizarre cast of eight playable characters, ranging from a gym teacher to the spiritual leader of the Sioux Native American people, there’s someone I can connect with, and become one with, and make it to the top, just like any other decent fighting game, even if this really isn’t one… If nothing else, it’s funny though, with some of these moves the very definition of so bad it’s good, but halfway through this list I am already questioning my own sanity!

3. International Truck Racing (Amiga)

I’m going to stick with the poor old Amiga for another game I only played for the first time relatively recently, although I did already have a soft spot for its marginally less underwhelming C64 variant! Anyway, this one came along during that initial excitement phase when I got my A500 Mini in 2022, and I was exploring every nook and cranny of a system I’d only experienced at a friend’s house at the time. It’s a top-down racer from 1992, where you’re competing in truck-racing league across Europe, with each event taking the form of qualifying then going up against six other juggernauts, or you can play two-player, although an auto-rubber-banding feature kind of removes any competitive excitement from that mode. That said, if you’re after excitement, then maybe stick with Supercars or something instead because you won’t find it anywhere here, and that’s exactly why I like it! Much like the farming game from earlier (albeit obviously far less intentional), there’s a joy in the monotony of not doing much here, as you slowly plod around each course, briefly plotting a course through the always-bunched competitors when the need arises, then just plodding on to the finish. Lovely! The graphics aren’t exactly pushing the Amiga, the scrolling jerks like it’s on an Atari ST, and there’s no weight to the sound, in particular the non-stop explosion noise at the merest brush with anything else. Then there’s no physics to the trailer, which even Atari’s Fire Truck managed in 1978, and that’s compounded by it being literally a black rectangle on the back of every racer! Treat it like it’s the America Truck Simulator demake equivalent of the aforementioned Farming Simulator one though, and you’re in for a very pleasant time!

2. MIG-29 Soviet Fighter (Amiga)

Wow, I really do have it in for the Amiga here… Not sure my little swerve-ball about the Atari ST just now is fooling anyone! But there’s really no denying that for the sheer wonder of a lot of what it did, there was an awful lot of crap on there that’s now been swept under the carpet too! Case in point, MIG-29 from 1989, which could be considered a more tactical take on Afterburner that we also just looked at, and, to be fair to this version, isn’t any better on the Spectrum (where it began life) or on the NES, which I also own on Codemasters Collection 1 for Evercade! Wherever you play though, it’s a 3D on-rails shoot ‘em up where you’re a fighter pilot trying to take down a rogue KGB commander and his World Terrorist Army, which mostly consists of badly-drawn planes, terribly-drawn tanks and various other bits of military hardware jerking towards you (to varying degrees depending on how many at once) across a series of dull-as-dishwater environments. To liven things up a bit, you’re equipped with (and can pick up) bombs and air-to-ground missiles for vehicles, and anti-aircraft guns and air-to-air missiles for enemy planes, and even a nuclear warhead for when the going gets really tough, and there’s the thing – for all the crap graphics, crap sound and questionable controls, the gameplay gets way too hard too fast, and even going nuclear at the earliest opportunity isn’t going to change that! It’s probably still better than the Amiga port of Afterburner though (stick with the C64 for that!), and as we’ve now seen a few times, there’s a not-necessarily-intended sparseness to the action and a general monotony that I seem to have a thing for! Maybe we’re finally getting to the bottom of these guilty pleasures I have…

1. Beast Wrestler (Mega Drive)

Yes, I do believe that as we come to the top spot, we may well have identified an ongoing thread here that I’d genuinely never considered as part of my gaming psychology until right now because Beast Wrestler once again ticks the dull, monotonous and mostly tedious boxes that keep cropping up at the business end of this countdown, not to mention also having a splash of the slightly dodgy controls! Had some really bad box art too when it first appeared in Japan in 1991, then on the Genesis in America the following year, but to return to another previous thread, while I was aware of it at the time, I only played it for the first time when it arrived on Evercade in 2022, as part of the Renovation Collection 1. It’s a one-on-one wrestling game set in a very medieval-looking future, where they’ve created ten gigantic beasts competing to become the world champion… “The ruler (player) needs to skillfully manipulate the Control Pad in order to become a good ruler of the Beast Wrestlers. Are you ready to challenge the Dragon Warriors?” There is a single match, one or two player game, but the drawn-out tournament mode is where you’ll find the “enjoyment of a long and involved game” as you fight at various levels to win money to buy boosts, train better or genetically splice your beast to evolve new moves. “Try many interesting beasts to enjoy different deathblow techniques…” I could quote this manual all day! Anyway, it plays and controls like a regular wrestling game, with a handful of situational attacks, dashes and specials on directions plus two buttons depending on your wrestler, and there’s a really nice variety of monsters to choose from, each with plenty of character in their colourful and detailed “25-feet tall” sprites, but unfortunately any colour of any kind probably ends there! The arenas are as dull and lifeless as the fights themselves, which go on forever (or for as long as your kick-out finger can keep moving), and for all the different moves at hand, they’re all effectively the same and take so long to have any effect, especially given the unpredictable nature of pulling the decent ones off. Positioning is equally unpredictable, with some very stiff movement never really matching-up to some odd camera choices, which is further hampered by some very suspect collision detection. But… You already know what I’m going to say by now! And there’s a decent sense of progression away from the fights themselves that brings real satisfaction to eventually wearing an opponent down enough for your special to finally have the desired effect. Music’s alright too!

Okay, enough gushing about games I know no one else likes, so let me quickly close with a few honourable mentions! Number eleven in the list would have been Backyard Wrestling 2 – There Goes the Neighborhood on PlayStation 2, and while I might just happen to enjoy playing as big-boobed trailer-trash in a thong leaping through a picnic table onto a bloke who thinks he’s a vampire, it’s also a madcap twist on the genre that’s genuinely loads of fun! You’ll have noticed another wrestling game pictured at the top of the page here (although you understandably might not have recognised it as such), and that’s Intergalactic Cage Match on the ZX Spectrum, which doesn’t really have any redeeming features but I’d spent my pocket money on it so I learned to enjoy it! Also on the Spectrum, there’s an obscure, strangely top-down-ish Daley Thompson’s Decathlon-type game called Ready, Steady, Go I want to mention, which features some kind of cross-country hurdling, canoeing, cycling and, er, penalty saving, although you’ll need the patience of a saint to see anything beyond the first one… Which luckily it appears I have! Coming back to big-boobed, I guess Dragon’s Crown Pro on PlayStation 4 would fit the guilty pleasure bill if we’re thinking about beat ‘em ups you wouldn’t want your wife walking in on your playing, and likewise Rumble Roses on PS2, just to bring us full circle back to big-boobs and wrestling again! Which I reckon is a very good place to call it a day here, so I hope you’ve enjoyed reading what I think turned out a bit different to what we might have expected at the beginning… It’s certainly given me food for thought!

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