9. Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance
2005 | PS2, Xbox

We looked at a lot of crappy "urban" games for this article - 187: Ride or Die, 25 to Life, Urban Reign - but none of them came close to hitting the depths of unintentional comedy found in Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance. A sad attempt by naïve Japanese developers who wanted to hop onto the gritty American crime bandwagon, watching Beat Down's intro is like watching a gangster movie written and directed by a homeschooled nine-year-old from Wyoming.

It begins with a brief text narration, which is immediately followed by a loading screen. Then there's a short sequence with an old man talking on a phone, after which we get another load screen. Finally, we're introduced to our heroes: five young, attractive and vaguely effeminate "gangsters" with trendy hairstyles (if you're Japanese) and matching suits, who wander around dockyards at night muttering rambling exposition at each other for no reason. They're there because one of them heard there was a "major deal" going down. Also, one of them has a gruesome fake Irish accent, and feels the need to growl things like "Time to open the gates of hell!" before he walks into a drug deal.

It's made worse by subtitles that are so far out of sync with the voices as to be useless, actors who overenunciate every curse word they utter and the word "crap" being pronounced "crop."

See this pile of crop for yourself: