4. Dirt from Dirt: Origin of the Species
PC | PS2 (not released yet)

While some character designs are weakened by a lack of flair or creative thought, some try far too hard and get it all wrong in the process. Like Dirt, who's a complete crock of shit.

It might have been acceptable to front a game with a 'kick ass urban rock chick' in 1996, but Dirt only came out on PC in November of last year. Dirt is described as a "girl that will not lie down easily" which is a cheap lead into a gag we've decided not to make about her looking a bit like a prostitute. Probably intended to come across as a real-life Suicide Girl, she's turned out like the product of a loner rock geek's messy sex dream.

The lip piercings, the deliberately visible thong and the slightly sinister connotations of her wearing a child's teddy bear rucksack, combine to create an image so ill-conceived that it can only have been green-lit by men who've spent their lives in some kind of fantasy land.

The punchline here is that the release of Dirt (in development, we imagine, since sometime in 1996) was heralded with a press release that stated, "Dirt has been a long-time-coming, but will be well worth the wait."

It went on to get mostly two out of ten review scores.