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Forgotten, but not gone
Yo-Ho Kablammo
Considering Yo-Ho Kablammo was universally panned and has what is perhaps the saddest Wikipedia page in existence, you have to wonder if its few votes didn't all come from just one person. The game itself looks like a 99-cent shovelware mobile game that took a wrong turn on its way to the iTunes storefront and ended up on Xbox. There it plagued unsuspecting consumers - who were seduced by the monkey on the cover and its axe-murderer-esque eyes - with a banal, ship-to-ship combat game that makes you want to throw yourself overboard.
Black College Football Xperience: The Doug Williams Edition
When the best part about your football game is the halftime marching band minigame, you have a serious problem. Such is the fate of Black College Football Xperience: The Doug Williams Edition for Xbox 360. This is less of a football game and more of a train wreck happening in slow motion. As our own Richard Grisham noted in his review, "There are missteps galore, including magically teleporting footballs, brain-dead blockers and tacklers, even obvious mathematical errors in the stats. Sadly, BCFX simply isnt anywhere near ready for the big time."
Blazing Birds
If you've never seen professional badminton, it's pretty amazing. It's sort of like watching professional ping pong, except the 'ball' - or rather, shuttlecock - is constantly 10-feet up in the air. Then you have two people down on the ground swinging their rackets around as though a swarm of angry bees just broke into the arena. It's hard to see how you could improve upon this already amazing sport, but Blazing Birds gives it the old college try by replacing the players with what appear to be robot eagle heads mounted on unicycles. This is a great idea to be sure, but ultimately wasn't enough to mask another mediocre sports game.
Wits & Wagers
Before we dive into the rules of Wits & Wagers, take a look at this trailer for the game. Why did Hidden Path make the characters look absolutely horrifying? Just look at those all-too-realistic heads on top of those cartoon bodies. And that one with the clown face, it's the stuff of nightmares. Wits & Wagers is a trivia game in which every question can be answered with a number - for example, "How many feet wide is an NFL football field?" Players take an educated guess, and the one who's closest to the actual answer without going over (Price is Right style) is awarded points. If you don't know the answer, you can bet on someone else's answer with the hopes of sharing in their windfall. Just make sure you don't bet on the clown.
Obut Petanque 2
Petanque is an extremely French-sounding name for an extremely French-sounding sport where you throw balls at other balls from really far away. To my uncultured, American sensibilities, it reminds me of horseshoes, except you want your horseshoe to land as close to the stake as possible without touching it. So it's a really passive-aggressive form of horseshoes. This may sound simple enough, but Obut Petanque 2 fills the screen with so many gauges, meters, and other graphs, you'd think you were flying a fighter jet instead of throwing metal balls at the ground.
Death by Cube
If you've seen the 1997 horror flick Cube, then you already know how lethal these shapes can be. Death by Cube is filled with killer cubes that shuffle around on four legs and explode into giant puddles of blood when you shoot them - because video games. You control a tiny, laser-shooting android who can collect various power-ups to change between spread shot, homing shot, and other weapon types. But the most exciting weapon has to be the reflector shield, which soaks up enemy fire and returns it in a giant, glorious shotgun blast of bullets. Think Robotron: 2084, but the robots bleed all over the place.
CellFactor Psychokinetic Wars
Holy Hell, based on that title alone how was this NOT the most amazing game on the Xbox 360? Let's break this down: 'CellFactor' could mean anything, but 'Psychokinetic Wars' screams giant battlefields with wacky powers. And that's what this Unreal Tournament-inspired FPS was going for, complete with a female robot named Bishop who can throw objects with her mind. Oddly enough, this is the third game in the CellFactor series, the first two being glorified tech demos designed to showcase Ageia's physics processors.
Planets Under Attack
Planets Under Attack brings all of the joys of planet-on-planet violence without the hours-long complexity of, say, Planetary Annihilation. In this real-time strategy game, you control a cluster of planets and construct swarms of ships to go forth and colonize other planets in your glorious name. Of course, the other players are trying to do the same thing, which means occasionally building giant, world-cracking death rays on your planets to keep others at bay. Giant lasers aside, each of the game's three races - humans, robots, and aliens - has its own unique abilities to fit your playstyle. And while this game almost certainly won't find a new home on Xbox One, you can check it out on Steam.
Tornado Outbreak
Everyone who voted for this game is a hero, because 2009's Tornado Outbreak was shuttled into obscurity as soon as it left the assembly line. You control Zephyr, a wind elemental who takes the form of a teeny, tiny baby tornado (seriously, it's like the size of a chicken). Growing in size means sucking up rocks, feathers, fences, trees, houses, and everything else in sight until you're a rampaging twister leveling entire city blocks. There's also a fully voiced and surprisingly fleshed out backstory establishing Zephyr, his wind warriors, and how he's actually on a quest to save the Earth (by knocking your house over).
