The Golden Kusoges 2023: Best of the Weekly Kusoge

destructoid.com:

We’re friends, right? I can be honest with you. I know it. I was going to follow up my earlier list, 10 bad games you should play, with a similar list around the same time of year. However, I don’t have a kusoge chambered for today, so I’m bumping it to a year-end list.

Do you know how difficult it is to play a bad game every week? Not just finding, playing through, and then writing up while also covering other responsibilities, but the mental toll it takes on a person. So, even though the column is informally called “Weekly Kusoge” (not related to Hardcore Gaming 101’s “Your Weekly Kusoge”), I skip a week whenever playing bad games just isn’t enough motivation to get out of bed.

With that in mind, I did 36 Weekly Kusoge articles in 2023. Here are the 10 “best” games I covered this year.

I covered Castlevania 64 and Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness back-to-back to show some love for the series’ more maligned attempts at 3D translation. And really, I can understand why they haven’t been ported, but their reputation as blotches on the series’ record is maybe not as apt. At the very least, they’re more interesting than, say, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

Legacy of Darkness is sort of the updated version of the vanilla N64 Castlevania. It includes the narrative campaigns of the earlier game, improving some things, but cutting a few features due to space. Personally, I think it’s still better, but there are some who prefer the original or, alternatively, suggest you should play both. That latter point, I can agree with.

Going into the article, I already knew that I liked the N64’s 1999 revisit to Midway’s Paperboy series. You shouldn’t be ashamed that a bad game can click with you. It’s not a matter of whether or not you can