10 Worst DS Games

The DS version of The Sims 2 shares its name with the PC game and little else. Griptonite Games made it as a linear game of its own: your Sim manages the only hotel in a deserted corner of Strangetown, a hot, dry town that aliens keep trying to colonize. Lead writer Darby McDevitt took the hotel idea from Fawlty Towers, and the producer said the DS version ended up with the strangest plot-based humor of any game. It averages 50 out of 100.

Players remember it fondly, as a strange little game that barely plays like The Sims. One critic found the plot too linear, which is fair, but a hotel under alien attack was never going to please someone who just wanted to build a house. The score is the only thing keeping it here.

Eragon came out in November 2006 to coincide with the film. The handheld versions were made separately, mostly by Amaze Entertainment, and the DS one uses its touchscreen in the battle system. Unlike the console versions, it lets you take more than one path through the story and choose which skills your hero learns. It averages 49 out of 100.

The handhelds got better reviews than the console versions, and one critic praised the DS game for being long for a movie license. Players barely mention it. That leaves Eragon in an odd spot, a tie-in that did more with its license than most and still sits this low because of its score. If you liked the book as a kid, the DS version is the one to try.

Brave starts where the film turns Queen Elinor into a bear. Merida chases her through the forest, and a witch sends her off to cleanse the waystones that the cursed bear Mor'du has corrupted, which is a lot of chores for a girl whose mother is now a bear. On the way she finds her triplet brothers, who have been turned into bears as well. It was the last Pixar game from Disney Interactive Studios before the studio closed in 2016. It averages 51 out of 100.

It barely comes up when players talk about the DS. Critics were mixed across its versions, and their loudest complaints were about the Kinect mode on the Xbox 360, a problem the DS never had. It is the kind of tie-in that fills a weekend and then slips out of memory.

Scooby and the gang visit Fred's cousin Jed at a special effects studio and find him missing, with his animatronics gone haywire. The DS version is a shorter 2D platformer than the console ones, with less fighting and the same focus on collecting clues. It leans on the touch screen: in a Scientist costume, Scooby dissolves the blocks of Mubber in his way, and boss fights turn into chases where you dodge obstacles and trigger traps. It is the third Scooby-Doo game with a laugh track.

It averages 54 out of 100, the best score on this list. Players rarely bring it up. For a young Scooby fan it is still the safest pick here, because a short game with chases and costume tricks is about what a cartoon tie-in should be.

Micro Machines V4 races toy cars on courses built around household things, from pool tables to the edge of a bathtub. Every racer shares one screen, so if you get far enough ahead that a rival drops out of view, you score a point. Take enough hits and your car loses a wheel, which makes it slower and gives it less grip. There are 750 vehicles to collect.

Reviewers found it competent, but its poor graphics and shallow gameplay held it back. It averages 49 out of 100. On the DS, players hardly talk about it. The shared screen is still a clever party idea, and it works best with friends in the room, where knocking someone off the screen is half the fun.

Pokémon Dash was the first Pokémon game on the DS and a launch title in Japan and Europe. You play it by moving the stylus in the direction you want Pikachu to run, through checkpoints and up into the sky for balloon races. A brand new console with two screens and a touch pad, and the first Pokémon game on it is a jogging race? Finish Grand Prix mode with Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen or Emerald in the second slot and it builds courses shaped like the Pokémon in your team.

It received generally unfavorable reviews and averages 47 out of 100. One critic called it "simply one of the laziest uses of the DS's touch screen technology to date". Japan was kinder. The few players who bring it up can't agree on whether it's a fun, quirky game or just a boring one.

Dust Strikers is modeled after Guilty Gear Isuka, with fights for up to four players across both screens, and it was the first versus fighting game for the DS to be released outside Japan. It is also the first Guilty Gear game with mini-games, such as Venom's Billiards, a game of pool against your opponent. The boss is Gig, an immense insect-like monster with an angel attached to its bottom half. It averages 47 out of 100.

Players almost never bring it up. That is a shame, because the package is generous and strange in all the right ways. The trouble is the format: Guilty Gear lives on fast, precise fights between two players, and a crowded four-player brawl on two small screens works against exactly that.

Elite Penguin Force is a point-and-click adventure based on Disney's online game Club Penguin. Your penguin joins the Elite Penguin Force, gets a Spy Gadget in the shape of a Nintendo DS, and investigates mysterious events on the island over thirteen story missions. The first big case is the disappearance of Gary the Gadget Guy. Coins you earned in the game could be sent to your penguin online.

Critics gave it generally positive reviews and it sold more than 1.5 million copies, yet it averages 39 out of 100. Players hardly bring it up, and never to complain. The gap makes sense once you think about who owned it: kids with a Club Penguin account loved it, and people rating it years later had no penguin to send coins to.

The Golden Compass is the game of the 2007 film. Shiny Entertainment made the other versions, and A2M made the one for the DS. The game came out before the film and ends a little differently, because the last half hour of the film was re-edited too late for the game to follow. So the game keeps the book's order, with Bolvangar before Svalbard.

It received generally unfavorable reviews across every platform, and one reviewer gave the DS version 4 out of 10. It averages 39 out of 100. Not one player we surveyed brought up the DS version. A big fantasy film with an armored polar bear in it deserved a better game than this.

Crash Boom Bang! is a party game made by Dimps, the only Crash Bandicoot game ever made by a Japanese company and the last one released in Japan. The Viscount, who is obsessed with finding the Super Big Power Crystal, lures the cast into a fake race with a prize of $100 million, so they'll dig it up for him. Each stage is a board game where everyone rolls dice at once, and the square you land on can win or lose you Wumpa Fruit or start one of forty mini-games. Even the prize money is fake.

Critics found the minigames dull and simplistic, and one pointed out that rolling the dice is done with a button press, in a game run almost entirely from the touch screen. Another suggested it only as a means to "destroy a child's love of videogames". It averages 26 out of 100, the lowest score here, and players barely bring it up.