Pokemon Gold Silver

An elusive unlicensed Super Nintendo game, supposedly titled "Pokemon Gold Silver" has been recently dumped. Joy of joys.

I've subjected myself to more than enough unplayable crap over the years, but this one takes the cake. Unresponsive controls, jerky scrolling, sprite clipping issues and horrendous level design make this a candidate for the worst cartridge-based game to be conceived by man. Yet someone, somewhere felt it was morally right to put it up for sale. Meanwhile Steve Jobs dies of cancer. What a world.

Pokemon Gold Silver is a platformer, but for once, it doesn't star the useless yellow rodent that is Pikachu. Instead, the game is headed by two Pocket Monsters from the second generation - the green bean with legs,  Chikorita (or "Chokorita" as its called here) or the "not as good as Squirtle", Totodile ("Waninoko"). The objective? Save the Eurozone from its economic woes... or something.

I'm one of the select few who saw little point in extending the original set of Pokémon past 151 monsters, and so the existence of this game doesn't phase me much. It was clearly released as a cash-in during the late 1990s, predictably ignoring any of the rules or regulations of the Pokémon series in favour of half-baked garbage. You hop across trees firing projectiles at other creatures, before hitting something you can't see and dying. You can switch between the two characters with the select button, and I think each has a special move - Totodile freezing time and Chikorita floating about a bit. Did this happen in Nintendo's games?

Pokemon Gold Silver is a nasty piece of work. Clearly nobody in the team that built it bothered to load the game into their Super Nintendos, and so the end result is an unplayable mess of objects vaguely related to Nintendo's efforts (except the music, which I believe was stolen from the likes of Disney's Bonkers). Above all else is the game's inability to render sprites that are partially on screen - they pop into view when the camera moves, and this results in cheap and painful deaths because you'll likely have no clue what's coming.

In order to master Pokemon Gold Silver you need significant amounts of patience, a good memory and a lack of emotions, because this is nothing more than a long, frustrating experience with no pay-off and certainly no entertainment value. Whereas it's still not the worst video game I've given a spin, it's certainly the worst time I've had on the Super Nintendo. I can't even recommend it to Pokémon fans - just as a alternative to cutting yourself.