What’s The Worst Christmas Game You Ever Got?

With Christmas Day almost upon us, no doubt many of you are asking for games to be crammed in your stocking. But such requests aren’t always the stuff of fond memories: sometimes Christmas games can scar you.

I remember December 25, 1990 like it was yesterday. The world was in the grip of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fever, and Australia was suffering as badly as everywhere else. As a ten year-old as serious about mutant turtles as I was about video games, there was only one thing I was asking for that year: the TMNT video game.

Being ten years old, though, I wasn’t fully up to speed on the fact gaming platforms could significantly differ. See, I’d sunk countless coins into the TMNT Arcade game, which was amazing, and simply presumed that the TMNT game I was asking for on my family’s Commodore 64 would be the same game.

It wasn’t. The game I wanted looked like this.

The game I got looked like this.

It was, for want of a better term, a piece of shit. My childhood memories of Christmas holidays are normally happy ones, but this, this was a dark time.

So, Kotaku readers, what was the worst game you ever got on Christmas morning?