Numbers 4 and 5
4. Daikatana (Eidos Interactive, 2000)
Platforms: Windows, Nintendo 64, GameCube
Sometimes ambitious projects are badly underplanned. I get that. And sometimes you end up with a little release-date slippage. I get that too. And sometimes the end result isn't quite what was expected. I definitely get that.
5. Pac-Man (Atari, 1981)
Worst. Port. Ever.
When I was growing up in Montreal in the early 1980s, getting Atari games was something of a challenge--they simply weren't as readily available as in the United States, and the ones that did make it up here usually arrived at a later date. But I wanted--no, I needed to have the highly anticipated home version of Pac-Man, the hottest arcade game of its era. So on the Saturday after it came out, my family got into the car and drove 2 hours across the border to Vermont.
When we returned home, my best friend and fellow Atari disciple came over to witness the unveiling--and we were greeted by several degrees of awfulness. Nothing about this game looked, sounded, or felt the same as the arcade version; even Pac-Man himself wasn't his usual pie-with-a-slice-missing shape, and his trademark "wakka wakka wakka" had become a grating "bonk bonk bonk." The ghosts shimmered in and out of existence (like, er, ghosts), owing to the 2600's limited graphics capabilities. What should have been little white power pellets looked like stale Twinkies.
I went on to master the game because I owned it and therefore felt an obligation to do so, but I felt unclean every time I started it up. (The following year Atari released a vastly better home version of Pac-Man for the Atari 400 and 800 computer systems, but it still didn't make up for the company's earlier travesty.)
The 1981 Pac-Man gets a few more points on our badness scale for company arrogance: It seems that Atari figured that the mere thought of having Pac-Man at home would motivate people to buy consoles, as 12 million cartridges were manufactured--even though only around 10 million Atari 2600 consoles existed.