Collider just published a ranked list of the 10 worst games of the 2010s, and reading it felt like flipping through a scrapbook of bad decisions I personally watched launch in real time. Ride to Hell: Retribution leads the pack, which is correct. It's the rare kind of bad that transcends failure and becomes folklore.

Ride to Hell earned that reputation the hard way. I remember reviewers at the time struggling to articulate how broken it actually was, because normal review vocabulary doesn't cover it. Some games are disappointing. Ride to Hell was a monument.

Metal Gear Survive making the cut stings but is fair. Konami took a beloved stealth series and steered it into survival-grind territory, and fans never forgave the pivot. You could feel the frustration radiating off every forum thread that year.

The rest of the lineup covers the decade's greatest hits of disaster: rushed licensed games, broken launches, sequels nobody asked for. What struck me is how many of these I covered or played back then, and how the 2010s had a distinctly modern flavor of bad. The worst games of my NES days were usually just boring, cheap cartridge filler from companies cashing in on a license. The worst games of the 2010s were ambitious projects that collapsed under their own weight in public, with day-one patches that couldn't save them and pre-order bonuses sold for versions that never worked.

There's a lesson in here about scope. Most of the games on Collider's list weren't small productions phoning it in. They were mid-to-large projects with real budgets that shipped anyway, because the release date came due whether the game was finished or not. I keep coming back to that as studios keep betting everything on enormous blockbuster swings. Shipping broken and patching later became a business model, and lists like this are the receipts.

If you want the full ranking with the reasoning behind each pick, the piece is worth your time. It's a fun walk through a decade of wreckage, and it'll probably remind you of at least one game you'd blocked out entirely.

My only quibble: I'd argue a couple of infamous cash-grab launches from late in the decade deserved spots, but that's the eternal argument with any ranked list. Have you played Ride to Hell? If not, keep it that way. Some legends are better admired from a distance, and I say that as someone who finished the original Final Fantasy with a Japanese dictionary in his lap. My tolerance for suffering is high. Even I tapped out.