This year's winner for Flat-Out Worst Game of 2003, Gods and Generals, simply should not have been made, for many, many reasons--and there are at least as many for why you shouldn't play it. Yes, it looks terrible. Yes, it sounds terrible. Yes, it's a licensed game based on a critical failure of a motion picture. Gods and Generals was developed, first and foremost, to be a marketing tool to promote a movie; making a decent game was at best a second priority, though after playing the game, we're led to believe that the developer may not have cared at all, one way or another.

Gods and Generals is a first-person shooter based on the US Civil War, and it makes the worst use of the Lithtech game engine we've ever seen--while it uses the interface and some of the inventory systems of last year's outstanding first-person shooter No One Lives Forever 2, it looks and sounds absolutely horrendous. You can generally count the number of textures used in the game's primitive 3D environments on the fingers of one hand, and to keep track of all the different enemies you face, you need only one finger (and we'll leave the choice of finger up to you).

According to Gods and Generals, the Civil War was fought by a bunch of mute clones whose terrible AI caused them to spawn out of thin air, only to stand stock-still while being shot in the face, all to the tune of the same hiccupping music clip played over and over again. If you're used to playing high-quality games with actual production values, interesting premises, and good gameplay, you may be flabbergasted after playing Gods and Generals. You might expect to see this sort of thing from a high school computer class project or surreptitiously slipped onto a shareware game CD, but a game this bad had no business appearing on store shelves next to respectable games that are actually worth buying. If you're a developer or publisher, and you take just one message away from this year's awards, it's this: For any game to be worth a damn, it must be developed as a game--not as a shoddy afterthought of an unrelated marketing campaign. And if you simply enjoy playing games, and you take just one message away from this year's awards, it's this: Don't play this game.