Unfortunately, not all games can be good, but some turn out to be especially poor. These are the games that aren't forgotten as quickly as the many lackluster games that are published each season; these particularly bad games gain notoriety for being so remarkably flawed. They're not necessarily disappointing, since no one really expected much of them in the first place, but then again, no one was prepared for just how lousy these games turned out to be. It's a regrettable commendation, but even so, GameSpot now presents you with the five nominees for Worst Game of the Year.

Despite its name, Beachhead 2000 may as well have been an arcade game from the early '90s. In the game, you play as a stationary turret gunner, and you fire at wave after wave of poorly rendered enemy units... and that's more or less it. Beachhead 2000 isn't an exciting shooter - it's an extremely repetitive and wholly uninspired game.

Blaze & Blade is a PC port of an already poor action/role-playing game for the Sony PlayStation console. Though it tried to be an exciting game featuring fantasy characters, monsters, and magic spells, it suffers terribly from ugly, blocky graphics and thoroughly tedious gameplay. Its multiplayer option is also too cumbersome to attempt.

Deep Raider was apparently intended to be an action/strategy game that lets you play as an ecologically conscious scientist who explores the ocean on the back of a dolphin. But the rest of the game got lost amid the lackluster graphics, the poor map feature, and the game's remarkably bad voice acting.

Demise was supposed to be a graphical conversion of a MUD - a multiuser dungeon, in which players use a text-driven interface to create characters and battle monsters. Unfortunately, the game's unattractive 3D graphics, silly sound effects, and repetitive gameplay all indicate that Demise might have been better off as a text-based game.

The fully 3D sequel to Shiny Entertainment's classic 2D side scroller proved to be an immense disappointment. Extremely cumbersome camera control manages to suck all the fun out of this otherwise uninspired and predictable third-person action game.