There are a lot of games that are beautiful to look at. They are works of art encased in the trenches of a battlefield full of sophisticated AI and blood splatter algorithms. They have plots that seem as if they were written by Shakespeare if only Shakespeare had been a gamer. And while we won't compare the experience to sex, the games are still pretty damn good(and you can turn them off when you're done).

 Then there are also games that are downright ugly and have plots less imaginative than any movie made by Eddie Murphy.  But some of these ugly games are more addictive than a cocaine-laced heroin burger from Wendy's.

#5 Dwarf Fortress

It used to be that the only good use of making ASCII pictures was to demonstrate that you could make virtual dongs everywhere.

Some other people looked at ASCII and said, fuck the dongs, let's make dwarves. And thus dwarf fortress was created. The graphics are all ASCII where entire jumbles of ++++ or ***** become so much more than mere math symbols.

Even one of the more ferocious animals in the game, the elephant, known to kill dwarves without mercy, is depicted by a gray E.

Run for your fucking lives, they're capitalized.

To a beginner, understanding what the hell is going on in the game would be like reading Matrix code.

All I see is blonde, brunette, bearded.

But soon after you get past the lack of glitz you become engrossed in the gameplay where you can set traps to kill monsters, fight off gigantic dwarf eating dragons, and send a few of your dwarves to their death by making them fall into magma.

Check it out here.

#4 Pac Man

Even in the 80's, the gaming world was dominated by shooters and hero questing games. Along came Pac Man, a little game that taught people the joy of eating pills off the floor. And like an ad for LSD, if Pac Man ate the big sugar-circle he became super strong and could fight GHOSTS!

But the game didn't have some amazing back story going for it. Honestly, what the hell is Pac Man's motivation for running around in a maze and dodging ghosts? Glory, honor, revenge? No, he just runs through a maze 255 times with just as much motivation and backstory as a stormtrooper.

Your motivation is that you're dumb.

But this game is smoking hot. It ruled the universe and still sits on the throne of greatness due to it's fun and addictive nature and it's insanely hard to beat game play.

This simplistic and unartistic game captured people's attention and wallets so thoroughly that they slapped a pretty bow on the character, called it Ms. Pac Man and it BLEW EVERYONE'S FUCKING MIND.

HOLY FUCK IT'S A RED BOW!

And that's why this heroic 7/8ths of a circle is still poppin pills and eating ghosts decades later.

#3 Asteroids

Instead of a triple rendered missle with realistic thrusters shooting towards an asteroid with 10 million detailed pixels, Asteroids had a triangle that shot out a 1 pixel dot to blast polygons.

Like most of the games listed here, Asteroids was plotless and ugly. The real thing Asteroids had going for it was the sound. The pew-pew sound was a very life-like representation of what many kids(and man-children) shooting fake guns sound like.

There was also the rhythmic heart beat sound. it might have been one step removed from Stephen Hawking's voice box but when the beat started getting faster you couldn't help but get tense.  

Your own heart would starting pounding in synch and soon you'd lose your concentration and smack into an asteroid. Then the slow and relaxing beat would come back and you'd repeat the Tell Tale Heart over and over again until you confessed your guilt about something, anything, just so long as the heart beat finally stopped.

To experience the game you can click here, heart be damned.

#2 Solitaire

Of all the computer games in the known universe, solitaire is arguably the best known game around. And in the 15+ years that it has been around in computer form, the graphics haven't changed much. Couple that with the fact that there is no gambling involved and the success of solitaire seems puzzling.

Yet since versions of solitaire are on almost all computers it's easy to open up a game when your mind begins to stall. It's also quieter and a little less noticeable than  Fallout 3. Despite the ease of play and the relatively fast time it takes to play, solitaire gets you addicted faster than a free bag of blow.

Solitaire also has a smart Asian cousin that it can cheat off of.

Go ahead, open up a game and play just ONE ROUND regardless of whether you win or lose. Can you do it? Can you close out the game after just one round?  

Go ahead, play one game, we'll wait. Tell us in the comments, we'll know if you're lying.

 #1 Tetris

Not only is this 24 year old game very plain looking, it's also extremely repetitive. Take one of seven different shaped blocks and place on the screen. Take another, and another and another until you get a line. Repeat until you win, which is typically never.

If you'd never seen the game and heard that description then you might think that Tetris is one of the worst games of all time. But the second you play it you can't stop.

You will find yourself in a world where you are constantly organizing shapes, desperately trying to eliminate 4 lines at once.

But the shapes never  stop falling from the sky. Like an army of the undead they keep coming, relentless. Your palms get sweaty as they speed up, going from Romero zombie speed to Dawn of the Dead remake speed.

Like zombies, Tetris was good at destroying your brain.

You are on your game though, you've been waiting for this moment, you are not going to let a mother fucking L to take you down. You rotate, move left, move right, you even move it into an opening at the last second. They come faster than a kid on prom night and you keep up with the speed. The blocks pile up but a deft move gives you a 4 line clear and a new high score. You smile, for only a second.

The blocks keep coming.

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