Before Watch Dogs: the best and worst hacking games

Jak 3

What if hacking could be big game of Pac-Man? That's the way Jak and Daxter saw it. Shame it wasn't actually as fun as it sounds.

The aim was to guide Daxter around the Pac-Man board, chomping bits of data that would allow you to breaking into the computer network. Not only was it an extremely rudimentary approach to hacking, it lasted way too long.

Alpha Protocol

Alpha Protocol wasn't a terrible game, but its hacking mini-game... oh jeez it was bad. A bunch of constantly moving numbers and letters were thrown up on the screen and your task was to match sequences. It hurt our brains and far too frequently.

For a game so concerned with choice, it's a shame we never had the option of turning this feature off.

Mass Effect

Perhaps we'll get some flack for putting this in the "worst" list but the 'Bypass' hacking mini-game found in the PC version of Mass Effect felt a bit lazy. It was essentially Frogger, but the frog had been replaced with a triangle, the roads with circles, and the cars with coloured blocks - and the aim was to snake the triangle through said blocks and reach the target in the middle.

Still, it was a darned sight better than the hacking mini-game on the console version, which was basically just a sh*t version of Simon Says.

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