Irritating Stick (1998). Play online

Summary

Irritating Stick drops you into a bizarre carnival‑style puzzle that hails from a Japanese TV game‑show segment. The core challenge is simple‑looking: guide a spinning metal stick through increasingly tangled wire mazes while a timer counts down. Touch the maze walls and the controller rumbles violently, forcing you back to the last checkpoint; add moving robots, rotating spike wheels, or slot‑machine‑like obstacles and the pressure spikes. The game arrived stateside in early 1999 after a Japan‑only launch the previous year, even snagging a spot on the Jampack Winter ’98 demo disc. Critics weren’t kind – it earned a chorus of low scores and was even crowned the #1 worst‑named game by GameRevolution – though Japan’s Famitsu gave it a respectable 29/40, suggesting the concept amused some more than others.