For me, it has to be Alien: Colonial Marines as it’s terrible due to inconsistent frame rate (moments the game ran smooth and times where lag was insane, even with the best hardware). Both player & enemy AI is crap since the combat wasn’t even that immersive plus Xenomorph AI isn’t as intimidating due to it being poorly implemented.
I was a kid that inherited an NES from a family member, so they already had a ton of good games. Double Dribble, Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island. A lot of hits.
But there were also a bunch of cool games, or so I thought. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That looks cool. Ah, this is kinda advanced for a kid. It must be a me problem. Well, let’s check out this Ghostbusters game.
That’s when I realized that games could be dogshit. The whole game’s music is a 30-second loop. The gameplay doesn’t even make sense, and to this day I have not tried to learn it. Nay, I refuse to.
I felt so vindicated when I found the AVGN as I got older.
There’s certainly dogshit nowadays, but I don’t think modern gamers understand that NES games set the price standard that is just now changing. A $50 game, I believe, is around $180 adjusted for inflation. You buy Forspoken, you get your refund, and then you buy Halo on sale for $4 instead. You buy Ghostbusters, and that’s your game. That’s the game you have. Play it, or don’t.
Yeah, a single NES game was tough for a kid to save up for. I was usually able to do various chores around the neighborhood and be able to buy a game every few months. I distinctly remember that Zelda II was $52 and Metal Gear was $48 and I earned the money myself as a little kid. Those two games specifically were worth the effort. I’d have been pissed if I spent that hard earned money on Ghostbusters.
I learned to avoid those early on, so I haven’t played many games based on mives.
Of the ones that i actually played, it must’ve been Batman Forever on SNES. I never figured how to get past that part in the first fucking level, where you’re expected to press up + select at a very specific spot
I had few licenced games, I realized they were mostly crap early (especially back in the 80s/90s when I began playing video games).
But I had the Fifth Element tie-in game. It may not be the worst licenced game (it’s certainly not good either) but it’s very weird.
They went all alternate scenario on it, with story points diverging a lot from the movie… But they still used actual clips from the movie to introduce each level. How you ask? By doing their own wild cut of the movie, taking half of the clips out of context and reordering them to fit the new plot.
This means for example that Leeloo keeps her lab resurrection “outfit” (three bandage rolls) for half the game, just because the iconic diving scene has been repurposed and happens very late, and she’s in that outfit in the movie scene. It makes sense in the movie, she’s supposed to be running from the lab just after being resurrected and normally she gets all Jean-Paul Gaultier’d very shortly after that.
Other deviations from the plot include Korben being involved from the beginning instead of meeting Leeloo by pure chance (the taxi diving is intentional in the game), or a bomb minigame in a spaceport where Korben has to defuse a dozen of phones rigged to explode based on a movie one-off scene where Zorg executes one person this way (and Korben isn’t even there to witness it).
Also a stupid chase for the four elements through the whole game. You know you need some dirt to “open” the Earth stone in the Egyptian temple at the end? Well, that’s why you need to collect a specific flower pot from a random apartment in NY a couple levels before. Instead of, you know, a pinch of sand from that very temple. LIKE THEY ACTUALLY DO IN THE MOVIE.
Shit, I keep forgetting I had that game, the controls were fucking awful. I think I only ever managed to get to level 4 once or twice. It came with my console (along 13 other games, I think, including Crash 3, Mega Man Legends and Gran Turismo)
I only watched the movie some 3 years after first playing the game, when it aired on local TV. It was weird. I also recall reading somewhere that some movie game deals were made before the movies’ script was finished, so that would explain the game being completely “out of place”
The movie is Besson-core, full of busted plot points and stupid ideas, kitsch as hell but at least made at a time when he still gave some fuck. So it was still entertaining, and I liked it back then. I mean, I got the game (on PC in my case) because of it.
I get why it is still somewhat pop-culture relevant. Unlike most of Luc Besson’s career as a producer and director since then. Most of it is seriously unwatchable. Aaand even though there were signs before, now we know he’s a creepy bastard, which doesn’t help enjoying his movies (but certainly explains how he treats some of his characters).
My siblings and I have a bunch of the movie/TV based games for the Gameboy. The problem was you couldn’t tell if the game was bad or just not intuitive. Some games you would eventually figure out and could beat, but fuck some you were stuck on the first level forever.
There were a lot of absolutely awful ones when I was kid, so many I just forget them all. Back then we had a ZX Spectrum and the games cost like £2.99 each so you can imagine how much effort was put into them. I understand why the studios keep cranking out crappy movie tie-ins and why they keep selling well, because when I was a kid if there was a movie I loved I’d jump at the chance to buy the video game for it. Back then there was no internet to instantly check reviews so you just bought whatever had good box art.
I remember the Jaws game being particularly depressing. It was one of those classic games where it just drops you in an environment with no instructions on how to complete the game or anything. It was just a maze with loads of moving things that instantly killed you. I generally just moved around until I ran out of lives then tried again.
‘Star wars : rebel assault’ was a masterpiece of awful - at least on DOS. I don’t know if it was better on console and just a crappy pc port.
I actually enjoyed playing it because of how awful it was. I think i made it about half way through the levels - hard to know - hoping it might get better, but many of the levels the controls were so bad it was pretty much perseverance and luck. The gameplay was tedious, yet also hard due to the controls - which tbf might be realistic for how actual space shooting would be.
Whenever you did pass a level the feeling was relief that it was over, and thankfulness for the luck, certainly not triumph. Save points were not after every level which was especially tiresome, and proved that it was luck more than skill.
I don’t think I can blame my pc or my joystick, as this came out around the same time as the legit brilliant ‘Star wars: X-wing’ . The contrast between the two was remarkable. X-wing played very well even on what was probably a potato of its day. I reckon I’d have bought rebel assault based on the strength of X-wing and trust for lucasarts as a brand (until this game).
I think it was hyped due to having full motion video sequences or something or maybe just starwars fanboys, but gameplay was utter dogshite.
It was actually one of the first (or the first?) CD-Rom games for PC IIRC, and was often bundled with the drives themselves - at least that was the way i got that game back then. You are right, it was pretty random if you would be able to progress or not.
Rebel Assault was neat, but the controls were terrible. Using a joystick to point a cursor on the screen is frustratingly inaccurate - and not all joysticks were created equal. Cheaper ones were inaccurate and had weird axis profiles thta made the game even harder than it should have been - and trying to play it with mouse was at least as frustrating.
I beat the demo before getting the actual game, the demo was just levels 1, 2, and 10. When you beat the demo it gives you a code to skip to level 11 in the full version. I ended up beating the game after using the code, but I could never beat level 3, so I never even got to play levels 4 through 9.
Rebel Assault wasn’t good, but it wasn’t all that bad IMO. It was just a game that was rushed in order to use CD-ROMs and FMV. Everyone that had a PC that could play it that I knew owned it though, so I bet that did well sales-wise.
You’re absolutely right that it was nothing compared to X-wing or TIE Fighter (the true GOAT of that sort of game).
sorry. not an answer. your question though just made me think about movie and game adaptations because before the majority was movie to game but I kinda think now game to movied dominates.
This sort of question has come up many times, and my knee jerk reaction is to always say E.T. for the Atari 2600, but I have actually played a worse licensed game that could arguably be said was an adaptation of a movie. It was Superman 64 for the Nintendo 64. It is just an utter failure of a game. It is boring, buggy, and frustrating. It looks bad, controls bad, plays bad. At no point does that game approach “fun”.
In the spirit of the post, one could argue that this isn’t specifically about the Superman movie and could be more about the comic books. I never read them, so I can’t say. Honestly, the game was so bad it was hard to tell which inspired it.
Ah fair enough, I guess that technically disqualifies it from the post. Regardless, I feel it was good to spread awareness of what a piece of shit it was!
It really was so bad. In that egregious way that just shits on your childhood. It came out during the rise of popularity of the animated Batman and Superman shows that were top notch productions and I remember being excited that it was a game and fortunately I got to play a demo at toys r us before I wasted money on it.
The one silver lining is watching humorous YouTubers do long plays of it now.
We are all biased. :-) There is no other way to judge games for your personal taste or experience.
It also depends on the context. I assume you was a E.T. fan and you was young, didn’t have many games and really wanted to like it and played it a lot overlooking its flaws, until you got a bit the hang of it. I am assuming a lot here! Then decade later you have so much experience, filter out good from bad games and then comes Superman 64, maybe you don’t even care about Superman (Just assuming here, let’s put anyone in this role, not just you). And then “oh yeah shitty game, no one cares”.
I think you misunderstood the context actually. I was indeed young when I played E.T., but I wasn’t a fan of the game (or movie really) ever. The game was very very frustrating to basically everyone that played it and I hate it so very much. I was actually glad to see that the rest of the human race hated it once the internet became common, it made me feel more in tune with the rest of society. All that being said, I think Superman 64 is a worse game and I consider that almost an accomplishment in itself.
Men in Black (1997). I played this as a kid. Think of this like playing Call of Duty with RE1’s camera and tank controls. Here’s a video of the game if anyone’s curious.
Goblet of Fire. Complete trash compared to what came before.
Speaking of which, Deathly Hallows Part 1. Everything about it was awful. Part 2 at least has a decent action shooter combat system, but it didn’t feel Harry Potter at all.
MIB was weird. It tried to be everything, including a point and click, action game and platformer, all with fixed camera and clunky tank controls.
It sucks at everything. There’s a hint of a mediocre point and click in there, maybe if they’d remove everything else. With the action it’s unbearable.
E.T. was such a bad game. I still have my copy. What’s funny is that at one point I ended up with two copies because one of my friends left their copy at my house, but no one would claim it so I have no idea which friend it was (four of us owned a 2600). I can think of nothing more damning of a game than this example.
Edit: In case anyone wants to see what a surviving copy looks like, here is mine https://imgur.com/a/bcDxAbt
While it certainly was a bad game it didn’t destroy the gaming industry in the US. It’s a great symbol and was one of the many symptoms (lots of bad games) that got a lot of people fired …
And there are people saying that they immediately knew it was bad. Not me. I played it for a stupid long time. When I was 12 I would play any video game for as long as I could. And I remember screen after screen of just terrible, unimaginative redundant gameplay and wondering if I was doing it wrong…
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Madagascar on Nintendo Game Cube.
Ghostbusters on NES.
I was a kid that inherited an NES from a family member, so they already had a ton of good games. Double Dribble, Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island. A lot of hits.
But there were also a bunch of cool games, or so I thought. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That looks cool. Ah, this is kinda advanced for a kid. It must be a me problem. Well, let’s check out this Ghostbusters game.
That’s when I realized that games could be dogshit. The whole game’s music is a 30-second loop. The gameplay doesn’t even make sense, and to this day I have not tried to learn it. Nay, I refuse to.
I felt so vindicated when I found the AVGN as I got older.
Good call on this one. Ghostbusters was such a shitty game.
and this is all you get for beating it:
There’s certainly dogshit nowadays, but I don’t think modern gamers understand that NES games set the price standard that is just now changing. A $50 game, I believe, is around $180 adjusted for inflation. You buy Forspoken, you get your refund, and then you buy Halo on sale for $4 instead. You buy Ghostbusters, and that’s your game. That’s the game you have. Play it, or don’t.
Thank goodness for rentals.
Yeah, a single NES game was tough for a kid to save up for. I was usually able to do various chores around the neighborhood and be able to buy a game every few months. I distinctly remember that Zelda II was $52 and Metal Gear was $48 and I earned the money myself as a little kid. Those two games specifically were worth the effort. I’d have been pissed if I spent that hard earned money on Ghostbusters.
I learned to avoid those early on, so I haven’t played many games based on mives.
Of the ones that i actually played, it must’ve been Batman Forever on SNES. I never figured how to get past that part in the first fucking level, where you’re expected to press up + select at a very specific spot
I had few licenced games, I realized they were mostly crap early (especially back in the 80s/90s when I began playing video games).
But I had the Fifth Element tie-in game. It may not be the worst licenced game (it’s certainly not good either) but it’s very weird.
They went all alternate scenario on it, with story points diverging a lot from the movie… But they still used actual clips from the movie to introduce each level. How you ask? By doing their own wild cut of the movie, taking half of the clips out of context and reordering them to fit the new plot.
This means for example that Leeloo keeps her lab resurrection “outfit” (three bandage rolls) for half the game, just because the iconic diving scene has been repurposed and happens very late, and she’s in that outfit in the movie scene. It makes sense in the movie, she’s supposed to be running from the lab just after being resurrected and normally she gets all Jean-Paul Gaultier’d very shortly after that.
Other deviations from the plot include Korben being involved from the beginning instead of meeting Leeloo by pure chance (the taxi diving is intentional in the game), or a bomb minigame in a spaceport where Korben has to defuse a dozen of phones rigged to explode based on a movie one-off scene where Zorg executes one person this way (and Korben isn’t even there to witness it).
Also a stupid chase for the four elements through the whole game. You know you need some dirt to “open” the Earth stone in the Egyptian temple at the end? Well, that’s why you need to collect a specific flower pot from a random apartment in NY a couple levels before. Instead of, you know, a pinch of sand from that very temple. LIKE THEY ACTUALLY DO IN THE MOVIE.
Shit, I keep forgetting I had that game, the controls were fucking awful. I think I only ever managed to get to level 4 once or twice. It came with my console (along 13 other games, I think, including Crash 3, Mega Man Legends and Gran Turismo)
I only watched the movie some 3 years after first playing the game, when it aired on local TV. It was weird. I also recall reading somewhere that some movie game deals were made before the movies’ script was finished, so that would explain the game being completely “out of place”
The movie is Besson-core, full of busted plot points and stupid ideas, kitsch as hell but at least made at a time when he still gave some fuck. So it was still entertaining, and I liked it back then. I mean, I got the game (on PC in my case) because of it.
I get why it is still somewhat pop-culture relevant. Unlike most of Luc Besson’s career as a producer and director since then. Most of it is seriously unwatchable. Aaand even though there were signs before, now we know he’s a creepy bastard, which doesn’t help enjoying his movies (but certainly explains how he treats some of his characters).
I remember back in the Amiga days when every movie tie-in game was a crappy 2D platformer.
Too many to name as the 80s through to early 2000s was full of them. Star Wars on the original Gameboy comes to mind though.
My siblings and I have a bunch of the movie/TV based games for the Gameboy. The problem was you couldn’t tell if the game was bad or just not intuitive. Some games you would eventually figure out and could beat, but fuck some you were stuck on the first level forever.
There were a lot of absolutely awful ones when I was kid, so many I just forget them all. Back then we had a ZX Spectrum and the games cost like £2.99 each so you can imagine how much effort was put into them. I understand why the studios keep cranking out crappy movie tie-ins and why they keep selling well, because when I was a kid if there was a movie I loved I’d jump at the chance to buy the video game for it. Back then there was no internet to instantly check reviews so you just bought whatever had good box art.
I remember the Jaws game being particularly depressing. It was one of those classic games where it just drops you in an environment with no instructions on how to complete the game or anything. It was just a maze with loads of moving things that instantly killed you. I generally just moved around until I ran out of lives then tried again.
Practically anything made in the 90s
‘Star wars : rebel assault’ was a masterpiece of awful - at least on DOS. I don’t know if it was better on console and just a crappy pc port.
I actually enjoyed playing it because of how awful it was. I think i made it about half way through the levels - hard to know - hoping it might get better, but many of the levels the controls were so bad it was pretty much perseverance and luck. The gameplay was tedious, yet also hard due to the controls - which tbf might be realistic for how actual space shooting would be.
Whenever you did pass a level the feeling was relief that it was over, and thankfulness for the luck, certainly not triumph. Save points were not after every level which was especially tiresome, and proved that it was luck more than skill.
I don’t think I can blame my pc or my joystick, as this came out around the same time as the legit brilliant ‘Star wars: X-wing’ . The contrast between the two was remarkable. X-wing played very well even on what was probably a potato of its day. I reckon I’d have bought rebel assault based on the strength of X-wing and trust for lucasarts as a brand (until this game).
I think it was hyped due to having full motion video sequences or something or maybe just starwars fanboys, but gameplay was utter dogshite.
It was actually one of the first (or the first?) CD-Rom games for PC IIRC, and was often bundled with the drives themselves - at least that was the way i got that game back then. You are right, it was pretty random if you would be able to progress or not.
I don’t think i’ve ever managed to finish those fucking flight training missions.
Rebel Assault was neat, but the controls were terrible. Using a joystick to point a cursor on the screen is frustratingly inaccurate - and not all joysticks were created equal. Cheaper ones were inaccurate and had weird axis profiles thta made the game even harder than it should have been - and trying to play it with mouse was at least as frustrating.
I beat the demo before getting the actual game, the demo was just levels 1, 2, and 10. When you beat the demo it gives you a code to skip to level 11 in the full version. I ended up beating the game after using the code, but I could never beat level 3, so I never even got to play levels 4 through 9.
Rebel Assault wasn’t good, but it wasn’t all that bad IMO. It was just a game that was rushed in order to use CD-ROMs and FMV. Everyone that had a PC that could play it that I knew owned it though, so I bet that did well sales-wise.
You’re absolutely right that it was nothing compared to X-wing or TIE Fighter (the true GOAT of that sort of game).
Back to the future based on the third movie for the genesis made me cry as a kid.
sorry. not an answer. your question though just made me think about movie and game adaptations because before the majority was movie to game but I kinda think now game to movied dominates.
This sort of question has come up many times, and my knee jerk reaction is to always say E.T. for the Atari 2600, but I have actually played a worse licensed game that could arguably be said was an adaptation of a movie. It was Superman 64 for the Nintendo 64. It is just an utter failure of a game. It is boring, buggy, and frustrating. It looks bad, controls bad, plays bad. At no point does that game approach “fun”.
In the spirit of the post, one could argue that this isn’t specifically about the Superman movie and could be more about the comic books. I never read them, so I can’t say. Honestly, the game was so bad it was hard to tell which inspired it.
Well… it’s based on the 90s cartoon…
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115378/
But in reality it was “inspired” by cash grab money and bad management.
Ah fair enough, I guess that technically disqualifies it from the post. Regardless, I feel it was good to spread awareness of what a piece of shit it was!
It really was so bad. In that egregious way that just shits on your childhood. It came out during the rise of popularity of the animated Batman and Superman shows that were top notch productions and I remember being excited that it was a game and fortunately I got to play a demo at toys r us before I wasted money on it.
The one silver lining is watching humorous YouTubers do long plays of it now.
I watched this years ago. I think. There are a lot of videos on this subject.
https://youtu.be/mBuP3EsAkcA
Oh wow I forgot about that game. I couldn’t figure out any of the mechanics or even the goals.
I genuinely think that Superman 64 is more entertaining and fun to play than E.T. .
Not a high bar, but perhaps you’re right. I played a LOT more E.T. so I am for sure biased.
We are all biased. :-) There is no other way to judge games for your personal taste or experience.
It also depends on the context. I assume you was a E.T. fan and you was young, didn’t have many games and really wanted to like it and played it a lot overlooking its flaws, until you got a bit the hang of it. I am assuming a lot here! Then decade later you have so much experience, filter out good from bad games and then comes Superman 64, maybe you don’t even care about Superman (Just assuming here, let’s put anyone in this role, not just you). And then “oh yeah shitty game, no one cares”.
I think you misunderstood the context actually. I was indeed young when I played E.T., but I wasn’t a fan of the game (or movie really) ever. The game was very very frustrating to basically everyone that played it and I hate it so very much. I was actually glad to see that the rest of the human race hated it once the internet became common, it made me feel more in tune with the rest of society. All that being said, I think Superman 64 is a worse game and I consider that almost an accomplishment in itself.
Right, I assumed too much here.
Men in Black (1997). I played this as a kid. Think of this like playing Call of Duty with RE1’s camera and tank controls. Here’s a video of the game if anyone’s curious.
Goblet of Fire. Complete trash compared to what came before.
Speaking of which, Deathly Hallows Part 1. Everything about it was awful. Part 2 at least has a decent action shooter combat system, but it didn’t feel Harry Potter at all.
MIB was weird. It tried to be everything, including a point and click, action game and platformer, all with fixed camera and clunky tank controls.
It sucks at everything. There’s a hint of a mediocre point and click in there, maybe if they’d remove everything else. With the action it’s unbearable.
I never played it, but E.T. The Extraterrestrial caused the near death of the entire video game industry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)#Effect_on_Atari
E.T. was such a bad game. I still have my copy. What’s funny is that at one point I ended up with two copies because one of my friends left their copy at my house, but no one would claim it so I have no idea which friend it was (four of us owned a 2600). I can think of nothing more damning of a game than this example.
Edit: In case anyone wants to see what a surviving copy looks like, here is mine https://imgur.com/a/bcDxAbt
That’s an insane exaggeration of consequences, but that game is still uniquely boring.
I played it, briefly. It was horrible. Definitely right up there for me.
While it certainly was a bad game it didn’t destroy the gaming industry in the US. It’s a great symbol and was one of the many symptoms (lots of bad games) that got a lot of people fired …
I don’t want to sound cliche but yeah. E.T.
And there are people saying that they immediately knew it was bad. Not me. I played it for a stupid long time. When I was 12 I would play any video game for as long as I could. And I remember screen after screen of just terrible, unimaginative redundant gameplay and wondering if I was doing it wrong…
NES, Back to the future. That was a video game rental that wasted a whole weekend but at least it was just a rental.