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.
The disaster of Colonial Marines is well documented. Iirc, part of the issue is that they gimped the Xenomorph AI at the last minute, an issue that has been fixed with mods. Another part, I believe, was Borderlands. I don’t think it was outright proven, but there were accusations that money provided for the development of Aliens was instead funnelled to the development of Borderlands by gearbox.
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.
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.
I watched this years ago. I think. There are a lot of videos on this subject.
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.
Oh wow I forgot about that game. I couldn’t figure out any of the mechanics or even the goals.
Back to the Future on Atari
To my knowledge, Gearbox has never managed to fully shake the allegations that they took Sega’s money for Alien: Colonial Marines and diverted most of it to Borderlands 2.
They also outsourced most of the development to another studio, and covered up that fact before release. After release, they happily pointed the blame away from themselves and onto the other studio, which promptly closed. The whole thing was basically set up to fail.
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.
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.
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
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…
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 …
That’s an insane exaggeration of consequences, but that game is still uniquely boring.
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
I played it, briefly. It was horrible. Definitely right up there for me.
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.
this is going to be a super obscure one.
so there’s this popular swedish movie franchise that started out as an adoption of a danish movie franchise, but blew through all of their scripts and outgrew it after just three films. it’s about a trio of thieves who try to steal high-stakes targets by means of ludicrous plans[1] but usually fail due to sheer incompetency, only to then have the treasure land in their lap by sheer luck at the end. and in the late 90’s, when macromedia shockwave was the big thing, a couple of shockwave-based point-and-click adventures were released with the trio as protagonists. each character has their own special skill, and you need to switch between them to use them. a fun premise, and a fitting one. i had both, but only got the second one much later. the first one is seared into my mind.
the problems start almost immediately. the first puzzle in the game is to blow up a door using dynamite, and at your home base you have five different bags of dynamite to choose from, from one to five sticks. if you pick three, you get through the door. if you take any more, you blow the whole wall out and the police are immediately alerted. game over. if you pick less, you make too much noise and the police are immediately alerted. game over. and if you pick them all up and select the right one, the rest stay in your inventory for the entire game. the inventory is a bar at the bottom of the screen you have to scroll from left to right, and there’s so many junk items to pick up that you can easily spend minutes searching for every puzzle. and you don’t know what items are junk without playing because while the heist and the items needed for it is planned out beforehand, getting those items always involves hilarious hi-jinks and inventory puzzles. and then the actual heists involve hilarious hi-jinks, inventory puzzles, and extremely exact timing. in a game running on shockwave. at something like five frames per second.
my family gathered around the pc and managed to get through it after many gruelling nights, but only because my mum repeatedly flirted with the studio’s it support guy over the phone so he would give us hints.
- ↩︎
like for example there's this one heist
where a unique diamond necklace is being transported through stockholm in an armored van for display at a high-security museum, and they decide to intercept it en-route. for this they acquire 100 helium balloons, a big bone, a tiny dog, a flagpole, and a sandwich. guy 1 and his kid use the big bone to lure away a guard dog at the marina while the guard is distracted, then replace the guard dog with the tiny dog so the guard faints when he looks at it. the kid then sneaks into the marina to steal a dinghy, and together they mount the flagpole on it so it has a really tall mast. meanwhile guy 2 and 3 hide on a bus to its end stop, where there’s usually a bathroom for the driver. when the driver goes in, they steal the bus but leave the sandwich so he has something to eat before calling it in. guy 1 runs up onto the roof of a nearby building to look for the van. when he sees the van approach a lifting bridge, he releases the balloons as a signal to the others. the kid approaches the lifting bridge in the dinghy with the really tall mast so it has to open. while the armored van is stopped at the bridge, guy 2 drives up next to it in the bus and opens the back door, where guy 3 picks the lock, climbs in, and starts putting the diamonds in his bag. but because guy 3 is a pompous ass, he stops a bit longer to pick up some champagne that’s also in the armored van for some reason. at this exact moment the bridge closes the van starts moving with him inside. luckily guy 2 manages to also open the front door of the bus exactly as guy 3 steps out. victory! …and then guy 1’s wife gives the bag with the diamonds in it to charity because it’s old and ugly and she didn’t look inside and they’re gonna be rich because of the diamonds anyway so who wants an old, ugly bag. women! <slide whistle>
This is interesting. The Danish Ohlsen-Banden movies were crazy popular in Germany when I was a child. Now I’m tempted to watch the Swedish movies…
there’s also a norwegian version! they both came out before the swedish one so the tone is pretty different, the most popular jönssonligan films were made in the 80s.
Home Alone for the Game Boy. It was just a generic jump and run. It was just super boring.
There was a kinda odd mistake with the Xenomorph AI in this game. There was a typo in the .ini file.
Though personally i have an irrational phobia towards Xenomorphis and i just can’t play anything against them, regardless of how bad the game or AI is.
Wasn’t it found out that this isn’t actually true? Correcting the typo doesn’t result in the AI actually functioning any better, IIRC.
If tall it took as one typo fix, how come Gearbox never fixed it? How long would that fix take, like three seconds?
I mean even with the AI fix it isn’t much better.
Nothing irrational about fear of xenomorphs (xenophobia 2.0?)
Charlies Angels on the Gamecube. I worked at a blockbuster at the time and just used it as a free rental as I was curious. god damn it was by far the worst game I had ever played.
I haven’t played it, but man, that screams “bad game”.
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.
Honestly, I think I lucked out with movie licensed games. Spiderman, Star Wars, X-men origins wolverine, I’m struggling to think of a bad one that I’ve played outside of displays in stores.
Okay, I looked it up to make sure there was a movie for this and easily the worst one I’ve played is Bionicle. I literally beat it the night I got it and was so disappointed. If it wasn’t so short, it could’ve been pretty good.
it’s still crazy to me how good Spider-Man 2 was back in the day. because of that and the original GoldenEye, I have forgotten any bad adaptations as well.
I remember back in the Amiga days when every movie tie-in game was a crappy 2D platformer.
