Regular viewers of our Worst Games Ever series
are aware of our affinity for bad movie tie-ins. We’ve seen our share of tosh over the years, a
couple of which may feature today in fact, but there’s so much more out there
from a genre renowned for inadequacy. There’s a special kind of disillusion you
get from a bad movie tie-in that differs from your usual gaming drivel. While your
typically terrible titles like Ride to Hell: Retribution will let you down by simply
being rubbish, a game riding the coattails of a movie already has a
pre-established fanbase to disappoint. Terrible games like Charlie’s Angels, Rambo:
The Video Game and The Crow: City of Angels are all utterly horrendous, but the movies they’re
based on are also ghastly, so it was expected -and before you come at me saying Rambo: First Blood
is good, the game is based on the whole First Blood Trilogy which is a load of old piffle!...
apologies for the harsh language there. Therefore in this list, the greater the disparity between
film and game quality, the higher it will place. I’m Peter from TripleJump and here
are the 10 Worst Movie Tie-In Video Games. 10. March of the Penguins I have no words. The first entry on
this list and it’s already too much. Who thought that a documentary
about the real life struggles of the Emperor Penguin would make
for a good video game. Who?! The game is basically just a series of
mini-puzzle-games, the first of which is a rip off of Lemmings -only without the
charm or quality. There’s also an Ecco the Dolphin inspired level and some other
basic puzzles involving the titular avians, but that information is utterly irrelevant as
you’ll most likely never pass the first level- partly because it’s quite difficult and also
due to it being utterly horrible to play. You may look at March of the Penguins and wonder
if it’s just an unlicensed browser game, but, alas, it was actually a full release on the Game
Boy Advance. What’s worse, is that you don’t even get the smooth, sultry tones of Morgan Freeman
to narrate your adventure like in the movie. 9. Fast & Furious: Showdown F&F Showdown is set between the fifth
and sixth films which, admittedly, aren’t cinematic masterpieces. However, they
are popular and are by no means terrible, garnering generally favourable reviews. The reason this game belongs here -when the
emphasis is on the disparity in quality- is because of how truly deplorable it is. Fast & Furious: Showdown holds the distinction
of being the worst reviewed movie tie-in on Metacritic -sitting pretty between Drake
of the 99 Dragons and Rambo, on the very last page of the list of every game reviewed on
the site- an impressive feat to say the least. What’s most baffling is how you can get this
so wrong. Fast & Furious seems to be an ideal candidate for a tie-in game, all you have to do
is make a good racing game with stunts in it and you’re onto a winner -think Burnout Paradise
with a bit of Jim Petrol and Wayne “The Pebble” Swanson in it
and you’re golden, I don’t watch the films. What I’m getting at, is that with such an
easily marketable franchise like Fast & Furious you’d have to be pretty incompetant to
bugger it up to the extent that they did with Showdown. Let’s just hope the next
installment is a bit bette- oh, nevermind… 8. LJN Not just a game for this entry, but
an entire company’s back catalogue. There were a slew of abhorrent NES games to come
out in the 80’s, and the majority of them can be put down to LJN. Jaws, Back to the Future,
X-Men, Alien 3, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Karate Kid, Beetlejuice, the list goes
on with each being more terrible than the last. LJN, contrary to popular belief, never
actually developed any of their games. Instead, they’d ship their licenses off to other studios
and then just publish whatever they got back, regardless of how good it was. One department you
definitely wouldn’t find at LJN in the 80’s was Quality Control. You may be wondering how they
secured so many movie licenses when they never did anything good with them? Well it’s because
they could make games quickly and cheaply to coincide with the movie release! Isn’t capitalism
just grand. LJN was bought out in 1990 by Acclaim and ceased to exist by ‘95, and the world
has been a much brighter place since then. 7. Napoleon Dynamite: The Game You look at games like Hellboy: The Science
of Evil, Iron Man, Terminator Salvation, Star Trek The Video Game, Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and think: “Yes, they’re bad, but I can see why they were made.” These are the playable yet dull cash-grabs
which suffer from a lack of imagination, care and polish. This is why Napoleon Dynamite The
Game takes it to the next level, because it’s all of the reasons the other games are rubbish, plus
it had no reason to exist in the first place. Much like March of the Penguins, Napoleon
Dynamite is a series of simple mini-games that’d be more at home on Miniclip than
a Nintendo branded console -you’ll likely find better games there than
the ones on offer in Napoleon Dynamite anyway. The greatest insult for a game of this nature,
is that its existence is completely unnecessary. The only compliment I can offer is that at least
they attempted something with the art style -where the school book-esque design at least attempts
to match the aesthetic of the cult classic film- but based on the lackadaisical nature of the game
itself, that could’ve been entirely by accident. 6. Kung Fu Panda 2 We’re only a handful of entries into this list
and I’m already running out of ways to say that something is bad. So for this section the writer has
resorted to using a thesaurus to spice things up a bit. Kung Fu Panda 2 is an egregious game. The peccant
movie tie-in suffers the same fate as the list of ignominious games from the last entry. However,
while those ones were targeted more at teens and adults, Kung Fu Panda 2 is marketed at kids.
Children aren’t yet developed or experienced enough to identify when something isn’t good.
After all, you aren’t going to see a six year old reading an IGN review... probably. It’s why making
a game this abominable is particularly iniquitous. The controls are vapid.
The writing, prosaic. The game is just all round is just a piece of-
It’s just really bad, alright? The Kung Fu Panda 2 game came out
around the time of the Kinect push, but rather than making the game for either just
the Kinect or a controller, they opted to make a version for both -which is a bit like
saying: “I had the choice to study Kung Fu or become a panda, but instead I decided to do
both at the same time.” I very much doubt you’d have time to do both and still come out with good
results -something that shows in Kung Fu Panda 2. 5. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial You thought this would be number one,
didn’t you? Well, Ha! Admittedly, it probably deserves the top spot.
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was so bad it’s considered the reason that the original
branch of Atari disbanded in the mid-eighties. But you all know about this game, it’s surely
the most infamous of all the bad movie tie-ins and often cited as one of the worst video
games of all time. So today, dear viewer, we’ll do something a bit different. Let’s defend
E.T. and say why it’s been given a bad rap. First of all, it was made by one person in the
span of five and a half weeks -I don’t think I could make E.T. with today’s technology in that
amount of time. Speaking of tech, this was 1982 a time before game engines and our modern,
more sophisticated programming languages. Much like today, games the scale of E.T. would’ve
most likely had an entire team behind them and been given far longer a development cycle, making
the solo endeavor that much more impressive. It’s also… also... No, that’s enough of that.
The game is rubbish, but at least you can blame the studio for being overly ambitious and not
the developer. We’ve got your back, Howard. 4. Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days Video games and gun-based violence go hand in
hand. You’d be hard pushed to find a modern, Triple-A game that doesn’t involve
the effervescent murdering of legions of living things. The
same goes for films. After all, Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn’t have had such
a bountiful career if not for the plethora of ultra-violent flicks made for him to star
in. So of all the films involving guns, why choose the one that would be least suited
to a video game format for your tie-in title? To make it worse, at least the usual movie tie-in games are released at a similar time to its
subject matter to capitalise on the hype. Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days couldn’t
even manage this simple task, coming out twenty-five years after the film’s
initial release -even E.T. got that bit right! You’d think that a lack of time-sensitive pressure would mean the game could be
perfected before its release, but you’d be wrong, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days
is as broken as any other shoddy movie tie-in. To quote the description of the game that
appears on Google, from their own website: “Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days is a new game that
brings all the drama and tension from the movie in a unique time-rewind surprising
gameplay.” If we ignore the… questionable sentence structure for the time being, this
“time-rewind” mechanic is less of a creative, exciting tool, and more of a gimmick that grows
tiresome within the first few minutes of gameplay. Also, the name Bloody Days sounds like what
a disgruntled office worker would say after they’ve evolved past the point of just
hating Mondays: Bloody… Days, all of ‘em. 3. Star Wars Kinect Saying this is the worst of the Star Wars games is
like saying that Dengue Fever is the worst of the tropical diseases, it’s got a lot of competition
and most of them are going to cause you pain. There are better and worse Star Wars games out
there, that is undeniable. Pretty much everything made for the Atari 2600,
Masters of Teras Kasi and The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes, to name but a
few, are all fundamentally worse… but Star Wars Kinect did this…
which is unforgivable! Remember how Rogue One made
Darth Vader seem cool again? Because I don’t. All I could see was this
the entire time! Easy now, let’s calm down. It’s already been difficult to be a Star Wars
fan for the past few... years? Decades, maybe? But this may be the most painful thing to happen to the
franchise. Star Wars Kinect somehow manages to make both followers of the movies, and of gaming
in general, ashamed to say that they’re fans… What? There’s other mini-games
than just the dancing one?... Well what are they like then?... Oh... Never mind 2. Fight Club
IMDB ranks Fight Club as the 11th greatest film ever made. Metacritic lists Fight Club the
game as the 17,332nd greatest game ever made, which for reference means there are only about
200 games worse than it -and that includes a lot of duplicates. This is a prime example
of disparity between film and game quality. From the bland graphics, to the bland combat,
to the bland cutscenes and the bland characters -it’s so bad it didn’t even warrant getting
the thesaurus back up, Fight Club the game somehow manages to fail on all fronts at
just being a game, movie tie-in part aside. I think that our very own Ben Potter said it
best: "What is going on? This is sh*t" ... which just about sums it up really.
It’s a poorly crafted tournament fighter akin to Street Fighter and Tekken, just without
all of the things that make those games good. Fight Club the game is almost a parody of
everything the film was trying to do or say. Yes, a movie about anti-capitalism and escapism from
the rigmarole that is our mundane human existence, is made into a tedious, repetitive
cash grab -a sweet irony indeed. 1. Robocop The Robocop games are truly special in their
incompetence. Not only are the original NES games utter drivel, there was there a terrible
tie-in game released 16 years after the original, and when the remake released in 2014, there
was also a bad tie-in game for that too. Yes, this is a level of trash
that spans multiple generations, a feat of ineptitude bordering on
impressive. Let’s break this down: Firstly you had the NES trilogy. Each game was
released to coincide with the three original Robocop movies. They were all far, far too
difficult but the challenge came from overly quick enemies and clunky controls
rather than any clever design. The games were quite pretty looking for the time, though
that’s all we can give it by way of complement. Then came the 2003 reboot… or remake...
- no, regurgitation I think is best… Then the 2003 regurgitation appeared on the original
Xbox and PS2 to horrendous reviews. From Titus Interactive, the brilliant minds behind Superman
64, we were given a bog-standard first-person shooter that was considered “unplayable”
by the entire journalistic world. Finally, there was the Robocop reboot in 2014.
While the film itself was frighteningly mediocre, it still got a game of sorts -though it was just
a mobile release. The game itself was… well, it existed, which is just about all you can
say from a gameplay perspective, with the main talking point appearing when
you see how insultingly monetised it was -but what else was to be expected
from a freemium movie tie-in? Aaaaaand that’s the lot. There are a veritable
smorgasbord of bad movie tie-ins out there, so why not let us know your least favourites
in the comments below.
