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 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
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I watched this years ago. I think. There are a lot of videos on this subject.
‘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.
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).
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 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 don’t think i’ve ever managed to finish those fucking flight training missions.
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.
I’ve played very few movie-to-game adaptations, but one that I did play was Total Recall for NES. It’s fairly ass, imo.
The game does follow the movie fairly well, although I can’t say I recall Arnie pummeling dozens of hobos in a cement factory in the movie x)
The controls were fairly stiff and difficulty quite high up there, it was on NES after all.
Total Recall was quite bad, as were most NES movie based games. Dark Man and Nightmare on Elm Street were also really bad. I loved the Nightmare on Elm Street movies as a kid, so I really wanted it to not suck.
Total recall was my first thought as well. But I’m sure there’s got to be worse ones than that.
Probably the LJN’s entire NES-catalogue? IIRC they were pretty much all some media-property-license-schlock.
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.
Blair Witch Project. From the little I remember from the very little I played it, the objective was to kill stick things. So bad
To cue anyone’s memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films
Back to the future based on the third movie for the genesis made me cry as a kid.
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
Madagascar on Nintendo Game Cube.
NES, Back to the future. That was a video game rental that wasted a whole weekend but at least it was just a rental.
The Avatar game from 2009. Honestly, it was only fun because it was so buggy you could basically get anywhere on the map and do anything you wanted.
It was from an era where a good story driven game was not only possible, but common, and it managed to be the worst story and the worst game of the year.
Shit, that game was pretty bad too. It’s nice to have bending, but the entire tone was off and it’s clear they didn’t have people who cared working on it.
Wait, is this talking about the movie game for M Night’s AtLA game? Or is it talking about the movie game for James Cameron’s Avatar?
James Cameron’s Avatar.
