Disclaimer: Before anyone goes and gets their panties in a bunch over what didn’t make this list lets establish that we all know that NES Rambo, Die Hard, The Karate Kid, Top Gun, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, the Sega Master System version of Rocky, and the Atari Texas Chainsaw Massacre suck hard. It would have been very easy to make this list all NES titles. We could have even made a top twenty five worst movie based video games list and never made it past the N64/PlayStation era. So in the interest of diversity we’ve limited 8/16bit participation to populating just some of the list with only the worst offenders showing up. And now, the 7 worst video games based on movies.
Dis-honorable mention – Iron Man (Xbox 360), G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra (Xbox 360/PS3) and King Kong (Xbox 360)
#7 WORST – JAWS UNLEASHED (Xbox)
We were promised open world awesomeness. We were promised Shark Theft Auto. Instead Appaloosa Interactive and Majesco delivered the wholly broken and unenjoyable Jaws Unleashed. Bad textures, slow down, lock-ups, and a camera that actively works against you make Jaws almost unplayable. Jaws packs a main story, a bunch of side missions, and some cool shark abilities; making this water logged turd even more disappointing. It’s physically difficult to say, but Jaws Unleashed is even worse than the NES Jaws game, at least you could see how bad that one was.
#6 WORST – WAYNE’S WORLD (SNES)
This is clearly on the wrong list. The SNES version of Wayne’s World is one of the greatest games ever made… Not! (see what I did there). Wayne’s World is packed full of weirdness and pain-in-the-assery. Prepare to spend hours fighting animated musical instruments, living coffee cups, and disco balls? What about a random ass Elvis boss? Yeah, me neither. In addition to the terrible and infuriating enemies the music is awful; and the repetition of Wayne’s only two phrases is enough to make you pull your hair out. The game player also suffers from the shortcomings of 2.5D game design. Path blocking foreground objects and mysteriously non-weight bearing platforms are in abundance. Possibly the worst thing about Wayne’s World is the fact that it’s not the first one! An NES version exists that is also thoroughly god awful. Who is the psycho hose beast who said “game on!” when presented with the idea of another Wayne’s World game? (did it again).
#5 WORST – WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (NES)
Terrible games often have an element of fun to them. A little nugget of gameplay that simultaneously makes us hopeful and fills us with ire. A beam of light that illuminates what the game could have been. Yeah, not Roger Rabbit. This game sucks through and through. From the bull-crap searching you have to do, to the poor driving controls, shopping, codes, combat, useless items… Where to start? Searching things in the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes forever, like the game has to load the response to your “search” request for that particular book case, and about 90 percent of the time whatever you’re searching for is empty! I estimate that I wasted; let’s see 10 seconds x 1000 searches = 10000 seconds or 2.77 hours just searching! With a vast majority of that time spent finding nothing! Controlling that stupid car makes you feel either drunk or brain damaged. It moves like it’s on a sheet of ice… that’s moving… and your wheels are made of ice too.
#4 WORST – BACK TO THE FUTURE (NES)
Remember that part in Back to the Future when Marty had to throw milkshakes at thugs in the diner? No. Because that is not part of Back to the Future. Not part of the movie anyway. That seems to be the theme of this game; source material be damned! Most of what is in the game is not in the movie. Do you remember Marty cruising the streets of Hill Valley in 1955 tossing bowling balls at hula-hopping teenage girls? Cause it didn’t happen. Where did the big ass killer bees come from, and what’s this heart catching boss fight verses your mom? None of Back to the Future on the NES makes sense and none of it is fun. Back to the Future is 1.21 jigawatts of terrible.
#3 WORST – SUPERMAN 64 (N64)
Debuting at E3 ’98 Superman 64 has the dubious honor of being a part of the short list of worst video games of all time. Superman 64 was in trouble from the very start, no, before its start. To say that Superman 64 had graphical problems is an understatement. When these piss-poor graphics are explained in story, that my friend is your very first tip off that this game sucks hard. If the graphical failings are explained as being a part of the game what else were the devs at Titus Software too lazy to fix? Well: First off Superman can’t fly. Well, he can physically lift off the ground, but once he’s up he controls like a tank made of horse crap. Second; clipping is a problem. When was the last time you played a game and thought to yourself “wow, this clipping is a problem”- Never. “This clipping is an annoyance” – yeah sure that happens from time to time. Third; The graphical quality is comparable to the fun. That is to say it’s effing boring.
#2 WORST – E.T. (ATARI 2600)
E.T. is a horrifying bastard of a game unleashed upon the masses by a few hell corrupted souls at Atari. Created by one guy in, no joke, five weeks – E.T. is comprised of five or six screens for you as E.T. to run around on avoiding the F.B.I and looking for pieces of a broken intergalactic phone. Collect the phone pieces and get back to the rendezvous to be pick up by your ship before you’ve used up all of your energy, thus ending the round and scoring mad points; sounds easy enough right? Well it’s not. This game is a known pile of garbage. In fact E.T. is only well know for how bad it is. It has been argued by many to be the worst game ever made. Quite plainly it looks like crap, it plays like crap, and it’s just crap!
#1 WORST – STREET FIGHTER THE MOVIE THE GAME (PlayStation)
If you follow the symbiotic circle that brought Street Fighter The Movie The Game into being you’d imagine that it wouldn’t be far off from the Street Fighter source material. A game based on a movie based on a game, the end game should be pretty close to the beginning game shouldn’t it? Well maybe that symbiotic circle was more of an incestuous circle, judging by the tiny headed drooling cross eyed offspring it produced. And there is the reason Street Fighter The Movie The Game tops this list. How hard would it have been to simply re-skin an already existing game? Only slightly harder than not making this abomination in the first place! It’s hard to believe but Capcom developed the game based on the movie based on their game. The awful wanna-be Mortal Combat digitized actors only serve to reinforce how disappointing the movie was. While most of the games on this list are infuriating Street Fighter The Movie The Game is saddening.