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The Problem with Licensed Games

 The Problem with Licensed Games
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...is that they tend to be mediocre at best. But why is this so?
There are two ways to sell games: Quality of game, and reputation of name. Most games that sell fall into at least one of the two categories. So... video and card game developers could take some time to develop an original property made with care, imagination and the ultimate goal of developing a brand new franchise. Or, they could just buy into an already-popular property via licensing — permission to build a game around a TV show, or a movie, or a comic book, or a work of literature, or anything really (and we mean anything note Although the last one was pretty good.).
Given the built-in customer interest and sales potential in a licensed property, there's considerably less incentive for developers to make an actually good game. This is most obvious in Video Games, but it also applies to Board Games and Trading Card Games. Pinball games tend to avert this, as it's very hard (but not impossible) to screw up pinball. The situation varies in the Tabletop RPG world; some licensed games are pretty poor, but many are okay and some are famously good. It helps that the writers are often dedicated borderline fanboys who are in the business for love (it's not likely to be for the money), and who know the subject-matter inside out.
Of course, the ability of licensed games to sell on name alone is a major reason for their poor quality, but it's hardly the only one. Developers are often pressured by movie studio execs to have the game ready for release alongside the movie (which, in the studio execs' eyes, practically equates these games to tie-in action figures, lunchboxes, and other low-grade merchandise), which can shorten development time. Stretching the plot of a 100 minute movie into a twenty hour game can lead to a lot of filler material or serious diversions from the movie's plot. Sometimes the diversions are not the fault of the developer, but rather down to the game being based on a draft or early version of the property, only for the final product to radically depart from the initial concept - a character heavily featured in the game can be cut entirely or a major concept is removed or changed due to poor audience tests. This can happen late enough so there is no time to alter the game to more closely match the finished property.
Licensed games also attempt to emulate the most popular genres at the time in an effort to maintain appeal — side-scrollers and Fighting Games were popular in the The '90s and more recently, Grand Theft Auto clones and shooters are common as well. Sometimes they will be a confusing mesh of gameplay genres as the developers attempt to figure out just what their license could be used for to fill up enough game time to push it out the door, and that's assuming the product isn't chock full of Game Breaking Bugs because of the short Q/A window. Perhaps worst of all, many licensed games are made by people with little (if any) knowledge of the franchise they are licensing. So games based on these franchises tend to completely miss what made the franchises popular to begin with. Thus, many licensed games are designed in a manner that has nothing to do with the plot or general style of the franchise (for example, The Riddler, instead of inflicting riddles on Batman, might just try to riddle him with bullets throughout the entire boss fight).
And despite what one might expect with a title based on a lucrative property, there is often ironically less money available than usual for a company to spend making a licensed game; a significant amount of the funding that would normally be channeled into the title's actual development is instead used up before development just to buy the license in the first place. Also, a bad non-licensed game might be cancelled or delayed. A game that has a license lined up for it is either obligated to release in a specific time frame, or the publishers will decide to shove it out the door for an easy buck from fans of the license; another reason why so many licensed games are contenders for worst game ever, period.
Another thing to note is that back in the The '80s, plenty of product licensees in the US did not know what to expect from the video game industry and who would be the most appropriate to give a license to, so they did the sensible thing and grabbed a telephone book to search for the first game development studio that showed up on the pages. The video game corporations Atari, Activision, Accolade, Acclaim and Absolute Entertainment (summed up in chronological order for ease) had given themselves their own brand names exactly for this reason. It is only as of the late 90's, with a very recognizable AAA video game development industry, that this trend was put to a halt.
As of The New '10s, the video games version of this phenomenon has largely (though not completely) faded away. The first reason is that the economics of game development made licensed games less viable: as video games were established as a multi-billion dollar industry, media and sport licensors caught on and greatly increased the cost necessary to get a license. This meant getting any random IP for the sake of name recognition became a less viable tactic, and along with the rise of cost of retail video game development, restricted the profitable licenses worth acquiring to only the biggest video game publishers or the licensors themselves, with companies such as Warner Bros. investing heavily into video game publishing and treating video games of their properties just as seriously as any other component of the Expanded Universe. Indeed, video games have increasingly been seen as a narrative medium in their own right, making a straight adaptation of a film a less inticing proposition in the first place. How can it have a compelling story if you've probably already seen the movie and know what to expect? Mind you, this isn't as much an issue for non-film licenses, e.g. a game based on a comic book or less serialized TV series can just tell an original story, but it can still fall victim to the other problems mentioned here.
The second reason for the downfall of this trend in video games is that, quite simply, consumers eventually caught on to the poor quality of licensed games and stopped buying them. This, combined with the death of the worst offenders of this such as Acclaim and THQ (which itself stated its desire to stop being associated with bad licensed games marketed for kids before its bankruptcy), means licensed games are far less numerous in recent times and are more likely to either be Mobile Phone Games that aren't much worse than other mobile games not tied to an existing IP or blockbuster titles that aren't mandated to tie into some upcoming release, averting the development issues that made most licensed games bad. "Traditional" rushed cash-ins still exist, but they're nowhere near as common as they used to be.
Of course, movies based on video games don't tend to go over well either, for much of the same reasons. It's a kind of cross-media Porting Disaster.
A related phenomenon is that, prior to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, wherein many non-videogame companies - up to and including Quaker Oats - had a gaming division.
There are exceptions, of course. A pretty good chunk of the exceptions were either released years after the source material or were based on a franchise that had been running for years, thus relieving the time pressure often inherent in licensed games. Mediocre licensed games are so numerous, it's probably easier to list only egregious examples. Exceptions should be listed on their own page. See Spiritual Adaptation for a way some games go around this, intentionally or not.
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The Finding Nemo tie-in game isn't a trainwreck by any means, but it still contains a horrible case of Loads and Loads of Loading (sometimes more than a minute per level!), ugly visuals, obvious soundalike actors, and gameplay that is little more than a lame Gameplay Roulette that tries a little too hard to follow the movie shot-for-shot, which ended up constraining it a bit too much. Many of the stages are quite uninspired as well, ranging anywhere from Pass Through the Rings to sliding puzzles. The Gamecube version in particular deserves special mention as it doubles as a Porting Disaster, with incredibly noticeable lag on quite a few of the stages that makes the already lousy visuals even harder on the eyes.
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Miami Vice received a little-known DOS game by Capstone (reviewed here) that suffers from terrible controls, convoluted gameplay, and ridiculous bugs. The game is like a puzzle/platformer hybrid controlled entirely by the mouse and spacebar. In the linked review, the reviewer could not figure out how to pass the second level because there's nothing to be anything to really indicate the goal of the level. He also encountered several strange, albeit unintentionally amusing glitches, such as Crockett and Tubbs's sprites becoming cloned and their inexplicable ability to walk across thin air where no platforms are indicated.
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Its slower pace than most other Sonic games has been routinely compared to the infamous Werehog, with monotonous use of the "Tetherbeam" mechanic to destroy enemies.
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The Irate Gamer Game, despite being hyped for years, looks like it was made in a week. It's a platformer for mobile devices with really bad controls even by those standards, dull levels, minimal enemies, pointless ladders (you can't go up), and overall lazy design. The only upside is the art for the comic book-style cutscenes. The game only lasted 3 months on the iOS App Store before getting pulled; it was revealed that it was a reskin of a different mobile game that sells its assets to potential game makers. The Irate Gamer himself made a (now deleted) glowing video about it, comparing it to Angry Birds. Years later he realized he was scammed.
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While Monsters, Inc.: Scream Team is a well-regarded 3D platformer in its own right, the same can't be said for the far more obscure PS2-exclusive Monsters, Inc. game, which has ugly graphics that look about on par with a PS1 game, poorly designed platforming with extremely difficult sections early on in the game (the second level features a mail train segment which lasts a long time and instantly kills Sulley if he falls at any point while the third level has both a chimney segment which requires pinpoint-perfect reflexes and accuracy and a zipline that takes you right back to the beginning of the level without telling you) and demotes Mike to an NPC. To top it all off, the game adapts the movie's plot so badly that it comes off as a Random Events Plot, and has an insulting A Winner Is You ending that doesn't actually resolve anything the game brings up.
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The Fellowship of the Ring for the GBA (licensed from the book, not the movie) is a tedious RPG riddled with bugs, some of them game-breaking.
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Ariel The Little Mermaid was developed by Blue Sky Software for the Sega Genesis, and so could offer fancier graphics than Capcom's NES game The Little Mermaid, which is better in almost every other way. It also tries for greater complexity of gameplay, but ends up forcing the player to swim around labyrinthine levels with unresponsive controls and terrible collision detection hunting for transformed friends to shoot musical notes at; these musical notes are also a very weak primary attack. Flounder and Sebastian can be summoned, but don't really help much. After slowly putting down Final Boss Ursula, the ending consists mainly of a "Congratulations!" screen.
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Coraline received a video game adaptation for the PlayStation 2 and the Wii that went way too far in becoming a Pragmatic Adaptation. The game is more than playable and does a solid job of recreating the source material and getting some of the voice actors of the movie to reprise their roles. It finds its spot here, however, due to the mediocre graphics and dull gameplay consisting of bland minigames and mission objectives. The story falls short as well since the game can't seem to make up its mind on whether or not it wants to follow the movie or just do its own thing. Chunks of the story are omitted, with heavy Broad Strokes and awkward character dialogue that explains the game's controls, which to some defeats the purpose of the game even more, as one is just better off just sticking to watching the movie. On the higher note, the soundtrack is excellent, and the Game Over screen is very memorable. The Nintendo DS version of the game, however, is a different story.
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On one hand, The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge has a lot of good things going for it. Most of the movie's original cast is back, the graphics are good, the story serves as a decent sequel to the first movie, and the songs are good (even if they're just the ones from the original movie with new lyrics, though there is one new one). However, its Devil May Cry-style combat is very repetitive with a poor camera, and the player frequently has to backtrack to do something as simple as refill their health. It also takes several seconds just for the pause menu to appear.
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Wreck-It Ralph is one of the most successful video game movies out there. Ironically, its own video game adaptation has been panned for its subpar graphics, being short (it has only 18 levels), repetitive (the levels all feel the same), easy (there is no penalty for death) and having a ton of wasted potential. The mobile game, however, belongs on the other list.
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All of this led to people nicknaming the game "Sonic '06 2" and "Sonic '14". Sega was quite aware of its lack of quality, since they withheld review copies and tried to take down early Let's Play videos. It wasn't enough to save the game from absolutely flopping and killing off the Sonic Boom subseries before it could truly take off.
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Darkwing Duck has a stellar NES licensed game published and developed by Capcom, mainly because it uses a modified version of Mega Man 5's game engine. The game developed by Interactive Designs for the TurboGrafx-16, on the other hand, is vastly inferior. It suffers from a lot of problems, such as stiff and sluggish controls which only serve to make the platforming parts even harder, boring music, unfair difficultynote If Darkwing stays in one spot, such as a platform, for too long an anvil lands on his head. That costs one of your lives, naturally., and only four bosses (Tuskernini, Megavolt, Moliarty, and Steelbeak; the NES version at least lets you fight the other members of the Fearsome Four).
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A very rare and ironic in-universe example occurs in Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People Episode 5: 8-Bit is Enough.
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Shrek is infamous for spawning numerous horrible licensed games. Swedish gaming magazine LEVEL once gave a Shrek game 4/10 and noted that it's surprisingly good for a Shrek game. For a few more specific examples:
There are multiple racing games, one of which, Swamp Kart Speedway for the Game Boy Advance, sticks out with its hideous graphics and bizarre, awful menu music on top of being a blatant Mario Kart rip-off. The worst part about that game is that every time a racer passes you, they go "Bye-bye!" (taken from the scene in the movie where Shrek tries to explain to Donkey how "ogres have layers"). And the same "Bye-bye!" sound is used for every single character.
Fairy Tale Freakdown is also a good example, being very easy, having bad controls and the mugshots of the characters trying too hard to emulate a CGI appearance (the game was released on the Game Boy Color).
Even more insulting is that the first Shrek game was supposed to show off the hardware capabilities of the Xbox, and was actually supposed to be an original IP before being repurposed into a Shrek game. The end result is a wannabe Tech-Demo Game that impressed absolutely nobody, suffering from mediocre gameplay, terrible Camera Screw, and abysmal audio. Its supposed Updated Re-release for the GameCube (named Shrek Extra Large) is even worse, with a graphical downgrade and poor frame rate issues.
Shrek Treasure Hunt already has an incredibly lame premise where you're just going around collecting items for a picnic, making the title rather questionable at best. Not only is the game thoroughly unengaging and dull, it's particularly brought down by its absolutely horrendous visuals, and despite hardly looking at all graphically impressive by PS1 standards, the frame rate borders on slideshow territory. This is completely inexcusable considering the game came out in 2002, a decent amount into the sixth generation's lifespan, so the developers should have been more than familiar with ways to mitigate it by that point.
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Steve Jackson Games' Illuminati: New World Order is a collectible version of their previous classic Illuminati. Unfortunately, they borrowed many mechanics and cards from the non-collectible version without thinking about how deckbuilding would allow them to be exploited, and most games of INWO were immediately won by whichever player went first.
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The Shannara video game adaptation. For RPG elements, it isn't too awful, just badly cliched, but the gameplay mechanics — especially the combat engine — suck horribly.
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The Tamagotchi virtual pet toys' first Game Boy adaptation is notorious for how easy killing a Tamagotchi is (even moreso than the Tamagotchi Ocean, which is considered Nintendo Hard) and that they can die of old age eventually. The entire Game Boy trilogy's death scenes are also infamous for their disturbing ways of playing out, even to some adults.
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Beauty and the Beast had two games for the Sega Genesis by Sunsoft, each based on one of the title characters. Belle's Quest was a fairly lame collection of minigames, and Roar of the Beast was an uninspired platformer. The NES and SNES games published by Hudson Soft and developed by Probe Entertainment did not improve much on the gameplay of Roar of the Beast either.
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The Polar Express, a multi-platform adventure game based on the hit movie. The graphics are okay for the time, nothing phenomenal and they don't reach Unintentional Uncanny Valley like the film. The gameplay features various Unexpected Genre Changes, though they're poorly played out. The voice acting for some of the characters isn't so great either. The worst part of the game has to be the timespan; it can be beaten within a few hours or less, one sitting and it makes you feel you're missing out.
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ISCO is a contract developer to run away from really fast (being the contract developer hired to make Transformers: Convoy no Nazo). The reason they get their own section is because all of their games tend to have the same problems, which are ugly graphics, bad sound effects, awful controls and lack of playability. They are so horrible that after playing their games you will probably never look at LJN the same way ever again.
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WWF WrestleMania for the NES is the first WWF-licensed game, and easily the worst. The entire game consists almost entirely of punches and kicks. The only grappling hold (in a wrestling game) is a body slam. On top of that, the controls are just awkward and unresponsive, making the simple act of pinning the opponent difficult. The quality of the game (or lack thereof) can't even be blamed on system limitations, as decent wrestling games do exist on the NES (Pro Wrestling and Tecmo World Wrestling come to mind).
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William Shatner's TekWar was an early FPS on the Build Engine (the same engine that powered Duke Nukem 3D) and is considered one of the worst games to ever run on the Engine (and that's saying a lot), with graphics crunched into hideous pixelated unrecognizability, clunky and irritating gameplay, and some utterly dreadful level design. The game also features FMV sequences with William Shatner chewing you out if you kill too many enemies, despite killing bad guys being the point of the game, which gets annoying fast; and a seizure-inducing final mission in cyberspace full of garish visuals and confusing objectives.
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Garfield has a string of licensed games that are as lazy as the cat himself.
The Famicom game A Week of Garfield starts going wrong with its Excuse Plot, where Garfield inexplicably wants to save Odie. In actual gameplay, it's a side-scrolling platformer with ugly graphics and primitive level design. Beating a level requires jumping around randomly to make a key appear. Difficulty comes mainly from having to face enemies like spiders with a pathetic kick attack and no Mercy Invincibility or extra lives. The array of weapons Garfield can use are limited and inaccurate.
The Commodore 64's Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal is an adventure game. The problem is that it's ripe with Moon Logic Puzzles and Red Herrings, plus it has absolutely no hints for what you have to do. It's even Unintentionally Unwinnable if Garfield ends up eating an important item he happens to be carrying around. The graphics are also rather ugly, and the soundtrack consists of one looping track. The Amiga release helps it out a bit, but it's still not a game worth recommending.
Garfield had a string of generic platformers between the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, the worst being Garfield: The Search for Pooky. The game's start screen is written in Comic Sans and miscapitalizes the title, which sets the tone perfectly. The cutscene graphics are poorly cropped directly from the comic, ripe with scaling and coloring errors, and the dialogue is awkwardly written. It has to be seen to be believed.◊ The gameplay suffers from weird physics and boring sidescroller levels.
Garfield Kart and its remaster Garfield Kart: Furious Racing are two of the fat cat's most famous video game outings... for all the wrong reasons.
The original game for the Nintendo 3DS garnered much ridicule from gamers over its absurd premise, and when they finally got their hands on it they found the game was hardly any good in practice either. The presentation is bland, the gameplay is exceedingly run-of-the-mill, the karts control very poorly, extra content is frustrating to unlock, and there's hardly anything distinctly "Garfield" about it besides the playable characters. The game is also absurdly easy due to the rampant Artificial Stupidity of the AI drivers. Sharing a system with Mario Kart 7 (which, mind, was Christmas Rushed onto the 3DS as an emergency and still ended up a stellar game for the system) only serves to highlight how bland and unambitious the game is compared to other kart racers at the time.
The upscaled port for consoles and PC, Furious Racing, manages to be even worse than the original game. That it adds very little new content that isn't already in the original game is problematic enough, but the game also has the misfortune of being an absolute trainwreck. The AI drivers go from being dumber than Odie to playing so unfairly they put the infamously unbalanced Rubberband AI in Mario Kart Wii to shame (not helped by the addition of hat power-ups that can give AI players either additional or more accurate ammunition to hit you with) and make finishing most races in a position higher than third a chore. The game and physics are poorly designed for the new speeds the karts can reach, as races are absolute chaos on higher difficulties with karts regularly shooting off the track due to not being able to turn quickly enough, dropping through the track or through walls, driving on walls if you hit them right, and going flying out of control or being flipped completely over from so much as hitting an anthill. Add the game's broken and unhelpful respawn system that resets the player's position if they so much as brush their kart against a wall, and you get a game whose only true merit is getting your friends together to revel in how hilariously broken it is.
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LEGO Racers has a reworked iteration on the Game Boy Color, and it's an eyesore to put it lightly. The game is what can best be described as a Pole Position clone, but worse in every single way, including dull, repetitive visuals, very loose and slippery controls, and a draw distance so low that it's impossible to see what's coming. The sound design is also painful, with obnoxious sound effects and poorly remixed music from the original console/PC version.
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Extreme Sports with The Berenstain Bears would have been passable as an NES game, but it came out in late 2000 for Game Boy Color. Every event in the game is the same, a downward course with terrible controls, only made different by the graphics like boating, skateboarding, or snowboarding. The game has no background music and sound effects right out of the Atari 2600. If you do manage to beat the game it won't take long, only about ten minutes.
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Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage: Subverted, as the SNES game has good controls, good music, and is actually all-around decentnote It's probably best known for being one of the few SNES games that has a colored cartridge, in this case red. The port of Doom also had a red cart, and Killer Instinct had a black cart. When the Nerd declared it So Okay, It's Average, then discovered it was made by LJN, it blew his mind and made him suffer a breakdown: "IT'S NOT SHIT! IT'S NOOOOOOOOOOT SHIIIIIIIIIIT!!!"
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The Suite Life of Zack and Cody: Tipton Trouble is dull, repetitive, and lazily put together. In the words of Cole Sprouse, "The best way to beat that game is to eject it and physically destroy it."
Its GBA sister game, Tipton Caper, doesn't fare much better. It's a dull clone of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap with tedious and simple puzzles, lousy stealth segments, and movement speed so painfully slow you'd swear the twins themselves are just as bored as you are.
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Popeye games:
Popeye Saves the Earth is often named as the worst modern-day Pinball game ever made, and with good reason. The Popeye characters are shoehorned into an Anvilicious Green Aesop Excuse Plot (Popeye saves endangered critters from Bluto the corporate polluter, really), while the game is a clunky affair where half of the table is blocked by the giant white toilet-shaped hull of Popeye's boat. It wasn't any better for Williams Electronics, as the game required customized tooling which raised its price, and the company got threatened with lawsuits when they tried to use a minimum orders clause to force distributors to buy machines they didn't want. About the only good thing you can say for the game is that it keeps small kids entertained with an inoffensive theme.
The 2021 game for the Nintendo Switch was developed by Sabec, developers of such venerated classics as Calculator and Piano. Wildly overpriced at $12.99, it's an arcade-y Endless Game where the player must collect hearts or letters thrown by Olive Oyl, essentially a low-budget remake of Nintendo's 1982 arcade title. The gameplay is utterly mindless; the stages (all three of them) consist of low-poly, seemingly untextured models purchased on the cheap from a stock model library, and are much too large to support the gameplay; and glitches wreak havoc on any genuine attempts to play the game—swimming around or even opening the HOME Menu can cause Popeye to die for no reason.
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The Lord of the Rings: Gollum already received some skepticism over its very premise from the word Go (a Stealth-Based Game with Gollum as the main character left players and LOTR fans alike scratching their heads), but when the game released, it was released in...a very un-precious state with more game-ending glitches, bizarre graphical glitches, and Game-Breaking Bugs than you could shake an Orc club at.
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ECW had two disastrous video game adaptations at the end of its lifespan:
The first was Hardcore Revolution, which Acclaim clearly made it to ride the coattails of WWF War Zone and WWF Attitude. Not only are the controls worse than both of those games, the exclusive match types aren't even worth it. The AI's tendency to cheat does not help things either. The fact that it's Attitude with an ECW coat of paint did not do well with ECW fans.
Then came Anarchy Rulz, which has been considered one of the worst professional wrestling games of all time. The cheating AI still exists and it does little, if anything, to address the problems from Hardcore Revolution. It was the last video game to have the ECW license.
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WWF games have a long history of being this trope:
While most of THQ's wrestling games based on WWE tend to be well regarded, two of their attempts to branch into different genres were not so lucky. First there was Betrayal, a Game Boy Color Beat 'em Up panned for "idiot AI" among other things. Then there was Crush Hour for the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox, which is essentially a poor man's Twisted Metal whose only redeeming feature is the Narmtastic commentary provided by Jim Ross ("TWISTY ROCKETS!").
WWF WrestleMania for the NES is the first WWF-licensed game, and easily the worst. The entire game consists almost entirely of punches and kicks. The only grappling hold (in a wrestling game) is a body slam. On top of that, the controls are just awkward and unresponsive, making the simple act of pinning the opponent difficult. The quality of the game (or lack thereof) can't even be blamed on system limitations, as decent wrestling games do exist on the NES (Pro Wrestling and Tecmo World Wrestling come to mind).
WWF King of the Ring was released at the end of the NES' life cycle. It has worse visuals, fuzzy DPCM samples, and wrestlers sharing the same moveset. While it does have the nice draw of making your own wrestler, it only goes as far as modifying their attributes.
WWF Raw for the Xbox was criticized for its grappling system, lack of play modes that previous WWF/WWE games had, and only having 35 wrestlers on its roster. It's a regression from wrestling games that came out the year before on previous gen consoles.
WWE 2K20 was the first WWE game developed by Visual Conceptsnote Mainly known for their well regarded 2K sports games series, which was created after Electronic Arts refused to provide any of their sports games to the Dreamcast (though as of 2022 the only license they have left is the NBA, though they've recently picked up the PGA Tour). For one, it's a noticeable step down from 2K19, the last WWE game that was developed by Yuke's. It's also an Obvious Beta, as many bugs were present at its release. It also eschewed features out from the previous installment. It was so critically reviled that the developers skipped the next year to work on the next installment (meaning there is no WWE 2K21). Thankfully, 2K22 was seen as a Surprisingly Improved Sequel, fixing many issues that 2K20 had.
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Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool and Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest are two of the sorriest 16-bit Mascot with Attitude platformers. The snack food mascot may be Totally Radical, but he doesn't seem like the fastest animal on land in either game.
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Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure for the Nintendo GameCube. The game is a Minigame Game where you play as a random kid in the eponymous theme park trying to get on the rides based on Universal's famous movie franchises. The game is saddled with extremely monotonous and boring gameplay. In order to get on any of the attractions and rides in the park, you don't do anything reasonable like trying to get tickets, no. You have to run around the park picking up garbage, and there's a lot of it. Navigation around the park is difficult as the camera doesn't follow your character, and you're given no map, so it's very easy to get lost. To make matters worse, the minigame attractions themselves are very brief, one-note, have bad controls, a bad camera, or contain all of the four problems, making the excruciating, convoluted effort to get access to them not even worth it. The Angry Video Game Nerd looks at the game here.
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Gravity Falls: Legend of the Gnome Gemulets for the Nintendo 3DS. While its spritework, dialogue, and characterization are well-done and show-accurate, thanks to Alex Hirsch overseeing the project, the game suffers from incredibly monotonous gameplay, music that sounds more fitting for a western, boring boss battles that are blatant rehashes/reskins of one another, and the game itself being far too easy. The game is very low on the creepiness factor, and this is Gravity Falls we're talking about.
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Heroes of the Lance is an excellent contender for "worst Dungeons & Dragons game ever". If the drab graphics, clunky controls, repetitive music and rotten hit detection don't turn you off, maybe the fact that the game has a nasty Unwinnable condition will do it for you (as described there). Watch Spoony suffer through it here.
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Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius has two different game adaptations, both of which (especially the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions) are quite dreadful:
The PS2 and GameCube iteration was developed by the same studio as SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman. It's a 3D platformer with a fixed camera angle, poor graphics (with one of the worst-looking models of Jimmy ever made), horrendous controls that can lead to cheap deaths, plenty of glitches, only six levels consisting of the same thing over and over again, a very poor grasp of the source material, and absolutely terrible level design; it's clear no part of the game was designed around the camera system, or even the basic controls. In one part of the game, you need to jump up from a ledge to a higher platform, a simple task that any platform game will have plenty of—only nine times out of ten, Jimmy can't jump high enough to consistently reach it. Other parts of the game position the camera in such a way that it hides Bottomless Pits by making platforms seem connected until it's too late.
The other version, developed for PCs, while not outright horrendous, still isn't good enough to avoid falling into this trope. While it wasn't as frustrating to play, it has very dated graphics that barely stand up next to an early PlayStation game (despite releasing in 2001!), the controls are very slippery (though considering what happened to the PS2/GameCube versions, it could have been worse), the animation is very limited and eye-gouging (characters look like lifeless puppets and are completely motionless during conversation), the game is very short-clocking in at about two hours, the gameplay, while more functional, is very dull and uninteresting primarily consisting of one Fetch Quest after another, and it bears very little resemblance to the movie in terms of plot (though still more than what can be said for the PS2/GameCube versions). About the only redeeming factor is the original voice cast being present.
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While FIFA Soccer games in the late 2010s normally rate with wildly deviant reviews, FIFA 20 Legacy Edition for the Nintendo Switch is nigh-universally panned as nothing more than a reskin of previous games, with the new features of mainline FIFA 20 nowhere in sight. The highest professional Metacritic review is a Spanish site at 65, with the majority giving it sub-50 ratings; IGN in particular gave it a 40 out of 100 and called it a "macrotransaction". As for fan reviews, with the exception of a few devout fans who will give it a 10 out of 10 no matter what, the reviews are almost unanimously negative, and the user Metascore sits at 0.2 out of 10 because of it.
History repeated itself with the sequential releases of FIFA 21 Legacy Edition, FIFA 22 Legacy Edition and FIFA 23 Legacy Edition. All of which were barely changed from the Switch release of FIFA 19 and released at full retail price. When Simon Cardy of IGN reviewed FIFA 21 Legacy Edition he snarkily copied and pasted his review of FIFA 20 to mock EAs laziness, giving each of the aforementioned titles a pitiful 2 out of 10.
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Revolution X, featuring Aerosmith is a mixed case. It makes for a rather decent, albeit Nintendo Hard (especially if you're playing alone) light gun arcade (making it essentially So Okay, It's Average), but the home conversions for Genesis and SNES are nothing short of awful, with severely downgraded graphics, limited continues (thus ratcheting up the difficulty in getting to the end) and the music looping indefinitely to the point of annoying the hell out of the player. And worse yet, the SNES and Genesis version could offer Super Scope & Menacer support (it's still a rail shooter, after all), but nope.
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Somehow, the people at Takara thought the game deserved a sequel in the form of Transformers: ★Headmasters. Despite numerous improvements (can take more than one hit before you die, save feature, more than two characters), it's still as bad as Mystery of Convoy and is riddled with errors. All but one of the playable characters share a sprite, the one who doesn't is depicted as the wrong character, etc.
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Many of the The Lord of the Rings non-movie games:
The SNES version of The Fellowship of the Ring is really bad, even by the standards of that console's generation. Good luck trying to get anywhere in that game. If you lose your instruction booklet, you're pretty screwed, as it has the layouts of all of the (very large) cave maps. If a character dies, their death is permanent, and you're usually unable to advance the plot without them. However, it doesn't tell you this, so much time can be wasted before you realize you screwed yourself over by letting Pippin get eaten by a dog.
The Fellowship of the Ring for the GBA (licensed from the book, not the movie) is a tedious RPG riddled with bugs, some of them game-breaking.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum already received some skepticism over its very premise from the word Go (a Stealth-Based Game with Gollum as the main character left players and LOTR fans alike scratching their heads), but when the game released, it was released in...a very un-precious state with more game-ending glitches, bizarre graphical glitches, and Game-Breaking Bugs than you could shake an Orc club at.
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The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery for the Game Boy Advance has extremely blurry graphics, a dull soundtrack, and is extremely difficult and tedious for its target audience of young girls.
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Race With Ryan, a Ryan ToysReview Mascot Racer, was criticized for being a $39.99 game with only six tracks, 21 racers that turn out to be 7 racers each with 2 variations, and the annoying photorealistic Ryan who appears on the screen frequently shouting out poor quality voice clips. Otherwise, with its beautifully-designed tracks and good controls, it's a So Okay, It's Average game.
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Windham Classics in the early '80s had several brilliant games; their The Wonderful Wizard of Oz text adventure that incorporated elements from the first two Oz books, their Below the Root game that became one of the first video games to be a canon sequel to a non-video game work, their witty Alice's Adventures in Wonderland game, their faithful Treasure Island text adventure... and then there's their attempt at Swiss Family Robinson that has an awful parser, a very bad mapping system, and poorly written instructions, and was obnoxiously short even by the era's standards.
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Toy Story has had its share of licensed games over the years, and while many of them are very well put together and fun, there are a handful of exceptions. Coincidentally, most of them are handheld ports of the franchise's console game entries:
The Game Boy port of the first game, based on the first movie. The gameplay feels very slow and plodding, the graphics try and fail to emulate the movie, controls are terrible, and it's missing many of the levels that its console counterparts have.
The Game Boy Color version of the Toy Story 2 game. Like its predecessor on the Game Boy, the controls and physics are terrible, the graphics are boring, the music is annoying and the game doesn't seem to understand the source material very well; having the LGMs and Rex as enemies with no reason for it.
The Nintendo DS version of the Toy Story 3 game. The controls were stripped down completely, it feels less imaginative than its console counterparts, and it lacks the game's most popular feature, the Toy Box modenote the same one that would serve as the inspiration for Disney Infinity.
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Izzy's Quest For The Olympic Rings is what you would get when someone decided that the 1996 Summer Olympics mascot should receive their own game. The game is all about the 1996 Olympics mascot "Izzy" embarking on a quest to recover the Olympic Rings from the Ring Guardians so he could travel to Atlanta to light the flame and save the games. The game is as bog-standard as it gets, with uninteresting level design, repetitive gameplay, and horrendous slowdown especially for the SNES version. The game does have decent graphics and fun spritework, but that wasn't enough to save it from the heap.
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Gargoyles for the Sega Genesis looks rather nice, at least in the first couple of levels, and Goliath is very mobile, but the combat is atrocious; attacks never seen to deal a consistent amount of damage, with fights either ending in half a second or turning into long-protracted affairs. Goliath's grab attack is Awesome, but Impractical since the hit detection on it is terrible and most enemies you can grab will just start meleeing you the instant you get into range to use it. On top of that, the difficulty curve is extremely steep, capped off with having only one continue and no passwords.
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There were two video games based on The Rocketeer: the Nintendo Entertainment System verison developed by Ironwind Software and Realtime Associates and published by Bandai in 1991, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System verison developed by Nova Logic and published by IGS in 1992. The NES game has colorful cutscenes that follow the movie, but still suffers from an overabundance of enemies who can easily kill you while it's hard for you to kill them, as well as a jet pack that requires you to find fuel for it, and even then, should only be used sparingly. While the game does provide a password system, you still get a Game Over after losing one life. The SNES game, despite being on a more advanced console, is even worse, as the first few levels require you to beat an airplace race, and in order to win it, you must pay close attention to what's going on in the tiny box in the HUD, not what's going on on the main screen, when it should be the other way around. In the shoot-em-up levels, which appear later in the game, you can actually destroy your health power-ups, and while enemies can change direction to attack you, you can't. Your reward for beating both games is an A Winner Is You ending. The Angry Video Game Nerd has reviewed both these games, saying that the SNES version in particular may have surpassed The Wizard of Oz and Hong Kong '97 as the worst SNES game he's ever played.
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While The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure for the PS1 follows the plots of the first two movies fairly well, and has high-quality video clips from said movies (albeit dubbed with the game's voice actors), the game suffers from sub-par graphics, even for PS1 standards, unresponsive controls that lock on occasion, Simba's attacks (rolling and roaring) getting him hurt more often than the enemies, collecting the tokens required to beat the levels being far too easy, and mediocre unlockable bonus games. Things only got worse when it was ported to the Game Boy Color. Hardware limitations obviously meant the video clips couldn't stay, and in turn players received even sloppier graphics, repetitive gameplay, and none of the memorable music from the films, with one incredibly annoying song playing throughout the entire game.
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Kim Possible: Revenge of Monkey Fist for the Game Boy Advance was the first game based on the series, and easily the worst. While the bad graphics were forgivable (it was released early in the GBA's lifespan), what wasn't forgivable was the simplistic gameplay (all you do is run from left to right with the occassional gadget section), and pathetically easy boss battles (only Drakken puts up a challenge). Interestingly, the game was developed by Digital Eclipse, who also did the well received video game based on Lilo & Stitch for the same platform.
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Animorphs games:
Animorphs: Shattered Reality for the PlayStation is a classic example. Horrific controls, crappy graphics, annoying and downright weird sound, no sense of storyline whatsoever, and the main gimmick only being used in specific (rare) instances in-game; these things make baby Andalites cry. This is not made any better by the fact that the game looks like a re-skinned Crash Bandicoot. Even the animations look almost exactly like Crash's, and the Wumpa fruit has been changed to "A" coins.
By far the worst of the trifecta has to be the Game Boy Color game, simply titled Animorphs. While Shattered Reality is a straightforward Platform Game and Know the Secret is an Action-Adventure title, Animorphs is a Role-Playing Game that, to put it altogether too mildly, takes a great deal of inspiration from the Pokémon games. Boasting a largely incomprehensible script, forgettable music (criminal in that the music of the previous two titles is one of their few redeeming features), no strategy of any kind, lackluster gameplay, a faulty password system in place of a save feature, many Guide Dang It! moments, and a truly horrid amount of game-breaking bugs, it's quite clear that this is the one Animorphs title that truly deserves the label of Shovelware. The game received bad reviews from IGN, though oddly enough, Nintendo Power gave it a 3 out of 5.
Animorphs: Know the Secret, while not as offensive as the PlayStation game, is pretty subpar and has trouble being consistent with the books (such as assigning the wrong signature morphs to the wrong characters).
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In-universe: in CollegeHumor's Hardly Working video on the Most Retro Video Game System Ever, the Skaris One-Bit has a GoldenEye licensed game... which consists of the screen flashing a square on and off a specific number of times, indicating that you should read a specific page of the included book, while playing a horribly beepy and discordant song in the background.
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Treasure Island (1988) received a beat-em-up/platformer sequel in the mid-2000's that looks appealing on the surface thanks to the original director, David Cherkassky, returning to oversee the art, which leads to the graphics doing a very good imitation of the TV movies' art style; plus, it also features several of the original voice actors including Dr. Livesey's. Unfortunately, the game is very simplistic and repetitive, can be beaten in less than an hour, has a paper-thin plot that makes no sense even by the original's slapstick standards, and most of the characters either barely appear or are absent entirely. Most agree that it could have had great potential but in practice is more like a nice-looking tech demo.
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Tarzan has a phenomenal tie-in game released for fifth-gen consoles. To tie in with its follow-up TV show, another Tarzan game was made called Tarzan: Untamed for the PS2 and GameCube, and to say it's a disappointing follow-up is an understatement. The game features bland, uninspired linear level design that is extremely on-rails with almost no freedom of movement, the visuals are dull and ugly (even being outshined by the aforementioned game despite being released on far inferior hardware), the controls are stiff and heavy, all three bosses require Button Mashing to defeat, which can be difficult without the use of a turbo controller, and the game is extremely short.
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Two of the games from the American Girls Collection for the Nintendo DS, namely Julie Finds a Way and Kit Mystery Challenge were given scathing reviews, mainly due to piss-poor gameplay and controls. The American Girls Premiere game for the PC and Mac is a different story, though.
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The Disney Afternoon inspired a few classics, but TaleSpin resulted only in mediocre at best games. The NES game by Capcom is regarded to be an okayish side-scrolling shooter that's probably Capcom's weakest Disney tie-in — albeit still the best game based on this show. The Sega Genesis game is a generic platformer with murky, unappealing graphics, and boring level design. The TurboGrafx-16 game is seen as the bottom of the barrel, however, as despite having better graphics than the Genesis game, it's brought down by atrocious controls, severely faulty collision detection, and all-around uninspired gameplay (faults it shares with the even more notorious Darkwing Duck tie-in game on the same system, which was developed by the same company).
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While Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron are well-regarded by critics and fans alike, the sequel Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark (doubling as a crossover with the live-action movies) fares much worse, suffering from poor optimization, excessive amounts of recycled assets, monotonous gameplay, and a nigh-incomprehensible story plagued by Continuity Snarls for both continuities.
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Extra Credits discusses this in one episode and explains the roots of this problem. Back when the civilian internet and video game magazines didn't exist, parents purchased games for their children based on franchises their kids liked being on the cover. Because these games would sell regardless, making them became less about making a good game and about cutting corners and production costs whenever possible, resulting in some very shoddy games.
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In a twist on this trope, Frogger: The Great Quest got a license to make a game about a classic arcade game. While some Frogger games before and after were actually surprisingly good, this one attempted to make it into a 3D action platformer and failed miserably. You attack enemies by spitting at them, and when close enough you use frog-fu (no, we're not making this up, this is the exact terminology the game uses). The controls are horrible, the only difficult thing is figuring out what the heck you're supposed to do, there is no replay value unless you want to start the whole game over again, and the voice acting is somewhere between bad and the kind of voice that makes you want to take a hammer to your head. The story has some very uncomfortable implications, and very few, if any, of the characters are likable at all.
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You’d think that Pokémon wouldn’t fall into this trap since it’s based on video games. However, the Pokémon Play It! CD-ROM game, meant to introduce fans to the trading card game, is mostly remembered for having awful, awful CG character designs, and less than stellar graphics in general. While it plays fine, it's rather slow-paced and limited in scope (only four decks total, which version 2 expands to seven). The online Trading Card Game released on tablets is viewed as somewhat better, though.
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Zorro (1995) was a clone of the original Prince of Persia games featuring sluggish controls and unforgiving platforming.
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The Lion King 1 ½ for the Game Boy Advance isn't a complete trash fire, it still doesn't make it that far past "mediocre". It controls decently well and has a clever tag-team platforming mechanic, but suffers from shallow gameplay, bland level design, no bosses at all, and a very short game time. If you don't go for 100% Completion, you can beat it in a little over an hour. If you do decide to go for it, be prepared to deal with tons of frustrating Trial-and-Error Gameplay with item placement that frequently requires the player to be psychic.
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Alice in Wonderland (2010), the video game adaptation of Tim Burton's film, was a decided letdown to fans of the movie. Many of the battles are unintuitive, and the player doesn't even play as Alice — rather, as five residents of Underland (though they do fortunately consist of fan-favorites such as the Mad Hatter), who have to make their way through the entire map while preventing Alice from being captured. It's not horrible, but it's extremely disappointing.
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Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric garnered a number of criticisms since its release:
The textures and other graphical effects are subpar, looking more like a GameCube game from 2002 than a Wii U game from 2014.
Its slower pace than most other Sonic games has been routinely compared to the infamous Werehog, with monotonous use of the "Tetherbeam" mechanic to destroy enemies.
Some also hated the constant chatter from the heroes during gameplay (especially since the game's attempts at humor tend to fall flat).
Perhaps the most damning thing, however, is the slew of bugs and general lack of polish that the game exhibits. Among others:
This video quickly went viral for many reasons: the fact that spin dashing into an NPC triggers a cutscene, Sonic's allies can clip through them, the aforementioned lackluster dialogue and graphics, the fact that an invading battleship makes no noise at all and (despite the characters claiming it's attacking) doing absolutely nothing, and finally the cheery music remaining while said battleship invades.
Then there are the gameplay-related ones - for starters, in one section that's shown from a side perspective (i.e. like a 2D sidescroller) the player can inexplicably clip through the back wall by moving into it.
Another infamous glitch has the player trying to move against an invisible wall, only for Sonic to grab onto its top as if it were a ledge and then fall through the level endlessly, necessitating a reset.
There's also an infinite jump glitch involving Knuckles and pausing the game mid-double-jump that allows you to access the final area almost immediately upon reaching the hub world. Notably, the developers caught wind of this one and patched it out.
Finally, there's the fact that, when the player is enclosed in a force field and made to fight enemies in order to get out, dying can cause you to respawn outside the force field, with no way to attack enemies and progress.
All of this led to people nicknaming the game "Sonic '06 2" and "Sonic '14". Sega was quite aware of its lack of quality, since they withheld review copies and tried to take down early Let's Play videos. It wasn't enough to save the game from absolutely flopping and killing off the Sonic Boom subseries before it could truly take off.
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Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular for the Nintendo Entertainment System is a compilation of sports-themed mini-games similar to Track & Field.note The game was originally released in Japan in 1988 as a Donald Duck game, but due to Capcom holding the exclusive North American license for Disney games, Kemco had to use Peanuts characters instead when they released the game in North America one year later. The game only has three characters from the Peanuts franchise; Snoopy, Spike, and Woodstock. Each event has questionable controls, and some events, such as "Pile of Pizza" and "River Jump" are near-impossible to complete as a result. Watch The Angry Video Game Nerd review the game here.note Skip to 22:33:42.
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RWBY: Grimm Eclipse is criticized for a bland and shallow combat system (Remember: This is a game based off an animated web series that prides itself with its over the top fight scenes), tedious grinding, unfair difficulty and railroading level progression, all taking place in empty and overly-spacious environments. Cases were also made against RWBY Deckbuilding Game (despite its polish, the niche genre and overtly complex system made it not catch on and last only one year), RWBY: Crystal Match (too casual and shallow), and RWBY: Amity Arena (mostly for Gacha Games elements and unbalancing).
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Transformers has a weak trading card game primarily based on the live-action movies. It's a "3D Battle-Card Game" that certainly has its flaws: characters are represented as punch-out buildable cards that can either be built as vehicles/animals or out-of-proportion, poorly rendered robots (here's Optimus, for those interested◊), and the game can easily be played without the card models. Only two sets were released.
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Brash Entertainment did nothing but these games, with their Alvin and the Chipmunks and Jumper tie-ins receiving some of the absolute lowest scores of the 7th generation. The studio was quickly shut down 18 months after being formed. note Incidentally, Brash were working on a Saw game just as they went under; Konami eventually snagged the publishing rights from their ruin and the final game ended up being somewhat decent. Well, except for the combat system.
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Their most infamous title is Little Britain: The Video Game for the PS2, which was nominated by various UK critics for being the worst licensed game ever made at the time of its release. The same critics also noted that it was the worst game they ever played on that system.
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Guitar Hero: Van Halen, unlike the other two band-centric entries of the series, is widely seen as a disappointment and the nadir of the series. A lackluster selection of supporting acts (with only the odd shiny nugget, such as "Painkiller' and "Space Truckin'"), the headliners' selection all but ignoring the Sammy Hagar era, a dearth of extra features meaning that the game can be beaten in one afternoon, and essentially being more of the same with a Van Halen coat of paint - all of these helped cement, once and for all, the perception that Activision saw GH as nothing more than a Cash-Cow Franchise, even as it was losing steam in the wake of the recession. Unsurprisingly, it came out early in 2010, the same year the series died its first death.
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The Incredibles licensed game is a mixed bag. It features a decent variety of gameplay, the controls are tight and responsive, and you even get Samuel L. Jackson as Frozone narrating the tutorials. However, most of the levels are long, tedious, repetitive, and at times confusing or downright unfair, with overly-precise platforming that often forces the player to backtrack. The game also suffers from Fake Longevity in the form of Padding that often has you doing the same things over and over again (you have to fight the Omnidroid three times, with each fight being nearly identical and lasting an eternity). It's not the worst licensed game ever, but it's not as great as it could be, either.
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Warhammer 40,000: Storm Of Vengeance is usually hailed as a five-lane game with no humor and no charm and a slapped on Warhammer 40,000 theme.
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SpongeBob HeroPants (a video game tie-in to The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water), is the second of two SpongeBob games released under Activision and a direct follow-up to Plankton's Robotic Revenge while suffering from many of the same problems. Dull platforming, tiresome combat, mediocre graphics (doesn't help that it was stuck on handhelds and the then previous-gen Xbox 360), and a plot that barely has anything to do with the film except for the fact that the cast's superhero forms return (including a horrifically-rendered photorealistic CG Sandy). It served as a Franchise Killer for the SpongeBob video game franchise until THQ Nordic got the publishing rights to the series back and put out Battle For Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated, a remake of Battle For Bikini Bottom which revived the series. Though SpongeBob still wouldn't get any entirely new games until The Cosmic Shake in 2023, which proved that the series is back on track.
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Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey is a really easy game with zero challenge at all. Minigames are dull and basic, the Bogs are the only enemies in the entire game and are very weak, the player can't get killed by all means, clunky controls especially in Wii version, can be completed within a few hours or less and the only unlockables in the entire game is just the Belle minigame in where the player must avoid the Bogs after completing all of the princesses worlds and the Golden dress that can be unlocked after beating the game. To top it off, in PS2, the save file size in the memory card is 1,200KB which is unnecessary for a game that lacks replay value especially in 8MB memory cards even compared to many popular game franchises from that console like Need for Speed, Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, Burnout which has far more replay value and requires either more-or-less KBs to save those games than this game.
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Hulk Hogan's Main Event for the Xbox 360, which fails to take advantage of the Kinect capabilities as promised. Unlike the other wrestling games listed here, this isn't a product based on a wrestling company, although it does promote Hulk Hogan's former role in TNA.
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Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games were good at avoiding this until Ride and Shred, but Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 takes the cake of skateboarding disappointment. For starters, the game weighs 4.6 GB, while the day-one patch is larger, being 7.7 GB. But that was only the beginning. The game frequently crashes, has a lot of glitches, half of which can break the game, lack of the actual Create-A-Skater mode, poor online capabilities, bland maps and lots of the exact same challenges, save for different objects. The fact that the contract between Activision & Tony Hawk to make games ended the day it was released doesn't help in the slightest. You can watch the review here. The game stopped the franchise dead in its tracks for several years until a remake compilation of the first two games gave the franchise some shred of dignity back.
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LEGO Friends qualifies for two reasons. First, it's In Name Only as it has absolutely nothing to do with LEGO at all, to the point that the characters are all humans. Second, it hits so deep into the Girl-Show Ghetto that even most Barbie merch would blush. While it's understandable that LEGO would take a back seat as it did in the Scala line it was originally based on (it used human dolls over sets that were still built with LEGO, if to a lesser extent than your average set), the game is mostly about a bunch of teenage girls who run their band Tuff Stuff. Most of the game is just stereotypical teenage girly socializing while trying to make music for their band, and is one of the most bizarre choices for a LEGO game adaptation. Unsurprisingly, LEGO never bothered with games based on the girl-oriented product lines afterwards.
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Capstone Software was a home computer developer active in the 80s and 90s best known for their FPS titles such as Witchaven and Operation Body Count, but the majority of their games were licensed titles of dubious quality.
Their Trump Castle games were a series of mediocre gambling themed game collections created only to promote the Trump casino brand.
The Dark Half, a point and click adventure game based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. The game featured confusing puzzles and uninspired visuals, earning a mostly negative reception from critics.
Miami Vice received a little-known DOS game by Capstone (reviewed here) that suffers from terrible controls, convoluted gameplay, and ridiculous bugs. The game is like a puzzle/platformer hybrid controlled entirely by the mouse and spacebar. In the linked review, the reviewer could not figure out how to pass the second level because there's nothing to be anything to really indicate the goal of the level. He also encountered several strange, albeit unintentionally amusing glitches, such as Crockett and Tubbs's sprites becoming cloned and their inexplicable ability to walk across thin air where no platforms are indicated.
William Shatner's TekWar was an early FPS on the Build Engine (the same engine that powered Duke Nukem 3D) and is considered one of the worst games to ever run on the Engine (and that's saying a lot), with graphics crunched into hideous pixelated unrecognizability, clunky and irritating gameplay, and some utterly dreadful level design. The game also features FMV sequences with William Shatner chewing you out if you kill too many enemies, despite killing bad guys being the point of the game, which gets annoying fast; and a seizure-inducing final mission in cyberspace full of garish visuals and confusing objectives.
Zorro (1995) was a clone of the original Prince of Persia games featuring sluggish controls and unforgiving platforming.
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The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures is a downplayed version of this trope, since its presentation is legitimately good (the graphics and music are top-notch, and the essence of the Nerd himself comes across well), but the sheer difficulty turned some people off from it, as well as the fact that the game follows some of the game design conventions the Nerd absolutely hates (though not without irony).
In the original version of The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation, "Area 52" was a satire of poor movie tie-in games, specifically being based on Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. The AVGN I & II Deluxe version removes the movie references, however, making the world feel like a generic sci-fi world as a result.
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Dick Tracy on the NES is a good example of how not to balance a video game. To start with its many issues, it is incredibly Nintendo Hard, and it is guaranteed to cause several Game Overs. While it has a Password Save - it only keeps track of what case the player starts at. Any clues or weapons obtained after a Game Over will have to be collected again. The game also has no idea whether it's following the movie or not, such as using characters' likeliness from the film but not the story proper. There are a lot of Demonic Spiders and Goddamned Bats during the overhead and side-scrolling segments, many of which pose a threat to Dick Tracy himself. Platforming is extremely suspect, especially during the pier levels where Tracy's Super Drowning Skills come into play. You also have to interrogate suspects to see if they're involved with the crime or not, and you can't back out once you talk to them. There's also a lot of Railroading involved - even if you collect the last clue that says the suspect did it first, you must have every clue beforehand. Then the last case throws a curveball at the player: after finding the final clue that tells the player they need to arrest Big Boy Caprice, the game doesn't tell you where he is (he's at the Club Ritz) or why Pruneface is there as one of the six suspects in the first place when he doesn't appear at all. At least the graphics and soundtrack are good, but that is what keeps this game from truly being bad.
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Even worse is Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (not to be confused with the Gold Box game simply titled Pool of Radiance, which averts this trope). Aside from horrible balance issues and a thoroughly dull campaign, it has one spectacularly awful bug—if you install the game to anything other than the default filepath then try to uninstall it... kiss the entire contents of your hard drive goodbye!
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Aladdin had two excellent video games on 16-bit platforms. The European-only Nintendo Entertainment System developed by NMS Software was vastly inferior to its 16-bit counterparts. It has limited palette choices, questionable music choices (A Whole New World for the final level?) and the Jafar fight being ridiculously easy.
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Even more insulting is that the first Shrek game was supposed to show off the hardware capabilities of the Xbox, and was actually supposed to be an original IP before being repurposed into a Shrek game. The end result is a wannabe Tech-Demo Game that impressed absolutely nobody, suffering from mediocre gameplay, terrible Camera Screw, and abysmal audio. Its supposed Updated Re-release for the GameCube (named Shrek Extra Large) is even worse, with a graphical downgrade and poor frame rate issues.
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Acclaim subverted this with games such as Turok and Shadow Man, which were genuinely good games — but they were too little, too late to help the company, and while Shadow Man received good critical reception, it failed to be a success in stores and became more of a cult hit, despite getting a sequel.
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While The LEGO Movie Videogame is the opposite of this trope, its sequel, The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame, isn't. Many of its issues are due to being built off of LEGO Worlds, which includes all the flaws from that game (such as the camera system clipping through the terrain in several parts, for example). The real kicker here though, is that the game does a half-assed job at adapting the story. None of the cutscenes are voiced (or recreations of the scenes from the movie!), with only Lucy narrating everything, and the ending is blatantly unfinished. Many of the side quests drag on for too long, the worlds are uninspired, none of the characters have their own unique abilities, and the Nintendo Switch version of the game has a plethora of performance problems. The result is an Obvious Beta that many fans consider to be the worst LEGO game ever released.
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Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, one of the most infamous examples. See Porting Disaster and that other Wiki for details.
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Spellfire, a hastily put together CCG based on Dungeons & Dragons and mostly reused art, created by TSR to cash in on the Magic fad while it lasted. Three years later, TSR went bankrupt and was bought by WOTC, the creators of Magic... but not before being reduced to using photos of TSR employees in extremely crude costumes as card "art."
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They made the PS2 version of Home Alone, which is tenuously related to its source material at best (not even appearing to be set during Christmastime), has weak graphics, and the gameplay it features is very slow and boring.
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While most official (or officially-approved in the case of the games in htfgames.com) Happy Tree Friends games tend to be So Okay, It's Average due to being plain arcade games or just one of those "generic" Flash games, the absolute low point when it comes to the games is probably Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm for the Xbox and PC. Before the smartphone games, it was the only major release (the older mobile games are rather obscure), and it's the only one to be released for a console, at that. Graphically, it stays true to the show... but perhaps too much. The mostly-solid bright colors look unpleasant, the Happy Tree Friends' 3D models look plain (what with the stiff, flat face whose expressions only change when they gets certain injuries), and the blood and gore graphics are very dull and cheap-looking. Gameplay-wise, it's just an uninspired Lemmings clone minus the behavior-changers (you can only freeze, thaw out, scare off, or burn the Happy Tree Friends) and with more Artificial Stupidity. While every level has environment-based gimmicks and traps, they all feel the same. The game's rather short (at around 2 hours for an experienced player), it doesn't make use of all the HTF characters (not counting the episode that comes with the game and the Xbox achievement icons, only 8 out of 20—Lammy and Mr. Pickels didn't exist yet—main characters are in-game) and the special episode it promises is already readily-watchable on YouTube in its entirety.
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In the original version of The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation, "Area 52" was a satire of poor movie tie-in games, specifically being based on Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. The AVGN I & II Deluxe version removes the movie references, however, making the world feel like a generic sci-fi world as a result.
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WWF King of the Ring was released at the end of the NES' life cycle. It has worse visuals, fuzzy DPCM samples, and wrestlers sharing the same moveset. While it does have the nice draw of making your own wrestler, it only goes as far as modifying their attributes.
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Pucca's Kisses Game for the WiiWare service attemps to mix Auto-Runner with Point and click adventure and does it very poorly.
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Its GBA sister game, Tipton Caper, doesn't fare much better. It's a dull clone of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap with tedious and simple puzzles, lousy stealth segments, and movement speed so painfully slow you'd swear the twins themselves are just as bored as you are.
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Paperinik New Adventures is regarded as one of the best comics ever created in Italy and one of the best Disney comics in general. The videogame based on it, however? They cut all the 30+ years of history the character has, only introduced a handful of the beloved "new" characters, and made repetitive stages and boring boss battles. It's a shame that this is what most people outside of Europe think about when they think "Paperinik".
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) is a game for the NES, loosely based on the book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Featuring mangled controls, Fake Difficulty everywhere (the mad bombers can easily take your health away in one bomb if you're right in the bomb's way and Jekyll moves really slow), Everything Trying to Kill You including cats, dogs, birds, etc. Hyde's levels aren't much better. You have to press Up+B to shoot a fireball, which isn't so bad...but sometimes it only works when it wants to. The Hyde levels are technically "timed" in a sense if you catch up to where Dr. Jekyll went insane, you'd instantly get a Game Over (but at least you get continues). Furthermore, the American version inexplicably removed two levels that were in the Japanese version and repeated two levels to compensate. The Angry Video Game Nerd considers this the worst game he's played that involves actual gameplay.
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Bébé's Kids isn't a great movie to begin with, but its SNES licensed game, developed by Radical Entertainment, is one of the worst to be found on that system. Wretched controls, hideous graphics, dull music, unintelligent yet tough enemies, a two-minute timer... and that's just the first level. It doesn't get better from there.
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The Make My Video quartet (C+C Music Factory, INXS, Kriss Kross, and Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch) are often considered the worst games ever put out for the Sega CD, and some of the worst Interactive Movie games on top of that. Gameplay, such as you can even call it that, amounts to arranging clips of poorly compressed and grainy video for three songs per artist, with no reward outside of sitting through your creation.
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Sneak King plays much like a kid-friendly version of Manhunt or Assassin's Creed. Think about that for a second.
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The Dark Half, a point and click adventure game based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. The game featured confusing puzzles and uninspired visuals, earning a mostly negative reception from critics.
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Chicken Little wasn't a great movie to begin with, but while many would tell you that its own licensed game belongs on the other page, the same unfortunately cannot be said for Chicken Little: Ace In Action. For its merit, it features voice talent from Adam West and was developed by Avalanche Software, but the gameplay is extremely basic and essentially amounts to a handful of Minigames strung together, has graphics that feel rather unsettling especially during cutscenes and the entire story is an Excuse Plot within an Excuse Plot. Put them together and you got yourself a mediocre game.
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The PS2 and GameCube iteration was developed by the same studio as SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman. It's a 3D platformer with a fixed camera angle, poor graphics (with one of the worst-looking models of Jimmy ever made), horrendous controls that can lead to cheap deaths, plenty of glitches, only six levels consisting of the same thing over and over again, a very poor grasp of the source material, and absolutely terrible level design; it's clear no part of the game was designed around the camera system, or even the basic controls. In one part of the game, you need to jump up from a ledge to a higher platform, a simple task that any platform game will have plenty of—only nine times out of ten, Jimmy can't jump high enough to consistently reach it. Other parts of the game position the camera in such a way that it hides Bottomless Pits by making platforms seem connected until it's too late.
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Games based directly on the Transformers toys:
The Transformers for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum back in the mid-1980s, published by Ocean Software. Memorable incidents include Autobots dying from a fall of any distance, Autobots dying from landing on a slope after flying, Autobots dying from not being pixel-perfectly positioned when switching characters, Autobots dying from the bizarre collision detection, Autobots dying for no apparent reason, Autobots dying... perhaps the game was designed by Decepticons? Except for the fact that the Decepticons are even MORE fragile, as the game inverts the typical 'touch me and you die' game mechanics — any Autobot who is flying or in vehicle mode will instantly kill any Decepticon by ramming them. This means that Bumblebee, who has ridiculous amounts of shields, is a death machine in car form.
According to this interview, even the development team thought this particular Transformers game was awful.
Transformers: Convoy no Nazo was created to tease the death of Optimus Prime in between the second and third seasons of The Transformers, the cause of which had not been revealed yet in Japan due to the movie's delay. Predictably, it's lazy, rushed, and hardly playable thanks to having ludicrous amounts of Fake Difficulty — Ultra Magnus can take only a single hit before dying. Collecting all seven RODIMUS letters will let you replay the game as Rodimus Prime, who has a different vehicle mode sprite, but is budget-savingly a Palette Swap of Ultra Magnus in-game and controls identically. Struggle through the same tedious procession of flat, enemy-filled stages twice, and the game has an embarrassing A Winner Is You ending to reward you for your efforts.
Somehow, the people at Takara thought the game deserved a sequel in the form of Transformers: ★Headmasters. Despite numerous improvements (can take more than one hit before you die, save feature, more than two characters), it's still as bad as Mystery of Convoy and is riddled with errors. All but one of the playable characters share a sprite, the one who doesn't is depicted as the wrong character, etc.
While Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron are well-regarded by critics and fans alike, the sequel Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark (doubling as a crossover with the live-action movies) fares much worse, suffering from poor optimization, excessive amounts of recycled assets, monotonous gameplay, and a nigh-incomprehensible story plagued by Continuity Snarls for both continuities.
Transformers has a weak trading card game primarily based on the live-action movies. It's a "3D Battle-Card Game" that certainly has its flaws: characters are represented as punch-out buildable cards that can either be built as vehicles/animals or out-of-proportion, poorly rendered robots (here's Optimus, for those interested◊), and the game can easily be played without the card models. Only two sets were released.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

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type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 Play It Bogart (Web Video) / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 Rerez (Web Video) / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 Ross's Game Dungeon (Web Video) / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 SuperMarioLogan (Web Video) / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 Yung Junko (Web Video) / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 Dr. Brinner: Ghost Psychiatrist (Webcomic) / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games
 F is for Family / int_1c0718c5
type
The Problem with Licensed Games