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.
So many good ones already listed I’ll add a unique one.
Street Fighter: The Movie
It was a game, based on the movie, based on the original games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NES, Back to the future. That was a video game rental that wasted a whole weekend but at least it was just a rental.
Ghostbusters on NES.
I was a kid that inherited an NES from a family member, so they already had a ton of good games. Double Dribble, Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island. A lot of hits.
But there were also a bunch of cool games, or so I thought. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That looks cool. Ah, this is kinda advanced for a kid. It must be a me problem. Well, let’s check out this Ghostbusters game.
That’s when I realized that games could be dogshit. The whole game’s music is a 30-second loop. The gameplay doesn’t even make sense, and to this day I have not tried to learn it. Nay, I refuse to.
I felt so vindicated when I found the AVGN as I got older.
Good call on this one. Ghostbusters was such a shitty game.
and this is all you get for beating it:
There’s certainly dogshit nowadays, but I don’t think modern gamers understand that NES games set the price standard that is just now changing. A $50 game, I believe, is around $180 adjusted for inflation. You buy Forspoken, you get your refund, and then you buy Halo on sale for $4 instead. You buy Ghostbusters, and that’s your game. That’s the game you have. Play it, or don’t.
Thank goodness for rentals.
Yeah, a single NES game was tough for a kid to save up for. I was usually able to do various chores around the neighborhood and be able to buy a game every few months. I distinctly remember that Zelda II was $52 and Metal Gear was $48 and I earned the money myself as a little kid. Those two games specifically were worth the effort. I’d have been pissed if I spent that hard earned money on Ghostbusters.
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
Blues brothers.
Charlies Angels on the Gamecube. I worked at a blockbuster at the time and just used it as a free rental as I was curious. god damn it was by far the worst game I had ever played.
I haven’t played it, but man, that screams “bad game”.
I am going to try something different.
Godfather, from the pantheon of one of the greatest movies ever, to one of the greatest forgotten GTA clones, one of the worst game adaptations of a movie…well, relatively.
Chronicles of Riddick and Scarface are all abandonware now, those are good games being…vanished.
Madagascar on Nintendo Game Cube.
Back to the Future on Atari
Honestly, I think I lucked out with movie licensed games. Spiderman, Star Wars, X-men origins wolverine, I’m struggling to think of a bad one that I’ve played outside of displays in stores.
Okay, I looked it up to make sure there was a movie for this and easily the worst one I’ve played is Bionicle. I literally beat it the night I got it and was so disappointed. If it wasn’t so short, it could’ve been pretty good.
it’s still crazy to me how good Spider-Man 2 was back in the day. because of that and the original GoldenEye, I have forgotten any bad adaptations as well.
Home Alone for the Game Boy. It was just a generic jump and run. It was just super boring.
sorry. not an answer. your question though just made me think about movie and game adaptations because before the majority was movie to game but I kinda think now game to movied dominates.
