The Problem with Licensed Games: Difference between revisions
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|'''Josh "Livestock" Boruff''', ''[[Something Awful]]''}}
'''The
There are two ways to sell video games: Quality of game, and reputation of name. Most video games that sell fall into at least one of the two categories. Game developers could take some time to develop an original property made with care for the end product and the idea of developing a brand new franchise.
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* ''[[The Simpsons]]'' has had quite a few great games; in fact, ''[[The Simpsons Arcade]]'' game is often regarded as a contender for "Best Licensed Game of All Time". Unfortunately, the franchise has also had quite a few stinkers:
** ''Bart vs. the Space Mutants'' and ''The Simpsons: Bart vs. The World'' were [[Nintendo Hard]] platformers with annoying controls that lead to a lot of [[Fake Difficulty]] and mediocre graphics. To spare explanation, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKnl0CvfeLs check out the Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the games.]
** ''The Simpsons Wrestling'', for [[Playstation]];
** ''[[Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly]]'' for [[Game Boy]]. The title of this game might suggest the
* The NES game based off ''[[Terminator|The Terminator]]'' deserves a more detailed description, awful sound, stiff controls, and ugly graphics. The first level is the ONLY level you have a gun and grenades (Unlike, well, EVERY other version.), as soon as you get to the past you have nothing but your fists (you can kick too, but whats the point?).
** The SNES ''Terminator'' game could use some mention too, the levels are brutally long (the 2nd level is INSANE) Sound Effects tend to drown out all two of the music tracks in the game, and it was just [[Nintendo Hard|cruelly difficult]].
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* One game that many people don't realize was intended to be a licensed game was [[Acclaim]]'s ''[[Warlock (film)|Warlock]]'', created for the SNES and Genesis two years after the second movie of the same title was released. It included gems like bad collision detection, enemies that would spawn with no warning and had little to no pattern to them, [[Not the Fall That Kills You|a mechanic that kills you if you fall from a height that's anywhere higher than the height of the playable character]], wonky player movements (like the protagonist ''crouching automatically when firing forward''), and having only a single life to get through the game unless you die with a ''specific item in your inventory'' (although there ''was'' a password system, thankfully) meant the game was particularly putrid. Its only saving grace was an [[Good Bad Bugs|item use exploit]] that effectively made you invincible and harmful to the touch during the item's effect.
** One SNES magazine writer said that he was worried about his ability to give an objective review of the game, as star Julian Sands was his cousin. Then he started playing the game, and was relieved to find that it was ''so bad'' he could tear into it mercilessly.
* The 16-bit version of ''[[Wayne's World]]'' is possibly one of the most loathed, least playable 16-bit games ever. Bad collision detection, hideous sprites and atrociously digitized voices (especially in the Sega version) are just part of the problem with this. Mainly considered [[Snark Bait|only worthwhile to mock]]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20100102101013/http://sega-16.com/review_page.php?id=966&title=Wayne
* The NES ''[[Where's Waldo]]'' game (released by [[Acclaim]] in 1992), owing to the severe graphical limitations of the system, was barely playable (as all the people in the crowds are identical stick figures) and has none of the visual fun that made the books memorable.
* ''[[
== Fifth Generation (1995-2000) ==
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** The GBC game is pretty terrible, though the sound is certainly better than the others. The crowning achievement is the fully implemented final level is [[Dummied Out]], accessible with a password or hacking but not natural play, so the game ends abruptly.
* ''Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge''. As if being based on the abysmal second ''[[Pumpkinhead]]'' movie wasn't bad enough, developer BAP Interactive thought it was a brilliant idea to set the game in a metaphysical netherworld completely unrelated to the movies, where you were forced to wander through repetitive corridors and view clips from the movie in order to obtain items, and endure pointless crystal collecting segments ''every time you killed an enemy''. Even something as mundane as replenishing health and ammo was needlessly convoluted. And worst of all, you could be punished for taking items you weren't supposed to take with you ''[[Bag of Spilling|by having your entire inventory cleared out]]'' without ever knowing which item it was you shouldn't have brought along. [[The Spoony Experiment|Spoony's]] grilling of this piece of shit was long overdue.
* It's not that the developers of ''[[Jurassic Park]]: Trespasser'' didn't [https://web.archive.org/web/20200328031450/http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Trespasser/ try]. In fact, the game had numerous innovative aspects going for itself (real-time physics, procedurally generated animations, an experimental no heads-up-display approach where players had to ''look down at a tattoo on the player character's breast to see their health'' and the play character ''counts the number of bullets in her weapon aloud'', artificially intelligent dinosaurs) and was a genuinely ambitious project [http://www.vimeo.com/789247 that was to leave its mark on the industry for years]... but [[Executive Meddling|the publishers wanted the game to come out on time]], and the game was [[Vaporware|already infamous for numerous delays]], so many of its supposedly defining features were either severely cut down or left completely unfinished. The game was heavily panned upon its release for its [[Obvious Beta|numerous glitches]] and its impossibly steep system requirements (owing to its huge outdoor environments, which was completely uncalled for at the time), and by the time the game was patched and most users' computers were finally good enough to run the game fluidly, the damage had already been done and the game was quickly forgotten after many a gamer's focus shifted to the fantastic ''[[Half Life]]'' and the phenomenally awful ''[[Daikatana]]'', and in the end the game's attempt at a groundbreaking physics engine was a tremendous inspiration during the development of ''Half-Life 2''.
** As an interesting note, it seems that the game received a spiritual successor about seven years later in the form of the below-mentioned ''[[Peter Jackson]]'s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie'', a HUD-less first-person shooter based on a major film by a big-name director where the player uses guns and other environmental objects to kill dinosaurs on a mysterious island. The only difference is that the latter game turned out to be genuinely good.
* ''KISS Pinball'' for the PC and [[PlayStation]] consisted of two pinball boards which were utterly undistinguished aside from the graphical styling and a few voice clips. The soundtrack was made of generic rock riffs and contained no [[KISS]] songs. The [[PlayStation]] version also suffered from nauseous camera panning.
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** The most egregious problem with this particular licensed game is that they had a cheap, easy method to make a decent game. Take ''Street Fighter II'', change the graphics, release. Instead the developers seemed [[Genre Blindness|Genre Blind]] and tried to develop a brand new fighting system, only to be foiled by the limited development time and budget they should have expected had they been more [[Genre Savvy]].
* The infamous ''[[Superman 64|Superman]]'' game for the N64, based on [[Superman: The Animated Series|the animated series]], is another licensed game that's a contender for Worst. Game. Ever. It featured clumsy controls, mediocre graphics, and a horrendously dull plot, where [[Lex Luthor]]'s diabolical scheme was to trap Superman in a virtual world... and literally make him [[Pass Through the Rings|jump (or fly, rather) through hoops]].
* There was a video game based on the movie ''White Men Can't Jump''. Not only did it come out four years after the movie, but it was based on the [[Atari Jaguar]] system. By this time, Atari was losing in the console war, and in less than a year, they discontinued the Jaguar. The game itself was a shameless attempt to cash in on the name of [[White Men Can't Jump|a popular movie]], and is just two-on-two basketball with [[In Name Only|nothing to do with the movie at all]]. The controls are bad, the graphics are bad, and the dialogue is nothing but one cliche after another. Even if you like video basketball, this was a game to avoid.
* The ''Starship Troopers'' MMO had space battles instead of marine-bug battles. This was because it was actually just a version of the Silent Death computer game (also developed by Mythic) with different graphics. In spite of the cost-cutting, it still came out a year after the movie.
* ''[[The Powerpuff Girls]] had a few bad games in this era:
** In 2000, [[BAM! Entertainment]] got the idea to put out three games for [[Game Boy Color]], one for each Girl. Kind of the same idea as [[Pokemon]]. The results, well….
*** The first game, (
*** The second game - (
*** Very few reviews exist for the third game, ''[[The Powerpuff Girls: Battle HIM!]]'' (which as the title implies, has Bubbles go up against HIM) possibly because nobody wanted to play it after playing the first two. Any masochist who ''does'' will feel the urge to throw their Game Boy Color away. Bubbles is a lot stronger and faster than Blossom or Buttercup was in the previous games, but the controls are still bad. This game also has bad level design and [[Trial and Error Gameplay]]; you never know whether the pit
*** In the end, these three games were pretty much three versions of the same game, and all were bad. More than likely it was a shameless cash grab done to exploit a popular series.
** ''[[The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Straction]]''. This game was released in
*** Now, if
* As mentioned above, BAM! also released a ''[[
* ''[[Addams Family Values (video game)|Addams Family Values]]'', released in 1995 for SNES. Slightly better than ''Fester's Quest'', but as this was a direct movie tie-in, and like most such games, was pretty bad. Moby Games described this as "an action-adventure game with slight RPG elements". By "slight', that basically meant Fester (the protagonist) gained hp as he leveled up, but not much else. Unlike Fester's Quest, the game had a lot of humor that was indeed loyal to the franchise, but the graphics were bad, the game mechanics were almost broken, and the gameplay was just dull, consisting mostly of Fester going from point A to point B, getting an item, and back to point A. The save points were the worst part, requiring players to write down a ridiculously long passcode before turning the game off in order to save progress.
== Sixth Generation (2001-05) ==
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* The ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' game ''Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor'' had, aside from horrible balance issues and a thoroughly dull campaign, one [[Game Breaking Bug|spectacularly awful bug]]—if you installed the game to anything other than the default filepath then tried to ''uninstall'' it... kiss the entire contents of your hard drive goodbye!
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings|The Fellowship Of The Ring]]'' for the GBA (licensed from the book, not the movie) was a tedious [[RPG]] riddled with bugs, some of them [[Game Breaking Bug|game-breaking]].
* There was a particularly crappy video game adaptation of ''[[Fight Club (film)|Fight Club]]'', released in 2004. Perhaps worse is that there are people who actually believe [[Older Than They Think|the movie was based off of the video game]].
** The game has absolutely no merits of its own that would make it stand out if it ''
** The main difference is that you're meant to win in the game. And the game rewards you for it. The game based on a nihilistic view of the human race and the human success instinct REWARDS YOU FOR WINNING. So, that's [[Misaimed Fandom]], ''and'' the game is a blatant attempt at taking commercial advantage from a film that was deeply critical of the consumerist culture. It even manages to make a serious continuity error in one cutscene by making a scene showing {{spoiler|Tyler and the narrator as different characters}}, implying the developers didn't even watch the movie.
** Notably, it also includes [[Limp Bizkit|Fred Durst]] as a [[Guest Fighter|playable character]]. Whether the game is cursed further by his presence or somewhat [[Catharsis Factor|redeemed by the ability to break all his limbs]] is up to the player.
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** The one good thing it had going for it was that the entire voice cast of the actual show was onboard. But even that is [[Fridge Horror|kind of depressing]] if you stop to think about it too much.
* Not even foreign films are safe from bad video game adaptations. The PC game ''Torrente'' (based on the Spanish cop movie spoof ''Torrente: The Stupid Arm of the Law'') is a mediocre [[Third-Person Shooter]] whose only unique point is that the protagonist is a fat, bald, dimwitted sluggard.
* While most of [[THQ]]'s ''wrestling'' games based on [[World Wrestling Entertainment|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|beat em' up]] panned for "[[Artificial Stupidity|idiot AI]]" among other things. Then there was ''Crush Hour'' for the [[PlayStation 2]] and [[Xbox]], which was essentially a poor man's ''[[Twisted Metal]]'' whose only redeeming feature was the [[Narm]]tastic commentary provided by [[Jim Ross]] ("TWISTY ROCKETS!"). Fortunately, THQ learned their lesson and stuck to ''wrestling'' games with the WWE license, which is what ''wrestling'' fans usually want when they hear about an upcoming game based on their favorite ''wrestling'' company anyway.
** Well at least they tried to for nine years. 2012 will see the debut of ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BssF6scsfSE WWE Brawl]'', which will be a pure beat em up game ''without'' a wrestling ring.
* ''[[Yu Yu Hakusho]]: Spirit Detective'' for the GBA was abysmally boring in addition to sporting graphics that made the characters only distinguishable by their hair and outfits.
* ''[[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 [[Uncanny Valley]] like the film. The gameplay features various [[Unexpected Genre Change]]s, 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.
* How in the world could someone have messed up a ''[[Samurai Jack]]'' video game? With a cartoon that has such an awesome hero with equally-awesome enemies and settings, a video game adaptation should have been easy, but ''[[Samurai Jack: The Shadow of Aku]]'' (released in 2004 for [[Playstation|Playstation 2]] and [[GameCube]]) was anything but. Mary Jane Irwin of [[IGN]] criticized the game for its annoying combat system, "uninteresting" story, and [[It's Easy, So It Sucks| lack of any real challenge]]. The visuals were the worst part; her review noting that "Everything is incredibly angular and the only way to describe it is awful. It's just sad that in no way was the show's incredible presentation translated into the videogame." [[GameSpot]]'s Alex Navarro called it "utterly forgettable" and said, "its lack of depth, style, or technical polish essentially ruins whatever chance it ever could have had to appeal to anyone outside of the most diehard of Samurai Jack fans". Possibly the only good part was the score, but all-in-all, Jack's video game debut was a failure.
* ''[[The Powerpuff Girls: Relish Rampage]]'' At least ''Chemical X-Straction'' was no worse than other stuff released for those systems in
* BAM! did no better with ''[[Dexter's Laboratory]]'' tie ins on the ''[[Game Boy Advance]]'':
** ''[[
** Finally, there was ''[[Dexter's Laboratory: Chess Challenge]]'', which was kind of a ''
== Seventh Generation (2006-Present) ==
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* ''[[Doctor Who]]: Return to Earth'' by Asylum Entertainment on the Wii. The gameplay consists, for 90% of the game, of shooting crystals at '''floating smiley faces''' with the Sonic Screwdriver (which, on top of being completely nonsensical for ''Doctor Who'', is even more bizarre than the [[Out of Character]] Amiga platformer ''Dalek Attack'') and shoddy stealth while dealing with an [[Camera Screw|uncooperative camera]] and severe framerate lag on some occasions, the graphics look like they came from an upscaled PlayStation One game with special effects that make the classic series look like modern Summer blockbusters and a decent dosing of [[Uncanny Valley]] animations, the plot's an incoherent excuse to have Cybermen ''and'' Daleks in the same story, [[Artificial Stupidity|reducing their in-game intelligences to herp-derping, walls-staring levels]] in the process, the level designs involve tedious backtracking to fill up on crystals and (in the endgame) messy masses of floating platforms with reckless disregard for in-universe sense and the mandatory ball maze minigames are frustating enough to make you want to toss your Wiimote. The only positives are the Murray Gold soundtrack and the Sonic Screwdriver Wiimote that was released alongside it. The kicker? Nintendo reportedly paid [[The BBC]] £10,000,000 for exclusive ''Doctor Who'' games, and yet the '''free''' <ref>(if you live in the UK, that is)</ref> ''Adventure Games'' have far better production values. As the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK [https://web.archive.org/web/20141007234959/http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/21460/reviews/doctor-who-wii-game-review-review/ put it], Asylum are "people who hate games, sci-fi, and everything decent about humanity". Ouch.
** The [[Nintendo DS]] game ''Evacuation Earth'', released at the same time as ''Return to Earth'', wasn't nearly as badly received...although few considered it to be anything better than [[So Okay It's Average]].
* The [[Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (video game)|adaptation of ''
* The ''[[Eragon (video game)|Eragon]]'' video game was somewhat bad, though the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwOJZCSn5rk soundtrack] is ''[[Crowning Music of Awesome|amazing]]''. Not surprisingly, the music was also the only half-decent thing about the movie.
** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=finUoxop0Pg The Harry Potter games have this as well.]
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** ''[[Looney Tunes]]: Cartoon Conductor'' was a boring music game for the DS with little to no replayability or fun.
* ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]'''s game (by [[Ubisoft]]) is visually amazing, but lacking in many of the final details of the film, likely due to being released before it. Some of these are minor things, while others are...not. It's by no means the very worst as licensed games go, but still has a storyline that both makes no sense and in places openly contradicts canon, suffers from some very bad voice acting and mistakes with the Na'vi language, as well as inexplicably low-quality models and textures for the Na'vi which really stand out against the rest.
* There was a cheap movie cash-in DS game based on ''[[Harry Potter and
* Mostly averted with the main ''[[FIFA Soccer]]'' games but the [[World Cup]] and [[European Championship]] games tend to suffer from this up until the ''Euro 2008'' game.
* The ''[[NCIS]]'' video game was very poor and described as "a point and click adventure without the venture".
* Usually, the ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' franchise is a great crossover adapting many [[Humongous Mecha]] series. But the ball was dropped '''hard''' for ''[[Super Robot Wars K]]''. Between flaws like the [[Scrappy Mechanic|malfunctioning]] Partner Battle system, [[Plot Hole|poor story]][[Cosmic Deadline|writing]] and a main character that [[The Scrappy|fans hardly like]], it's no wonder that this game is considered the worst entry.
* ''[[Napoleon Dynamite|Napoleon Dynamite: The Game]]''. With most of the games on this page, you can at least understand ''why'' they were made, most of them being developed to cash in on some movie or TV show that was popular at the time. In this case, it’s hard to imagine such logic being behind this game’s creation. This is just a bunch of mini-games with characters from the famous [[Cult Classic]], and has very little of the humor of the source material. One review, from GameSpot, called it "irrelevant", "a poor effort", and not "even halfway amusing" giving it a score of 4.0/10.
== Specific Companies ==
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