The Problem With Licensed Games / Live-Action Films

Taking the license of a Live-Action movie and adapting it to a game has historically been an easy way to earn extra revenue for game devs through brand recognition alone, it's also where a huge number of quickly produced cash-ins have reared their ugly heads.

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• The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland had a game for the Game Boy Color, developed by Bonsai Interactive and published by NewKidCo. Although the game is rated E for Everyone rather than eC for Early Childhood as one might expect, the game is still very easy, even on the Hard difficulty (except for Huxley's Chopper), and to accompany with the game's low difficulty, it is also only eight levels long, and skilled players will beat each level in less than a minute. Your reward for beating the game is a single screen that says "Congratulations! Elmo and his blanket are together! Yeah!"
• Alien games:
  • The NES adaptation of Alien³ comes this close to averting this trope - even more surprising considering it was published by notorious schlock studio LJN. It has great music, decent graphics, and is loyal enough to the source material by NES standards that it could have been great... had they not swapped the jump and shoot controls (B jumps) and given you a ridiculously low time limit to beat each stage. The SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive (which the NES game is a stripped-down version of) releases are examples of No Problem with Licensed Games.
  • Aliens: Colonial Marines has been panned by the vast majority of critics and a large amount of players as well, with complaints about graphical errors, terrible AI, a lack of genuine tension, and unlikable characters. The dev team has been trying to make amends with patches to fix the graphics errors and AI, and bring the game closer to what it was supposed to be judging from the trailers. What's particularly odd is that Aliens had been a massive influence on first person shooters for well over a decade; the creators of Colonial Marines could have just copied the original's imitators and been well-received. Many years later, it was discovered that the godawful enemy AI —one of the biggest sticking points in critical reviews— had been the fault of a single typo in the game's code (PROTIP: "tether" is spelled without an A).
• There's an Army of Darkness card game. There was something seriously wrong with it, as it was way too easy to win without really doing anything. It doesn't help that the instructions are written the way Ash talks.
• 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.
• Back to the Future games infamously have a rotten track record, with nearly every attempt being a dud:
  • Back to the Future (1989) for the NES was for most of its stages a Vertical Scrolling Shooter with Marty as a One-Hit-Point Wonder who races against a time limit down the streets of Hill Valley on foot and a hard-to-control skateboard and collects clocks while avoiding or throwing bowling balls at swarms of bees, hula-hoop girls and people walking back and forth holding invisible sheets of glass. The music in these stages, a practically unrecognizable remix of "The Power of Love", is as repetitious and awful as the gameplay. The three indoor stages don't provide much relief, the first being a disgustingly Nintendo Hard shooter where Marty must hold Lou's Café against an onslaught of 99 merciless bullies. Perhaps the best thing to be said about this game is that its Excuse Plot follows the movie in very Broad Strokes.
  • Its sequel, Back to the Future Part II & III ^note (yes, into one game; makes sense considering II and III were filmed as one movie) was made by the same company (Beam Software) and released by the same publisher (LJN) and still isn't that good. It has you return a lot of Plot Coupons to their appropriate time period in the second part. The only problem is that Marty is again a One-Hit-Point Wonder. What makes this worse is that you had to play Part II in one sitting. You're bound to run into your clone while returning, which also kills you in one hit. Part III is much shorter and has you do the same, but with fewer Plot Coupons needed to finish the game. The music, at least, was pretty good, although it was often drowned out by the obnoxious sound effects.
  • Even the pinball game couldn't avoid this trope — instead of doing anything interesting with time travel, time paradoxes, hoverboards, or getting the DeLorean up to 88 MPH, Data East Pinball slapped BTTF artwork on a generic pinball table loaded with Spelling Bonuses, threw in a few songs from Huey Lewis and the News and ZZ Top, then cashed the checks. No wonder Michael J. Fox refused to license his likeness for the game.
• Batman:
  • Batman Begins is far better than most games on here and also had some very innovative and interesting ideas for a Licensed Game, primarily using fear as an element and a great emphasis on stealth, with obvious influence taken from both Metal Gear and Splinter Cell. Unfortunately the execution did not quite hit the mark and it is generally seen as an average game. The biggest problem is that the game constantly held the player's hand, intentionally leading them on the correct path to sneak by an enemy, use something to scare them, and then beat the startled enemy up. It'd be understandable if it was done just for the tutorial, but that's what the entire game was like. However, on the upside, the elements from this game did go on to greatly inspire the Batman: Arkham Series, one of the biggest aversions of this trope imaginable.
  • Batman Forever for its various consoles is considered to be one of the worst Batman games ever. The game was developed by Probe Software and published by Acclaim, a company that was mostly known for releasing games of dubious quality. The game had extremely awkward controls, gadgets that didn't work, terrible level design, and having fiendishly Nintendo Hard difficulty due to you having only 5 lives (which gets shared between both players in a 2 player game) and being forced to restart at the beginning of the game if you got a game over. Depending on which console you play the game for, the game may end up being nigh-unplayable.
  • Batman & Robin got a video game adaptation for the PlayStation, which was also published and developed by the same companies as Batman Forever. It managed to be even worse, given how obtuse its objectives are, in which everything boils down to luck on whether certain enemies or bosses spawn or not. It also had undetailed, blurry graphics, and a rather choppy frame rate, particularly when the player is driving the Batmobile. The player also cannot shoot at any civilians or they'll risk losing health as a penalty, which wouldn't be so bad if the roads weren't so narrow and the Batmobile controlled as if it were on ice. There exists a combat mode and a detective mode, in which the latter leaves the player completely defenseless if there are any criminals around. If the player has to fast travel to the Batcave, they'll be penalized as well. You also have a limited amount of time to stop crimes; if Poison Ivy or Mr. Freeze get away, it's an automatic Non-Standard Game Over.
• For the 2012 Battleship movie, they released a tie-in game. You'd expect them to use the classic turn-based format or at least naval combat like the last game to bear the name. Instead, it's a First-Person Shooter in a transparent attempt to ride the "modern military shooter" bandwagon. This wouldn't be so bad if they at least made the gameplay good, but they couldn't even pull that off. The graphics are terrible, the enemy AI is too dumb to pose a challenge, there's only five weapons available to the player, the levels are repetitive, and the story is nonexistent. There are a few naval combat segments, but those are pulled off rather poorly too. The whole thing can be completed in four hours or less. The Wii/DS/3DS version was closer to the original, being a Turn-Based Strategy strictly focused on naval warfare, and was only slightly better for it.

• Beverly Hills Cop:
  • Somehow, the film ended up being turned into a PS2 first-person shooter in 2006. The first warning sign is that the game is on a single CD. Once you start playing the game itself, it quickly becomes apparent how it takes up so little space: For starters, there is no voice-acted dialogue and no music during gameplay. Speaking of gameplay, the first level of the game starts with a forced stealth section where it seems like whether you get seen has nothing to do with being in the line of sight of enemies. Once you get to actual shooting, it doesn't get any better. There are plenty of glitches both with the graphics and programming. To top things off, apparently the developer did not get the rights for Eddie Murphy's likeness or the iconic theme tune, so both are replaced with something that only bears a slight resemblance to the source.
  • The release on PC, Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64 was bashed for being just a bunch of mediocre minigames hastily thrown together. In the case of the PC version, Porting Disaster was added to the mix, offering terrible EGA graphics and music sounding like someone strangling an ice cream truck. Notably, this release came out in 1990, 6 years after the first movie. By then, PCs had better music options from add-ons like the AdLib, Creative Game Blaster, or even the original Sound Blaster. Additionally, VGA graphics cards which allowed for much better graphics were starting to catch on.
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure had a game based on the movies for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was published by LJN and developed by Rocket Science Games, and it was quite frankly, not very good. The game is an overhead adventure game where it is extremely vague and unclear where you are supposed to go next at times. Some NPCs will ask Bill or Ted questions. The player has no indication whether it is the right or wrong answer until they choose it. If you choose the wrong choice in those questions, you go to jail and if you run out of keys for jail, it's Game Over. Because of the depth issues on the map, Bill or Ted can't even jump over fences or any objects. The controls aren't much better, and the camera can't catch up to Bill or Ted at times, making the game a bigger chore than it should be. Even better, some items are found by jumping at certain points of the map, with no indication that you can get it by jumping. The Angry Video Game Nerd took a good look into the game, and commented that it was not only one of the worst NES games that he had ever played, but the single worst game that LJN — a company whose games he has a legendary disdain for — ever produced.
• Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge. As if being based on the abysmal Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings 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. Not helping matters was the fact the game gave no clues on what you were supposed to be doing, which meant that the poor sod who bought this game would end up either blindly experimenting with items if that particular copy came with the manual or aimlessly wandering around in a futile search for an exit if it didn't (and there's a significant chance it didn't if it was bought second-hand). And worst of all, you could be punished for taking items you weren't supposed to take with you by having your entire inventory cleared out without ever knowing which item it was you shouldn't have brought along.
• A variety of games based on Bram Stoker's Dracula were released for various platforms. None of these were particularly good, but the SNES/Sega Genesis version stands out as a disappointment: it's an action platformer with annoying combat mechanics, boring level design, a laughable attempt at presenting a story, and the inexplicable requirement in some levels of contacting an old guy who imagines weapons in thought bubbles. It's remembered more fondly at Traveller's Tales, since it was the first game they developed that sold well; some of their later Licensed Games would set a higher standard.
• The Catwoman (2004) game was so bad that a Warner Bros. executive threatened to impose punishments into all future property licenses such that if the video game didn't get sufficiently positive reviews, the company would have to pay a fine for damaging WB's property. The irony of a WB executive complaining about another studio damaging their property is highlighted when you realize the game under discussion was the tie-in to the execrable Catwoman (2004) movie.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory brought back all the cast but Johnny Depp, yet managed to take all the magic out of the film with empty environments and boring gameplay, particularly the repetitive minigames to rescue the four children who get their just desserts. To quote a review, "It was at this point that we realised we were already drowning in a sea of warm, brown, sticky goo, and that it wasn't chocolate."
• Demolition Man had a fairly ambitious 3DO game that even featured all-new footage of Sylvester Stallone in the menus. Unfortunately, at times the objectives were unclear, the first-person segments were troubled by too similar environments, and the boss fights in the style of a fighting game were simply lame.
• Dennis the Menace (known simply as Dennis in Europe) received a Licensed Game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, and Amiga CD32 by Ocean Software in 1993. The plot of the game is that Switchblade Sam has stolen Mr. Wilson's coin collection and kidnapped Margaret and Joey, so Dennis has to find the missing coins, defeat Sam, and rescue his friends. The objective of each stage is to find four coins, but the stages are very big and the coins are often hidden in obscure places, making it easy to lose track of where you are. The game also has a time limit that doesn't reset when you lose a life, and if time runs out, you lose all your lives. The auto-scrolling levels take five minutes to complete, but can take even longer if you mess up and lose a life (which is very easy to do). In the third Sewer level, the bubbles that you need to jump across to complete the level sometimes don't spawn, requiring you to make blind jumps. As for weapons, the most effective ones are the slingshot and the peashooter, but even then, enemies still take many hits to kill. The most useless weapon, though, is the squirt gun, which can stun enemies, but most of the time, doesn't do anything and it takes a few seconds just to stun an enemy. It doesn't even kill the fire enemies in the Boiler Room level. The Angry Video Game Nerd has reviewed the SNES version, saying it's one of the worst SNES games he ever played.
• Dirty Dancing had a licensed PC game which was released nearly 15 years after the film was made, containing almost no music from the movie, almost no connection to its plot, and gameplay consisting entirely of mostly unplayably buggy minigames, the most functional of which is just a ripoff of Bejeweled. (For those interested, here's the Spoony One's take on the game.)
• Enter the Matrix was a brave but ultimately doomed attempt to make a game that actually tied in with its parent title, in this case The Matrix Reloaded. It had footage shot especially for it during the shoot of The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, and explained several critical plot points in the former film. Unfortunately, this failed for two reasons — firstly, the game just wasn't very good. It wasn't awful by any means, but the imbalanced difficulty and horribly designed game engine made it annoying to play. Secondly, what many viewers felt should have been the big action sequence of Reloaded, namely the power plant takeover, was barely even mentioned in the film because it had been reserved for the game, which pissed off quite a few people and contributed to the impression that Enter the Matrix was just an excuse for The Wachowskis to get even more money out of their fans. The game did at least get some praise for the nifty hacking minigame that was included, but mostly just contributed to the backlash that the franchise was starting to suffer from.
• The Eragon video game felt like a pared down and lame version of the games based on The Lord of the Rings, full of bugs, repetitive gameplay (even if the game is fairly short, being able to get finished in 6 hours), uncooperative camera angles, and jerky character animation, along with a lack of effort in the presentation, which barely presents the film's story. On a positive note, the soundtrack is amazing.

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial:
  • E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 is the Trope Maker, or at least the Trope Codifier. It was produced for no other reason than to quickly cash in on the success of the 1982 movie, and was hurried through production in a matter of weeks (the average 2600 game would have a development time of between five and six months) to be on the shelves for the Christmas shopping season. Its gameplay consists entirely of E.T. falling into pits in order to search for pieces of his space telephone. Although it sold very well, Atari made the mistake of producing more cartridges than systems in existence hoping it would become a system seller — as such, it contributed to Atari's profit losses and (although there were lots of games way worse at the time) made such a contribution to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 that it got a reputation as one of the "worst games in history". More information, or experience the horror yourself.
  • While not as bad as the Atari game, E.T. and the Cosmic Garden for the Game Boy Color and the 2001 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Game Boy Advance weren't that good either. The former is a boring real time game that has you gardening on other planets. It's too easy, very boring, and has awful music. The later game has F.B.I agents who attack E.T. by shaking him in a way that makes it look like he's giving them a blowjob, while E.T. attacks by running blindly at his enemies.

• There was a particularly crappy video game adaptation of Fight Club, released in 2004. The main difference between the game and the movie 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 also includes Fred Durst as a playable character. Whether the game is cursed further by his presence or somewhat redeemed by the ability to break all his limbs is up to the player.
• Decipher released a Massive Multiplayer Crossover Card Game called Fight Klub based on one-on-one fights between famous movie characters. Jigsaw versus Hannibal Lecter, Mr. Blond versus Ash, John Rambo versus RoboCop, Chev Chelios versus Scott McCoy, Tank Girl versus Sil, and more. How could this be anything but awesome? Complicated rules obfuscating simplistic gameplay, online-only distribution, and pyramid-scheme-style enticement bonuses, that's how.
• Ghostbusters games:
  • The NES version of Ghostbusters, which was simultaneously released for the Atari 2600 without any change in gameplay. The stairway segment is easily one of the most tedious moments: the player has to avoid ghosts homing onto them, while they mash buttons to move.
  • Ghostbusters II on the NES was slightly an improvement, but not by much. The sprite graphics don't look very good, and most of the levels are traveling from point A to B. There is also no pause button, meaning players will not have any chance to take a break from their progress. HAL Laboratory published different games based on the movie for the Game Boy and NES that were quite good, despite the latter was only released in Japan and Europe.
  • Atari and Terminal Reality's 2009 revival is considered such a great use of the license that many — including Dan Aykroyd himself — consider it the film series' canonical third movie. Its sequel, 2011's Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime, is much less so, with the most obvious strike against it being the absence of the original Ghostbusters team - leaving the day to be saved by a group of fresh-faced rookies who aren't quite as charming. Also working against Sanctum are its overuse of Cut and Paste Environments, AI partners who do more to harm than help, and the general monotony of gameplay (get trapped in a room, fight a bunch of color-coded ghosts, move on to next room, rinse, repeat).
  • The 2016 reboot was given a video game tie-in long after games based on then-upcoming summer movies were no longer popular with developers, and the reason for the latter shows. Like Sanctum of Slime the gameplay is monotonous, the controls are unresponsive, the levels are far too large, the upgrade system is poorly implemented, and again the characters from the film are replaced with rookies. Surprisingly, it didn't directly have a hand in the demise of its developer FireForge Games, which filed for bankruptcy just three days after the game's release after being embroiled in several prior lawsuits, though it's safe to assume it did nothing to help their situation.
• Gods and Generals (by Stellar Stone, "developers" of the infamous Big Rigs). It was a Civil War-themed FPS based on the 4½ hour long Ted Turner-financed Epic Movie of the same name, riddled with bugs, sloppy gameplay, horribly outdated graphics for the time, and to top it off, terrible AI and more bugs to top it off.
• Grease received a game for the Wii and Nintendo DS that was half Minigame Game and half Rhythm Game. It received poor reviews because of bad graphics and poor controls.
• Harry Potter film-based games:
  • There was a cheap movie cash-in GBA/DS game based on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Aside from the three Triwizard challenges, the other levels ranged from plausible to perplexing. For example, the Yule Ball was represented by a rhythm minigame, and one of the longest levels involved chasing the golden egg through the sewer system for no other reason than because Harry couldn't keep a good grip on it. ^note The egg-chase level also existed in the console versions, but was better received there. The console version is another case, ditching the world design of "Hogwarts as an open world" that was present in the two previous games to a more level-based design, plus Ron and Hermione being unhelpful when controlled by the AI. Up until the release of other games in this list, the Goblet of Fire games were considered the worst of the series. The design based around collecting shields to unlock new levels requiring several runs through the same levels to perform different tasks was not particularly welcomed either.
  • The adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Incredibly unimpressive graphics, horrible Gears of War-like gameplay, no freedom at all during missions and really poor story-telling. Part 2 pushed it one step further by being both underachieving and awfully short.
  • Criticisms were also raised towards the games based on the first (mostly the original for Playstation and PC, deemed mediocre and considered only for kids; the one for the PS2\GC\Xbox had only the issue of basically being a repaint of the well-received Chamber of Secrets to instead tell the story of the previous movie), fifth (in spite of a meticulously created open world Hogwarts, the gameplay was overtly reliant on Fetch Quests where Harry had to do menial tasks for NPCs, plus awkward controls in creating spells by doing wand motions with the analog stick) and sixth (with more time to work as the film got delayed EA only at most fixed some of the more criticized aspects of the fifth, like less fetch quests, better magic controls, and a return of the flying segments, but the gameplay was still fairly repetitive).
  • Harry Potter for Kinect, a collection of motion controlled video games based on important scenes from the movie saga. Think this one has a fighting chance because it wasn't rushed to come out alongside a movie? Think again, it still sucks.
• Highlander had the misfortune to have this done purposely. The developers feared that if the game sold well, they’d go bankrupt from the royalties that had to be paid to the owners of the franchise rights. So they intentionally gave the game clunky controls and bad gameplay. The game released with the animated TV series wasn’t well received either and the attempt at a PlayStation 3 game was cancelled before the game ever launched.
• The Home Alone video game series that THQ published in 1991 and 1992. The first one on the NES is completely awful, thanks to unresponsive controls, and your reward for beating the game in the twenty-minute time limit? The same bad ending you get for losing. Even worse is its sequel, Lost in New York, which ranges from irredeemably terrible (Game Boy and NES) to So Bad, It's Good (Super NES). The NES and Game Boy versions feature terrible play control, below-average graphics, Fake Difficulty, and also its weird assortment of enemies, including a vacuum out to kill Kevin.
  • The game made in 2006 for the PlayStation 2, only released in Europe, and published by infamous shovelware studio Blast! Entertainment. On top of its lackluster gameplay, it's also notable for having no connection to the films whatsoever aside from the brand name — there's a kid alone at home, and he's trying to fend off burglars, and... that's it. No Macaulay Culkin, no Christmas trappings (the game appears to take place during the summer), nothing to suggest anything to do with any films in the series — even the dreaded sequels — aside from the movie's logo being used prominently.
• Indiana Jones has a mixed record with this trope. While most games are decent or outright good, there are some clunkers here and there:
  • There exists the Atari 2600 adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark that required a lot of Guide Dang It! moments with complicated inventory puzzles.
  • Tengen released a port of the arcade version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the Nintendo Entertainment System that was a Porting Disaster. The maps were extremely convoluted to navigate and switching weapons was a complicated affair in a game that is already sluggish to begin with. Jumping can be difficult too because if the player jumps, they could easily fall into a lava pit, with no fault on their own because of the wonky controls.
  • The Ubisoft-published version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was such an example. It was a porting disaster of the Master System version, where the game looked like a Game Boy game (before the actual Game Boy port was released), bosses had way too much health, and a lack of music variety. It has a nasty trap in the final level: if the player chooses the wrong grail, they have to replay the entire game from the beginning.
• Awesome as the Iron Man films are, the 7th generation adaptations of them are shockingly bad. The first game was riddled with poor controls, horrendous graphics, bugs that could force you to restart, bad hit detection, and placed you on maps where there was nowhere you weren't under constant fire from respawning enemies, even though Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. The second game cleaned things up somewhat and threw in War Machine as second player, but it wasn't much better than mediocre. How did they take a game where you fly through the air in an invincible power suit at the speed of sound while blasting terrorists with missiles from ten thousand feet and make it bad???

• James Bond games:
  • For movie-based games, Tomorrow Never Dies inspired a tedious third person shooter and Quantum of Solace an average cover-based first-person shooter which was far more of a Casino Royale (2006) adaptation. The World Is Not Enough was considered good, on the N64 at least (by way of playing a lot like GoldenEye (1997)), but had the problem of not reaching that game's brilliance.
  • 007 Legends. Mediocre gameplay, nonsensical story and idiotic enemy AI among other things led to a long list of bad critical reviews, Eurocom going out of business after 25 years in game development, and Activision dropping the Bond game license.
  • Gottlieb's James Bond 007 pinball machine, partially based on The Spy Who Loved Me. The game ignored almost everything about the films for an unusual timer-based game that required the player to make shots for additional playtime. Players and operators still hated the game, but at least it wasn't the license's fault.
• Jaws has two cases, an NES game that is short (can be finished in an hour...) and horribly repetitive (...mostly spent swimming around harpooning innocent and harmless sea creatures as Level Grinding before facing the shark), and Jaws Unleashed, that for all the potential of a Wide-Open Sandbox where you play as a shark, is plagued by rather atrocious controls and wonky camera interface.
• Ju-on: The Grudge - Haunted House Simulator on the Wii is otherwise divorced from the films, starring a new family being terrorized by the vengeful ghosts of Kayako and her son Toshio, and it manages to have some fairly creepy moments, but everything else is just subpar. Your characters walk slightly faster than a turtle, the gameplay is limited to navigating environments collecting keys to open doors or flashlight batteries to keep pressing on through the instant-death darkness, and the game's touted unique two-player mode is only effective on people completely unfamiliar with the game, since the button-press scare effects never change.
• Jurassic Park games:
  • It's not that the developers of Jurassic Park: Trespasser didn't 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 that was to leave its mark on the industry for years... but the publishers wanted the game to come out on time, and the game was 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 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. ^note It seems that the game received a spiritual successor about seven years later in the form of 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.
  • The problem with Jurassic Park Interactive for the 3DO; it didn't require any discipline to make it. They saw what the film had done and they made it into a collection of bizarre minigames with Loads and Loads of Loading. They didn't get the actors to reprise their roles, so they get new actors who were described in a Giant Bomb video as looking like "the stars of a Jurassic Park porno." They stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as they could, and before they even knew what they had, they patented it, they packaged it, they slapped it on a 3DO disk and now, they're selling it.
  • The PlayStation adaptation of The Lost World: Jurassic Park received praise on two fronts: one, pretty cool dinosaur graphics. Two, it featured one of gaming's earliest original orchestral scores. Everything else was slammed: sloppy, repetitive game play, difficult controls, incredible difficulty of certain levels, and most annoyingly, the fact that, despite having 30 levels, you couldn't ever save.
• King Kong games:
  • While Peter Jackson's King Kong averts this trope on the consoles, the DS one does not. It's a first-person shooter where you can almost go through the entire game without killing anything. Top it with bugs that cause Jack to fall out of the level, bad hit detection, graphics that make the characters look hideous, and the game's short length meaning it can be beaten in less than a few hours. Even the parts where you get to play as King Kong (which is the best-looking part of this game), you have very little involvement in, since it just resorts to spamming the same 2 buttons. The PSP version received a mixed reception for a shorter length and cut-down features compared to the consoles, but was not as panned as the DS version.
  • Skull Island: Rise of Kong released as an extremely buggy and unpolished Obvious Beta, with terrible graphics, bland and confusing set pieces, and gameplay that is dull and repetitive. Many derided its $40 USD price tag, due to both the above factors and the fact it can be easily beaten in less than four hours. Unfavourable comparisons were made between it and Peter Jackson's King Kong, which is, by contrast, considered a strong aversion, and saying it resembles a throwback to 2000s-era tie-in Shovelware.
• Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green was a low-budget FPS that opened with a promising corn field level where the surrounding zombies could only be located by their groans and the sound of them pushing through the corn, and then follows it with bland levels and buggy gameplay that made killing incredibly stupid undead people (when the movie is actually about zombies getting smarter!) very unfun.
• Last Action Hero had its video game adaptation released in 1993. The NES version was easily one of the worst versions. Dull, lifeless graphics, irritating music and Mooks that never stop coming are some of the main problems this game has.
• The Lawnmower Man had two different licensed games, one for the SNES, Sega Genesis (not Sega CD), and Game Boy, the other for DOS and Sega CD. The latter one was an Interactive Movie with extreme cases of both Gameplay Roulette and Fake Difficulty. Also, for no good reason, the limitations of the Genesis color palette (which degraded the quality of the pre-rendered 3D graphics) were present in the DOS version, even though it used the MCGA video mode (167,772,162 colors total, 256 on-screen at once).
• The Mad Max game released on the Nintendo Entertainment System was filled with problems. The driving sections were plagued by strict fuel limits and it wasn't easy to find fuel. The arena segments had combatants who had no problems driving into bottomless pits instead of attacking you. The sound quality was also questionable at best, to the point where PCM samples were hard to hear. Your reward for beating this game was A Winner Is You style ending.
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein had confusing and at times abusingly hard gameplay in a maze-like level layout, with the Monster himself being slightly bipolar: he limps and lurches and yet is able to perform huge jumps!
• Pacific Rim can be described as 2500 tons of awesome. The game based on the movie instead makes giant robots fighting Kaiju mind-numbingly boring and tedious, given the combat is shallow, the controls are highly uncooperative bordering on random, the characters move as though they're wading through molasses, and much of the game's content (including new characters and Jaeger customization) is locked behind paywalls.
• Platoon had an officially licensed game 1987 by Ocean. It was plagued by clunky controls, confusing level design, an unfair lack of continues, and just all around cumbersome gameplay. If they wanted to recreate the feeling of struggling to survive out in the Vietnam jungles, well, they certainly nailed it.
• Rambo: The Video Game: Instead of some Wide-Open Sandbox game, a third person Gears of War clone, or even just a generic lazy as hell first person shooter, it is a $40 rail-shooter on PC and console that can be completed in only two hours with lazily implemented QTE in between the rail-shooter sections. The trailer and Steam previews outright lie by either showing trailer scenes that suggested FPS gameplay or made the game seem larger than it really is. The soundtrack is boring, cheap and repetitive, the perks are laughably pointless and last of all, the final level has a massive Difficulty Spike, probably due to a lack of playtesting, as you will be forced to spend the entire level taking potshots against the enormous storm of lead that's being hurled your way and the "boss" of the level (an attack helicopter) along with everyone else on the screen. All you're armed with is an AK-47 and whatever perks you happened to pick up. If you sat through the rest of this game you'd most likely quit here.
• R.I.P.D., already considered a bad enough movie on its own, got a now-delisted game on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Steam that was merely a generic horde shooter with humdrum gameplay, unremarkable graphics, incompetent AI, and little in the way of plot.
• Titus Software's RoboCop for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. The graphics are bland and distracting, the gameplay is repetitive and slow-paced, and the voice-acting is abysmal (with RoboCop actively taking joy in killing criminals). Lack of variety, long levels, RoboCop's slow movement speed, the ease of dying spontaneously from an errant explosion, weapon sound effects that sound like they were ripped from the internet, and inability to save during a level makes for a painfully boring first-person shooter.
• Rocky generally had mediocre video games, but the Sega Master System game, developed and published by Sega in 1987, falls squarely into this trope. The game is both too difficult and too short, having only three boxers to fight^note Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, and Ivan Drago, and the pre-match training requires a lot of practive beforehand. If you over-qualify, you get hidden moves that make the fights tolerable. However, some of them require constant button mashing to over-qualify and that boils down to luck. This game was notably the first game not on a Nintendo console to be reviewed by The Angry Video Game Nerd.
• The game based on Space Jam was a basketball game that had graphics that resembled a game from the 16-bit era (the game was released for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn), simplistic gameplay and low difficulty, unbalanced characters (Michael Jordan is more powerful than the Monstars), and carnival style minigames thrown in which didn't fit the core game. On a side note, the game was developed by Sculptured Software, who, in addition to NBA Jam Extreme (which the Space Jam game was built off of), developed Looney Tunes B-Ball, which was far better received.
  • The game based on Space Jam: A New Legacy eschewed the basketball elements and story in favor of a generic beat-'em-up with only three playable characters (LeBron, Bugs and Lola).
• Spider-Man film-based games:
  • Spider-Man 3: Swinging from webs and crawling on walls could cause the camera to shift around at nauseating levels. Graphics were bad for the time, with citizens becoming very obvious 2D sprites with no regard for collision detection if they were more than 20 meters away, and didn't look any better up close. Audio could get unbearable at points, as Spider-Man had many catchphrases but repeated them nonstop, and going into underground areas made everything sound like it was recorded inside a steel drum. Citizens also sometimes switched voices when you interacted with them. The story was broken to little bits and the game was artificially lengthened with a billion terrible side-quests and various missions (though the one to "Retrieve the delicious fruit pies" was an amusing Call-Back to the Hostess cake ads). If anything, it also owes its mediocrity to Sequelitis, as the other Spider-Man games before and after are genuinely good. Also, it features Kari Wahlgren as Mary Jane Watson. This should be good right? Wrong. SWING HIGHER! SWING HIGHER!
  • The Amazing Spider-Man 2 could have been a good game, but is held back by far too many glaring flaws to ignore. The game is plagued with bland visuals for its time, an almost completely empty New York City, combat that results in mashing the same button multiple times with no real combos to be found, numerous bugs, a boring story, repetitive side missions, and a Hero/Menace system that had potential, but doesn't work at all like it's supposed to.
• 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.
• Even with a track record as great as Star Wars games tend to have, there's bound to be a few duds just by the sheer number that exist:
  • The Japan-exclusive 1987 Star Wars game by Namco stars Luke Skywalker as a One-Hit-Point Wonder whose in-game sprite has black hair. There are levels requiring precise jumping in between spikes of instant death, and the Nintendo Hardness is aggravated by Luke's lightsaber having poor hit detection. What does not help things is that the floaty jumping physics are aggravated by imprecise platform jumping, meaning you'll frequently miss the intended jump and fall into the many Bottomless Pits. This game's real notoriety, however, is not based on difficulty but because it plays fast and loose with the Star Wars canon. Before leaving Tatooine, there is a Boss Battle against Darth Vader... or rather, a decoy who turns into a giant scorpion after one hit. This sort of thing happens on every level, including several worlds that don't appear in A New Hope, which this game is very loosely based off of. And speaking of worlds, there's also the fact that you'll also have to rescue your allies (who are all on Tatooine when they all meet in the film): Obi-Wan Kenobi, C-3PO, Chewbacca (who's on a random ice planet), and Han Solo (who's being held captive on Yavin IV) - making you realize it's YOU who's flying the Millenium Falcon between worlds!
  • The NES would get another adaptation also based on A New Hope a few years later by Beam Software. It still manages to fall into this trope because of several factors. It is difficult to control Luke Skywalker because he moves around way too quickly. Getting him to stop on a dime is easier said than done. It is still Nintendo Hard because of how dangerous several enemies are throughout the game. Han Solo and Princess Leia are playable, but they only have one life. Obi-Wan can revive them, but he can only do it several times. While the game is more faithful to the source material and the quite good music and graphics for its time are nice draws, it is otherwise a mediocre game.
  • Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi was LucasArts' attempt at doing a Tekken-style fighting game. The game was originally going to be developed by Capcom, the Japanese company behind hit franchises like Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom, but LucasArts instead opted to make it themselves for unknown reasons. LucasArts' lack of experience with fighting games proved to be a huge problem, especially when it came to implementing Game Breaking elements like Force abilities and lightsabers. The end result was a slow, clunky game where characters like Luke and Darth Vader could easily curb stomp everyone else in the cast without much effort. Ironically, Capcom would recycle their unfinished work on the Star Wars fighting game into Star Gladiator, which received better reviews than Masters of Teräs Käsi.
  • The PlayStation and PC adaptation of The Phantom Menace is below average. Excellent audio (which is the common strong point of Star Wars anyway) and fair-looking full 3D graphics aside, the decent level design is doomed by unfitting puzzle/adventure levels tacked on breaking the pace, awkward controls, horrible camera placement, buggy coding, imbalanced weapons, and a seriously flawed dueling mechanic can ruin your experience halfway through.
  • Attack of the Clones on Game Boy Advance is a very phoned-in and poor licensed game. The pre-rendered graphics and animations are smooth and there are 3D flying sections that are impressive for GBA, but the controls are stiff, lightsaber moves are laughably limited and the 2D level design is tepid at best. Most of the game is simply walk from left to right, occasionally jump on a platform, hit enemy with lightsaber until it dies, etc., with nearly every area in the game feeling like a slightly shuffled skin-swap of the area before. Revenge of the Sith on GBA was released a few years later and was far more appealing, well-made and fun to play, giving Attack of the Clones no excuse.
  • The Rogue Squadron games are considered to be among the best Star Wars games out there, but when you try to crop the gameplay to fit on a GBA cart you get 2003's Flight of the Falcon. Whilst certainly an ambitious attempt to give the GBA a flight sim/dogfight game (and to be fair, the music is actually pretty decent) the fact is that the graphics were not only blotchy and pixelated, but they dragged the game's speed to a chugging crawl. Add to that repetitive overly-long levels and poor controls and you end up with a complete mess.
  • Star Wars: Obi-Wan, one of the Xbox's launch titles, told Ben's story before and during The Phantom Menace. Probably helped by production turmoils (it was supposed to be on the PC, a Spiritual Successor to Jedi Knight), the game had a good battle system (with Force powers and using one of the analog sticks to handle the lightsaber) being brought down by bad camera, poor graphics and level design, and repetitive combat.
  • While much of the poor reaction to Kinect Star Wars was likely due to both Microsoft and LucasArts hyping it up as the Killer App for the Kinect, when in fact it was a pretty run-of-the-mill collection of minigames, it ultimately fell down for the same reason as far too many other Kinect games—the erratic and often unresponsive controls. On top of that, the minigames themselves were either okayish but had been done better elsewhere (the space combat and podracing parts), or just too silly to take seriously (the infamous dancing minigame, which ironically enough was probably the one which controlled the best).
  • While Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) is a reasonably polished big-budget game, during its initial release it became one of the most infamous Star Wars games of all time for its horribly unbalanced and luck-based microtransaction and progression system, which makes the game frustrating, unrewarding and borderline unplayable for many people. More importantly, the gameplay was perceived as monotonous due to lack of variety, and the game's much-hyped story mode is frequently seen as lackluster and formulaic in both plot and mechanics. The result, despite very good graphics and sound design, was So Okay, It's Average reception (65/100 on Metacritic) and a moderate under-performance in EA's expected sales. However, the game did later manage to Win Back the Crowd by regularly releasing new modes and characters free of charge and getting rid of the greedy progression system.
• The Street Fighter movie had a particularly bad video game adaptation, which doesn't seem all that out-of-the-ordinary until you realize that the movie was itself an adaptation of the most influential Fighting Game ever made, Street Fighter II. The home version for the PS and Saturn was relatively decent by comparison, but the arcade version was really that bad.
  • 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 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.
    • Indeed, this ended up being Capcom's approach when it came time to port (read: completely revamp) the game for the console release as the console game (subtitled "Real Battle on Film") was built using a modified Super Street Fighter II Turbo engine with digitized sprites of the actors instead of their own art.
  • Alan Noon, the guy primarily responsible for it later came to the Internet, apologized, and left a post-mortem account. Updated link to the story post. To save some time, look for the posts by the user "anoon".
• Terminator games:
  • The NES game based on The Terminator has 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 what's 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 cruelly difficult.
  • There was a PC game of Terminator 2: Judgment Day in early 90s, each level of which was based on an action scene from the film. Some of those scenes don't translate well; for example, the first level consisted entirely of holding off the T-1000 with a shotgun. To make matters worse, there was only one save point per level.
  • The SNES and Genesis versions weren't a significant improvement. They're not offensively terrible, but they are very slowly-paced and loaded with Fake Difficulty from unavoidable attacks and enemies who move faster than you do. The only two things they have going for them is the rather cool main BGM (unfortunately tempered by it being one of the only music tracks in the game), and the fact that the T-800's sprite bears an amusing resemblance to Hank Hill in a biker outfit.
  • The Game Boy version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day was also not that great. Some of the problems included poor graphics, the inability to tell whether an object was part of the background or not, and sluggish frame rate. It was also filled with Nintendo Hard segments, for example the level where you have to re-program the T-800. It is widely considered That One Level, due to the little room for error the player is given. You were given one life and no continues and also have no option to continue the game.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was adapted into a PlayStation 2/Xbox game with underwhelming graphics and two game modes: broken and generic first-person shooting, which doesn't even convey well the film plot; and lame one-on-one fighting, usually against the T-X, that easily enters tedious Button Mashing.
  • Terminator 3: War of the Machines, which in spite of the name is unrelated to the movie, was an attempt at Battlefield 1942 in the future war... only it was not fun to play, or polished at all - among the glitches, GameSpot's video review highlighted the unbelievably bad hit detection; the graphics and sound were also unremarkable. Reviews on Terminator 3: The Redemption, which actually averted the trope for once, noted that the subtitle was probably in regards to how bad the previous two T3 games were.
  • Terminator Salvation. While it has decent graphics, great music, and a decent combat system that feels more than a little familiar, in general it's pretty lousy. Sure, the combat's decent — it's just a shame that the battles are so damned repetitive and generally feature the same two enemies: annoying flying robots, and spider-like robots that require flanking to defeat. To flank them effectively, it's best to have your partner keep their attention while you come around back and finish them. Too bad the AI's fairly terrible, and while the game does have a co-op option, it's not online enabled — so if you don't have anybody to play with and don't have Xbox Live, you're screwed. Oh, and it's very short, but considering how you'll spend those 4-5 hours fighting the same annoying enemies over and over again, that's probably a positive thing. Unsurprisingly, Salvation was one of the factors behind developer GRIN's shutdown...and it was their only game that can be considered a definite flop. ^note The negative reception of the Salvation console game led to Raw Thrills delaying their Terminator: Salvation arcade game until Spring 2010 so they could get it right. And they did- it looks awesome and had much better reception, but it's filled with countless cheap shots.
  • Bethesda Softworks has produced five games based on the Terminator franchise. These are their only games that have bombed. (though one got good reviews)
• The Three Stooges got their own multi-platform video game in the late 80's. It does a fine job of capturing the right tone for a Stooges game and has loads of nods to many of their famous short films and actual voice clips from the guys, but the mini-games that make up its core gameplay have very clunky controls and the difficulty curve is surprisingly tough because of the reaction speed needed to master them. It remained enough of a Cult Classic to get an Updated Re-release for the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation many years later.
  • There was also an arcade game put out by Gottlieb in 1984, which lacked the variety and charm of the later release and had rather bland gameplay.
• The SNES Time Cop game released by Cryo Interactive in 1995 is a sloppy action platformer starring a goofy digitized facsimile of Jean-Claude Van Damme through five stages as he struggles with laggy controls, useless moves, cheap hits, slow and stupid-looking enemies, glitches, and poorly-executed Unexpected Gameplay Changes (the "best" one being a shmup sequence where you control a large submarine that takes up an eighth of the screen). Its only redeeming qualities are that it's broken and inept in a funny way and features a bizarrely catchy soundtrack by David Cage.
• The NES game based on Top Gun was quite boring, with complete lack of music during the stages, out-of-place refueling sections, landing sequences that are hard to pull off even if you know how to do it, and inaccurate portrayal of aerial dogfights. However, the sequel averts this trope by fixing all of these problems.
• 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.
• Total Recall (1990), published by Acclaim and developed by Interplay for the NES, frustrated many players early into the game with a movie theater showing the game's credits and Inescapable Ambushes in alleys by midgets wearing purple jumpsuits. The rest of the game bears more relation to the movie (it includes the X-ray scanner and the subway shootout), but it's mostly a mediocre Beat 'em Up with bad hit detection and a lot of cheap hits.
• Toys: Let The Toy Wars Begin, made for the SNES and Sega Genesis by Absolute Entertainment in 1993 as a tie-in to the Robin Williams film of the same name from the previous year. It's not like the makers of the game had to do much to improve the plot - the film was a goofy story about a toy designer fighting to get back his father's ailing company from the hands of a military general who plans to weaponize children's toys, and it flopped critically and commercially at the box office. The resulting game was a dismal top-down shooter with a whopping four stages, wherein the player commanded a limited amount of toys against an unlimited stream of AI enemies from the opposing general's side. The game was mercilessly panned - GamePro and several other publications blasted the game for many missed opportunities, the lack of a two-player mode, terrible visuals (even by SNES standards) and one of the least-relevant adaptations of a film ever made.
• Transformers film-games:
  • Transformers: The Game (the one of the 2007 live-action movie) wasn't merely bad (a 15-foot robot could get stuck on a broken tree branch), it was inexorably boring. Most of the game involved driving to your next destination within a time limit with a car that handles like an ice cream van in an Alaskan winter without snow-chains. Oh, and kicking things until they explode. And the graphics were pretty mediocre, too.
  • The plot for the game was bad beyond belief as well, as hilariously noted by (who else?) TFWiki.net in their article here:
    It can be surmised that the writers for the game had not seen the script for the movie. Or been allowed on the same continent as it.
  • The video game based on Dark of the Moon (which is more or less a prequel/sidestory of the movie) was developed by the same folks behind the well-received Transformers: War for Cybertron, and yet it got hit with some less than average review scores. The main issue? On the Wii and 3DS at least, it's a Transformers game where you don't transform.
• One game that many people don't realize was intended to be a licensed game was Acclaim's Warlock, created for the SNES and Sega 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, 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 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.
• Wayne's World games:
  • Wayne's World (Gray Matter) is one of the most loathed, least playable 16-bit games ever. Bad collision detection, hideous sprites and atrociously digitized voices are just part of the problem with this. Mainly considered only worthwhile to mock. Read this review for more details.
  • Its NES counterpart, Wayne's World (Radical Entertainment), fared no better. It was developed by the oft-mentioned Radical Entertainment, who also developed the first Terminator and Rocky and Bullwinkle video games for the NES a year before. Released in November of 1993, it even uses the same engine as both games. You play as either Wayne or Garth (depending on what level you're on). Depending on who you're playing as, your only attacks are either a laser gun (Garth) or a clunky, unreliable kick (Wayne). The game suffers from repetitive music, bland graphics and repetitive backgrounds and unimaginative enemies. Like both games, your only reward is A Winner Is You screen. Excellent!
• One of the final games for the Atari Jaguar was an arcade style basketball game based on the film White Men Can't Jump. Not only did it come out more than three years after the movie (which was already a pretty strange choice for a licensed video game to begin with), it was also a total trainwreck of a game. White Men Can't Jump suffered from poor graphics, a ridiculous set of rules, a wonky camera, none of the movie's characters (meaning the license is completely pointless), and poor ball physics.
• The Super NES Platform Game of the famous 1939 The Wizard of Oz film adaptation had a lot of problems. Released in November 1993, the game features clunky controls and doesn't follow the movie at all. Absurdly, the game's Attract Mode features Dorothy falling into a Bottomless Pit. It is also infamous for Fake Difficulty from blind falls, a severe case of Hitbox Dissonance from both enemies and platforms alike, and no Mercy Invincibility. Worse, there are separate lives for each of the characters. The river level has you cross it over with some of the worst jump precisions in video games. Either you'll make the jump, or you will somehow fall into the river and drown despite clearly landing on the platform. The Angry Video Game Nerd lists the game's overwhelmingly horrible bugs and design flaws in his review of the game.
• Zathura had a video game adaptation for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox that suffered uninspired stage design, slow and sluggish gameplay, and a lot of Fake Difficulty. Of the two versions, the PS2 iteration is the lesser, with very bad frame rate issues that may give you an eye strain. The Xbox version runs at a solid 60 fps that brings the game up from "hardly tolerable" to "mediocre", but still is far from anything one would want to spend money on.

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