50 Worst Movie Videogames

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By published

Licensed to kill: terrible tie-ins

Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game

Worst Element: Surely this would be better as a straightforward karaoke game rather than being forced to play all of those laborious quests just to get on stage?

Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon

The Movies: The short but enduring run of features made by the martial arts star in the early 1970s, the most famous being Enter The Dragon .

The Game Version: A new story combining all of the movies' tried-and-tested elements, as Bruce fights an organised crime gang, poor voice performances, lengthy load times and unresponsive controls.

Worst Element: The poorly-designed controls limit your ability to perform to Lee's standards… but then, we doubt there's a developer around who could translate his skills into pixel form.

Spider-man 3

The Movie: Third time unlucky for Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire, as narrative overkill drives Peter Parker into taking a misguided career change into a dancing bad boy.

The Game Version: A moody Spidey does not a good film make, making this a backwards step for the game trilogy. On the plus side, Bruce Campbell is playing the Narrator again.

Worst Element: Different plots and supporting villains depending on the platform, which is a nightmare for completists.

Fight Club

The Movie: The first rule about Fight Club is… that it isn't really about fighting, being more concerned with pre-millennial angst, nihilistic masculinity and making soap out of post-liposuction fat.

The Game Version: Inevitably, the film's nuances are abandoned so the game can concentrate on the fighting, along the lines of countless other second-rate games.

Worst Element: Your reward for winning one section is to unlock a virtual avatar of Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst. On the plus side, you can then deliberately lose in order to see the crap kicked out of him.

Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie

The Movie: The one about the big ape directed by the guy who did The Lord Of The Rings , ie it's not the King Kong that's in black-and-white or the one that uses the World Trade Center for its climax.

The Game Version: You play as either Jack Driscoll or Kong himself. Either way, Jackson makes it hard for you by controversially removing the Heads Up Display so you don't know how much juice is left in your life bar.

Worst Element: Jackson's commitment to pushing the visual quality meant that the Xbox 260 version only worked on high-definition TVs, meaning that the game was too dark to be played on a standard-def set.

Dick Tracy

The Movie: Warren Beatty's eye-popping live-action comic, which perfectly replicates the look and feel of the original newspaper strip and then ruins it by casting Madonna.

The Game Version: A mix of driving game and side-scrolling adventure, as Tracy tours the city seeking crimes to stop. A bit like the film, except without the stunning cinematography, costumes or production design.

Worst Element: The driving sections are automatically locked on to the required destination, which rather takes away the fun of getting behind the wheel to find the bad guys yourself.

Independence Day

The Movie: Decade-defining blockbuster that made Will Smith a star, blew up the White House and (briefly) made Roland Emmerich look like the king of mindless spectacle before Michael Bay took his crown.

The Game Version: Where the film tackled the response to invasion by a large ensemble, the game - for Play Station and others - turned the story into straightforward flying and shooting game as the player hunted down alien spaceships.

Worst Element: There are only so many times you find a target and launch your missiles. As Game Spot put it, "each new level brings a sense of deja vu that can make the Eiffel Tower level feel the same as the Grand Canyon."

Jumper: Griffin's Story

The Movie: Doug Liman's maligned actioner about tween teleporters Haydn Christiansen and Jamie Bell, locked in combat with an over-acting Samuel L. Jackson.

The Game Version: A typically rushed attempt to cash-in on the latest blockbuster, the kindest thing you can say is that - since few watched the movie - even fewer saw the weak graphics or repetitive gameplay of the game.

Worst Element: The title, which suggests the hubris that the developers were hoping to follow-up with the 'Stories' of other characters from the film.

Mean Girls

The Movie: Modern high-school classic written by Tina Fey, in which a never-better Lindsay Lohan rises to power by being… well, mean.

The Game Version: A standard-issue puzzle game along the lines of Puzzle Quest , in which collecting shoes and lipstick means being able to deliver better put-downs.

Worst Element: So much time had elapsed between the film (2004) and its game (2010) that Lohan's face was left off the cover, due to her toxic reputation and/or insane demands for money for using her likeness (depending on who you believe).

Hudson Hawk

The Movie: Much derided comedy adventure starring Bruce Willis.

The Game Version: A cheapo cash-in for NES, in which Hudson sneaks past various guard dogs by chucking balls to distract them.

Worst Element: The 'jump' button invariably failed, ensuring that Hudson came across as an enthusiastic lemming as he ran off buildings.