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6. Thor: God of Thunder
The Marvel Studios films have been a series of good-to-great movies that includes one of the best superhero flicks of all time, The Avengers. The same cant be said for games based on those movies, with terrible titles based on the first and second Iron Man, as well as the Incredible Hulk. But as bad as those were, its the Thor movie tie-in on 360/PS3 that's the absolute worst, from its uninspired action to its pure glitchiness.
Clearly rushed to market for the films release, the game shifted from merely boring to incredibly broken at the drop of a hammer. The graphics fared no better, recreating the film's actors as poorly articulated mannequins. But instead of making us angry, this horrendous package makes us pity Thor. The God of Thunder deserved far better.
5. Marvel's Uncanny X-Men
Many NES games look so archaic by today's standards that it's hard to figure out whether a game is truly awful or if it has just aged badly. Well, anyone that's ever played Uncanny X-Men back in the day can attest that it has always been a sloppy, ugly, stupidly difficult action game that felt like a total rip-off. Its mediocrity is a bigger danger to the X-Men than Magneto and Juggernaut combined.
The top down viewpoint of the camera means the mighty X-Men are rendered as squat approximations of themselves, and the bright reds and greens of the environments will scorch the ever-loving hell out of your eyes. Also, because the game works as a (terrible) Contra-style shooter, good luck playing as Wolverine, Colossus, or any other character that can't shoot. This NES title has the distinction of being the first X-Men game ever made, and given how awful it is, it's surprising it wasn't the last.
4. Spawn: The Eternal
Capcom has a fairly good track record as a developer, but its game based on Image Comics' Spawn series for the PlayStation has to be a low point for the company. The game comes straight from hell, with graphics that are hideous beyond belief thanks to textures that wouldn't look good on an Apple II. And the poorly placed camera only makes The Eternal look even worse by getting too close to Spawn, thus zooming in on all the flaws.
Spawn himself is a shambling pile of polygons that threaten to fall apart at any moment, particularly when the gameplay shifts into its Tekken wannabe combat. When not in battle, Spawn slowly walks through the empty, ugly subways of New York City in search of keys. One bonus of this catastrophe is that it made the other mediocre Spawn titles look playable by comparison.
3. Batman: Dark Tomorrow
Now that the formula for a stupendous Batman game has been perfected, many would rather forget all the horribleness that preceded Arkham Asylum. Out of all the detritus that bares the Batman insignia, Dark Tomorrow is by far the worst, plagued by enough problems to fill a Batcave. The graphics were atrocious even when it was released, the controls needlessly confusing, the camera unpredictable, and you beat up giant rats more often than you face any of Bat's famous rogues gallery.
Given it's many, many flaws, it's hard to decide the worst moment of the game. There's no denying that the horribly unintuitive first-person search for clues is almost impossible even with the help of a guide. But then there's the fact that, if you suffer through till the very end, you're screwed out of the "good" ending if you don't find a secret room and deactivate some explosives. The lengthy cutscene of Batman's death in the bad ending is the final middle finger to anyone foolish enough to play Dark Tomorrow.
2. Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis
Aquaman gets more grief than he deserves, because the character can be cool when handled correctly. Sadly, Battle for Atlantis doesn't handle the character correctly.. In fact, it's just the type of bottom-of-the-barrel game that people imagine a loser like Aquaman would star in. To make this even more unpalatable, you play as the grittier, hook-wearing Aquaman of the '90s, guiding him to defend his poorly rendered undersea kingdom from the same handful of enemies over and over again.
An offensive-looking game with flawed swimming controls that seems to be built with a budget of $5, this game is so infamous it might prevent Aquaman from ever starring in another one. Based on the multiple entries on this list, the DC Comics employee that approved the creation of video games from 1997 to 2006 sure seemed to hate gamers.
1. Superman (N64)
You probably expected this would take the top spot on this list, but believe us when we say Superman earned number one here. Also called Superman 64, the story takes place in a VR recreation of Metropolis, so nothing is actually at stake, but that lame plot point is a good in-game excuse for why the world looks like polygonal dog feces. The normally indestructible and lightning fast Superman can barely move in this game, and the majority of the unplayable mess is spent trying in vain to maneuver Superman through floating rings as fast as you can (which for Superman 64 means glacially slow).
And even if you somehow beat this impossible collection of timed challenges, you get one last kick in the junk from the developers. After saving the day, super nemesis Lex Luthor reveals that Superman's virtual exploits didn't even really and that Lex is still free to threaten Metropolis. Who knows if Superman will ever star is a truly great game some day, but it'd be impossible for the Man of Steel to ever have a worse one than this.
Ruh roh...
No list of horrible games is ever truly complete. There were tons of runner-ups here, and if you have any harrowing tales of heroically terrible comic games, be sure to share them in the comments!
Need more super heroic features? Read our list of the best super hero games and the best Spider-Man games.
