Top 10 Games Based On Movies

Five of the Worst

Now it’s time for the flip-side of the coin – the five worst games based on films, ever. Creating the first list was a chore because we couldn’t immediately think of ten really decent film-based games. This one wasn’t. If anything, it was difficult to narrow it down to just five.

Still, we’ve done our best. Take a gander at the selection below and let us know what you would have changed in the forums – while we wish you had been spared some of the games below, the simple fact is that licensed games usually sell really well. It’s actually statistically likely that you’ve played some of the games below.

5. Fight Club
Developer: Genuine Games

While the film-version of Fight Club has gone down in history as one of the best films of recent years for its bleak but ultimately redemptive and freeing tone, the game based on it has been mercifully forgotten. Released almost five years after the film and book, Fight Club is nothing but a lame cash-in that uses a weak side-story to try and excuse the awful and generic gameplay.

Not only does the game suffer from boring gameplay and design, but the cut scenes and graphics for the game are bland beyond belief. The developer tried to hide the mediocrity under a veneer of hardcore violence, but failed completely.


4. Catwoman
Developer: Electronic Arts

It was obvious that someone would try and do an awful, rushed game based on Halle Berry’s equally atrocious Catwoman movie. It wasn’t obvious that it would be this awful though – perhaps one of the most random and infuriatingly assembled works ever.

To its credit, Catwoman does at least disregard the plot of the film and try to go in a new direction with the franchise. It’s got a very detailed virtual likeness to Halle Berry too, which does lend it some appeal – but it isn’t enough. The camera feels like it’s tied to a seizure victim during an earthquake and the combat centres around kicking people into wardrobes, for some bizarre reason.

3. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game
Developer: Capcom

Street Fighter was a good game before Jean Claude Van Damme came along and spoiled it all by starring in the movie, so you would have thought that all Capcom would have to do is do a slightly padded out release. But it didn’t.

Instead, Capcom tried to emulate the style of the increasingly popular Mortal Kombat, using digitally captured versions of the actors and awfully compressed voice snippets. It was still Street Fighter underneath, but layer on top of it was the most clunky and ugly beat-em-up since Rise of the Robots.


2. Jaws: Unleashed
Developer: Appaloosa Interactive

Trying to base a game on the Jaws films, where the whole thrill is the one-on-one nature of...erm, fishing...was always going to be difficult. Appaloosa’s attempt however was purely ludicrous, essentially trying to create a GTA clone in an underwater environment populated mainly by glitches and bugs.

Even when you can get the game working though, it’s not really worth the effort – not unless you enjoy using Jaws to lob explosive barrels at ships. Trust us, it’s nowhere near as awesome as it sounds.

1. E.T the Extra-Terrestrial
Developer: Atari

Often labelled as the worst game ever made, E.T. was so massively hyped up that, when it turned out to be little more than a turd in a box, thousands of extra copies were eventually buried in a New Mexico landfill. Not only that, but it nearly put Atari out of business for good and contributed heavily to the game crash of 1983. The game was so bad it nearly buried the entire industry.

Almost unplayable thanks to poor game design, uninformative graphics and nonsense game mechanics, E.T. really is the worst game ever made.