Top 10 Worst Video Game Launch Titles

Kicking off our countdown is the famous full motion video game that features scantly-clad hotties and B-movie violence. I know, it sounds like a good game? Sadly, it’s a terrible, unterrifying experience.

Yes, it’s true that Night Trap has become a cult classic and major source of nostalgia. This is due to featuring full-motion video and laughable bad acting, as well as the ability to control hidden cameras during a co-ed sleepover.

Unfortunately, this game is marred by an unforgiving vertical learning curve, and a frustrating focus on memorization and timing.

One of the very first games on the Nintendo 64, it arrived as a lousy port of a two year old arcade game. Heck, it was even a month late to the official launch, due to Nintendo’s trademark censorship, which removed the ability to run down livestock! Even worse, it featured downgraded graphics on Nintendo’s then-insanely powerful hardware!

More like fools gold if you ask me! Sorry Mortal Kombat fans, but this game has no value whatsoever. Released at a time when the series had just become irritating, this shallow fighter badly transitioned to the third dimension and grafted on a completely useless weapons system.

The game was so bad, it had the audacity to be released twice, with a second printing of the game created exclusively to fix its crippling bugs and horrific load times.

We were promised a motion experience that would blow our minds, complete with realistic swordplay! What did we get instead? A disappointingly slow and clunky first person shooter, with controls that would glitch out at random! This bland sword fighting game was so bad that its sequel went a completely different direction. Unfortunately, it kept the name, forever associating it with epic launch day disappointment.

No, you didn’t hear the name wrong. 1987’s “Street Fighter” was re-released, and re-named so that it could become a quick and easy launch title for this earlier CD-based home console.

A far cry from what the series would become, this earlier entry once again featured slow action, clunky controls and jerky movements. And no, you don’t get to ever fight the actual street, which may have been an improvement, if that idea even made sense.

Unfortunately for Nintendo, the Wii instantly became a breeding ground for quick cash in game releases from day one. As a result, we have a tie of several equally terrible licensed games! These each failed to be fun, or even remotely exploit the revolutionary motion-controls of the Wii.

These games include, “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, “Happy Feet”, “SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab”, “Cars” and “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.”

Sadly, these games were only meant to swipe the money of unsuspecting parents, and give their children a reason to cry.

It’s true, everyone loves the big ape, but his wife-beater clad son shouldn’t be teaching us math! There are countless better ways to launch a system than to turn an iconic series into nothing more than a calculator simulater. Thankfully, gamers didn’t need online reviews back in 1983 to know when to steer clear of schoolwork.

So let me get this straight, a fantastic game series was given a crappy movie, which was then turned into an even crappier video game?

Well its true, the folks over at Capcom thought it would be a great idea. In the process they replaced the series beloved cartoon look with digitized characters taken straight from the movie.

Even worse, they stripped away everything else fans loved, including its spot on controls and gameplay. The end result was a clunky and less violent Mortal Kombat clone.

Not only a directionless free-roaming 3D shooter, this horrific pack-in title sported a very unwelcome surprise. Namely, it featured a green bald-headed female computer that simply won’t stop repeating the same thing over an over!

Rounding out our Top 10 Worst Launch Titles is the one game without a single redeeming quality. Starring the musical talents of actor Mark Wahlberg, this MTV inspired title scored 0 out of 10 score when it arrived on Sega’s equally bad hardware.

Exploiting compressed video segments, bad acting, and the ability to distort music videos, this game featured no actual gameplay! If you’re a fan of this game, please seek psychiatric help.