Even though these games may provide a more interactive medium than their paperback counterparts, you'll probably prefer the simple joys of reading the source material compared to these messes.
- Atari were infamous in their Infogrames era for their licensed video games based on several Franco-Belgian comics. The Smurfs, Asterix, Tintin, Spirou and Lucky Luke were among the series that received video game adaptations, all of which were incredibly hard for the wrong reasons.
- Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis is universally considered one of the worst video games ever created. So bad it even inspired its own special category for awful video games on gaming show X-Play: The "Golden Mullet Award".
- The Avengers games:
- With The Avengers in Galactic Storm, Data East decided to make an Avengers Fighting Game without most of the series' recognizable heroes. The only playable A-lister is Captain America, with the rest of the roster consisting of Black Knight, Crystal, Thunderstrike, and a bunch of obscure Kree villains. Bizarrely, they did include some better known Avengers like Iron Man and Thor...but only as Assist Characters. The clunky CGI models, stilted animation, repetitive music and limited voice work don't help matters, nor does the fact that Marvel Super Heroes dropped the same year, with a much more recognizable cast of heroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk.
- The Marvel's Avengers action-adventure game was a rather mediocre adaptation of the Marvel Avengers brand. While the story did receive some praise, many critics and audiences criticized the game for its exploitative microtransactions, lack of enemy variety and extremely grindy system. The RPG elements were particularly disliked as they made Earth's mightiest heroes feel underpowered and forces players to grind for hours. The poor reception lead to the game resulted in a $105 million loss for publisher Square Enix and lead to said publisher selling off its western studios.
- Batman games:
- While most agree the story of Batman: Dark Tomorrow actually quite decent, following it requires getting through really lackluster and unpolished gameplay with stiff controls, repetitive combat and an unhelpful camera.
- The Batman: Arkham Series is an astounding aversion. But Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate counts because in paring down the core elements to a portable 2½D Metroid Vania, the execution is clunkier, particularly the fighting and detective mode.
- The Buck Rogers tabletop RPG by TSR was doomed from the start. To begin with, the game was made by decree of Lorraine Williams, the head of TSR at the time who also just happened to own the Buck Rogers IP (and thus hoped to make money from both ends of the deal). She pulled top writers from Forgotten Realms to make an RPG that nobody except her really wanted, and doing that with her usual management style (which included a ban on playtesting, and a mandate to shove the product out the door as fast as possible in large quantities) meant that the game had no hope of being a good RPG. Even with Williams' promotion, only a couple of game supplements made it out the door.
- The Fantastic Four PlayStation game is an incredibly mediocre side-scrolling Beat 'em Up filled with elevator music enticing the player to take a nap instead of continue playing.
- The Incredible Hulk: The Pantheon Saga was a game based loosely on the "Fall of the Pantheon" arc from the comics and developed by the otherwise competent Eidos Interactive. It would simply be an unremarkable puzzle platformer, but it also has graphics that do little to take advantage of the PlayStation and Sega Saturn and is Nintendo Hard in spite of its short length, as the Hulk goes down in far fewer hits than he realistically should. At the very least, it has a great soundtrack, the Assist Character mechanic was interesting if not weakly implemented, and the cutscenes can veer into So Bad, It's Good territory.
- Saban's Iznogoud is a 2D platformer with bad controls and physics (Iznogoud comes to a full stop whenever he lands from a jump), graphics that make it hard to know where you can stand or enter, maze-like levels filled with too many enemies (whose designs don't indicate if you can jump on them safely or not), and a requirement that you have enough gold coins before progressing to the next level, when throwing said coins is also the main method of attack.
- The idea behind Justice League Task Force isn't a bad one, but a mixture of bland graphics, Limited Animation, clunky gameplay, unresponsive controls and a roster of only nine characters (three of which are bosses) make for a completely underwhelming cash-in. The fact that it was only released for the SNES and Genesis also means it lacks the flashiness of the games it was either copying or trying to compete with.
- To give credit where it's due, Sega's Scud the Disposable Assassin for the Saturn does faithfully capture the tone of the comics it adapts, has a rocking soundtrack, and creatively mixes 2D Run-And-Gun action with 1st Person Gallery Shooting (that's also fully compatible with the Sega Stunner Light Gun), but unfortunately, all of its positives are canceled out by two glaring issues: The controls are sluggish and the unforgiving difficutly that will leave you for dead before you even reach Jeff.
- Silver Surfer (1990) for the NES. The game controls well, has decent graphics and incredible music. However, it found its position here due to the severe Badass Decay of the titular character (the Silver Surfer is a One-Hit-Point Wonder), combined with the absolutely unforgiving and sometimes downright unfair difficulty, really diminishing the fun factor.
- While not a terrible game per se, Spawn: Armageddon for the GameCube, PS2, and Xbox is a painfully mediocre brawler even with Todd McFarlane himself handling direction. The game has a laughably small amount of combos, a large variety of weapons that barely feel any different from one another, frustrating level design, enemies that are either cheap or don't put up a fight at all, and combat that shamelessly apes the Devil May Cry series without any of the depth and style that makes it one of the best in the genre. It says something about its underwhelming quality that we haven't seen another Spawn game since then. That being said, however, it’s much better compared to the other Spawn games, and is considered to be the franchise’s second best game behind Spawn: In the Demon's Hand.
- Spider-Man:
- The PS2 version of Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is borderline unplayable. It's got graphics on par with an early PlayStation 1 game, next to no voice acting, no actual ending, and just plain bad 2D fighting mechanics.
- Spider-Man: The Sinister Six (not to be confused with the Game Boy Color title of the (almost) same name) is an exceptionally rare point-and-click adventure game for the PC based on the series. The game is incredibly obscure, and given its myriad of problems (such as frustrating puzzles, finicky action sequences with poor controls, atrocious graphics, and a meandering and rather weak story), it may well be better that way.
- Return of the Sinister Six fared no better: it's an NES game that is way too difficult for the wrong reasons, featuring clunky controls (not helping that B jumps instead of A) and only one life and one continue, with no way of getting extra continues.
- Spider-Man: The Animated Series got a licensed adaptation and it wasn't any better. Published by LJN Toysnote , it was a multi-platform game that had subpar graphics, lack of animations, overly complex gameplay, poor sound effects, and an overused storyline. The game was a critical and financial flop, and served as a Creator Killer for the LJN brand name.
- While the Ultimate Spider-Man (2005) game is pretty good, the same cannot be said for its sequel/prequel, Spider-Man: Battle for New York on GBA. While the Nintendo DS version is alright at best and So Okay, It's Average at worst, the GBA counterpart is an awful game loaded with glitchy collision detection (since enemy attacks and hazards can hit you even if they never touch you, while your own attacks can pass through enemies without damaging them for no reason), enemies and turrets are often placed in spots where you can't see them, a grueling difficulty curve made absolutely unfair thanks to the above issues, mediocre graphics (even by GBA standards) and a forgettable soundtrack.
- Despite the great soundtrack, there are a lot of problems with Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge. Software Creations were given a strict deadline to get the game out in time for the 1992 holiday season, and it shows at times. Hitbox Dissonance is an issue with every character, such as an enemy's attacks hitting them when they're a few pixels away, the controls aren't very responsive at times, and the difficult maze-like levels have frustrated those who played it back in the day. You also have to beat the game in one sitting, which doesn't help things at all. Even worse is that you have to do the Fetch Quest introduction stage every time you start the game, and you're only allowed to skip it if you get a game over.
- Superman games:
- The infamous Superman 64 game for the N64, based on the animated series, is another licensed game that's a contender for Worst. Game. Ever. It features clumsy controls, mediocre graphics, a boatload of glitches, a disorientingly short draw distance (due to Kryptonite Fog), and a horrendously dull plot, where Lex Luthor's diabolical scheme is to trap Superman in a virtual world... and make him fly through rings. If you have the patience to complete that partnote , the rest of the game consists of extremely dull puzzle-solving and even worse combat.
- Kemco's Superman
game for the NES, a side-scrolling Action-Adventure game which provides a fun experience in neither action (Superman has pathetic attacks, moves slowly and can be harmed by bullets) nor adventure (Superman's "flight" power works like a broken Warp Whistle, and there are places which he can only reach by riding the subway, which he needs a ticket for). Its bizarre abstract nature is legendary. The original Famicom version at least has some decent renditions of John Williams' score from the films going for it, but the NES version doesn't even get that.
- The Uncanny X-Men for the NES, published by LJN Toys and developed by an obscure studio called Pixel. The six available player characters are mostly blotchy Palette Swaps of each other, and the characters that use melee attacks have no animation for them. Computer-controlled characters have Artificial Stupidity. The level design, sound effects and music are like a bad nightmare. Those few players who make it through most of this poorly-designed, Nintendo Hard game are in for a nasty surprise: a secret code is required to unlock the last level. This code is hidden within the fine print on the cartridge, and even that's missing a crucial button. To uncover this last button, the player has to kill an arbitrary amount of a certain kind of enemy on each stage.
- Wolverine on the NES, developed by Software Creations and published by LJN, is a Nintendo Hard side scrolling platformer where Wolverine's claws can be activated by pressing the select button. It's more effective not to attack with them out, since hitting an enemy with the claws out reduces Wolverine's health.
