The Problem With Licensed Games / Live-Action TV

Whether you prefer to binge-watch or tune in each week for your favourite Live-Action TV shows, its clear that these games aren't worth your time.

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• The popularity of The A-Team in the 1980s naturally led to the production of several licensed games of varying quality. By far the worst is the Commodore 64 version, a fixed-screen shooter more primitive than Space Invaders in which you do nothing but shoot down monochromatic heads of A-Team members as they drift back and forth in a black void while shooting back. Even more bafflingly, the title screen has recognizable theme music, but it's from Star Wars.

• Airwolf had a handful of bad licensed games based on the TV show:
  • There was the Amstrad CPC game that you had to navigate the helicopter through narrow mazes. There was no Mercy Invincibility and anything could drain your entire health meter in a second. It was also a Timed Mission, so if you ran out of time, it was Game Over. It freezes on the last screen as your reward.
  • The 1988 Japan-only game was a generic, but forgettable side-scrolling shoot 'em up. It is prone to slow down when there are too many enemies on the screen, a cardinal sin for shoot 'em ups.
  • The 1989 Nintendo Entertainment System game published by Acclaim has terrible collision detection, particularly in the side-scrolling sections. It leads to the player taking cheap deaths because the helicopter's hitbox is much larger than it appears to be. Combat sections are difficult because you have to avoid swarms of missiles that are difficult to shoot down. You get three lives and no continues, in a game that is twenty missions long.
• ALF had a video game released for the Sega Master System in 1989. The plot of the game is that ALF is trying to repair his spaceship so he can head to Mars. What would otherwise be a short adventure game (20 minutes at most) can take well over an hour due to Fake Difficulty through convoluted controls, bad programming, and Goddamned Bats which become Demonic Spiders due to ALF being able to take only one hit. The game consists almost entirely of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, both by design and by mistake, as it features a lot of unfair traps, including shop items that make you too poor to buy the items you'll actually need and one, the ALF book, which restarts the game after triggering an Info Dump that ends by informing the player of such, the only time that it is so much as hinted at.^note In-game, at least. The game's instruction manual subtly hints at this by telling you the ALF Book "Tells an interesting story that will really take you back to the beginning!" The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed this game as part of his "The Twelve Days of Shitsmas" marathon.

• America's Next Top Model has two games that were released for the DS and Wii and are Top Model In Name Only. The Wii version in particular suffers from buggy controls, the occasional weird glitch (such as the model's head coming OFF in the final catwalk) and both unoriginal gameplay, flat voice acting and a very cliched, boring story. On top of that, once you "win" (quite easy to do), there's one last line you say (which isn't awe-inspiring or anything) and then a blank screen. That's it.
• The company that tried to make a Babylon 5 flight simulator game honestly tried to make it a high quality game that faithfully depicted how a StarFury would handle. They took so long trying to get it right that they were still working on it after the series was over, resulting in the project being cancelled.

• The Battlestar Galactica game on console should have been a lot better than it is, given that Starlancer co-developers Warthog Games were behind it. Unfortunately, it's something of a letdown; unreasonably difficult with poor controls, and a plot and setting that mixes and matches elements of the original, remake and probably Galactica 1980 into an incoherent mess of an Alternate Continuity, despite being sold as a direct prequel to the 2003 series.

• Big Time Rush: Dance Party for the Nintendo Wii, a rhythm game tie-in to the Nickelodeon TV series Big Time Rush. On one hand, it at least features actual songs from the show. On the other hand, it features a super-basic premise with none of the wacky shenanigans from the show, ugly graphics even for the Wii, UI glitches, the same repetitive dance moves, stiff animation, and ridiculously easy gameplay. You're supposed to dance along to the song ala Just Dance, the problem is that this game can't detect whether or not you're actually doing the dance move correctly so there's nothing stopping you from shaking the Wii Remote to the timing of the song. There's a pointless career mode with No Ending and no reward for finishing.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has two terrible portable games, a painfully shallow and repetitive Beat 'em Up for the Game Boy Color, and a generic and frustrating side scroller for the Game Boy Advance. The show also had some X-Box and Play Station releases that largely avoided this trap, being mostly favorably reviewed, though they didn't fare too well financially.

• The CSI: NY game isn't as good as the others in the franchise. It isn't awful, but for some reason is mostly puzzles and hidden item stuff as opposed to the more detailed evidence collecting, tests, interviewing, etc. of the other two shows. Plus, the puzzles can frustrate to no end, especially the "draw a line without touching the non matching items" one and the "draw the outline" one. Plus, each case is short, and Mac and Stella are the only player characters, as opposed to either all of the team at various points or an original player character like the rest. And fans tend to view it as yet another example of the show getting the short end of the stick.

• Desperate Housewives: The Game is The Sims with a story line and voice work which sound absolutely nothing like the DH actresses. The game is known for a glitch which rendered it unplayable on many laptops and computers. When the game is inserted, the computer screen will simply read FAIL. Still, the game does have a very well written story and does let you interact with many of the DH characters. View here to see the Lets Play Bad Game Theater crew react to it.

• Doctor Who games:
  • Doctor Who: Return to Earth by Asylum Entertainment on the Wii. The gameplay consists, for 90% of the game, of shooting crystals at floating smiley faces with the Sonic Screwdriver (which, on top of being completely nonsensical for Doctor Who, is even more bizarre than the Out of Character Amiga platformer Dalek Attack) and shoddy stealth while dealing with an uncooperative camera and severe framerate lag on some occasions, the graphics look like they came from an upscaled PlayStation 1 game with special effects that make the classic series look like modern Summer blockbusters and a decent dosing of Unintentional Uncanny Valley animations, the plot's an incoherent excuse to have Cybermen and Daleks in the same story, reducing their in-game intelligences to herp-derping, walls-staring levels in the process, the level designs involve tedious backtracking to fill up on crystals and (in the endgame) messy masses of floating platforms with reckless disregard for in-universe sense and the mandatory ball maze minigames are frustating enough to make you want to toss your Wiimote. The only positives are the Murray Gold soundtrack and the Sonic Screwdriver Wiimote that was released alongside it. The kicker? Nintendo reportedly paid The BBC £10,000,000 for exclusive Doctor Who games, and yet the free ^note (if you live in the UK, that is) Adventure Games have far better production values. As the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK put it, Asylum are "people who hate games, sci-fi, and everything decent about humanity". Ouch.
  • Long before that, there was Destiny of the Doctors, notable for featuring Anthony Ainley in his final performance as the Master before his death... and not much else. The game puts you in the shoes of "Graak", a blue blob and literal Featureless Protagonist who is tasked with rescuing the seven incarnations of the Doctor who have been captured by the Master; in essence, you're playing as a non-entity while the Doctors themselves are barely even in their own game. The gameplay itself boils down to bobbing up and down the corridors of the TARDIS in first person while avoiding familiar enemies and solving puzzles to reach the Master, but your objectives are unclear, the controls are stiff, the enemies range from braindead to nigh impossible to avoid, and the game's 3D engine constantly has you get hung up on obstacles or even hopelessly stuck. Saving the Doctors involves beating several unintuitive minigames like racing the Master by train/car, solving a maze, or jousting a Sontaran, but the awkward controls and cheap difficulty means you're likely to die the first few times going through them which boots you back to the main menu and forces you to replay large chunks of the game because save points are few and far between. The few saving graces to this game are Anthony Ainley hamming it up in the cutscenes, and the encyclopedia sections that feature clips from the show.
• Game of Thrones recieved praise for its story (penned by George R. R. Martin himself) but otherwise got bad reviews due to poor graphics, combat, and boring progression.
• Gilligan's Island:
  • The Adventures of Gilligans Island, published by Bandai for the NES in 1989, is generally regarded as one of that console's worst titles, due to its unreliable controls and extremely hard to beat enemies.
  • The Gilligan's Island Pinball is frowned upon by veteran players, who find it unchallenging and unbalanced — the main game objectives are too easy to achieve, and the "Jungle Run" shot allows even moderately-skilled players to rack up several hundred million points in one round. Still, it's fun as long as you don't take it seriously.
• In 1987, a game based on the British Series Grange Hill was released by the prolific developer Bug-Byte Software. The target demographic quickly discovered that Real Life offered the same gameplay options with vastly better graphics. The game's also noteworthy for having one of the most ludicrous Nonstandard Game Over scenarios in any game: You can "die" by accepting a packet of drugs from a pusher. YouTube reviewer Stuart Ashen featured Grange Hill in his list of the quickest game overs, and said that the fastest way to die is to walk back home and prepare to get scolded by your mother.
  Ashen: Gonch's mother really does look like she's going to kill him. Look at her! She looks like a cross between an Egyptian mummy and a praying mantis!
• Hannah Montana: Music Jam for the Nintendo DS has some cool features, like the ability to make music videos and record your own songs, but there are only four pre-recorded songs, subpar graphics, the guitar in the game sounds more like a toy piano, a story mode that takes about an hour to complete, and random, unrelated mini-games.
• Hell's Kitchen received a Wii & PC game adaptation focused on managing a restaurant that is, while not horrible, decidedly sub-par. Gordon Ramsay looks like a caricature of himself and nearly the entire appeal of the show is lost — the game is too damn easy due to a lack of competition factor, and it's almost impossible to make Ramsay angry unless you deliberately mess up.
• At the height of its popularity, Home Improvement got a video game adaptation for the Super NES, entitled Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!^note According to a trailer for the game, a Sega Genesis version was planned, but never officially released. Since building stuff, grunting, and arguing with Jill over missing the playoffs wouldn't be very conductive to a platformer, Tim Taylor instead has adventures across several other television sets to recover his stolen tools. Said TV sets are huge, confusing, badly-designed labyrinths filled with numerous real death traps and deadly animatronics like sword-wielding knights and dinosaurs that breathe fire(!). To add insult to the injury of frustrating, lackluster and repetitive gameplay, the game includes a booklet without any information in it aside from the repeated insistence that "Real men don't need instructions." It seems more likely that an actual manual was left out because if they really wanted to be helpful to players, the only directions in it would be to remove the Home Improvement cartridge from the console and replace it with a better game.
• Iron Chef America received a tie-in game called Iron Chef America Supreme Cuisine for the Wii and Nintendo DS in 2008. The show and its concept in and of itself sounds like it would lend itself fairly well to a video game, but in execution, the game just completely drops the ball. While the gameplay could be far worse, admittedly, (though it could also be a lot more interesting) near about everything else brings the game down. Gone is the elaborate Iron Chef set, replaced mostly by simple countertops and stovetops. Only three actual Iron Chefs (Mario Batali, Masaharu Morimoto, and Cat Cora) are featured in the game, along with host Mark Dacascos and commentator Alton Brown, and their character models in the game look generic and bland at best, just outright bad at worst. There is also no judging shown in the game at all; once you finish your dish, you are thrown straight to the results screen, and there is little reward for actually winning. On top of that, there is Loads and Loads of Loading and, at least in the Wii version, non-stop commentary from Alton Brown, using his horrendously botched character model that makes him look like a talking spiky-haired potato). In short, the game(s) provide a very watered-down and mediocre experience of the show and make the energetic and exciting show seem like a total snorefest.
• Kamen Rider games:
  • Kamen Rider Club is an utter mess of a platformer with busted controls, a tedious and glitchy RPG combat mini-game, useless power-ups, and the requirement to do a monstrous amount of money grinding in order to complete the game - to the point that a casual playthrough can take up to six hours, and even speedruns tend to be around an hour and a half. In a game with no save feature or continues.
  • Kamen Rider BLACK: Taiketsu Shadow Moon for the Famicom Disk System is a side-scrolling action platformer with okay graphics, bland stage design, sluggish movement and atrociously bad controls.
  • Kamen Rider ZO had a game for the Sega CD. Just picture the movie given the So Bad, It's Good Godzilla-style dub, then make it playable Dragon's Lair style.
  • While the Kamen Rider / V3 / Kuuga-Kabuto fighting game series has a bunch of entries in the other page, some of them are less lucky. A change of developers (Kaze did Kamen Rider to Agito, and Digifloyd did Ryuki to Kabuto) made the series noticeably worse, with the low points being the shallow Kamen Rider 555 and Kamen Rider Blade games.
  • The Rider Generation series were average beat'em up games on the whole, but with lots of Fanservice. However, All Kamen Rider Rider: Revolution inexplicably changed the genre into a Metroidvania game that all but killed the franchise.
  • The budget game The Bike Race is an absolutely broken racing game that disregards any physics. It also ignores the Riders' abilities by putting generic special bike powers.
  • While Genealogy of Justice's story is good for fans, everything else is just plain bad. The Fixed Camera straight out of Resident Evil is slow and bothersome for the awkward beat'em up engine, the puzzles are weak at best and the motorcycle scenes are straight out of Battletoads, with next to no life and the brilliant idea of racing an obstacle-filled lap with the camera on the front of the rider.
  • Kamen Rider Summonride is a critically-panned game, filled with shallow and lazy fanservice with no purpose and impossible to play without buying lots and lots of toys.
• While the Knight Rider games have been of varying quality, the 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System video game is certainly the most notorious of the bunch. It is not only one of the most difficult NES games because of the game's Luck Based Missions with traffic spawning and there are no checkpoints in any of the levels. KITT also gets no Mercy Invincibility either, so several bullets will drain your shield meter quickly. Then once nighttime levels come into play, you cannot tell when bullets on the road can and cannot hit your sensors due to Hitbox Dissonance. You're only given three passwords the whole game, which feels like it's not enough due to the game's high difficulty. The Schizophrenic Difficulty also doesn't help things either, as one level could be much harder than another. The final level is also notorious for not only having a Boss Rush at the end, but it also has a strict mission timer. There's also a Game-Breaking Bug because of a bonus feature that is not worth the effort: completing the Drive mode twice eventually crashes the game in Mission Mode because of there being no in-game check to skip the weapon screen when all upgrades have been chosen.
• Lost: The Video Game (known as Lost: Via Domus in certain territories) for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows. It's faithful to the show, and utilizes its flashback system. The high points are the story, the use of music from the show, and the very realistic environments. The gameplay is slightly reminiscent of 1990s Adventure Games like King's Quest and Monkey Island, only in full 3D. However, the game's overall quality is mediocre— you get a gun but only use it a few times throughout the entire game, and there's the recurring (and annoying) fuse-plugging minigame. The actors for Ben, Sun, Desmond, Mikhail, Tom, and Claire lent their voices for the game (mostly because they have only 4-5 quotes for the whole four hours of the game), but the rest of the characters were voiced by stand-ins. For this reason, they often sound a little different than from the show (this hit Locke the worst) and some characters (Jin, Desmond, Tom after he takes his beard off) look nothing like their actors. To top it all, the game is short, and the ending? A Gainax Ending; you get onto a boat and ride off the island...only to see Oceanic 815 break up and crash onto the island, with you waking up on the beach as opposed to the jungle, and your love interest, who was killed shortly before your flight, having been restored to life, albeit bloodied. You can die randomly in the cave sections, which are all built like mazes.
• The Muppets:
  • Jim Henson's Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival is a minigame collection released for the NES in 1990, though the minigames all seem like early 1980s knockoffs with their amateurish graphics and shallow, repetitive gameplay, often made worse by bad controls and hit detection. Versions of this game were released for the Apple ][, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS a year earlier, and they are even buggier than the NES version, with the MS-DOS version prone to random softlocking.
  • Jim Henson's The Muppets, released in 1999 for the Game Boy Color, doesn't fare much better. The plot of the game is that Kermit and Animal are trying to rescue their friends, who have been taken to various time periods by Dr. Honeydew's time machine. The game suffers from clunky controls, sub-par graphics, horrible music, enemies that take way too many hits to kill^note not helping matters is that you have to keep restocking your ammunition, which comes in the forms of paper planes or drumsticks, and poor level design. Every level is a huge labyrinth, and Kermit and Animal take damage from falling from even the lowest of heights.
• Narcos: Rise of the Cartels looks promising at a first glance: it boasts pretty good production values and makes the interesting choice to adapt the first season as a XCOM-inspired turn-based tactics game with management aspects. However, as youtuber minimme elaborates, the initial positive impression gives way to mediocrity thanks to the game's litanny of bad design choices, such as the inexplicable decision to let players only move one unit at a time per turn (a major kneecapper in a tactical game), extremely repetitive mission structure, unbalanced units and shallow management gameplay due to the lack of meaningful choice and the fact that player can never run out of money. As an adaptation of Narcos, it fails due to none of the original actors reprising their roles and being replaced by bad sound-alikes and that it remakes key scenes of the show as generic shootouts with little to no resemblance to their original context.
• The NCIS video game is very poor and was described as "a point and click adventure without the venture".
• The Nickelodeon GUTS game for the SNES suffers from repetitive gameplay (Basic Training and Tornado Run are one and the same, but obviously given different names), annoying music, and the fact that the Aggro Crag, the final event, is just a glorified Basic Training level. You have to get a certain amount of points in the first-player mode, there are more girls (6) than boys (2) when you choose your player, and there's no Mike O'Malley! Moira "Mo" Quirk (Mike's co-host), on the other hand, is there.
• The Office (US) has a PC disc game. It is a time-management game similar to Diner Dash that involves handing out colored folders, and the character designs are out of the Uncanny Valley, not to mention that the game has none of the show's humor, even when pulling office pranks, and the music isn't the show's iconic theme music.
• Pimp My Ride:
  • The original game based on the series of the same name comes with horrible graphics, clunky minigames and physics. Crashing cars and objects is a requirement to win money which contradicts the show itself. The vehicles aren't licensed. Also, the player is restricted to tuning cars in the order that the game dictates and must do so via rhythm game and failing results in paying the full price of the part.
  • Pimp My Ride: Street Racing has horrible graphics for a 2009 game which look like a early PS2 game, repetitive gameplay with challenges that are the same in every race such as the one that requires to beat the target time, collect all 20 scrilla coins scattered in the track and completing the first lap without damage. Also, like the former, the vehicles aren't licensed. Winning every Championship and Arcade races and unlocking all cars, parts and the trophies, the game never ever shows an ending cutscene or any congratulation screen and the credits won't even roll.
• Power Rangers games:
  • One notable crappy game is the Nintendo 64 version of Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue. The cutscenes were done in a comic style, which might be good... if they weren't drawn really, really, crappily. The gameplay and graphics weren't anything special either - British magazine N64 compared it to "constipated puppet men jerking around LEGO cities". It also had the misfortune to be released at a time when the Power Rangers franchise had fallen out of favor, which couldn't have helped.
  • While the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers games released for the SNES, Genesis, and Game Gear belong on the other list, the Game Boy adaptation is not so good. The Game Boy version suffers from poor graphics, poor use of the Super Game Boy color palette (the main color is the color of your chosen Ranger), a cheesy bleepy rendition of the iconic "Go Go Power Rangers" theme (and before you blame the system's 8-bit limitations, here's the version for Power Rangers: The Movie on the same system, and here's the Game Gear version), and the fact that using your weapon drains a bit of health. The fact that the game has only five levels doesn't help matters.
    • The Sega CD version doesn't fare much better. Though it uses video from actual episodes, the whole game is a sequence of quick-time events, where you press the indicated direction or button, but the scenes are the same whether you succeed or fail. It also has Easy-Mode Mockery, where you have to play on hard to see all the levels (the first episode and the 5-part Green With Evil storyline), but hard mode doesn't show you what you need to press or when.
  • The download-only Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Mega Battle for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One could have easily been a decent side-scrolling Beat 'em Up, but is ruined completely by its abysmal hit detection, unbalanced difficulty, lack of content (the game is only a few hours long, there is no online mode, and all the Rangers' combo lists are identical), and tedious level design with a severe case of Checkpoint Starvation. Angry Joe completely tears it apart here, and would later name it as the second worst game he played that year.
  • Outside video games, there is a Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers card game, but its rules tend to make little sense. The designers seem to fail to appreciate that resource systems are more about time than actual resources.
• Robot Wars: Metal Mayhem for the Game Boy Color is the first game based on the series, and generally considered the worst. The 8-bit handheld wasn't capable of doing the series justice, and it shows: several of the robots look and play nothing like their in-game counterparts, staple mechanics like flippers and srimechs are non-existent, and battles generally consist of either ramming into your opponent and holding down A to flail your weapon about, or taking advantage of their poor AI to lure them into an arena hazard. On top of this, the roster mostly consists of obscure robots that were knocked out in the heats, including five that lost in their very first match (two of whom were beaten in a single hit), while fan favourites like Razer and Hypno-Disc are completely missing. The controls are terrible (trying to turn too quickly causes your robot to spin uncontrollably), and the Robot Workshop is so limited that it may as well have not been included.
• Sabrina The Teenage Witch: A Twitch In Time! for the PlayStation, despite nailing the show's humor and writing and returning voice talent from the show, checks the boxes for every single issue of early 3D platform games; very average graphics, poor slippery controls and shoddy platform hitboxes that cause needless damage/unfair fall deaths, Welcome to Corneria voiced dialogue (that is easily glitched into repeating by pausing), and an uncooperative camera with no aiming or strafing system that makes encountering and fighting enemies an ordeal.
• Of The Shield: The Game one reviewer said that it "has no appeal to anyone who has more than 50 percent of his brain intact. Anyone who isn't in a vegetative state will most likely wish that he were after getting through all 15 levels of the game."
• The Sopranos: Road to Respect has mediocre graphics, lousy game mechanics and has you playing Big Pussy's illegitimate son who gets to beat up a bunch of thugs by button mashing with the occasional character from the show cameoing for good measure (including your father's ghost).
• Space Sheriff Spirits, based on the first three entries of the Metal Heroes series, failed on all accounts. While the Space Sheriff Gavan mode is full of stupid gameplay choices, the overly-hyped Crisis Crossover mode reuses characters and animations from the earlier mode and only amounts to a bunch of shallow extra missions.
• Star Trek:
  • Some of the elder statesmen out there might remember a tabletop tactical fleet game called Star Fleet Battles. Complex even by comparison of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, but balanced out over years and years of play to create a strong thinking-man's starship wargame. It even has a "turn sequence" which sets out in detail which step is to follow which — writing the subroutine for the players. Now, what happened when somebody finally figured out you could put something like Star Fleet Battles out as a computer RPG and wash your hands of all the pencil-based bookkeeping? Starfleet Command, that's what happened. Missing several core races in the original release (for rights reasons), horribly buggy at the best of times, and sometimes couldn't even install on your computer without the game crashing the machine as it was transferring files.
    • ...yet also fondly remembered enough to also have an entry on the No Problem with Licensed Games page.
  • Then there's Star Trek Pinball, a video pinball game universally panned for wantonly slapping Trek artwork on three annoyingly bad pinball games filled with grainy graphics, unrealistic physics, frequent crashes, and an advertised-but-absent LAN multiplayer feature. It is widely believed that the game was rushed as an attempt by Interplay to raise money due to problems during development of the unreleased Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan's Fury.
  • Star Trek New Worlds, a dreadful clunker of a ground-based RTS featuring fuzzy graphics, ludicrously complicated resource management (You Require More Vespene Gas? How about five fucking flavours of it or you can't build anything?), and wonky AI. The only thing the game has going for it is the fantastic soundtrack.
  • Star Trek: Shattered Universe may well be the single worst game to bear the Star Trek license. It has the admittedly very cool concept of exploring the Mirror Universe during the TOS movie era, but this concept drowns in a mess of glitches, Fake Difficulty, bad controls and generally poor gameplay. Adding insult to injury, this is the last game from the period when Trek games were being regularly produced — largely due to Star Trek: Nemesis being a Box Office Bomb and Star Trek: Enterprise getting cancelled — making it a very sour note for the game franchise to go out on.
  • Star Trek Online launched in a very incomplete state due to a ridiculously Troubled Production: the original studio, Perpetual, never got anywhere and eventually lost the license. Cryptic Studios elected to start over from scratch using the engine from their superhero RPG Champions Online, but because of contract terms had to do four or five years of work in a year-and-a-half. As a result, while the background literature was pretty good, the end-game content was severely lacking, the Starfleet single-player campaign was repetitive and uninspired, and the Klingons didn't even get a storyline mode—you couldn't start a KDF character until you had a level 30 Starfleet character and KDF characters could only level at all through PVP. To make matters worse, the game's then-publisher Atari starved the game of investment so they could use the profits to pay off their debts. It wasn't until Perfect World bought Cryptic and restructured the game into an Allegedly Free Game microtransaction model that things started to improve, and the game still really didn't hit its stride until the Legacy of Romulus Expansion Pack added playable Romulans and gave the Klingons a full campaign.^note For a given value of "full": every mission after the Fek'Ihri story arc is a copy-pasted Federation mission, with the dialog sometimes still thinking you're a member of Starfleet. LOR finally brought the game to roughly the state it should have been in when it came out three years earlier.
  • Star Trek: Infinite is notorious for being a Stellaris reskin with only a quarter of the content of the the base game while also at the same time riddled with bugs and imbalance that seriously hampers the game experience. While this appears to be typical of the Paradox's "release first, fix later" philosophy, the negative reception to the game meant it was immediately abandoned just one year after release in contrast to the afromented Stellaris which is still going strong in spite of the 6 year gap between them. It's all the more telling that the game ended being overshadowed by the official fan-made mods that without any of the money required, provided 10x times as much content as an official game could ever provide.
• Tweenies: Game Time was released for the PS1 in 2001 by BBC Multimedia. The game is a Mini Game Game, but there are only four mini-games; "Jake's Dot World", "Milo's Space Race", "Bella's Fairytale Castle" and "Fizz's Disco". These mini-games can all be beaten within five minutes. The game's character models are ugly, Max's in particular looking nothing like his TV series counterpart, and the game has tons of loading screens, including one before the screen that asks you whether or not you want to play the same mini-game again. The game's FMVs run at a very low framerate, and sound design is horribly bit-crushed. The game also has two notable glitches; one that makes the game load forever, requiring you to reset it, and another that makes the game stuck on a repeating sound when you choose a mini-game before the Tweenie you play as finishes talking. Caddicarus has an entertaining review of the game.

• While there is a lot of games from the Ultra Series in the other page, Ultraman All-Star Chronicle is a very mediocre cash-grab RPG.
  • The Ultraman: Towards the Future game for the SNES is notorious for its poor graphics and unfair difficulty levels.
• Vazelina Hjulkalender got a shoddy licensed mini-game collection consisting of basic games like a Pop Quiz, a Shell Game, multiple rudimentary jigsaw puzzles, a strange memory game where you feed people fluids that are supposed to go into cars, and a poorly-made Pac-Man clone where the camera will abruptly jump to follow your movements because it can't display the whole maze at once. Bizarrely, while Vazelina Bilopphøggers had a comic based on it that could have served as inspiration, the game instead opts to slap photos of the members' faces (sometimes using photo series to "animate" them) on poorly-animated bodies, creating a weird effect. Also, one of the mini-games uses an annoying nine-second loop as background music.

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