No matter how good one's family might be, we all have that one relative that we're embarrassed to have, like some drunk uncle or an asshole in-law or someone with the stupidity of Paris Hilton. Would you believe that video games are no different? For all the Triple A franchises in the gaming industry that sweep the magazines game of the year awards and get tons of internet flash movies based on them, even they have a game in their seemingly perfect family that embarrass them to no end. How did the games that usually get the A+ wind up with a game that's lucky to get anything beyond an F? In this week's edition of Gaming Trends, we take a look at some of the "drunk uncle" games in gaming's biggest families and find out who spiked the gene pool to cause it.Zelda: Wand of Gamelon
Blame: Phillips CD-i; Nintendo's incompetence
Nintendo and Sony were going to createa CD add-on for the SNES. But because of contract problems between Nintendo and Sony, Nintendo decided to screw Sony and go with Phillips instead. In the end, they just gave Phillips the Zelda franchise and Sony decided to take what they had and release it as a console. That console sold 100 million units worldwide. The Zelda games for Phillips went down as one of the worse ever.
Why were the games so bad? Now I can rant on and on about how everything was horrible, but really, all I'm going to do is point out this picture of Link:
"I'm so hungry, I can eat an octorok!" says Princess Link.
Seriously, Link looks like a damn lady! This screenshot alone is enough reason for me to not play this game.
Snake's Revenge
Blame: Ultra Konami; Lack of Hideo Kojima's genius
So when Metal Gear was launched in the U.S., it did a lot better then people thought it actually would (supposedly over a million units sold). Next logical step? Make a sequel! Snake's Revenge was being developed for the western audience in mind, and Hideo Kojima was not part of the project. How can you not have the guy who created the first game be NOT part of the sequel? Turns out the Japanese sales of the game weren't that good, so Kojima had no plans for a sequel. But one day on a train ride, a member of the Snake's Revenge development team told Kojima that Snake's Revenge really wasn't a true sequel and requested that Kojima do one. The next day, Kojima worked on Metal Gear 2 released only in Japan, while we were still stuck with Snake's Revenge.
While the actual game probably wasn't that bad, it was definitely not what Metal Gear was supposed to be like, and so it quickly became non-canon to the franchise. But then again, if it wasn't for this game, the franchise would've have just ended here instead of continuing with Metal Gear Solid.
Mario is Missing!
Blame: The Software Toolworks; Education
He's right there you moron!
Nintendo once again licensed it's characters to another company, this time for the sake of EDUTAINMENT~! In this game, "Bowser has set up a castle in Antarctica, and plans to use many hair dryers from the Hafta Havit mail-order company to melt the Antarctic ice and flood the Earth." So when Mario gets trapped in Bowser's castle, it's up to Luigi to save him by stopping all the koopas in various cities. Gameplay consisted of going left and right, stomping on a koopa, answering some trivia questions, and repeating this a lot of times. If you knew what city you were in, you can get Yoshi to help make this crap go twice as fast. Joy.
So this was basically a pointless educational game with just about no replay value at all. At least Mario didn't look like a lady.
Mortal Kombat: Special Forces
Blame: Departure of Midway employees
After the failure that was MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero, Midway would try once again to make an action-adventure game with MK: Special Forces. But while in development, several Midway staff members had left the company, including series co-creator John Tobias. So after making several changes to the game, they released what is now known as the worst Mortal Kombat game of all time (unless you want to count MK Advance).The game was so horrible that the series was on hiatus until Deadly Alliance came and revived the series.
FF7: Dirge of Cerberus
Blame: Square-Enix; Rabid FF7 fans
Final Fantasy VII is still very popular today as it was in 1997. So with all this love still around for this game, Square-Enix decides to milk it for all it's worth by releasing the "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII Series". The results ended up something like this:
Rabid Fanboy: "OMG FF7 IS COMING BACK! They're making a movie and cell phone games and Vincent is going to be in his very own video game!"Several months pass...Rabid Fanboy: "OMG the movie was subpar! And I'm never going to be able to play those cell phone games! Oh, and this game with Vincent in it SUCKS!"Dirge of Cerberus had you play as the cool/mysterious/originally optional Vincent. The game was categorized as a "gun-action RPG", but due to lousy controls and terrible story, the game just wasn't good at all.
After all the hype died down for the rebirth of FF7, this game turned out to be a piece of crap. Square-Enix should just stick to making Final Fantasy an RPG franchise rather then doing all these spin-offs.
Resident Evil Survivor
Blame: Capcom
A spin-off to the RE series, this game was a first person shooter like House of the Dead, only unlike House of the Dead, this game sucked. With no support of the Namco GunCon, this game was instead made to be really slow since you needed to hold a button to make a crosshair appear so you can fire. Those controls barely work and aren't really fun folks, so of course this game just turned out to be a piece of crap.
Despite that, however, the Gun Survivor games in Japan went on to have three more sequels, the 4thbeing in America as RE Dead Aim, which was an improvement but still pretty much mediocre.
Street Fighter the Movie
Blame: Incredible Technologies; Jean-Claude Van Damme
Street Fighter the Movie was just another bad video game to movie translation. Unfortunely, a game was to be made based on the movie based on the game. But since it was Street Fighter, it couldn't be that bad could it?
But as it turns out, it was the worst Street Fighter game of all time, mainly because Capcom had very little to do in actually making the game. The makers, Incredible Technologies, decided to make some kind of bastard hybrid between Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat by making three different kind of super combos. Capcom did try redoing most of the game for the console versions, but it still turned out really bad. So not only did this go down as a bad movie game, this went down as a bad movie game based on a bad game to movie translation.
NOTABLE
Sonic - Sonic has tried to copy nearly every genre Mario tried and it usually failed.
Racing: Sonic R and Sonic Riders. Both sucked.
Fighting: Sonic the Fighters. Average arcade game.
Party: Sonic Shuffle. Suck-didiley-ucked.
Mega Man - Mega Man gets cloned out like he was a sports title.
Mega Man 6: It was 1993. SNES was out for two years now. GET WITH THE TIMES CAPCOM!
Mega Man X6 and X7: X6 was a very awful rush job. X7's 3D look was terrible, especially the upside-down level.
Mega Man Battle Network's 3 to 6: Split into two games for twice the boredom. Let's hope that Mega Man ZX doesn't suck, especially since they're trying to make this completely new all over again.
WHO'S NEXT?
Halo - Halo has always been a perfect franchise so far, so it's just bound to eventually "Jump the Shark" (or maybe "Jump the GameShark"?). Microsoft has announced it's own portable device, so Halo may be ported over. My prediction? It's going to suffer major problems. Like some PSP games, the handheld may not feel right because of the different controls and could have horrible graphics. The storyline will have little or nothing to do with the canon. Bungie, already tired out from making three Halo games, may wind up just half-assing this one or just letting some unknown developer take over that have no idea what they're doing.
But remember, this is just my opinionated prediction based on little to no facts about the Microsoft portable and Bungie, and what I've learned from the games above. But if this actually does happen, I will be doing a Larry Csonka style of gloating for months to come.
So what have we learned today? We've learned that when you take out the main person responsible for the franchise, the game will wind up sucking. Trying to turn the game into a totally different genre is also very risky and can lead to poor results. Movie games just plain suck, especially movie games based on video game movies. And Wikipedia is a great source of information despite claims of fake source material.
