11. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
If you just look up screenshots of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you would be led to believe it’s at least a decent game. The graphics are surprisingly good for a licensed title, with a cartoony, dreamlike quality that fits the film well. And it even has a really great soundtrack, similar to the Danny Elfman score of the film. Sounds like an underrated gem, right? Well, no. The problems begin when you actually try to play Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie can engage in both platforming and directing Oompa Loompas, but regardless of what you’re trying to do, everything is just sluggish and unintuitive, and all inevitably made worse by the terrible camera, which makes the game unnecessarily difficult to play. It’s just a painfully unfun experience, even if it does have a couple good qualities.
10. The Simpsons Skateboarding
The Simpsons Skateboarding is the very definition of a cheap cash-in. Riding on the coattails of the massive popularity of the Tony Hawk franchise at the time, Fox Interactive and EA simply slapped The Simpsons license onto a terrible skateboarding engine and called it a day. You know how Tony Hawk games are lauded for their iconic level design and smooth controls? Well, there’s none of that here!
Levels are boring and straightforward, with not many options for creative combos. The more complicated tricks are difficult to pull off, and even basic moves don’t register much of the time. But perhaps worst of all, aside from the voice clips that quickly grow repetitive, The Simpsons Skateboarding doesn’t even make much use of its license, the franchise mostly feeling like window dressing to trick fans of the show into spending money. Any old IP could have been shoehorned into this mess.
9. Fight Club
First off, given the anti-consumerist message of the book and film, it’s downright embarrassing that this game exists at all. But even if you can put that aside, there’s simply nothing redeeming about the Fight Club video game. The graphics are bland, and the mechanics do nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of other better fighting games out there. It also doesn’t help that all the characters basically play the same.
As for the characters, well, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton wisely stayed away from this adaptation, though Meat Loaf, never one to turn down an easy paycheck, happily participated. The rest of the roster was rounded out by Abraham Lincoln and Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst (seriously), and you’re honestly way better off just checking out a YouTube video of them fighting than spending the time it actually takes to play through the game and unlock them.
