The 6 Worst Games Ever Farted Out by Beloved Franchises

Producing sequels to classic game video games is one helluva balancing act. If you deprive gamers of sequels, you risk irrelevancy (hello, EarthBound). If you flood the market with shoddy crap, you'll ruin the brand (hello, Sonic the Hedgehog).

That balancing act means even the most beloved gaming franchises have farted out a trainwreck of a game once or twice in their lives. The results range from simply unplayable to laughably insane.

The Classic Game

In Street Fighter 2, a motley gang of martial artists travel to exotic locales to vie for the title of The World Warrior. These fighters are far from conventional--they range from "man in white pajamas who shoots fireballs" to "man in red pajamas who shoots fireballs" to "Chinese woman with Warren Sapp's thighs."

The Crappy Sequel

In the early 1990s, Street Fighter 2 was such a mammoth success that it warranted the creation of five more games also surnamed Street Fighter 2. In 1994, Hollywood jumped on board and gave us Street Fighter, the movie, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and a "we can't believe he once won awards for his acting" Raul Julia as the main characters from Street Fighter 2, the game.

A definite step down for the visionary who soulfully portrayed Gomez in "The Addams Family" movie.

This all culminated in a game based on that movie called Street Fighter: The Movie. Yes, the game was called Street Fighter: The Movie where the movie was simply called Street Fighter. Which remember was based on the Street Fighter games. It was at this exact point that the Street Fighter phenomenon promptly looped around and blew itself.

Street Fighter: The Game of The Movie of The Game was released at a time when digitized graphics--a la Mortal Kombat--were all the rage, so it made sense to use real footage of the film's stars. The game's designers were savvy. Who wouldn't want a game in which you could repeatedly punch Jean-Claude van Damme in the grill?

If he's American, why's he have a Belgian accent - oh, fuck it. None of his movies explain this.

In theory, digitized graphics required programmers to film the actors on a green screen and then fluidly reanimate them into gameplay. In practice, digitizing made the street fighters look like alcoholic marionettes pooped out by MS Paint

Thus you wound up controlling actors playing the parts of the characters you controlled in the previous games. And the game played like the pasted-on imitation it was--the fighters were spasmodic shadows of their formers selves, as if you really were trying to with a fight with a remote-controlled Raul Julia.

It also didn't help that Blanka looked not like a bioelectrical jungle warrior, but rather that kid from Mask.

The Classic Game

An engimatic half-moon crescent consumes oblate spheroids until the heat death of the universe.

The Crappy Sequel

We expect certain things of our video game heroes. For example, when we play a Donkey Kong game, we've signed on for the big galoot throwing barrels, not pontificating on the finer points of Rimbaud and cunnilingus.

Similarly, when we play a Pac-Man game, we anticipate endless, godless labyrinths, implacably angry poltergeists, and a deluge of non-prescription pills the likes of which this planet has not seen since the Electric Ladyland world tour.

It's no coincidence that the most of the Xanax generation grew up playing Pac-Man.

And when you pop Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures into your Super Nintendo, well, you've volunteered to baby-sit a manic-depressive family man with limbs. Liiiiiiiiimbs.

Seriously, you don't even get the joy of playing as Pac-Man. You are instead an omniscient slingshot that must guide the Pacster through his banal daily tasks, whether it be milking cows or checking his mail. Unluckily for the player, Pac-Man is a moody little prick and it's your job to put up with his frequent spells of middle-class melancholia.

This is why we hate character development in video games. We dug Pac-Man in the 1980s. Sure, he was just a faceless pill-head, but he was our faceless pill-head. After witnessing the poor guy's psychological meltdowns in Pac-Man 2, we're willing to bet that those Power Pellets were Zoloft.

This looks vaguely familiar.

Also, why's he a harried husband? Going-through-the-motions marriage sex with Ms. Pac-Man doesn't make for an exciting game. This game would've been way radder had our hero been a model-bedding commodities broker or, hell, ex-NFL superdouche Adam "Pacman" Jones.

The Classic Game

A good blue robot must kill nine evil robots. He then fights the same damn mad scientist. Spikes always kill him, and the futuristic soundtrack always sounds like it was composed in 1987. The games' cover art also used to be uber-prog rock.

Mega Man is the golden mean of video game franchises. The game's formula has remained essentially unchanged--and perfect--for the last 20+ years...

The Crappy Sequel

...other than 1994, that is, when Mega Man developers Capcom used robot-on-robot warfare as window dressing for a soccer match. Was this game a metaphor for mid-1990s futbol violence? Who cares? This game was violence against the human soul.

The game's premise is simple. Dr. Wily, the Mega Man series' perennial villain, has given up his goal of world domination. He is now seemingly content to dominate a single soccer stadium:

Instead of prancing about a small square room until Mega Man shows up, Dr. Wily's evil robots resign themselves to kicking a ball around a field until Mega Man shows up.

And instead of shooting Dr. Wily between the eyes and saving society the trouble of having to put up with him ever again, Mega Man opts to challenge each of his robot minions to tedious, crudely animated soccer match.

We suspect soccer hooligans invaded Capcom's HQ one weekend, designed this game, and choked to death on their own vomit. When Capcom's designers came back on Monday, they discovered some bloated, booze-soaked corpses and Mega Man Soccer. Capcom--not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth--released the game, only taking time to edit out the tits.