Yeah, the dream of playing as Bruce Willis didn't quite work out -- those twelve pixels don't really draw you into the idea of possessing Bruce Willis's body. But at least you get to see him during the cutscenes, right?

Activision
No, not really. Apparently each of Bruce's facial features had their own contract disputes.

So you're not quite Bruce Willis. So what? You're used to that. But here's where things really went off the rails. Delays, complications, and even a cancellation plagued the project. Activision originally intended for Bruce to play a sidekick -- he was meant to run along next to you, the game's real star, and deliver quips as he helped you kill bad guys. But, predictably, at some point during the chaotic development he was bumped up to lead.

Activision
They threw in some poorly animated strippers and just hoped you wouldn't notice the poorly done everything else.

Unfortunately, they only had audio recordings of Bruce Willis saying silly murder quips. There was no way to build a story out of a pile of absurd one-liners, right? Well, yes. You're exactly right, and that's why the results are completely absurd. Bruce Willis hardly ever talks unless it's to awkwardly open a barely-relevant one-liner. He sadistically laughs at his own slayings and talks to himself like a lunatic. "OPEN UP A CAN OF WHOOP-ASS! THAT LAST STEP'S A DOOZY!!!"

It comes across as a mean-spirited parody of an action hero starring the man who helped define that archetype. It's singularly bizarre, and we'll never see anything like it until they get Bruce Willis to star in his own Die Hard porn parody.

However, the most toe-curlingly embarrassing part of the performance comes in a sequence where Count Goldblum grabs hold of the young female protagonist and uses all his sexual magnetism on the little girl, which is no small amount, to coerce her into a dance. It's hard to explain, but imagine walking in on your parents boning, only one of them is 14 and the other is Jeff Goldblum in a vampire costume. If that's sexy to you, you're definitely going to end up in prison.

Dreamworks Interactive
"BLAH! So, I, we, you ... would, uhh as they say, like to DANCE here, with me, yes?"

Then, Goldblum takes hold of her hands and the two swirl around in a sheepishly disturbing ballroom dance, during which the protagonist asks the player to use this opportunity to pick the Count's pocket. So not only are you expected to watch this tornado of creepiness, you're expected to stick your hand directly into it.

Dreamworks Interactive
Do not use that hand on any other part of Jeff's body. Just trust us on this.

Picking Goldblumeratu's pocket is accomplished by taking the cursor (in the form of a, gasp, severed hand) and clicking all over his body. This takes place while the girl twirls around him, ducking under his robes as he lifts them. Again, it's hard to explain, but try to picture a bullfight in an elevator, only you're pawing at Jeff Goldblum in a vampire costume.

It's only then when you realize that the true horror was unfolding right in front of you all along: you are watching a man whose enormous talent could not prevent him from this nightmarish career decision. It could happen to you, too!

In 1999, Sega was finishing production on Space Channel 5, a game about an intergalactic TV ratings war where a young reporter fights off an alien invasion with dance. Still with us? Good, because we have a lot more strangeness to navigate.

So as they were finishing the game, they got a call saying Michael Jackson wants to be in it. After all, dance combined with insanity was Michael Jackson's wheelhouse.

Sega
"I was a little surprised to hear that I'm not already in this."

And obviously, when the King Of Pop and star of the very first deranged dance battle title wants to be in your video game, you say YES. So they added him as Space Michael and his dance moves, hisses, and whinnies became instrumental in defeating the aliens. By Earth standards, it's remarkably weird, but for Michael Jackson and outer space, all of these things are pretty ordinary.

Sega
In space, no one can hear you SHAMONE.

But Michael Jackson's video game appearances got strange by any standards later that same year when he showed up in the boxing game Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2. It's one thing for MJ to appear in an intergalactic dance off, but this was a man whose nasal cavity was protected with a thin layer of modeling clay and spirit gum. He should not be anywhere near a boxing ring. And sure enough, the results were ... unsettling.

Midway
Unrelated to Michael Jackson in the boxing game, here is a picture of a fragmented witch soul screaming for help from between dimensions.

At the risk of making things weirder, the makers of Ready 2 Rumble didn't simply stretch a Michael Jackson-like face over a skull and call it a day. That was, of course, the job of Michael Jackson's personal assistants every morning. No, the developers actually had Michael Jackson come in and perform his own motion capture and sound recording.

That's right, someone called in the 42-year-old performer of "Heal The World" to faithfully animate his fighting style. Which seems especially stupid because as any Michael fan knows, his fighting style is sexily transforming into a car or a panther and then leaving.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Who could hit that face? Who could even be sure that WAS a face?

So, while the role of Mr. Blonde stayed in the hands of acclaimed CobraGator star Michael Madsen, the rest of the cast was replaced with actors without as much star power. As in, you might have met them personally and you still wouldn't recognize their names. And after the 3D artists got done "rendering" them, you wouldn't recognize their faces as human. The game features an unkind caricature of Michael Madsen, but the rest of the cast looks like unfinished clones who crawled out of their pods a week early.

Square Enix
We're not sure the artists have ever seen humans, let alone the movie.

Look at those shiny, moon-faced monstrosities. It's as if the developers were personally upset at the other actors for refusing to do the game and wanted to get revenge in the most impotent, petty way possible. "Oh, Tim Roth's too good for a video game? Well, let's see how his face likes looking like a Jon Gruden sex doll! And how his voice likes being Kobar from Captain Planet!"

Square Enix
The Incredible Hulk wasn't the only time Roth was a CG abomination.

No disrespect to the journeyman voice actor who gave us Kobar from Captain Planet, of course, but Michael Madsen agreeing to do this game (and the disinterested performance) seems to support the theory that he died in 1996 and his corpse is stumbling around on muscle memory. It may seem like an insane conspiracy theory, but if you've seen him act in anything in the last 20 years, you know his agent drops him off at different locations where his limp, dead body releases gasses that seem almost like speech. It's inhuman, and it leads to strange situations like this where he is both the only famous actor working on a project, and also the only terrible one.

We previously talked about how the 1996 video game Ripper was definitely, objectively the worst performance of Christopher Walken's career. But it was not the only video game he starred in that year while giving 10 percent effort. He also appeared in Privateer 2: The Darkening, a sequel to the genre-defining game from the Wing Commander series. It featured an all-star cast of Clive Owen, John Hurt, Brian Blessed, and David Warner, and like most sequels, managed to disappoint almost everyone.

Electronic Arts
"I. Am looking AT. A computer."

The game had almost nothing in common with its predecessor and was filmed almost entirely in close-up. The plan may have been to get so far up the actors' noses no one would notice how bored everyone was. Or, maybe they were forced to shoot the thing in front of a single green sheet in somebody's studio apartment.

Electronic Arts
Also the same look on Clive's face when he wasn't on camera.

It was set in a remote part of the Wing Commander universe no one had ever heard of and focused on a clueless Clive Owen dealing with the loss of his memories. He truly embraced this aspect of his character by delivering his lines as if he was reading them from illegible cue cards.

The game featured annoyingly large number of full-motion cutscenes, which meant two things: One, the game was lethally dull. And two, they didn't have time to get a lot of takes. Scenes involving action, movement, or characters interrupting one another felt like awkward dress rehearsals never meant to be in the final cut.

Electronic Arts
"Rehearsals?"

It also follows the old writing rule of "Never say in one line what you could say in 17 minutes of meandering dialog and a slow-motion walking scene." The only good things to come from it is that we now know with certainty that 1) it's difficult to film compelling high-concept drama with only a tiny room and a green screen and 2) it's apparently clinically impossible to kill a Sci-Fi audience with boredom.

Electronic Arts
"Look, if we use the gun on ourselves we can leave this shitty story forever."

Four years later, Hopper played Walter Pensky, a retired agent in an interactive movie set in the 1940s that ties the real-life unsolved case of the Cleveland Torso Murders to theories of Nazi occultism. Hopper delivers his lines as if he's just won a Diazepam eating contest, which may be because his character is in a wheelchair, but is almost certainly because he loathes every second of it. He will stop several times a sentence to take a breath and control his temper. It's like he simply can't believe he's Dennis Hopper and he's actually fucking doing what he's fucking doing.

Interplay
Neither can we.

But despite what seems to be obvious contempt for the medium, Dennis agreed to do another video game for the Wii called Deadly Creatures. In this one, he and Billy Bob Thornton play humans looking for Civil War gold. You might have thought it was odd we mentioned he was "human," but it's because you yourself play a scorpion. The point is, video games are weird and you might be starting to understand why Dennis Hopper hates them.

It's possible video games hate Dennis Hopper back. Deadly Creatures almost feels like a revenge fantasy against the actor. The developers cast him as the game's final boss and you, as a scorpion, can only beat the game if you crawl down Dennis Hopper's pants and sting him on the dick. THREE TIMES. This is not a joke:

THQ
Never pick a fight with video games, Dennis Hopper.

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Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements. An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move. A young woman from the trailer park and her very smelly cat. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, a new novel about futuristic shit, by David Wong.