Did you know you can’t spell “unripe tendons” without Super Nintendo? That doesn’t make any sense, but neither do these, the worst SNES games of all time.
Pit Fighter
Let’s be straight with you here: a lot of the worst games on Nintendo’s grey and purple wonder are fighting games. That’s likely because many chancers and charlatans wanted to capitalise on the incredible success of games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Chancers and Charlatans is my favourite Dungeons and Dragons offshoot. But the amount of fighting games that launched with their own take on fatalities probably deserves its own video.
To give Pit Fighter some credit, it did the whole “digitized photos of actors doing moves” aesthetic two years before Mortal Kombat came along, but to take that credit away entirely, the SNES version of this game is widely considered to be among the worst video games ever made.
Developed by Atari, Pit Fighter was considered to be a pretty successful arcade release, selling thousands of units across the world and was reportedly a top earner in various regions. Equal parts beat ‘em up and fighting game, players picked from one of three characters and punched, kicked and grappled their way through 15 matches, taking on various non-playable characters in the process. In arcades, it was decent enough fun, but as was the case with the majority of the SNES’ biggest disasters, the porting process left something lost in translation.
The gameplay was more sluggish than a bunch of slugs cosplaying as Hans Moleman, the graphics were massively downgraded and even the soundtrack was a pale imitation. Comparing the two side by side, you’d barely recognise them as the same game. They really scored a double dribble rebound or whatever, basketball!
Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball
If it’s one thing that the 80s and 90s arcade and console games were lousy with, it was fighting games, but just behind that was basketball games.
NBA Jam, Street Hoop, Looney Tunes B-Ball; the list could go on and on. But more specifically, there were a few athlete and team sponsored games too. From Charles Barkley’s Shut Up & Jam, the Harlem Globetrotters official game or Slam City with Scottie Pippin, is that all the same language, you had your fill of licensed basketball games. So it’s not surprising to see Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball do things a bit differently.
Originally released as Future Basketball on the Atari ST and Amiga by Hewson Consultants, Hudson Soft ported the game to the SNES using Bill Laimbeer’s likeness and reputation for aggressive play to market this new violent take on hoops. It’s like Red Card but terrible instead of peak.
Set in the far-far future of…2031, Combat Basketball sees Bill Laimbeer emerge from hiding to become the new commissioner of the NBA. Now that he’s the big man in charge, he immediately changes basketball to become more violent, sacking the referees, outlawing fouls and adding weapons to the deal to create the ultimate bloodsport.
Is Bill Laimbeer like the Duncan Ferguson of basketball or something?
Sounds like a sport bereft of rules, but apparently there’s still out of bounds and backcourt violations. Even when there are no rules, we must have manners. As for the game itself, it took the unusual approach of playing in a top-down perspective, similar to the Speedball games, but the problem is that Speedball was actually fun. Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball absolutely sucked. The bad graphics and controls will be drivin’ you around the bend in about 5 minutes.
Race Drivin’
Another example of Atari trying to port a game to home consoles with about the same amount of success as a poorly made submersible investigating the Titanic, Race Drivin’ was the sequel to arcade hit Hard Drivin’.
Released in 1989 in arcades, Hard Drivin’ was designed to be one of the first fully 3D driving games. It used polygons and a fully customised cabinet to simulate the driving experience. Much like Pit Fighter, Hard Drivin’ was hailed as quite the commercial success when it came to the arcades. But once it came time for the console ports, particularly the Commodore 64, the home console processing power just didn’t match up to what was available in the arcade. The C64 port in particular was considered among the worst games on the entire platform, which says a lot.
Surely history wouldn’t repeat itself a second time though for the same series? Surely history wouldn’t repeat itself?
Race Drivin’ would improve on the sequel in a few ways, adding new tracks and cars, along with improved vehicle handling because of a faster microprocessor. Unfortunately, then came time to make the console ports, and just like before, the team behind it really struggled to do it justice in the same way as something like Killer Instinct did when it got ported from arcades.
A lot of gamers really didn’t care about framerate way back when, but when Race Drivin’ is dipping into the single digits, it’s hard not to wish you’d spent your time on literally anything else.
Timecop
You might not know that Jean Claude Van Damme’s Timecop was actually based on a Dark Horse series of comics. You might also have forgotten completely about the SNES game that ties into the movie. You might also also have simply just repressed any memory of this game’s existence because it is so bad.
Is the game bad because David Cage composed Timecop’s soundtrack? Well no, not particularly. The whole thing is kinda bad.
Set after the events of the film, but without a digitised JCVD who was probably too busy modelling for Street Fighter: The Movie – The Game, you follow the film’s protagonist Max Walker and his impeccable mullet as you travel through time to try and stop the guy who created time travel. Sorry, Doc Brown, you must die.
Like many licensed tie-ins of the 80s and 90s, Timecop is terrible, and a large part of that is because controlling Max Walker feels like you’re watching a giraffe navigate a frozen lake.
Revolution X
You know, there’s more video games based on artists and musicians than you’d think.
Kiss made a pretty cheeks FPS game for the Dreamcast called Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child, itself based on a series of comic books by Todd McFarlane.
We also got Rap Jam, a b-ball game with famous rappers and hip-hop artists like Coolio, LL Cool J, and Public Enemy. But when it comes to the obscure world of musician fronted video games, there’s arguably no more famous example than Aerosmith’s Revolution X.
Released in arcades in 1994, Revolution X is set in the dystopian future of 1996 and sees you trying to rescue a captured Aerosmith from the clutches of the oppressive New Order Nation, who’ve outlawed pretty much all “youth culture”. In this day and age, we’d back them if it meant banning Skibidi Toilet.
So yeah, it’s another example of an arcade port losing its lustre as it makes the transition to home console release. Revolution X suffered the same fate as other light gun games coming to console: it’s just not as fun without the plastic gun.
The soundtrack is arguably the best part, with bangers like Eat The Rich, Walk This Way and Sweet Emotion all included, but even those have been crushed down when brought to the SNES. Combine those with the sluggish control cursor and reduced visual quality and you’ve got a game that’s a real chore to play. What a bunch of Ballz with a z.
Ballz
Let’s get the positives out of the way first: the Ballz soundtrack whips. Whoever made the decision to add samples of a woman having, well, let’s say “a good time”, every five seconds is clearly a master of the auditory form. That’s where the good things to say about Ballz end.
Ballz, or Ballz 3D: The Battle Of The Ballz or Bulge or whatever other name it’s known by, is a 2.5D fighting game that took an innovative approach to character design: make em balls. Instead of developing full blown character sprites, one of the designers, Keith Kirby, made the observation that spheres could be used to simulate 3D while saving the processor a ton of power, as spheres will look the same no matter where the camera is pointing. From there, Ballz was born.
More so than the gameplay, Ballz is mostly remembered for the racy marketing and innuendo used over the name Ballz, though the SNES got the worst end of the stick there. In the original intro for the Genesis, the game even states “To be the champion, you gotta have Ballz!”, but the SNES version says “you gotta play Ballz!” instead.
As for the gameplay, Ballz is probably one of the worst fighting games to play, with weak hits, bonkers AI at times and a just generally miserable experience at all times. For whatever reason, Ballz was given a decent amount of praise when it first launched, though I think most were mainly impressed with the game’s graphics rather than gameplay. Nowadays, that’s the only impressive thing about it. Quite the riddle how anyone enjoyed this back in the day.
Batman Forever
Batman Forever is a pretty abysmal take on what some consider to be an already pretty bad movie. I liked it a lot when I was young. We do have to give Acclaim a small sliver of credit when it comes to publishing Batman Forever though. As mentioned, a lot of rough SNES games were because developers were trying to chase a 1:1 comparison on diminished hardware, which just wasn’t feasible.
To sidestep the issue when developing Batman Forever, Acclaim had Probe Entertainment develop two different versions of the Batman Forever game, one for arcades that’d later be ported to PS1 and SEGA Saturn, and another that launched a year earlier for the SNES and Genesis.
This sounds like it’d be a clever way of avoiding one of the most common complaints regarding arcade ports to home consoles, but unfortunately for Probe Entertainment, both the arcade game and the SNES version were lambasted by critics. Most of the critics had problems with the actual gameplay, citing it as sluggish and unsatisfying, which is the last thing you want in a game about a superhero who’s made their reputation on punching people.
For some in particular, the fact that there were other, better Batman games available on the SNES, such as The Adventures Of Batman & Robin based on the animated series, made this attempt at the Caped Crusader feel less than ace.
Space Ace
Porting older games to modern platforms might sound like a more recent practice, but some developers and publishers were doing it even in the 90s. Take the game Space Ace by the creators of Dragon’s Lair for instance. That game was developed and released for arcades back in 1983 and was printed on a LaserDisc.
Over a decade later though, Oxford Digital Enterprises got the idea in their heads that they should bring Space Ace to the SNES, only to find that the limited cartridge size and overall capabilities of the SNES weren’t quite up to the same standards of the LaserDisc. Therefore, Space Ace had to be completely retooled in order to work on the SNES. It went from an interactive movie to a side scrolling platformer that managed to squeeze all the charm and magic from the original release and chuck it in the bin.
As a game, Space Ace for the SNES retains the same story and sequences from the original release, only now instead of following QTEs, you’re actually the one dodging lasers and other obstacles. Sounds like that’d be an upgrade to a lot of people, but the reality of Space Ace is that it’s an extremely frustrating exercise in trial and error, somehow more so than in the original game where choosing the wrong option in a cutscene led to instant death.
Almost every level sees the player bombarded with lasers, obstacles and an auto-scrolling camera insistent on making you want to throw your controller into the TV. Space Ace might’ve been a LaserDisc legend, but it’s a SNES stinker, and I kid you not.
Bebe’s Kids
Has anyone here watched the film Bebe’s Kids? Considering the film was considered a box office flop, probably not, but you might be familiar with either the movie or the original stand-up routine from the late comedian Robin Harris. The routine talks about a beleaguered Robin as, in an attempt to impress his new girlfriend, he agrees to accompany her and her son to Disneyworld, only to get saddled with the children of one of the girlfriend’s friends.
The film follows the same path, albeit with a license free version of an amusement park, but was lambasted by the majority of critics. Surely, game developers would be fools to try and make a video game version of this film two years after its release, right?
Apparently those fools were Radical Entertainment, but at least they bucked their ideas up by the time that The Simpsons Hit & Run and Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction rolled around. Ignore what they did later.
Controlling two of the Kids, LaShawn or Kahlil, you wander through several levels of Fun World battering security guards, mascots and other members of staff, all in the course of basically demolishing the park as is what happens in the film. Sure, they don’t do it in the film by squaring up with everyone, but there’s at least some accuracy here.
Still, Radical might have been better served turning Bebe’s Kids into a text adventure game, as the beat ‘em up gameplay feels about as quick as me when trying to figure out if I should get a hair transplant. It might grow back on its own, right? Throw in some tanky enemies too and you’ll be tapping out before you’ve even seen the second level. Right, this final game sadly isn’t missing today.
Mario Is Missing
A lot of the SNES’ worst offenders are third party games based on existing licenses. So you’d think there’d be some possibility that Nintendo would be immune to that curse when they decided to license the Mario Bros. out to The Software Toolworks to create an educational-focused Mario Bros. game.
That’s the thing with curses. They absolutely hate the education system.
Released in 1993, Mario Is Missing sees the red-wearing plumber kidnapped by Bowser, who’s decided to relocate to the real world, specifically a castle in Antarctica, and is planning to steal and sell the world’s landmarks so he can buy hairdryers to melt the polar ice caps. Bonkers stuff.
With Mario out of commission, it’s the younger brother Luigi’s time to shine, in what was his first home console leading role. His actual first game lead was Luigi’s Hammer Toss as a Game Watch, which definitely makes for a good trivia point in a pub quiz.
Speaking of trivia, the gameplay plays out by travelling through portals and figuring out which real life city you’ve landed in. To do that, you talk to the locals and answer simple trivia questions based on what you can see and have been told. Again, it’s educational, so the game’s appeal will vary depending on if you’re potty trained or not, but for the SNES version specifically, Mario Is Missing used Super Mario World’s assets.
Despite that, controlling the game during the very basic platforming sections felt awful, leaving many to feel like it lacked the proper Nintendo charm, or like it was just another Mario rip-off in a sea of them. It was just wearing the Mario Bros. skin, which is more unsettling when you think about it.
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