The 10 Worst Movie Tie-In Games Ever

pcmag.com:

With the Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye making its way to the Switch after a quarter century, people are starting to look fondly at movie tie-in games again. Reader, that would be a terrible mistake. Often shoveled out as quick money cash grabs developed by third-rate studios, movie games are the scum of the electronic entertainment universe. In this piece, we’ll open up the vaults to reveal the worst of the worst, video games so bad you’ll throw your popcorn and your controller at the screen.

The lore behind Atari 2600 mega-flop E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is well known by now—programmer Howard Scott Warshaw had a mere five weeks to get the game done for a Christmas release, and it was so puzzling, ugly, and unintuitive that it crashed and burned. Atari had paid a rumored $25 million for the right to make the game in the first place, so it stung extra hard. There were a number of obtuse adventure games on the 2600, most of which weren’t very good, but the ridiculous time frame (which forced Atari to skip user testing) made this one of the absolute worst. Atari would record a loss of $583 million in 1983, with this game partially to blame.

The PlayStation 2 era was notorious for tremendous highs and catastrophic lows, especially near the end of the system’s lifespan. One of the absolute worst games the console ever saw was 2004’s Bad Boys: Miami Takedown, released in conjunction with the 2003 sequel. This game is a third-person shooter roughly following the movie’s plot, but neither Will Smith nor Martin Lawrence could be bothered to record dialogue for it, and their two stand-ins sound nothing like them. Action is monotonous, with each mission simply requiring you to go from one location to another while pumping bullets