Top 10 Worst Games Based on Horror Movies
By Dustin Mendel | October 29, 2011 | Features | No comments | Share
Halloween is just a few days away, which typically means that on any cable channel worth its salt, you’re likely to find classic scary movies like Halloween or Poltergeist playing non-stop. For fans of horror movies, you might be tempted to tickle your gamer bone (that doesn’t sound right) at the same time with video game adaptations of your favourite films, but I’m here today to tell you not to bother. Games based on horror movies have always had an embarrassing reputation, and I’ve collected a small sample for you to wrinkle your nose at. Without further ado, let’s see which famous scary movies have suffered the indignity of inspiring a bad game, although to be fair, most of these franchises have done a fine job of shaming themselves with subsequent sequels.
10. The Thing (PS2/Xbox)
John Carpenter’s The Thing happens to be my favourite scary movie, so when I first heard that a sequel was on its way in the form of a video game, two questions came to mind: did The Thing really need a sequel, and is there any way such a game could be good? The answer to both is a resounding no. The Thing definitely looked like it could’ve been a solid survival horror game, but it turned out it was actually a hideous alien pretending to be a solid survival horror game, which needed to be set on fire.
If you’ve seen the movie that the game was based on, and I pray that you have, you may be wondering how a movie that focused mainly on a group of men giving each other suspicious looks and pricking each other with pins could translate into a video game. Needless to say, it doesn’t exactly capture the atmosphere and tension of the movie, but The Thing certainly gets points for trying. The game puts you in charge of a squad of soldiers investigating the events of the movie, and it’s your responsibility to keep your team from turning on each other, or falling apart mentally while fighting off aliens and periodically checking to see if your partner who has been flanking you for hours has secretly turned into a horrific monster.
Wait a second, I thought you had green eyes!
As I said, it all sounds pretty cool, but ultimately the trust/fear system doesn’t really do anything, and the game quickly devolves into an overly complicated Resident Evil clone. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the game’s developers also decided to take the movie’s ambiguous ending and kick it in the mouth, explaining the fate of the team from the film while the game’s characters are battling massive monsters that were nowhere to be found in the source material. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that the recent prequel (also called The Thing) retconned the events of the game and somehow made everything worse.
9. A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES)
There was a time, long ago, when the Nightmare on Elm Street movies were the pinnacle of horror. Sure, the reboot was a disappointment, and the later movies in the series focused more on the comedic styling of Robert Englund than actual scares, but the first few movies were incredibly scary, and the premise was disturbing, relatable in a strange way, and incredibly original. A video game featuring Freddy Krueger that allowed you to play both in the real world and in your nightmares seemed like a guaranteed success, but then, we wouldn’t be here including it on this list if that were the case.
Freddy's done screwing around at this point.
A Nightmare on Elm Street was one of only a handful of games on the NES that supported four players, which would’ve been great if they’d been given something fun to do together. The game’s premise was solid, and it held true to the original movie in a way many of these games failed to. Players would battle through different locations on Elm Street, searching for the bones of Freddy Krueger in the hopes of destroying him, while battling him in some fairly epic boss fights for an NES game.
The problems arose during the rest of the game, when Freddy was off washing his ugly sweaters. Horror movie games have a common problem when the entire premise is built around confronting a central antagonist: either the game consists of nothing but one ongoing battle with the villain, or the developers just say screw it, and start making up filler content. In the case of ANoES, that meant fighting off an endless barrage of bats and garden snakes during the daytime sequences, and Freddy-inspired creatures during the nightmares. The levels were also sprawling labyrinths, which quickly sucked out whatever scares the game was supposed to be providing and replaced them with boredom.
I’d like to think that under the right circumstances, a game based on ANoES could be good, but then I remember that this game was developed by Rare, a company that went on to rule the world with Goldeneye and Donkey Kong Country, at a time when only gameplay mattered, rather than graphics and online functionality. In the hands of a different developer under today’s harsh scrutiny, it may be best that Freddy stays dead. Or alive, I’m not sure what his deal is in the movies anymore.
8. Saw II: Flesh and Blood (PS3/X360)
The Saw movies might be one of the most polarizing horror franchises around; during the seven years that the movies were released, their box office success was rivalled only by their plummeting critical reception. Saw always toed the “torture porn” line and if watching people lop off their own body parts like it was a carnival game isn’t your cup of tea, it’s probably safe to say you weren’t their target audience. Critics weren’t quite as forgiving when it came to the two games based on the movies, and particularly the second game, which was painful enough to play through that if they’re looking for ideas for a Saw 8, they could just release footage of a focus group playing Saw II: Flesh and Blood.
Saw II introduced players to Michael Tapp, the son of Danny Glover’s character in the first movie. The game follows the theme established in the movies that if a character, isn’t shown dying on screen, even if they’ve been critically injured and left in a pile of filth, they’re alive and secretly involved with the events of the movies. Michael is on the hunt for Jigsaw as a result of the events of the first game, and as a result, he’s captured by the serial killer’s new protégé, Pighead II (don’t ask), and thrust into one of Jigsaw’s games.
Remember this trap? I bet that guy does.
That plot could easily be confused with the stories of any of the Saw sequels, so top marks to the game’s writers I suppose, but from there, Saw II becomes a clumsy collection of quick-time events and puzzles that seem more appropriate on that Minute to Win It game show than in a Saw game. Rather than attempting to improve the combat system from the first game (remember all the fist fights in the Saw movies? No?), the developers decided to replace it entirely with QTEs. When it becomes impossible for any trap or enemy to surprise you without a prompt appearing on the screen to push a button, you might as well throw the whole game in a pit of dirty syringes.
7. The Ring: Terror’s Realm (Dreamcast)
If you’re like me, you were probably surprised to hear that The Ring, one of the better horror movies in the last ten years, is actually a remake of Ringu, an even creepier Japanese horror flick. If that’s the case, allow me to blow your mind once again; the Ring movies were all adapted from a series of books, which in turn spawned a video game for the Dreamcast in 2000. If the prospect of trying to defeat an ancient curse while being stalked by the creepy little girl in the well sounds like a good time, not only does that make you a disturbed individual, but you would be sorely disappointed with The Ring: Terror’s Realm, a game that Jason X look like a stellar sequel to Friday the 13th.
It’s only fair to assume that after five movies, four books and a manga series, not including the American movies, the story of a cursed little girl would be getting a little played out at some point. When it came to making The Ring: Terror’s Realm, the developers decided to go a different route, repurposing the curse as a computer program that sucks its victims into a virtual reality program and forcing them to fight their way out. The end result is a combination between a poor man’s Tron and and a homeless man’s Resident Evil, with the Ringname bolted on as an afterthought.
The face of every person who bought this game.
Saying nothing about the game’s visual and gameplay issues, of which there are plenty, The Ring: Terror’s Realm ignores everything about The Ring that made it what it was. For all I know, I’m way off base and this is a natural progression of where the story was headed in the Japanese versions, but if that’s the case, I’m glad they stopped after one bad sequel in America.
6. Halloween (Atari)
When I was looking for games to include in this list, it struck me as strange that no one had ever attempted to make a game based on the Halloween franchise. Games like Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 3 worked as well as they did, in part, because the player was constantly being pursued by an unstoppable killing machine, and Michael Myers personifies that perfectly. When I finally stumbled across this gem for the Atari, the game I had pictured in my head didn’t exactly match up with the real thing.
Halloween, as with most other games from the early 80s, has the depth of a paper plate. The player controls an unnamed babysitter, who must gather up children and rescue them from the faceless killer, also unnamed in the game for whatever reason, although it’s a safe bet he’s supposed to be Michael Myers. The game consists of running through countless, nearly identical screens in either direction, watching out for Michael while grabbing what look like Muppets and herding them to safety.
What makes this game so great (or horrible, depending on whether you work for a child advocacy group or not) is that while you lose a life if Michael manages to catch you with his robotic stabbing attack, the game doesn’t penalize you if one of the children dies. If you decide it’s too much of a risk to try to save one of the kids, you can effectively shrug your shoulders and watch as they’re needlessly butchered. Depending on how long you bother to play this thing, you can help rack Michael’s kill count up to unseen levels in the movies, only this time, his victims are only children. How this managed to see a full release on a system that was played primarily by kids is beyond me.
To be fair, it's hard to feel bad when everything looks so ridiculous.
5. Evil Dead: Hail to the King (Playstation)
As much as I’ve always liked the Evil Dead movies, they’ve always kind of depressed me too. As horror films, they never really got a fair shake from the public, who either dismissed them for being too silly or mocked their cheap special effects. The franchise was effectively abandoned by those who made it, despite fans begging for a sequel or a reboot, and Bruce Campbell, the star of all three movies, never saw the level of success he deserved from his role as Ash. Then there are the games, which seem to only exist to try to ruin the reputation of the movies for anyone who mistakenly plays them.
In Evil Dead: Hail to the King, the worst of the offending games, Ash returns to the cabin from the first two movies, where his girlfriend is kidnapped by Deadites, an evil clone of him is created, and the pages of the Necronomicon have been scattered. The problem with this is that the developers basically took plot points from all three movies, but rather than just allowing players to play through the story that they’ve grown to know and love, this is supposed to be a new sequel to Army of Darkness. This rehash of Ash’s story is framed within a—what else—Resident Evil clone, with fewer weapons and uglier monsters.
Ash during happier times.
While it’s cool that Bruce Campbell returned to voice Ash in Hail to the King, I really would have preferred it if he hadn’t, so I could pretend that this game had nothing to do with the movies. The game is easy enough so that you’re rarely in danger of dying, but the clumsy combat controls needlessly drag out battles to the point where you’ll start avoiding enemies just to kill time. This game is basically Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler: nowhere near as cool as you remember, but you can still see a glimpse of its former self, which just kind of makes you sad for it, rather than nostalgic.
4. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (SNES)
Of all the movie monsters on this list, Dracula is arguably the most famous, and he’s managed to have a successful video game career as well. The original Castlevania is considered a masterpiece, and unlike some of the other horror film villains, he has both a creepy setting and a stable of secondary enemies associated with him. The problem with Bram Stoker’s Dracula is that it is based not only on the movie but on the original book of the same name, and as Electronic Arts will tell you, it’s incredibly difficult to create a game based on a famous piece of literature.
Rather than attempt to closely follow the plot of either the book or the movie, which would be close to impossible and incredibly boring, the developers took several liberties with the story, similar to how EA turned part of the Divine Comedy into Dante’s Inferno. Dracula is a side-scroller that takes the player through many of the movie’s famous locations, which have become overrun with angry townspeople, animals and other vampires that endlessly respawn if the player leaves the screen and return. Fighting off what look to be pirates as you search a village inn for items is a bit of a departure from the movie in and of itself, but the game really hits its stride when it comes to the boss fights, of which there are many.
Dracula himself makes several appearances as a boss, as do his vampire brides, Renfield, and even his pet dragon. What’s that? You don’t remember a dragon in Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Funny, I don’t either, and it seems like a pretty insane thing to just throw into the game without explanation. Maybe when someone gets around to making a game based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they can include a series of mini-games featuring a talking bicycle just to keep up with Dracula.
3. Friday the 13th (NES)
When the Friday the 13th game first came out, I was far too young to have seen any of the movies, but the insane box art, which featured a knife wielding Jason Voorhees on a Technicolor backdrop, was too amazing to pass up. After playing the game, I had no understanding of what the movies were about, and I was convinced that Friday the 13th had to be the worst movie ever made. My opinion of the movies has improved, albeit slightly, with age, but the Friday the 13th game remains one of the biggest wastes of time in all of video games.
The story of Friday the 13th isn’t a confusing one. A group of counsellors visit a camp that happens to be the hangout of Jason, and he proceeds to pick them off one at a time. The game, on the other hand, is fantastically confusing, forcing players to control six different characters at the same time like some kind of hivemind, while searching a dozen different caves, forests and cabins for items or Jason himself. That’s right, in this game you’re actually looking for the guy with the big knife, rather than running from him until your lungs burst.
Every once in a while, an alarm goes off, alerting the player to the fact that Jason is about to attack either a counsellor or one of the children at the camp, and you have to frantically switch between players to try to find Jason before he can kill them, which works about as well as it did for the people in the movies. More often than not, I would never be able to find Jason in time, or I would switch over to a counsellor just as Jason was burying a hatchet into his forehead. If the movies had been anything like this game, they would’ve been eight hours long, and full of people just wandering around with confused looks on their faces while all the kills occurred off camera.
And then it would end with Jason sitting on his ass.
2. Jaws Unleashed (PS2/Xbox)
For whatever reason, two games have been made based on the Jaws movies: an ugly game for the NES that was basically a glorified fishing game with Jaws guest starring, and Jaws Unleashed, a game that was released almost twenty years later. Only one of these games could make it onto this list, and it isn’t the fishing one. In other words, in our quest to capture the world’s worst horror movie games, we’re going to need a bigger boat for this one.
Jaws Unleashed inexplicably puts the players in the role of Jaws (technically Jaws VI) as he comes to Amity Island to wreak havoc on an evil corporation, or something. If you’ve seen Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, which was basically a giant environmentalist guilt trip under the guise of a monster movie, you know how much it sucks when mindless killing machines develop a philosophy, which seems to be the case here. Jaws spends as much time eating things as he does sabotaging oil rigs and taking down the man. At his disposal are a series of upgradable attacks, including tail whips and corkscrew attacks, the very things Jaws is best known for.
I'M A SHAAAARK!
Jaws typically spends every movie he’s in just killing indiscriminately, and his death is usually the result of a serious of wild coincidences. Since that doesn’t make for a compelling video game apparently, the deck has been heavily stacked against him, both deliberately and accidentally. To begin with, the game plays like hell, with glitches and a broken camera system. Then there’s the fact that Jaws needs to constantly eat to keep his strength up, like he’s an anaemic eighth grader who just fainted in gym class. Finally, the island has been fortified with mines, armed soldiers and a jacked up killer whale that wants you dead. If Amity Island had half this crap during the first movie, Sam Quint would be on a beach right now, sipping margaritas instead of lying in bite sized chunks at the bottom of the ocean.
The original Jaws movie was incredibly scary for its time, mainly because for nearly the entire movie, you never see the shark. In Jaws Unleashed, you spend the entire game looking at the shark’s ass. A better metaphor I could not give you.
1. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Atari)
If I had to say something positive about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre game that was released for the Atari, it would be that as far as I know, it didn’t burn your house down when you turned it on. This game is, without a doubt, the worst example of a horror game, a licensed game, or just video games in general. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial may have nearly destroyed the entire industry when it was released, but it can kiss my ass compared to this game.
I have a mental shortlist of things to avoid when making a good game based on a horror movie, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre checks every box. You play as Leatherface, or at least that’s what you’re told, since nothing about his appearance confirms this, and you spend the entire game running around a brightly lit field, brandishing what looks to be your own mangled arm. In order to gain points, you have to maneuver around wheelchairs, bull skulls and fences while chasing down what looks to be Charlie Brown. If you happen to touch anything before you can begin murdering people, it triggers a high pitched beep, furthering the assault on your senses.
When analyzing games that are this old, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this was the best technology had to offer at the time, and that in context, Texas Chainsaw Massacre could’ve been fun. No. This game is a blight on video games that transcends time or context. I would gladly play a 24 hour marathon of the Halloween game before I’d even sit down to watch someone else play this game again. I worry that what I’m saying doesn’t do the game justice, so I’ve included a sample of the game below. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
