Video games based on comic book superheroes have been around for decades, but they aren’t all fun to play. While developers strive to produce high-quality adaptations with licenses from Marvel, DC, and other publishers, they often fail to capture the essence of the source material, resulting in subpar adaptations that fans rarely seem to engage with. That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions, as games like the Arkham Batman titles and Insomniac’s Spider-Man series are utterly fantastic. Sadly, they and a handful of others are outliers, as there are far more bad comic book video games than there are good ones. These five are among the worst, and they’re presented in no particular order.
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1) The Amazing Spider-Man – Nintendo Game Boy
The Game Boy was a transformative system that significantly evolved handheld gaming options when it was released in 1989. It featured dozens of exceptional games, many of which remain fun to this day, but The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t one of them. The game could have been great despite the hardware limitations, but it’s just an awful adaptation. It’s a side-scroller beat ‘em up, but it has shoddy controls and odd combat mechanics. Jumping isn’t handled well, which doesn’t make a lot of sense for the title character, and it’s not a game many return to out of nostalgia.
2) Silver Surfer – Nintendo Entertainment System
Ask any Marvel Comics fan, and they’ll tell you that the Silver Surfer is incredibly powerful. You wouldn’t know that playing Silver Surfer on the Nintendo Entertainment System, as the game makes him die so often, it’s a feature. There’s even a meme of the death screen because it happens so frequently that this is easily one of the most challenging games on the NES, making “Nintendo Hard” seem insufficient as a description. It’s essentially “Bullet Hell” on steroids, and any little bump kills the Silver Surfer, which makes absolutely no sense and drains all of the fun out of playing him.
3) X-Men: Madness in Murderworld – Commodore 64, MS-DOS, & Amiga
When X-Men: Madness in Murderworld was released in 1989, the hardware didn’t allow for a ton of features, but other games of the era were engaging, challenging experiences. That’s not how players took X-Men: Madness in Murderworld, which is ridiculously difficult. It features permadeath, a story that doesn’t align with the comics published at the time, which were some of the best X-Men books ever made, thanks to Chris Claremont, and its difficulty curve was a bear. One of the most significant problems is its permadeath because if you need a dead character to pass an area, you’re out of luck and have to start all over again, which nobody likes.
4) The Uncanny X-Men – Nintendo Entertainment System
The NES features several fun comic book games — Batman – The Video Game is an exceptional example. That’s a title that employs its character and their abilities with aplomb, but The Uncanny X-Men is as far from Batman as you can get. This is one of many terrible titles published by LJN, which took licenses and destroyed them on the console for years. The character sprites are terrible and difficult to discern from one another, and the colors are draining on the eyes, as there’s very little breaking them up. Combat is poorly coded, and it can be beaten far too easily, eliminating any real challenge.
5) Superman 64 – Nintendo 64
From the outset, we said this wasn’t a ranked list, but still, there was no way that Superman 64 wasn’t going to be at the bottom. The game is notorious for being extremely difficult to play and featuring bland, uninteresting levels that repeat. Gameplay begins with Superman flying through rings, which the controls appear to be coded to prevent the player from doing. Most couldn’t even make it through the first level, and the few who did were rewarded with an even worse one. The levels are timed, so you feel stressed with every ring you miss. It’s all just a bit too punishing for 99.99999999999% of players.
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Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures -
Courtesy of S-Game Studio -
Cover art from the back of the Ultima Online CD jewel case.
