5 Worst Games Based on Cartoons, Ranked

There have been plenty of great games based on cartoons, with everything from South Park: The Stick of Truth to The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Of course, with so many options out there, for every great game there are tons that failed to live up to the hype. These are often games based on incredibly popular cartoons, but that doesn’t always translate into a good video game, leaving fans upset and angry at spending their hard-earned cash on a flop. We looked through a few dozen crummy examples and ranked the worst of the worst, based on contemporary critics’ reviews upon release, and how utterly disappointing they were.

5) Celebrity Deathmatch

Celebrity Deathmatch is a funny stop-motion series that ran on MTV, featuring a ton of hilarious one-on-one fights between a wide variety of celebrities. The series ran for six seasons with 93 episodes in total, and it spawned a wrestling-style game released in 2003 for PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC. It’s horrible. It should have worked, seeing as Celebrity Deathmatch did a decent job of covering the show’s premise, but it’s one of the worst games of the early 2000s. The controls are wonky, it fails to match the show’s humor, and it’s painful to play — especially if you enjoy the series.

4) South Park

It came as no surprise to anyone that South Park spawned a video game franchise, but its first attempt failed. South Park was released on the Nintendo 64 in 1998, followed by PlayStation and PC ports in ’99, and the latter two have no redeeming qualities. The N64 version fared slightly better than the others, but mostly, it was a huge disappointment. You can play it for about five minutes, finding it funny, and then it wears off, making a single playthrough an uninteresting slog. Fortunately, while the first game was a nightmare, several that followed were excellent.

3) Superman 64

Of all the crappy cartoon-based games, Superman: The New Superman Adventures, better known as Superman 64, is the best known. It’s an absolutely awful game based on Superman: The Animated Series that is buggy, almost impossible to play, and repetitive, so if you do manage to make it beyond the first level (which is a near-Sisyphean task), you’ll just have to redo the same gameplay every other level. The game is absolutely hated by anyone unlucky enough to play it, but it’s surprising to learn it’s not the lowest-rated cartoon-based game out there.

2) Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22

It seems strange, but one of the worst fighting games based on a cartoon, or anime in this case, is Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22. It was released in 1995 on the PlayStation and features gameplay similar to other fighters of the era. When it was released, almost nobody liked it because of its slow gameplay and lack of a story mode. Its visuals also fell short of the standards expected of a PlayStation game, and critics shredded it. That’s despite having a rather large roster of 27 playable characters, which was impressive. Still, even that couldn’t save Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 from being destroyed by critics and players alike.

1) Simpsons Wrestling

For the most part, early Simpsons games were pretty great — especially the arcade titles released in the 1990s. In 2001, the worst Simpsons game arrived on the PlayStation as The Simpsons Wrestling, featuring 20 characters from the show, all voiced by their actors, who battle it out in the wrestling ring. On paper, it should have worked, but in practice, The Simpsons Wrestling was a mess that’s often found on lists of the worst games ever made. It’s certainly the worst cartoon game ever made, and outside of its audio track, it’s not worth a single attempt at playing it.

What’s the worst cartoon-inspired game you’ve played? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

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