Nintendo entered the 16-bit era with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which featured an incredible library of excellent games. Throughout the system’s life, the SNES boasted a library of more than 1,700 official games, which is a lot. With so many titles, there were several that didn’t rise to the level of success of Super Mario World and other hot titles. Several were okay, while others were just awful. We’ve chosen five SNES games that were the absolute worst, chosen based on contemporary critics’ reviews upon release, how frustrating they were to play, and how much gamers hated them.
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1) Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Terminator 2: Judgment Day was one of the biggest Summer blockbusters of all time when it premiered in 1991, so a ton of games soon followed. There are some pretty good Terminator games, but the SNES port was just terrible. It was published by LJN, which, if you know anything about the company, is indicative of a pile of digital crap. The side-scrolling game featured terrible collision detection, poorly designed character sprites, bland backgrounds, and an overall gameplay that wasn’t fun at all. It was a lousy game that nobody would have purchased had it not been tied to the movie, and anyone who did immediately regretted spending their money on Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
2) Captain Novolin
Normally, I wouldn’t include an educational game on a list like this, but Captain Novolin is just too bad and weird to exclude. The SNES game centers on its titular hero, who has type 1 diabetes. He’s on a quest to save the mayor from Blubberman, and it’s all been funded by Novo Nordisk, which makes a type of insulin for people with diabetes. The concept wasn’t bad, and the game was freely distributed to hospitals and to children with diabetes, which was nice. Unfortunately, the execution was terrible, leaving the game a mess that wasn’t entertaining or educational beyond its base message.
3) Pit Fighter
Pit Fighter is a 1990 arcade fighting game developed by Atari that used digitized actors via bluescreens to incorporate them into the game. This type of digitization is exactly how Mortal Kombat nailed its visuals two years later. In the arcades, the game looked great, but the SNES port by Tengen was pretty crappy. The game was overhyped and significantly underdelivered, as the SNES couldn’t meet the requirements to run it as well as it did in its original form. The result was a game with terrible controls that made it next to impossible to play, and it looked almost nothing like its predecessor.
4) Space Ace
When LaserDisc games arrived in arcades, they rocked the industry, and Space Ace was a popular entry. The game was much like its predecessor, Dragon’s Lair, and its sequel, but set in space with a sci-fi theme instead of fantasy. In 1994, Absolute Entertainment ported Space Ace to the SNES, and while the publisher attempted to recreate the game as best it could, it just didn’t happen. Without the full-motion video and only a few low-res cutscenes, it’s just not the same game, and what’s left is a side-scroller that doesn’t look good, the hit detection is crummy, and gameplay is mostly a trial-and-error sort of affair.
5) Bebe’s Kids
Bebe’s Kids was a popular animated movie released in 1992, and two years later, a game based on the film was released for the SNES. It’s unclear why it took so long to arrive, but the wait didn’t do the game any favors when it came to sales. Regardless, on its own, Bebe’s Kids is an awful game that features ridiculously slow-paced action and gameplay that’s boring until you get into a fight that extends for way too long, as enemies take very little damage with each hit. On top of that, the controls were terribly coded, making it hard to do much of anything, and the game failed to achieve any measure of success.
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