It's not easy to build up a successful gaming franchise. It requires a lot of time, development efforts, and, of course, marketing millions to get your series to a point where it's love, loathed, and otherwise just generally 'known' by people all over the world. Alongside the titles worth talking about positively, whether it's out of cockiness or a misguided desire to improve on the series in some way, many big franchises also have their share of games they want you to forget about - hoping we'll brush them under the carpet to never be seen again. But the internet never forgets. Ranging from strange spin-offs that try to break out of the franchise's core genre, to big-name games hurriedly made by obscure developers or arcade games that had virtually unrecognisable console ports, each series has a history of hilarious mistakes. In fact, it's probably because of some of the terrible offerings in famous franchises that the AAA industry's taking such a 'safety-first' approach these days, so let's stick the following list of games in the gallows and pelt them with figurative rotten fruit, as we run through the most insanely awful video games from famous franchises.
10. Mortal Kombat: Special Forces
At a time when the Mortal Kombat series was experimenting with polygons and 3D graphics rather than trusty old sprites of digitised real people, there were some strange things happening on the peripheries of the infamous franchise. Firstly, there were the Mythologies games, which tried building up narratives around the famous characters Sub-Zero and Liu Kang. That didn't really work out, so how about release a top-down brawler set in an endless maze of corridors starring none other than Jax! Yeah, that's right, Jax! Because everyone knows and loves the big metal-armed lump, don't they? Special Forces doesn't start off too badly, with decent combo-based fighting mechanics and- oh, actually, that's where the compliments end, as the levels are drab, the shooting which takes up most of the game is terrible and Jax is, just, well, Jax. And that front cover - a true relic of everything that was wrong with 90s style.
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
