Some people just aren't very good at coming up with new ideas, it's a fact of life.
Practically everything in today's society has been blamed in some way for destroying people's imaginations, but nobody really knows the process behind why some of us make absolutely terrible decisions. Don't take that the wrong way, mistakes are made so we can learn from them - or so we're led to believe - but when awful ideas trickle out into mainstream entertainment, one can only wish that such things had never reached conception.
Case in point - video games. Spin-offs aren't inevitably always bad, not by a long shot, but there's no denying that there's a long list of stinkers that give the term a bad name. Hell, you see it in the movie industry almost every other day that Hollywood has announced a spin-off of a successful film franchise only for fans to respond with trepidation or just outright groans.
Some of the games you'll see on this list aren't even necessarily bad from a gameplay standpoint, but rather, they're deviation from the source material is so absurd that you have to wonder how such a decision ever came about. Platforming icons that are relegated to playing football, total genre changes from strategy to first-person shooter and fighting game turned futuristic side-scroller - all of those obscurities are here, unfortunately.
It's too late to go back and delete their entire existence now, but all anyone really asks is; please, games developers, just put a little bit of thought into your games next time, okay?
20. Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight
Someone at Capcom thought it would be a good idea to make Street Fighter's Ken a cyborg, put him in his own spin-off and then set it 25 years in the future.
Advertisement
As it turns out, the localisation team for the game totally ballsed-up the name of the game - it was never meant to be a Street Fighter spin-off. Oh well, too late now.