The 10 Worst SNES Games

Pac-Man is a game that will go down in history as not only one of the most influential arcade games of all time, but one that is today still utterly playable by everyone. Hell, there's a good chance that Pac-Man will still be played by gamers long after we are all dead a buried. The official sequel to the game... well, not so much. Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures takes everyone's favorite yellow, pill-popping, circle and radically changes everything that made the original game great.

The first thing you'll notice is that the maze gameplay of Pac-Man is gone, replaced by a point-and-click adventure engine. And not a good point-and-click like those from LucasArts. The game also only ever released on consoles of the day. but one thing people often overlook when talking Pac-Man 2 is that the game didn't just come out of left field. In Japan there was an arcade game released called Pac-Land that featured a side-scrolling Pac-Man, but as this was an arcade game it lacked the point-and-click aspects in favor of much faster gameplay. The game was also popular enough to see tons of ports to computers of the time, as well as consoles like the TurboGrafx 16.

To be fair Pac-Man 2 would have been a fine enough game if only it had ditched the sequel moniker. Pac-Land was fine, but it never tread on the name of the original. Pac-Man 2 was so far away from a proper sequel that it pissed off new and old fans alike. Just imagine if a game like The Witcher 3 saw an official sequel that was a collectible card game and you have an idea of how crazy Pac-Man 2 was.

Pit-Fighter is the perfect example of a video game you rented on a Friday from Blockbuster and instantly regretted after playing it for five-minutes, but have to force yourself to play because you know your parents won't take you back to the video store and you had nothing else. The game is a part of its arcade counterpart, but lacking everything that made that game a neat oddity. Let's face it, the arcade version of Pit-Fighter wasn't that great of a game and only stood out because of its digitized characters.

In the transition to the Super Nintendo the game lost a number of features, not least of which were the graphics, including the interactive audience and the weapons that you could use during play. Even worse is that fact that this port saw three characters removed from the game including Southside Jim, Heavy Metal and Mad Miles. And because this is a port based on an arcade game you had to try and finish the game on a single credit, so odds are if you had this game you never finished it.

Pit-Fighter, in all its forms, does not stand up to the test of time unlike many of its arcade counterparts. It was one of the first games to focus on style over substance and when you remove that style for the home ports you aren't left with much. If you are having a great day and are in the mood ruin it, simply pop this one in and get ready to hate the world.

Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball is pretty lame and you'll need a beer to get through it. Thanks you and goodnight! Anyhow, this game is utter crap on a number of levels and might actually be the worst sports game to ever come out. It's so bad that my college roommate bought this game for me for $1 as punishment after he rented one weekend as a kid. Just imagine how bad a game has to be that after a single weekend it still sticks with you, raising your blood-pressure.

Bill Laimbeer is apparently some basketball player who played on the Pistons and known for being a giant asshole at a time when the entire team was known for being assholes. It's actually pretty impressive if you think about it in a really shitty light. For whatever reason this meant he was the perfect person to slap on the title about a basketball game that takes place in the year 2030. The gameplay was ages behind even NES basketball games with the action using a really strange overhead view of the court.

This means that you just looked down at the top of heads that all looked the same with flailing arms while they ran about. The games main feature was the lack of rules and destructive items. Seems like a cool enough idea, but the execution was completely lacking. But most shocking was that the game only used a single button to do everything when the Super Nintendo controller featured six.

We are probably breaking our own rules with Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus, but as it still plays like a traditional platformer and isn't overtly educational we are including it. We don't play by anyone's rules, including our own! Now, you might be thinking we typo the title wrong but that's where the game hints at it's educational roots. Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus is all about reminding kids to use their inhaler and teaching them all about asthma. But unlike most educational games there is an actual game at it's core, even if that game isn't all that great.

Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus is from the same people that created the much more well-known and covered Captain Novolin and seems to use the exact same engine. WaveQuest seemed to have cornered the market on these educational games disguised as actual games, so there must have been a market for them someplace. We are guessing through doctor's offices around the country, although nobody here can ever recall seeing it sold or offered to them.

As you can expect the game isn't all that great for a side-scroller, something that the Super Nintendo had in abundance, but at least the educational bits weren't a detriment to the overall experience. You spend the game trying to clear the air so, you know, you don't get asthma and the main characters can develop shortness of breath from all the stuff that an asthmatic would. Still, it's a bit weird for a Dinosaur to get sick from cigarette smoke, unless that's what actually killed them off.

The Wizard of Oz film came out back in 1939 so while this one is technically a movie tie-in, we feel the statute of limitations ran out on this one since nobody reading this was even alive when the film was out. And that's ignoring the fact that video games didn't even exist back in the days where the most important thing happening was The University of Oregon defeating Ohio State University to win the championship of the first NCAA men's basketball tournament. Oh, and probably that whole Nazi Germany kicking off World War II thing too.

But in 1993 The Wizard of Oz was a strange title to bring to the Super Nintendo, a console that probably didn't have a plethora of hardcore fans of the film. The strange thing is that I can't find any solid information that this game even existed. Clearly it did, as you can find it out in the wild, but I'm talking about information on the game seemingly being scrubbed from the internet and the people at Turner. As a game and traditional platformer, The Wizard of Oz fails on all counts. Hit detection is what we call in the industry "poor" and attacks are almost laughable, with the Tin Man being the only character of any value.

Each character has their own unique abilities and traits, but these almost never really come into play. What's odd that I didn't know when playing initially was that many of the stages later in the game come from the 1990 Wizard of Oz animated series from DIC, that I never knew existed. So what we have is a terrible idea for a game, based on a movie the predated video games, incorporating stuff for a animated series nobody watched.

Many people might think the Super Nintendo isn't all that great with arcade ports, but most of that has to do with the 90s video game industry itself. There was money to be made translating arcade games to consoles, but developers couldn't be bothered and often only took the job to earn an easy paycheck so they could focus on their own original IP.

Race Drivin was an arcade that was a bit of fun that managed to lose all that fun when it hit home consoles. The idea of this 3D driving game hitting the Super Nintendo made sense, especially with the SNES having the Super FX chip to push those polygons, but this wasn't the case. The team never bothered to use the chip and thus we ended up with one of the most choppy games ever released on the SNES.

The limited graphical output killed all the enjoyment the game had to offer. Things were already pretty bare as this was an arcade game, as you could only access three cars and two tracks. One was the Autocroos that let you drive around doing jack-all, and a stunt track that simply didn't work because of the framerate issues the game had. You'd get more action from looking at a flipbook about a car crash.

Street Combat is a terrible fighting game, but one that only gets worse the more you learn about it. You see, in the 90s Nintendo had this habit of not trusting the American audience to get straightforward ports of Japanese games. Street Combat is a complete total conversion of a Ranma 1/2 fighting game. As anime wasn't where it is today, and before an internet to find out about thing, Nintendo decided redo all the levels and characters to fit a more American tone.

Apparently this tone meant a bunch of stupid characters that not even your little brother would like. You played as some Ken looking robot dude against other, even more ridiculous characters that lack any sense of style or substance. At least when it was a Ranma 1/2 game it had a heart and soul, with an established backstory. I mean, it wasn't a good game in its original form, but at least fans would get some fun from it.

As Street Combat the game has nothing of value to offer fighting game fans, or video game fans in general. The US crowd simply saw it as a really crappy Street Fighter 2 knock off with characters that look liked they were done by a twelve year-old who forgot to do his project for art class and just found out it was due tomorrow. The "combat" was really weak, and the kicker was that you could only play as one character with the others only able to be accessed via a debug menu.

Faceball 2000 is what happens when the screensaver from Windows 95 gets turned into a full game. It's really not much more than that, and if you did have Windows 95 you already had a better free game with Hover. How Faceball 2000 got pitched and why on earth Nintendo approved it will always be a mystery. The sort of mystery that just ends in pain and suffering.

In Faceball 2000 you play as a 3D Pac-Man whose goal is to shoot other 3D Pac-Man people. That's it. No, I'm not kidding, that's really it. Well, sometimes the game tells you to "Have a nice day" but other than that is a utter bore of a game. You play in a first-person perspective and slowly float about the levels until you kill enough smiling balls. No story or real reason for this, you just sort of do it because you have to.

As this is a really early 3D game that didn't use the Super FX chip the action is forced into a tiny play-field with a giant HUD taking up most of the screen. Not a huge deal if you play or watch gameplay of the game today, but back with a 20-inch tube TV was considered huge, it was anything but. At the very least the SNES version allowed for two people to got at it, but chances are you'd get bored pretty quickly.

There was never a volume 2. It's always a bad idea to label your game the first of a series, especially when you have no experience in making or marketing video games. Motown Records is a historic record label that helped change the face of music forever. Motown Games was nothing more than some cheap was to milk gamers from their hard-earned money. They only ever released two games (the other could have made this list if we didn't leave out the movie rule) and both are considered some of the worst the Super Nintendo ever got.

RapJam: Volume One is quite the mystery. Not because there is an interesting story to dig through, (there isn't) but because the game makes no sense whatsoever. On paper the game should have been an easy win. Clone the gameplay of NBA Jam in a street-ball setting and insert a bunch of rappers that were pretty big at the time. It really does seem like a slam dunk of a video game, but the company simply had no idea how to create a video game.

The biggest offender in RapJam: Volume One is that the game has no music while you play. It's almost painful to think that a famed record company, using world-famous rappers forgot to incorporate music into their video game. It's amazing that the only sounds in the game are the bouncing of the ball and the occasional clapping of the crowd. If you can't sleep playing a game of RapJam: Volume One is better than any sleeping medicine. The game was also developed by Mandingo Entertainment, so there's that.

Frogger doesn't often come up when talking about the SNES and maybe that's a good thing. Sure, the Super Nintendo had a number of classic arcade ports, mostly notably in this conversation Ms Pac-Man, but Frogger just made no sense. This isn't some early SNES title and, in fact, is the last official Super Nintendo game released for the system. Not only that, but it's also one of the worst games to hit the system as nothing more than a cheap cash in.

This release came around when Frogger was rebooted in 3D for the Sony PlayStation, but for whatever reason they decided to create a version for the Super Nintendo. There was, of course, no way the 3D Frogger would work on the console, so they simply recreated the classic arcade game. You get one screen and simply play Frogger over and over again until you question you reason for existence.

The game takes zero advantage of the Super Nintendo hardware and looks like a cheap mobile offering. And we aren't talking some smartphone offering, instead we are talking about the ones you'd get on your old flip-phone done in Java. The game hit the market in 1997 and was a really sad way to say goodnight to the Super Nintendo.