The Worst N64 Games Ever
Were you lucky enough to avoid playing the worst N64 games?
More than two decades after its final official release, the Nintendo 64 is widely regarded as one of the company’s better consoles. Sure, the N64 saw plenty of controversy in its day. It never sold as well as the PlayStation, and sticking to the cartridge format while Sony and Sega moved on to CDs meant many developers shunned the console due to technical hurdles and its higher production costs. While the N64 never had a huge library of games, at least it had classic titles like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda; The Ocarina of Time, and GoldenEye 007.
But the N64 library wasn’t all hits. Along with the greats, the console saw quite a few terrible titles. Like, really bad. These are the 10 worst N64 games ever.
10. Olympic Hockey ‘98
Soon after its 1996 launch, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey hit the N64. It wasn’t a perfect hockey game, but it was a decent enough recreation of the sport, with solid graphics and surprisingly fun four-player action. A sequel that saw minor changes followed the next year. But then, Midway went back to the well one time too many, with even less effort.
Olympic Hockey is just Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey ’98 with different box art and team colors. Seriously, that’s it. Virtually nothing else has changed. For all intents and purposes, it’s a reskin that Midway charged full price for, without any warning to unsuspecting consumers. Most reviewers called out this embarrassing practice at the time, but it was so brazen and lazy, that it’s still worth shaming now.
9. WCW Backstage Assault
In 1998, EA gained the rights to make games for WCW when the wrestling promotion was still kind of a big deal. Their first effort, WCW Mayhem, wasn’t as good as the legendary THQ wrestling games that came to define the N64, but it certainly showed some potential and was even the first North American wrestling game to feature backstage fights. Unfortunately, EA took all the wrong feedback from focus groups and decided that the sequel should feature nothing but these backstage brawls.
That’s right, someone thought it would be a good idea to make a wrestling game that didn’t actually feature any action in a wrestling ring. The final result didn’t even make for a very good fighting game. WCW Backstage Assault is just a clunky, ugly mess, much like WCW itself at the time the game came out. The company was bought by WWE just three months later, saving wrestling fans from further awful WCW games.
8. Blues Brothers 2000
Literally the only person who wanted a years-too-late sequel to The Blues Brothers after the death of John Belushi was Dan Aykroyd. Even he (probably) didn’t want a video game based on that movie. Seriously, why does this game exist? The Blues Brothers movies don’t exactly have a ton of set pieces that lend themselves to a game, and there’s never been a huge demand for merchandise. But, as we’ll see more of on this list, publisher Titus Interactive made a lot of horrifically bad business decisions in the late ‘90s.
The game itself (which came out two years after the movie’s release) doesn’t even have much to do with the franchise. To unlock the final battle, you need to collect instruments and notes through various levels that include… a graveyard and swamp. Not exactly classic settings from the films. Titus could have thrown almost any license into this game, but they went out of their way to find one that almost actively pushed players away. The game is mercifully short, but there’s no reason to play it to begin with.
7. Daikatana
Daikatana was infamously announced with a print ad declaring “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch.” Coming off the heels of massive successes like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, it seemed like a safe bet that the legendary designer’s next game would be able to back up that level of confidence. But we were all so, so wrong.
Plagued by development issues and delays, the PC version of Daikatana was blasted by critics and gamers alike upon release for its bland level designs and boring gameplay. And the N64 version, with fewer enemies and dumber AI due to technical constraints, is even worse. More than two decades after its release, Daikatana is still little more than an industry punching bag, and rightfully so.
6. ClayFighter 63 1/3
After finding some success at retail with a couple of middling ClayFighter games during the 16-bit fighting game boom, Interplay figured there was enough demand out there for a next-gen sequel. ClayFighter 63 1/3 supposedly sold well, but no one considers it to be classic now. The gameplay is slow, the levels are drab and uninspired, and most of the humor has aged like milk.
Really, the only notable thing about the game is that a slightly improved and expanded edition, ClayFighter 63 1/3 Sculptor’s Cut came out a year later as a Blockbuster exclusive. Because of its rarity, it can sell for thousands of dollars complete. N64 collectors go nuts for this game, but anyone who thinks a game selling for that much must be good is in for a rude awakening. The N64 was full of bad fighting games, and yet, somehow, ClayFighter tops them all in terms of sheer crappiness.
5. Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
This one hurts, because in theory, a beat ‘em up based on Return of the Joker (still one of the very best Batman films) could have been fantastic, but a short development time and low budget crippled this game before it even had a chance. Return of the Joker is laughably unbalanced. For some reason, Terry McGinnis moves as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog, and while the ability to switch between multiple bat suits is cool in theory, all you really need is the defensive suit that can even make short work of even the final boss in just a few seconds.
The game doesn’t even make much use of the license. The graphics are barely passable, and the music sounds like it was pulled straight from the N64 sample library. Oh, and the whole awful mess can be beaten in about 30 minutes. Terry McGinnis deserves so much better.
4. Carmageddon 64
On PC, Carmageddon was one of those guilty pleasure games of the ‘90s that relied more on the novelty of ultra violence than actual great gameplay. It was just good, dumb fun running over pedestrians and watching them blow apart into gory chunks, even if the game didn’t have a ton of staying power. That’s all anyone wanted from the N64 port: running people over. And Carmageddon 64 (another pile of garbage stuffed into a cartridge from Titus) couldn’t even get that right.
The pedestrians in this version are replaced by zombies, and if you run them over, there’s a brief, unsatisfying animation of flickering green pixels. That could maybe be overlooked if literally anything else about the game was remotely fun, but it’s not. The controls are sloppy, the frame rate is barely better than a slide show, and the graphics are so bad that you could mistake this for an SNES title running off of a Super FX chip. And that’s being generous.
3. Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue
Look, if a game is obviously made for kids, you try to cut it a little bit of slack. Even if you keep the target audience in mind, though, there’s no defending this abysmal take on the Power Rangers franchise.
Lightspeed Rescue is a 3D action game with on-foot and vehicle segments, but after seeing the on-foot segments in action and the various horrendous animations completely unlike any known humanoid, you’ll wonder why the developers didn’t focus on the marginally better vehicle section. Even when you’re driving or hovering around, the 3D graphics look like they were thrown together in a week. And the entire hour-long ordeal is occasionally punctuated by comic book-style art that were apparently assigned to an intern to draw in Microsoft Paint. This is a master class in a company quickly pushing out slop and coasting on the license.
2. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero
The late ‘90s were a rough time for the Mortal Kombat series. Many fans were turned off by the new characters and mechanics in Mortal Kombat 3, and the franchise, which had built its reputation largely on digitized actors, hadn’t found its footing in the world of 3D just yet. Amidst these turbulent times, Midway decided that what the world needed was an action game starring Sub-Zero. In theory, that sounds kind of cool. No one was happy with the game we ended up with.
The main problem with Mortal Kombat Mythologies is that it tries to be a sidescrolling action game, but it still plays like a Mortal Kombat fighting game. It just doesn’t work, especially when the additions to this formula are extremely cheap deaths and a button solely dedicated to changing which direction you’re facing. After all these years, I’m not even really mad about how the game turned out; just deeply disappointed.
1. Superman 64
There was never really any doubt that Superman would top this list. It is unquestionably the worst game on the N64, and quite possibly the worst video game ever made.
If you’ve somehow avoided hearing about it before, here’s a quick rundown: besides the almost obligatory poor production values and clumsy controls, the game almost goes out of its way to make Superman himself as lame and unfun as possible, with abysmal (and barely sensical indoor sections), and a requirement that you fly through floating rings in the overly foggy outdoor sections.
To be fair, Titus (as bad as they were at making video games) apparently did have good intentions with Superman. In the intervening years, it’s come out that new incoming executives at Warner Bros. apparently hated that the deal had been made, and then went out of their way to complicate development, making arbitrary demands like that the entire game take place in a virtual version of Metropolis. But even keeping all that in mind, it’s shocking how bad the final game turned out. But the real shame of Superman is that it was so bad that it seems to have put off developers from even trying to make new games starring the Man of Steel. Publishers have only released four titles starring Superman (with the last being in 2006) since this game stunk up store shelves. It takes real talent to create something so terrible that no one else even wants to attempt to make a game based on one of the most popular characters in the world.
Written by
Chris Freiberg is a freelance writer and attorney (but not the cool Phoenix Wright kind) living in the Chicago area. His work has previously appeared in…