The early 2000s were a major change in the landscape of home gaming consoles. SEGA abruptly discontinued hardware production to focus solely on software development, while Microsoft staked their claim with the brand new Xbox. Sony and Nintendo, however, continued to power through in the next generation of consoles with the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube, respectively.
Sony did have a leg up on Nintendo, however. For starters, the PS2 launched a full year and a half earlier than the GameCube in Japan and North America, forcing Nintendo fans to either sit and wait on their wallets, or jump the gun and grab a PlayStation. The next major shake-up was the idea behind home consoles not only as a games system, but as a home entertainment system as well. PlayStation 2 and Xbox showed their versatility with both CD and DVD functionality, while Nintendo opted for a proprietary, petite-sized disc for the N64 successor.
In the end, GameCube sold the least amount of consoles of the generation (except for the SEGA Dreamcast, as production was discontinued before the GameCube even launched). If that less-than-powerful interior and proprietary features of the system aren’t enough, there are a number of titles that came to the GameCube that are best forgotten. Between bad licensing deals and adaptations that try to take from many of Nintendo’s flagship franchises, there’re dozens upon dozens of bad eggs that spoil the bunch for the console.
Here are 15 of the worst games to ever come out for the Nintendo GameCube.
15 Monsters, Inc. Scream Arena
Why not start with a bad licensed game, right? Monsters, Inc. Scream Arena was designed as a combination of the lore and characters of Disney and Pixar film Monsters, Inc., and a basic game of dodgeball. The objective of each game is to either knock down all members of the opposing team, or by filling the laughter canisters by hurling “laughballs” across the playing field. Like most licensed games, the play arenas are influenced by scenes from the original movie, along with the cast of characters that can be played with up to four players.
The only aspect of Monsters, Inc. Scream Arena that has any bit of integrity is the source material. After that, the gameplay is mediocre, and the amount of content in the game is slim at best. The game consists of only seven different arenas, with a couple more bonus stages and mini-games, should you suffer through the game’s story. On top of that, only five of the thirteen playable characters are available at the start, which adds another incentive to have to keep on playing in order to unlock them all. What makes Monsters, Inc. Scream Arena bad isn’t just its low number of characters and arenas to battle in, but how that amount is reduced even further in an attempt to try and keep people playing this already terrible game.
14 MC Groovz Dance Craze
Along with the new generations of home consoles, the rhythm based dance genre was making headway, both in arcades and in family’s homes. Most of this new movement can be contributed by none of that the Dance Dance Revolution series. With Dance Dance Revolution’s success, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that other companies would want to get in on the craze in an effort to grab a small piece of the pie. What MC Groovz Dance Craze tried to replicate however, was nothing short of a dud.
The biggest knock down that can be given to MC Groovz Dance Craze is its mundane presentation. While Dance Dance Revolution will incorporate music videos into the background, MC Groovz Dance Craze simply gives players two things: the music, and four directional arrows to coordinate to the song. Sure, its Spin play mode adds four diagonal buttons for an increased difficulty, but two of the games five modes in total requires a second beat pad for cooperative and competitive play. Talk about hidden costs to try and market your accessories.
13 Batman: Dark Tomorrow
Who doesn’t love a good Batman game? The current and last generation of consoles gave us incredible hits from RockSteady with the Arkham series. Back in 2003, GameCube had its own try at a popular Batman game with Batman: Dark Tomorrow. The game pits players as part of a rescue mission to bring back Commissioner Gordon, whose being held captive at the overrun Arkham Asylum. As per usual, you’ll go toe-to-toe with some of Bruce Wayne’s more familiar foes, including Ra’s al Ghul.
Unfortunately, the game went through development hell. What was once presented as an open world game in which you could utilize a multitude of Batman’s vehicles, became a linear, stealth-based adventure. In addition, the game came with the usual prerequisites that are bestowed upon nearly all horrible games: bad controls, awkward camera angles, and repetitive missions. But the big one for Batman: Dark Tomorrow is the absence of any hint of how to get the game’s true ending. Unless you found yourself searching the web to find out how to take out Ra’s al Ghul, he would always come out the victor. Not exactly the most appealing of endings for anyone who could put up with all of the technical hiccups throughout the game already.
Originally slated as a GameCube exclusive, Batman: Dark Tomorrow also launched on Xbox. The PlayStation 2 version of the game eventually was discontinued shortly afterwards.
12 Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure
If you could pit a game within the upper echelon of licensed titles, Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure would top that list. The goal of Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure is for the player to travel around the park to partake in a series of jobs and mini-games in order to gain access to the park’s rides and movie quizzes. These latter activities, as you’d expect, are based off of some of the most popular movies to come out of Universal Studios, such as E.T., Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Jaws, and more.
The game loses its hook on players right from the beginning. The lack of customizing your character, for starters, is a turn-off. Once you’re in the park however, the errands you have to run in order to gain access to the attractions are awful. I’m not sure who thought picking up loose trash would be fun thing to do in a video game, but I can tell you it sure isn’t. Running into characters in costumes and shaking their hands doesn’t count as much fun either. Once again, we have another licensed game whose only selling point to get you to buy it is the source material, not the gameplay.
11 Charlie’s Angels
Based off of the first and second films, GameCube’s Charlie’s Angels is a beat ’em up style game consisting primary of melee combat, blunt weaponry, and environmental takedowns. In Charlie’s Angels, the goal of the game is to uncover a mystery of a series of national treasures that have gone missing. The game allows players to switch between each of the Angels as you fight through multiple levels and groups of enemies.
The key problem when it comes to the switching feature is that you can’t go change between Angels while you’re in combat. Also while you’re in combat and navigating through levels, all of the girls are seen wearing swimsuits, which not only causes themes to clash in the game, but is a terrible attempt of sex appeal. Collectibles in the game consist of photos and film reels from Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, which is a bit of a parody of itself, since you could just watch the movie to catch the material there.
It should be no surprise that every aspect of the game has been critically panned, seeing as how GamesRadar currently has the game 79th on their “Worst Games of All Time” list.
10 Aquaman: Battle For Atlantis
As I mentioned previously with Batman: Dark Tomorrow, the peak of critically acclaimed DC based video games is the Arkham series. However, GameCube’s Batman-bust wasn’t the only title from the comic book company that fell flat on its face. Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis sees Aquaman returning to Atlantis in order to save its people and take down Black Manta. There’s no speech or text during combat or traversal, but instead cinematics are presented in comic form with still pictures and text bubbles for characters.
The scary part when you finally get to play the game is how similar it is to Superman 64, and everyone knows how badly that turned out. There’s nothing to gloat about when fighting enemies, and the way that groups of enemies try to attack Aquaman isn’t in the most convincing of ways. Top that with submarine missions that don’t scratch any sort of itch, and the gameplay is universally poor. The idea of having comic influenced cinematics looks cool on the surface, but it unfortunately breaks up the pace of the game…if there ever was any.
9 Pokémon Box: Ruby And Sapphire
You’ll probably call me crazy for having any sort of Pokémon game in any sort of “worst games” catalog. However, this console spin-off for Pokémon’s third generation gets the knock for its lack of practicality. Similar to Nintendo 64’s Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Box: Ruby and Sapphire came bundled in with a Game Boy Advance link cable and memory card. The idea behind the game is that it acts as a storage system for whichever third-gen game you have (Ruby, Sapphire, Leaf Green, and Fire Red titles). A “Showcase” feature is also included that allowed players to create and display game pieces of Pokémon, and the GBA link cable gave players the ability to connect and play their handheld games on TV.
The issue with this “game” is that it’s presented as a super niche add-on that was hard to find right off the bat. There was fairly limited availability in the states, and in Europe the game had to be rebranded due to translation problems. In order to get full use out of the game, players essentially needed to have collected a respectable number of Pokémon to make full use of the title.
8 P.N.03
With Capcom’s P.N.03, players take control of Vanessa Z. Schnieder, a freelance mercenary contracted with taking out a line of berserk robots who in the past, had killed her parents. Despite its apparent parallels to other Capcom properties, the developer intentionally designed the game to avoid similarities to the company’s Devil May Cry and Resident Evil franchises. In order to take out the line of killer robots, Vanessa’s character was designed with acrobatic movements and self producing lethal weaponary (basically, she shoots beams out of her arms).
From a technical standpoint, players who gave P.N.03 a shot probably noticed something right away with the combat: Vanessa cannot shoot and move at the same time. While this leads players to troubleshoot and find different methods of survival, it breaks up the pace of the game a bit. Due to development time constraints, features such as Vanessa wielding actual firearms were cut out, leaving players in control of this strange cybernetic humanoid. If that’s not enough, the game finishes with quite the open-ended conclusion, and in a pre-DLC era, players were left scratching their heads as to what’d just transpired before them.
7 Finding Nemo
Hey look, another game based off of a movie! Finding Nemo does what nearly all movie-based games have done, and that’s try to take the story from the big screen and morph it into an interactive experience. Based off of the 2003 movie by Disney and Pixar, you’ll get to control Nemo, Marlin, and Dory through levels based off of the movies more notable scenes. The game does run on the Crash Bandicoot engine, though its gameplay isn’t as engrossing as those games were to fans.
As always, there’s nothing new to expect with these licensed titles. Aside from those who are huge fans of the source material or game collectors, you could expect to be disappointed with this one.
6 Nickelodeon Party Blast
If you were a fan of classic Nickelodeon cartoons from the 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of throwing all of your favorite characters into a party mashup should’ve caught you’re attention. Eight different characters to choose from, and six different party modes across twenty different stages? What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, apparently. The gameplay is severely unbalanced and broken. Trying to move around the playing field is cumbersome. The audio queues are abysmal. It’s almost as if they tried to make this game as bad as they could. If you ever need your cartoon fix, by all means stay away from this mess and go turn on your TV. Reception was so poor that the PS2 version of the game was inevitably canned, and IGN scored the game with a whooping 1.1 out of 10!
5 Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
Before I ridicule its game adaptation, credit should be given to the cast of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. With the exception of Johnny Depp, every main actor from the movie was available to do the voice over work for their respective characters in the game (James Arnold Taylor replaced Depp). Just like the movie, you’ll have to find the golden ticket to get into the factory before making your way through the weirdness that is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
One big issue that seems to come with movie based games is that they tend to release on or around the same time as the movie they’re influenced by hits the big screen, which can make a game feel rushed or budgeted. 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory falls under that same scenario and in turn, leaves us with a game that is once again all too short and all too easy. With awkward control schemes and super simple missions, the game’s 39/100 user rating on Metacritic is about as respectable as you can image that game would be.
4 Shrek Super Party
What may be worse that a bad movie game is one that tries to take the ideas of a successful series, and fails on all fronts. Enter Shrek Super Party, Dreamworks’ game adaptation of Mario Party, where you’ll get to play as Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and Lord Farquaad in a board game based competition littered with mini-games and what not.
The problem with Shrek Super Party isn’t necessarily the type of game that it is, but the type of game that it tries to be. If you want a multiplayer party game to play with your friends, Mario Party is always going to be the #1 choice. But the attempt to basically copy everything that Nintendo’s flagship party game does falls short at every mark with no glimpse of success.
3 Sonic Riders
After losing the console wars of the 1990s to Nintendo and Sony, Sega pulled out of the hardware business in an effort to focus solely on making games as a third party developer. Shortly after the shift in direction, Sega was putting on games for their then-competitors, as they continued to support the Sonic franchise with a heap of spin-off titles. One of those games was Sonic Riders. While a racing game at heart, Sonic Riders tries its hand with the typical generic storyline of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles in a battle against Dr. Eggman.
Even though its critical ratings may not numerically put in the category of worst GameCube games, Sonic games are always going to be compared to its counterpart, Mario, and in this case specifically, Mario Kart. The fan base is there for Mario, while not so much for Sonic. Sure, Sonic Riders did receive an eventual sequel for the Wii, but the Game Boy Advance version of the game was eventually cancelled. Possibly due to the low sales numbers for a company as large as SEGA (around 920,000 total units sold).
2 Disney Sports Skateboarding
Yet another attempt at a developer trying to use a successful game series as an influence on a new project is Disney Sports Skateboarding. In a game mainly geared towards a younger audience, you get to play as Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Max, or Pete in a number of skate park and downhill jam levels.
The big reason why this game is geared towards a younger audience is the difficulty. The game is amazingly easy, and a skateboarding game that holds your hand throughout isn’t something that can retain players for very long. The 3D environments don’t work well with the level complexity, and the game is technically inferior to other skateboarding games that launched around the same time, most notably Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. If you’re looking to go back and take a crack at some old school skating games, you should settle for some THPS without any second thought.
1 Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly
The introduction of Spyro the Dragon in 1998 by Insomniac established one of the companies most iconic characters from the PS1 generation. Thanks to Ripto’s Rage and Year of the Dragon, along with Naughty Dog’s Crash Bandicoot, PlayStation had established two fan favorites for the Sony family.
Unfortunately, the business side of the industry eventually took hold. After the release of the final game in the trilogy in 2000, Universal Interactive bought the rights for Spyro from Insomniac in an attempt to continue the series, as Insomniac moved onto the Ratchet & Clank series. When Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly released in 2002, the fact that it was a multiplatform title was already enough to leave a sour taste in some people’s mouths (Spyro was my favorite series from the original PlayStation. Therefore, I digress…).
But if that wasn’t enough, the final product clearly looked like a rushed project. Glitches and bugs were common enough for it to get knocked. If that wasn’t the worst of it, the publisher decided to bring back Ripto from the second game without explaining how exactly he returned. The continuation of the Spyro series by anyone else other than Insomniac left too many flaws and too many unanswered questions.
