6 game spinoffs that should never have been made

Occasionally, videogame IP spins-off in to other games that bare little resemblance to their progenitors. sometimes it works well; in the case of Wario, those Raving Rabbids, Super Puzzle Fighter, Metal Gear Rising, Super Mario RPG or that Castlevania spinoff game you never played, Kid Dracula. Sometimes though; they really shouldn’t exist. Here are five such games.

Mortal Kombat: Special Forces (PS1)

Take two of the most uninteresting characters in Mortal Kombat’s history; Jax and Sonya – as members of a special forces team who must track down Kano in a 3D-action brawler with terrible controls. And then remove Sonya leaving just Jax playable and you’ll end up with this, considered by many to be the very worst Mortal Kombat game ever made. Because it is.

Death By Degrees (PS2)

This lesser-known Tekken spinoff features series favourite, the assassin Nina in a game with a premise that sounds good on paper; an action game starring the purple-clad femme fatale. Problem is it went to the future and took Too Human’s clunkly twin-sticked controls and made them worse, and had aeon-long load-times and confusing camera angles.

Bomberman: Act Zero (Xbox 360)

It’s a new generation of consoles, with shinier graphics! Hooray! the obvious course of action here is to take a cute, iconic – if somewhat destructive – character and give him a dark and gritty reboot. That’s what Hudson did with Bomberman:  Act Zero, making the bomber a cyborg slave forced into a televised deathmatch against other cyborgs. That’s really depressing, guys. Boring, too. Not even Michael Bay could manage to make explosions this mind-numbingly dull.

Borderlands Legends (iOS)

Here at Lazygamer we’re pretty much addicted to Borderlands (especially Darryn, who stops working just to redeem shift keys) so we, like many of you, were excited by he prospect of a mobile smartphone version of the game. Until we played it. somehow, 2K china managed to take everything that was awesome about the entire concept and make it the most terribly boring thing we’ve ever played.

Castlevania: Judgement

Take one of the most respected and revered franchises in all of gaming, give its iconic characters an bastardised anime make-over and then turn it in to a waggly, one-on-one motion-controlled fighting game and you’d be left wondering just why Konami even bothered.

Hotel Mario

As you all know, Mario games are something I hold very dear to me – and he’s no stranger to spin-off games. He’s been in pretty much ever kind of genre imaginable; a kart driver, Tennis player, referee – you get the idea. Hell, he’s even been a typing tutor. Somehow though, what Fantasy Factory did with the licence they managed to get for Phillips’ CDi format should be punishable by death. it has the most asinine gameplay ever conceived; Mario and Luigi have to open and shut doors within the hotel within a time limit. that’s pretty much it. Worse though, is the monstrous nonsense they used for the game’s cut-scenes. Here, Feel my pain. They managed to do similar things to the Legend of Zelda – but that hurts too much to even talk about.

Last Updated: August 7, 2013