Worst Home Game You've Played...

[Jeremy Nelson]

Including all versions (board games, video games, Tiger LCD games, etc) what is the worst home game adaptation you've ever played?

My vote goes to The Price is Right DOS game, though it might be so bad that it's downright entertaining. Extra props go to the designer who thought people who bought this game wanted to see a bloody corpse in a Cliffhangers loss.

[PYLdude]

American Gladiators for NES.

I mean, there’s games that aren’t faithful to the source material, and then there’s…this.

[MikeK]

Fun House, with equal disdain for the PC game and the NES game.

What BFG said about Gladiators, applies as much, if not more, to both games.

[Fedya]

You mean there are people who don't want to see a bloody corpse after a Cliffhangers loss?

[BrandonFG]

Fun House, with equal disdain for the PC game and the NES game.

What BFG said about Gladiators, applies as much, if not more, to both games.

*Chris, although now that I'm here I would add the Gladiators physical versions of the show's games. I remember being pretty frustrated by the Eliminator home edition.

/A real treadmill, climbing net, and zipline in our apartment would've been badass tho

[Kevin Prather]

My vote goes to The Price is Right DOS game, though it might be so bad that it's downright entertaining. Extra props go to the designer who thought people who bought this game wanted to see a bloody corpse in a Cliffhangers loss.

And apparently the mountain climber can't get up the mountain on his own accord, he needs an elk to push him up the mountain.

I just watched a YouTube playthrough of this game. A few of the highlights include Credit Card being played with a $20,000 truck as one of the prizes, Range Game played for a $115 necktie collection (good luck stopping that range in time), and One Right Price played for a $23 set of earrings and an $18 hairdryer.

[chad1m]

Press Your Luck: 2010 Edition by Ludia.

They took the time to consult game show fans for the best board setups to use, and the fans responded by linking them to fan sites that showed them the three values in each square. Unfortunately, the developers somehow took that to mean that there were only three different cycles on the board, which gave game players a screen with two Whammies, a screen with seven Whammies, and a screen with zero Whammies.

[Steve Gavazzi]

A few of the highlights include Credit Card being played with a $20,000 truck as one of the prizes

Fun fact, with credit to Scott:  That truck can also show up as a small prize in Cliff Hangers.

Less fun fact:  You can only type four digits in Cliff Hangers, so if the truck shows up, so will the bloody corpse.

[Sodboy13]

IIRC, all the prizes in the Wii PYL game were worth the exact same amount, too.

NES Family Feud had terrible sound and graphics, was extremely slow, and a question database that didn't differentiate between front game and Fast Money questions.

NES American Gladiators at least had some elements of the show. I don't even know what Fun House was supposed to be, other than an existing game the company already had in the pipeline, with some IP slapped on top.

Electronic standalone TPIR was a waste, except hey, fun little Plinko board.

I can't imagine anyone playing the big Plinko board to the included instructions or game material, and the manufacturing problems have been discussed here at length. Awesome when you put a little TLC into it, at least.

[TLEberle]

Fun House for NES was a reskin of a game titled Out of Gas, which I think you can find for the Game Boy.

There are so many examples that were either unplayable in that state, a total non-sequitur or just not fun, but on a personal level $100,000 Pyramid for Sierra was toothachingly frustrating.

I can scarcely imagine what I would have to do to set up the copy of the Fort Boyard home game that made its way to the northwest corner of these United States.

[Dbacksfan12]

My vote goes to The Price is Right DOS game, though it might be so bad that it's downright entertaining. Extra props go to the designer who thought people who bought this game wanted to see a bloody corpse in a Cliffhangers loss.

I’ll give them credit for one thing—they tried to differentiate prizes from different merchants so it wasn’t simply guessing a number.  I seem to recall a faux K-Mart having lesser-valued prizes vs. the ones from the faux Sears.

[PYLdude]

I think most Ludia games could qualify for a worst list.

The worst of them all, I think, is the Pyramid game they made. I mean, holy hell, there is such a thing as too easy and this fell into that category.

[beatlefreak84]

Even though I absolutely agree with PYL on the Wii being godawful, I think I will give this honor to Tiger's Name That Tune handheld:

-The crappy sound chip made it almost impossible to guess some songs
-You had to spell the song title EXACTLY as it was written for the game, spaces and all, or you are counted wrong and lose money.  Any other game I have played where you typed answers had some leeway built in for spelling or spacing, like Jeopardy on the NES.
-You lose the value of tunes for incorrect guesses.  No version of the show penalized you like this and thus incentivized not buzzing in unless you were 100% sure.

It was cool to have a home version of a game show that I never expected to be released in that format.  But, of all the Tiger game show games I had, that was the worst, even though it was the only one I had that didn't require cards or a separate question book.

Anthony

[tyshaun1]

Press Your Luck: 2010 Edition by Ludia.

They took the time to consult game show fans for the best board setups to use, and the fans responded by linking them to fan sites that showed them the three values in each square. Unfortunately, the developers somehow took that to mean that there were only three different cycles on the board, which gave game players a screen with two Whammies, a screen with seven Whammies, and a screen with zero Whammies.

It's amazing that after ALL these years, no professional developer has managed to come close to either Curt King's or Big Jon's homebrew versions of PYL. Ludia was so lazy about their product that they made every single prize worth $4000 in BOTH rounds. And Gamestar's board isn't much better.

[daveromanjr]

This goes way back but on the Apple II the Wheel of Fortune : Second New Edition had a painfully slow walk to Vanna.  It felt like it'd take her forever to walk to where the letters lit up (Queued):