Licensed games

[bgmnts]

So I'm picking up where I left off with Mad Max and I've come to the conclusions it's one of the best licensed games of all time.

Obviously most licensed games are really crap cash-ins that don't really do much new or fun but under the mound of shit there are some diamonds, at the moment I can think of:

Mad Max,
The Warriors,
Scarface: The World is Yours,
LotR: The Return of the King,
King Kong,
The Godfather,
The Incredible Hulk,
The Punisher,
The Thing.

There are actually quite a few decent licensed efforts and I'm pleased with this.

[The Crumb]

Goldeneye is my personal GOAT. Feels like it's somehow detached from the stigma of being a licensed game.
Some of the other Bond games are decent, e.g. Nightfire
Chronicles of Riddick on Xbox
The Marvel vs Capcom games, especially 2
That Dragon Ball Z fighting game a while ago
Spiderman 2
Dark Forces and Jedi Knight
Star Wars Battlefront 2
X wing/Tie Fighter series

[Pink Gregory]

Isn't it so strange that no element of the Warriors game persisted in any subsequent Rockstar game?

Obviously they didn't sustain the license but it was a more than competent level based brawler that could handle co op really well, and so little of that was around at the time or since.

[oggyraiding]

The X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance games (not the Switch one though) are good dumb fun.
Guardians Of The Galaxy is better than it ought to be.
Batman Arkham shit is well received.
Several good Spider Man games.
Toy Story 2.
Bugs Bunny: Lost In Time.
Very recent example, but Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is nice.

Queen: The eYe was not good, but the novelty of an action game based on Queen's music makes it stick in my head.

[JamesTC]

Toy Story 2

Top of the pile. Banger of a 3D platformer.

[Pink Gregory]

Top of the pile. Banger of a 3D platformer.

Getting the green laser power up that makes it go DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Star Wars has a pretty good average, I think. Rose-tinted glasses, perhaps, but I remember Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64 very fondly. I had high hopes for that Squadrons game a couple of years ago, but found it surprisingly boring. Jedi Fallen Order was generic as all getout, but it stands up on it's own merits.

The Marvel vs Capcom games, especially 2

Marvel Vs Capcom 2 and marijuana are the chief reasons I got a 2.2 at university (also, I'm a big thicko). I got the third game recently and found it rather disappointing.

[C_Larence]

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Simpsons Hit & Run
I had a soft spot for the Buffy game on PS2 and repeatedly rented it from my local video store
The Mummy Returns

[Mister Six]

I've picked up Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, although I haven't played it yet. Apparently it's basically just a Yakuza game, so I'm confident in saying that it'll be great.

[Jerzy Bondov]

That guy madhair got me onto Bill & Ted on the Game Boy. Lovely little game, just a fairly simple single screen platformer but really well made.

[beanheadmcginty]

Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 on the Amiga
Frankie Goes To Hollywood on the C64
Micro Machines on the MegaDrive

[Pink Gregory]

I had a soft spot for the Buffy game on PS2 and repeatedly rented it from my local video store

The first one?  I got it recently for the Xbox and I can't beat Spike, who's pretty much the first boss.  Great flying kick though.

[H-O-W-L]

Terminator: Resistance is a newer one that's shit-hot. Got the gameplay of a game from about ten years ago, but so bloody faithful and a good enough game in its own right IMO. Wonky writing and some terrible voice acting, but it's quite fitting for a James Cameron property.

[C_Larence]

The first one?  I got it recently for the Xbox and I can't beat Spike, who's pretty much the first boss.  Great flying kick though.

It was subtitled "Chaos Bleeds", not sure if it was the first game or not.
I still remember a line of dialogue Xander would say whenever you tried to use with an item you couldn't interact with   

"Nada, zip, zilch. The big goose egg"

[lazarou]

It was subtitled "Chaos Bleeds", not sure if it was the first game or not.

Not the first one, that was xbox exclusive. Plays quite similarly but is based quite a bit earlier in the series, is a lot more buffy-centric and has a bit of a darker tone compared to chaos bleeds. I remember enjoying both though.

[Pink Gregory]

I think the first one has more of the actual Buffy cast as voices, think it's everyone but Willow and Buffy herself, which makes you wonder why they would have bothered paying for everyone else.

[MojoJojo]

Robocop 3 on the amiga might be contender for best licensed game to shitty original ratio.

I think now licensed games aren't anymore likely to be shit than oc stuff - license holders see video games as a core part of the franchise rather than just another lunch box to collect a paycheck for.

In the 90s licenses were almost universally terrible. Anyone remember what it was like in the 80s? The only examples I can think of are ET - notoriously bad- and The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy - which was OK, but was a text adventure so barely counts as a video game.

[The Culture Bunker]

The "Yes, Prime Minister" game on Speccy was pretty good. Very text heavy, though I suppose you'd expect that given the source material - the plot was you played as Jim Hacker in the run-up to an election, making various decisions that would affect your poll ratings, with the fall-out being explained as extracts from Bernard and Humphrey's memoirs.

[AsparagusTrevor]

Robocop 3 on the amiga might be contender for best licensed game to shitty original ratio.

It's definitely up there with 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'.

The console versions of Robocop 3 weren't great, they were the bog-standard licensed platformers but the Amiga version was like peeking into the future. 3D polygon world and characters?!

[Malcy]

Scarface: The World Is Yours. Have sunk so many hours into that game, played it through several times and even started playing it again on PC recently but no controller support which is a huge pain when it comes to Coke sales and gang intimidation.

The soundtrack is one of the best in any games as well. I have it in now. A massive amount of great music and a couple of odd choices like a recent, for the time, LL Cool J track and a D12 song from their 2004 album.

Another game with a top voice cast as well.

Robocop Vs Terminator and a massive amount of Star Trek & Star Wars games as well.

[madhair60]

there are loads of great licensed games. hundreds. the stigma is weird, it should be directed at paedophile anime games (literally every single one of them) and wank-shit triple-A sludge fuck.

[letsgobrian]

I've picked up Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, although I haven't played it yet. Apparently it's basically just a Yakuza game, so I'm confident in saying that it'll be great.

It is the only Yakuza game I've abandoned. It's fine up until a point, and that point is the clunky wilderness exploration seemingly built on the taxi racing engine from Yakuza 5.

[Mister Six]

In the 90s licenses were almost universally terrible. Anyone remember what it was like in the 80s? The only examples I can think of are ET - notoriously bad- and The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy - which was OK, but was a text adventure so barely counts as a video game.

The HHGG game was actually written by Adams, as was another Infocom game, the deliberately frustrating Bureaucracy. They were funny, of course, be he wasn't much of a game designer.

I had a Spectrum, which usually got hand-me-down conversions of arcade/Amiga licences, typically from Ocean, most of which followed a minigame-type format in which the odd-numbered levels were rudimentary platformers or side-scrolling shoot/beat-em-ups, and the even-numbered levels were code-breaking, driving, first-person target-shooting or puzzle games.

I caught on pretty fast that most of these were shite, but I did have a copy of RoboCop, which made the odd choice of not letting you pass on to level 2 (a first-person target-shooting level) if you'd run out of ammo. Which I usually had. So most of the time I was left walking back and forth on the screen with bugger all to do until I restarted.

Anyway, good licenced games - Trapdoor was a smart little adventure game with chunky, colourful graphics based on the claymation kids' show of the same name, followed by a sequel, Through the Trap Door.



The bloke who made that, Don Priestley, also made a similarly pretty Popeye game, along similar puzzle-solving lines:



And he made Flunky, which was set in Buckingham Palace, but probably not licensed by the royal family...



There was a Batman video game based on the 1989 film that was more of the Ocean shite described above, but there was also a pretty good action-adventure game called Batman: The Caped Crusader that (I think) proceeded it. It had a neat visual style, with comic-panel-like screens laid over one another, and was basically two games in one, with one side of the tape tasking you with stopping the Penguin, and the other pitting you against the Joker.



There was an even earlier Batman game that I didn't play, an isometric puzzler along the lines of Head Over Heels that starred an adorably tiny and pudgy not-very-Dark Knight. I recall that got some good reviews.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I reckon Ocean are largely responsible for the bad reputation of licenced games. I remember them churning out millions of identikit platformers in the 90s, with just the main character modelled after some film character.

It wasn't all like that though. Jurassic Park on the SNES was something different: a mission based open world thing, that switched to a first person view when you went indoors. No savegame or passwords though, so I never got close to finishing it.