 Hi there, a couple months ago I took a look at some games that had some weird, confusing or just plain awful box art to reveal that the games themselves are actually half way decent and worth a playthrough. This time around let's take a look at the opposite, games with cool looking covers and titles with accompanying games that are, uh, not so good. A great example of this is Captain America and the Avengers. This is some kickass original art here with lots of movement and action featuring recognizable characters. I mean, come on, it's the Avengers. There's no way this game can be bad, right? Oh yes it can. This was a botched port of the arcade game developed on the SNES by Mindscape, who were responsible for some of the worst games on the system, like Determinator. This game is such cheap, lazy crap, beat them up with nothing but damaged loops where you get trapped over and over again. So annoying. If you want to play a much better version of this game, play Captain America and the Avengers on Sega Genesis, or better yet, just play the arcade game. Outlander was originally developed as a video game adaptation for the film Road Warrior starring Mel Gibson, a great idea for a game since Road Warrior would make for great video game fodder. However, Mindscape was behind this one too, and they lost the license midway through development and had to change the name to Outlander. The cover, while being an obvious rip-off, shows what could be a promising game, but this might have been a case where the rights were pulled once they saw how bad this game looked. The driving stages are a good idea in theory, like being able to shoot out of either window using the L and R buttons, but the gameplay is executed very poorly. The frame rate is awful, and the gameplay is like you're driving under water, and the side-scrolling stages, oof, yeah, this game is not good. It's meant to imply that the guy standing in the cover is the Road Warrior, but in this case, it's if the Road Warrior were played by Bronson Pinchot. Here's Super Godzilla, and yeah, it's not going to take a rocket scientist to figure out a cover for a Godzilla video game. Just have Godzilla doing Godzilla things, and hey, let's throw in two fire-breathing dragons on there, too. That is incredibly badass looking. So conventional wisdom would have you believe that you play this one as Godzilla, causing all sorts of chaos and destruction, but not really. Instead, it's this awkward split-screen where you're clumsily shuffling around the city, being interrupted with these dialogue sequences. It seems that they're trying to replicate the experience of the films, but that's the wrong approach in my opinion, and it doesn't help that the battles themselves are so painfully slow. I'm told that this game does pick up once you have the option of playing as Super Godzilla, but I mean, you still have to suffer through the first half of the game. So no thanks. Next, we have Cyber Spin. All right, some sweet combat racing, a jet-powered car and a huge explosion. Or how about none of those things? Cyber Spin has a classic case of an 8-bit game refitted to a 16-bit platform at the very last second. Everything about this game screams NES. Not that there's anything wrong with NES games, of course. It's just that, you know, when I'm playing a Super Nintendo game, I'd like it to look, play, and feel like a frickin' Super Nintendo game. The controls here are so oversensitive to the point that the game punishes you for going too fast. Yes, a racing game that discourages speed. Doesn't that sound fun? OK, maybe we should simplify things even further. How about Gun Force? It's a bunch of robots shooting guns. It is a force of guns. You cannot possibly screw this one up. And, ah, jeez, it's another one of those running guns with floaty jumping and running like you're trying to waddle through quicksand. It's less of a running gun and more of a jogging gun. Gun Force isn't that bad. It's just painfully mediocre. And it's a really short game, too. So it turns out those robot soldiers on the cover may have just been stormtroopers trying to hit the broad side of a barn. Next, there's Skull Jagger, Revolt of the Westikins. Now, I have to admit, this game isn't bad at all. It's actually pretty decent. But this cover is a lot better than just decent. It's freaking awesome. And this giant evil dude looks like a cross between Sigat from Street Fighter II and one of those giant skulls that float around in Actraiser. Plus, you've got your hero fighting an enemy soldier plus the bright colors and the great title. What's not to love here? The game itself is fine. It's a good enough action platformer, although the art style they were going for here falls flat and makes the game look cheap, especially the dialogue scenes where you only see a shot of the island with text underneath. It turns out they decided on putting most of the story and the cool visuals into the instruction manual, which is a whopping 80 pages long. It's a really cool book that'll have to get its own video someday. I just wish they could have put some of that in the game itself. Let's look at Best of the Best Championship Karate, featuring a guy getting kicked right in the face. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. But this is one of those cinematic style games where the emphasis is put more on smooth sprite work, which is nice looking, but that's the focus rather than the combat itself. There is some interesting stuff here like customizing your own moves, but come on, man, I just wanna play as Danny Bonaducci kicking Jon Stossel in the face. Yeah, that's right, I'm doubling down on Jon Stossel mentions. Hey, it's probably the most that guy's been talked about in like 20 years. Next, there's Brandish, and man, oh man, I wanted to play this game for the longest time, ever since I first saw this game for sale at Toys R Us way back when. The thing is, I never, ever saw this game for rent anywhere, so I never got to play it until much, much later. So in my head, I always had this vision of an anime art-styled adventure RPG, and yeah, what in the hell is going on here? Brandish is one of the most disorienting games ever. You try and move around, but instead, you're actually rotating the room itself. This game is more of a dungeon crawler but with an overhead viewpoint instead of a first-person perspective, and it's just so incredibly clunky. To the game's credit, the story here is pretty good, but man, I can't help but think of Brandish as a huge disappointment. If you wanna play a Brandish game, you're better off with the PSP remake. GD Lean is an interesting piece of Super Nintendo history. It was meant to be ported over to North America as one of the system's first localized RPGs, if not the first. It was even pictured as one of the early, upcoming SNES titles in a Super Nintendo Preview issue of Nintendo Power, and the cover looks pretty damn cool. It's hard to go wrong with the main hero here alongside his friends fighting some hideous-looking monsters. But sadly, GD Lean never got localized, and to this day, it hasn't seen a finished English translation because, well, it's just not very good. It's based on a light novel series which was eventually made into an anime, but the game is just so rough around the edges, the encounter rate is ridiculous, the user interface is cumbersome, and you can just find way better than this game. I also want to mention a Super Nintendo game that was made within the last couple years, Unholy Knight. Wait a minute, what? A new Super Nintendo game, and it was made by the people who worked on games like King of Fighters and Samurai Showdown? And check out these badass-looking fighters you get to play as, this looks awesome. But unfortunately, Unholy Knight is a sloppy mess. This game looks like it was made for Sega Saturn but crammed onto a Super Nintendo cartridge instead. The framerate is awful, so the gameplay is choppy beyond belief, so don't let those giant physics-defying anime boobs fool you. Unholy Knight is not worth picking up. Finally, we gotta talk about my old nemesis again, Bill Ambeer's Combat Basketball, just because the notion of combat basketball sounds cool. It seems like that idea would be perfect for a video game. We've seen it before to an extent in games like Our Trivals, and that was a couple of years before NBA Jam hit arcades, so hey, the opportunity was there. But instead, this game adopted an overhead bird's-eye view where you can't tell the players apart, and the game utilizes a grand total of two buttons, one to shove and one to pass. Well, wait a second, shouldn't there be a button to shoot? Yes, there should. But instead, the game has you throw a pass in the general direction of the basket to shoot. It's just awful. I think I'd rather play Pete and Kvilja's Combat Baseball or Bubby Brister's Combat Football before touching this game again. All right, that's all for now. I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a good rest of your day.