The 10 Worst Fighting Games

If you come to this site often (and we hope you do), then there’s something you just gotta know about us. We. Love. Fighting games! Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Soul Calibur, we eat that shit up, man.

In fact, we’ve been playing fighting games for so long, it feels like performing ultra combos and advancing guards is wired in our DNA. We’re dead serious. We BLEED for this genre.

That said, having played so many great fighters in the past, we’ve come across some bad ones, too. Some REALLY bad ones. Shaq-Fu bad (whoops, guess you know one of our picks). This is a list of the worst fighting games ever made. Shoryuken? Shoryucan’t!

Boy, are we glad we got a Kinect. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to play this piece of shit. Maybe it’s the unresponsive movements that we hate about it. Maybe it’s the laughable dialogue between the combatants when they’re pounding away at each other that we despise (“I shoulda worn my helmet”).

Or maybe, it’s just the fact that it’s one of the blandest fighting games we’ve ever played in our entire live. Whatever it is, this game lands right in at number 10, just edging out Pit Fighter and the Fight Club video game. Fighters Uncaged, you must be proud.

You know how like, when you were younger, a game would come out for one of your favorite shows and it sucked ass. But since there were no other games like that back then, you forced yourself to like it until one day, you actually DID like it. Well, Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate 22 was not that game.

Sure, we tried to enjoy it, but we couldn’t. We just couldn’t. It was impossible. The graphics were pretty cool at the time, and we loved the idea of playing as Goku, Trunks, and Hercule (Mr. Sataaaan!), but everything else about it was piss poor going on disastrous.

The control was ass, the action was yawn inducing, and battles mainly consisted of you charging up and shooting energy blasts from the air, which really sucked. It didn’t do the DBZ name justice and no game did until the Budokai series arrived much later. Legendary magazine, EGM, had this to say about the game: It’s like “someone crapped in a jewel case and passed it off as a game.” No truer words were ever spoken. Ultimate Battle 22 is a total 0.

Nineteen ninety-four was a big year for Double Dragon suckatude. That was the year that both the horrendous Double Dragon movie came out, (starring Party of Five and T-1000) and also the year that this piece of garbage fighting game was released.

Based mainly of the ridiculous cartoon series that was also in syndication at the time, Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls is offensive because they took a great beat-‘em-up franchise (though, DD 3 was pretty awful, too), and turned it into a lousy, Street Fighter knock off that wasn’t worth existing.

How could a franchise so awesome sink so low? We don’t know, but this game is probably the worst in the series. It was really that boring. Because of this game, we’re GLAD this former beat em up franchise is dead. Streets of Rage was better anyway.

Sonic the Hedgehog must have the most loyal fanbase in the entire world. Devotees of the blue blur will stick with him for well over a decade of trash for just ONE good game. But Sonic the Fighters was not that game.

This fighter was incredibly easy (press punch, punch, punch, until you’ve beaten the game) and it wasn’t fun in the slightest. Our main problem with the game though was just how short and stubby the characters were. How was that enjoyable?

Their attacks felt like dandelion tufts colliding with the wind. And seriously? Sonic in a fighting game (that isn’t Smash Bros.)? Seriously?...Seriously? That’s probably one of the worst ideas for a fighting game ever. That’s like putting Shaquille O’ Neal in a fighting game and having him battle against a mummy and other weird, other-worldly creatures. It just doesn’t make any sense, man! Oh, and speaking of Shaquille O’Neal…

Many of you might be surprised that this isn’t the number one worst fighting game of all time. It certainly lands itself ON a lot of number one worst fighting games of all time lists. But here’s the thing.

Yes, Shaq Fu stars Shaquille O’Neal doing martial arts. Yes, the hit detection is God awful, and, yes, did we mention it stars Shaquille O’Neal doing martial arts? But while it was totally ass to play and difficult beyond measure, it’s also sort of become a piece of cult video game history.

In that way, it’s a popular shitty game, and not just a shitty, shitty game. So while yes, it IS terrible. But, in being so bad, it’s carved a place for itself in video game history. It’s like the Troll 2 of video games. It’s so bad, it’s good.

The next five games on this list can’t make that claim. They also didn’t come packaged with a limited edition CD with their stars rapping on them, either (though, you could make the argument that that should knock this game down even lower on this list. But how could you when It’s the BIG SHAQ DIESEL! Uh uh! Hey, Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes.

It was hard choosing amongst Ultra Vortek, Fight for Life, and Kasumi Ninja for the worst Jaguar fighting game, but we’re going to go with the last one mentioned because it’s probably the most famous. And also the worst.

From the character select screen, where you have to walk around to choose your combatant, to the actual fighting, which was such a shameless a rip-off of Mortal Kombat that it should have been called Shameless Rip-Off, everything about Kasumi Ninja blows.

There’s a guy with a kilt who shoots flames out his junk, a ninja named Habuki (orignial!) and terrible fatalities that aren’t even worth the meager button inputs. Oh, and also the Jaguar’s horrendous controller. Seriously, we don’t hate ourselves enough to play this game more than five minutes. We never even saw the third fight.

A major complaint of fighting games is that the characters are usually unoriginal. In Mortal Kombat, all it took was a palatte swap of Sub-Zero and you had Scorpion, Reptile, Rain, etc.

Well, in 3D Ballz, EVERY character is just a palatte swap of different colored balls (oh, we’re sorry, ballz). Factor in that hitting said ballz of your opponent seemed impossible to do—impossible to the point where you didn’t even know you were hitting your opponent at all—and you have the number four worst fighting game of all time. D-d-d-d-d-do ya have it? (Oh wait, that’s guts).

Okay, we HATE fighting games where you can only play as one character. Especially when that character plays like shit. Enter Ultraman: Towards the Future.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We LOVE Ultraman. But this game was just pathetic. The difficulty was up to 11 and the controls made us angry with how crummy they were. Every more in our arsenal seemed to be a jump kick or a missed punch. It was infuriating. There was no rhyme or reason to it. And it was just so damn boring.

Any fighting game that has us nodding off belongs on this list. Even if it’s Ultraman. Actually, ESPECIALLY if it’s Ultraman. Ultraman is the shit. How could they mess him up this badly? Bandai, what the hell happened?

Remember how we said in the Ultraman discussion how we hated games where you could only play as one character? Well, in the story mode of Rise of the Robots, the same is true, and you only get this bland ass blue cyborg character with no personality whatsoever.

His movelist consisted of punching, kicking, and…well, punching and kicking, and he was just so dull to look at. At LEAST the Ultraman game had Ultraman in it. THIS game had nobody. It was clunky, extremely difficult to play and it actually put us to sleep when it originally came out.

Seriously, it put us to f*cking sleep. When we woke up, we returned it to the video store and saw somebody else walk in the store with the exact same game in his hands. He looked grumpy, like he had just woken up. True story.

Okay, we already know what you’re going to say. It’s a hack, leave it alone. Or, it was never meant to be taken seriously. Well, here’s what we have to say: It’s the worst fighting game ever made. Even though this game was never officially released by any company, the fact that it’s out there and you can play gives it a spot on this list, and what a spot it is! It controls like Street Fighter but the moves only work when they want to work and the attacks only hit only when they want to hit.

Oh, and Mario shooting a Hadouken is unsettling. It just doesn’t sit right with us *shivers*. The game features all of your favorite characters, like Kinopio (Toad) and Yossy (Yoshi), and they’re beating the shit out of each other. If there’s one silver lining to all this, and we’re only guessing, but Nintendo probably got a hold of this game and got so angry that they decided to make a fighting game of their own.

And thus was the birth of Super Smash Bros…or, so we imagine. But seriously, this game is the pits. Stay away from it. Stay very FAR away from it.