The 5 Best and 5 Worst Games Based On Cartoons

We’re all adults here at Complex, but we’re not going to lie. We still watch cartoons.

And we’re not just talking about the grown-up fare, like Family Guy or Cowboy Bebop, but stuff for kids, too. Like shows where characters fall down and get anvils dropped on their heads. Don’t front, we’re kids at heart for life.

That said, video games have an in-between relationship with cartoons. Some have been awesome, and some have been awful. Here’s a list of both, starting with the worst.

RELATED: The 25 Greatest Kids Shows From The 90s

The fact that there are SO many sequels to Crazy Castle would lead you to believe that the series is actually good. But no, that’s not true, the series is monotonous and lazy.

How lazy is it? Well, given that the gameplay of opening doors was pretty much the same throughout the entire series and didn’t even NEED Bugs Bunny, the last game in the series, Crazy Castle 5 actually features Woody Wood Pecker instead. And it’s the same exact game. Way to use that license, Kemco.

Though it (kind of) kept the humor of the show, the gameplay was dreadful, especially Brian’s stealthy sections. Peter’s beat-up levels were boring, and Stewie’s shooting sections were yawn inducing. Futurama had better luck with their game.

What a waste of potential. We look forward to the new RPG coming out this year, but putting the South Park gang in an FPS was a bad idea from the get-go. The graphics were good, at the time, but the rest of the game was sloppy and awful. Cartman deserved better.

While the NES was PLAGUED by awful Simpsons games (every last one of them; take your pick), Simpsons Wrestling on the original Playstation is by FAR the worst Simpsons game ever made.

You could mash buttons and win every round and it just played like a mess. It wasn’t even really wrestling. But you know what it was? The Simpsons name slapped on a turd in jewel case. That is all.

If you read our worst fighting games of all time article, you’ll know just how much we hate this game. It’s a catastrophe. We waited years for a DBZ game. YEARS. And what we got was Ultimate Battle 22, a game so incompetent that even our incredibly biased love for the show back in the day couldn’t save it from being thrown in the garbage.

The biggest offense was that they broke our hearts. Yep, that’s what makes it number one. They broke. Our. Hearts.

While not beloved by all, we enjoyed taking our heroes of the “heh-heh’s and the huh-huh’s” across town finding fragments of ticket stubs to go see Gwar. The attitude of the game fit that of the show and we thought it was pretty hard to put down. Heh heh, we said hard.

Yes, Epic Mickey had its strong points, but we much preferred this older game that took us from Steamboat Willie to (back then) modern day times. And to think, God of War creator David Jaffe worked on this game. He must have been calmer back then. Those were the days.

Simpsons and video games have had a VERY rocky relationship together, with more of the games being awful than good. But The Simpsons: Hit and Run hit the sweet spot with its humor and GTA3 style gameplay. We loved it. We still pull it out to this day to play.

After The Simpsons, the Batman animated series is arguably the second greatest cartoon of the 90s, and this game for the SNES was a fitting translation of the excellence from the show.

Your favorite villains are all there and their levels were interesting and fit the tone of each character (We still love that first level with the Joker on the roller coaster). A classic, through and through.

Capcom made a LOT of great Disney related games back in the day, but Duck Tales was their crowning achievement.

The music was amazing, the gameplay was stellar and easy, and it had just the right amount of difficulty and levels to make it satisfying. Greatest cartoon related video game ever? Yep, you bet.