6. ClayFighter 63 1/3
After finding some success at retail with a couple of middling ClayFighter games during the 16-bit fighting game boom, Interplay figured there was enough demand out there for a next-gen sequel. ClayFighter 63 1/3 supposedly sold well, but no one considers it to be classic now. The gameplay is slow, the levels are drab and uninspired, and most of the humor has aged like milk.
Really, the only notable thing about the game is that a slightly improved and expanded edition, ClayFighter 63 1/3 Sculptor’s Cut came out a year later as a Blockbuster exclusive. Because of its rarity, it can sell for thousands of dollars complete. N64 collectors go nuts for this game, but anyone who thinks a game selling for that much must be good is in for a rude awakening. The N64 was full of bad fighting games, and yet, somehow, ClayFighter tops them all in terms of sheer crappiness.
5. Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
This one hurts, because in theory, a beat ‘em up based on Return of the Joker (still one of the very best Batman films) could have been fantastic, but a short development time and low budget crippled this game before it even had a chance. Return of the Joker is laughably unbalanced. For some reason, Terry McGinnis moves as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog, and while the ability to switch between multiple bat suits is cool in theory, all you really need is the defensive suit that can even make short work of even the final boss in just a few seconds.
The game doesn’t even make much use of the license. The graphics are barely passable, and the music sounds like it was pulled straight from the N64 sample library. Oh, and the whole awful mess can be beaten in about 30 minutes. Terry McGinnis deserves so much better.
4. Carmageddon 64
On PC, Carmageddon was one of those guilty pleasure games of the ‘90s that relied more on the novelty of ultra violence than actual great gameplay. It was just good, dumb fun running over pedestrians and watching them blow apart into gory chunks, even if the game didn’t have a ton of staying power. That’s all anyone wanted from the N64 port: running people over. And Carmageddon 64 (another pile of garbage stuffed into a cartridge from Titus) couldn’t even get that right.
The pedestrians in this version are replaced by zombies, and if you run them over, there’s a brief, unsatisfying animation of flickering green pixels. That could maybe be overlooked if literally anything else about the game was remotely fun, but it’s not. The controls are sloppy, the frame rate is barely better than a slide show, and the graphics are so bad that you could mistake this for an SNES title running off of a Super FX chip. And that’s being generous.