From the airwaves to the joysticks, these games took popular shows and transformed them into glitchy, boring messes.

The world of video games is a tough place, and developers and publishers need to take any advantage they can get. Creating a game based on an existing media franchise—say, a TV show—is often seen as a way to tap into somebody else’s marketing budget and sell a few more units with less risk. But with that often comes a dip in quality, as fans will accept inferior products if they’re devoted enough. At the very end of the scale are games like these, which took TV licenses and transformed them into truly terrible electronic entertainment.

Reality TV is a scourge on the culture, so how could video games based on reality TV shows be any less? Duck Dynasty was a wildly popular program chronicling the bearded exploits of a family of duck hunting supply manufacturers, but critics claimed that their good ol’ boy image was just for show. The 2017 video game lets you play teenage John Luke Robertson as he hunts ducks, drives through swamps, hunts ducks, catches frogs, hunts ducks, and hunts ducks. The narrative is incoherent, the graphics are terrible, the gameplay is bare-bones, and it loves to play scenes from the TV show in poorly encoded video.

J. J. Abrams’ first breakthrough show seems like it would be a perfect candidate for a video game adaptation. Alias was full of twisty plots, hand-to-hand combat, sneaking, and spying. But the poor 2004 tie-in game managed to bungle just about everything. Stealth action was the hotness in video games in the early 00s, but Alias boasted bizarrely inconsistent AI that had enemies spotting you in total darkness, then flailing around helplessly as you punched them to death. When you weren’t contending with the broken sneaking mechanics, Alias had you solving brain-dead logic puzzles and lockpicking minigames.

Jay Ward’s early 60s animated series Rocky and Bullwinkle was miles ahead of its time, a zippy, clever take on dated tropes that is still funny today. The same can’t be said about THQ’s disastrous adaptation for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Made with the same engine THQ used for Wayne’s World and Terminator 2, it’s a plug-ugly mess with primitive graphics, atonal music, tons of glitches, and unbalanced gameplay. The best thing you can say about it is that the entire game can be completed in five minutes.

Another reality TV show turned mini-game compilation, Sea of Chaos purports to place the player in the role of a far North crab fisherman in the Bering Sea. You crew a boat and take it out to crabbing spots, where you have to play through five different activities that are so shallow a crab wouldn’t even survive in them. When the most fun you’re having is throwing fish crabs on two different conveyor belts, things aren’t good. Oh, and there are massive load times in between each game, just to keep things especially frustrating.

Some TV shows lend themselves well to video games because they’re packed with action and adventure. But what can you do when you find yourself with the license to a hit comedy about a grunting dad who hosts a TV show about home repair? Well, if you’re Absolute Entertainment you make the deranged Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit, which makes Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor fight mummies and dinosaurs to get his new Binford tools back. It almost gets points for weirdness, but they’re not enough to save this clunky 16-bit platformer.

The Sega Master System didn’t have too many TV tie-in games, but considering the quality of ALF, that’s probably a good thing. Based on the NBC sitcom starring a furry alien puppet with a taste for cats, this game was released for Christmas 1989 way before it was ready, against the objections of programmer Kevin Seghetti. ALF must wander the neighborhood finding objects to fix his spaceship, but it’s plagued by wildly inconsistent difficulty, weird hit detection, and some of the most primitive graphics on the system. But it is the only game where you can hit a bat with a log of salami, so there’s that.

It’s impossible to overstate what a media juggernaut Lost was in its prime, spawning obsessed fans coming up with rich, complex theories about what was happening on its mysterious island. So, of course, we got a video game tie-in, the absolutely inessential Via Domus. Fans who bought the game hoping it would give them more insight into their favorite show instead found themselves playing a totally new character who gets so afraid of the dark that being in a cave will kill him. Throw in boring fusebox puzzles and awful stand-in voice acting—the guy who plays Sawyer is hilariously bad—and you’ve got a massive disappointment for fans.

This is a real obscurity, but it’s so stinky it deserves to be noted. Homey D. Clown was a breakthrough character on the 1990s urban sketch comedy series In Living Color, a foul-mouthed, face-painted entertainer with the catchphrase “Homey don’t play that.” In 1993, Seattle-based developers Synergistic Software released a tie-in game for MS-DOS computers, and it’s painful. The game is a graphic adventure of the type that was popular at the time, but it’s devoid of any kind of charm or innovation—just a clown wandering around a generic pixelized city being accosted by identical passers-by asking him to “do tricks.”

Adaptations of game shows are pretty safe territory for developers, but the minds at Gravity-i managed to screw up the Nintendo DS version of Deal or No Deal so badly that it has become the stuff of legends. If you’re unfamiliar with the source material, the Howie Mandel-hosted show had contestants eliminate briefcases that contained random amounts of money or opt to take a guaranteed offer from the “banker.” It’s all luck, no skill. But Gravity-i coded the game so ineptly that every time you boot up the game, the cases are arranged in the same pattern and the million dollars is in case 13. How do you blow something as simple as “random numbers” and still ship the game?

Comedy is a tricky thing to get right in electronic gaming, and regional comedy is even more so. Little Britain was a briefly popular early 00s sketch show from the UK that hasn’t aged well due to stuff like blackface characters. But at the time there was money to be made, so publisher Mastertronic Group commissioned the most low-effort of concepts: a minigame collection. But this is no ordinary minigame collection—each of the activities in Little Britain: The Video Game is either a boring, repetitive button masher or a rip-off of an existing game slathered in edgy humor and inane voice samples.

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K. Thor Jensen is a writer and cartoonist living in the Pacific Northwest. He has contributed to dozens of prestigious outlets, including PCMag, Tested, Clickhole, and Newsweek. His second graphic novel, Cloud Stories, was released in 2017.

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