LJN
| LJN | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
There is no gold at the end of this rainbow.
| ||||||||||||
|
"How many of these games are worthless?! All the LJN ones, I can tell you that, but there are good games here, there are! Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man, but then A BIG FUCKING SHITSTORM HIT IT! A SHITSTORM OF HORRIBLE GAMES! And at the middle of it all, a rainbow! A rainbow of shit! LJN!"
— Angry Video Game Nerd
LJN Toys Ltd. was an American toy company and video game publisher founded in 1970. The company published movie tie-in and TV show-based games mainly for Nintendo consoles since 1987 and was owned by MCA. The company was sold to Acclaim Entertainment in 1990, and published games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy that Acclaim acquired the rights to, as well as getting rid of their toy counterpart. LJN produced the Roll & Rocker accessory and their own console, the LJN Video Art.
LJN was dissolved in 1995 by Acclaim, but not before Jack Friedman, the founder of LJN, founded THQ as his new independent company following the accquisition by MCA in 1990. The brand were often briefly used in some of the subsequent products made by Acclaim, such as Spirit of Speed 1937 (released in 2000). After Acclaim's own demise in 2004, the brand were later used by Hasbro for their reproduction of LJN toys.
List of video games
- Main article: LJN/List of games
Why There Was No Gold at the End of Their Rainbow
NOTE: The first six reasons are from the 94th AVGN episode Back To The Future ReRevisited, colored after the ”Shit Rainbow/Spectrum of Awfulness”. Below the reasons are a game each showcasing them.
- Putrid gameplay.
- Major League Baseball: Poor physics, including terrible fielding, and sometimes the controls suffer from input delay.
- Bad musical abominations.
- Beetlejuice: The music in the game is not based on the movie, instead using original music, which sounds way too silly and peppy for a game based on a horror movie.
- Graphical farts and garlic.
- The Uncanny X-Men: The name is an accurate representation: poor graphics and palette swaps for every character.
- Piss-poor lack of loyalty to source material.
- Back to the Future: Barely faithful at all to the film, mostly in the horrible mini-games.
- "Orange (aren't) you a fucking idiot?"
- Friday the 13th: A confusing to navigate game in which it may seem like you're going the right way, but you may actually be going the wrong way.
- High-stress anger-inducing masochism.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Horrible, slippery driving controls, slow searching, and a time limit to writing down a password after a game over.
- Sometimes LJN didn't even credit the developers at all.
- They are also known for forcing the developers who were developing for them, to rush their games to meet their pitiful deadlines to get the game out while the movie's popularity was sky high, causing their games to be released in unacceptable conditions.
- They also produced the Roll & Rocker which, as shown in AVGN's NES Accessories episode, which barely even works unless you found a rare one that worked.
Put that all together, you got all the colors of the shit rainbow. Hooray LJN.
Redeeming Qualities
- Some of the games they published, including Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage, the 16-bit WWF games, the Town & Country Surf Designs games, the SNES versions of Terminator 2: The Arcade Game and Alien 3, Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and True Lies are actually pretty decent, if not good.
- They've also made the awesome ThunderCats toyline, the first line of WWF action figures, and the popular but controversial Entertech toyline of water guns.
- A few of their games have great music (e.g. Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wolverine and Beetlejuice).
Videos