Any thoughts on the LJN company?
 

It's the company with the rainbow logo on it.

They made a bunch of stinkers like X-Men for NES, Spider-Man for NES, Wolverine for NES, Bill and Ted for NES, Beetlejuice for NES, Crash Test Dummies for SNES and others including Friday The 13th for NES.

There is gold at the end of their rainbow only a pot of pigcrap.

I thought Friday the 13th wasn't that bad.

But, yeah, the rest were terrible.

It stands for Laughing Joking Numbnuts and is the number one most hated company of the AVGN.

And AVGN must be Acid Vodka Gulping Numbnuts.

I....That's not really funny, sir.

Yeah... I know.

Bad joke for a bad company, I guess.

I never saw/played a good LJN game. They were terrible.

They were bought by Acclaim in 1990. That should show you their level of quality right there.

Unfortunately, I played a number of LJN games as a kid and was always frustrated by them.

Having said that, AVGN's hatred for them, and how he displays this, is pretty entertaining.

That Bill and Ted game isn't too bad... at least I remember it being kinda fun.

Actually, looking over a list of games they did, I really liked Maximum Carnage back in the day. The only thing I thought that it could have used, was two players.

They did rectify that in the sequel, Separation Anxiety, but that game was trash in comparison.

I may be wrong, but I believe LJN was more-or-less just a "front" to publish additional games for Acclaim. Back in the day, monopolistic Nintendo had a limit of how many titles a year a company could produce for the NES, in the interest of "quality control" (I believe it was five titles max). Some companies got around this by publishing games under more than one name, Konami/Ultra is probably the most famous example of this practice.

I was just about to mention that before you went on ahead. :P

The only good game LJN made was Spiderman and Venom: Maximum Carnage. Very good scrolling beat-em up game.

Well, yeah, considering the fact that LJN also never did any development in-house to my knowledge. They were all either done by Acclaim proper or farmed out to someone else.

Acclaim also had Arena and Flying Edge, if I recall.

Yup, I remember Acclaim's Arena and Flying Edge labels too. I'm not sure what was up with those--I believe they came into being after Nintendo was more-or-less legally forced to allow publishers/developers to make as many titles, per year, for their consoles as they wanted. I seem to recall a lot of Game Gear games were Flying Edge and Arena for some reason. There are doubtlessly various legal loopholes a corporation can take advantage of if they have a bunch of smaller businesses under their wing publishing stuff--maybe Acclaim got some kind of big tax break or something out of having those multiple labels.

Call me crazy, but I also seem to remember that LJN were the ones that released the original Thundercats action figures. Maybe they had some license rights that Acclaim wanted to produce games for? Could be that's how they ended up in bed together.