On one hand, we're always sad to see undeserving people out of work, especially when the executives responsible for their sudden unemployment get to float gently away on a golden parachute.

On the other hand, Acclaim's games have caused us a lot of misery over the years. Oh, not everything they've made (or published) has been bad, and in fact we were all quite looking forward to upcoming bullet-hell shooter The Red Star. But when Acclaim made a bad game, it was really bad. And so today we say our farewells to Acclaim with a fond look back at the worst of times we've shared.

The first Turok game, back in the primordial days of the N64, had its moments. At least until you grew tired of respawning dinosaurs bursting out of the fog. And god, the jumping puzzles. But it was kind of OK, back in 1996.

The series started a serious nosedive with the crash-happy sequel and plummeted downward from there. The most recent -- and final -- Turok game wasn't necessarily the most awful (that dishonor goes to those terrible Game Boy Color versions), but it was definitely the most pointless. Shooters have become really good in recent years, but Turok never seemed to progress beyond its clumsy N64 debut. The "Evolution" subtitle was probably supposed to indicate the series was making a bold leap forward. Unfortunately, though, the actual gameplay seemed more like evolving an extra toe when what was really needed were wings and razor-sharp claws. No wonder the series went extinct.

Acclaim's bread-and-butter during the 16-bit era was the "bitterly fun-free comic-based scrolling brawler" genre. Quite a few attempts were made to drag that tired beast into the PlayStation's 32-bit world, none of which were particularly good. But none were as bad as Fantastic Four, Acclaim's effort to keep the Final Fight clone on life support using a comic series whose relevance ended sometime around 1982. Acclaim, it seemed, was not e for the PlayStation's brave new world -- although Sony greenlighted the game anyway, apparently because someone in the approval department had issues with other people's happiness.

Think of this as the early prototype for X-Men Legends. Except that instead of being the model for how the upcoming game should be made, it serves as a stern warning for how it absolutely should not turn out. Although the characters in this top-down adventure did vaguely resemble ugly versions of Marvel's mutant heroes, we'd like to think that the real X-Men could have performed more impressive feats. Like shooting at diagonal angles, for one. And not dying at the hands of endless swarms of generic bad guys. That sort of thing.

How did Acclaim let go of the World Wrestling Federation license? WWF Warzone and WWF Attitude were titanic hits, capitalizing on the late-'90s pro wrestling fad with the first successful American-made 3D wrestling games, and so of course, Acclaim let the property slip through its fingers into the hands of THQ, which promptly locked it up for eternity and still makes millions off sweaty man-grappling each year.

A three-way deal saw THQ grab the WWF license from Acclaim, while passing the rival WCW license to Electronic Arts. Acclaim was left the odd man out, and so they signed up the odd man out in the pro wrestling business: Paul Heyman's Philadelphia-based Extreme Championship Wrestling, which rose to minor fame and middling cable-TV exposure on the strength of the same mix of misogyny, foul language, and chaotic violence that the WWF would later make far more money with.

Maybe a good ECW game could have been made, but Acclaim's Hardcore Revolution wasn't it. The Austin team's wrestling engine looked like hell in comparison to far better efforts from Japanese developers, and Acclaim's deal with ECW neatly coincided with the promotion's final collapse. ECW lost its TV deal and sold out to the WWF, and Acclaim was left holding the bag.

The Crow films were beset by problems, the most tragic of which was the untimely death of Brandon Lee due to careless technicians. This game, based on the ill-conceived cinematic sequel, wasn't that bad. But lord knows it certainly wasn't good. Another in a long line of Acclaim comic properties which somehow reduced heroes as diverse as Iron Man, Invisible Girl and Venom to walking left to right punching endless waves of identical thugs, City of Angels was pretty much the same thing. Except darker and with uglier graphics. And, of course, based on a movie that really should never have been made.

In contrast, the best the US side of the company could come up with was a guy who camped out in front of a store a few months in advance of the release of Turok: Evolution. And he even gave up after a while (probably from all the ridicule he suffered). Well, they did offer to pay someone $10,000 to name their baby "Turok," but we never bothered to follow up on how that one worked out, because it was just too depressing.

So for lowering the bar for human dignity, we tip our hats to Acclaim's European marketers. Thanks for making our species just a little stupider all around. We'll miss you guys.