Today's Epic Fail list is a variation on a theme; we're taking a look at things that everyone thought would be epic failures, but turned out to be huge successes, in other words, games, movies and TV shows that manages to succeed in spite of impossible odds.

Crackdown: Originally known as "the game you have to buy for the Halo 3 beta", Crackdown very quickly came into it's own. The day it was launched millions of Halo and Microsoft fanboys rushed stores to get their copy for a Halo 3 beta code. However, the beta wasn't open on day one, so people actually had to PLAY Crackdown to entertain themselves.

They soon discovered that not only is Crackdown fun, but it is a great game. Nothing complicated or high concept, just free-roaming, super-powered, non-stop destruction. It was a thing of beauty. The addition of hop in/out co-op made things even sweeter, and with future downloadable content like new characters, weapons, vehicles, and mini-games, Crackdown quickly moved from a game that everyone wrote off before they had even seen it to a must own for anyone with an Xbox 360. 
--Patrick Roche-Sowa

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Today's Epic Fail list is a departure: The following list of songs fail by being too catchy.

Songwriters aim for a certain amount of hookyness for their tunes, but some have the misfortune of over shooting the mark to the extent that they create monstrous melodies that, once heard, will never leave you head, even though you hate them.

We've collected the most egregious examples below, in no particular order, but feel free to add your own in our comment section. Behold: Epic Fail: Songs That Get Stuck In Your Head!

Chocolate Rain:

This song is viral, literally and figuratively. It seeps into your brain and never gets out, cycling over and over on a continuous loop of baritone and sadness. What's not so bad about this song getting stuck in your head is that it's not some annoying song you hear on the radio, it's Tay Zonday's original music he put up for free on youtube. However, the downside is that no one knows the lyrics to this marathon of a song, and since there's no chorus you end up singing "Chocolate Rain....dah dum dum dah dum dum dum dah dum dah, Chocolate Rain...dah dah dah soemthing something dah nah nah".
--Patrick Roche-Sowa

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It's almost summertime, and that means weenie roasts, vacations and summer blockbusters! Because we love nothing more than raining on parades, please enjoy TheFeed's list of the most epically fail blockbuster movies of all time.

Cloverfield: From the moment it was first advertised, I was really looking forward to Cloverfield, and the days leading up to the movie were fueled with all kinds of speculation as to what it would be. Then, I saw it. And what it would be, and what it is, is a giant, steaming pile of crap.

You kidding me? You can climb up the side of a leaning skyscraper to pull your girlfriend off of a piece of rebar and then ask her to run while gutted but miraculously unhurt only moments later? A monster can swat you out of the sky in a helicopter, but you won’t die from the fall? Really? I mean, REALLY? Also, you didn’t drop the frackin’ camera when the annihilation of millions of New Yorkers began? You held onto it…why? Because you’re self-absorbed and think that people care about what you think about the end of the world? Oh, and the army is going to have you in their possession, and then just sneak you out the back door of an emergency facility, just as long as you don’t break curfew? Gimme a break.

Cloverfield sucked. Yes, the monster was cool, but that was it, and you have to care about characters to care whether or not they live or die, and I just wanted to watch them die. Quickly. FAIL.
--Michael D'Alonzo

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You can’t swing a dead hooker around the gaming world this week without hitting Grand Theft Auto IV. While the Grand Theft Auto series is among the most important (and most awesomest) series in gaming history, it’s not perfect—nothing is. Little annoyances within GTA’s games' nearly flawless worlds--errors that would be unnoticeable in lesser titles--are epically fail because even a little bit of stink sticks out in a rose garden.

Hence today’s topic: Epic Fail: Grand Theft Auto.

Car Surfing: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – This is one of those things that’s passed off as “cool,” when it really should have been passed off as a “glitch.” You know how you can jump onto the roof of a car while it’s still moving, and then the car will continue, as if the driver has no idea that there’s a living person on his/her roof, for as long as the drivers are endlessly, casually driving around the city? You know how, in real life, if there was someone on your car who had tried to pull you and/or hundreds of other people out of their cars on city streets that you’d do anything possible to get him off your car, or at least drive to where cops hang out? Doesn’t that seem lame to you? Yeah, me too.
Probability it's corrected in GTA IV: 90%
--Michael D'Alonzo

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You can't expect Hollywood screenwriters to think of every movie. They gotta come from other sources, and, when the venerable, traditional sources of film's raw material (TV, Novels, Plays, Older Movies) runs out, filmmakers turn to other raw materials.

Below are the most egregious failures in film adaptations in the history of ever. It's personal, not comprehensive, so feel free to add your own in our comments section!

Silent Hill (Based on the videogames)

Step 1: Take a beloved franchise.
Step 2: Take the setting of the game and make everything else up.
Step 3: Throw in Pyramid Head.

This movie is an Epic Fail because it had so much potential. It even had a great start to it, but it’s like the film switched directors half-way through. The ending contained a sequence that basically tried to explain what was going on in a few minutes and I’m not even sure they knew what what going on in this terrible adaptation.
--Brian Leahy

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April Fool's Day is a day to pull pranks. It's a day to get clever and make people think something that just isn't true. It's a day Type B personalities love and Type Aers just can't stand. Many of the gags that happened earlier this week on April 1 were quite amusing. They didn't go too far, they were well-thought out and executed comments on society, or they were just plain harmless leg-pulling. Some of them, however were uninspired, ill-advised, or down right stupid. Here, we present, TheFeed's list of those that disappointed us in a most epic way.


"Kaketaku" - For April Fools, Kotaku did a series of articles about cake under the fake name “Kaketaku”. Now, we love Kotaku, but really? Yes, Portal was great and we all had a laugh at the cake joke, but it’s been done to death already. This joke falls on the side of obvious fake-ness and made many of us roll our eyes. There was no added level of “is it true?” to this one. One article might have worked, but 10 articles about the same joke gets old.
- Brian Leahy

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We all love the guitar, drum and microphone peripherals that came with Rock Band, but the slew of secondary instruments that the makers of the game have released have been a lot less satisfying. Okay, the Rock Band Key-Tar was pretty cool, but did we really need a Rock Band stand-up bass?

Below the cut is a list of the most epic failures in Rock Band extra instruments.

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In honor of the release of Super Smash Bro. Brawl, we decided to cover Fighting Games in this week's Epic Fail. So play nice kids, it's all fun and games until someone starts crying.

I owned this game for less than a single day when it came out back in 2005. Being a wrestling fan, and a wrestling game fan, I was expecting something great from this, especially given the trailers and the graphics. Boy, was I wrong.

The controls were awful. Simply awful. It was impossible to figure out how to play the game, even after reading the manual, and the flow of the game was really bad as well. Matches dragged on for minutes on end, without any way to pin your opponent, the gameplay was really awful, and, in the end, only the intros turned out to look good. In short, this is one epic fail of a fighting game.

-- Mike DAlonzo

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It's happened to all of us. You're playing an incredible game when you stumble upon a level or mission that makes you frustrated or annoyed or possibly even question the fun of the game as a whole. For this week's Epic Fail Thursday, TheFeed would like to welcome you to our selection of the most Epic Fail Videogame Levels of all time. Take note, we tried to avoid levels in downright terrible games, since pretty much all the levels in bad games are fails. This list is comprised of levels or missions from the games that we hold dear, games that, aside from the mentioned levels, would be just about perfect.

Be sure to let us know what you think of our list? Did we miss any epic fail levels from your favorite games? Feel free to expand on our list in the comments section below.

Speeder Bike Race (Battletoads)

Okay, I understand that this game is infamously hard, but it's also a lot of fun - except these levels. You're moving so fast you hardly have time to react to the giant concrete blocks flying at your toad. the only warning you get is the block flashing on the right side of the screen moments before it tries to kill you, and by the time you're halfway through, there are so many blocks coming at you so fast one after the other, the blinking blocks blend into one solid block, defeating the purpose of the flashing block acting as a warning. Yes it's just as annoying as it sounds. Also, you have to duck under some of them. How in the hell do you duck on a speeder bike?

-thepattractive

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Since the dawn of time, Man has dreamed of flying. Also going to school naked. But mostly of flying. While the majesty of man's conquest of gravity is super-inspiring and crap, we'd rather focus on the times when Mans' reach exceeds his grasp and rather than shuffling off the coil of this earth and soaring into the heavens, Man is more like, "oh, crap!" while he hurtles to the ground and certain death and/or humiliation. We're like that.

Please enjoy TheFeed's Epic Fail: Attempts at Flight.

Icarus: The classic, first ,and most epic of all epically failed flyers, mythical Icarus got carried away with the wings he'd created stolen from his pops, and flew too close to sun, melting the wax that held his contraption together, and causing his spectacular crash. Usually seen as a metaphor for man's hubris, I choose to think of the story of Icarus as a cautionary tale about using heat resistant wax when attaching bird wings to your arms. But Kid Icarus on the NES was pretty sweet.
--sjohnson

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Super villainy just doesn't pay off. The social contract of comic books demands that evil-doers who menace Black Lightning or Apache Chief are defeated by the end of the book or the end of the story-line. Even recurring villain favorites are shunted off to Arkham Asylum or forcibly banished back to Bizarro Universe. The absolute best a super villain can hope for is a successful retreat.

But some super villains are so nonthreatening, laughable and just plain dumb that they sink to the bottom of even the loser class of super-villains. So below are the Epic Failures of comicdom villainy. Enjoy!

Big Sir:  Born Doofus P. Ratchet, Big Sir is an enemy of The Flash, and, as far as I know, the only mentally disabled man ever to have owned the title of supervillain. Yep, a group of other supervillains, known as The Rogue’s Gallery, recovered Doofus from a mental hospital, put him in an iron suit, and gave him a weapon, an energy mace, which is not necessarily the best thing to hand a retarded person, but what do I know?

The Flash eventually defeated Big Sir. Probably by pulling a Snack Pak from his backpack and offering it to him.
--mdalonzo

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In past weeks, we've discussed the epic failure of various aspects of videogames, films, television and technology, but today, in honor of St. Valentine's Day, TheFeed will be discussing failures of the heart. Strap in for our list of Epic Failures: Ex Girlfriends...then leave your own terrible dating experience in our comments section!

Bleahy:  Back in college, I had been dating a girl who was generally pretty crazy. Like, if we had a fight she’d get a full on panic attack. Wanting to break up with her, but not wanting to drive her to hurt herself or others, I stayed with her and tried to convince her to get some counseling. She finally saw someone and they put her on some medication. Then I broke up with her. A few days later she came by my house to “give me the things I had at her place”, which ended up being pasta sauce and toilet paper. This is odd, because I wasn’t keeping any sauce or TP at her place. I threw out them out.

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This week, the shining spotlight of Epic Fail Thursday comes gleaming into the pages of the comic books most of us have held dearly to our hearts since our childhood. In other words, here is TheFeed's list of Epic Fail Superheroes, and may God have mercy on your soul.

This week's Fail is a gift from all of TheFeed's contributors clamoring to tell you who are the worst of the worst when it comes to superheroing. Some of the answers might surprise you.

Spitfire and the Troubleshooters - As a kid, I tried to get into comic books. People seemed to like them, and I figured I should get in on the action. So, in the Fall of 1986, with allowance secured inside my trusty Velcro wallet, I ventured down to the corner book shop and picked up issue # 1 of Spitfire and the Troubleshooters. A super hero decked out in a badass hi-tech exoskeleton that looked like a roided-out Master Chief seemed like it would be pretty cool. It wasn’t. Perhaps it was the ragtag juvenile sidekicks dubbed “The Troubleshooters,” who sounded like people you’d call if your VCR was on the fritz and who set the tone for similar teams to follow like the one in “Captain Planet” (hey, has anyone mentioned the Captain in this piece?). Long story short: I never did get into comic books.

-mbretz

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Super Bowl, for making us believe all these years, for building us up just to break us down, and for making us watch Brian Boitano skate and twirl around for the halftime show in '92, you are this Thursday's Epic Fail.

Let us first start with the game itself:

Wide Right! from Scott Norwood in Super Bowl XXV - After an incredible drive from the legendary Jim Kelly held together by great runs from Thurman Thomas, Norwood misses a potential game-winning field goal in the closing seconds. Providing the villain for Ace Ventura does not make up for this epic failure. See the last 10 minutes of the game on the tube.

The Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV - XXVIII -  Four consecutive Super Bowl appearances. Four losses. Epic fail.

The Game Every Year - Because of frequent disparities between the two leagues of the NFL, one team typically blows out the other, meaning months of anticipation, and weeks of analysis all add up to one trumped up, anticlimactic event that becomes about everything except the actual game, because the game usually sucks.

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In honor of the title of the next James Bond movie (Quantum of Solace), this week's list of Epic Failures is movie titles. Specifically, we're talking movie titles that fail the movies they are meant to represent. Like, say, Quantum of Solace.

Before you start being like "What about The Incredibly Strange People Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies? That's a fail title." No, hypothetical reader, it isn't. That title nicely sums up the madcap, energetic, mid 60s youth-culture vibe of that under-rated film. Same with names like K-9 Cop. It's about a dog cop, so it's a perfect title. Fail titles are the opposite. They don't fit the movies they are attached to. Get it?

Here's the list, son:

• Quantum of Solace: James Bond movie titles are supposed to be badass (Live and Let Die) or at least funny (Octopussy), they're not supposed to be oblique and/or wimpy. A "quantum" is a measurement of the smallest amount of energy, and "solace" means comfort or consolation. So, rather than portending a huge amount of ass-whupping, the title of this movie promises just a little bit of caring. Why not call it "A Smidge of Hugs?"
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls: . When anyone mentions crystals, we think of  hippies and when we think of hippies we want to punch you.
• Miller's Crossing: The Coen Brother's stylized tale of Irish mobsters is one of the great crime films ever made, but the title conjures images of a Merchant Ivory style high-brow chick-flick.
• Antz: This animated movie was called "Antz" but was actually about "Ants." Fail.

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