The Show: You bring your beat-up, broke down piece of crap car down to L.A. and a has-been rapper watches other people repair, refresh and upgrade your crappy ass ride. And that's not all, these idiots also add things that just don't belong, such as tiny HDTVs in the front lights, an aquarium in the trunk and a touch screen computer on the roof. Apparently ride-pimping is recession proof.

The Game: Depending on which version you played, Pimp My Ride went from "horrible" to "virtually unplayable." Like the TV show, the game gives you the chance to customize your own cars through a series of boring mini-games. Ultimately you're judged on how well you meet your client's demands, but deep down you know that you'll always judge yourself for spending the time to play such a useless game. When the game was released it scored universally terrible scores, including a 1.7 from GameSpot and a solid 2.0 from IGN. But the real problem is the fact that there really isn't much of a game here, which may explain why it's no fun to play. Having customizable cars in your video game can be a lot of fun, basing the entire game around that concept is just plain unnecessary.

The Show: Lovable family man hosts a popular tool-based TV show. Hilarity ensues, complete with similar plots revolving around misunderstandings, children acting up and the stupid man being, well, a stupid man. The show is famous for being the launching pad of Tim Allen, who would later insist on torturing an entire nation with three different Santa Claus movies. Home Improvement also featured the guy that would go on to host Family Feud. Well, one of the guys. Oh never mind.

The Game: You know you're in for a bad time when this is the plot of your game: Tim "The Toolman" Taylor is on a quest to find all of his Binford power tools. You see, something happened on the Tool Time set and now all of the power tools are gone. Oh no! So, it's Tim's job to track down all of these ... you know what, you know how terrible this plot is, there's no reason I have to bore you. Like most of the unnecessary television games, Home Improvement is only loosely tied to the popular show. Anybody that has seen the show can tell you that half of the things you do in this game are out of character for the Tim Taylor. This loving family man wouldn't shoot nails at his enemies, he wouldn't take a blow torch to a bear. The one stroke of genius came when Absolute Entertainment decided to not give gamers an instruction manual, explaining that "real men don't read instructions." When that joke is better than the entire game, that's when you know you're in for a bad time.

The Show: This is the show where contestants enter in hopes of being crowned the country's greatest singer, only most of them actually suck and the three (now four) judges rip them to shreds. However, sometimes people manage to make it through and that's when all of the singers have to, well, sing. And if America likes them then they stay another week and do some more singing. From week to week Simon will say some nasty insult that the audience boos; Paula will act like she's on drugs and Randy will criticize that "it's a little pitchy, dawg." It's super popular, maybe you've heard of it?

The Game: First and foremost, pay close attention to the system in question. This is not one of those situations where I'm suggesting that ALL American Idol games are unnecessary, just one very specific one. The truth is, there's a place for the American Idol games. Who doesn't love singing? And better yet, the songs aren't necessarily the biggest Idol hits. It's a nice alternative to SingStar and Rock Band. But the same cannot be said about the Game Boy Advance version. Unlike all of the other Idol games, this GBA title is a scaled-back retread of Dance Dance Revolution. And since it's a cartridge-based game for the GBA you can guess that the music is off the hook. I've put countless hours into this abysmal release and I still can't figure out what this has to do with American Idol. If you don't have the hardware to play the music (the most important part of a music game), then your very existence is unnecessary.

The Show: Wikipedia describes this long-running Cartoon Network program as a "show about three anthropomorphic fast food items, along with their next-door neighbor, and their life together in New Jersey. The Aqua Teens were originally billed as a detective crime fighting unit; however, the crime-solving aspect of the show was quickly abandoned." All that may be true, but that's certainly not what I get from watching the few episodes I saw. Perhaps I wasn't stoned enough to detect the show's nuance. Or maybe it's just not my thing.

The Game: The game attempts to take all of the "humor" of the animated series and cram it into a golf game. At least, that's what it attempts. What we get is the single worst golf game of all time, a sports game so bad that the best parts when you aren't even playing golf. Then again, I'm not so sure the developers set out to make a good golf game, after playing this thing I am convinced that the game is purposely terrible. Could it be that they set out to make the worst sports game of all time? With archaic controls, sluggish animation and only one course (if you can even call it that); this Aqua Team Hunger Force game fails on every possible level. The name is funny and the cinemas are occasionally cute, but make no mistake about it, Zombie Ninja Pro-Am is one of the worst games of all time.

The Show: Guy picks one of two dozen identical briefcases and then, in the slowest fashion imaginable, he chooses the remaining briefcases. As he does this a man referred to as "The Banker" calls to offer the contestant a low amount of money to stop, but the guy playing is smarter and plays on. The game usually concludes with the guy choosing the wrong briefcase and the audience feeling sympathy. Oh ... and there are busty models holding the briefcases, I guess I should have mentioned that earlier.

The Game: Have you ever wanted to be part of a TV game show but aren't smart enough to get on Jeopardy, Who Wants to be a Millionaire or Wheel of Fortune? Then I have a game for you! It's Deal or No Deal, the game show so simple that a trained monkey could play it. There's no excuse to watch this overly dramatic guessing game on TV and even less of a reason to actually play it on a game console. The truth is, you don't need a disc and a game system to play this thing, all you need is 24 pieces of paper, a pen and a calculator. That's it. I bet you already have all of those things in your computer drawer. Best of all, you can reuse all of the components, so you won't even need to waste paper each time. It's bad enough that this show is popular enough to warrant so many airings on TV, but I cannot think of another game so glaringly unnecessary. Even if you're the biggest fan of the show alive, there's absolutely no reason for you to buy this game.