Day 13: Movie Adaptations

That's possibly Jean Claude Van Damme.

Who doesn't love a good movie?  With any good movie comes the want to relive it by watching it time and time again.  Well what if you could be in the movie?  Direct it with your video game controller.  Sounds awesome, right?  Well you're wrong, horribly, horribly wrong.  Let's start with the shittiest movie/game adaptation ever: Street Figher the Movie the Game.  Who's fucking idea was this?  Street Fighter was already a very successful game franchise, why'd they need to go and fuck it up?  The movie was a pile of crap starring a bunch of B-movie rejects, but it was just too awesome to pass up making a game for, because who doesn't love a game that uses digitizes actors?  Beyond the lag caused by the digitization, the game is just your basic Street Fighter with a bunch of limitations and minus the fun that the pace and excitement of Street Fighter 2 brings.  All in all, this was a pretty crappy fighter game and shouldn't even exist it's so bad.

Looks fun, right?  It's not.

The list goes on and on with games that are shat out so quickly by third parties looking to cash in on the hot, new box office smash hit.  For instance, Jurassic Park was an epic book and movie, and I personally love it as both.  But did it ever need to have games made after it?  There were so many fucking Jurassic Park games that it's almost as pathetic as the third movie itself, and that's saying a lot.  The one I owned was Jurassic Park 2:  The Chaos Continues.  It was a decent side-scrolling shooter, but that's all it was, decent.  You ran around shooting an infinite number of dinosaurs until you got bored out of your mind or couldn't find out where to go.  In fact, the game allowed various objects to get in front of your objectives so that you literally couldn't see the way to go.  That's a good game right there.

It looks like it could be a good game.

The Matrix is an undeniably groundbreaking movie, but the games it produced do not stand up to the title they're named after.  One perfect example is The Matrix Online.  Not only did this game just not get enough players and attention to really become as popular as WoW, but it suffered from some serious control issues.  When I played for a short time I just couldn't figure it out.  Like it was way too futuristic for me to understand because it takes place in the Matrix.  Of course the last straw with this thing was the fact that everyone and their mother tried to be Neo.  I mean, just look at the picture above, the coat, the hair, it's all the same.  And everyone tried.  So here again we see that the game is alright, but it just can't live up to the movie, nor can it deliver such a great experience as a game not associated to a movie.

Rabble rabble rabble, I'm a Frost Giant.

Now we've come to the cream of the crop, as well as one of the most current movie/video game adaptations.  Thor: God of Thunder was released in conjunction with the movie, and most people agree that the film was in line with the greatness of all of the recent Marvel Comics movies leading up to the Avengers.  Now this game had a lot to live up to, but it also had a lot of potential.  Unfortunately, it bombed like a giant turd splashing in the toilet.  The game's release made it clear that the company rushed through production and attempted to just shit out gold.  All of the defects and bugs killed the game and reduced it to what many people have called a bargain bin game.  Yes, this game is barely worth the five dollars you could end up paying for it at your local Gamestop.

So why do all of these game suck ass?  Is it because the companies rushed to get them out in time for the big movie release?  Is it because they have something to live up to, and when they don't hit the standard that the movie created we snub them off as bad?  No, the reason these games suck is because they're designed around a plot and idea that's not created for a video game setting.  Jurassic Park, Lost World, and the third movie just don't have enough action and pure shooting violence to be that type of game, never mind the multitude of flaws that came with it.  Thor was an awesome movie in a sequence of films designed to be a cinematic experience, and the game just cannot compete with that unless it was treated in the same manner.  The game was in a world all by itself, while the movie had all of the other Marvel movies to draw attention to it.  Throw in a production team that can't work the bugs out before shipping and you get a pile of steaming goat shit.  The Matrix Online just couldn't compete with better MMOs that were already out on the scene and the customization ability just leads everyone to try to make it like the movie, which we already know it couldn't be.  Finally we come back to Street Fighter.  This is a rare specimen, but I think it exemplifies all of the qualities of the other movie games while living in its own bubble.  The movie was developed around the plot of a game, rather than the game being developed around the plot of the movie.  We can see in reverse how the connection fails and see an extreme version of the failed video game movie in Street Fighter the Movie the Game.  I think the lesson that needs to come out of this is that the video game industry cannot depend on the success of the movie industry.  No one, and I'm pretty damn certain on this, wants to play a shitty movie game over an excellent standalone game.  It's like the difference between getting a Popsicle that's been stored in 90 degree weather and one that's been frozen the entire time.  They'll both taste similar, but one's just a pool of flavored piss.