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Movie-Based Videogames - Not Actually That Bad?
Moryath writes "The fine folks at Glide Underground look like they've started a new weekly column - and for their opening run, they tackled the question of whether movie-licensed games are in fact cursed or not. Apparently it was in honor of too many reviewers picking up the new Chronicles of Riddick title, and proclaiming boldly that the game broke some curse - 'movie video games suck, it doesn't suck but it's a movie game, ergo curse broken.' Quite an interesting read, going back all the way to the days of Atari 2600 to examine the history of movie-licensed games."
I played the Chronicles of Riddick game. The game was good, but the movie sucked! Perhaps this is a new paradigm! A video game based on a movie can be good...if the movie sucks!
Hello? Anybody remember 1998?
Maybe it was just me, but I actually liked Enter the Matrix. It was a short game and not particularly challenging, but it was fun, it had stuff from the actors and plenty of quality cutscenes without being intrusive about it. I guess it depends on your definition of "suck" -- if the majority has to like it, then I'm sure lots of games that are good suck, regardless of the movie license stuff. End rambling.
I won't play movie based games because they're an obvious cash-in. Doesn't matter much if it's that good or not.
That being said, the Chronicles of Riddick isn't an adaptation of the movie, it's just a seperate story for the character which is both more creative a development and well made, so probably a bad example to use in comparison to other movie-licensed-crap.
I think he mentioned that under the blanket of "James Bond" series, in the N64 section...
The underlying problem is still and will always be there- games based on movies tend to be promotional tie-ins first, games second.
Not all video games based on movies suck unfortunately though it is the majority.
:)
(briefly) Looking over the article it seems as though it was written more from a console standpoint. If you look at the arcade you'll notice that most movie based games are actually enjoyable. It's true that they are mostly shooters/fighters though.
Star Wars Trilogy was a great time sink and provided a lot of enjoyment for me on my lunch breaks.
Star Wars Racer had a lot more excitement than the actual movie
The Jurassic Park shooter was fun also.
I wouldn't call the above games great, they had their problems but they definately didn't suck.
On a tangent, it's a shame the arcade scene isn't how it used to be. I miss the days that sega ruled the arcades.
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
For a while I thought it was called Schwarzeneggerbecause his name was bigger than the title on the cartridge. It was a sidescroller starring a guy with a machine gun shooting bubbles. Surprisingly fun for a few hours. Alex.
It just had the same title.
The game took place before pitch black in the timeline. The only real similarity was the Riddick charactor.
It had it's own plot, storyline, etc. I think it did well because it didn't even try to be a movie game. It stood on it's own and was just a good console shooter.
--Chris
So, the idea of "one game that breaks the curse" doesn't really work for me.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
It depends on the developer, the freedom they have, and the original movie material.
Have movie-based games become better (relative to other games released around the same time on the same platforms over the last decade? Probably, and that's probably the result of Hollywood paying more attention to them, as well as games becoming the big business it is today. Is the average movie-based game as good as the average non-movie-based game? Possibly, since they typically contain very little innovation (which of your favorite games is movie-based?) little polish (since the games are typically rushed to meet the movie deadline) but are seldom completely unplayable.
But if I were to try and come up with a list of my top 50 games of all time, it would probably include one or two movie-based games at most, and yours probably would, too.
Chick games, but fun.
I got these games for the wife but Nemo was really fun to watch and pick up the controller at difficult portions. Frankly it was fun reliving the movie. Havn't seen haunted mansion, and looks like the game is nothing like the movie but its also a fun game. They are both puzzle/adventure games. Simple to play, decent graphics, a hell of alot less buggy then morrowind. I wouldn't mind recomending them at all.
Movie based games are utter shite.
Movie INSPIRED games tend to be good.
schild
editor, f13.net
I always loved the Aliens VS. Predator arcade game. I realize that there was a comic book, but the movie is coming out sometime.
And the top down Jurassic Park game for the NES(or SNES? I can't remember) I was so close to beating that game until I got killed by a bug. I got stuck in a plant. That was the last time I played it.
So I wonder if this means that Starbreeze, the developers, can sue the movie makers for making a crappy movie?
I wonder if we're actually seeing a different sort of trend developing, when movies suck so bad I say they should have be released "Direct to Video ... Game".
I was rather underwhelmed by the plot in Chronicles of Riddick, I mean really, dude escapes from prison, gets tangled up with a religeous military commander, lots of gunfights, melee, corny jokes... great video game, defintely not your epic sci-fi.
Even Shrek 2, for all its comedy, the whole thing with the Keebler Elf Potion Factory, so help me I was sitting in my chair thinking "conveyor belts, jump to the next one, swing on the machine... Shrek 2 The Video Game is on its way". It's almost like scenes are gratuitously added to the movies so that there's something to do to stretch out a game.
Of course from the capitalist perspective, it's ingenious. You'll blow $8 on a movie for two hours entertainment, $20 for a DVD, but if you can get people to spend $50 on a game, now that's serious profit.
Any clue how much input Tigon (Vin Deisel's company) had on the game? I mean, don't get me wrong, much props to Starbreeze, but without Diesel's wanting to make it worthwhile would they have gotten so much control?
It's not that movie-related games are bad, just movie-regurgitating ones. On that note, anyone know of other games that did this? This, Matrix, Aliens vs Predator?
Games made from movie franchises tend to suck, but that doesn't mean that they must. The reason they tend to suck is that the story has already been told, and in order to remain true to it, artifical limitiations must be placed on the user (you can't kill that person because they're your friend...the movie says so).
The best games let the gamer tell the story by making interesting choices about how to proceed. In many cases movies have already made those choices (implicitly and explicitly) so there's less potential for fun. That doesn't mean that there no fun left....just less than there would have been.
From what I've seen, not all movie-based games suck. Not by a long stretch of the imagination. However, as a general (horribly general) rule, I think they can be broken down into two groups.
First of all, we have games which come out within the same immediate time-frame as the movie they're based on. These tend to suck. Examples include, but are by no means limited to: Enter the Matrix, Fifth Element, Terminator 3, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure you can think of many more. This is where Chronicles of Riddick breaks the rules; it falls into this category and doesn't suck. But most games in this group are, and always will be, cheap attempts to cash in on a movie whose brand has a short shelf-life.
The second group contains games based on movies or movie franchises which appear when the movies aren't the hype-of-the-moment. In general, these tend to be games based on *good* movies, since only the better movies stand up over time. Examples here include: Aliens vs Predator games (excluding the recent console RTS), Blade Runner (the adventure game - it's aging now, but it still rocks) and Terminator: Future Shock (and Skynet). Perhaps because the movies aren't flavour of the moment, these games have more freedom to move into expanded universes and craft a plot that works well for a game, rather than a movie.
Of course, half-way between the two groups, we have the Star Wars games, some of which rock and some of which suck. I think, however, that the same rule holds true here. Think about it... in the early and mid 90s, before the prequels, Star Wars games tend to rock. We have the SNES platformers/shooters, the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series etc. Sure, there's the odd dud, like Rebel Assault, but at least they're innovative duds. When Episode 1 comes out, the quality of Star Wars games, even from an objective, non-Jar-Jar-bashing point of view falls through the floor. We get a few utterly forgettable shooters and third-person games. Even today, when the license has recovered a bit from its nadir, the best games (Kotor and JK2) are those which are based more heavily on the universe of the original trilogy.
Nemo was really fun to watch and pick up the controller at difficult portions. Frankly it was fun reliving the movie.
Unless I'm totally mistaken, the Nemo video game came out far before the movie did. So that really doesn't have its own curse going for it. That's why there can be DnD video games that are good - they weren't based on the abysmal movie. (Of Daily Radar "DnD movie fails saving throw against sucking ass" fame)
--LordPixie
That first Ghostbusters game on NES was pretty tight.
Street Fighter:The Movie.. game
Now that was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's a little know fact that movies and the games that are based on them draw Karma from the same limited pool.
That means that if the movie is really, really good, there just isn't enough juice left to make a good game.
Luckily for the programmers on Riddick, they found that the pool had been strangely untouched when they got to it.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
Cross-media retellings generally suck. The novellization of a movie, the movie of a novel, the miniseries of the novel, the comic adaptation, and the video game license.
Cross media *shared universes* however, can be great. Note the Halo novels; the retelling of the video game blows, the other two novels are wonderful. Riddick: Butcher's Bay; not the movie, just a different chapter.
Enter the Matrix, well, I didn't think it was so bad. Rushed, certainly, but I quite liked it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Seems to be:
games based on a movie (ie the game plot and objectives mirror the movie plot and objectives)
vs.
games inspired by a movie (ie games that merely occur in the same universe with more or less the same characters as a movie)
I know there are exceptions to the rule on both sides, so I do not need to be inundated with examples. But generally, this seems to be the determining factor.
Wow... now I feel old... I actually remember the He-Man video game...
Nephilium Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition. -- Paul Keller
Why hasn't anyone mentioned the Lord of the Rings? It is both a great movie trilogy, and a great trilogy of games....one would think these games would defy this....
I don't understand why the author chooses to defend mediocre titles, as that just tells developers that it's OK to release mediocre titles. Why settle for mediocre when you can have good titles?
And in response to those that wonder why the Riddick game is gaining so much praise for breaking the video game curse, here's why: First of all, it was released right before the release of the Riddick movie, so they were obviously trying to cash in on eachother, and most people were expecting a sub-par game as a result. It was a surprise that it turned out to be this good, as most good movie-licensed games come out much later after the release of the movie. Furthermore, there was very little hype for this game leading up to its release, as there was even less hype for the movie. Since most people weren't expecting much or didn't know anything at all about it, they were surprised by how good it was.
See, there's a VERY good reason that games that use movie licenses have a bad rep: THQ. Now, many of you may not remember THQ in their sucky SNES days, but at that point, all THQ did was license stuff and make crappy games from them. Admittedly, some of these games didn't MERIT being made from the movies in the first place, but they were.
- Home Alone
- Home Alone 2
- Lawnmower Man
- Wayne's World
And let's not forget one of the BIGGEST license hounds: Acclaim.
- Judge Dredd
- Demolition Man
- Dragon - The Bruce Lee Story
- Spawn
- Stargate
Other companies got in on the fun, too:
- Bram Stoker's Dracula (Sony)
- Cool World (Ocean)
- Pagemaster (Fox Interactive - a crappy movie that was MADE to be a crappy game)
- Robocop 3 (Ocean)
- Rocketeer (IGS)
- T2: Judgement Day (LJN - NOT a port of the Midway gun game)
- Time Cop (JVC)
- True Lies (LJN)
- Untouchables (Ocean)
Now, that's just the "clogging the Blockbuster rental aisle" crap that came out on the SNES. There were also many, many crappy movie games on other systems.
My problem with that article is that the guy who wrote it simply didn't do his homework. Were there some good movie licensed games? Sure...he hit it on the head with the Star Wars stuff. But those are VASTLY outnumbered by the "grab a license and do a substandard genre-of-the-day" games that are PUMPED out on a yearly basis. All you have to do is walk the rental aisles and look at the $2.00 used game stack at GameStop to see the glut that's there.
So, counting the titles he talked about, it looks like we have maybe 2 good SNES games with movie licenses, and 23 ones that were tolerable at best. THAT'S where the impression comes from.
Also, people tend to remember big name flops, and movie licenses have had them in spades. ET started the trend, and there's pretty much been a big time flameout for a movie license on every platform since.
... I have to agree, i genrally feel that move based games tend to be some of the worst, not that they are often terrible, its just very rare that they try anything new or do anything better than before.
I have Riddick however is actually an amazing game, It doesn't do stealth as well as splinter cell however its significatly better than Manhunt (nearly as brutal too). Its not as good a raw shooter as say Quake 2 (still amazing) but its nearly that good (only really hampered by the lack of guns and the fact quite linear). Add all this to an atmosphere that is both very believable and very tense and you have a truly outstanding game
If you look at movie-based (or movie-inspired) games as a genre, the crap to good ratio is about the same as any other mature genre. Most of it is crap (ET, Rocketeer, Untouchables) but there are quite a few good games in the genre (Super Star Wars, Tron, Blade Runner). That's true for all genres.
What makes the movie-based genre different? The movies still get seen from time to time, especially the good ones. That makes us remember the games even if they were terrible. I can't remember most of the slew of crappy 1-on-1 fighter games from the mid-90's that were SF2/MK clones, but I can remember most of the NES movie conversions that were terrible (Total Recall, Three Stooges, Karate Kid, Rambo).
Movie-based games only seem worse because we actually remember the bad ones from this genre.
The C64 version gave you 3x more options with how to customize your vehicle - plus, instead of the ridiculous stair climbing crap at the end, you just had to sneak two of your three guys past Mr. Stay Puft.
The NES version was good on its own, but it still was a mediocre port of the fantastic C64 version.
Funny thing about that - they're mentioned in the article. Also, the old SNES version of Lord of the Rings (based on the book/the Bakshi animation) are mentioned too.
It's called "doing your homework".
I wouldn't say that - he did say he was leaving things (like the reason movie-based games are usually bad) for another week. And going back and looking up titles all the way back through the 2600 days must have taken a while.
You're saying that because he didn't mention your particular games - or because he didn't go by the "well the impression comes from the percentage of games" - that he didn't do his homework.
Isn't it more likely that he was just trying to show that there are plenty of movie-license games that can manage to not suck - not that they'll all be super blockbusters like Halo, but that they'll be good enough that people still like them - and that the presence of a license, all by itself, shouldn't be reason to dump the game?
I mean, seriously now. Look at the titles you mention - Robocop 3 is a prime suspect here, why knock it when the first Robocop game on NES was, while not super-ultra-cool, decently fun to play? Or at very least, that explains why a Robocop 3 was made as much as the presence of the movie does.
The other question is - as many crappy movie games come out, is it pretty close to the percentage of non-movie games that are also crappy? I mean, sure, we don't remember the crappy ones as long when they're not movie licensed, but they're certainly there, or haven't you seen the bargain bin at Gamestop lately?
Riddick wasnt a great movie to videogame conversion, it was yet another horrible videogame to movie conversion. Did these reviewers not see the movie?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's really funny how the writer throws Secret of Vulcan Fury into the suck pile considering it was cancelled.
I was thinking 'Little Nemo'. In which case, the game was released before the movie. My bad. =)
Of course, this was all based on a much older comic, if I'm not completely mistaken.
--LordPixie
For the 3DO was pretty faithful to the movie. Even has the sex scene with Sly & Bullock. "You're doing a good deed" "I'm the Demo Man"
The coin-op Terminator 2 game ruled (the light gun game). I hadn't spent that much cash on a game since Gauntlet.
//e was the game to play. I never did get past the stay puft marshmallow man though.
And Ghostbusters on the Apple
Tron: Deadly Discs (an incredibly rare game) was also a lot of fun, and the best tron-based game I've played.
I think the key is that the games need to provide actual gameplay, and not much story. We know the story, we've seen the movie.. don't waste our time with FMV.
a summer make...
Not to troll here but what's up with all these articles about games based on movies and their apparent success?
Just because "Riddick" is a decent title doesn't mean the flood gates are open again for more movie based games. We've still got a ways to go before games rival the movies their based on.
For now I think publishers should learn from the lesson "The Chronicles of Riddick" has taught us:
If you wanna release a game based on a movie you gotta be playing hard ball. Gamers aren't as stupid as you think. We want a solid game to accomidate a solid movie.
Those are GAME-BASED movies not MOVIE-BASED games.
so then is everyone looking forward to the Doom Movie?
Max Payne is the one i'm really looking forward too - that game is just destined for John Woo greatness (and may pull him out that creative slump that he's been in recently..).
Morale seems good, considering, although high spirits are just no substitute for eight hundred rounds a minute
Finally! The Secret Steps to Breaking the Licensed-Videogame Curse, revealed to the public for the first time!
1) Make a good game.
2) Make a good game.
3) Treat the source material with respect.
4) Make a good game.
5) Get the original actors, writers, directors, etc. to help where appropriate - with voice-overs, backstory, scripts, etc.
6) Make a good game.
7) Try not to license a crappy property.
8) Make a good game.
9) Polish until your good game is *great*.
Remember, folks - you read it here first!