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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 think he mentioned that under the blanket of "James Bond" series, in the N64 section...
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
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.
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.