Games, Movies, Comics Collide

Three unrelated pieces of news floating around today all point to the ongoing collision of older medias and gaming. Most Exciting: Joystiq reports that the rights to make a Sin City game have been picked up by Red Mile entertainment. Despite their role as the creators of the Jackass game, that seems like good news. Less Exciting: The two Lego Star Wars games sold really, really well, and so it's not terribly surprising that Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga has been announced by the folks at LucasArts. Next Generation has the details, saying the game will be released on the PS3, 360, DS, and Wii. The Wii/DS games will be redesigned for their unique control schemes, and the high-end consoles will feature online co-op play. Truly Confusing: Fox has picked up the movie rights for a The Sims movie. Given the way many people play The Sims, I can only assume it will be rated NC-17 and released straight to DVD.

Comments

Re:collision indeed

[flyingsquid]

Almost without fail (I said almost), any game based on a movie, or movie based on a game has been crap.

I propose a national task force to deal with this.

SCENE: Office of a big-shot Hollywood MOVIE PRODUCER. He is sitting back in his big leather chair, smoking a fat cigar, thinking out loud.

MOVIE PRODUCER: Hey, I know what we could do. It'd be a shitty movie but if we do it cheap enough, we'll still make a profit! We could base a movie on 'Daikatana'!

Murmurs of assent come from around the room. But suddenly, the door to the MOVIE PRODUCER's office bursts open. We see a FEDERAL AGENT, dressed in a dark suit and dark glasses, burst in, flanked by two members of an elite team wearing body armor and carrying submachine guns. The MOVIE PRODUCER gets up, backs away. The FEDERAL AGENT walks right up to him, stares him directly in the eye, unblinking. Then punches him in the nuts.

MOVIE PRODUCER: Argh!!! What did you do that for???

The FEDERAL AGENT pulls out a badge and shows it to the MOVIE PRODUCER.

FEDERAL AGENT: Sorry, sir. My name is Agent Rex Hightower, and I'm a member of the FBI's Movie Adaptation Task Force. Any time a member of America's movie industry decides to adapt an old TV sitcom, cartoon, or videogame into a movie, I'm required by federal law to intervene and stop them. The American people finally decided that they had taken enough of your crappy movies and that direct action was required. And that's where we come in.

MOVIE PRODUCER: It'll take more than a tap in the cojones to keep me from making that movie! You don't understand the money involved! That movie will make millions!

FEDERAL AGENT: No sir. You don't understand. We're very serious about what we do. You see, that was just a warning. Next time, the gloves comes off. [quiet for a moment] You don't even want to know about what happened to that poor bastard who was trying to turn 'Mister Ed' into a feature film...

So that's my idea for how things would work. Actually, it probably wouldn't work as a law. But it would be a clever premise for a movie... hm. Have your people call my people.

Re:collision indeed

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

"Comics to either medium seem to do relatively well if done right."

I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you sir. Prior to Spider-Man on the PS1, there really, in my opinion, had never been a good video game based on a comic book. Looking back there were games like Maximum Carnage on the SNES that, first of all, was really just a generic beat 'em up with Spider-Man skinned on and, even ignoring that, was a poor beat 'em up at that. You, of course, have all the Superman games which I think most can agree have been terrible. I remember a Superman game on the Genesis that was just awful. Again, generic side-scrolling. [Of course, Superman presents special challenges in making a game but I'm not going to get into that.] So I think that the rule on comics to video games has been that the video game was poor. I heard that the X-Men Rise of Apocalypse game was fairly good but missed it so I can't comment. Really, I think the only good comic-to-vg has been those Spider-Man games, with the one for PS2 being a really enjoyable game.

Now, as far as comics to movies go - again, I think that there have been problems. For every Batman Begins and Sin City, you've got a Batman and Robin, Superman IV, Batman Forever, Captain America, The Punisher [either one]. Although maybe there's just a limited sample to really comment on but I feel like there are more stinkers than good films. At the end of the day, X-Men 3 was a huge slap in the face to readers of the comic and I am still mad about it so perhaps all of the above is just nonsense that was leading up to me being snide.

The trick is that the changing medium means you're not usually going to have a direct translation of content. You still have to retain the spirit of the characters and their motivations. X-Men 3 took the idea, flushed it down the toilet, and spit in my face over and over again.