Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Need New Respect

An anonymous reader writes "Hollywood has yet to find any video game property it is willing to treat with the same respect as J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K.Rowling, arguably still following the principles that led to the appalling Super Mario Bros. movie in 1992: 'A game lacks the complexity that a movie requires.' Yet a modern gaming masterpiece such as Mass Effect has the depth and breadth to deserve better treatment in the proposed trilogy. Is Hollywood again going to disrespect fans who, in this case, have as much right to see a good plot respected as the readers of Lord Of The Rings? This article discusses why and how Hollywood should grow up regarding these adaptations."

Comments

What is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point of making a video game into a movie? You already have the story, the actors, the dialog, the setpieces, etc.

Re:What is the point

[c0mpliant]

Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like". This is when marketing execs see golden opportunity. Not only will you get most of the fans of the game to see it at least once, you'll probably get the people who wouldn't have touched a game with a barge poll.

In my mind respect is only one part of the equation worth exploring. Understanding of the game becomes another. Mass Effect may have been about shooting Geth, driving the Mako and using biotics but there was an underlying theme of good versus evil within the character. Perhaps not even versus, both Paragon and Renegade are a part of Shepard, problem is you can't introduce choice into a film and therefore can't communicate it as well as you can in a game. Another issue is whether you have Shepard as a man or a woman. Jennifer Hale was by far the better voice actor and I would find a real female lead a far more interesting story than another bland bloke. The fact that she was a woman wasn't exploited for sexual purposes in ME, it just so happened she was a woman. But you know that wouldn't be how hollywood would do it.

The article says that judging by the IMDB page, its set during the first contact war, so they wouldn't be having to ruin everyones Shepard on them if they did make the film.
Incidently the website linked to was down for me so here is a link to a google cache of it

Re:What is the point

[glwtta]

there was an underlying theme of good versus evil within the character.

Ah, good versus evil, how profound. Did they by any chance choose the motif of broken mirrors to show the protagonist's fragmented self?

Re:What is the point

[ZeRu]

You already have the story, the actors, the dialog, the setpieces, etc.

That's the whole point actually. You have everything needed for a good movie...but we haven't yet seen a movie adaptation of a video game which utilizes all of the above to the best possible extent.

Re:What is the point

[somersault]

Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like"

What? Where have you been for the past four years? I even hear there's plenty of girls who play WoW. Of course WoW and Wii games are designed to cater for noobs, but it's still plenty of people playing computer games. Gaming is very mainstream these days.

The only game->movie film I really thought was anywhere near good was Tomb Raider (the first one, the second was "meh"). Though perhaps the fact I only ever played the demos helped with that (didn't really like the game).

Re:What is the point

[aussie_a]

Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like".

There are also those who refuse to shell out money for an entire console simply because it has a single game they want. There are also those unwilling to make the 30+ hour investment a game requires. There are also people (such as myself) who are unable to grasp the mechanics of modern gameplay and partake in such pleasures as Mass Effect (I struggle with combat that isn't turn based and/or menu driven).

But hey, don't let facts stop you from making a martyr of yourself simply because you play video games.

Re:What is the point

[c0mpliant]

Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore". No one is talking about making a film out of Wii Sports or Farmville or any of the other games which are well and truly casual gaming. We're talking about Mass Effect, we're talking about Resident Evil, we're talking about House of Dead we're talking about the other million and one games which a majority of people in the world simply will not play.

Re:What is the point

[c0mpliant]

Both Mass Effect games are available for PC. Most people who are interested in games or at least are open to the concept of games will either have a PC or one console which will play 90% of games out there. Those who are unwilling to invest 30+ hours which a game requires usually don't make the same excuse to not watch a TV series which by the end of 2 seasons has usually clocked up more hours than it takes to complete a game.
Your third point I accept, there maybe those who simply can't play computer games, but by the same token there are films which have story lines which are too complex for some people but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be made. However I would be very surprised if you couldn't adapt to even the easiest setting on the game.

Re:What is the point

[lxs]

I think it's great and I firmly believe the next step is turning architecture into cinematic classics. Who needs original content?

(Come to think of it, Helvetica the movie was quite excellent. I can't wait for the adaptation of Comic Sans, let's hire Uwe Boll for that.)

Re:What is the point

[hairyfeet]

Well I'd say part of the problem would be that in the games with a story to work with trying to fit it into an hour and a half would probably suck. Take one of my favorites: Bioshock. You'd have the whole "capitalism gone mad" part, the main character and his loss of identity, a world descended into madness, and of course all the Ayn Rand references.

Trying to keep even 60% of that while keeping a story that can go from start to end in an hour and a half would probably end up with some lame half assed POS simply because trying to squeeze that much into that little amount of time while keeping the action up would probably be impossible.

The few we have seen that have been able to pull it off, like the first Tomb Raider and Resident Evil were already dealing with themes the audience already knew even if they had never picked up a game. Indiana Jones and zombies respectfully. How many would understand and follow Bioshock if they had never heard of Ayn Rand? It would probably end up coming off as a parody like the commercials in Robocop.

Re:What is the point

[Marcika]

Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore". No one is talking about making a film out of Wii Sports or Farmville or any of the other games which are well and truly casual gaming. We're talking about Mass Effect, we're talking about Resident Evil, we're talking about House of Dead we're talking about the other million and one games which a majority of people in the world simply will not play.

Arguably a Zelda movie or a Warcraft movie would have a target audience that is an order of magnitude larger than any of these... And first person shooters rarely translate well into movies - I didn't expect the Doom movie to be any good, but even Max Payne (which is an FPS that is as narrative-driven as they come) was pretty rubbish as a movie.

Re:What is the point

[c0mpliant]

If you had read the next sentence its probably not versus, its more likely a comment the duality of man, capable of both extraordinary acts of kindness and evil. The unusual thing with Mass Effect compared with every film which has explored the same theme, is that you make the choice, you can then see the effects of your actions and if that way inclined you can see what would have happened had you done something different.

Re:What is the point

[mcvos]

Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like". This is when marketing execs see golden opportunity. Not only will you get most of the fans of the game to see it at least once, you'll probably get the people who wouldn't have touched a game with a barge poll.

Why would people who don't care about the game be interested in a movie adaptation of that game? Game movies are every bit as nerdy as the games themselves. Possibly even more so; The Sims and Farmville aren't terribly nerdy as far as I can tell, but simply make The Sims: The Movie or Farmville: The Movie, and all of a sudden it's nerdy.

Movies are a different medium than games. A story doesn't translate well from an active, participatory medium like games to a passive consumption medium like movies. And if you want to attract people who don't care about the game, why would you even try to make such an adaptation? Just make an original story that's designed to be good for that medium.

Have you noticed that games based on movies also almost always suck? The mediums are too different, despite the similar visuals.

Re:What is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Jennifer Hale was by far the better voice actor and I would find a real female lead a far more interesting story than another bland bloke.

And I would find a real male lead a far more interesting story than another bland chick.

Since the VA wouldn't be playing the lead role anyway, I don't really see why there'd be a difference.

Re:What is the point

[somersault]

Well, Max Payne was actually a TPS, but I agree with you. Gaming is not nerdy these days. There may be a distinction between "hardcore" and "casual" gaming, but that is simply down to how much time people have to play their games, their individual skill level, and their interests.

Re:What is the point

[glwtta]

The unusual thing with Mass Effect compared with every film which has explored the same theme, is that you make the choice, you can then see the effects of your actions and if that way inclined you can see what would have happened had you done something different.

I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.

Re:What is the point

[somersault]

Wha? I've not played Mass Effect or Resident Evil (well, I played a demo of RE1 ~14 years ago but I hated the controls and camera angles and any time I've seen someone playing the sequels I can't say it's got me any more interested), but I love the Resident Evil movies.

How does House of the Dead fit into your list? It's available to the public in the arcades - plenty of casual gamers will have played it, and the plot didn't seem special to me.

Re:What is the point

[vlm]

Come on, the wii is casual gaming. Casual gaming is not the same as what would be considered "hardcore"

Its simpler than that. Its framing the question by careful selection of description to get the answer you want. It has little relationship with reality of course.

Real gaming, also known hardcore gaming, is just endless remakes of Wolfenstein3D from 1992. I thought it was fun for a couple years (decades?) but now its pretty boring. "I've got a good idea, lets fight WWII again, err, uh, I mean lets do it again in higher res"

Not real gaming, also known as "casual" or "for noobs" is merely the entire human experience of technologically aided recreation with the sole exclusion of first person shooters.

Re:What is the point

[poetmatt]

moreover, people only care if it's a good adaptation.

there have been plenty of horrible ones. House of the dead anyone?

Re:What is the point

[VJ42]

What's the point of making a video game into a movie? You already have the story, the actors, the dialog, the setpieces, etc.

Apart from the actors, so does a book. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry potter movies show that you can make half decent movies when you already have story, dialogue etc. in place; it's just another medium for telling the same story*, some people like video games, others like movies, others prefer books. Many like a mix - I don't like FPS games, but if they released a good movie of one, I'd watch it happily.


*The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy was released for radio, TV, as books, as a computer game, as a film, and last but not least, it was also released as a towel. None of these versions are consistent with each other so this does not always entirely hold...

Re:What is the point

[tophermeyer]

I'm pretty sure I've read a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps that explored similar territory.

Right. It's a similar literary mechanic, but for grown ups.

As a kid I remember having an Indiana Jones choose your own adventure. The difference is that with Indy I had to choose whether to flee from the Nazis out the front door or climb the window to the roof. In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.

Re:What is the point

[stewbacca]

Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like".

I think a large number of people think some nerd games are nerd like, but think games in general are fun. Some more well adjusted members of society understand that LARPing and playing Quidditch are just a bit too, well, nerdy for most people.

Re:What is the point

[mcgrew]

I think there are two reasons. One, they see a cash cow; fans of the game are going to see the movie no matter how bad it is, and with a few exceptions there aren't many games with a serious plot. "Chess -- The Motion Picture!"

That said, you could take DOOM and make a great thriller out of it.

What I can't understand is why so many games that are based on movies suck so badly.

Re:What is the point

[hal2814]

I know you didn't just call out the Wii for not being "hardcore" compared to... wait for it... House of the Dead? WTF, dude? House of the Dead is about as casual as you can get. It's an arcade shooter that's designed to get people to stick a few quarters in for a few minutes of play. More to the point, THE FUCKING GAME IS AVAILABLE ON THE WII. Stop buying into marketing bullshit and start evaluating games and consoles for what they are. There's no logical definition that makes Metroid: Other M or Super Mario Galaxy any less "hardcore" than Mass Effect.

Re:What is the point

[Abstrackt]

Arguably a Zelda movie or a Warcraft movie would have a target audience that is an order of magnitude larger than any of these... And first person shooters rarely translate well into movies - I didn't expect the Doom movie to be any good, but even Max Payne (which is an FPS that is as narrative-driven as they come) was pretty rubbish as a movie.

I think Half-Life would make a great movie, the whole story's already there. They'd also save a fortune on writing Gordon Freeman's lines!

Re:What is the point

[mcgrew]

Real gaming, also known hardcore gaming

Wow. Real men don't eat quiche? Look, I used to be heavily into PC gaming, to the point of having a popular Quake site* and being published on Planet Quake. But man, your comment is elitist to the point of silliness.

That's like saying "real golfers play golf every day". It's an absurd statement.

Re:What is the point

[0123456]

In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.

And that difference is? In both cases you get to make artificial choices forced on you by the game designer; you don't get to make arbitrary choices like you do in real life, and none of them really matter.

BTW, I remember even Dr Who having to decide whether or not to commit genocide to eliminate the Daleks in the 1970s, _on a kids' SF show_. So claiming this is somehow 'adult' seems pretty funny.

Gaming went seriously downhill once designers decided 'oh, we've got to have a _story_'. That meant forcing the player onto rails they can't escape from other than a few pointless and arbitrary 'choices' of tihs kind, and adding numerous cut-scenes where their character does things the player would never do themselves, because the character must do those things to keep the player on the rails of the 'story'... Most modern game designers seem to be frustrated movie directors and from the cliched 'stories' they try to force onto the player and the sub-B-movie cut-scenes you can see exactly why the're just frustrated movie directors and not real ones.

Re:What is the point

[Xtravar]

Because right or wrong, there are a large amount of people who wont play a computer game because its too "nerd like".

That's crazy-talk. You're right that they want to exploit the existing fan base *and* non-gamers who may wander in, but this has nothing to do with the War On Nerds.

The article says that judging by the IMDB page, its set during the first contact war, so they wouldn't be having to ruin everyones Shepard on them if they did make the film.

My Shepard is female, because I don't like watching guy's butts when I play video games for hours on end. I doubt they will cast a female Shepard.

Re:What is the point

[Mongoose Disciple]

Bioshock's a bad example for another reason, though: the game cleverly riffs on the nature/cliches of video games.

You're told to do something, and without question you end up doing it. (There's no way to progress in the game unless you do, of course.) Repeat, repeat, repeat. You pretty much always do this kind of thing in a video game so it never occurs to you to question whether or not your character has free will until the game reveals that he essentially doesn't.

There's just no way to translate that effectively into a movie. Certainly there are movies that pull similar tricks on you by using the conventions of movies against you -- [i]The Sixth Sense[/i] did this, for example, in my opinion -- but I don't know that Bioshock's gimmick and reveal can be shoehorned into that.

Re:What is the point

[jewens]

Of course "Chess -- the Motion Picture!" was actually called "Searching for Bobby Fischer".

Re:What is the point

[mcgrew]

None of these versions are consistent with each other

Welll, the TV series and the books are pretty close.

Re:What is the point

[delinear]

Why would people who don't care about the game be interested in a movie adaptation of that game?

My GF has never read LotR but she loved the movies - I even gave her my copy of the books to read after she'd seen the movie but she just couldn't get interested in them at all. You don't need to have enjoyed a story in one medium to be able to enjoy it in another.

And if you want to attract people who don't care about the game, why would you even try to make such an adaptation? Just make an original story that's designed to be good for that medium.

It seems like that's the problem - Hollywood struggles for good ideas and original stories. Mainstream gaming often suffers the same issue, but there does at least seem to be some variety in gaming, and because the story is told over a longer arc than a movie, there's more opportunity to try something different in the course of the game. That makes them a potentially lucrative source of ideas for movie-makers if they can just figure out how to adapt them in such a way that non-gamers don't dismiss them as being "just about games" and gamers dismiss them as being an insult to the world described in their favourite game.

Re:What is the point

[delinear]

Too many games that are based on movies are made not because the developers have some interesting story to tell or game mechanics to share, but to cash in on clueless mums and dads buying presents over the holiday seasons.

Re:What is the point

[Rakarra]

I think there are two reasons. One, they see a cash cow; fans of the game are going to see the movie no matter how bad it is, and with a few exceptions there aren't many games with a serious plot. "Chess -- The Motion Picture!"

That said, you could take DOOM and make a great thriller out of it.

What I can't understand is why so many games that are based on movies suck so badly.

You answered your own question. A big reason games based on movies usually suck, and the reason movies based on games usually suck are the same -- they're tie-ins. They're seen as marketing and merchandising, not an area where where you spend the real effort. It usually goes to not your best people (usually it goes to people unassociated with the original production, chosen for how cheaply they can bring the property to market). They don't have time to "get it right," especially when it comes to games tied-in to movies. Many times they have just enough time to throw something together and release it.

You can look at any movie based on a video game as an example. You can look at any of the games tied in with Pixar's movies as another.

I'm guessing executives think there's more money to be had by making half-assed versions of games/movies based on great movies/games then there is with spending a lot of resources to make a product the same quality and value as the original. I have the feeling that they're right.

Re:What is the point

[enderjsv]

How did your post get modded up TWICE? Seriously, you're really claiming all hardcore gaming is a remake of wolfenstein3D? Or were you being sarcastic? I'd love to know how Portal, Half life, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, God of War, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Fallout, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty... How do justify calling all these games mere remakes of wolfenstein.

Even if you limit it to just FPS games (which I believe was your REAL point, though you failed to specify), I'd hardly think half life, portal, Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield or Bioshock could be called remakes of wolfenstein without SEVERE exaggeration. It's absurd and ignorant.

Re:What is the point

[Machtyn]

But that's also the problem. The whole story is told through a single person's point-of-view... that person having no dialog.

I'm not writer, so I couldn't say what a good Half-Life movie would be. I can only venture to guess that the story would not revolve around Gordon Freeman so much as we have in the games. Perhaps it can explore the G-Man's influence, the time between resonance cascade and the Combine coming to power, or post Citadel destruction, or what happened at Ravenholm.

Besides, what's wrong with the Lara Croft movies? I know, they're Indiana Jones type movies, but the game was basically Indy is a girl.

Re:What is the point

[Machtyn]

THHGTTG isn't consistent between mediums (or even between books). That was by design by the author. I think some fans missed that point when watching the movie. (unless I am misunderstanding their complaint.)

Re:What is the point

[GameboyRMH]

I played through the first two Tomb Raider games (which are classics IMO!) and I liked the first movie, but I agree the second one was pretty bland.

Re:What is the point

[Bahamut_Omega]

If anything; I have seen my fair share of games that have been shifted to other mediums. Tomb Raider was pretty much horrible for me to watch. The only western shift that did work well enough was the first Mortal Kombat movie. In that case Mortal Kombat had managed to get everything right as far as I can tell. Of course it was done before the whole 3-d crapfest that the series had become. On the other hand, Street Fighter made for a lousy shift in North America; only due to Hollywood's interference. But taking what was done with it in Japan; namely the anime movies and series that were released. Of course there were some detractors in shifting Ryu to from a wandering warrior to a wise ass punk in Street Fighter II V; but it kept the flavour rather nicely. Keep in mind I haven't seen the Zero/Alpha series, so I can't comment on something I haven't seen. Now to the other adaptations from games in Japan, are somewhat along the same lines with varying success. Monster Rancher, Pokémon, Digimon being games as well as anime does work to a certain extent. But the most extreme it was taken to was the .hack series by Namco Bandai. Don't get me started on that one; as it went into both anime & game formats at the same time.

Re:What is the point

[GameboyRMH]

While it is possible to be a hardcore Tag or Catch player, it is impossible to become a hardcore Wii Sports or Angry Birds player. The games are just too simple and cannot be made more complicated.

Re:What is the point

[somersault]

Yeah I haven't watched any of the Mortal Kombat or Streetfighter movies yet, they did look a little awful. I saw Dead or Alive cheap and got it.. decent action I suppose, though obviously nothing amazing on the plot front.

I forgot to mention the Resident Evil movies above, I think they're very good.

The Pokemon series was pretty decent I suppose, it did get me to try the game on a GB emulator and I spent over 100 hours playing it :P (I did buy an actual Pokemon GBA cartridge later on for my DS, for those who are annoyed at the blatant piracy)

Re:What is the point

[Pentium100]

Adventure games would probably translate well, since they have a lot of story and not much gameplay, that is you are walking around, getting items etc, but that is a smaller part compared to the story, unlike some FPS games that basically tell you "This is an invasion, you are a space marine, go kill that army" - that is a lot of gameplay and not much story.

Still, half life probably would make a good movie, but you would have to include the events that happened between HL1 and HL2, otherwise it would be just a guy shooting almost everyone.

As for adventure games, I think I would enjoy Syberia or The Longest Journey as a movie, they probably would be even better - less pixel hunting :)

Re:What is the point

[mcvos]

My GF has never read LotR but she loved the movies - I even gave her my copy of the books to read after she'd seen the movie but she just couldn't get interested in them at all. You don't need to have enjoyed a story in one medium to be able to enjoy it in another.

LotR isn't a game, it's a book. It's already a fully fleshed-out linear story. You just need to add visuals. That's a lot easier to do for the visually oriented movie industry than turning gameplay into a linear story that somehow does justice to the gameplay.

My point is that the only redeeming value a movie adaptation of a game has, is that gamers love the source material. Turning it into a good movie is not trivial, and apparently it's really easy to get so far away from the source material that the gamers won't like it either. Books are different. By turning them into a movie, you can keep most of the plot, but you translate it to a more accessible medium.

It seems like that's the problem - Hollywood struggles for good ideas and original stories. Mainstream gaming often suffers the same issue, but there does at least seem to be some variety in gaming, and because the story is told over a longer arc than a movie, there's more opportunity to try something different in the course of the game.

That just makes it even harder to turn them into movies. But the real problem is that the majority of games aren't about stories at all. Yes, they have some cool ideas, but in the end, they're about gameplay, and story and setting and all that are just an excuse to spotlight the gameplay. By turning them into a movie, you lose the most important part.

That doesn't mean there's nothing worth salvaging in games, but it requires more work and more creativity than when you use a book.

That makes them a potentially lucrative source of ideas for movie-makers if they can just figure out how to adapt them in such a way that non-gamers don't dismiss them as being "just about games" and gamers dismiss them as being an insult to the world described in their favourite game.

But that's hard to do. It's easier to just drop the game and make something that's free from all that uncomfortable baggage.

Re:What is the point

[PyroMosh]

As someone else pointed out, Max Payne is a Third Person Shooter, not an FPS, but your point still stands.

The sad thing is Max Payne may have made for a poor movie, but I do think it represents the high water mark for game to movie adaptations so far. Looks at what's out there:

Super Mario Bros. - I get it. The material in Super Mario didn't lend itself to a decent story. That's why you departed so much from it (Goombas are 8 foot lizards instead of 2 ft mushrooms, etc.). But if you're going to depart, why didn't you do something good?

Street Fighter - Generic Fighter Movie with bad acting and video game cliches! Sign me up!

Mortal Kombat - See Street Fighter, but darker and with better special effects.

Wing Commander - This should have been the high water mark. When the Wing Commander movie went into production, The Wing Commander game series was by far the closest the game industry had come to the vaunted "Interactive Movie" experience. It's creator / director / mastermind Chris Roberts was the same guy who was responsible for the games. It had a great budget and groundbreaking special effects. They got their choice of headline stars. Perfect formula. Except Chris Roberts, for reasons only known to him, departed significantly from the plot of the Wing Commander games. He introduced concepts that were alien to the Wing commander universe, (Pilgrims? Really?) and then just generally couldn't bring things together. Status: Total Loss.

Final Fantasy was impressive but only on a technical achievement level. It's plot was... well, I suspect that I wasn't bad, but just not for Western audiences. Perhaps someone more familiar with Japanese media can comment on it.

Resident Evil - I didn't see this, but the only thing I heard positive about it was a scantily clad Milla Jovovich running around soaking wet with guns. While that's appealing, it didn't sell me on the film.

Doom - I don't even know where to start.

Max Payne - The story was so-so. The acting was okay. The effects were good. The atmosphere was good. The production value was good. I really think this was the best the industry has produced so far. That's sad.

Am I missing some gem out there that was a game first and was made into a great film?

Re:What is the point

[VJ42]

THHGTTG isn't consistent between mediums (or even between books). That was by design by the author. I think some fans missed that point when watching the movie. (unless I am misunderstanding their complaint.)

The "original" version was actually the radio series, and it was self consistent(ish), only once the books started being written did us fans embrace the inconsistencies as part of it's charm, enough to make many think that the books came first; so they made DNA write book 5 and retconned it into radio (after having made a TV series). That's why it's inconsistent. (Mostly) Not by design. The 'problem' with the movie is that it felt more like a story in the H2G2 world rather than H2G2 itself. Here the inconsistencies were deliberate because IIRC DNA always felt he had under developed Trillian as a character, so used it as an opportunity to make her more relevant (and thus had to re-write much of the story - some fans didn't like that; personally I like the movie, but think of it as set in an alternate universe. Mostly I really wish I was old enough to have bought the H2G2 towel though ;p Seriously M&S did an H2G2 Towel for a short time when the original series was aired & was at the peak of it's popularity here in the UK. They must be worth a fortune to the right people now.

Re:What is the point

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

There's no logical definition that makes Metroid: Other M or Super Mario Galaxy any less "hardcore" than Mass Effect.

...aside from the fact that Mass Effect has sex scenes.

Re:What is the point

[Ihmhi]

Now Typing of the Dead, THAT is hardcore.

Q!

Z!

FRF!

BANANAS!

Re:What is the point

[vlm]

Real gaming, also known hardcore gaming

Wow. Real men don't eat quiche? Look, I used to be heavily into PC gaming, to the point of having a popular Quake site* and being published on Planet Quake. But man, your comment is elitist to the point of silliness.

That's like saying "real golfers play golf every day". It's an absurd statement.

Agree completely with you, read the line directly above:

Its framing the question by careful selection of description to get the answer you want. It has little relationship with reality of course.

Re:What is the point

[hal2814]

touche

Re:What is the point

[somersault]

Hardcore tag? Do you mean like Parkour tag or something?

I don't think you've played much Wii sports if you can't imagine it being hardcore - in single player it's maybe pretty easy, but in multiplayer the level of gaming depends on the attitude and skill of the players. The gameplay is pretty simple in a lot of the games, but so is something like Tetris. The challenge where you have to get as many bounces off the wall as you can in Tennis takes a lot of skill, and my sisters got pretty competitive with it. I found it difficult to get anywhere near their scores.

Re:What is the point

[GameboyRMH]

Do you mean like Parkour tag or something?

That's exactly what I had in mind :P

I haven't played a lot of Wii Sports so maybe it's more complicated than it seems.

Re:What is the point

[somersault]

Yeah I've seen a video of it before, looked a lot of fun. I've yet to try it with the guys I do Parkour with :)

Well, I maybe am not remembering it all but I think Wii Sports is:

Tennis: Your character moves around automatically, but the timing and power of your shots is pretty important. If you get two good players against each other it is pretty competitive.

Baseball: seems this is a little flawed as when I was playing it, if I do a certain throw each time I can pretty much make it impossible for the other person to hit the ball. There's a lot of variation you can do in the pitches and swing angles/speed etc tho.

Golf: I just found this bloody difficult to judge the swings, maybe it's better with MotionPlus

Bowling: Again there's a lot you can do with spin etc, it's pretty similar to real bowling, but without the weight obviously.

Boxing: Again it's a relatively simple game, but you can do hooks, jabs, dodge sideways/back etc.. another one that I felt was let down by the controls, again might be better with MotionPlus. I can imagine could be pretty tactical if you get good at it.

Sorry, just when people make broad sweeping statements I like to try to point out the exceptions. There's some stuff in Wii Sports and Wii Fit that is enjoyable even for hardcore gamers, I got pretty serious about the bubble racing and kept going til I 5 starred the courses :p

I've now got all gold in the GT5 license tests, and actually acing some of the Wii Fit stuff was more frustrating than half of the license tests!

Re:What is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there are several Lord of the Rings games, and some of them came out before the movies. The current online version (free to play) is actually very well done, and does a fantastic job of presenting the lore.

Respect?

[spooje]

Where was Hollywood respect when they were talking about dwarf tossing?

Hollywood only cares about making money so they can throw some ewoks into a movie to sell some extra toys to kids they will.

Re:Respect?

[Tim C]

That is were Hollywood keeps going wrong, they still don't get that what they could produce is eye-candy porn.

I take it you've not watched Avatar then.

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Evil monster with no motivation appears and gets blown up by equally unmotivated guy/gal.

If you phrase it like that you almost make it sound like LOTR. Anyway, Mass Effect doesn't need to compete with great literature when it gets turned into a movie, but simple make a good movie. And the story of Mass Effect is easily better then basically everything that passes these days as sci-fi in the cinema.

Re:Respect?

[Jesus_666]

Of course most movies have rather simple plots too... or rather, can be reduced to one.

For example Citizen Kane: A man dies and a reporter makes a documentation about him.

War of the worlds: Aliens attack Earth.

Pulp Fiction: Two hitmen have a variety of amusing misadventures, as has a boxer.


While I wouldn't say that, for instance, Mass Effect has the most complex of plots I would call it on par with what passes as a plot in your average Hollywood movie. (The ones above not neccessarily included.) While the plot ultimately boils down to "the bad guy wants to kill everyone", most of it is spent figuring out what's actually going on, with the focus being on the characters found along the way.

In a way, you could say it's a sci-fi adaptation of Indiana Jones: The good guys race with the bad guys for an ancient artifact of immense power in order to keep the bad guys from taking over/depopulating the world/galaxy, visiting a variety of interesting places in the process. We even have the same kind of smart-talking action hero as the lead, depending on how you play the game.

If they turned Mass Effect into Indiana Jones In Space, would that sacrifice a lot of the game? Not really, especially if they try to preserve Bioware's humor in the dialogues. Mass Effect is a game that would work with relatively little added; most of the work would be in cutting it down to size.


I agree that they do add a lot of unneccessary cruft to video game movies but it's not like all video games are Doom. A theoretical Monkey Island movie would very much not work if it was action-focused just like Alone in the Dark didn't work as a fast-paced action flick. What you can do with a game depends on how the game is in the first place. If you strongly deviate from the game's genre or change around the plot too much it's obvious that you lose whatever narrative qualities the game had. Unless your writing is good enough to carry the movie on its own you're going to end up with a mediocre result.

The main problem is not all video games lacking some narrative quality found in movies or not providing enough material, the problem is film makers who insist on adding completely new material that doesn't fit or focusing on something that only was a minor part of the original game. For instance, Mass Effect: The Movie would probably make the romance sideplot the main plot with everything else just used for backdrop. And then they'd wonder why nobody likes it.

Re:Respect?

[houghi]

And here we are talking about only video games. What about "Chess, the movie" and "Chess II, return of the King."

Re:Respect?

[Vectormatic]

yeah, the last thing that comes to mind when thinking of the LOTR movies is "respect for the original plot". I understand that a movie can only be so long before your audience falls asleep, but hand waving saruman away with a one-liner and instead tacking on 10 minutes of happy ending, fade out, happy ending, fade out was a slap in the face to anyone who read the actual books

The LOTR movies might be enjoyable in their own right, but they dont do justice to the original work by Tolkien

Re:Respect?

[mcvos]

All (most?) of those happy endings were actually in the books. It's just that they still had quite a bit of story in between them, and that got skipped. If you skip the story leading up to it, you'd better skip the ending too.

I don't mind that some stuff got cut. And some of the additions were brilliant even! (The ring is much scarier and has real personality in the movie.) The problem is that also some unnecessary nonsense was added, and some of the cuts necessitated more cuts that weren't made. It's still the best fantasy adaptation ever, and a really impressive movie, very inspired at some points (Gollum, the Ring), but the book it was based on is often considered the best book ever. You can't possibly do that justice.

Re:Respect?

[spiffmastercow]

I think the happy ending GP was referring to was the Hobbit ending, which I'm actually very glad they removed, as it seemed entirely unnecessary.

Re:Respect?

[stewbacca]

George Lucas only cares about making money so he can throw some ewoks into a movie to sell some extra toys to kids.

FTFY.

Re:Respect?

[stewbacca]

Director hubris. They think they can make classic works even better, because they are such great directors.

I understood moving pieces around to fit into three three-hour movies, but changing stuff and adding stupid love stories to make them more suitable to American Viewing Audiences was just dumb.

Re:Respect?

[rjstanford]

And here we are talking about only video games. What about "Chess, the movie" and "Chess II, return of the King."

I take it that you've never seen Chess: The Musical? Quite good, actually - Nobody's Side is one of my favorite songs. You've probably at least heard One Night in Bangkok before (aka: the song that financed the musical, in popular mythology at least).

Re:Respect?

[stewbacca]

You forgot to mention that Tomb Raider was successful because it was an early-ish era video game feeding off the success of a movie franchise and the nerd appeal of sexy avatar character.

Other than that Tomb Raider games are pretty lame.

Re:Respect?

[ultranova]

I understand that a movie can only be so long before your audience falls asleep, but hand waving saruman away with a one-liner and instead tacking on 10 minutes of happy ending, fade out, happy ending, fade out was a slap in the face to anyone who read the actual books

No, it wasn't. They cut out the Saruman takes Shrine -subplot, and instad have Grima kill Saruman at Orthanc. They also cut Tom Bombadil, the fight with the undead in a Barrow-down, and the parts of backstory where Sauron had a fair form and helped elves forge the Rings of Power, was beaten by Numenor, and deceived and sank Numenor. They even cut the Shadow of Sauron departing from Mordor, instead having his (literal!) eye explode.

It had been better to make LotR a mini-series rather than a movie trilogy, but they didn't, and as a result things had to be cut.

Re:Respect?

[grumbel]

Tomb Raider games where successful because they where among the first true third person 3D games and really good once too for their time. They of course also feed of a bit of the success from Indiana Jones, but that isn't exactly anything remarkable, as a ton of video games take heavy inspiration from movies without acquiring a proper license. The whole sexy bit was in large part just marketing and isn't really part of the games themselves. And of course, ironically enough, later Indiana Jones games where Tomb Raider clones themselves.

The issue with the Tomb Raider movies was basically just that they weren't all that well written. Tomb Raider, as a franchise, works due to the character and setting, just like Indiana Jones or James Bond, not due to any specific story lines. And just as you can write a good movie with such a character, you can also write a bad one (see Indy4 for a bad movie).

Re:Respect?

[Duradin]

One game movie is just like another when you've got your head down over your pieces brother.

Re:Respect?

[dzfoo]

It wasn't really unnecessary. In the context of the original work, the Scouring of the Shire represents the violability of the entire world. It meant that the evil that passed through the Third Age of Middle Earth affected it in such powerful ways, that it touched everything and everyone, including the sheltered and good-natured Hobbits. Thus, nothing hence would ever be the same.

This is a very fundamental lesson to be learned about the world: the most innocent and pure are just as vulnerable to the whims of fate as the rest; and that that innocence may be the necessary price to pay to overcome strife or worse evils, and by it achieve the greater good.

        -dZ.

Re:Respect?

[knarfling]

My biggest problem with the movies was the way they handled the basic premise of the book. Don't get me wrong, I loved the movies, but they did not tell the same story as the book.

The book tells a story of halflings who, although great people were doing great things all around them, still grew up and managed to do great things. It was possible, even if they were looked down upon as unimportant, for them to do great things. They did not have to rely on another hero, they could become their own hero.

The movie told more of a story about great people doing great things and the hobbits were more of a side story. Their story was told only as it connected with Aragorn's story, or Legolas's story, or Gimli's story. The story of how the hobbits learned that they had to fight and when they first met real danger with the barrow wights wasn't important to Aragorn's story, so it wasn't told. When they learned that they could fight by themselves and did not need men, elves or wizards to clean up a mess in their own land, it was not told because it had no effect on Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas or Gimli.

Yes, I know that the hobbits were central to the quest of the ring. Without the hobbits, there would be story to tell. Aragorn would still have the choice to become King of Gondor, but there would be no hobbits to help him choose what was more important to him. Still, the book presented many of the actions of the times only as they dealt with the hobbits. The movie was exactly backwards. It presented all the actions from a human perspective.

Again, I loved the movies. They did a wonderful job with much of the story, and added some insights that I had not seen before. I own the DVDs of both the extended edition as well as the standard release, and I continue to watch them as time permits. (not often enough, of course.) Still, I kind of wish the movies did a better job of showing how the hobbits grew up and took responsibility for their own lands and problems.

Re:Respect?

[kubernet3s]

Thhhaatt's a pretty narrow view of gaming, don't you think? I could certainly see that the kind of narrative that drives a book isn't really possible in games, but "pure action" is certainly not the reason all, or even most people play games. There are visual, thematic, and yes even narrative elements to games that draw people to play, and not everyone gets bored if they have to go five minutes without seeing an explosion or Lara Croft's tits. Giving the example of Tomb Raider, much as the article gives the Mario Brothers movie (which I'd have to say, could have been much worse), is I think indicative of the problem. People making movies out of games for some reason feel possessed to go for barely-explicated platformers, which they then treat as hour and a half resume-ruiners for whatever hack won't leave the studio alone. Tomb Raider wasn't terrible because it "added too much depth" to any preexisting great story, but because it was ACTUALLY a terrible story written to fill the gaps in a game which had almost no story to begin with. The same goes for most game movies: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy (though FF does have deep stories, they decided instead to write a story shittier than all the put together). No one ever uses the narrative arc of a game to create a movie, and instead we're given ludicrous origin stories for puzzlers and platformers. I half expect to see a Pac-Man game where a genetic experiment has to be hunted down by vampires. This is what is meant by respect: say what you will about the LoTR movies, but they were a legitimate cinematic endeavor that most of the moviegoing public considered perfectly adequate, and did pretty well at the Oscars, as I recall. Harry Potter is in a similar vein, (despite the quality of THOSE movies, eesh). I know that they are very few games that could stand up to real works of literature. I know that after studying literature, story based gaming was all but ruined for me as it became painful to watch the hackneyed voice acting and ridiculous posturing that most "deep games" include (I haven't picked up a game in years where the male protagonist wasn't doing a 'batman voice' the entire time) but far worse IPs get far better treatment from Hollywood. No one's expecting that Hollywood turn Mass Effect into Casablanca, but it doesn't deserve to be made into a twenty page made-for-TV script that is basically an hourlong excuse for tits. Hollywood should appreciate that gamers have an interest in the stories that go into the games they play; that these stories are deserving of sincere cinematic attention, and that gamers deserve to come out of a game-based movie at LEAST as happy as a Harry Potter fan coming out of a Harry Potter movie, instead of, as the case is now, shocked or nauseous.

Re:Respect?

[spiffmastercow]

It wasn't really unnecessary. In the context of the original work, the Scouring of the Shire represents the violability of the entire world. It meant that the evil that passed through the Third Age of Middle Earth affected it in such powerful ways, that it touched everything and everyone, including the sheltered and good-natured Hobbits. Thus, nothing hence would ever be the same.

This is a very fundamental lesson to be learned about the world: the most innocent and pure are just as vulnerable to the whims of fate as the rest; and that that innocence may be the necessary price to pay to overcome strife or worse evils, and by it achieve the greater good.

-dZ.

That may be, but it still reminded me a lot of Ewoks.

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

The love story is in the book. Or don't the appendices count?\

And why is it the Americans' fault?

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I love the scene. everyone is dancing except the formerly-jovial veterans, now forever scarred by what they went through.

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what do you expect when they serve an audience that thinks Mass Effect has depth? What depth? Evil monster with no motivation appears and gets blown up by equally unmotivated guy/gal. Great literature this does NOT make. Granted it has depth if you grew up on superman comics but then Hollywood got you well covered.

Have you actually played Mass Effect? If you did, maybe you blasted past the dialogue, or went to make a sandwich or something. Saren has motivation: he thinks he's being a dutiful Turian and he gets corrupted. You could say he's a bit dim, or just weak willed and prideful. The Reapers have motivation: they farm other species like we would farm livestock. Shepard has motivation: I'll let you guess what that might be. I'd go so far as to say that Mass Effect has the deepest plot of any game to date. (ME 2, maybe not so much.) I'd even rank it among some of the great works of science fiction.

Re:Respect?

[CaseM]

I honestly felt the LOTR book adaptations added wayyyy too much detail. For example, Tom Bombadil: not in the movies at all. Why did this dude Token or whatever his name is feel the need to invent characters not in the original script?

Re:Respect?

[Rakarra]

It wasn't really unnecessary. In the context of the original work, the Scouring of the Shire represents the violability of the entire world.

It's also a point that had been hammered home many times already, both in the books and in the movies.

Re:Respect?

[Machtyn]

My problem was the mishandling of Pippin and Meriadoc. Those characters totally had a maturing when they stood in the Treant council. Instead, the director put the critical decision and statement in the hands of the head Treant. I too thought the movies were an excellent adaptation of the books.

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of game mechanics, let's not forget that Tomb Raider was more or less a 3D version of Prince of Persia.

Re:Respect?

[mcvos]

Me too. I love all the Shire scenes, both the start and the end of the trilogy. But in the books, I got extremely annoyed by the increasingly morose Frodo.

Re:Respect?

[mcvos]

This is very well put. It also explains why the Scouring of the Shire is missing, and why that's so bad. It's when the hobbits finally take matters in their own hand and put things in order. And it doesn't happen in the movies.

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Evil monster with no motivation appears and gets blown up by equally unmotivated guy/gal.

If you're going to try to mock a plot by describing 1% of it, you should at least try to describe that 1% correctly.

Re:Respect?

[Rakarra]

The movie told more of a story about great people doing great things and the hobbits were more of a side story. Their story was told only as it connected with Aragorn's story, or Legolas's story, or Gimli's story.

Legolas? Gimli? Since when did the movies go into their stories? The movies focused far more on the hobbits than it did them. I think the movies were all about Aragorn and the hobbits. And maybe Gandalf and Saruman. Everyone else, after Boromir died, became a side character.

The story of how the hobbits learned that they had to fight and when they first met real danger with the barrow wights wasn't important to Aragorn's story, so it wasn't told.

It wasn't told because the core story of the movies focuses on the ring and sauron's war to regain it. The Barrow Downs, like Tom Bombadil, is unnecessary background in a movie. It gives you a wonderful feeling for "the world" but has little bearing on the plot as a whole. You have the extended edition, I think Jackson mentions the Barrows were originally scripted, but the movies were still way too long, and they had to cut out most of the Fellowship that wasn't actually about the ring and its journey.

Yes, I know that the hobbits were central to the quest of the ring. Without the hobbits, there would be story to tell. Aragorn would still have the choice to become King of Gondor, but there would be no hobbits to help him choose what was more important to him. Still, the book presented many of the actions of the times only as they dealt with the hobbits. The movie was exactly backwards. It presented all the actions from a human perspective.

I found the second movie (though not the Frodo/Sam side) to be human centered, though the Return of the King had far more of a balance. A lot more of Pippin as a pawn, Merry and Pippin rescuing each other, etc. It would have been easy to leave them completely as side characters like Legolas and Gimli.

Re:Respect?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of games that are "about" story:

Take the Neverwinter Nights series, for example: it's not so much a game as a storytelling medium, as the thousands of fan-made modules demonstrate.

Assassin's Creed, Freelancer - stupid and cliched stories, both, but still the story is more important than the gameplay.

Jade Empire - frankly, better scripted and acted already than most Hollywood movies, and with a very cool villain.

Right?

[Alarindris]

If you want someone to make a movie the way you want to see it, become a director.

It seems there is a heavy feeling of entitlement as far as media and the arts go here.
Like people often say here, ideas are a dime a dozen. The implementation is the hard part.

Re:Right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like people often say here, ideas are a dime a dozen. The implementation is the hard part.

Good point.

Re:Right?

[ADRA]

I had a similar thought to yours when I read the story heading. The only time that comic books got decent adaptations were from people who really loved them. Why did it take decades for many good comic based movies to be made after their original stories have long sit idle? Because the people who pitch and produce passionate and -good- adaptations of these stories needed to grow up first. Plus, having a good history of success making comic movies has made it easier for the pay masters to open their wallets to the idea of comic movies. Video game based adaptations will have their days, but they will need those few first break-away hits to make people stand up and notice. Wing commander and company were not these success stories, alas.

Re:Right?

[Raumkraut]

Ideas are indeed a dime a dozen, but we're talking about already successful ideas with existing fan-bases.

Personally I think the problem is that people try to make a movie based on a video game, rather than making a movie based on characters, setting, and plot.
There is often the same issue with games based on movies, and they usually suck just as much as the game-to-movie attempts.

Don't make a movie of a game, just make a movie.
Don't make a game of a movie, just make a game.

Re:Right?

[Hognoxious]

You could make a movie that's inspired by a game, or loosely based on it. Take the characters, the main gist of the "plot" and maybe even the look, but adapt it in a way more suited to the cinema.

Of course, then everyone will complain about the discrepancies/inaccuracies/inconsistencies or whatever. OMG not canon oneleventyone!!!!

Re:Right?

[grumbel]

If you want someone to make a movie the way you want to see it, become a director.

Even that didn't work for video games, see the Wing Commander movie.

Re:Right?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well now that's a helpful sentiment. It's like saying if you don't like watching your favorite football team lose, you should suit up in pads and start running windsprints. Directing movies has significantly high barriers to entry. Oh, you can become an independent director, but nobody is going to watch your crap.

Re:Right?

[HungryHobo]

It wasn't fantastic but it was quite true to the feel of the original game: the silent hill movie adaption.

I imagine that video game adaptions fall prey to the same problems that book adaptions do: if the author doesn't give a damn then it gets turned into a generic crap hollywood film.

A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which wet down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said 'Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centes of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys. Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years. -- Terry Pratchett

now anyone familiar with the book will know from this that the person across the table didn't even read the back of the book or even the first 2 lines of the back of the book, to quote them here for anyone not familiar with professor terry Pratchett works:

Mort has been chosen as Death's apprentice. He gets board and lodging and free use of company horse, and doesn't even need time off for his grandmother's funeral.

and there's so many crappy directors who just keep making the same film over and over, if given a story they chop off everything which doesn't fit their one and only story and then nail the 2 together poorly.

Re:Right?

[mcvos]

Tomb Raider worked well enough. No idea how far it strayed from the original, as I haven't played it, but Indiana Jones-clone-with-hot-chick-and-SFX-overdose is a perfectly valid movie concept, apparently.

Re:Right?

[Duradin]

What Wing Commander movie? There was no Wing Commander movie. Even if there is an extra fighter in the hangar that says "Wing Commander" it never existed.

Now if you'll excuse me I have some memories to repress.

Re:Right?

[tlhIngan]

Ideas are indeed a dime a dozen, but we're talking about already successful ideas with existing fan-bases.

Personally I think the problem is that people try to make a movie based on a video game, rather than making a movie based on characters, setting, and plot.
There is often the same issue with games based on movies, and they usually suck just as much as the game-to-movie attempts.

Don't make a movie of a game, just make a movie.
Don't make a game of a movie, just make a game.

Problem is exactly that. Movies, comic books, books, games are different media with different requirements. There are things you can do in books that you can't do in a movie, comic book or game. And things you have to do in a movie that cannot be done in another media format. Ditto games.

Take an existing universe, say the Halo one (which has comic books, books (NYT bestsellers), and games). If we take a book and game example (The Flood, Halo Combat Evolved), they're describing the same things, yet different. The game has to have action and expository detracts. Yet the book has to have expository because that's what books do. They also have to go deeper down - adding details that don't make sense in the game, and give the Master Chief actually some character.

Then take the comic book and books (The Fall of Reach, same title for both), and the book goes into more background and details that would turn a 20-page by 4 comic book series into a 200+ page series. And it's been set in stone, so Halo Reach couldn't even touch that storyline except at the end, and not directly.

Managing multiple media is extremely difficult - and you'll find the Halo series is probably not even the best example, yet it's one where an attempt has been made at multiple media formats. And probably why the Halo movie has been put off indefinitely. There have been several live-action shorts, but that's it - probably to get a feel for what the limitations are. And to grow a universe, multiple media formats is required - books can do things really well that a game or comic book cannot, and ditto the other formats. But it takes a lot of work.

I think the other problem with movies is the hollywood effect. Games and books tend to appeal to specific audiences (who can and do overlap). Movies have to appeal to everyone as their goal is asses in seats which means unfortunate compromises meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. So you get crap subplots and false conflicts just to ensure it appeals to as many people as possible.

Re:Right?

[Anonymous Coward]

The director who made the _Wing Commander_ movie wanted to remake _Das Boot_, not make a movie from the video games.

Re:Right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, having a good history of success making comic movies has made it easier for the pay masters to open their wallets to the idea of comic movies. Video game based adaptations will have their days, but they will need those few first break-away hits to make people stand up and notice.

They've had them. Just because some video game adaptations are low budget crap doesn't mean they all are. The budgets of these films likely reflect the quality of the proposals made to the studios. Tomb Raider got an ~$80m budget and ~$90m for the sequel. Final Fantasy got ~$135m. Prince of Persia got ~$200m. The paymasters have already shown a willingness to "open their wallets."

The lack of quality in the genre isn't due to the fact that the genre isn't getting the respect it deserves from the studios, it's due to other factors like the lack of depth in the genre and the lack of dedicated and talented individuals to lovingly create the adaptation. The Lord of the Rings could have been absolute crap, but Peter Jackson and company devoted literally years of their lives to doing it right. When someone with the talent and motivation decides to make it happen, it will. But until that time, there's nothing that anyone else can do to force it.

I agree with GP...either be the person that can make it happen or quit your bitching. Complaining that talented people don't share your interests is a bit self-centered. And I agree with you that we just need to wait long enough for the people who grew up playing video games with reasonable story lines to come of age as filmmakers.

Mass Effect

[IamTheRealMike]

The first Mass Effect was the business, story wise. Deeply thought out, self consistent world, interesting characters, a shadowy nemesis and a basically solid beginning, middle and end. Everything Hollywood needs to make a great movie.

But Mass Effect 2, though technically speaking a better game, definitely fared worse on the plot. The plot in ME2 suffered heavily from being wrapped around a fairly trivial design doc and didn't really have any beginning as such. Basically: hero dies, is rescued by an enigmatic terrorist leader with access to incredible resources, who tells him to recruit the most badass characters in the galaxy to fight an alien menace. 90% of the game involves this "recruitment". It's a race against the clock but nobody demonstrates any sense of urgency at all. There's never a "well, he'll do, let's get going!" to be heard. Once you have some arbitrary number of characters you jump through a wormhole, fight some baddies and blow up a space station. Fin.

There's some other stuff in there that advances the plot of the trilogy as a whole, but it's pretty weak.

Basically, if the author of TFA is hoping that Mass Effect will become a successful video game/movie crossover franchise, he'd better hope they only try and do it to the first game.

Re:Mass Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need is ME1's plot and ME2's characterization.

Though, to be fair, ME1's plot is pretty B-grade when you look at it closely...and this is coming from somebody who has played both games to excess.

Re:Mass Effect

[AmiMoJo]

As with movie sequels often the original writers were not planning to write one but commercial pressures demand they do. Sequels are often pretty poor for that reason.

Games are slowly getting better, using proper script writers and trying to make vocal work easier for the actors. Actors in games have a particularly hard time because they tend to end up in a sound recording booth reciting lines that have little context. Even with animated movies there is a fixed plot and some character development. Most games seem to be very much centred around the player with other characters being there simply to interact with or walk you through how to climb a ladder (MGS).

It reminds me of the situation with daytime TV in the 80s. It was cheezy has hell, badly written and badly acted. It was all down to lack of budget and time, and while I expect there will always be shows like that I'd say that the bar has definitely been raised since then. Go back and watch some episodes of major shows like Babylon 5 and you will be shocked how corny it all is. Actually Stargate and Battlestar Galactica are good examples too - compare how they were originally to their latest incarnations. Eventually the same thing will happen to games... Hopefully.

Re:Mass Effect

[ZombieWomble]

I once heard an observation about the ME series that makes a lot of sense: ME1 is following the template of a movie; ME2 is following the template of a TV series with a large ensemble cast, like Star Trek.

After our hero is introduced and the scene set, it's then broken into "episodes" which are heavily focused on one member of the "cast", who the rest of the time just stay in the background and throw in the occasional quip. Every now and again throw in a plot advancing episode to keep things ticking over, and finish with beating on a Big Bad. But be sure to wrap up with a bit of a cliffhanger to ensure people are hyped for the next sesaon.

The actual plot of any given episode, most of the time, is immaterial - any events which happen in a character episode are expected to be contained within that episode, and exist only to frame character development or provide obstacles for them to overcome. Since most games follow the movie template, it does feel very different to play, but not necessarily worse - the focus on characterisation did pay off, I feel. Still not perfect, but then nor is the characterisation in most good TV series either.

Sadly, having said all that, I do agree that it wouldn't work as well as a movie, which does make me concerned about the quality of any adapation, since it's going to have to stray pretty far from the plot to fit it into a movie-shaped box.

Re:Mass Effect

[mcvos]

Computer games with A-grade plots are extremely rare. Mostly, you want stuff to do, so there's a quest and maybe a bunch of side quests. Meet people, explore new areas, talk a bit here and there, and kill stuff. Unless your name is Lord of the Rings, people have done this before and done it better. You're going to get a B-movie at best.

Very, very few games have more interesting plots than that. Planescape: Torment stands out here. Maybe the original Fallout games. Half-Life perhaps. I can't think of anything else that has a movie-worthy plot. And even of these, only Torment is truly interesting, plot-wise. The others are still "figure out what the problem is and kill it" stories, just good ones.

Re:Mass Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

The first Mass Effect was the business, story wise. Deeply thought out, self consistent world, interesting characters, a shadowy nemesis and a basically solid beginning, middle and end. Everything Hollywood needs to make a great movie.

But Mass Effect 2, though technically speaking a better game, definitely fared worse on the plot. The plot in ME2 suffered heavily from being wrapped around a fairly trivial design doc and didn't really have any beginning as such. Basically: hero dies, is rescued by an enigmatic terrorist leader with access to incredible resources, who tells him to recruit the most badass characters in the galaxy to fight an alien menace. 90% of the game involves this "recruitment". It's a race against the clock but nobody demonstrates any sense of urgency at all. There's never a "well, he'll do, let's get going!" to be heard. Once you have some arbitrary number of characters you jump through a wormhole, fight some baddies and blow up a space station. Fin.

There's some other stuff in there that advances the plot of the trilogy as a whole, but it's pretty weak.

Basically, if the author of TFA is hoping that Mass Effect will become a successful video game/movie crossover franchise, he'd better hope they only try and do it to the first game.

No no and no.

Besides the fact I personally think ME2 was just as good as ME1,

DO NOT MAKE A MOVIE IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF SHEPARD!

Considering the very level of customization that goes into the game, whether it be your character or the decisions you make, (especially the latter!,) the game experience is different for EVERYONE and the movie would NOT be the Mass Effect you know. I propose a movie based on the Illusive Man or The Alliance or something. Not. Shepard.

Re:Mass Effect

[Custard Horse]

Isn't just the case that modern games have the graphical capability to mimic film hence the increased appeal of modern games and their ability to be turned into good films? Not everyone wants to play games that are so far removed from reality and nobody wants to watch a film based on the premise.

Previously popular games were 'cutesy' or simplistic: Pac-Man, Bubble Bobble, Horace Goes Skiing - none of those would have made a good film. Pac-Man literally has no depth of character - whether those hyphens are wafers or crack - he just can't get enough. On a deeper level that could be comment on the effect of greed on the human soul - but only if you were on crack.

Super Mario Brothers was the epitome of 'missing the point'. A successful game does not a good movie make. Street Fighter was better but still dreadful and Mortal Combat was 'acceptable'. Doom could have been good but it is widely accepted that the director has the 'reverse-Midas effect' - everything he touches turns to shit - therefore the chance was missed.

The Modern Warfare series of games would make great films but I suspect that it would be like seeing a film after reading the book i.e. a little disappointing.

Re:Mass Effect

[0123456]

Though, to be fair, ME1's plot is pretty B-grade when you look at it closely...and this is coming from somebody who has played both games to excess.

Bingo. As a movie, Mass Effect would be at best a Sci-Fi channel B-movie with Bruce Campbell.

Re:Mass Effect

[jgtg32a]

I've always though ME was highly overrated but it isn't that bad.

Re:Mass Effect

[ThirdPrize]

Going around and gathering your team is ok once or twice, but i wouldn't want to do it again. In ME2 you could probably have Sheppard survive but the rest of his team die. That means we will probably have to gather a new team again.

Re:Mass Effect

[0123456]

I've always though ME was highly overrated but it isn't that bad.

Actually, I think the only way that you could do it as a movie would be as a Bruce Campbell parody. And half of it would be spent going up and down elevators.

My favorite part was when the aliens told me I was like the most bad-ass human ever and they'd let me in their secret alien club, and then I went down the elevator yet again and there was someone hanging around who wanted me, the most bad-ass human alive, to go and beat up some gangster.

'Woo-hoo, look at me, I'm the most bad-ass human alive and I'm in the secret alien club'
'Hello Bruce_01, if you beat up this gangster for me I'll give you this rusty ray gun I found in the garbage'
'WTF? Didn't you hear the news? The aliens just said I'm the most bad-ass human alive and let me into the secret alien club and you want me to beat up some stupid gangster? Would you like me to collect some rat tails while I'm at it?'
'Rat tails? That's the next quest!'

B-movie story, insanely long unskippable cut-scenes that don't even reach B-movie levels, elevators, elevators, elevators, and the same tired, tedious quest mechanic that we lifted from bad fantasy novels thirty years ago. Why would anyone want to watch this as a movie other than to make fun of it?

Re:Mass Effect

[jgtg32a]

...
You make a very compelling argument

Re:Mass Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

So thanks, I guess I don't have to play Mass Effect 2 now.

It's called a spoiler alert, jerk. Use it.

In videogames, the protagonist is the player.

[Tei]

Movies are tales can be written down in 2 pages, maybe one.

Games are interactive experience, that often have worldbuilding.

Games are not tryiing to write a story, but can be the result, would be a side effect of the worldbuilding and gameplay.

There are games that have zero lore, and zero story to it. Think... Minecraft.

But is this important? Not, because you can make a awesome movie inspired in Minecraft. Key word here is inspired. The less material Minecraft have, the better movie a inspired moviemaker have, because is free to do his own thing.

The translation? you can't translate gameplay to a movie, or no one know how to do that, so you can't translate games to movies. And gameplay is the core of a videogame. You can get a videogames about spaceships in space, replace the space by a grass land, and the ships by wizards, and will still be the same exact game.

Theres is deep in videogames, but if often user made, and that depends on the player creativity and attitude. You can't make a good movie out of a 16 years old playing to win, but you can make a good movie out of two slighty dumb guys goofing around in a game (the type of dudes you would love to drink a beers with).
Games like Morrowind would best be served as serials, like Battlestart Galactica or Babylon 5.
But has a movie? maybe not.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the proposed cast is that Yvonne Strahowski as Miranda Lawson or is this movie based on Thriller?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the proposed cast is that Yvonne Strahowski as Miranda Lawson or is this movie based on Thriller?

If they put Yvonne Strahovski in I'd watch, she can even make blocks of lego look sexy, BTW why are there so many hot Aussie women on US TV

I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Spy Handler]

the movie

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[MrQuacker]

Quickly now, shut up before they hear you...

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[SeaFox]

"A touching film of humanity at its best when all the cards are down..."

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, you can watch "Minesweeper, The Movie". Look it up in YT

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Anonymous Coward]

"...when you feel like the deck is stacked against you..."

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Vectormatic]

They managed to make Doom into a movie, so solitaite should be a walk in the park

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[SJ2000]

Nah, they only do action.

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Shikaku]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14KwzYBjm-8

All I get is a video about being blown up.

OH you meant minesweeper not minecraft, silly me. It's still the same either way however.

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[jimshatt]

Ooh! Minefield: The movie! Where a guy gets trapped inside a computer, and has to play a computer game but then in real life, sort of, to liberate himself!
Oh wait...

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[tbannist]

In a world where the deck is stacked against him. One man chooses to deal himself a new hand of cards...

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[JohnnyBGod]

Believe it or not, it's been done, albeit as part of a Portuguese comedy show, set in a bathroom accessory store that doubled as a film studio. The director films it, and then the producer feels it needs to be sexier, and the result is this.

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[loimprevisto]

You asked for it...

Minesweeper: The Movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[LongearedBat]

so solitaire should be a walk in the park

Yeah, but a lonely walk in the park.

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Rakarra]

That's what the recent Bond movie Casino Royale felt like in the middle section.

Re:I'm still waiting for Solitaire

[Dabido]

http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=solitaire

There are fourteen of them so far. Take your pick. :-)

Was Lara Croft Tomb Raider adaptation of a game?

[Rsriram]

If so, it had a good budget, effects and commercial success.

No more Uwe

[MrQuacker]

How about we just stop letting Uwe Boll direct videogame inspired movies.

Re:No more Uwe

[adamofgreyskull]

Hope you're fit...talking like that you're in line for an ass-whoopin'.

Re:No more Uwe

[lxs]

Hush now. Postal was awesome.

Re:No more Uwe

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a boxer?

That certainly explains why his movies seem so ... brain damaged.

Re:No more Uwe

[slimshady945]

Hush now. Postal was awesome.

...and Far Cry was even better!

Re:No more Uwe

[Legion303]

Uwe's boxing won't do much good against an angry mob of 800,000 angry nerds.

Re:No more Uwe

[pinkushun]

Boll might be a dick towards mainline hollywood directors, but they deserve it, because they are "fucking retards".

Re:No more Uwe

[Anonymous Coward]

How about ending questions with question marks?

Re:No more Uwe

[RevWaldo]

Uwe Boll wobbles but he don't fall down.

.

Doom movie

[Anonymous Coward]

The Doom movie is a prime example of what NOT to do, and what to do. Include a little game experience like the first-person part, but do not completely change the plot/story, and especially do not change it to a clichè and worn out plot.

Re:Doom movie

[Com2Kid]

I am actually surprised they DID change it.

While the original Doom did not exactly have a solid story line, the setting (HELL) is a pretty damn good one. It would require a large budget to fully realize, but a bad ass marine vs hell's legion could have made for an awesome action horror film.

Prince of Persia

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Hollywood has yet to find any video game property it is willing to treat with the same respect as J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K.Rowling

IMO the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie was top-notch and one of the best movies in 2010. So, if Hollywood really wants to make a movie based on a video game, they can pull it quite easily, effectively and remarkably.

So no attitude needs to be changed. It mostly/just depends on their will to make a real movie.

Re:Prince of Persia

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the best in 2010? You may not have watched many movies in 2010 then.

That said, it was a competent popcorn action movie... which is fine, and probably as good an adaptation as the series as a whole was going to get (a more loyal adaptation of the aesthetics of the first game only would have been a better movie, but would probably end up too disney-esque to attract the same gamer demographic that is now attached to the brand).

But it's worth noting that the movie has barely any real plot - it's an action flick based on a platformer, so it doesn't matter that much, but it bypasses many of the dilemmas of adapting a game into a narrative, where either there is nothing to adapt (Doom) or there is way too much non-linear depth to fit on a streamlined single plot (e.g.: Deus Ex).

You can argue that LoTR also has way far more material than could fit in a movie, but the fact is it's already a linear narrative... a director can have a gut sense of the pacing and timing of the plot, and whether X chapters fit on Y script pages and Z minutes of movie work, using standard narrative tools. Most interesting games are non-linear interactive experiences, so X hours of gameplay do not translate directly to Y pages or Z minutes of video unless the game was already an extremely linear experience, or the movie is a really bad and confusing movie.

It's like talking about a movie adaptation of a painting - it makes no sense. The media is different and the objectives are different, we should be talking of movies "inspired by" games, not "adapted from" games before we can expect some consistently good movies coming out of this.

Re:Prince of Persia

[achenaar]

o.O
Seriously?
Neither of you are slating the Prince of Persia movie as the unmitigated pile of crap that it was?
I'm now wondering if we've seen different films under the same name...
It was utter garbage. Truly embarrassing. From Gyllenhaal's hair (and the selection of Gyllenhaal as the prince in the first place), through the use of what for all the world looked like the font Papyrus (argh!) to the dagger being used precisely three times and not one of which was in combat or a time of great peril as per the major point of the bleedin' game.
I made the mistake of seeing that pile of trash at the cinema and both I and the missus (she'd played sands of time and enjoyed it thoroughly) were the closest we'd ever been to storming out of the theatre.
Having paid actual money to be there however, we stuck it out.
In retrospect, I wish we'd have left.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Do video games need the respect of Hollywood now?

Must suck to life in the kind of world that "anonymous reader" does.

Shepard: Wrex.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shepard: Wrex.

Uncharted

[IrrepressibleMonkey]

Uncharted is the perfect candidate for a popcorn movie, but from all the revelations/rumours it sounds like the movie studio is determined to dump everything that is good about the character and plot while adding unnecessary father/son (and Uncle???) dynamics.

At which point you have to ask: "Why bother?"

Oh yes, it's the money you can scalp from disappointed fans. Great.

Re:Uncharted

[Tim C]

Oh yes, it's the money you can scalp from disappointed fans. Great.

So watch the trailers, read some reviews, and it if looks like it's crap, don't watch it.

Scalp? No one is forcing you to spend your money just because you like the game.

Re:Uncharted

[IrrepressibleMonkey]

Scalp? No one is forcing you to spend your money just because you like the game.

Oh behave. I rarely watch video game movies and I can't remember ever seeing one at the cinema. Like most of the Slashdot crowd, I'm very selective about all my spending and research everything from films to games to washing mashines before parting with my money.

But let's not kid ourselves that all consumers will ever be like that. Or that those who don't research a film before going to see it deserve to be ripped off by a film that solely relies on a name borrowed from a previously successful video game.

Re:Uncharted

[stewbacca]

Uncharted is the perfect candidate for a popcorn movie

Straight-to-the-trash is the perfect candidate for popcorn movies.

Uncharted was fun because I was playing it. It is not really fun to watch somebody playing it, which is what a movie would be like.

Respect?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Respect that respected Science Fiction authors get when their thought provoking stories are turned into action flicks with rappers?

Respect Tolkien got when Elves appeared at Helms Deep?

Hollywood knows about respect, it is what is underneath their boots.

And what do you expect when they serve an audience that thinks Mass Effect has depth? What depth? Evil monster with no motivation appears and gets blown up by equally unmotivated guy/gal. Great literature this does NOT make. Granted it has depth if you grew up on superman comics but then Hollywood got you well covered.

Games to movies rarely will work because most games are simply NOT about story. Tomb Raider? It is about solving the puzzles and making the jumps. As much as I would like to see a well proportioned woman spending an hour and half flexing her body on the silver screen, it would have any depth. Except maybe her cleavage.

Tomb Raider, Doom, Mario Brothers: These are games, you play them for the game. NOT the story. Trying to bolt a story on top that becomes 90% of the content instead of 10% is going to require addition of stuff the player simply does not want. Case in point: Lara Croft in the original is a rather bland character with no boyfriend or past. In the movie she suddenly gets a love interest. HELLO! She was supposed to be MY fantasy, not some other guy.

But in a game, this doesn't matter. The little we know about the game Lara Croft is plenty, but jumped up movie directors think they GOT to tell a story. That is were Hollywood keeps going wrong, they still don't get that what they could produce is eye-candy porn. Take Transforms (please). Remove the humans and just gives us 1.5 hours of robots fighting. Zero attempt at story and even less at badly acted out emotions. I liked revenge of the fallen, just fastforward when a human shows up.

Tomb Raider the Story does not work. Tomb Raider the action-adventure does, but focus on action, not bolted on "depth". Give me a mindless 2D movie where I can park my brain at the door and just enjoy myself.

Hollywood isn't ruining game movies by not adding enough depth, but by adding to much. Pure 100% action, that is why I play games, add this to game movies and you are golden.

WTF!?

[Aceticon]

The vast majority of games out there don't have enough plot to fill a matchbox. How exactly are they worthy of extra respect versus any random short-story?

Really, Super Mario Bros. the movie was very close to the spirit of the games (light entertainment) and had more plot that all the games put together.

Just because some games have a bunch of fanboys out there doesn't mean that they or their game are worthy of special respect.

Might as well complain that movies about popular sports like football (the American one and the Rest Of The World one) don't show enough respect for the game - at least there are more fans for any of of those sports than there are for any specific computer game.

Re:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want "depth and breadth" read a book, there are millions out there, that make most movies and games, look as what they really are, childish. Hell, if you're not a reader, then go for comics, manga and manhwa.

Re:WTF!?

[IronSight]

Man, I must be crazy. I actually liked the Mario movie... the resident evil movies... the street fighter movie... parasite eve... silent hill... I know the fiction is always way off, but I don't really care. I'd rather watch a movie in the resident evil universe (maybe not akin to the game story at all) than a couple of vampires sucking face, or a couple of wizards discovering puberty.

Re:WTF!?

[stewbacca]

Spoiler Alert: The Princess is another castle.

That's some deep plot right there!

Re:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one was asking for a Super Mario Bros. movie.

Re:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot. It's not unreasonable to expect depth and breadth from a movie. Some books would have been better off as movies: Jennifer Government by Max Berry is a prime example. It's all action-oriented and nothing is described that couldn't be shot on film. The medium of storytelling should be based on what the best way of showing the story. Notes From the Underground would make a lame movie. Inception would make for a lame book.

Movies can and do have depth and breadth and it should be expected from them. Video game movies are detrimental to the movie industry b/c it reinforces your bullshit belief that movies are just a visual distraction. Spielberg, Allen, Cameron, Nolan, and many other greats, thank god, disagree. Michael Bay is bottom of the barrel trash, but by your criteria he's the standard that filmmakers should aspire to.

And to even suggest that comics, manga, and manhwa have depth. . .please, shoot yourself before you have the chance to breed.

Re:WTF!?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Really, Super Mario Bros. the movie was very close to the spirit of the games (light entertainment) and had more plot that all the games put together.

Based on what? Did you even see that movie?

Re:WTF!?

[Anonymous Coward]

And to even suggest that comics, manga, and manhwa have depth. . .please, shoot yourself before you have the chance to breed.

That's a foolish belief for you to hold. There are comics and manga that have a higher sum of narrative prose included than The Lord of the Rings or Dune. It's not an indicator of quality, but it would be ignorant to imagine that an entire medium has sprouted no works of depth. Try demonstrating a little depth, yourself.

Sam and Max

[Anonymous Coward]

A Sam and Max movie would be perfectly awesome, and also cheap to make!

Sorry, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any game that has a story good enough to be told well in a movie should have been a movie in the first place.

I play games for the gameplay, not some damn story that interrupts gameplay (you know, the reason we play games in the first place?) every ten seconds.

We need a gaming crash like we had in the US in the mid-80s again. Sadly this won't happen because modern gamers would actually *like* E.T. and give it "Game of the Year."

Re:Sorry, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but video games were just board games on TV in the mid-80s. You are going nuts.

Re:Sorry, but...

[FrootLoops]

That's an unfounded generalization. Not everyone plays games for the single-minded purpose of gameplay. Maybe you'd like storyless flash games?

Re:Sorry, but...

[Legion303]

I play games for the gameplay, not some damn story that interrupts gameplay

It sounds like the story-driven games you've been playing are the Squaresoft ones. Good story-driven games work the story in organically, not through Square's bullshit 70/30 cutscene-to-play ratio.

Re:Sorry, but...

[m50d]

Sometimes you can tell a story better through a game than through a movie; it makes it more immersive, and that can make a big difference when it's a story about the consequences of one's actions. Don't be so quick to dismiss a whole medium.

Uwe Boll

[chadruva]

Just don't let Uwe Boll direct or anyware near the studio and you may get a decent adaptation!

Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[igreaterthanu]

...have as much right to see a good plot respected as the readers of Lord Of The Rings?

The movies for Lord Of The Rings had many parts cut and bits moved around here and there. In particular a huge chunk of the Two Towers was cut. The plot was not set in stone and unchanged.

Don't get me wrong, Peter Jackson did a wonderful job. There were some changes that I really don't like though.

So with that said, don't expect Hollywood to treat any story with respect. They just do what they want.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[FrootLoops]

What would you consider "respecting a plot"? There's no way in the world to fit the LotR books in their entirety in a trilogy, so many parts had to get cut. Any other book should be the same. Book plots and movie plots have vastly different implementation details, too, and it's unsurprising changes have to be made. Perhaps you think it's impossible to respect a plot of some books in making a movie version? I have my pet annoyances with the changes in the recent LotR movies, but I still think they did a very good job overall of respecting the story as much as possible for a movie adaptation.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[Vectormatic]

There's no way in the world to fit the LotR books in their entirety in a trilogy, so many parts had to get cut.

agreed, but they made some pretty damn awefull cutting decisions, in RotK, Sarumans role is completely cut, and his name is mentioned once or so when gandalf happens to pass by isengard, a whole 20 seconds of Saruman related stuff. His entire coup of the shire at the end is cut, and replaced by: happy hobbit homecomming *fade out* happy hobbit party *fade out* happy hobbit wedding *fade out* happy hobbit baby shower *fade out ad nauseam*. I remember sitting in the theatre almost getting up everytime it faded out again, only to once again be confronted by yet another happy ending scene.

the fellowship took me some getting used to (my own imagination had filled in things differently), two towers was OK, RotK was a slap in the face when it comes to how the plot was handled

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[Hognoxious]

What would you consider "respecting a plot"?

Can we define it by what it isn't? Dwarf tossing & surfboarding elves for starters.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[0123456]

Can we define it by what it isn't? Dwarf tossing & surfboarding elves for starters.

I might have managed to get beyond the first ninety pages of the LOTR books if they had dwarf tossing and surfboarding elves rather than tedious sixty-page interludes about elvish folk dancing every ten pages. If the movie was a direct translation of the books, the audience would have walked out two hours into the fifteen-hour-long first movie of the trilogy.

Actually, in that respect they are rather like the average modern game which has two minutes of actual gameplay followed by a twenty-minute unskippable cutscene where characters tell each other things you already know and repeat it six times just to make sure you know they know they know it.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming you're thinking about the scenes where the hobbits are staying with Tom Bombadil. I can't really think of anything that could be in the first ninety pages that would resemble elvish folk dancing. I mean, there was Bilbo's birthday party... It seems to me that there's enough evil trees trying to eat them and undead horrors and Nazgul hunting them and so forth quite early on in the books, that most people with any attention span wouldn't be turned off after such a short time reading.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[Hognoxious]

I might have managed to get beyond the first ninety pages of the LOTR books if they had dwarf tossing and surfboarding elves

And I might have got more than ninety pages into Nicholas Nickleby if it had more pictures of boobies in it.

What was your point again? Oh yes, you wanted the board books - try the kids' section, right over there.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[FrootLoops]

That's a nice sound byte, but it glosses over the other 9 hours of the films. I'd be sad if a few minutes of running joke can determine whether a trilogy respected the plot of its source material or not.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[FrootLoops]

Yeah, I agree Saruman and the Harrowing of the Shire getting cut didn't agree well with me. But the movies were already obscenely long. Sometimes a movie just doesn't need yet another sub plot, even if a book series does. In any case, I was happy with so much of what *was* included it outweighs my annoyance by quite a ways. I also understand why they might have felt the need to cut those plot lines, and I think respect for the source material is the only thing that kept the movies from cutting far more.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[Hognoxious]

That's a nice sound byte

Sure it's not an int?

I'd be sad

You are. Very much so.

if a few minutes of running joke

I suppose you weren't expecting the Spanish Inquisition, but surfing elves is not a running joke. It's barely a joke at all.

Those things were a cheap attempt at light relief that had no business being there. Picture Tom Hanks winking at the camera and giving a thumbs up when the airstrike comes in near the end of Saving Private Ryan.

As to it being a small amount of time, what the fuck has that got to do with anything? It's still jarring. It still breaks the flow. Take a very hypothetical case: imagine you went on a 9 hour date and at some point she gave you a well-deserved kick in the nuts for being such a tedious twerp. I somehow doubt it would be the other 8 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds that'd stick in your mind.

Re:Hollywood directors? Respect? Since when!

[FrootLoops]

Certainly the magnitude of "disrespect" matters--Elrond making a dark pact with Sauron to sink Valinor wouldn't take much screen time, but would be horrific abuse of the source material. My opinion of the dwarf tossing is that it's not very serious, but I suppose you strongly disagree. Length of time matters to me since I can ignore things more easily if they're short, as a rule of thumb.

I don't think the insults were warranted. Your first post sounds like it was meant to be a sound byte. It's short and would make a good quote. I pointed that out and said I disagreed with you and you got angry.

Games don't need validation through film

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand people who cry out for a good "film of a game". Games are their own medium, they don't need hollywood to come along and put their blockbuster seal of approval on them. If you want a Mass Effect narrative on your screen then go and play Mass Effect - simple.

Re:Games don't need validation through film

[Anonymous Coward]

You are operating under the mistaken assumption that the reason for wanting to see a good "movie game" is to provide some kind of validation for games as a medium. It isn't. I play a game and sometimes think, "hey, this plot could make for a pretty good movie", just like I sometimes do when I'm reading a good novel or comic. That's all there is to it.

Hollywood is making a film out of Battleship

[Required Snark]

Yes, the board game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(film)

Next will be Tic-Tac-Tow

Anyone who is looking for "respect" in Hollywood deserves the respect that the upcoming "Yogi Bear" CGI animation deserves. Or Garfield or the TWO chipmunk movies had.

I'd tell the poster to grow up, but that would require leaving their parent's basement, which would be hard for a person over the age of 25 who has never had a real job and has as their most prized possession a collection of McDonald's Happy Meals figures.

Re:Hollywood is making a film out of Battleship

[91degrees]

Next will be Tic-Tac-Tow

Well, they took a few liberties with the game, but there's already been a movie about it.

Re:Hollywood is making a film out of Battleship

[dzfoo]

That wasn't Tic-Tac-Toe, that was Global Thermonuclear War: The Movie.

        -dZ.

Re:Hollywood is making a film out of Battleship

[Rakarra]

Having watched the original Yogi Bear, I think the movie will probably be pretty faithful. People today have some rose-colored glasses when it comes to remembering how great their childhood programs were.

There are a number of cartoons I liked as a kid that I watched decades later and realized "this was terrible. My memory is horrible, this wasn't good at all, even by kids' standards."

Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[sealfoss]

I hate the Lord of the Rings movies. Hate. They're visually stunning, I'll give them that. Though, thats as far as I go. I read the books years before the movies came out, and to put it mildly, together they are a literary masterpiece. A literary masterpiece that Peter Jackson completely fucked up and shat upon within the first five minutes of HIS Fellowship of The Ring movie (by explaining who and what Sauron was and why the one ring was so important). Oh, and in The Two Towers, please show me where the fuck it is mentioned that the Enemy had access to gun powder for a fucking bomb. Horse Shit! But these movies are paraded around as the "best ever" simply because they were based of something much greater, paying almost no attention to the actual quality of the movies. I wonder how many "fans" ( by which i mean fan-boys, or posers, or both ) of LOTR out there haven't even glanced at the books? If you have read the books, you would find the movies a very nice visual component to what you already know as LOTR, that is all. To claim these movies as anything more than that is a travesty, and a racial fucking slur against Tolkien's own work. Fuck Peter Jackson. Fuck his movies. My point is, the author of this post is assuming that Hollywood cares anything about the content off which they're basing ANY of their movies. Nine times out of ten, the only thing Hollywood cares about is making a movie that will make them money, as cheaply as possible. Movies based off anything, a book, a real event... a video game, all they offer Hollywood is an existing fan base that might automatically buy a ticket. Consider the Watchmen movie; horrid. They raped Hell Blazer like a Chinese finger trap, calling it "Constintine". Fight Club is the only movie i can think of that was better than the book ( yes, fuck the book is what I said ). SO, why in the HELL would you think Hollywood would treat video game based movies any differently? The most I think they would ever do is prevent Uwe Boll from directing them.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[gmhowell]

Nerd rage is the best rage.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[Com2Kid]

Oh re-fucking-lax. The books are entertainment, the movies are a related form of entertainment.

Nine times out of ten, the only thing Hollywood cares about is making a movie that will make them money, as cheaply as possible.

No shit, it is called capitalism. Money pays the bills, no one works for free.

I wonder how many "fans" ( by which i mean fan-boys, or posers, or both ) of LOTR out there haven't even glanced at the books?

Well 99.9% of the nerds who went and saw it did.

If you have read the books, you would find the movies a very nice visual component to what you already know as LOTR, that is all.

And what is wrong with the movies being just that?

To claim these movies as anything more than that is a travesty, and a racial fucking slur against Tolkien's own work.

Shit gets chopped up. People die. Awesome action scenes. I'm good.

And how the fuck is it a racial slur? Seriously WTF?

It is a movie. It had action and good music.

Lower your expectations a bit. Yesh.

They raped Hell Blazer like a Chinese finger trap, calling it "Constintine".

Constantine sucked because it had too much emo whining and not enough action. *yawn*

It was based on another work? Hey guess what? I don't give a shit. I go to the movies to be entertained.

I don't give a fuck about the "artistic merit" of the original work. Hell for that matter I don't care about the artistic merit of the movies I go to see. If I want a good story I read a book. I go to the movie theater to see shit get blown up.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's kind of his point. Now we have a bunch of people like you who think they know LotR and try to talk about LotR. Your ignorance and 'I don't care about artistic merit' attitude insult us when applied to what we consider a great work of literature.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[sealfoss]

yeah, i bet you dressed up like a hobbit when you went to the movie before you even knew what one was. your nerd-fu is sub-par my friend.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[stewbacca]

I've said many of the same things, but in much more socially acceptable tone.

I may be wrong, but the bad guys conjured up some magical gun powder in the book and blew up the sewer gate at Helm's Deep or whatever it is in the books as well.

I thought the first movie was the best adaptation, BECAUSE it relied the least on fancy graphics and epic battle scenes. It was the deepest of the movies from a literary stance. The second movie was a boring CGI-fest. The third movie seem rushed to put all the pieces together, which was impossible given Peter Jackson messed with perfectly good pieces from the first two movies.

If you think Jackson butchered these books, you should read The Lovely Bones, then watch the mind-bogglingly stupid movie adaptation.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[sealfoss]

He's ed wood reincarnate.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[An ominous Cow art]

Oh, and in The Two Towers, please show me where the fuck it is mentioned that the Enemy had access to gun powder for a fucking bomb.

Even when I read the book for the first time at age 11 or so, I interpreted that as some sort of bomb.

Ok, found it on Google books. The phrases are: "the Orcs have brought a devilry from Orthanc" and "a blasting fire".

There's plenty not to like about the LotR movies, but this is something that actually worked well, I think.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[sealfoss]

"devilry from Orthanc" and "blasting fire" DOES NOT EQUATE

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[painandgreed]

I hate the Lord of the Rings movies. Hate. They're visually stunning, I'll give them that. Though, thats as far as I go. I read the books years before the movies came out, and to put it mildly, together they are a literary masterpiece.

Bah! I read the LotR books before the movies came out starting when my mother read them to me at 5 as bedtime stories. I read them on my own in grade school after that and then again several times in high school and college. After the movies, I read them again. They are dear and loved by me, but sorry, they don't hold up. The stories meander with plenty of plot holes. There are side bits that have very little to do with the plot. Female characters are all but non-existent, as even Eowyn's defeat of the Witch King is just a few lines and just there to be mythical play on words. He puts forth ideas of class and race that are best left in the early 20th century and usually not welcome in the 21st. The books needed to be updated as pure adaptations might have pleased the few Tolkien geeks out there, but would have been found fairly unpalatable by current society."

Narnia books are similar. Re-reading them as an adult and the preaching and hatred of liberals and muslims is disturbing. He never really even explains why liberals are bad, just that they are. His representation of muslims are bad because they worship the devil. In the end they really start to lose it. As children's books, they're ok, because nobody really cares about plot holes and logic in a children's book.

Watchmen was pretty good actually. Yes, I want my giant space squid, but I can see how that would have taken much more set up in the movie that there wasn't time for. I'll give you Constantine which is the problem with Hollywood these days. It would have been a pasable movie if it didn't have some other IP spashed across it.

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Orcs in the books do make use of "blasting fire" in the attack on Helm's Deep. Though you're right that it's not specifically used to blow up the culvert (Orcs crawling through the culvert "like rats" is described though), or the wall the culvert was in. Changes were made to the overall structure of the battle and some of the smaller details. Some of the larger changes were bothersome, like having elves (aside from Legolas) come to their aid and leaving out the Ents and Huorns entirely. So were some of the smaller things, like the stupid dwarf tossing joke. Some of the larger changes just didn't bother me that much, like leaving out the orcs human allies (understandable, since it's easier to make non-humans look real when you're computer animating them en masse) and the exact progression of territory lost to the orcs, regained, etc. We expect the details of an action sequence to be fairly fluid from a book to a movie since a book can rely heavily on the readers imagination, but a movie has to show the action. As such, the orcs blowing up the culvert to get in didn't bother me that much since it didn't include any critical elements that weren't in the books. There were also small details that certainly didn't bother me, like Legolas riding down the stairway on the shield. It's not as if the books describe how he fights every moment and it's also not as if his superhuman agility, speed and tirelessness are at odds with his description in the book, nor is riding on a shield some idea that doesn't belong in an "ancient" context since it's been done historically for at least a thousand years. Then there are the things that some people I've met think are additions, but actually aren't, like Legolas and Gimli with their counting game, although the exact dialogue is altered.

So, overall, I disagree with you on the Lord of the Rings. I did actually have a ton of problems with some of the changes like you did, but I weighed them against the scope of the work. What you're doing is like some professors I've had who'll take a set number of percentage points off for every error in an assignment, regardless of its length (and relative contribution to your overall grade), effectively magnifying the effects of individual errors in large papers (maybe a bad analogy, I think I'm just bitter). I have to say that I agree with you about Constantine although they got a few things right (like the fact that it's a really bad idea to be a friend of his). Can't really say for Fight Club. For Watchmen... Well, they mostly did the movie scene for scene from the comic. They made changes, like the details of the big deception, but that makes some sense because they would have had to include the whole subplot about writers and geneticists who'd gone missing and so forth. They sanitized out the racial undertones and clipped characters and I think actually went ahead and used the name Watchmen for the group that Captain Metropolis (who wasn't in the movie, so they used Ozymandias instead) was trying to put together. They also changed the way that Rorschach killed the child-killer. About that, I find it interesting that they strengthened the implicit assumption that he was also a child rapist by leaving out Rorshach's dialogue about how it was actually a kidnapping for ransom which the kidnapper had screwed up by kidnapping the wrong girl. Apparently, these days it's not monstrous enough to kidnap a child, then kill her and feed her to dogs, she has to be raped, too. \Although the movie doesn't say she was, but every single person I've asked assumes she was. For that matter, they changed most of the action sequences in various ways, but none of those are extremely bothering. The comic was actually pretty action light and audiences like action. Also, maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, but I didn't notice any shadows graffitied on any walls. Plus, the timeframe on the whole energy revolution Dr Manhattan had ushered in was timeshifted from having already happened to just starting in the movies present. In the movie, it appears that things

Re:Hollywood doesn't give a flying fuck.

[Rakarra]

Narnia books are similar. Re-reading them as an adult and the preaching and hatred of liberals and muslims is disturbing. He never really even explains why liberals are bad, just that they are. His representation of muslims are bad because they worship the devil. In the end they really start to lose it. As children's books, they're ok, because nobody really cares about plot holes and logic in a children's book.

The Last Battle gets bizarre. When I was going through my atheist phase in high school (I'm agnostic now), I remember being rather offended by C.S. Lewis's unsubtle attacks on the non-religious. I can understand it from a religious viewpoint, but Lewis went at it from a scientific argument. He spent many many pages talking about how the dwarves refused to believe in the existence of Aslan, despite Aslan being... you know, right there, physically, healing people, doing the things only Aslan could do. It was a heavyhanded way of Lewis to say "we have all this -proof- that the Christian God exists, and they're just stubborn fools compared to us faithful ones." Offensive to any non-believer, since we actually have no proof of God. Most Christians would argue that's the purpose of faith. Lewis's arrogance and frustration were apparent.

Then there was the whole Aslan = Jesus and Tash = Allah parable, and when Aslan mentioned that if you do good works in the name of Tash, you're actually worshiping Aslan, and evil deeds done in the name of Aslan are worshiping Tash. I'm sure that will be... "edited down" and smoothed out in the upcoming movie translation.

for what?

[Tom]

Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck. Some books don't make good movies, and many movies would suck in book form. Likewise, while a few games make good movies and vice versa, the usual case is that they don't, so why try?

A movie is first and foremost about storytelling, in a carefully set up series of scenes, with a dramatic curve and a specific ending that everything in the movie is subtly linked to so that near the end you get the feeling of everything falling together like the pieces of a puzzle. Well, good movies anyway. It's about changing perspective, it can tell the story from various angles, leave storylines hanging for a while then return to them - there is a lot in the way how the story is told, in pacing and in letting the viewer know more than the protagonists on the screen.

Games are about decisions, reactions, about finding out clues and hints and about consequences. You are the protagonist, so even if they include cinematics of the evil guy planning his next move, the protagonist then knows about it. The pacing depends on you more than on the story. There are usually multiple routes and endings. It is a lot more about your character than about the story. And one of the challenges is that even the most meaningless random encounter could kill you, while in the movies we all know the hero never gets hurt except by the bad guy himself or one of his leutenants. All the nameless "random encounter" guys are just there as targets.

A good movie and a good game are not made following the same recipe. A good movie about a game, or a good game about a movie, will have little in common except the setting. Example: The Aliens and the Predator movies, and the AvP games (don't get me started about the AvP movies, they were crap). Great movies, great games, exactly because the games did not try to copy the movies but created their own world within the movie setting.

Re:for what?

[rjstanford]

Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck..

Ah, so you're familiar with Dan Brown's work then?

In the year 3000...

[matunos]

Movies will *be* video games, so who cares?

gamers == readers

[__aatirs3925]

Readers generally dislike movie adaptations of the book such as a lot of the LOTR fans from the original trilogy didn't like the movie because it was better played in their mind. Gamers tend to have that higher standard as well, and they will always expect more from something that adapts from what they are used to. A game isn't built like a movie and when it is, it's called Final Fantasy 13... hah. Though, anyone seen the IGN april fools movie trailer of the legend of zelda? That looked like it had amazing potential and I would be stoked if peter jackson did a movie like that, but I'm sure he's pre-occupied with the hobbit 1 and 2.

In the end, it's not that they can't make movies into games or games into movies properly, it's just that they don't pick the right ones to adapt. I don't think a Halo movie would be that great but Parasite Eve? That might be just as decent as Resident Evil if you're a fan of the movies. Then again, Resident Evil is originally a novel, no? So there's a great example on how a novel has a decent movie trilogy and pretty fun games.

Re:gamers == readers

[grumbel]

Gamers tend to have that higher standard as well, and they will always expect more from something that adapts from what they are used to.

Kind of, thats why good video game movies don't adopt an already existing story, but write a new one in the same universe. Resident Evil: Degeneration and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children do that and they are as a result fine video game movies. The trouble with adoption is that you have to rewrite, reinvent and just change stuff around that people are already deeply familiar with and while one can't avoid that in a book, it just feels out of places in games where the source material already is in no small parts build out of movie pieces.

Re:gamers == readers

[icebraining]

Resident Evil is originally a novel, no?

No, novels were made from the game, not the game from novels.

Re:gamers == readers

[Stevecrox]

Readers generally dislike book adaptations because Hollywood tends to trample over the book's storyline and do whatever they want.

Harry Potter, LOTR, and Twilight appear to be good adaptations. Just as Spiderman and Watchmen were good adaptations.

Sure there can be cuts and changes, but in those films the directors made changes so they story would work on the screen and they either have the writer enforcing the plot or a director that really cares about the subject.

Hollywood's failure with game conversions is like Star Trek 13, or Thunderbirds. Rather than learn the universe, the rules, care about the characters, etc.. (basically take the time to know what it is that is so loved about the book/game) they will do their own thing. Heck in Thunderbirds they changed the order of age of the brothers. In Star Trek they basically tell us the last 20 year of TV shows didn't happen.

there was an underlying theme of good versus evil

[Anonymous Coward]

The underlying theme of Mass Effect is lesbian sex with blue alien chicks.

What would grinding look like in a movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet a modern gaming masterpiece such as Mass Effect has the depth and breadth to deserve better treatment in the proposed trilogy

The extended version of the Mass Effect movie will then include hours of footage where the team is grinding faceless sandy moons, raiding the same structures over and over again.

WTF!?-Deus Ex.

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of games out there don't have enough plot to fill a matchbox. How exactly are they worthy of extra respect versus any random short-story?

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. That so much deserves to be made into a movie.

Re:WTF!?-Deus Ex.

[Anonymous Coward]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. That so much deserves to be made into a movie.

??? What deserves to be made into a movie? A few game trailers and some random interviews? The game isn't even out, for all we know its going to be a cliched POS. It might be a great game, it might be another ET from the Atari. But until it's out, there isn't anything to make you really think it would be a good story, let alone worth making a movie out of.

The problem is the "interpretations"

[TheDarkMaster]

I think the problem is not the history of the games themselves or the question of how to convert the game mechanics on film. The problem for me are the stupid "adjustments" that a idiot director makes in the history. As an example, do you remember the movie "Catwoman"? The movie have only the name from the comics history, the rest is a retarded vision from a jerk director who probably wanted to leave his "mark" in the movie. And the exact same thing happens in adaptations of games to movies.

Re:The problem is the "interpretations"

[SteeldrivingJon]

"As an example, do you remember the movie "Catwoman"?"

For which Halle Berry won a Razzie for worst actress, and actually showed up to collect it. Among other things she thanked "Warner Bros., for putting me in a godawful piece of s--- movie." And said to her manager "Next time, read the script".

And for that, I'll always have a certain amount of respect for her.

Re:The problem is the "interpretations"

[dzfoo]

And for that, I'll always have a certain amount of respect for her.

Didn't she read the script?

        -dZ.

side note

[Anonymous Coward]

kinda off topic, but i dont think there's a video game movie out there that comes anywhere close to silent hill. i really enjoyed that one.

Not hard

[ledow]

You could make a movie out of Half-life 2. Or even the original Half-life. It's not difficult at all. You have established characters, half-decent plot, tons of special-FX opportunities, at least an hour and a half of actual movement and things happening and people explaining plot, characters and sub-plots all the way through, and it fits in well with other movies which have (to be honest) not dissimilar plots, scenes, dialogue, etc.

But then you'd have to find someone who knew that game well enough to direct it (I think almost every video-game conversion has been awful because the people behind it want to turn it into a cheap, shit movie rather than treat the game *as* a movie and work from there, just padding it out). Then you'd have to find an audience - with Half-life 2, you could probably introduce anyone to that plot and it would be understandable without even knowing the games - people would love to hate the G-man. Then you'd have to find someone who can gauge that audience and "take a risk" in their eyes on investing many millions (rather than throw it a few mil like you would some Youtube kid who wanted to make a movie - "Yeah, son, it's really good, here, that's all your getting because you're not one of us"). Then you need to find people who can actually act (apparently that's REALLY difficult when it comes to video-game-movies).

It's actually easy: no harder than getting any other thing movie-ised, or any movie game-ised (and look at the disasters there have been there!). You just need to actually take it seriously, not rely on the "nerds will love it" factor and actually make a MOVIE from an established franchise. You already have plot. You'd need some screenwriting. Your artistic direction is set in stone. Your characterisation is done for you. Your casting will be pretty easy, provided you can get the cash to have someone actually good in it. The acting won't be difficult or intense. Your special FX budget will probably be largest but that's not shock in today's Hollywood. And if in doubt, half your CGI is done for you at the games studio already.

Too often, it's seen as "this'll make us 50% profit on a couple of million and who cares if nobody goes back for a second screening or buys the DVD?" rather than actually *making a movie*. How much was pored into the Aliens movies? How much was pored into EVERY Aliens video game ever made ever since? If it's as close as a 10-1 ratio (in adjusted-for-inflation terms), I'll be impressed. And how many of those games actually come *close* to capturing the right atmosphere compared to their rivals (Few... the closest are actually Aliens-rip-off-clones that do a better job even if they can't use the same characters / aliens / lines)? I love the Aliens movies - still yet to find an Aliens game that actually grips my interest or makes me feel like I'm in the movie. It's the same thing, but the other way around. Hell, even most of the Games Workshop crap (Blood Bowl, Warhammer, etc.) would make and sell movies if someone picked it up and fleshed it out to a couple of hours of consistent content, but nobody bothers.

Hollywood is about quick returns - that's why they only ever advertise the first-week-returns and things like that. They expect to make their money back in a week and if they can do that by only investing a handful of millions, they will. It's probably quite good business sense. In the UK, we had a TV series Red Dwarf. It ran for eight series, was wildly popular and it would be FABULOUS to make a comedy movie of it - it's just *designed* for that, and there's been talk with studios for DECADES - there's supposedly even several finished scripts that were carved out with major movie studios. The interest wanes when they hear it needs money, when they can't replace the main character with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed hunk to keep the ladies' interest, can't cut out the more risky jokes because "the US audience might not understand them" (hell, they wanted to change the title when it was trialled in the US because

Re:Not hard

[penguinchris]

I like your rant, but I'd also like to point out that there is plenty of "good" stuff (TV and film) being made these days. Just because Hollywood is shoving crap down our throats left and right doesn't mean there isn't anything else - if you ignore the crap (which is incredibly easy to do) you'll find some good stuff. And more often than not, the good stuff is widely recognized as good. The latest 3D CGI-fest may do well for a couple of weeks with the under-25 crowd (with some exceptions that do really well, like Avatar), but come "awards season" everyone's talking about the truly good films that came out that year and no one remembers the stupid stuff.

Honestly, do you really care that they push out endless Twilight and Harry Potter films to pre-teen girls? Sure, if it were up to us we'd spend the money on better films, but better films don't always get the same ROI. If it means having some money available for more risky films, then I don't care if they spend hundreds of millions on Twilight films that I don't have to watch. If people only made "good" films based on good material, the industry wouldn't be as large and there wouldn't be as much money available for movies.

Re:Not hard

[stewbacca]

There have been plenty of movies worth going to the cinema for recently. Up! and A Serious Man being two I saw last year that were worth 20x the price of one Avatar ticket!

But your point is good. Most movies suck because most movie viewers suck and will be lining up en masse for Yogi Bear.

Blade Runner guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Westwood went broke partially because of trying to realize the OP vision.
As did the company that did the Last Express.

Gamers suck ass.

The Doom movie was shockingly non-crappy...

[RichiH]

...and it even featured Dwayne "the really sucky actor" Johnson; a sure sign of bad plots.

Re:The Doom movie was shockingly non-crappy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to mod you up for the title, but I can't b/c you called the Rock a sucky actor. Not all Dwayne Johnson's movies are the greatest, but that guy can act. Be Cool, for example, completely sucked: but the Rock was awesome in it. Southland Tales was ridiculously over-the-top, but Johnson really held it together with his great acting ability. Hell, just look at what he did in the WWF. That was nothing but acting/choreography, but he played the bad guy so well that people loathed him.

You can't blame the guy for not landing roles in Oscar-quality films. That's not easy to do, especially coming from a wrestling background. Studios have good reason to fear casting wrestlers after "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan. But don't judge Johnson's acting on the quality of the script: he can only do so much with the lines he's given, and he makes them as good as they can be.

But yes, Doom the movie was awesome, especially when it went into first-person mode.

Re:The Doom movie was shockingly non-crappy...

[Rakarra]

Dwayne Johnson's not George Clooney or Johnny Depp, but I wouldn't say he's a bad actor. He sure doesn't show good judgement in which movies to star in though.

Re:The Doom movie was shockingly non-crappy...

[RichiH]

> He sure doesn't show good judgement in which movies to star in though.

That makes him a bad actor.

Screw your opinion

[Eightbitgnosis]

Seeing Super Mario Brothers in theaters was completely awesome. You are completely wrong

If you reduce it to a strawman...

[Moraelin]

If you reduce it to an oversimplified strawman, of course nothing is profound. The Odyssey is just about some guy dicking around the sea instead of going home. LORD of the ring is a old-timey==good vs industrialism-and-change==bad story. War And Peace is about war and identity crisis. Crime And Punishment is just about the simple moral dilemma of whether you can justify evil means for a good purpose, so basically good vs evil again. (Since you already reduced similar themes in ME2 to just simple good vs evil, or to seeing the same basic trope in a choose-your-adventure book.) Etc. Not very profound when put that way, is it?

In fact, I your message was trolling, because otherwise it's so stupid it's depressing. What makes something profound or not isn't just having theme X or theme Y in it, but you do with it and what you explore from there. You can take any theme in the world and turn it into a shallow exercise, or do something thought-provoking with. You just need to look at the likes of Lewis Caroll who managed to turn something as dry as hating the new mathematics and especially topology, into a classic, or L. Frank Baum who took a political alegory so far that most people don't even figure it out and again managed to turn it into something both popular and for many people thought-provoking.

So, really, troll or just stupid?

Re:If you reduce it to a strawman...

[killmenow]

Maybe the person you responded to isn't a troll or stupid, just a hipster.

Re:If you reduce it to a strawman...

[Quiet_Desperation]

old-timey==good vs industrialism-and-change==bad story

Segmentation fault

Re:If you reduce it to a strawman...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."

Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:

* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.

-- Dave Barry

Now planescape torment

[aepervius]

THAT would be the type of game I respect and like for the story "what can change the nature of man". "regrets". As you said the other game incomparison have no depth. Still a film on PS:torment would lose part of the depth by having a prefered start / middle and ending path. That would break it for me, as every time i replay it, I get a different story.

Re:Now planescape torment

[jgtg32a]

A film wouldn't do it justice, an HBO/Showtime/AMC series on the other hand.

Re:Now planescape torment

[ulzeraj]

Agreed. I think a movie _must_ have a simple plot and storyline. You must be able to explain the whole movie in one single phrase like "the heroes travel in time to rescue his stolen silver pantaloons and become the full metal unit". Of course we have wonderful movies that don't apply to that rule like say Donny Darko but those are considered cult by a minority of above-the-average-joe-intellects and therefore are not attractive to movie makers that wants to make money (and fantastic FX that a Planescape movie should require).

The series permit side quests and gives time to explain and develop the complexity of the enviroment. So in said series TNO would awake in the dusties' morgue, explore the slums, solve the problems of the Dead Nations, confront or ally with the Many-as-one, escape from the Modron maze, meet Trias in Carceri and much much more... something that obviously cant just fit into a movie.

Sorry for bad english btw. It is not my native language.

Except it doesn't actually happen

[Moraelin]

Of course, then everyone will complain about the discrepancies/inaccuracies/inconsistencies or whatever. OMG not canon oneleventyone!!!!

You mean like how everyone complained about Knights Of The Old Republic not being yet another dumb merchandising exercise of the movie characters? Oh, wait, they didn't. It actually received high praise, several awards, and was described as one of the most influential pieces of work of the Star Wars universe. And it sold a metric buttload of copies too.

And it actually did better than, say, SWG's using the signature characters as merchandising.

Because it seems to me like that's the real problem with game to movie, or movie to game adaptations. They're really just doing a merchandising exercise. You know, same as putting Vader's mug on a t-shirt. It doesn't make the t-shirt any better, but you expect people to buy it just because OMG IT'S DARTH VADER.

And similarly you end up with a movie or game whose only merit is that it features certain signature characters, but they don't actually do anything meaningful or interesting. And somehow, much to Hollywood's surprise, that seems to work less well for movies than for t-shirts. People tend to still expect an interesting story in a movie, not just seeing Mario.

No, and fuck you

[Legion303]

Video games don't need movie adaptations. We've progressed past that point. Hollywood can suck it.

Re:No, and fuck you

[Synonymous Homonym]

Movies just lack the complexity that a game requires.
It is a limitation of the medium.

Re:No, and fuck you

[Anonymous Coward]

^ This, so so much.

Turning good games into popular movies is akin to turning good movies into popular sculptures. How the hell do you cut out all the hours of context and character progression and jam it into some rock, what's more - even if you succeed - who cares? Nobody cares about sculptures anymore, and in a couple decades my generation won't watch movies either. Games are a superior medium to movies, period. Movies are the rock paintings of our age - the sooner the rest of you come out of the cave and check out what we're doing with ceramic pot art the better.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

[chemicaldave]

When was the last time you played a good video-game adaptation of a movie?

Re:Two Sides of the Same Coin

[inu_maru]

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World
  (ok, this might be a Special case...)

Planescape:Torment? Baldurs' Gate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Planescape:Torment? Baldurs' Gate? In the action area, Half Life (in the same vein as Alien the Movie, maybe Aliens). How about Fallout the original? Space opera has Privateer2 (I think: the one with FMV anyway).

Re:there was an underlying theme of good versus ev

[Anonymous Coward]

So just another Avatar rip off then?

Braindead Hollywood

[Drakkenmensch]

from TFA:

However, judging from the synopsis currently on IMDB, the story looks set to take place during the First Contact War – events that transpire prior to those of the game itself. Fans of the series will know that this is an integral part of Mass Effect mythology, but once again, this has me pounding my head into my desk. Mythologically significant or not, The First Contact War has no direct connection to the events of the game. Once again, Hollywood seems to think it knows better. With a trilogy outline so clearly established in the first game, and with Hollywood apparently envisaging Mass Effect as a movie trilogy, this change to telling a story that pre-dates the first game’s storyline is completely nonsensical.

Once more proving that Hollywood executives, in thinking that they know better than celebrated videogame creators and millions of die-hard fans, apply their reverse-Midas touch to yet another solid gold idea to turn it into worthless, poisonous lead.

Re:Braindead Hollywood

[ThirdPrize]

Thing is they may want to make a trilogy but we may never see the last one. The only way to make big films these days is to do a few of them back to back. that runs the risk of committing to three films when you don't know how well the first one will do. The third Narnia film got canned, dropped by the studio and picked up by another studio. despite the first few films making big bucks.

Re:Braindead Hollywood

[Drakkenmensch]

Honestly, I'm less worried about the third movie not being green lit after two successful ones. It's a far more likely scenario of the first one being a massive stinkbomb that dooms the whole project from day one.

Re:Was Lara Croft Tomb Raider adaptation of a game

[pinkushun]

It also had breasts, which in male geek (and partial female geek) culture, makes a reasonable substitute for plot and character development.

So? :P

[Moraelin]

I'm not sure I need an extra category there, though. The kind of hipster who praises X just because it's "in" and dismisses Y with some hare-brained excuse just because it's not on the list of hip things he should like, falls quite neatly under "stupid" in my system.

Re:So? :P

[jmac_the_man]

A hipster praises Y because it's "not in" and dismisses X with the hare-brained excuse that it is on the list of things he should like. I really hope hipsters are real-life trolls, but I can't honestly say I'm sure.

Books vs Video Games

[wzinc]

Have you read the book?

No, I didn't even know there was a book.

Have you played the game?

Yes, yes I have.

Comparisons

[rjstanford]

Is Hollywood again going to disrespect fans who, in this case, have as much right to see a good plot respected as readers of The Lord of The Rings?

Wha? Did you really compare a recent pop-culture video game to a book series that's enjoyed over 150 million copies sold over the last 56 years? I personally feel that it probably does deserve better than its likely to get, but saying that its an epic structure worthy of the same respect that one of the seminal works of modern fiction received is just plain silly.

Re:Comparisons

[mgiuca]

Did you really compare a recent pop-culture video game to a book series that's enjoyed over 150 million copies sold over the last 56 years?

By this logic, FarmVille, with about 62 million users, deserves at least one epic Hollywood blockbuster.

Re:Comparisons

[rjstanford]

It would probably do well. See Julie & Julia for a pretty good treatment of another unlikely popular source - cooking blogs.

Re:Was Lara Croft Tomb Raider adaptation of a game

[netsavior]

It also had breasts, which in male geek (and partial female geek) culture, makes a reasonable substitute for plot and character development.

And THAT is what I am calling Angelina's breasts from now on. As in: "Did you see the Plot and Character Development in Cyborg 2, classic."

You don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Hollywood productions are not about story telling, they are all about ROI.

Video games and Superheroes are good for producers because of the branding: you could make an adventure movie about an unknown guy in the desert, but if you put a well know brand in it like "Prince of Persia" you'll get more publicity and public, even if the story is a crap.

There are a lot of good and creative movie writers, is just that usually more creative stories doesn't get into big productions: they are too risky from the investment point of view.

Game adaptations doesn't need more respect, the public needs more respect!

Inverse is true

[stewbacca]

Games made after movies are even worse than movies made after games!

Anyone else notice the inverse is true as well?

Touché

[killmenow]

It felt a bit redundant considering the possibility of "hipster" once "stupid" was listed. It's like shades of grey.

Re:Was Lara Croft Tomb Raider adaptation of a game

[Hatta]

None of which actually makes it a good movie.

Ultimate Video Game Plot: Bad Dudes

[McDozer]

Ninja's have captured the President...are you a bad enough dude to get him back?

Re:Ultimate Video Game Plot: Bad Dudes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ninja's have captured the President...are you a bad enough dude to get him back?

Michael Dudikoff should pay one of the bad dudes.

Games to Movies

[theGhostPony]

I always thought that Elder Scrolls IV / Oblivion would make a good movie. Classic good vs. evil struggle were not everyone is who they seem and a world with some rich history.

Re:Games to Movies

[lxs]

I disagree, but it would make a classic TV series like the old Adam West Batman series. Every week a new quest that is almost the same as last week's quest with wood elves camping it up for comic relief. It could last for nine seasons easily.

why does a game need a movie adaptation?

[jollyreaper]

They can already pull off the same kind of visual storytelling you get in the movies, plus they're interactive. What could a movie possibly bring to the mix? It's not like we're talking about greatly changing media and showing a different side of the story like with Hitchhiker's Guide where the books, game, movie, and tv show all had a slightly different twist on the material. Bring a book to the screen, I can see that. A game? Not so much.

Re:why does a game need a movie adaptation?

[dzfoo]

Simple: reading a book, playing a game, and watching a movie are three very different activities requiring different measures of involvement, commitment, and effort.

Reading a book takes significant mental effort and requires an unspecified amount of time commitment. Video games doubly so, for they require skill and adaptive training to master and complete. Both of them are also rather active endeavors, in which the subject requires at least some active participation in order to remain engaged within the context.

Watching a movie, in contrast, is a passive activity. It requires little effort and virtually no participation, other than the occasional push to connect plot lines and character motivations--which does not occur on every movie. It also requires a finite time engagement, which is known in advance. This means that, as opposed to playing a video game or reading a book, when planning to watch a movie you know exactly how long it will take for you to get the ultimate pay-off and fulfillment. This allows for a more casual participation: You buy a ticket (or put in a DVD), and you're done and wrapped up in about two hours, ready for something else.

Being a less complex activity, and requiring much less effort and engagement, the fulfillment and enjoyment provided by a movie may not be as rich as with books or other media; but it is nonetheless a very enjoyable experience.

So, why are movies being made of video games or books? Because people want to watch them; it's that simple. Because some people, at least some of the time, want to experience the enjoyment and thrill provided by the latter more complex activities without the mental effort or open-ended commitment required by them. This may be out of laziness, inexperience, or any sort of reason; but the fact is that they are willing to pay the price of admission for this experience, and they are willing to accept the compromises inherent in the transfer to a different medium.

Now, the question you really meant to ask is why does a game or book require a crap movie adaptation? The answer is, it does not. However, it is cheaper that way, and most people won't know nor care about the difference: The fans will generally pay to watch it, and the non-fans will generally pay to find out what all the hoopla is about. Most of the time, this formula works for Hollywood. It provides maximum profits at minimum cost.

              -dZ.

Video game arent...

[NuKe_MoNgOoSe]

played by directors they cant be. No one wants their beloved games reimagined they want to be able to sit and recognize and relate to things from the games they love. Super Mario Bros. is a key indicator of what not to do with a beloved franchise, that would be equivalent to making Zelda with machine gun toting ninjas and UFOs...seriously. Mortal Kombat (the origina) was probably my favorite video game adaptation that stayed damn close to the mark. The viral video that was released some time ago about the revamp having Scorpion working undercover for the police to route out Shang Tsung and allow him to seek revenge against Sub-Zero THAT looks like a movie I could get into. The fight between Johnny Cage and Baraka was top notch. The big issue with hollywood remaking game movies is that they have to make them for the masses not just the hardcore fans. A perfect example of that is Transformers, Michael Bay raped my childhood by not adopting all they could of G1 (Generation 1 for people living under a rock or too young to know wtf im talking about) He scored big points getting Peter Cullen (original Prime) but lost those points just as fast not using Frank Welker (original Megatron) I enjoyed the movies and in truth it had a lot of throwbacks to the old series but for some people the sanctity of the substance should not be tampered with and that is how I feel.

They should have

[Anonymous Coward]

Made a 20 or so episode of one of my early civilization games. Then the condensed, or "Prince" version at 10 episodes, and finally the "Emperor" version coming in at a mere 15 minutes. And they could have done it in 1993.

Different Kinds of Stories

[Millennium]

Game-movies and movie-games make about as much sense as building a statue out of paint: sure, you can do it, but you're not using the medium the way it works best. Games and movies are suited to entirely different kinds of stories, neither one superior nor inferior to the other, merely different. Shoehorning one into the other seldom if ever works well. This is not an issue of respect or dominance, it's about round pegs and square holes.

Pac Man: The Motion Picture

[Quiet_Desperation]

Haunted by the ghosts of his past, lost in a maze of madness, a man turns to pills...

Take it all the way

[Quiet_Desperation]

Chess III: Checkmate

Still waiting

[operagost]

I'm still waiting for the REAL Doom movie, based on the comic book. Can you imagine Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson delivering these immortal lines:

Rip and tear your guts! You are huge! That means you have huge guts! Rip and tear!

Resident Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Resident Evil. Some of the best zombie movies ever made imho.

Mass Effect? Really?

[RobinEggs]

All the games you had to choose from in making your argument, and you choose Mass Effect? Really?

What about Deus Ex? In fact, Invisible War might make a better movie than the first one, even if it wasn't quite as good a game. Planescape: Torment could be the fantasy movie of the millenium. No One Lives Forever practically cries out to become a movie, even if it is similar to Austin Powers. Fallout 1 already *felt* like playing a movie.

His weird little cast list is especially odd. Notice how many of those choices look almost exactly like the character from the game? Who gives a crap? It should be enough to actually use the damn story they're given; asking the cast to almost perfectly resemble the game is just arbitrary and unimaginative, and lends the impression that fan boys don't want a movie but a two-hour cutscene re-rendering the entire game.

The movie they'll never make

[swordgeek]

A game that should have been wildly popular, and deserves to be made into a great movie is Grim Fandango. Sadly, it will never happen.

Monkey Island

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they did really well with Monkey Island the movie. Although why they chose to call it Pirates of the Caribbean instead, I don't know.

I will give video games new respect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Once they start making video game movies that deserve respect!

If one game spawns a good movie or 3, that is not enough to give blanket respect to all future video game movies.

If makers of video game movies want their movies to have respect... They need to not make movies based on games because the game is popular, they need to focus on the games that have enough of a plot, and depth to support a movie. If several game to movie adaptations come to pass that are good, then I will start to consider them worthy of respect.

At the risk of repeating myself

[Moraelin]

At the risk of repeating myself, it's stupid to try to argue something down just based on an over-simplified summary of a trope.

Yes, believe it or not, there's only a handful of tropes around. You can find the same tropes in kids shows, or in elaborate alegories for adults. Until someone invents a new trope, yes, of course, you'll find examples of each in both lightweight kids' stuff and in profound stuff and anything in between.

Dismissing something just because some trope was also done in a kid's show, without any consideration of the context or how well it was done, is just freaking stupid.

Not the least because it's a textbook example of the association fallacy.

No Respect between Media

[BloodSpite]

As long as video games are not considered a culturally communicative benefit to society (see Roger Eberts article regarding how video games are lacking http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html ) then video games, no matter how breathtaking as Mass Effect et al well continue to be given short term billing by Hollywood. Lets face it, as far as Hollywood is concerned the video game industry is a threat to their own creative ability, they are not going to give a level playing field.

The other direction sucks

[Animats]

Video games from movies have historically sucked. The classic problem was that they turned into what game designers call a "track ride", a game where you're forced to follow the script through scene after scene. (Sometimes with puzzles thrown in.) Worse, the movie studio typically insisted on artistic control to protect their "franchise", which made the lock-in even worse.

The other direction has a better history. Yes, "Super Mario Brothers", the movie, was disappointing. ("Must have been a non-union job.") "Tomb Raider", though, was a big success, and turned the entire genre around. Although the movie had plot problems, the production values were high. The temple scenes were filmed in Cambodia. The arctic scenes were filmed in Iceland. Angelina Jolie put in enough time on the firing range, with real weapons, to look convincing. CG was used with restraint. The visual reality made it work. (Kirk Petruccelli was the production designer.)

Hint: if you have to fly someone on wires for a fight scene, you're doing it wrong. ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" suffered from that. Michelle Yeoh is an excellent martial artist, and they made her look fake by flying her around.)

Plots and dialogue remain a problem, but that's someone else's department.

Re:there was an underlying theme of good versus ev

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I didn't see any girl-on-girl action in Avatar, which is unfortunate; it would have improved the film considerably.

Still waiting for...

[Darinbob]

The Secret of Monkey Island: The Musical
Thief 3D
Fallout Hollywood

And really, there are not other video games I want to see made as movies...

Speaking of game/movie crossovers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I do not want to play the fucking game to find out what happened between the first movie and the second.

Best video game movie conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/

Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

Seriously, its got everything.

Its the ultimate meta-game to movie conversion.

Appalling???

[zzsmirkzz]

Who the hell said Super Mario Bros - The Movie was appalling? Out of all the video game movies made, this is one of the best, right up there with Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Prince of Persia. Don't forget it was meant to be a kid's movie and when I saw it as a kid I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now Alone in the Dark and Doom were appalling movies.

Half-Life/2

[scurvyj]

Just thought I'd better mention it.

Apparently Valve trust hollywood so little they have decided that if a film is made they will do it themselves, though they are unclear as yet on exactly what form it will take.

It could, of course, be the most boring film on earth if done wrong. Shoot, shoot, shoot, puzzle, shoot, shoot, shoot, puzzle, Revelation, shoot, shoot, shoot, puzzle.....

They need to take some inspiration from the (UTTERLY BRILLIANT) Escape From City 17 ten minute short done on youtube, and friends (eg. the Overwatch soldier stating his brainwashed 'reasons' and saying he is 'making a difference', brrrrr).

I have to say, I did enjoy the Doom film even though it had nothing to do with the franchise (there wasn't much story to begin with :) )

Pitches needing the Green Light

[braindrainbahrain]

Oh, come now. Plenty of game-based movies have been proposed, but few make it to production. Check out:

Pac-Man the Movie

Pac-Man the (other) Movie

Minesweeper - The Movie

Myst Movie

[mgiuca]

A bunch of guys have been working on the Myst movie for a couple of years now, and recently got picked up by a Hollywood studio. I hope that project goes well. Though it's not technically a video game movie (as the team are quick to point out) -- it is based on the novels which provide a lot of additional backstory to the games.

Maybe more movies should be made based on the backstory of the games, rather than the games themselves?

Learn to detach.

[Journe]

Hi there! I was just like you once, just like all my friends! I too one expressed hate, discontent, rage, and much more at motion picture adaptations of video games, but not anymore. You can learn to enjoy the movies just like I can, with my patented One-Step RealityKick System.

Simply bend over, place your head between your legs...and realize that it's a fuckin' movie, not a video game. Enjoy it for what it is. As I understand it, the RE films have sucked donkey balls in comparison to the games. On the other hand, I find the films enjoyable. Of course they're not the same as the games, what would be the point then? If you're a fan, then you've played the games already. Let them have their new plots that don't follow the game. The fun isn't in seeing X kill Y with Z gun just like in Game A, it's in seeing X from Game A have a new adventure. It's the same for films adapted from books, comics, etc.

FWIW, no amount of detachment will make the Dragon Ball Z movie not make you want to kill yourself. Just a heads up. Even my incredible system has its limits.

Movies from other art works are not movies

[vorlich]

they are merely brand extensions. It works the same for games and books made from original movie screenplays, they are the product of the fervent imagination of the brand extension manager seeking to squeeze every last cent out of the audience.
A real original movie has three acts four principal characters and an ending where good defeats evil. That is the artform it is one of the few original artforms uniquely American - apart from the musical.
Naturally, I am waiting with my breath firmly bated in full expectation of Duke Nukem - The Movie.

Hollywood is so dead and forgotten!

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget about Hollywood all toghether actually hope they go bankrupt and all of them have to move to some slum, Actually think that the game companies that make these games should also make movies of them, its their intellectual property its their plots and their stories, they know them the best, they should make them, and forget about stupid actors, this should all be done in CG.

Thats my 2cents im not even gonna argue about this, Hollywood is so dead and forgotten!

Written by La Revolucion

Hitman was good

[RivenAleem]

I enjoyed Hitman

Re:Hitman was good

[loustic]

True, Hitman was enjoyable. Probably because it wasn't made by Uwe Boll...

Why adaptation fails?

[nedwnelson]

Video games have inherently different emphases (or disadvantages) in storytelling than books or movie scripts. It is unreasonable to expect faithful adaptation and yet at the same time some groundbreaking storytelling. The source materials in some cases are just simply inadequate. This mismatch, with along gamers' different expectations, is a major cause of the failing.