THE ENVELOPE,
PLEASE…
Presenting the best and worst
movie-related games
.BEST GAME .
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Escape From Butcher Bay 2004, VIVENDI UNIVERSAL Better than the Vin Diesel vehicle The Chronicles of Riddick and possibly its predecessor, Pitch Black, Butcher Bay has eye-popping graphics and a decent script. A standout for the original Xbox.
. BEST MOVIE GAME .
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Featuring voice-overs from many of the surviving principal actors from the 1972 movie cast (including Abe Vigoda, but minus Al Pacino), this above-average Grand Theft Auto knockoff earns a footnote for being one of Marlon Brando’s last-ever acting gigs.
THE BEST NEW CINEMATIC TIE-INS DON’T STICK TOO CLOSE TO
THEIR SILVER-SCREEN COUNTERPARTS
. WORST MOVIE GAME .
Americans already spend about as much on video games every year as they do going to the movies, but in a synergy-sucking twist, games based on movies have a reputation as shoddy marketing gimmicks, often lacking even the thin artistic merit of a hastily green-lit popcorn flick.
The most effective of this summer’s crop of movie tie-ins also has the most tenuous connection to its source material. Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy ( ½) mixes elements of all three Jason Bourne movies and Ludlum’s books into a new story line, but arrives almost a year after Matt Damon’s last turn as the tortured superspy. Damon himself is MIA, forcing the game to incorporate a bland virtual stand-in, but that actually helps keep it from being just another knockoff souvenir. It is largely successful, mixing frequent shoot-outs with brutal hand-to-hand combat that apes the films’ extended martial arts beatdowns and shaky handheld camera work.
The comic-book movie genre is having a renaissance of sorts, with Robert Downey Jr.’s performance attracting raves for Iron Man, and a rebooted Hulk franchise capturing more of the escapist vibe of its source material than Ang Lee’s morose 2003 take. These films’ video game counterparts fall in to the same trap as the vast majority of movie-based titles—their DNA comes from a marketing plan, not a game designer, and both would be forgettable without their big-screen cachet. Iron Man ( ½) is a
traditional take on the movie tie-in, acting as a highlight reel for the film’s action set pieces. Much of the film’s A-list cast, including Downey and Terrence Howard
(no Gwyneth, however) dutifully reprise their roles for voice-overs, but they’re little more than window dressing as protagonist Tony Stark builds himself suits of high-powered armor and engages in overly familiar video game shoot-outs, blasting bad guys with ray guns and missiles. For a game aimed at mainstream movie fans, Iron Man’s biggest weakness is complex controls that make flying around in a suit of armor about as difficult as we’d imagine actually flying around in a suit of armor would be.
By contrast, The Incredible Hulk ( ) is less slavishly devoted to the film that spawned it, and the original ’roid rager tears through a city center, smashing everything in sight. Endless armies of robots, monsters, and soldiers eventually turn up to add some tedious cinematic structure, but being able to toss cars around like softballs never gets old.
The head of a game development company recently let us in on why movie games are so frequently mediocre: DVDs, soundtrack albums, and foreign sales all support a film’s bottom line, while a companion video game only makes money from retail sales, so less time and money are allocated. Fortunately, not every movie-inspired game is the victim of such cynical accounting, and some standouts, from Bourne to Lego Star Wars, may well be as deserving of tricked-out collector’s edition box sets as their big-screen siblings. DAN ACKERMAN
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The film’s cast is re-created as stiff-acting robotic automatons (insert Lucy Liu joke here) in a game that manages to be both ugly and boring, thanks to rudimentary controls, repetitive fights against brain-dead bad guys, and low-budget graphics.
. WORST MOVIE GAME .
Proving that reviews don’t sell games, more than three million people bought this piece of junk, which turned the inventive world of The Matrix into a generic action brawler devoid of the high-flying stunts from the films. Worse, the movies’ heroes make only cameos, deferring to a virtual Jada Pinkett Smith. D.A.
References:
http://www.incrediblehulkthegame.marvel.com
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