f13.net

I'm compiling a list of movie-licensed games that were better than the movie.  Game-licensed movies (Mario Brothers, D&D, anything by Uwe Boll or Paul Anderson) don't count.  My list currently includes:

Riddick.


Am I missing any?

Catwoman is a toss-up. They were both equally bad.

I can't follow directions. You've got them all covered.

Those are game-licensed movies. Signe, will you spank him?

Does it have to be specifically tied to the movie itself?  If not, KOTOR I & II were better than any Star Wars movie except Empire.

Tomb Raider?

Stand in the corner and think about what you've done.

I see, my bad... game then movie.  You want movie then game.   Reading comprehension ftw.

This isn't going to be easy.  I don't watch many bad action movies.

Dune (love the books, but the movies suck ass).

Dune II the "game" is a classic.

EDIT: Yeah, probably doesn't count. It wasn't licensed from the "movies" per se.

I'd put Dune II above both movies and all the books.

I watched the Dune movie for the first time recently. I've never read the books, but I thought what the hell. Then I saw David Lynch did it. I want to kill him so much.

David Lynch's style with the newer Sci-Fi Channel versions adherence to the source material would make a good Dune flick.

Add another to the list: Golden Eye

Batman for the NES. Friday the 13th for the NES. Gremlins 2 for the NES.

Robocop the arcade game was pretty good, I'd put it even with the movie.

And of course, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. (Arcade, not Genesis) It's based on the video, which is practically a movie. One of the best arcade games ever.

Rambo on the C64 kicked major ass.

But Rambo kicked major ass too (yeah, I said that).

I hate you.  Now I have "Smooth Criminal" in my head.

Other arcade games: Tron and Death Race 2000. Both better than the movie.

Nothing is better than that movie. It may be the best movie in the last 20 ye...nay the last 300 years.

Come on... a game where you get to run over pedestrians to score points by turning them into gravestones.  That's like printing your own money.

Many a quarter were sacrificed to this game.

I'll take KOTOR, but it's something you'd probably get into a slapfight over if you said it in the wrong place.

I admit I hadn't thought back to the 80's.  TMNT might count.  Best 4 player arcade game ever.

The ST:tNG pinball game was lots of fun.  Does pinball count?

TMNT is based on cartoons (and that on comics), not movies, but who's counting?

I think you'll find more in the 80's/90's because the technology was worse. It was harder to try to mimic an existing property, so you had to just make a solid game and include some licensed elements.

You find the same thing with early arcade conversions. The home systems couldn't replicate the arcade so they had to improvise, and a lot of times the game turned out better. Ninja Gaiden is a perfect example of this. The NES couldn't do the huge sprites of the arcade game, so they changed it to a side-scroller that ended up being one of the best action games ever made. Bionic Commando is another good example - the arcade game is crap compared to the NES game.

I'm currently reading the series and I can't help but draw up imagery from the game in my head.

And I didn't even play it, I would go over to a bud's house and watch him play.

So ya, that's a second.

If it does, the Terminator pinball game was also cool.

Addams Family pinball machine was the coolest of the three.

Pretty much any licensed D&D game is far, far better than the licensed D&D movie.

Lum,  read the first post.  

Rasix, spank this man.

um... methinks your couch is slowing you down. The D&D GAMES are far better than the D&D MOVIE.

...oh. Silly CONDITIONS.

Quiet, you.  I could be drunk!

(http://xo.typepad.com/blog/sofacar.jpg)

While not based on the films, Fester's Quest was far better than either of the Raul Julia flicks, IMO.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

I'd agree on that, if I could have played through it. Fester's Quest is probably the hardest game in existence.

While Fester's was a great game it had nothing on the old Spectrum/C64/Arcade games of old.

I remember Duck Tales for NES being a blast. I don't recall if any movies had come out at the time. Damned be the rules.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Goldeneye at all.  Which one is better is debatable depending on the person, but still.

They did (http://forums.f13.net/viewtopic.php?p=48840#48840).

Am I "They"?

I doubt it's debatable. I mean, the game was good in every way. The only thing worth talking about in the movie was Famke Janssen.

Well there's that and Pierce Brosnan is the first guy since Connery to actually look like he was Bond. ( Not saying Roger Moore was a bad Bond, he just never looked the part )

I don't know about you guys, but I actually had fun with the Atari 2600 ET game.  Running from agents had my heart racing at ~8 years old.

The Temple of Doom arcade game was better than the movie. If nothing else it did't have an annoying Kate Capshaw in it. The PC Indiana Jones games were all better than Temple of Doom as well.

The NES version of Rambo seemed really fun when I played it at KMart while my parents were shopping one day...
---

On a somewhat related note, I'm suprised nobody ever made a game based on Mad Max. (Or, the Road Warrior more accurately)

I would also go out on a limb and say, without having played it at all, that Hudson Hawk the game was better than the movie.

I had the Atari 800XL version, and that one was actually quite fun. The 2600 version was a total piece of shit.

Between that, Robotron 2084, Star Raiders, Karateka, Zaxxon, Jumpman Jr, and Zaxxon, I was set up damn nice on games.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

Hell yeah, Zaxxon kicked ass (funny that you mention it twice).

The 2600 version of ET was more than a piece of shit. I think it's the first movie licensed game ever made. I'm not sure though. If anything, it's the one that set the trend for all that came after it, and why this thread exists in the first place.



Yet another movie redeemed by a babe. I'm willing to forgive Hudson Hawk for the giving a small part (albeit only a few seconds of screen time) to Lisa Matthews (aka Hottest Playmate Ever). The game probably doesn't hold that distinction.

SSI's Roadwar 2000 and Roadwar Europa were both loosely based on a Mad Max style universe; I assume they didn't have the money for a brand license. Both games were not too bad, in their own SSI-strategery sort of way.

Yeah, didn't she play that unforgettable role, 'Girl In Car'?  I swear to God, there should have been Oscars.

Heh, yep, but the point is, I doubt the game even had that.

EDIT: Actually, I think I played it. It was a side scroller that played very much like the Total Recall game (which sucked as well btw).

wha...?  no Lynch, just Toto.

sorry, movie wins here.  the "hand grenade" owns all.  i almost died seeing Carradine's deadpan delivery.

Lets see.. plumbing my massive depths of gaming knowledge, I come up with....

Rule #1: "By default all licensed games will suck more than what they're based on."

But actually that has been changing recently since technology has caught up with what the silver screen is capable of.   Riddick's a pretty good example, but I know there's more.

I suppose Kingdom Hearts would almost count since it's sort of a weird smear of dozens of Disney classics with a bit of Squaresoft mixed in.   There comes the question, "Better in what way?" and my answer here would be "Graphical presentation."   My apologies to your childhood memories, but Squaresoft is damn good at what they do, and most of those classics are just plain outgunned.

(If the answer to "Better in what way?" was, "Is interactive", then all games would be "better" than the movies.   That would be a gross misuse of the word "better".   Really, the whole topic's kinda offputting, like one of those "What's the best game ever?!" threads - best in what way?)

There's been many Star Wars games.   Some of them adhere to Rule #1 above.   Others are pretty dang good, such as Knights of the Old Republic (already mentioned), Jedi Starfighter, X-Wing, and Tie Fighter.   I think I enjoyed those for a longer duration than the movies.  Jedi Knight (the original) was also a fun experience, and the first time we really got to play Jedi on our personal computer.   The SNES Super Star Wars game was a lot of fun too.

I don't think there's ever been a Star Trek game that really did justice to the series, but Star Trek: 25th Anniversary came pretty close.  I hear Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force was a fairly good scripted FPS, and you can't do much worse than the TV series (cough!).

There's been dozens of Batman games, Many of them adhering to Rule #1 above, but I thought some of the modern ones were pretty good with their implementation of gadgets and whatnot.    Unfortunately all the games sort of blur together so I can't point out the specific one I played which really pulled off Batman well.

Enough spam, that's one lifelong game addict's brief look at the topic.

I wish I could find the link, but I read a web article about how one of the movie conglomerates were actually planning to charge companies that produced shitty games under their license, with the reasoning that if a game was that shitty, it diluted the brand and cost the studio money.

My question was, did that mean that they would pay extra for games that took shitty movies and increased the brand value by making an excellent game out of it?

Were this the case, Spielberg would have gotten even richer from the making of that godawful ET game for the Atari 2600.



This would take a design house with at least moderate business clout.  I imagine it would go something like this:

"Hi, we'd like to make a game based on your shitty movie. If we do, we'd demand a small percentage of any perceived increase in future dvd sales".  

I could see this as a decent business decision... especially for those movies relegated to the bargain bin 30 days after release.  Whether it is/could be done without nightmarish legal agreements is another isue.

Ahh, found the link to the Warner Bros. looks to reviewers to help ensure game quality (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/tech_reporter_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000517289). It seems I pretty much totally mis-remembered the article, but it's still at least somewhat relevant!

The discussion when that was posted was basically, "they are out of their minds", but that was mostly due to tying royalties to reviewer's ratings...and the comment I had made was still the same: "will they pay better royalties at the top end of ratings earned scales?".

I thought you were remembering the lawsuit from Paramount against Activision(?) saying they are making shit-tacular Star Trek games and need to stop smoking the crack before they ruin a good franchise.  Or am I misremembering?

Star Trek: Armada was fun with the Star Wars mod.

Star Destroyer > Enterprise

Yeah, Terminator was fucking cool too.  That's the first pinball game I remember as having the LED (or was it LCD???) screen in addition to the physical game.

I also loved that Funhouse pinball machine, where the head would talk constant shit, until you slammed him in the mouth with the ball.

The Guns & Roses pinball game was a lot of fun too!

Damn, I guess when video games became a household staple, I found more fun in pinball.  WTF is the point of paying 25-50 cents in an arcade for a game you play for free at home?  you can't play pinball for free at home(well, you can, but not in a tiny console box)!

I was always a huge fan of the Jurassic park pinball game with the smart missles and the big dinosaur head that ate your ball.