Movie-Licensed Games That Might Not Suck

Thanks to GameSpot for their new mini-feature discussing movie licenses that might actually make decent games, as opposed to "every big-budget blockbuster getting a cheap and dirty game that is less a game and more a lackluster piece of promotional material." The suggested movies include Run Lola Run as a game "with hundreds of available outcomes", Battle Royale as a "twisted and sadistic" action title, and Fletch with "a Max Payne style of narration.. to represent Fletch's internal dialogue." But, the big question - do Slashdot Games readers have any better suggestions?

They're missing the point...

[devnull17]

Making movies from licenses from good movies isn't necessarily hard. I think the main factor in explaining why almost all movie licenses suck is that most movie-licensed games must be released, ready or not, at the same time as their respective movies. Add to that the fact that the production cycle of a typical movie is shorter than that of the average game, and you have a recipe for disaster that smells vaguely like most of what Acclaim releases.

There's no reason that licensed games have to suck. Some [gamefaqs.com] don't [gamefaqs.com]. (Goldeneye was released years after its movie counterpart, and didn't really have a strict deadline to meet.) It's just that rushed games tend to suck.

Producing a good game nowadays requires more time and money than most licensors realize. When licensed games are treated less as a marketing tie-in and more as separate entities, their quality will improve dramatically.

ground rules

[evilWurst]

Just set a ground rule: don't start development of the game until the movie is already done its theatre run, gone to rental, gone to Wal-Mart purchase, and been shown on normal broadcast TV.

By then, the biggest factors that work to make a movie game SUCK are gone:

1) the movie is finished, and the game cannot increase hype for the movie, therefore there is no reason to rush or cut corners. There is no pressure to get the thing out the door before the movie is out.

2) the movie is finished, and therefore the movie's name on the box won't be enough to sell the game. Thus the game will actually have to be good on its own merits.

It isn't a guarantee of success, but it sure helps avoid failure.

To pick a nit...

[Jerf]

If you include all licensed franchises, Golden Eye was great, the various X-Wing/Tie Fighter series games were golden. TMNT/GI Joe in the arcade as well.

To pick a nit, I'd submit there's a major difference between movie license and franchise license. Of the games you list, the only one that might be considered truly movie licensed is Golden Eye, and given the enduring popularity of the James Bond franchise, even that is stretching it.

X-Wing and Tie Fighter were emphatically not movie licensed; there isn't a Star Wars movie five years either side of the original X-Wing (maybe more, I'm being conservative). GI Joe was popular for decades. I don't recall if TMNT had any movie-specific games, but it did have a lot of non-movie specific games.

Now, this [gamespot.com] is a Star Wars movie-licensed game. It is not immune to licensing crapiness.

Actually, Star Wars does have one of the few truly movie-based games that I did not read uniformly bad things about, and that was the Pod Racer games. Still, an exception does not a trend make.

Anyways, just a little nit, but when seen this way, the movie license sucks trend holds very strongly, whereas franchise licenses sometimes work out OK. (The best Star Trek games were set in the Original Series universe, 20-25+ years after the show went off the air, for instance.)