EXP: ScrewAttack's The Best EVER! Movie Game

[ScrewAttack]

ScrewAttack's The Best EVER! Movie Game

Movie tie-in games usually exist to make a quick buck, but these are a few that made us enjoy reliving the film experience with controllers in our hands.

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[Mikkaddo]

It's really very simple ladies and gentlemen. Jurassic Park, on the Gamegear.

I'ts only about 3 hours total if you go for the good ending (mostly because of the secret last level being a damn maze) but it's so good. it's SO good.

To save you the trouble of researching, here's how it worked, you're Allen Grant (somehow looking like a ghostbuster) you go to Isla Nublar to secure it (not strictly speaking the most faithful depiction, but who cares it's awesome!) and you get to start off choosing one of 4 areas, Pterodactyl, Triceratops, Brachiosaur, and Raptor. Each of the 4 levels started off with a car minigame where you shoot dinosaurs or pterosaurs and cans of gas (to give you more health, obviously) and then you go into the level proper. At the end of the level you have a boss fight against one of those 4 dinos. (my personal favorite boss is the raptor) but if you do that the game ends saying "sorry you suck bye."

This made me so crazy as a kid, turns out (as I discovered years later) if you get a perfect shot on all the dinosaurs in the driving level a t-rex or pachy shows up, kill THAT one in every level (the Pterosaur level has a pterosaur boss in the drive level) then you unlock at the end, the Visitor's Center level, get through that dive level perfect and you get TO the visitors center. Watching as people run in fear from the monsters inside.

Inside it, was a damn labyrinth twisting platforming paths up and down and doors that lead to the start or farther down and at the very end of it all, past holes with T-rexes come out, and lasers and raptors and shit, was a set of something like 10 doors. One of them leads to the final boss the rest, the ENTIRE rest . . . lead to the entrance. It's always the same door but still . . . get through the right door though and holy hell . . . you're in a room with a live T-Rex who will not rest until he's either eaten you or crushed you with boxes. Shoot the boxes above his head until he does though . . . and you get a HILARIOUS video that basically says "yay! you made John Hammond famous and he took all the credit after Jurassic Park opened without tragedy! congrats for all that work!"

It would also give you a funny little victory image after each boss saying you tranqed it and showing a completely pointless ammount of money you were "paid" for beating the monster. There's no shops, no merchants, not even a real score that means anything, so the money part is completely pointless except to be funny. And it is.

Best Ever: Jurassic Park Gamegear.

 

[Hivetyrant7]

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is certainly my favorite.

 

[Joos]

The best game based on a movie franchise is easily The Chroncles of Riddick: Escape from butcher bay. The game did everything you wanted it to to put you in the shoes of a menacing assassin/badass. Vin's voice overs really make this game a cut above and it's one of the few fps' that does hand to hand combat well. Good quality control of most aspects of the game makes you realise that this isn't some half baked movie tie in a game studio put minimal work into to get out the door for a quick buck; no, you can tell that the developers are fans of the franchise and have put heart and soul into the game to make it the best they could.

Assault on Dark Athena is also pretty good, but not quite up to the same level as the original. However, I hope Vin Diesel can find the funding to make more Riddick games; they are far better than the movies.

 

[Raggedstar]

I was watching this video thinking Spiderman 2 and Goldeneye would appear or at least be mentioned. The The Lion King happened and I squeed. My childhood, right there (quite literally since I got that game when it came out and didn't beat it until I was 14 because the manual didn't tell you how to do Simba's adult moves, particularly the one that tosses Scar off. Only way you knew it existed is that Simba does it once in the idle demo). Perhaps it's because I spent all those years failing at it, but I generally don't find this game to be as impossible as some say. I can play it on medium and die 3 times or less (fuck hard mode. THAT is impossible). Even here, The Stampede is actually quite easy. Not sure about on the SNES, but on the Genesis it always comes at a pattern in sync with the music. All you need to know is to know when to jump and move in time with the music and you can get through without a scratch. Also if you want to be cheap, most of the time you can hug the walls and be absolutely fine.

 

[ThetaReactor]

I keep hearing this notion that movie tie-in games used to be great but now they've got a bad reputation.

No. They've always sucked. And they were even worse back in the 8-bit days. There were a few exceptions, but if you pick up an NES cart with a movie title on the label, odds are it's a complete disaster. The tech wasn't there to pull off the cinematic feel of modern stuff, and most of them were cheap cash-ins that stuck the film's theme over a generic, mediocre genre staple. Today, you can pick up the Telltale or Lego version of your favorite IP and be guaranteed a game that's at least competent. Back then, we had LJN. Ugh.

I'd have to give the medal to Goldeneye, personally. I remember literally being on the edge of my seat for that one, heart pounding, leaning left and right in a futile effort to peek around the corners. And I obviously played too much of it, because I picked it up at a party not long ago, after many years absent, and was still slaughtering friends with the Klobb and strafing around the maps while staring at the walls to dissuade the evil screen-watchers. And Oddjob was never really a problem. That's the beauty of split-screen multiplayer: when your buddy pauses on him at the select screen, you can just lean over and slap the shit out of him. I'd need a bit of practice to do the Facility in under 2:05 these days, but I still remember where every soldier is.

The general rule is that the best film to game adaptations are the ones not released concurrently with the source: Goldeneye, Riddick, The Godfather, Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, The Warriors, Tron 2.0. Many of them don't try to precisely mimic the plot of the film, either. It's the good tie-ins that are really rare, like X-Men Origins or Scott Pilgrim.

What I find particularly interesting are the fan-made adaptations of cult films. There are games based on Tremors, The Room, and Manos: The Hands of Fate...