MOVIE - The Game

There’s an undeniable stigmatism with games that are tied to movies. If I were to ask the average gamer over the age of 12 if they had played Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs I have no doubt that the majority would say they hadn’t; most probably with an air of disgust as though I had just accused them of breaking wind. And whilst in this case such a reaction is justified, as it was a terrible game, I doubt many people will have had anything to go on that would have led them to reach this conclusion other than an assumption. I’m as guilty as any of making such assumptions; there are easily more bad tie-in games than there are good; but every once in a while one will come along that is actually pretty good, but it will still be treated as a leper to the gaming community because people would rather just assume it’s bad and be done with it.

X-men Origins: Wolverine is an example of a game that’s suffered from this, despite well-designed levels, a decently robust upgrade system, and some genuinely exciting set pieces (giving more than a few bad guys a helicopter rotor hair cut). It has yet to break 1.5 million units sold. It was by no means perfect, but it was fun, and deserved more recognition than it got.

When this is compared with Batman Arkham Asylum - released in the same year - which has sold over 6 million units, it doesn’t seem very fair. Admittedly Arkham Asylum was a different game and no, I’m not trying to compare them based on my enjoyment of them (Arkham wins), but it does illustrate my point. I feel that the problem lies in both the consumer and production side of things, which in essence means everyone should feel bad for what they have/haven’t done and needs to have a long hard think about what they’re going to do to fix it.

Let’s start with the production. Going back to the dawn of gaming history, since developers first crawled out of the primordial ooze and discovered that people buy merchandise tied to films they like, there have been innumerable games that have attempted to capitalize on this, with the units sold rarely being massive when compared to others in the field. You can’t really say that movie-game developers have it fair, as almost always they get hampered with very rigid deadlines to match up with the movie release. Furthermore the lack of “creative freedom” from having to adhere to established canon means that the people working on it have much less flexibly on overcoming problems such as difficulty scaling or level design.

However, considering they charge similar prices to most games, it would be unfair to allow them to get away with it because of “pressures” that compromise quality. Take Superman Returns: The Video Game. This one is a particularly interesting case, firstly because it got delayed by roughly five months and ended up coinciding with the DVD release instead of the film premiere, but more importantly because even with all of the additional time the developers had to polish it, it still managed to look twice as bad. The argument of not enough time seems somewhat moot in light of this, as does the constraints for creative licensing, considering the plot had nothing to do with the film (and your source material was Superman for god sake, how is it everyone ruins Superman?).

And it’s these examples that end up doing a disservice to the “tie-in” genre. It’s like when you have a class with a handful of well-behaved and relatively intelligent students, but surrounding them are poorly dressed, rude underachievers. No one remembers the good students because it’s the bad ones that make themselves more noticeable with all their hollering, nose picking and farting, and before long no one wants to bother with the class at all.

And with that we tie in nicely to the problem on the consumer side. In this instance we are the teachers, and we have free reign to choose which class we would rather have. The real question is, would we rather take the classes with the highest achieving students on average, or would we rather go looking in the underachieving classes for those few students who actually give a damn?

As already stated people tend to be predisposed to assume the worst when they know that a game was spawned from a film, particularly if the film wasn’t fantastic in the first place. The thing is though, that the game can still be good, and in several cases has been better. X-men Origins: Wolverine was critically received better than its film, and more iconically the original Goldeneye game is often touted as one of the best shooters of all time.

Ultimately I’d like to propose a solution that means better games for all and a change in business ethics for the producers. You might not like it, but it’s the only way things are going to change for the better. If, as consumers, you take these tie-ins more seriously, if they are given their chance to prove to us that they can be just as fun as similar games without the label, then there is every chance that developers will take pride in their work, because it will feel as though it is actually getting recognized. Likewise, developers need to take this pride in their work rather than pump out a “safe” item. It might not be the project they wanted, they might not like the time they have or the soulless corporate machine that commissioned it, but by lazily shoving anything out the door all you are doing is repeating a cycle that is harming the industry.

Finally, to those commissioning these games as nothing more than a cash grab, would you kindly pour all the money you earned into a comically sized pool, dive in, and drown on your own greed, as all you have no place being here.