Darth Wong wrote:Why do movie-based games always suck? Does anyone know?
They have every advantage in the world: the story is written for them, the characters are designed for them, there's Hollywood money behind the project, and as an added bonus, the characters and setting are already known and loved by the public. It's almost as if they must try to get it wrong.
1) Take a very large very complex project, such as making a good modern video game.
2) Slap on an ironclad end date (the release of the Movie) that has nothing to do with how well the project is actually doing or how much time the project should need to complete sucessfully.
That combination almost never goes well.
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After all the buzz I heard from Sega saying this would be different, that it'd be a good movie tie-in game with soul, and my hopes are dashed asunder. It's criminal that such a movie gets you all psyched up for the game, only to see it fail miserably.
Darth Wong wrote:Why do movie-based games always suck? Does anyone know?
They have every advantage in the world: the story is written for them, the characters are designed for them, there's Hollywood money behind the project, and as an added bonus, the characters and setting are already known and loved by the public. It's almost as if they must try to get it wrong.
I'd say the fact that a vast majority are poorly-made pieces of shit rushed out by the movie-release date to hopefully get a piece of that cash-cow has a lot to do with it.
Which, I think, is actually somewhat different from game-to-movie adaptations. That is more along the lines of, "Holy shit, this is actually popular, we'll give it to a bunch of liberal-arts fucks and/or Uwe Bolle who know jack shit about the game itself and let them run wild!"
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I'd say the fact that a vast majority are poorly-made pieces of shit rushed out by the movie-release date to hopefully get a piece of that cash-cow has a lot to do with it.
Pretty much. These movie games are always crap because they don't get enough time to actually make a decent game. It's always rushed based on the movie. If you look at how much 'time' goes into these types of games based on other games, you get your answer. The closer to being accurate to the movie it is, the less time they probably had to do it since they had to wait for the movie to be nearly finished.
Darth Wong wrote:Why do movie-based games always suck? Does anyone know?
They have every advantage in the world: the story is written for them, the characters are designed for them, there's Hollywood money behind the project, and as an added bonus, the characters and setting are already known and loved by the public. It's almost as if they must try to get it wrong.
1) Take a very large very complex project, such as making a good modern video game.
2) Slap on an ironclad end date (the release of the Movie) that has nothing to do with how well the project is actually doing or how much time the project should need to complete sucessfully.
That combination almost never goes well.
I recall some designers noting that the above usually resulted in half the development time that they would normally put into such a game, but I don't have the articles on hand to cite so take that with a grain of salt.
The few examples I can think of off-hand that didn't suck were Escape from Butcher Bay and Spider-Man 2. The latter benefited from building off of a previous version so I'm assuming a lot of the basics were already nailed down. Don't know about EfBB.
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