Movie Licensed Games with Moments that Don't Belong

When you hear the phrase "movie-licensed game" your first reaction is probably to cringe in revulsion.  Given the history of quick cash-ins that have been released in the past (and continue to be released to this day), your reaction would be pretty spot-on.  Countless times game developers have tried to expand on movie licenses by including areas, enemies, and boss battles that weren't in the films.  Sometimes it works, most times it doesn't.

With that in mind, today I want to take a look at some of the good and bad movie-licensed games that have been unleashed upon us.


The Good:

EA's Lord of the Rings Series - Multiplatform

Gandalf kicks the crap out of another EA hater.

Say what you will about Electronic Arts, but having them snag the license to the Lord of the Rings trilogy proved to be a great treat for gamers.  They didn't release a game based off of Fellowship of the Ring, but the other games which followed the plots of The Two Towers and Return of the King more than made up for it.  The games followed the movies fairly closely, allowing players to experience the major battles in the films, as well as some battles that weren't present.  The games are very well done and get your adrenaline flowing, so even when you encounter segments that aren't in the films you will be having too much fun dicing up Orcs to notice.

Jurassic Park - Sega Genesis

The T-Rex makes quite a few appearances.

Jurassic Park is a good example of what a game development team can do when they embrace a license and expand on its universe without wrecking it.  Most of the levels in the game aren't even areas that were featured in the movie, but there are some nods to the Jurassic Park novel, such as the river rafting level.   As you venture through a dinosaur-infested sewer system and power station, you really feel that these areas would have fit into the movie just fine, they are definitely plausible features of a prehistoric zoo gone wrong.


The Bad:

Terminator Salvation - Multiplatform

Prepare to be fighting these guys all the time.

I'll be honest here, I haven't seen the Terminator Salvation film; my experience with the Terminator movies begins with The Terminator and ends with Terminator 2.  However, I have played Salvation, and it's so bad that it deserves a mention here.  The game's biggest drawback is repetitiveness; you move from one post-apocalyptic city block to the next identical city block, fighting the same three enemy types over and over again.  In the film does John Connor end up defending a group of survivors in a subway station?  I have no idea, but I can say for sure that doing this in-game is boring as hell.

Rambo - NES

Is this Rambo or Arachnophobia?

I know this one has probably been done to death already, but seriously, did anybody on the development team even see the movie?  This game has Rambo trekking through the jungle fighting mostly wildlife, including implausible wildlife such as man-sized spiders.  Remember that bad-ass scene in the film when Rambo battled the evil birds?  Neither do I.


The Ugly: 

ET - Atari 2600

We all know this game, it's the holy grail of garbage.  The game that has almost nothing at all to do with the film.  The entirety of this game consists of controlling ET as he searches for pieces of telephones which are somehow found in gigantic sinkholes, because this all happened in the film, right?  To make the game even more infuriating, ET is also being pursued by scientists and government agents who threaten to capture him and take away the phone components you just spent half a day collecting.


And that about wraps it up, what movie-licensed games have you played that you found to be pretty good, or downright awful?

Eternal Darkness: Hallucinations that Steal Your Sanity

Remember the good old days of the survival horror genre?  Back when quick time events weren't considered a necessary feature, and Resident Evil games weren't Gears of War with zombies?  Those were the days.  Today I thought we could take a trip down memory lane to a survival horror game on the Gamecube called Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.  But rather than covering the plot of the game, let's take a look at the game's defining feature: sanity effects.

In Eternal Darkness, you are bestowed with a sanity meter, which fills up mainly by executing finishing moves on enemies.  However, this meter has a tendency to drain when you encounter said enemies, and once it reaches a critical level of emptiness you get to experience the game's sanity effects.

Sanity effects are events that occur to screw with your head, such as moments when you'll be exploring a room and spontaneously the sounds of screams or footsteps will be heard.  As your character's sanity further disappears, more extreme events will occur.  On occasion you might enter a room which appears to be filled with monsters all rushing to attack you, only to find that they vanish when you begin to fight back.  Other times you might suddenly find your character walking upside down on the ceiling, or even dying for no reason whatsoever.

The developers even went so far as to include sanity effects that will have you rushing to your Gamecube to check for actual hardware problems.  One of the more devious effects has you entering a room filled with monsters, only to have no control over your character while a message flashes on the screen telling you that your Gamecube's controller is unplugged.

Also brutal is when the screen goes completely dark, as if you had turned off your TV.  There is even a sanity effect that will nearly give you a heart attack: it pretends to delete all your saved games.

No matter what you choose, it still says that all saves have been deleted.

Thankfully all sanity effects are temporary, and upon completion of the event you will restart in the last room you entered, with no damage done to your inventory/saved games/Gamecube.  Truly this is a unique and unnerving feature, and one I much prefer to the button-mashing quick time events that seem to have become a staple in survival horror (if you can even call the new Resident Evil games survival horror these days).  If you've got a Gamecube, and you want to lose some sanity, definitely check this one out!

QWOP - The Flash Running Simulator From Hell

Hello everybody!  It's been an awful long time since the last update, let's just say I had a rotten 2012.  But now it's a new year, and it's time to get rolling with the strange again!

Today let's take a look at one of the most difficult flash games in existence: QWOP.

You'll spend the majority of your time at the starting line.

The objective of the game sounds simple enough: controlling only your character's thighs and calves, run 100 meters.  Piece of cake right?  Wrong, oh so very wrong.

Thighs are controlled using the Q & W keys, while the calves are controlled by the O & P keys, and it's up to you to time the movements of each limb segment perfectly in order to propel the runner forward.  It is insanely difficult just to keep the runner balanced, and in my case, I ended up falling backwards multiple times for impressive finishes such as -2.4 meters.

Standing upright has never been this tough.

 File QWOP under one of the most deceitful concepts for a game, something that sounds so easy yet is so frustratingly difficult.  Don't believe me?  Well try out QWOP for yourself and let me know how well you finish, maybe you'll even get to 100 meters and finish the game.

Introducing Blog Achievements!

Seeing as everything these days has some form of achievement system (Xbox 360, Steam, social networks, etc), I've decided to implement an achievement system for this blog (they can be found using the title bar at the top of the page).  It's just something silly, but it'll be fun to keep track of certain milestones.  If you guys have any ideas for achievements I should shoot for, let me know, and I'll add them to a "currently locked achievements" section.

The Birthday Cake is a Lie (and Poisonous)!

Amazing how time flies, today is the one-year anniversary of the first "Strange Moment in Gaming History" post on this blog!  Many thanks to everyone who has read and commented on my posts!

So why don't we celebrate with the cake from Portal?

Before you dig in though, you might want to read through the list of ingredients for the cake, which contains some inedible items, such as "fish shaped solid waste" and "fish shaped dirt."  If you feel that your stomach can handle GLaDOS' stomach-dissolving cake, well then enjoy!

The Dark Side of Voice Acting in Games

Voice acting in videogames always seems to be hit or miss. The voice actors either do a fantastic job, which immerses us into the story, or they fail spectacularly, leading to years of Youtube memes and bad jokes on gaming forums.  In the past I have written about some of the most famous instances of laughable voice acting, so today I'd like to try something different.

If you're a geek like me, you enjoy looking up game voice actors on IMDB in order to see all the various game characters they've voiced throughout their careers.  There's no doubt that while they may be proud to have voiced certain characters, they most certainly harbor deep feelings of shame at the thought of some of the other pixelated bozos they were suckered into voicing.

Take for instance John DiMaggio, the voice actor for Marcus Fenix of the Gears of War series (as well as roughly one billion other game characters).

As hard as it is to believe, the voice actor of the chainsaw-wielding bad-ass is also the same guy who voiced the goofy hairstyle-challenged Wakka from Final Fantasy X.

Let's go kill some Locust, ya?

Ouch right?  That's not even the worst case.  Remember our good buddy Grunt from Mass Effect 2?

This unstoppable tank of a Krogan was voiced by Steve Blum, who just happens to be the same guy who voiced the super-creepy Yellow Monkey in Ape Escape 3.

Tingle's got some competition in the creepiness category.

Hearing Grunt talk about killing things just won't be the same after learning about this unfortunate connection to the Ape Escape franchise.  Anyway, now we move on to what I consider the most tragic story of all: Jon St. John, the voice of Duke Nukem.

We've all heard the awesome one-liners, and we've all witnessed the 80's action-hero badassness that is Duke Nukem (ok not so much in his latest outing, but we can look past that because he's the Duke!).  But did you know that Jon St. John is also a voice actor in the somewhat recent (Dreamcast era to present) Sonic the Hedgehog games?  If the knowledge that Duke's voice actor is present in the Sonic series didn't make you run from your computer to go cry over your copy of Duke Nukem 3D, then maybe this will:  Jon St. John voices Big the Cat.

No you didn't read that wrong, the idiotic, annoying, clumsy blob Big the Cat shares the same voice actor with Duke Freaking Nukem.  It's painful isn't it?  I had to emulate a copy of Sonic Adventure just to verify it and witness the horror for myself.  Curse you Sega!!

And that wraps up this quick look at the dark side of voice acting.  Have you ever had any funny/shocking moments upon discovering the various characters a voice actor has...um...voiced?  Let me know, I'd like to hear your stories!

E3 Aftermath, and Halo 4: Master Chief Rides Again

Another year, another E3 come and gone.  I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with the show this year, I was expecting the Wii U to have a stronger presence.  It would have been awesome if Nintendo came along with a new Mario game (New Super Mario Bros doesn't count!), Zelda game, and Donkey Kong game, and really showed us how the gameplay can be fresh and exciting with the new tablet controller.

Doomed to be a gimmick? Let's hope not.

Also I'm a bit angry with Valve for not making any announcements.  A couple months back, Gabe Newell (the co-founder of Valve) said that Valve would be announcing "all our favorite things" at E3, including a game with a '3' in it.  Those of us who have been waiting for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (or just Half-Life 3) were pretty much jumping for joy at this point.  A couple weeks after this exciting statement, Newell followed up by saying he was pretty much lying through his teeth: Valve would not be making any announcements at E3.  Even after hearing this, I still held onto some hope, but alas, no announcements.

What surprised me the most at this year's E3 was the trailer and gameplay demo of Halo 4.  It did something I never thought possible: it got me interested in the Halo series again.  After playing the disappointing Halo 3: ODST, I vowed never to buy another Halo game again.  However, the trailer for Halo 4 appeals to my inner sci-fi geek; it looks like the game might actually have a strong story!  I'm very interested in learning about the world the Master Chief is stranded on, which appears to be populated by Forerunner-created AI.  Also I'm wondering why the Elites are an enemy again (make up your mind guys!).


What were your favorite moments of E3 2012?  Is there anything you're especially excited about?