Star Trek: The Game has been receiving some flak around the internet for being a very poorly crafted and put together game, despite having access to host of sources materials that could have been put to good use. In light of this, let’s review a few of the best and worst movie to game adaptations in history.
After all, movie themes and characters have been adapted into every possible franchise available, from Happy Meal toys to the online games found at MoneyGaming. Some of these adaptations have been huge successes, such as Nintendo’s 1997 cult classic Goldeneye, while others have not.
One of the biggest flops in recent memory is Transformers: The Game, though this isn’t saying much given the standard set by the movie itself. Overall, it seemed a lazy effort that relied far too much upon the idea of robots hitting each other to really worry about anything else.
On the other hand, something of a success was Pod Racer, part of the extensive Star Wars franchise that has possibly spawned more games, spanning more consoles than any other. The beauty of this game, as with other Star Wars games like TIE Fighter, was its ability to give the audience a deeper look at a part of the film that is something of a distraction from the actual plot.
By allowing fans not only to relive the moments of the movie they enjoyed but also to go beyond those moments to create something entirely original gives the game an edge over the generic movie-plot-line-role-playing action that so many adaptations stick to.
The same cannot be said of 007 Goldeneye, though as anyone whose played the game will immediately tell you, it was the two-player mode, not the single player mode that made this game so special. Many a gamer during the late 90’s will have spent hours vying for control of the character Oddjob, whose size gave him a distinct advantage during the tense multiplayer scenarios.
There are of course some horrendous failures when it’s done the other way round and films are created off the back of a video game. Adaptations such as Super Mario Bros (1993), Street Fighter (1994) and, of course, Mortal Combat (1997) might have seemed fun when you were a naïve adolescent, but try watching them now!
