Games based off movies, (why you should save your money for the big screen attraction)

Every summer blockbuster movies hit theaters all over the country, movies like spider-man, the transformers series; the recent batman and iron man movies all make millions in the box office. To promote these juggernauts of the silver screen many companies will release video games based on the movie, around or at the same time as the movie’s release. The idea is simple, video games are the biggest and strongest media outlet for at least the past 5 years and if you have a franchise with a comic book history like Thor and Green lantern why not make a game that will reach your target audience and get them excited about the upcoming movie? Movie based games are a great idea as a marketing tool, unfortunately they rarely create a nexus from being simple marketing tools to becoming good and compelling video games that will properly support the franchise.

A perfect example of this is the green lantern movie and the green lantern game rise of the man-hunters. For this example the movie good or bad is irrelevant but the game is there to support the movie and get the gaming community talking about the emerald knight, but the game is so horrible that if the game were anything like the movie I would never go see it (luckily it isn’t). For those who don’t know the green lantern is a superhero from DC comics who wears a power ring that gives him his ability’s. The ring can make constructs based of the wearer’s thoughts and willpower and it is said that the only weakness the ring has is its owner’s imagination (and the color yellow but that’s a story for another time). So the developers had an amazing franchise to bring into the gaming world, like most comic book movies do, the problem was the application of the franchise they had and making it into a game. Green lantern rise of the man-hunters is a terrible game, as a lantern you are supposed to have near limitless power but instead the game developers decided to drop you squarely into a god of war/devil may cry/ ninja gaiden like hack and slash game. For a character that has the power of the universe at his fingertips that is not the right type of game and on top of that it isn’t even done correctly, for God’s sake the green lantern cant even fly unless prompted or in a crappy level made specifically for flight!!!

So obviously I feel this game is garbage but there are many more that fall in the same category and there are a series of reasons. Unfortunately the majority of movie based games are not meant to be great or even good games, simply having Optimus prime or Batman on the cover of a game with a movie in the works seems to be enough marketing push for the developers to have done there job no matter what the games look like. There is also the fact that many movie game tie ins are made under the pretenses that they should be as cheap as possible under the overall franchises budget, not the right foot to start off on as a game developer. Will movie based video games ever be as good as there silver screen counterparts? Maybe but it is going to take some changes to the concept of what a video game based on a movie should be, it should be more than a marketing tool besides all the people in business and who are doing the advertisement for the movies and are a part of the game should know the best or worst marketing and advertisement you will get is always word of mouth.