gizmo_gal said:
I dont think all movie games suck or are bad
Let's see. There's Chronicles of Riddick, which was actually
better than the movie (not hard, but still, it was a fun little game.)
There's one Pirates of the Caribbean game that didn't suck, but that's because they shoehorned the license into an almost-completed Pirates!-themed game at the last second.
And then there's a handful of decent things from LucasArts (and BioWare buying a license from LucasArts):
Indina Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, some of the
Jedi Knight titles,
Knight of the Old Republic (if that qualifies.) Lego Star Wars, too. I guess with the bazillion awful Star Wars titles out there, a handful would have to be good...
...and that's about it. One thing that stands out is that most of those were made without time constraints -- Fate of Atlantis and the Jedi Knight games were made long after the movies were out, so they didn't have to rush the game to meet its deadline. One of the main reasons license games tend to suck is because of that -- they have to wait to start development on the game until the movie is almost done (so they have those awful images from the movie they can plaster over everything); then they have to rush development so they can release around the same time. Even Knights of the Old Republic 2 was damaged by this (IIRC they rushed to meet one of the prequel movies -- how painful, having a good game rushed and damaged to meet the deadline of a vastly worse movie. Should've delayed the movie until the game was done, it would have been better.) But at least in that case they
started long before the movie was finished -- typical license games have such a small window of time in which to be made that it's a miracle they get made at all. (That's why they're often just generic engines or other games with scenes and characters from the movie crudely plastered over them.)
Riddick is an odd exception, because the big-name actor from that movie owns his own game company and insisted that they make it right.
To me, the Harry Potter games were the biggest disappointment. They didn't
need to be based on the movie -- the fans don't really care about the movies anyway, they would've just wanted stuff from the books. There was no need to wait until they had scenes from the movie to work in, or images of the actors, or anything silly like that. They could've been started long in advance, and with so many movies they could've just worked and made a good game and then sold it alongside whichever movie was next. But the people who set the plans for those tie-ins don't know or care at all about videogames, and they know they can shovel out crap and people will buy it as long as it has the license -- so they went ahead and used still-frames from the movies, made the games in a few weeks, and they all sucked. That tells you everything you need to know about movie games right there.
(Still, in this case -- well, it's a racing game, you can't screw up a racing game
too badly, can you? And it's not like it's hard to slap some Speed Racer skins and models into a pre-existing racing game and call it a day.)