MOVIE TIE INS (ABRIDGED)
Hollywood loves the summer months. Whilst Iron Man, Harry Potter and chums are busting blocks at your local multiplex, pixellated counterparts slither along in their wake, desperately vying for your affections. More often than not, though, they’re a bit crap. So after another dismal dribble of sub-par titles this year, we decided to look at some of the few movie tie-ins from this generation of consoles that are actually worth top billing.
CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK:
Bucking the trend, this is a rare case of the game actually bettering the movies it’s drawn from. The two Riddick titles – Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena, both available in the latter’s release – put you in the charmingly polite and humanistic shoes of Vin Diesel’s gravel-gargling antihero. In this sense, the games are actually a better approximation of Riddick than the drippy and confused movie could ever be. Given the freedom to butcher and maim away from the trappings of a Hollywood good-guy character arc, Riddick is a great gaming protagonist, fleshed out by some solid stealth mechanics, moody sci-fi settings and brutal brawling. Moreover, the lore-heavy story-lines are allowed sufficient room to breathe in an electronic environment, evolving into a tense and atmospheric ride.
WOLVERINE
Similar to Riddick, Wolverine the game also manages to capture some of the visceral animalism that the movies have all but neutered. Not nearly as complex or sharp as Riddick, this is nevertheless an enjoyably brainless way to get under the skin of everyone’s favourite hairy misanthrope. A pretty standard slash-and-jump brawler, the production values are decent, and clawing people’s faces off is guiltily good fun, in an arcade kind of way. With its price suitably slashed by now, you could do a lot worse than take out your pent up berserker rage on this one, bub.
GOLDENEYE
Of course no list would be complete without the granddaddy of them all, Goldeneye, one of the few games to truly nail the essence of its film. Originally released for Nintendo 64, its addictive mix of innovative level design and manic multiplayer means it occupies a special place in many a nostalgic heart, something which has not gone unnoticed at Activision. Following on from last year’s decent update on Wii, James Bond will be back for more Goldeneye on XBOX and PS3, albeit in the pummelled, craggy guise of Daniel Craig rather than old smoothy Pierce Brosnan. Given there hasn’t been a decent take on Bond since From Russia With Love went old school back on the PS2, we’re tentatively excited about this one. It doesn’t hold anything as groundbreaking as its originator – surely there’s room for a Mass Effect style dialogue wheel composed entirely of misogynistic quips? – but seeing as it started the whole multiplayer craze, it seems only fair to give it another sip at the martini. Whether this will hold up to modern day scrutiny when there are so many similar games around is one thing, but since neither Call of Duty nor Battlefield allow you to play as a three-nippled assassin or hulking giant plagued by shoddy dental work, Goldeneye could yet reclaim its license to kill.
GENRE CLASSICS
Leaving aside Nintendo’s infamous mushroom-addled pipe enthusiast, the 16 bit world hasn’t had the greatest success in breaking through the generation gap. The reason many games are classics is because they’ve been hacked up and reappropriated a million times over. Whereas Brooklyn’s least effective plumber has maintained his notoriety by gleefully Frankenstein-ing himself, other games haven’t been so lucky. Beaten into insignificance by its own legacy, even a genre milestone such as Streets of Rage has surrendered and taken its bow as an unchanged novelty phone download.
Of course there are plenty of old timers worth an upgrade, so in the first of an occasional series, we're dissecting some gaming corpses for uninventive developers to bring back to life. Our first choice – Robocop vs The Terminator.
Barely fleshed out beyond the core concept of two franchises involving robots and extreme violence, Robocop vs The Terminator is worth revisiting for that concept alone. At the time, this was a no-brainer, luring in an audience whose only interaction with the movies had been heavily censored TV versions in which bad guys called people 'muddy funster crumbags', and tended to die in overly dramatic but curiously bloodless ways. Now you too could be Robocop without the need for wearing a bucket on your head and inserting an Amstrad board up your rectum.
Not that we did that, mind.
All this translated into a platforming bullet-fest, in which law enforcer and all round morality machine Robocop indiscriminately guns down everything in his path. That is until he comes up against the unstoppable Terminators... which turn out to be fairly easily stopped by gunning them down a bit. Who knew?
Despite some great graphics and a solid scrolling shooter base, it somewhat wastes the franchise by diminishing the Terminators, and attempting to make a coherent plot out of psychotic time-traveling robots taking a vacation in Detroit. We’d personally like to see reprogrammed Terminator Arnie, and Geordie La Forge prototype Peter Weller team up in some Army of Two style carnage, trading stilted robotic witticisms, and sorting out each other’s alternate futures in a twisted and nonsensical rip off of 48 hours - only with 2 “straight”-men and dangerously negative charisma levels. Mainly, we just want a game that makes perfect sense at 3am after a regretful alcopop binge. Gaming giants – make it happen.