Movie Tie-in Games

At first, a movie tie-in game sounds like a great idea. They combine two of my favorite things: movies and video games. But it's a real shame that so many of them are bad. In fact, it's a rare occurrence. I usually don't even bother with them, since they usually end up being pretty similar. They usually have decent combat, but very weak dialogue. The graphics are usually decent, but graphics play a very small part in influencing my opinion of a game. Telling you which ones to avoid would take too long, so let me tell you which ones are actually good and worth the money. Firstly is this past summer's Amazing Spider-Man. I get annoyed when games try to cram a whole bunch of extra stuff into the plot of the movie, but this game avoids that by setting the game after the movie, which I don't mind unless they try to stick scenes from the movie in there, but they didn't, so that was fine. The gameplay is fun and the combat doesn't make you remember long complicated combos in order to do cool stuff. Where dialogue is concerned, it's not as deep as some more story centric games, but there's nothing wrong with it, plus the characters sound like they did in the movie. Another movie game that I liked was one of the James Bond games. Most of them were pretty good. I didn't love Agent Under Fire and I thought Nightfire was pretty, but it's not connected to any of the movies. I thought From Russia with Love was good even though it deviates from the movie. But it also had a great 4 player splitscreen deathmatch type thing, which was especially fun when you found a jetpack, an armored car, or the controls for various traps located throughout the maps. I think I liked Nightfire a little bit more, but as far as the movie games are concerned, this one is the best I've played, even counting the more recent Quantum of Solace. I l Ike the Bond games because they combine elements of a stealth game and an FPS, and often give you fun gadgets to play with. Or if you want more all out violence, I recommend another Marvel game, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It's fun to slice people up with your claws, and the story follows the movie fairly closely. You also get to take advantage of Logan's animalistic senses. The only real issue I've had with it is that sometimes you need to press a button to open a door, but nothing will happen unless you're standing in exactly the right place, which can get frustrating. So I think those are the best movie tie-in games I've played. There are some others that are supposed to be decent, but this is just from the ones I've actually played. I won't give a final verdict since I'm talking about a genre if games, plus multiple individual games, but if I was, all three of these games would get very high marks for being good, and also for being good movie games.

Skyfall

I was looking forward to seeing this movie for a while. I didn't have time to see it until yesterday, but it did not disappoint. This one was a little more like the old Bond movies than the last 2 were, but it didn't have any of their bad qualities. Bond was as cool as ever, and had some actual gadgets this time, which I thought were kind of lacking in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. And now Q is in it, but he's a young computery guy now. There were some elements of the old Q in him though, like asking Bond to bring back the equipment in one piece, and mentioning an exploding pen. The gadgets in this movie are more realistic and reasonable, so you have slightly more classic Bondness without getting away from Daniel Craig Bondness, if that makes any sense. Another thing that I liked was that in this movie, M played a much more central role than before, since the villain's main grudge was against her. I thought the villain himself was a little weird, but really evil and crazy, so he was pretty good. Another thing that I would've changed is that the final battle takes place at Bond's old house with him, M, and another dude named Kincade against the whole army of bad guys. I like Kincade, but he wasn't introduced until very shortly before the battle, and the only thing he did prior to the attack was preparing for the attack. In my sometimes humble opinion, it just would've been nice if he was first brought in either in the beginning of the movie, or mentioned somewhere in the middle, then not seen until near the end. I've heard that some people were bothered by James' suits looking too tight on him, but honestly, I didn't even notice that. And now that it's been pointed out to me, guess how much I care? Not at all. Also, I'm trying to avoid spoiling anything, but something I really liked is that near the end of the movie, Bond gets his awesome old car. Complete with hidden machine guns! In Casino and Quantum, I thought "That's a cool car, but it's too bad it doesn't have hidden guns or anything. They're trying to be realistic though, so I see why they didn't do that". Now, I got what I wished for. Well, saw what I wished for. Sadly, I didn't actually receive an awesome ride with concealed machine guns in the front. Sigh. But I did see a pretty good movie, so there's that. Final Verdict: This movie gets five cool cars!